Spoke with Steve Huff from CrimeBlog last weekend for the story on the continued spat between the DA and the coroner. Interesting guy; has been following these kind of crimes for quite a while, and when you do that you develop a certain perspective, perhaps a certain type of expertise.

I won’t reprint his hunches here, there’s more on the CrimeBlog site if you’re interested. But one aspect of this case has me wondering, and I may ask a few questions on it this week:

If, as Huff seems to believe, Kevin Haines was the main target of the Blossom Hill slasher (my term, but appropriate, I think) - and if the Manheim Township Police presence at MT High School indicates that a kid might have had something to do with this, or they suspect a kid could have had something to do with it - then it stands to reason that there may well be a significant online element to this crime. Kids live their lives online these days; and as Huff mentioned in a previous post, some of the things which aroused his suspicions in fact came from Facebook.

My question is, how well-versed are the local cops in this? The DA told me last weekend that Manheim Township Police have “monitoring various Web site postings that relate to this case.”

Do they have the ability to go beyond merely “monitoring” them? Perhaps that’s one reason the FBI and state police were called in.

In any event: Huff on Saturday posted something regarding some parallels he sees between the Blossom Hill killings and a double murder in Napa, Calif., in 2004. It’s an interesting read, but he didn’t really get into an aspect that might be most pertinent to the ongoing feud between Totaro and Kirchner:

Copple smoked cigarettes, which all his friends knew, but the police had waited 10 months to tell the public that they were looking for a killer who smoked. When Copple heard the police say the killer smoked the same unusual brand as he did, he turned himself in and reportedly confessed.

Got that? Ten months into the investigation, police have no leads, so they disclose some additional information.

On the basis of that disclosure, the killer thinks they’re onto him - and he turns himself in.