The Most Disturbing Online Searches Of Suspected Killers

If true-crime shows have taught us anything, it's that it is virtually impossible to get away with murder. Even without taking into account the impressive advances in DNA technology and the proliferation of cameras everywhere within the last couple of decades, there are just too many ways to leave behind the crucial evidence that the cops will need to crack the case. Unsolved crimes tend to stick in the craw of homicide investigators, and those folks are nothing if not diligent.

But sometimes, in some areas, detectives don't have to put a ton of effort in, like with these suspected (and often convicted) murderers, who did not cover their digital tracks. These days, one of the first stones detectives will turn over in a murder investigation is the suspect's phone and online history — and the innocent don't generally tend to query the ol' Google for the kind of grim information these people did. Now would probably be a good time to warn you that this article is unavoidably going to cover some pretty disturbing topics, as many of the crimes involved were brutal indeed.

The following article includes references to domestic abuse, child abuse, stalking, and mass violence.

The 2011 murder trial of Casey Anthony, whose 2-year-old daughter Caylee went missing in 2008, riveted the U.S. Casey had roused suspicion by not reporting Caylee missing for over a month, partying and shopping during that time instead of panicking over her absent daughter, and acting decidedly nonchalant after coming under suspicion, according to Biography. Caylee's remains were found buried a short distance from Casey's house in late 2008.

At her trial, Casey Anthony's defense attorneys stunned jurors by presenting an alternate theory that Caylee's death had been accidental, and that her grandfather George Anthony had helped his daughter cover up the incident by disposing of her body.

Casey Anthony was shockingly acquitted of murder, although she was convicted of charges including lying to investigators — despite the fact that her search history, included as evidence during the trial, was eyebrow-raising to say the least. Per ABC News, the prosecution revealed that Casey had searched dozens of times for information on chloroform, and also performed searches for things like "household weapons" and "neck breaking." After the acquittal, Casey Anthony largely stayed out of the public eye until 2022, when she took part in a docuseries. In it, she contradicted her own defense by claiming to not know exactly what happened to Caylee — but that whatever it was, her father had been the one responsible, per E! News.

The 2012 abduction of 5-year-old April Jones from near her home in Powys, Wales riveted the U.K. According to The Guardian, it spurred the country's first-ever nationwide child alert, and witnesses soon emerged who had spotted the vehicle of local resident Mark Bridger cruising the area at the time of the disappearance — not to mention one witness who had briefly encountered Bridger himself, prowling the area alone on foot in camouflage fatigues. A brief investigation turned up blood and possible bone fragments at his home — as well as a computer that yielded some seriously disturbing information.

According to BBC, Bridger had recently searched for violent child sexual abuse material (CSAM). As horrifying as that is, more images found on the computer's hard drive were perhaps even more so: those of local child murder victims, as well as pictures of April and her sisters that had been lifted from Facebook. Bridger stood little chance at trial, and in 2013, The Guardian reported that he had been slapped with a life sentence with no chance of parole. He never disclosed what happened to April's remains, but the month following his conviction, a prison chaplain told Wales Online that Bridger had confessed to him that he was "99% certain that he remembered putting the body into [a nearby] river."

If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

Nikolas Cruz was the perpetrator of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, embarking on a rampage at Marjorie Douglas Stoneman High School that left 17 students and educators dead, per NBC News. While Cruz's guilt was never in doubt, prosecutors at his trial needed to provide evidence at his trial supporting first-degree murder charges — and among those pieces of evidence was the search history on the shooter's phone, which left little doubt that the horrifying act was premeditated.

According to a Florida Department of Law Enforcement document, the most prominent among these searches was "shooting people massacre," along with unrelated but disturbing searches for terms involving sexual assault and gun violence. The device also contained a screenshot of a Wikipedia article about the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting, and numerous notes — some rambling about Cruz's increasingly agitated mental state, and some describing exactly how he intended to keep calm while carrying out the massacre with chilling detachment. 

Per CNN, Cruz ended up pleading guilty right before his trial was set to start in 2021 — and while he had been up for the death penalty, his jury was unable to agree unanimously on that detail during the penalty phase of his trial. Cruz was slapped with 17 consecutive life sentences, meaning he will never be eligible for parole.

If you have been impacted by incidents of mass violence, or are experiencing emotional distress related to incidents of mass violence, you can call or text Disaster Distress Helpline at 1-800-985-5990 for support.

In 2013, Orange, California resident Maribel Ramos vanished from the apartment she shared with her friend and roommate, Kwang Chol Joy (via Orange County Register). Ramos' boyfriend would later tell investigators that he had overheard the pair arguing about money shortly before she went missing, and while Joy quickly became the subject of scrutiny, investigators found little in the way of evidence to tie him to the disappearance — at least, at first.

Police placed Joy under surveillance, and roughly two weeks after the disappearance, he was found to have used a library computer to search for information about how long it takes a body to decompose. He cleared the browser's search history, then used a satellite map to scout out an unassuming plot of land in nearby Santiago Canyon. After searching in the area for about 45 minutes, police turned up Ramos' remains — and investigators called the fateful map search a "virtual drive-by" of the area where Joy had disposed of Ramos' body. Per ABC News, Joy — who continued to maintain his innocence throughout his trial — was convicted of Ramos' murder in 2014, and given a sentence of 15 years to life in prison.

Jolene Cummings and Kimberly Kessler were co-workers at a Florida hair salon in 2018, and during Kessler's eventual trial for Cumming's murder in 2021, co-workers testified as to how the pair never really got along (via News 4 Jacksonville). One day in May 2018, they described a tense argument between the two at work — and the next day, Cummings vanished, leaving behind only a significant amount of blood at her place of work. Surveillance video showing Kessler abandoning Cummings' car in a parking lot the night of the disappearance suggested strongly that Kessler was involved, and once the police zeroed in on her, her internet search history quickly came under scrutiny.

Among a handful of suspicious search terms such as "autopsy," "cadaver," and "Florida female murderers," investigators found one that set off blaring red alarms: "Jolene Cummings no body no crime." Kessler's defense attorneys argued that indeed, with no hard physical evidence, their client should be set free (and that those pesky searches were just taken out of context), but it was an exercise in futility. 

Per the Florida Times-Union, Kesller was found guilty of killing Cummings, and sentenced to life in prison in 2022.

In 2018, investigators in Cedar Rapids, Iowa finally made an arrest in a nearly four-decades-old cold case: The murder of 18-year-old Michelle Martinko, who had been stabbed to death in a mall parking lot all the way back in 1979, per CBS 2 Iowa. Advances in DNA technology had allowed them to link 66-year-old Jerry Burns, who had been in his twenties at the time of the crime, to Martinko's slaying — and after he was arrested, his browsing history came into play in a rare instance of a suspect's internet activity implicating them in a crime that greatly predates the public internet.

The searches were conducted on a work computer at Burns' office, and while their rather ambiguous nature led the judge to prohibit that particular evidence from being shown to the jury, they are highly suggestive of some very disturbing proclivities. They included searches for violent and sadistic pornography, depictions of violence and murder, and in particular, violence against blonde women — like Martinko. In February 2020, Burns was found guilty of Martinko's murder on the strength of the DNA evidence, and in August of that year, he was handed a life sentence, according to the Des Moines Register. 

In 2022, CBS 2 News reported that Burns was appealing the conviction, based on the way in which his DNA sample was obtained: The police lifted it from a discarded drinking straw, one of many creative ways that investigators solved cold cases in 2022.