The Mom Squad
For this group of online sleuths, death makes a holiday
BY CHRIS LAMORTE With the new fall television season almost here,
how does this premise grab you: A group of
women, ordinary gals--housewives, soccer
moms, office workers--decide to spice up their
humdrum lives by entering the glamorous and
exciting world of undercover private
investigation. Been done before, you say?
Wasn't Charlie's Angels about a group of
bored, albeit sexy, policewomen recruited to
work for a private investigator?
Well, then, here's a Nineties twist: They use the
Internet to catch the killers. Still not interested?
Okay, get this: They solve real-life crimes,
crimes ripped from the front pages of today's
newspapers. And there are bad guys,
too--other Netheads who cause trouble and
work as enemy spies and throw out bitchy
one-liners every now and again. Very Heather
Locklear.
And here's the kicker: The action centers on
Boulder, Colorado. It's The Net meets Golden
Girls, with a splash of Murder, She Wrote
thrown in.
Nah. Too ridiculous. Not even Aaron Spelling
would produce something that far-fetched. It
could never happen, not even on TV.
But it could happen online. After all, virtual
reality is stranger than fiction.
Meet shorty, tinky, CatNip, mapek and, of
course, Mrs. Brady. These gals are plugged in
and ready for action. Their tools: the Net. Their
destination: Boulder. Their target: JonBenet
Ramsey's killer. Look out, sugar, 'cause here
they come.
More than twenty months have passed since
JonBenet Ramsey, a six-year-old beauty queen,
was discovered murdered in the basement of
her Boulder home on December 26, 1996.
Although the investigation into her death has
yet to produce an indictment, it's already given birth to a creature that grows
larger every day: the JonBenet virtual community.
The seeds of this online phenomenon were planted just days after the murder in
the Boulder News Forum,
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