Difference between revisions of "The Amy Boyer Case"

Revision as of 04:01, 25 November 2011

The Amy Boyer Case was the murder of Amy Boyer committed by Liam Youens in October 1999. Youens was able to obtain her personal information and determine her whereabouts through the Internet. This case has severe ethical implications in the real and online world. (Back to index)

Amy Boyer

Amy Boyer's high school photo

Amy Boyer was a young woman from Nashua, New Hampshire. She attended and graduated from Nashua High School and briefly worked in a dentist office before she was murdered at the age of 20. [1]

Liam Youens

Laim Youens also attended Nashua High School in Nashua, New Hampshire. He graduated in 1997, and subsequently enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He dropped out after one year. From an early age, Youens was described as antisocial and a loner. He was teased excessively throughout high school and immersed himself in violent video games. Youens is the youngest of six children. [2]

Pre-Murder Events

Evidence of Psychological Disorder

Youens was always antisocial and had low self-confidence. He was constantly teased throughout high school and believed he was innately unattractive. At home, he spent most of his time on his computer, playing violent video games and watching pornographic videos. He rarely spoke or ate with his family. [3]

Obsession with Amy Boyer

In eighth grade, Youens met Boyer through a church youth group. He instantly developed a love obsession with Boyer but was never confident enough to tell her. When he saw Boyer interacting with another boy on the school bus, Youens made his decision to eventually murder her. Boyer and her family never knew of Youen’s obsession. [4]

Previous Incidents of Violence

Youens believed he was unattractive and desperately wanted to get plastic surgery. In November 1996, when his mother refused such a request, Youens took his mother’s china cabinet and threw it down the stairs in retaliation. Subsequently, he was forced to undergo anger management classes. [5]

Youen’s Website Documenting Murder

Youens started a website, documenting his process and plans to murder Amy Boyer. His website ran for almost two and a half years. Youen’s website was taken off and is currently not available. However, a reproduction of his site still remains online. His desires, thoughts and actions are all documented explicitly online. [6]

The Internet’s Aid in Boyer’s Murder

Youens primarily relied on third party information searcher sites that obtain and sell individuals’ personal information. He was able to buy Boyer’s personal information such as her Social Security Number, home address and more. Youens was eventually able to obtain Boyer’s work location using Docusearch.

He contacted Docusearch’s contractor, Gambino, who falsely impersonated an insurance company representative. Gambino called Boyer’s mother and was able to obtain her work location through false statements and demands. [7]

Day of Murder

On October 1999, Liam Youens parked outside of Amy Boyer’s work office and waited for her day to end. As Boyer walked out to her car, Youens yelled out Boyer’s name and fired, killing her instantaneously. At the end of the shooting, Youens killed himself as well. [8]

Ethical Implications

The Amy Boyer case illustrates how ethical models are nonexistent in the online world. The internet does not have moral barriers that would restrict such behavior if in real life. Youens was able to access and obtain Boyer’s personal information without difficulty.

Moral Barriers

In real life, there are moral barriers that prevent people from doing harm to others. For example, Youens would have had more difficulty searching and finding Boyer’s information in real life than online. The difficulty and investigational nature of a search act as barriers that trigger a moral realization of wrongness in real life. Online, there are no such activating barriers.

“Different” Crimes Exist Online

Tavani describes stalking online as “a different kind of crime from stalking in the ‘offline world’” (Tavani 37-54). The nature of the “same” crime changes because the online environment offers many more opportunities for stalking. These can occur in the form of: instant messaging (to get into contact with the victim), searching for personal information, posting comments about the victim (to further the degree of stalking) and more. Any stalker online “can now stalk a targeted victim without having to leave the comfort of his or her home” (Tavani, 37-54).

Need for New Ethical Model

Real world ethics cannot apply and transfer easily to the online environment. There are simply no moral barriers in place in the Internet that would allow moral judgments and decisions to occur, such as in real life. Such a conflict results in “policy vacuums”, which Bynum, pages 25-48, describes in such a way that:

“Because of logical malleability, computing technology enables human beings to do an enormous number of new things that they never were able to do before. Since no one did them before, the question arises whether one ought to do them...one may discover that no laws or standards of good practice or ethical rules have been created to govern them…”policy vacuums”, some of which generate ‘conceptual muddles’”

A lack of morals to guide future actions limits ethical judgments online, resulting in conceptual muddles. Therefore, there is a new for a new ethical model that directly deals with dilemmas encountered in the online environment.