When violent crime strikes a social network, the ghosts of the dead start roaming the machines.

Deanne Bays was worried about her kid brother, Daniel. His girlfriend hadn't heard from him for a day and a half. There was no sign of him online, even though he usually spent hours a day on MySpace. And he'd been hanging out a lot with that drug dealer. Bays hoped that didn't mean young Daniel Varo was back in jail. All day long on February 7, even as Bays crammed for Accounting 211 and Spanish 102 and took her daughter to the dentist, she wondered where he could be. That evening, two hours into her 4-to-10 pm shift at the Norm Thompson catalog company, just outside Portland, Oregon, Bays finally got a chance to check her own MySpace page for messages. There was one from her husband, frantic, telling Bays to phone right away – even though he knew that she wasn't allowed to make personal calls on the job. Bays' inbox also had emails from two of Varo's ex-girlfriends. "What did he do now?" she groaned to herself, clicking on one of the notes: im freekin out i cant stop crying and i dont want to believe its true. he cant be gone … please call me or someone call me please.