Feb 19, 2008 9:33 pm US/Eastern
Incarcerated Killer Allowed To Lurk On MySpace
Parents Concerned About Joseph Druce Joining Social Web Site
WORCESTER (WBZ) ―
Convicted killer Joseph Druce gained national attention for his jailhouse murder of a pedophile priest.
Druce, like millions of people, has a MySpace page.
His favorite song is Nickelback's "Savin Me" blares from his MySpace page. He's 42 years old and lives in South Walpole where he's doing life behind bars at MCI-Cedar Junction - a maximum security prison.
"The interesting thing about MySpace.com is that anyone can be on there," said Professor James Fox with Northeastern University.
Even convicted murderers like Joseph Druce can be on the social networking site. Druce has 672 friends on the site. He received plenty of Valentine's. But disturbing to some is the fact that this provides a forum for a murderer to rant about his crime.
The MySpace page even shows a department of corrections video after Druce, who was already serving a life sentence, strangled pedophile Priest John Geoghan to death in his cell at the state prison in Shirley.
"It doesn't make sense to me," said Bob Curley, whose son was murdered. "It's crazy. It doesn't make sense that this can go on."
Curley's 10-year-old son Jeffrey was kidnapped and murdered back in 1997. He doesn't think any murderer should have the right to get a message out to the public.
"I would think they should monitor the service. I know they can't keep an eye on everything but there are things they should look into," Curley said. "There's got to be a cutoff between what's right and wrong."
The Department of Corrections says inmates in state prisons don't have Internet access so someone outside prison walls must be posting the comments for Druce and there's really nothing they can do about it.
"We would have a big issue if they could communicate directly but they can't," Fox said.
Fox said the fact that people have to make the choice to go to MySpace makes this less troubling. He said it also comes down to the rights of people like Druce.
"We can't say inmates have no First Amendment rights because victims' families don't want them to," he said. "We have to decide as a society what rights inmates should and shouldn't have."
MySpace officials said they have removed Druce's page after the site's content review team determined it violated the terms of their agreement, which prevents anything violent, obscene or offensive from being posted.
WBZ spoke with the Worcester County District Attorney's Office about Druce's page. They said this is one good reason why parents should be aware of what their kids are doing on the Internet and who they're corresponding with.
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