AOL to Shut Down Serial Killer Web Sites

America Online worked Friday to remove Web pages from its system featuring essays and artwork by serial killers, including one who called his victims “garbage.”

The nation’s largest Internet provider said the Web pages featuring work by Keith Hunter Jesperson and Danny Rolling would be removed by the weekend.

“We believe in a person’s right to speak, but we don’t believe individuals have a right to force us to associate with that speech,” said AOL spokeswoman Tricia Primrose.

Jesperson has been convicted of three murders in the Pacific Northwest and faces a fourth murder charge in Wyoming. Rolling is on Florida’s death row for the 1990 murders of five college students in Gainesville, Fla.

AOL launched an investigation into the pages after receiving a letter last week from Geringer, Primrose said.

The letter and a threat Thursday from Marc Klaas, whose 12-year-old daughter, Polly, was abducted and killed in 1993, to launch a boycott of AOL led to the company’s announcement that it would remove the pages.

Both the Jesperson and Rolling pages were put on the AOL system by Sondra London, a Florida author who was once engaged to Rolling.

AOL will also remove any linked pages on its system with similar material, including a page posted by London with essays by Gerard Schaefer, a former Florida sheriff’s deputy convicted of murdering two young women and suspected of killing up to 34 others. He was killed in a Florida prison in December 1995. He once dated London.

Primrose warned, however, that AOL cannot regulate the content of pages posted through other services.

Jesperson, an interstate trucker, became known as the Happy Face Killer because he drew smiley faces atop neatly printed letters to the media claiming that he killed eight women in five states and his conscience was bothering him.

In Jesperson’s page, filled with material forwarded to London, he compared his victims to garbage left along the road and described a fictional “self-start serial killer kit.”