What kind of website allows people to post murder photos? A look at 4chan

Images of a Port Orchard murder victim were posted to the website 4chan this week before police were even alerted to the crime.

The graphic, postmortem photos of murder victim Amber Lynn Coplin, 30, were posted online with text indicating law enforcement would know about the death once one of the woman’s relatives found her body.

“Check the news for port orchard Washington in a few hours. Her son will be home from school soon. He’ll find her, then call the cops. I just wanted to share the pics before they find me. I bought a bb gun that looks realistic enough. When they come, I’ll pull it and it will be suicide by cop.”

According to court documents, the images posted online matched Coplin’s body and inside of her apartment. Investigators believe that murder suspect, David Michael Kalac, 33, is responsible for posting the images to the website with comments about how Coplin was killed.

But what kind of website would allow this kind of posting? What is 4chan?

Twenty-two million users hop on to this anonymous, anything-goes forum every month.

The best way to picture message board site 4chan is a primordial soup where funny memes, daring pranks, and occasionally shocking violence bubbles to the surface.

It can be the source of everything good and bad in Internet culture.

Hugely popular web trends like LOL Cats and Advice Animals started there, and it’s the birthplace of rickrolling.

But a lot of shady activities also originate on 4chan, including cases of cyber bullying, Gamer Gate, the hacker group Anonymous, and the celebrity nude photo ring that ensnared Jennifer Lawrence.

Founder Christopher Poole, known as “moot” online, launched 4chan in 2003 at the age of 15, with an eye to celebrating video games and the anime and manga of Japanese pop culture. It’s grown from there. Moot described how the website has evolved in a Ted Talk.

“There’s no archive. There are no barriers. There’s no registration. These things that we’re used to with forms, don’t exist with 4chan. That’s led to this discussion that is completely raw, completely unfiltered.”

The site’s most popular message board, /b/ is known as a collection spot for racist, graphic, and grotesque imagery.

Matthias Schwartz wrote in the New York Times Magazine. “/b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.”

A recent survey suggests the vast number of users are young, college educated men who don’t discuss the site offline.