Blacksburg, Va. – The Virginia Tech killer went to eBay to buy ammunition clips for one of the types of guns he used in the rampage, a spokesman for the auction site confirmed Saturday.
Using the handle Blazers5505, Seung-Hui Cho bought two 10-round magazines for the Walther P22 – one of two handguns used in the massacre of 32 people. The clips were bought March 22 from a gun shop in Idaho.
“It’s apparent that he purchased the empty magazine clips,” eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said. “They’re similar to what could be purchased in any sporting goods store around the country.” On eBay and affiliated sites, Cho also sold several books with violent themes, tickets to Hokies football games, and a graphics calculator that contained several games.
Computer forensics have played a major role in the investigation into Cho’s motives. Authorities are examining the personal computers found in his dorm room. Experts say that when the subject of an investigation is a loner like Cho, such records can be a rich source of information.
An examination of a computer is “very revealing, particularly for a person like this,” said Mark Rasch of FTI Consulting, a computer and electronic investigation firm. “What we find … particularly with people who are very uncommunicative in person, is that they may be much more communicative and free to express themselves with the anonymity that computers and the Internet give you.”
Cho’s computers likely will hold records of any e-mail communications he had. But they could also show topics he researched, online purchases, his essays and diaries and photos.
In a telephone interview Saturday, Andy Koch recounted his former roommate’s quirks.
Cho mentioned he had an imaginary girlfriend. “He said her name was Jelly and she called him Spanky, and that she was a supermodel and she traveled through space,” Koch said. They were roommates in 2005-06.
“I told my parents, and I told other friends, and they kind of laughed,” he said. Then one day Koch went to Cho’s room and Cho wouldn’t open the door, saying he was with Jelly: “We’re making out,” Cho said.
Koch said it seemed weird mainly in hindsight. His first real worry came one night when campus police arrived to speak to Cho about bothering a female classmate.
Cho told his roommates that he’d apparently frightened a girl when he went to her room to “look her in the eye.” He said he’d gone there to see if she was cool, and instead saw “promiscuity” in her gaze. What she saw in his was enough for her to call police, Koch indicated.
On the eBay-affiliated website half.com, several books were listed for sale under the screen name “blazers5505.” They include “Men, Women, and Chainsaws” by Carol J. Clover, a book that explores gender in the modern horror film; the publisher’s note reads: “Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in sadism?” Others include “The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre,” by H.P. Lovecraft; and “The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense” by Joyce Carol Oates – a book in which the publisher writes: “In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.”
Books by those three authors were taught in his Contemporary Horror class, meaning he could have been merely selling the used books at the end of the semester.
The Washington Post contributed to this report.
