America Online promised to remove offensive material from a member's Web site because it features the words and artwork of serial killers, including a piece in which a murderer describes his victims as "piles of garbage."
By early Friday, the site was still on display.The nation's largest Internet provider was responding to a boycott threat by Marc Klaas, whose 12-year-old daughter, Polly, was abducted from her California home and killed in 1993. Klaas and Gov. Jim Geringer planned to urge others to boycott AOL until it stopped allowing Sondra London of Jacksonville, Fla., to post the material on her Web site.
Klaas particularly objects to the work of Keith Hunter Jesperson, known as the "Happy Face" killer, who is serving three life sentences in Oregon for killings in the Northwest and is charged with one murder in Wyoming.
"America Online is hiding behind freedom of speech in allowing this monster to have a public forum," said Klaas, who was in Wyoming this week to promote the Klaas Foundation for Children, which he established after his daughter's murder.
AOL spokeswoman Tricia Primrose said objectionable material would be removed by Friday. It wasn't clear whether the entire multipage site would be taken down.
"We came to the determination that the material on the site is offensive and objectionable and not something with which we wish to be associated," Primrose said.
The site also includes pictures and letters from Danny Rolling, who was once engaged to London and is on Florida's death row for the 1990 murders of five Gainesville college students.
London said she had removed from her site one part of Jesperson's material - the "self-start serial killer kit" - on the urging of an AOL attorney. Other portions of the site were intact early Friday, including a page of Jesperson's musings titled "My Piles of Garbage," in which he compares murder victims to roadside litter left by passing truckers.
In a letter to Geringer, AOL Senior Vice President and general counsel George Vradenburg III said none of the material was "authored, sponsored or condoned by AOL."
EDITOR'S NOTE: Rolling's Web address: (http://members.aol.com/danrolling/home.html); the first link for Jesperson is (http://members.aol.com/danrolling/face.html).