On Sept. 15, 2003, Rachelle Waterman sat down at her computer and took up a hobby enjoyed by millions of other American teenagers: She created a blog.

She titled it "My Crappy Life," and stated in a brief bio, "I live in the suckiest place on earth, a shit hole in Alaska."

The 15-year-old headlined her inaugural post "I'm a newbie," and wrote, "This is my first journal entry, what can I say ... I'm a virgin (or am I? ;) )"

For the next 14 months, until police investigating her mother's murder seized her computer, she updated the blog regularly. Investigators have said they found nothing of evidentiary value in the online diary, and one friend has suggested Rachelle's blog was not a reflection of reality.

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"It was a place to vent and ramble and spew, not an austere logical glimpse into her life," college student Jed Smith told the Associated Press.

Still, "My Crappy Life" provides a glimpse into how the high school junior wanted to be seen, if not how she actually was. Her audience was primarily other teenagers from her remote Alaska island, and in some of her writings she appears determined to impress them with her rebelliousness.

Lauri Waterman

She regularly accompanied her mother to church, but shortly after starting her blog she wrote, "Fuck going to church, why wake up early and sit in a crouded hall listening to someone preach for an hour? I say stay up as late you phsyciall can on Saturday and sleep all day Sunday not doing a damn thing! Power to the lazy people!"

A month later, in October 2003, she breezily described an "uneventful day" of high school: "I saved someone's ass when I picked up the bong that had fallen out of their pocket before the teacher saw it.....he totally owes me. It was really funny though."

In other entries, however, Waterman revealed herself to be decidedly mainstream, if not a little geeky.

Before Christmas 2003, she described in great detail the cookies she was baking with her mother. She bragged about her academic success, including a grade of 92 percent in Spanish, a speech on astrology "which ruled massive ass," and a science project comparing the cleanliness of public and private toilets. She praised Jane "Auston" as her favorite author, adding, "I am such a Victorian novel addict."

Most of the entries are the mundane concerns of a teenager growing up in an isolated village. With the nearest movie theater a three-hour ferry ride away, Waterman and her friends watch DVDs at home, and her blog is filled with short reviews, uniformly and at times inexplicably positive.

"I saw the Santa Cluas II last night, it was funny and pretty cute. I reccomend to people," she wrote in November 2003.

When her Academic Decathlon team plans a trip to Anchorage, she raves about the chance to visit places most teenagers take for granted.

"It's anchorage I get to go shopping at Hot Topic....mmmmm...Denny's," she wrote in February 2004.

Her posts were rarely detailed and, given the medium, feel surprisingly impersonal. In the fall of 2004, she posted an angst-filled entry asking her readers if they "ever feel completely alone? All the people who you care about and you thought cared about you just leave..." She did not explain the source of her sadness, but she followed it with a poem she had written entitled "Ode to Suicide."

Pain consumes my body,
Eating away like lye.
Tearing at my flesh
No more tears left to cry.

According to investigators, she posted the poem around the time she and alleged co-conspirators Brian Radel and Jason Arrant were finalizing plans, later discarded, to ambush her mother, Lauri Waterman, in her car.

The blog, however, contains no references to the plan or even the men. She occasionally mentions disputes with her parents, but she rarely seems angry about them.

"Well I just wanted to let everyone know I haven't been online or posting becuase I am grounded for getting an 89% on a math test, and I have computer restrictions because the parental units found my wicca books," she once wrote.

About five weeks later, her mother's severely burned body was found in a van.