Only four men were eventually charged with plotting Arrell Bell’s murder on the social networking site.
TRENTON - Technology experts told a court yesterday they were able to pinpoint the electronic fingerprint of a computer on which a Trenton man allegedly plotted to murder a fellow gang member on the Myspace networking site.
Detectives who investigated the murder of Arrel Bell, a 22-year-old city man shot and killed execution-style five years ago, said they had no leads in the case until they looked at Bell’s Myspace pages.
No eye-witnesses of the shooting were ever identified and no weapon was recovered, said Robert Cowan, who was a detective with the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office at the time.
Cowan, who was called to the scene of the shooting in Stacy Park, testified yesterday in the trial of Keith Williams, one of the men charged with conspiracy to murder Bell.
“We talked to the two individuals that came across the body,” he said. “But no one came forward that actually witnessed the homicide.”
Desperate for a break in the investigation, Cowan said he and Trenton Detective Steve White found some information and pictures on Bell’s public Myspace profile and eventually cast a wider net, looking into many of the men in Bell’s pictures.
But to really get information, Cowan said investigators had to get a communications warrant to see what the men had said privately on the site. Myspace then released messages associated with the profiles of about seven men to investigators.
Only four men were eventually charged with plotting Bell’s murder on the social networking site -- Williams, Karim Sampson, John Murphy and Brandon Edwards. Sampson, Murphy and Edwards are scheduled to go to trial later this year on the conspiracy charge, but no one has been charged with the actual murder. Prosecutors have said the four men, who were all members of the Sex Money Murder street gang, targeted Bell, also known as Broadway or B-Way, because they believed he had given a statement to police implicating Sampson in a 2007 robbery.
Matthew Nares, a copyright and compliance specialist at Myspace testified yesterday, explaining to the jury how Myspace keeps records on the server and the process required to get the records to law enforcement.
For this case the investigators got thousands of records. said Nares, who flew in from Myspace headquarters in Los Angeles to testify. Nares explained that Myspace tracks the “friend ID number” assigned to each account and records each IP (Internet Protocol) address associated with the account for each private message sent. An IP address is essentially a unique electronic fingerprint identifying a computer.
Many of the men who detectives were investigating had more than one account under their name, Cowan said.
Prosecutors also brought in Thomas Felty-Smith, a representative of Verizon, to explain how IP addresses are assigned to different modems and tracked for different accounts. In this case, investigators obtained records from Verizon for Williams’ house, to show that the same IP address that was associated with the wireless internet router in Williams’ house matched the IP address listed on the Myspace records.
Williams’ attorney Mark Fury argued that it could have been anyone using any device in Williams’ house and logged into his account who sent those messages, not necessarily Williams himself.
Fury says Williams is innocent and had nothing to do with the planning of the murder. He said these messages, if they were even sent by his client, are only a bunch of young men messing around. He says there is no clear murder plot depicted in the messages.
In the messages, which Cowan read to the jury in court, a frantic Sampson sends messages to the account that investigators believed to be Williams’ saying that they had better act quickly because Bell was leaving town to go to New York City.
Prosecutors said Sampson believed Bell had “snitched” on him, giving a statement against him to prosecutors in a robbery case in which both men were arrested in 2007, and wanted to kill him.
“He about to leave to go to New York for two weeks ... I can’t take the risk of him not coming back,” Cowan said the message stated.
Cowan said one message from the day before the shooting which prosecutors believe was sent to Sampson from Williams’ account said “lets do it tonight ... we’ll go to the park.”
Cowan will continue his testimony today, the fifth anniversary of Bell’s death. White is also expected to take the stand. Prosecutors said they also anticipate playing portions of a long statement Williams gave to police when he was arrested.
Contact Jenna Pizzi at jpizzi@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5717.
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