Amazon.com's role criticized in death-row
pen-pal Web sites
Lornet Turnbull, The Seattle Times, December 3, 2004

Meet Darold R.J. Stenson.

Six feet tall, with blond hair and blue eyes, he describes himself as a scuba instructor and ultra-light pilot who's traveled the world.

He enjoys reading and cooking and says he's seeking friends with similar interests — pen pals who will respond in a timely fashion to his letters.

What the 52-year-old Stenson doesn't discuss is the fact that he's a condemned killer, who sits on death row in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla. He was convicted 10 years ago after prosecutors said he shot to death his 28-year-old wife to collect $800,000 in insurance and then shot his business partner to make it look like a love-triangle murder suicide.

Stenson's plea for pen friends appears on a German Web site along with similar postings from hundreds of other death-row inmates across the U.S. — including two others at Walla Walla.

Such sites, the work of death-penalty opponents, are not new and despite the continued outrage of victims' advocates, aren't likely to go away soon.

But what's raising more than a few eyebrows is that this particular site, and other more graphic ones like it, have linked to an unlikely partner: Amazon.com.

" How can a company that partners with Toys R Us also promote violent killers?" asks Bret Vinocur, a victim's advocate from Ohio who runs Findmissingkids.com.

Vinocur has been tracking the activities of many of these sites for two years and uncovered four with Amazon links.

" These are not petty thieves," he said. "They are the worst of the worst."

The Web sites, with names such as "Serial Killer Central" and "Manson Family Picnic," are part of what Amazon calls its associate program.

Participant sites display a link to Amazon's Web site. If someone links to Amazon from the partner site and makes a purchase, the partner site gets a cut of up to 10 percent of the sale.

" It allows us to put ads for Amazon all over the Web," Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith said.

Sites that promote illegal activity or violence cannot participate, Smith said. Owners of such sites are required to sign an agreement to that effect and sites that are found to violate the guidelines are stripped from the program.

But Smith said hundreds of thousands of sites participate, and she acknowledges that Amazon does not review them before partnering up.

The death-row sites "are anti-death-penalty sites or sites advocating pen pals or friends for inmates," she said. "It's not advocating violent activity, so that's fine. That's appropriate."

After media inquiries, however, Amazon yesterday removed the two most extreme of the sites — Manson and Serial Killer Central — from the program. Those sites include graphic details on killing. Still retaining their links to Amazon, are at least two other sites promoting artwork and books by and about death-row inmates. Many of the inmates use the opportunity to ask for money.

Among the more notorious murderers on the remaining sites is California's Richard Allen Davis, convicted of murdering 12-year-old Polly Klaas.

In addition to Stenson's personal ad, ads for two other Washington inmates appear there:

Allen E. Gregory, 32, was sentenced in Pierce County in 2001 for raping and fatally stabbing his neighbor, 43-year-old Geneine Ann Harshfield, at her Tacoma home in 1996.

Cecil E. Davis, 45, was convicted and sentenced to die for killing and raping 65-year-old Yoshiko Couch of Tacoma in 1997. The Washington State Supreme Court last month overturned his death sentence. In his ad, Cecil Davis describes himself as "honest, trustworthy and fun to be with and talk to." He's the proud father of six children, he wrote.

Vinocur said Amazon needs to end its partnership with all the sites: "When does the bottom line overtake morality?" he asked.