Maybe even the craven mutts who prowl 4Chan looking for stolen celebrity nudes and revenge pics of ex-girlfriends were sickened by the images of a freshly murdered woman.
“Turns out its way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks on the movies,” the anonymous poster wrote when he uploaded the three photos to the site beginning at 2:56 p.m. on Tuesday.
The red marks on the woman’s neck distinguished the photo from the thousands of other 4Chan nudes. She appeared to be dead.
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“She fought so Damn hard,” the poster added in a follow-up comment.
He clearly considered 4Chan creeps to be kindred souls—and perhaps himself as just someone who had taken the notion of women as objects a step further—as he went on to say, “Check the news for port orchard Washington in a few hours. Her son will be home from school soon. He’ll find her, then call the cops. I just wanted to share the pics before they find me.”
Just about the time the killer was posting these words, the 13-year-old son of 30-year-old Amber Lynn Coplin was arriving home from school in Port Orchard, Washington. He saw his mother on the couch and figured she was sleeping, but then he became alarmed. He summoned his father, who does not reside there. The father hurried over and called 911 at 3:32 pm.
The police and the paramedics found the mother beyond saving. Somebody had rifled through her purse and placed her driver’s license beside her head, with a word scribbled across it.
“DEAD.”
More words were written on a picture that hung on a wall.
“She killed me first.”
A third message was on a window blind.
“Bad News.”
The same impulse that propelled the killer to scrawl on the picture and the license and the shade seems to have prompted him to take pictures of his own and post them on 4Chan—for an audience that he no doubt knew to be vast and seemingly imagined to be of a similar mind.
Neighbors reported having heard a violent argument the night before. The woman’s boyfriend had been living with her in recent days, but he was nowhere to be seen, and her car was gone.
The Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office secured an arrest warrant for 33-year-old David Kalac, described as 6-foot-2, 200 pounds, with brown eyes and brown hair and presumably “armed and dangerous.”
The affidavit for probable cause noted that the 4Chan photos “matched the deceased female, trauma we observed and the residence interior.” Investigators took note of two distinctive tattoos visible in both the photos and on the body, as well as in a family photo that appeared on Facebook in August.
“RIP Baby girl. I love and miss you more than you will ever know,” her older sister now posted.
The older sister also posted a plea.
“Please help us find this bastard Dave Kalac. He murdered my baby sister Amber yesterday and took her car. Her car is a Gold 2001 ford focus washington plates 495 YLY both back tires are donuts. If you see him please call 911.”
The car was spotted Wednesday by police in Portland, Oregon. The 4Chan poster also had written, “I bought a bb gun that looks realistic enough. When they come, I’ll pull it and it will be suicide by cop.” But the car roared away, the driver so desperate to escape that he veered into oncoming traffic. The cops suspended the high-speed pursuit lest some innocent be killed. The car was later found abandoned.
Before Kalac turned himself in late Wednesday night, police ran a check on his phone and saw that he had sent a message to a buddy as 6:20 a.m. on Tuesday: “You’ll see me in the news… There will be no more me. Ever. You’ll read about it. That’s all.”
Police also checked his criminal record, which proved to match something he had posted on Facebook in a list headed “100 Truths of David Kalac:
“Been arrested: Your kidding right? Do you even know me?”
His numerous arrests included a felony assault charge in 2011. He had apparently served only half his six-month sentence.
“For those of you that don’t know, I was on the road for 2 months then in jail,” he posted on Facebook in December 2012. “I’m out now and in Port Orchard. I have no phone anymore, so if you’d like to get a hold of me, this is it.”
“Way to go hows fredome feel,” a relative replied.
That New Year’s Eve, Kalac posted a view of romantic love.
“Something to think about for that New Years kiss. Kissing is just sucking on a long tube with poo on the other end.”
Coplin was among those who commented. Her response suggests that she took it as a joke such as might appeal to a woman who had seen kisses lead to becoming a single mother of four.
“Awesome!” she wrote.
This year, Kalac was arrested for domestic violence in a case that apparently did not involve Coplin. He was sentenced to three months in jail in April and seems to have taken up with Coplin following his release.
Coplin had been working since March as a $25,000-a-year claims rep with State Farm Insurance in nearby Tacoma. Her riches were in the love her family held for her and she held for her family.
“Happy birthday Dad!” she posted on her father’s Facebook page in October. “I hope you had a great day! I love you! !”
Her family’s love had now turned to deepest grief.
When those horrific photos first went up on 4Chan, a few posters responded with jokes so ghoulish you had to assume they did not believe the images actually were of a woman who had just been murdered.
After it became clear they were real, the images were taken down. And maybe even the creeps of 4Chan were sickened.
They might take a moment to wonder why the killer thought they were just the ones with whom he wanted “to share the pics.”
