Tom Arriola, a middle school drama teacher, kills people for fun — six or seven a year, by his count.

He has never been charged with murder, but the 41-year-old Mississippian is accused regularly of creating hours and hours of fun for thousands of visitors to his Web site, crimescene.com.

Nothing presented at crimescene.com is real, but the fictional murder investigations Arriola and his associates whip up each week have the look and feel of the real thing.

Taste, well that's another thing altogether. Depending on your point of view, Arriola is either a creative genius or a demented individual who gets his kicks out of inventing grisly crimes and torturing devoted armchair detectives until he's ready to reveal the identity of the killer.

Arriola just laughs at the latter suggestion.

As he tells it, crimescene.com's genesis was in 1994 when he was using the computer lab at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Introduced for the first time to the Web, Arriola began thinking about ways he could use the information superhighway and his own background in theater directing.

The answer came to him one night later that year.

"I had some friends over and they probably had a little too much to drink and were perhaps a little suggestible," Arriola recalls. "I convinced this guy and his girlfriend that we should stage her murder and that he'd be the murderer. So we staged it in my apartment ... I photographed everything. We created the first story around that."

Ever since those humble beginnings, Arriola and a small cadre of scriptwriters and volunteer consultants, including police officers and a forensic chemist, have been creating fictional murder investigations in Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional place created by author and Oxford, Miss., native William Faulkner.

Each case runs about eight or 10 weeks and typically starts with a news story or police press release about a crime reported somewhere in the county. Each Monday, the writers add updates, witness statements, the results of forensic tests and other information that real-life investigators would gather in search for the truth.

Readers participate in online discussions of the evidence, asking questions of two crimescene.com detectives and offering their own theories on whom they believe to be the killer. The case is "solved" when the suspect is revealed.

Recent cases include a woman's abduction, the discovery of a severed head, the murder of a student, the murder of an Olympic skating duo and the case of a victim who was buried alive.

The site is a lot slicker than in its early days and includes photos, documents, video and audio recordings to assist crimescene.com's faithful following as they try to crack the case.

"Every week I added a little more evidence, and it really began to look like a police Web site," Arriola said. "We always know who the killer is before we start the crime, but the audience is allowed to ask questions, point things out and offer theories before we reveal the killer ... It's kind of like doing a soap opera."

If crimescene.com suffers from any one problem it is the illusion of reality. Arriola said stories told to him by parents of real murdered or missing children touched him so much that he created realcrimes.com to publicize their plights.

Arriola has no interest in becoming the John Walsh of the Internet.

"Real misery is horrible. To deal with that sadness, it is just something I don't think I want to do," he said. "I don't want to get into the real. I'd rather stay with the fiction. We always catch the killer."

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