Woman's death hot topic on Madison blog

Madison, Conn. (WTNH) -  

The brutal death of a Madison woman has been the talk of the town, as evidenced by a man running a blog in the shoreline town.

"We haven't ever covered anything like this," said Chris Kilbourne, who covers Madison through his website InsideMadison.com . "Obviously it's a shock to everybody in Madison. I think that's makes this such big news is that this is happening in Madison."

Kilbourne's site is what's called hyper-local journalism. Essentially it's a blog that gathers news about just one town.

"So this is a place where I go out and try to troll the various news outlets to try to bring the coverage all under one roof for people," Kilbourne said.

Usually, that coverage is about new restaurants, or what entertainment is coming to town. But it's all changed in the past few weeks, first with teens arrested for sexual assault and now the body of a woman found in her yard near the Madison Country Club.

"The stories about the kids who are involved and the alleged sexual assault; It's just not the kind of thing... We normally hear about Madison because of the quality of its school system, not something like this," he said.

It's the first homicide in town since a man beat his nanny to death with a ball peen hammer in 1999. That was the last century. People are responding to this homicide in a very 21st-century way - with "tweets". InsideMadison.com runs a scroll of tweets involving Madison. Most have been about either the teens, or the homicide. And people are paying attention.

"Normally we would expect to see maybe 20 or 30 clicks on our tweets in a given day," Kilbourne said. "Yesterday we saw 215, so we're seeing more than five times the interest that we would normally see."

The most recent post on his blog kind of sum up the shock here in town. The top news is a new sex assault case involving teens, then new details about the homicide here near the beach. The third post starts out "What is happening to our sleepy little town?"