Wilkes Barre, Pa- In the blurry head shot, a young man with short dark hair grins, his head cocked to the side and his chest bare.

A single photograph — one that’s so fuzzy it’s difficult to decipher the man’s eye color — was released by police Feb. 2. They were seeking the man to question him about the murder of Bryan Charles Kocis, the Dallas Township man found slashed and burned in his home two weeks ago.

Less than 24 hours after the picture’s release, the man in the picture was identified by online community blogs and message boards as a 20-something former sailor who works in Virginia as a male escort.

The escort, who goes by the name “Harlow,” said Wednesday he was “shocked” to hear police were searching for him — even as his photo flicked on computer screens across the nation.

Police have not named any suspects in the Jan. 24 slaying of the 44-year-old adult film producer, but that has not stopped the seemingly endless online speculation from connections Kocis apparently made during his six years as an online porn producer.

“The amount of interviews we have to do and things all over the Internet we have to look at is unfathomable,” said Trooper Martin Connors, of the State Police at Wyoming.

The problem for investigators is sorting through the tangled web of online information, sifting out the rumors while searching for leads that could lead to the killer, police say.

Kocis’ murder has drawn considerable online attention from the adult entertainment industry and parts of the gay community. A search of the adult film producer’s name with the word “murder” returns nearly 400 Web pages — many are anonymous message boards where readers sound off on their own personal theory of whodunit.

“We are very aware of what’s going on on the Internet. The means of communication has changed,” Lt. Frank Hacken of the State Police at Wyoming said. “Technology has changed the process of policing to a certain degree. That’s something that makes the case more complex,” he said.

The nature of Kocis’ Web-based business makes this investigation more difficult to unravel, said Hacken.

“A lot of homicides, you’re dealing with a small community, and here you’re dealing with people associated all over the country,” he said. “The Internet allows his business to be worldwide.”

About 550,000 people live in the Wilkes-Barre and Scranton metropolitan area. More than 215 million frequent the national online community where Kocis sold his videos and searched for new models, and that number is growing.

As details of Kocis’ intensely private life began to rise to public scrutiny, the online community focused on his bitter, and costly business dispute with a California starlet with the stage name “Brent Corrigan.”

Corrigan released a short statement on his Web site Feb. 2, saying he has been advised by his attorney and police not to comment on the murder. Attorney John Yates, who has represented Corrigan in his business dispute with Kocis, said police want to question his client because he may have information about the man who was to visit Kocis the night he was slain.

Despite Corrigan’s silence, details of his life and fights with Kocis have appeared on Web sites across the nation. Many of those rumors are unverifiable.

But online, where millions behind computer screens have endless space on message boards to print anything, some claim to have all but solved the murder.

“You get calls from all over the place; it’s like Elvis sightings,” Connors said. “Once information is gathered that we feel is pertinent to the case, we’ll go or do whatever we have to. We can’t be sending people all over the United States and the world. You can’t be on a wild goose chase.”

Some anonymous online posters claim to have inside information on the murder, going so far as to claim they heard plans about the murder before it happened. Other writers seem to just be floating their own personal theory on the sensational slaying.

The changing way we communicate has lead to a whole new set of issues for Web site owners to consider, said April Masini, who runs an Internet dating magazine.

“The great thing about these sites is that they convey a lot of information quickly,” Masini said in an e-mail. “The downside is that what is conveyed is not always true, so the communication can be false, misleading and dangerous.”

The murder of Kocis sent shock waves across the country for those involved with the adult entertainment industry, said Jason Sechrest, who operates a Web site dedicated to gossip and news from the adult industry.

“So many people are coming forward with information that we were unaware of,” said Sechrest, who knows Corrigan professionally and interviewed him shortly after the dispute with Kocis began.

Lately, Corrigan has been connected in online sites to Harlow, the man in the picture police have said they want to question.

Photographs of Corrigan and Harlow appear on Sechrest’s Web site from an adult entertainment convention in Las Vegas earlier this year. The two men mug for the camera, their arms draped around each other.

At this point, there is nothing to indicate those connections are anything more than a product of the adult entertainment genre the pair are involved in.

“The bottom line is we’re doing as many interviews as possible,” said Hacken. “The more we learn about a victim, it helps us determination the causation factor of a homicide.”

Wade Malcolm and Bob Kalinowski, staff writers, contributed to this report.