Internet sleuths' passion for unsolved crime mysteries can be a love story with devastating consequences
When Todd Matthews' future father-in-law found the body of a Jane Doe in 1968, the term 'cyber sleuths' wasn't a thing, he told Oxygen. It still wasn't a thing in 1987, when Matthews, who was 17 at the time, learned about the dead body from his future wife and became obsessed with finding out the victim's identity. So he began investigating the 'Tent girl' - a moniker coined because of the circumstances of her discovery. Matthew, using his amateur sleuthing skills. correctly managed to identify the victim as Barbara Ann Hackman Taylor.
Back then, Matthews achieved his end goal without the help of the Internet, or any 'smart' communication tool. But after the Internet was born with vast amounts of data at our fingertips, sleuthing, specifically 'internet sleuthing' has become a thing among armchair detectives. But do these online detectives really help solve cold cases or has the Internet just made it easier to weave and spread conspiracy theories out of thin air with devastating consequences and wrongful allegations?
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Who are internet sleuths?
Internet sleuths are, simply put, true crime fanatics invested in the idea of solving unsolved mysteries. Amateur sleuths helping with real cases was once a rare phenomenon like Matthews identifying Taylor almost two decades after her body was found, or when the public sent in their 'solutions' to newspapers for published ciphers sent in by the infamous and yet unidentified "Zodiac Killer". In cases as heartbreaking as the disappearance of 3-year-old Madeleine McCann from a vacation resort in Portugal, a chunk of the investigation was wasted in trying to find a man who was spotted carrying a child in the neighborhood, just moments before Madeleine was discovered missing from her bedroom. But at least, in that case, there was an eye witness for the sighting, even if the pursuit of that lead how eventually futile.
Internet sleuths because of their persistence managed to solve cases. A mysterious 'tip' connected to the unsolved disappearance of then 25-year-old Paulette Jaster led to an unidentified body buried for 35 years in a Texas grave in 2014. A similar story played out in Netflix's 2019 true crime documentary 'Don't F**k With Cats' where sleuths online got together to track down Canadian Luka Magnotta, in Germany, who came under their radar for a disturbing video of dead kittens in 2010.
A Facebook community was created by Deanna Thompson in Las Vegas and John Green in Los Angeles to investigate the cases of the murdered animals. That investigation eventually helped identify Magnotta as the one who had posted videos of the inhumane murder of Chinese international student Jun Lin in 2012. Magnotta was eventually hunted down and extradited back to Canada to stand trial. This time, the internet was right in digging out the killer; at other times, the outcome of playing detective and pinning blame can lead to devastating end results.
Sleuthing can go very wrong
An article published by The Guardian by Michelle Dean quotes award-winning Texas Monthly reporter Pamela Colloff on the damage caused by internet sleuthing. "The evidence you uncover, and the way you frame the story, can have a tremendous influence on the case itself," said Coloff, who has written long, investigative crime pieces herself. This was in reference to the podcast 'Serial', where host Sarah Koenig opened a can of worms about the murder of Hae Min Lee, the 18-year-old teen whose then-boyfriend, Adnan Masud Syed, was convicted for her murder.
Adnan, who is serving a life sentence plus 30 years, maintains his innocence. But there's a bigger problem plaguing his loved ones; reddit theorists are targeting his family, bringing up false accusations, twisting the narrative to suit them as they please. The 'Serial' podcast aired an episodic recount of the events surrounding Lee's murder on November 18 and had an entire episode titled 'Rumours' dedicated to theories that lead to Adnan's conviction.
Journalist Michelle Dean reports that it's not just Adnan who is frustrated with the way things have ended up. Even the victim's brother allegedly was disgusted with how his tragedy had become fodder for the subreddit thread on Lee's murder. He addressed the redditors in a post titled: “I am Hae’s brother - Do not AMA [Ask Me Anything]”. In the post, he called the internet sleuths on the subreddit page “disgusting,” claiming that “TO ME ITS REAL LIFE.”
Adnan's older brother Tanveer Syed's narrative was also twisted into expressing resentment for his brother after Reddit users claimed a member of the defense lawyer’s office has allegedly noted in the file that Tanveer had called Adnan a "masterful liar.” Tanveer denied this to Dean, saying the law clerk misconstrued him when he said Adnan would tell "ordinary teenager’s lies about where he was going out to at night." Dean also noted: "Specifically, Tanveer says, he’d never have used the phrase 'masterful liar,' because to him it’s 'awkward language'.
Sleuthing and Unsolved deaths
In the recently released Netflix's 'Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel', the four-part documentary surrounds the mysterious 2013 disappearance of 21-year-old Elisa Lam in the premises of the ominous Los Angeles hotel. The docuseries indulges ample time to highlight certain overlooked instances in the discovery of Lam's body, 19 days later, in one of the tanks on the roof of the hotel.
Like the corrected cause of death in the autopsy report, the discrepancy surrounding whether the tank's lid was open or closed at the time of her discovery, and most importantly - whether it was murder or suicide - is still actively investigated and debated by internet sleuths.
As the documentary gauges, these sleuths were invested to the point that they dissected every bit of Lam's Tumblr feed -- thus making her diagnosed bipolar disorder, a private matter into a publicly discussed 'clue'. Many used the diagnosis to explain the last-seen security footage of Lam making eerie hand gestures inside the lift of the hotel. Others alleged, it's almost as if she's hiding from a potential murderer - thus encouraging the theory that one of the frequent lodgers at the hotel had killed her. Such theory-building got so intense, that Morbid, a Mexican musician, was blamed for staying at the hotel and releasing a song at the time of her disappearance.
Dressed in a dark, gothic fashion, and making music about violence and murder, made Morbid an easy target. His music video for 'Died in Pain' sees a girl running for her life from her murderer. Lyrics for another song of his talks about laying his love to rest in the water. All of this contributed to the Internet being 'certain' that he-dun-it. The Netflix documentary's latter half meanwhile totally busts those claims with Morbid telling his own story, and how the online bullying and attacks he faced made him suffer, forced him to give up on his music. Mexico's government investigative agency PGR also interrogated him and death threats from the Internet were a daily occurence.
This time, the Internet was not right, although they insist Lam's death cannot be ruled out as a suicide. Certain of foul play being involved, netizens still visit the Cecil Hotel in pursuit of Lam's spirit to find out what happened. The need to know the unknown and the quest for being the 'first' to solve a cold case seems enticing. But it is impossible to ignore the gray area of ethics involved in this kind of internet sleuthing.
An acquaintance of Adnan, Rabia, for instance, had to end up deleting her Reddit account, after being portrayed as a 'cartoonish villain' for insisting on Adnan's innocence. "This is exactly the problem with doing journalism at all. The 'ethics' are situational, and not always as clear as anyone would like," wrote Dean in the piece for Guardian, adding how a simple podcast which was sharing information, lead to the crime story falling "to the mercy of the thousands, even millions, of bored and curious people on the Internet."