Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
of Google and Wikipedia. Social media was just getting started but hadn’t yet produced communities like Reddit, and improved Internet access and functionality had not yet allowed for a site like Websleuths.
Like raw cosmic matter being slowly shaped and consolidated by the force of gravity, the Internet and its ability to facilitate crowdsourcing coalesced into a sphere accessible to all. These earliest websleuths turned their sights onto classic decades-old cold cases like the Green River Killer, Tent Girl, the Lady of the Dunes, the Boy in the Box (which dates all the way back to 1957), etc. More recent and contemporary cases like those of Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G, Jodie Arias, OJ Simpson, and Natalee Holloway fanned the flames of true crime as a moneymaker on cable TV shows like Nancy Grace.
The attacks of 9/11 had an impact on websleuths in forensic science, Halber believes. The number of victims that had to be ID’d sometimes with nothing more than microscopic shreds of DNA pushed the envelope of forensic technology and encouraged crowdsourced work.
The biggest online community used by websleuths at this time was the Doe Network, sometimes called the “Facebook of the dead,” which is a crowdsourced database of missing persons and unidentified bodies. It was launched in 1999 and in time thousands of volunteers would become members and contribute information gathered from public records, media archives, and medical examiner and coroner websites like Las Vegas Unidentified and the Florida Unidentified Decedent Database. The volunteers were so tenacious and pesky that law-enforcement officials and cops called them “Doe Nuts.” This set the stage for a prolonged tension over efforts to peek behind the “blue curtain” that has traditionally been drawn over police investigations.
A series of events in the middle half of the last decade acted as major accelerators for the websleuth movement. The first was in 2004 when Tricia Griffith purchased and revamped the Websleuths website, transforming the crime forum from a hostile vipers’ nest into one of the most trafficked and respected platforms for crowdsleuthing. The next year, in 2005, Reddit came online and quickly grew into a massive online community with several “subreddits” dedicated to websleuthing and cold cases.
In 2007, partly inspired by the success of the Doe Network, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), created a massive new database, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), dedicated to helping families and investigators identify remains and locate missing persons. Within only five years of its inception, NamUs users were mounting impressive numbers.
Crowdsleuthing was having a real effect, helping families find some degree of closure in cases of unimaginable loss and tragedy, delivering justice to hundreds of victims who had almost been completely snuffed out of existence.
A specific case spurred Tricia Griffith to join Websleuths and test her might at cold cases. The day after Christmas in 1996, six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her home, triggering one of the most scrutinized police investigations in modern times. Replete with a potentially staged abduction, unidentified DNA, inconclusive handwriting samples, a badly compromised crime scene, fake press leaks, false confessions, and hundreds of opposing theories, the case generated a small library of books, movies, and TV specials. The JonBenet case essentially created a new niche obsession with true crime.
In 2004, Tricia took the helm of Websleuths and made immediate changes. The forums had become unbearable, Tricia told me, “a sea of jerks” threatening each other, calling each other names, and trolling the hell out of anyone and everyone. Her initial goal, she said, was not to create a popular web forum but to give a platform to disenfranchised advocates. She also wanted to help the families of missing persons or homicide victims who weren’t getting media attention.
Tricia tightened the moderation on the site and made strict rules for communication etiquette and rumor regulation. She also banned a huge group of insufferable trolls. Eventually these measures had the unintended but welcome effect of attracting real websleuths . . . and lots of them. In only a couple years, Websleuths’ membership grew from only 250 to thousands.
Then the Casey Anthony case hit and Websleuths truly exploded.
WEBSLEUTHS
In The Skeleton Crew, Halber paints a portrait of websleuths as decentralized, spread out all over the country and world, usually anonymous, and ranging from a software sales rep like Dan Brady to college students and stay-at-home moms. They are true-crime fanatics, cold-case junkies, people for whom the prospect of cracking an unsolved murder ranks higher than almost any other human accomplishment. They are cold-case lifers.
Some websleuths hunt for forensic information or file FOIA requests; others work on behalf of families who are missing a loved one or who believe their loved one was the victim of foul play. They crowdsource granules of detail based on dental records and DNA, facial reconstruction models, post-mortem photos, computer-generated color portraits, clay dummies, Google or aerial maps. They may comb through online archives collecting census, voter, and military records, marriage and death certificates, property titles, business permits, and bankruptcy and criminal files.
Halber’s book chronicles the stories of several successful websleuths.
Bobby Lingoes, a Doe Network member who works as a civilian database manager for the police in Quincy, Massachusetts, helped solve a 2002 case of an unidentified body found in the Sudbury River. He crowdsleuthed the letters “PK,” which were tattooed on the body’s right shoulder, and found another Doe volunteer from Texas who remembered a missing man with that exact tattoo. Lingoes handed off this information to Framingham police; they subsequently identified the deceased man as forty-year-old Peter Kokinakis. He had disappeared that year from Houston.
Legendary websleuth Todd Matthews, who solved the infamous decades-old Tent Girl mystery, also solved a case using only a tattoo, a kangaroo tattoo that identified a missing woman found dead in Maryland.
Ellen Leach did what police in Missouri and Iowa had been unable to do for four years. Using a forensic reconstruction, she connected a skull found cemented into a bucket behind a dumpster in Missouri with a photograph of missing Iowa resident Greg May. It was Leach’s first solve in six years of websleuthing, and she still remembers the glow.
In 2008, Tonya Finsterwald, an amateur Doe sleuth from Texas, helped solve the 1980 case of a young man, Joseph Formica Jr., who suffered from mental illness and had disappeared from near his family’s home in Pennsylvania.
In another case, a websleuth’s tool of choice was Ancestry.com. While searching the Doe Network, Sheree Greenwood saw the picture of a victim’s bones and the garments worn prior to death, which included white tennis shoes, jeans, and a red T-shirt with a Native American graphic and the words “Wynn family reunion” with the date of the event and a list of names. Greenwood methodically hunted down the family members and the shirt designer and ultimately identified the deceased as Brenda Wright.
Halber says the websleuths and their crowdsleuthing techniques have not only solved a number of cases but are “transforming law enforcement’s relationship with the public.”
Indeed, it is important to remember that at the very beginning of the Elisa Lam case, LAPD law enforcement called upon the public to get involved with providing clues as to her whereabouts. They were not only open to but soliciting a co-relationship between the citizenry and the police, knowing full well that this meant deputizing websleuths to look into the case. Once they showed the surveillance footage, though, they couldn’t close Pandora’s Box.
Tricia Griffith says she knows for a fact that law-enforcement officials use the Websleuths site to gather information and keep an eye on the threads. She has tracked the IP addresses logged into the site and determined that multiple precincts have accounts they use to monitor activity on certain cases. Griffith is convinced that despite any outward posturing or criticism, a growing number of detectives consider the work of websleuths valuable.
But the relationship is not an altogether cozy one and, in fact, in the majority of cases, investigators are outright dismissive of websleuths and consider them impediments. Historically, law enforcement officials—be they police officers, detectives, or any number of deputies from local, regional, and federal task forces—do not want to talk to the public. And not