Amateur Online Sleuths: How They Work & Do They Help Solve Crimes?

Call them online sleuths, web detectives, or sometimes armchair vigilantes. These days apparently, they are everywhere, and you, too, could be one so long as you have a desktop or laptop computer with a connection to the Internet, and a passion for true crime — especially for unsolved homicides.

In April, a couple of thousand true crime fans gathered for the second annual convention of CrimeCon in Nashville, TN for “immersive experiences” (test your investigative skills, explore the crime scene, find clues, and use forensic tools to find the killer of a Nashville musician,) and “incredible guests” and “nerdy deep-dives into tactics and cases.” In an eye-opening account for the New York Post, writer Maureen Callahan described how Jim Clemente, a former FBI agent and a writer for Criminal Minds told attendees that the FBI needed the help of amateur sleuths like themselves.

One of the most poplar websites for such amateur detectives is Websleuths.com. It  focusses on unsolved cases, trials and missing persons. Separate forums exist on the website for many high profile unsolved homicides, like the Long Island serial killings of sex workers whose bodies were found at Gilgo Beach in Suffolk County. It is said that members of law enforcement agencies often read the discussions on the site which has more than 135,000 registered members.

Digital Clues

Truth be told, I wasn’t aware of how widespread this interest in solving crimes was until I read Michelle McNamara’s brilliant true crime book, I’ll Be Gone In The Dark : One Woman’s Obsessive Search For The Golden State Killer. As I wrote last week in Hunting A Serial Killer, Michelle’s obsession lay with establishing the identity of a sexual predator who had committed at least 12 homicides and fifty rapes in California between 1976 and 1986.

In describing how she pursued her obsession, she wrote: “When my family goes to sleep, I time travel and re-frame stale evidence using twenty-first-century technology. I start clicking, scouring the Internet for digital clues authorities may have overlooked, combing digitized phone books, yearbooks, and Google Earth views of crime scenes: a bottomless pit of potential leads for the laptop investigator who now exists in the virtual world. I share my theories with the loyal regulars who read my blog.” She also pored over thousands of pages of 1970s-era police files and autopsy reports; and she compiled documents listing all the unique items this serial predator had stolen over the years — and then tried to find them through websites like Ebay.

Fellow Obsessives

Michelle, who passed away in 2016, established connections with others who were interested in finding the Golden State Killer (GSK.) In her book she wrote about them as follows: “I found a group of hard-core seekers who congregated on an online message board and exchanged clues and theories on the case.” One was a woman she named the Social Worker who “one evening dined with a suspect and then bagged his water bottle for DNA.”

Another was The Kid whom she described as being “about a year of researching and several databases ahead” of her. The Kid, she wrote had spent “nearly four thousand hours data mining … cold-searching everything from Ancestry.com to USSearch.com… He has the 1983 Orange County telephone directory digitized on his hard drive.” The Kid (real name Paul Haynes) subsequently joined Michelle as a researcher and investigative partner and was one of two writers who, after her death, finished Michelle’s book using her notes and computer files. More recently he was a guest speaker at CrimeCon.

Michelle also described how she made “underground trades” with fellow online obsessives. What is an underground trade? In this instance, Michelle exchanged a copy of a disc of a two-hour videotaped interview with a person connected to one of the homicides for a flash drive with four thousand pages of digitized old police reports.

Longtime Interest

You may wonder, as I did, why online sleuths would be exchanging information that’s already been seen, combed through by its original owner, and presumably dismissed? Michelle (see photo) explained: “These underground trades, the result of furtive alliances forged from a shared obsession with a faceless serial killer, were common. Online sleuthers, retired detectives, and active detectives — everyone participated. I believed, as they did, that I and I alone was going to spot what no one else could see. In order to do that, I needed to see everything.”

Active Pursuit

Michelle’s interest in unsolved crimes predates her search for the Golden State Killer. She became an avid reporter of such crimes in 2006 when she set up her website truecrimediary.com to share information and to “find the angles others have overlooked.

She wrote in her book : ” the advent of the Internet transferred my interest (in cold cases) into an active pursuit […]once public records came online and sophisticated search engines were invented, I recognized how a head full of crime details could intersect with an empty search bar.”

Helping Cops

She realized early on that law enforcement was not taking advantage of the Internet when she contributed some information to authorities in Madison, Wisc. who were investigating the murder of 22-year old Kelly Nolan.  Because Kelly had a MySpace profile (remember MySpace?) Michelle did a MySpace search for young men in a five mile radius from where Kelly’s body was found.

Her rationale for looking into the MySpace profiles of young men is worth reading in her blog archive. She further wrote: “I kept circling back to one guy,” and eventually she found a photo of him on the Internet — a photo that resembled the sketch generated early in the investigation. She called his name into a tip line, and was asked to call again “if you find out anything else.”

That homicide remains unsolved. At the time of Michelle’s death in 2016, the identity of the Golden State Killer was also unknown. An arrest was made a couple of months after Michelle’s book was published, and while she did not get any official credit for unmasking GSK, Paul Holes, the investigator who eventually tracked him down referred to Michelle as “his detective partner on the case.”

Rare recognition

Such recognition for armchair detectives is rare. Websleuths features a section titled Resolved Cold Cases, although it wasn’t immediately clear to me if these were resolved exclusively by members of Websleuths.  Elsewhere, an undated article on ranker.com titled 18 Times Internet Teamed Up to Solve a Crime attributes the solving of the homicide of a lottery winner by his financial advisor in Florida in 2012 to online sleuths.

Last year, Netflix streamed a docuseries titled The Keepers which focussed on the investigation into the unsolved 1969 homicide of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a high school teacher and nun by two of her former students. Their online legwork did not lead to the arrest or conviction of anyone for Sister Cathy’s murder, but it uncovered a huge sexual abuse scandal involving the Catholic Church in Baltimore with more than 40 women coming forward to talk about it for the first time.

A 2015 article in The Washington Post stated, “it’s hard to see much value in the speculation that often passes for detective work on Websleuths” but also acknowledged that this is the “era of the Internet sleuth.”   And, that’s a point of view much more in line with that of CrimeCon presenters like Jim Clemente whose goal is “for all attendees to feel that they have as much chance of cracking a cold case as the most seasoned detective.”