The line between online and off is getting blurrier all the time.
There’s so much data about everyone floating around out there that even crimes are being
solved just by looking at someone’s online presence.
Now we know most of you are, like us, just regular, law abiding citizens who don’t
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Lives have been saved, mysteries have been unraveled, cold-blooded killers have leaked
information and gotten themselves caught.
As you’ll see today, it’s remarkable, horrifying, and sometimes funny how many crimes
have been solved by online sleuths.
Let’s begin with something light that we’ll put in the funny folder.
It all started when cops in Detroit said they were shutting down Six Mile Road for Angel’s
Night.
That’s the night volunteers patrol the city, a response to the mayhem of Devil’s Night
in years past.
Anyway, when that announcement hit the department’s Facebook page, one particular poster with
the name Champagne Torino wasn’t very happy.
He wrote on that page, shut down that street and you are getting shut down.
Ok, a troll, just another big man hiding behind a fake name.
But then when he started saying come Halloween, I’m going to put something nasty inside
kids’ candies, the cops looked a bit deeper into this Torino character.
Let’s just say that Mr. Torino wasn’t the brightest kid on the block and in no time
at all the police found out that he was named Michael Zaydel.
What’s more, the 21-year old had outstanding warrants for a DUI and also assault and battery.
The cops got in touch with him on Facebook, after which Zaydel offered them a deal that
was hard to refuse.
He said, ok, you got me, but if you want me to hand myself in, I’ll do it on the condition
you get one of your posts shared a thousand times.
What’s more, he said, I’ll come into the station loaded with donuts for you.
The department posted a picture and asked people to share it, with added information
about the challenge.
It went viral, and we mean globally.
Soon after, Zaydel walked into the station with a bag of glazed donuts.
Crime solved.
He got 39 days in jail.
Ok, this one isn’t funny at all, but it has a nice ending.
In 1995, two young men in Virginia were out driving when they crashed.
Both men died.
The driver, a 21-year old named Michael Hager had fallen asleep and the car hit a tree.
But what about the other guy, who was he?
The police didn’t know, and they still didn’t know after investigating.
One thing they did know was that he was a Grateful Dead fan.
He had two tickets in his pocket for one of their gigs and he was wearing one of their
t-shirts.
He was also wearing Levi’s and Fila running shoes.
Cops found a note, too.
It read, “Jason, Sorry we had to go, see ya around, call me #914-XXXX.
Caroline T. & Caroline O. Bye!!!!.”
That number had no area code and led to no great discovery.
Police did manage to find where the tickets had been bought, but it turned out the seller
was just a scalper.
He couldn’t remember selling the tickets.
Police also knew the dead man was about 20 years old, with long, brown curly hair.
He had two tattoos that looked like they’d been scribbled rather than done by a professional.
His teeth were in tip-top shape.
Still, with all this information, they just couldn’t get a name.
Hager, it turned out, had likely picked up the mystery man while he was hitchhiking.
Hager’s family said they knew nothing about a guy that fit that description.
The police named him Jason Doe.
It was a confounding mystery that really shouldn’t have been.
Some young man had just disappeared and not one person came forward and said anything.
One thing the police did was create an image of what the guy likely looked like, also wearing
that tie-dyed Grateful Dead t-shirt.
They posted that on the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children database.
Years passed and nothing happened.
Then an Australian Reddit user who was into unsolved mysteries read about the case.
She decided to start the thread “Grateful Doe” and posted the reconstructed image
and information about him.
One day she looked in her Inbox and found a message from a guy named Steve.
He said, I think I know that guy.
His name is Jason Callahan, I used to share a room with him.
Not long after, Jason Callahan’s half-sister was found with the help of Redditors.
You have to remember, this was 20 years after the accident, so she hadn’t known Jason.
But she said this later, “When I looked at that picture, it looked like my dad was
looking back at me.
He had the same face.
And he even had a lot of my facial features — my forehead and the shape of my face.
I knew in that moment, deep down, who that was.”
DNA tests proved it was him.
Jason had been found.
It turned out that he’d told his family those many years ago that he was leaving home
and going to follow the Grateful Dead around America.
His mother hadn’t filed a missing person’s report, but she did after she saw those Reddit
posts.
This next one is equally sad, but again there is some light in the darkness.
This is the story of a woman who lived in a small town called Eatonville in Pierce County,
Washington.
Her name was Susan Rainwater, and she was married to Al, a very devoted husband.
They might have been getting on in years, but they kept fit, often walking together
while holding hands.
One morning, Susan got up and made some coffee.
She brought a cup to her sleeping husband and as usual, told him that she’d be back
in a bit after she finished her morning bicycle ride.
She never returned.
30 years of marriage and Al never saw her alive again.
When he did see her the next time it was when he went looking for her.
She was dead in a ditch.
It was a hit and run, or seemed like one.
Al later said, “I was always worried about her, and she was always worried about me.”
No one had seen the accident.
But then forward-thinking state trooper Robert Reyer took to Twitter.
He posted a picture of the mangled bike and he also posted a tiny bit of black material
that had presumably come off the car.
To most people that bit of material could have been anything, but avid car enthusiasts
are not most people.
Responses came back, such as “Likely trim from a pop-up headlight, or an old 80s truck
headlight.”
And then someone said, “1983-84 chevy silverado headlamp bezel.”
Sometime later, someone posted the image on Reddit under r/WhatIsThisThing.
The user JeffsNuts didn’t waste any time in replying.
He knew his stuff.
He said what he saw was a part of the headlight bezel from a late-1980s Chevrolet C/K pickup.
In 2018 there weren’t too many of those around anymore.
He even talked about a certain notch that was peculiar to one exact model.
He then went back to watching football on TV.
He said it was actually totally random that he even answered the question about the image.
He’d just happened to see it, and had no idea about the terrible crime.
That same trooper got back on Reddit a few days later.
His message was this: “Detectives made an arrest today for Thursday’s
fatal bicyclist hit and run in Eatonville.
Reddit users identify a photographed broken car part as a mid-1980s Chevy truck headlight
assembly.”
The guy said he’d fallen asleep at the wheel, although judging by the heroin in his possession
when he was caught, maybe he’d gouged out.
He said he knew he’d hit someone, but didn’t want to see a body.
He was charged with vehicular homicide.
When the victim’s daughter spoke to the press, she said, “She didn't deserve to
be left on the side of the road with no one to help her because all she ever did was help
other people.”
As sad as it was, in a kind of way she was helped too after her death.
On another positive note, this is what someone wrote below the trooper’s post: “Look
at the internet today, being all useful and everything.”
As you’ll now see, the Internet can also get you in trouble.
This is a very short story.
You can call it a cautionary tale, or perhaps a modern-day parable.
There was a man, a Florida man, and his name was Johnson.
He was just 19.
Mr. Johnson thought it was a good idea to post photos of himself on Instagram holding
guns in his hands.
There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but if you’ve draped yourself in gold and
you’re sometimes holding wads of notes, well, you might bring attention to yourself,
especially if you have a criminal record and don’t have a license for those guns.
In fact, this kid had previous convictions for grand theft, burglary, and being a felon
in possession of a firearm.
Then there were all the recent robberies in the area where he lived.
So, after seeing his Instagram page, cops paid him a visit.
They found stolen electronic goods, stolen guns, stolen jewelry, and $250,000 in cash.
It was said this man had committed up to 40 burglaries where he lived.
He later amassed 142 charges.
When cops asked him what his job was, he replied, “thief.”
At least he was honest.
That one was hardly a difficult crime to solve, but this one was even easier, thanks to teens
who risked everything to get some attention online.
It was hardly the crime of the century.
Two young guys went on a rampage and vandalized just about everything in their sight, from
a school, to cars, to a nearby restaurant.
They even walked up to people eating at restaurants and blasted them with a stolen fire extinguisher.
They ran around, jumping on cars and just being a nuisance.
Everything they did they posted on Snapchat and the videos were seen by the public.
Let’s just say they didn’t get away with their crimes for long.
Both were charged with five felonies and four misdemeanors.
Ok, back to more serious crimes.
This one involves some hateful folks getting brought down by clever people on Twitter.
In 2014, two men in their 20s in Philadelphia were walking down the street when some guys
started insulting them about their sexuality.
The insults then turned to fists and the two men were severely beaten, one so badly his
jaw had to be wired.
Police decided to release the surveillance video online, after which a lot of disgusted
people took to Twitter.
They started sharing photos of that night and discussing timelines.
This led to the Twitter sleuths believing they had the men in a photo at a restaurant
close to where the beating happened.
They got in touch with the police.
The guy that posted the photo said he got it from a friend of a friend of a friend.
It just so happened that he had thousands of followers and between them, they had many
thousands more.
As one person put it, this exploded the internet.
Someone then used something called a Facebook Graph Search to see who had checked into that
restaurant around the time of the photo.
This led to some names being mentioned.
They sent their information to the Philadelphia Police Department.
Soon after, local news media tweeted, “Suspects in gay couple bashing attack in court today.”
Three people were charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, and recklessly endangering
another person.
This next one deserves its own movie.
In 2001 a retired trucker named Ronald Telfer pulled into a truck stop in Missouri, He saw
what looked like an abandoned bucket and thought nothing of it.
The next time he was back there the bucket was in the same place.
He kind of needed a bucket, so he went over to it.
It was full of concrete, so he hit the bucket against a wall.
At that moment he smelled something awful.
On inspection, it looked like inside the bucket there was meat and skin, albeit rotten.
He thought it must be from a dead animal, so he just emptied it and took it home to
use for feeding his pigs.
About a month later a guy named Franklin Ray Dean was at the truck stop when he noticed
what looked like a concrete cylinder, only when he got close he saw hair coming out of
it.
The police were called.
They had a dead man on their hands and it was likely a murder case.
Sometime later, a woman named Ellen Leach saw an image online that was a representation
of the skull that had been found.
She was a web sleuth and a very good one, but a skull wasn’t much to go on.
It wasn’t for police, either, who’d had no luck with their investigation.
Leach then spent day and night looking at the websites of medical examiners and police
departments.
She spent months and months looking at the image of the skull and tried to imagine what
the man would have looked like.
This is a long and complicated story, but let’s just say one day she saw a picture
of a missing person named Gregory May.
He was exactly what she’d been looking for.
Thanks to her hard work, a man named Douglas DeBruin, the best friend of the victim, was
charged with murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
It turned out he’d killed his friend to get hold of his valuable collection of Civil
War memorabilia.
Ok, now for the grizzliest story of all.
We’re going to condense this story just in case you already know about it, but we
feel we couldn’t do this show and completely leave it out.
In short, in 2010 a video appeared online of someone doing something unimaginable to
some cute kittens.
A Facebook group was started in an attempt to find the culprit.
He couldn’t be seen of course, but when someone posts a video there are usually lots
of clues in the background.
He posted three similar revolting videos in total, and each was scrutinized frame by frame.
The group looked at plug sockets.
They talked in detail about his cigarettes.
They found the kind of blanket he had on eBay and they came together quite brilliantly to
find out what vacuum cleaner he had and where to buy one.
They then used all the information and cross-referenced it with other data to come up with a name.
The sleuths used the footage to eventually track down a man named Luka Magnotta, a pathological
attention seeker who very likely had a bunch of personality disorders.
Police were handed the information and started an inquiry into his animal cruelty.
But worse, way worse, was what he would be convicted of.
Like many deranged killers, he went from killing animals to humans.
In 2012, he posted a video online of himself doing just that with an icepick.
Police soon realized it was the real thing.
Just a few days later, they turned up at his bloodstained apartment in Montreal and read
these words inside his closet, “If you dont like the reflection.
Dont look in the mirror.”
The victim, a university student, was found in several parts.
Magnotta was eventually apprehended in Germany and then sent back to Canada.
He was sentenced to life with no possibility of parole for 25 years.
Now you need to watch, “Horrifying Unsolved Internet Mysteries.”
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