Have you ever heard about the boy who discovered his own kidnapping while applying for college?
Or what about the punk rocker who tried to warn everyone about a predatory DJ?
Keep watching for those stories and more.
True crime theories can be found in every corner of the internet.
Case in point: the website Websleuths, which is a forum-style site devoted solely to true
crime and missing person cases.
And sometimes, the speculation on Websleuths can lead to the truth.
Sites like these are often resources that law enforcement agencies use to help crack
cold cases.
One such case was that of Abraham Shakespeare, a Florida man who won a $32 million lottery.
Shakespeare was the opposite of a greedy person.
He shared his winnings with people who would simply ask him.
That is, until he met DeeDee Moore.
Moore sparked up a friendship with Shakespeare and began managing his winnings.
When he disappeared in 2009, Moore told his friends and family a variety of stories and
concocted elaborate explanations.
Police suspected that she was involved with his disappearance but couldn't prove it.
But then posters on Websleuths started digging into her.
Tricia Griffith, a co-owner of the site, told Mother Jones that Moore made an anonymous
account to defend herself, unaware that it could be traced back to her IP address.
Moore was ultimately found guilty of killing the man, though Shakespeare's mother eventually
expressed forgiveness.
When 22-year-old Gabby Petito vanished in August 2021, many observers were quick to
theorize that her fiancé Brian Laundrie was responsible.
Petito and Laundrie had left New York for a road trip in Petito's van, but then something
happened that set off endless theories and speculation, as Laundrie drove home alone
in the van.
As Internet sleuths dove into Petito's social media for clues, many began to speculate that
she had died.
As theories about the case began to gain more and more attention, the number of people who
got involved grew as well.
This included the Bethune family, who'd been traveling in the Bridger-Teton National Forest
area at the same time as Petito and Laundrie.
When they analyzed their own videos from that time, they spotted Petito's van, and this
information ultimately helped solve her disappearance.
"It almost feels like you were meant to be there at that point in time.
Your camera was meant to be rolling."
The theories that she was murdered turned out to be true, though Laundrie was never
charged before his own remains were discovered in October.
Mark Lewis of Netflix's Don't F--- With Cats commented on the case to The New York Times,
as he noted,
"From the safety of your living room, you can do amazing things in terms of detection.
And many, many people are."
Prohibition was ratified in the United States in 1919, as the 18th Amendment banned the
production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages across the nation.
But ridding the country of alcohol wasn't a simple process.
Speakeasies roared to life, and bootleggers made and distributed their own illegal liquor.
And in New York, hundreds of people began dying of alcohol poisoning.
On February 6, 1927, The New York Times ran an article that read:
"Most of our liquor poison, 741 deaths in city in 1926, Norris reports to Walker; finds
alcohol a menace."
During Prohibition, New York City's chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, submitted
a report saying that he suspected the alcohol was being made more poisonous intentionally.
In 1928 he published an article called "Our Essay in Extermination," in which he urged
people to look at the shocking statistics.
The truth of the matter is that Norris was right, as alcohol was being poisoned.
And the responsible party was the United States government.
Government officials were frustrated with their own inability to enforce Prohibition,
so they began poisoning the commercial alcohol that bootleggers would steal.
Applying for college and scholarships usually involves a lot of time-intensive steps like
writing essays, obtaining documents, and proving your identity to verify the information you're sending.
For one particular application, the process was a bit more complicated.
As Julian Hernandez was entering his Social Security number, he kept running into errors.
He became suspicious and started to theorize that something about his identity was a lie.
And as it turned out, he was right.
With the help of his school counselor, he accessed The National Center for Missing & Exploited
Children's website and discovered the truth: his father Bobby Hernandez had kidnapped him
13 years earlier and falsified Julian's records.
In 2015, someone posted anonymously on Reddit about an incredibly similar scenario, leading
many to believe that Julian posted it himself and thereby assisted in solving his own kidnapping.
Julian indeed later identified himself as the anonymous poster, and his father was arrested
and charged.
The "Grateful Doe" was the name given to a 19-year-old boy who was found dead with Grateful
Dead ticket stubs in his pocket.
He was killed in a car accident, and because his body had been so badly injured, it wasn't
possible to identify him at the time.
He died in Virginia in 1995, and his body was never claimed, which led to the case going cold.
But many years later, internet investigators began trying to solve cases like this by creating
computer-generated renderings of victims' faces.
One anonymous user going by the name "greymetal" posted a computer rendering on Imgur in 2017
with the title:
"Do you recognise me?
I have been without my name for nearly 20 years"
The post included descriptions of a small star tattoo and a note found in a pocket,
among other details.
A woman named Lesha Johanneck, who runs multiple true crime pages, told The New York Times
that the "Grateful Doe's" mother contacted her after hearing about the information and
theorizing that it could be her son, Jason Callahan.
She then reported him missing in 2015 and said that he frequently disappeared, which
is why she didn't know where to start.
When multiple members of his family submitted their DNA, they discovered that his mother
was indeed correct.
In 1943, 4,443 bodies belonging to Polish officers were found in the forest of Katyn, Russia.
Chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels was then quick to form a committee to prove his
theory that it was actually the Soviet Union that was responsible.
The Soviet government insisted upon a fabricated tale, as they claimed that the Polish soldiers
were killed by the German army.
But once the Soviet Union fell, Russian authorities admitted to the theories that Goebbels and
Red Cross investigations had found physical evidence for.
As recounted in the book Surviving Katyn: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for
Truth, Joseph Stalin had ordered their deaths and the subsequent coverup.
Ultimately, it was determined that the Soviet Union was responsible for the deaths of nearly
22,000 Polish citizens.
But Goebbels didn't form the committee to prove this out of the kindness of his heart.
Instead, he wanted to create tension between the USSR, Europe, and America.
But even though it was officially declared in 2010 that Stalin and other top officials
were responsible, it didn't drive the wedge that Goebbels had hoped for, and U.S. President
Dwight Eisenhower didn't push for an international trial at the time that this information came
to light.
American General James Wilkinson, whose codename was Agent 13, provided Spanish intelligence
information about the inner workings of the American military.
At the same time, he was also serving in the United States Army.
This was before he tried his hand as a land speculator, like many others.
It was a way to chase the American Dream and become rich, but it didn't quite work out
as he'd hoped, as he soon fell into debt.
In 1787, he pledged an oath to Spain and was paid by them until the 1800s.
But he was also being paid by the United States.
Wilkinson even provided the Spanish forces with information about the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Author Andro Linklater wrote the book An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life
of General James Wilkinson, and according to him, there were of course theories about
the true nature of the general's activities.
As Linklater told NPR in 2010,
"Almost everyone suspected him of passing information to Spain.
Every single president from Washington to Madison knew of people's suspicions about him.
And yet they all trusted him."
But because Wilkinson was so skilled at the code that he used to communicate, nothing
was proven while he was alive, even when he was court martialed multiple times.
He died without ever being convicted of a crime, though documents connecting him to
Spain were eventually found.
Citizen investigations might not sound like the best practice, but in the United Kingdom
some police and even former Prime Minister Theresa May have toyed with the practice of
asking those with no police background to do the groundwork.
But when John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, appeared on a BBC show and
tried to voice his theory that former DJ Jimmy Savile was a predatory sex offender, he discovered
that his comments never aired.
In a 2015 article with The Guardian, Rotten claimed,
"[Saville was] into all sorts of seediness.
We all know about it but we're not allowed to talk about it.
I know some rumors."
As it turns out, Rotten was right.
As BBC director-general Tony Hall put it,
"A serial rapist and a predatory sexual abuser both hid in plain sight at the BBC for decades."
But while Savile was alive, he was treated like a saint.
On the Monday after he died, though, two journalists at the BBC itself started to look into the
truth, thereby risking their careers in the process.
But the truth came out, as they found multiple people willing to give testimony to Saville's
crimes on the record.
"It was common knowledge, but it wasn't common knowledge in the media."
A 65-year old grandmother using the internet dove into chat rooms for more than a year
to prove her theory: someone was seeking out depressed young people online and encouraging
them to end their lives.
As reported by the Wiltshire Times, Celia Blay, who describes herself as an internet
novice, eventually began to unravel the mystery that she found herself in.
One day in 2006, she was contacted by a 17-year-old girl who said she had plans to end her life.
Blay then learned that the girl had entered into a suicide pact with someone she believed
was another young, depressed girl.
After scouring chat rooms for the name of the other person, Blay found an alarming number
of similarities with other posts and theorized that the same person was engaging in these
pacts with no intention of going through with the pact.
As Blay revealed to the BBC,
"I gathered about 20 messages and took them to my local police.
But they said they couldn't investigate because the sources were anonymous."
Undeterred, Blay pressed on and continued to gather evidence until she ultimately decided
to set up a trap.
She would pose as a depressed young individual to make contact with the person whom her online
friends had theorized to be the instigator of these pacts.
She would do this by tracing the person's IP address.
The plan worked.
It led to William Melchert-Dinkel, a husband and father in Minnesota, who was ultimately
convicted of aiding suicide.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.