On October 22, 1989, Jacob Wetterling’s name became forever etched in my consciousness. I was 15 at the time, old enough to be mesmerized by the news coverage. Paynesville was much less than a day’s drive away, and my parents, who had always demanded to know a “route” when we went on our bike rides, suddenly seemed a bit less overbearing. Jacob, after all, had been taken by a man in a white van while he was out riding his bike, in a town not much bigger than mine.
The case went unsolved for decades, and would have probably stayed that way if it wasn’t for an internet investigative blogger named Joy Baker. Her painstaking work was crucial to Jacob’s remains eventually being found and his perpetrator, a serial predator, being brought to justice. I was excited to find her here on Substack, and you can read her entire journey.
Joy is one of the good sleuths.
Volunteers at the Doe Network and NamUs do similarly important work. They match unidentified remains to open missing persons files, one careful comparison at a time. These people who give the faceless dead their names back are behind the scenes, seeking no credit for themselves.
There are many people like these folks who put their own time, resources, and mental energy toward righting horrific wrongs. Sometimes they do it because they were victims once, and it helps their healing. Sometimes it’s because they have skills that lend themselves well to the pursuit of justice, and sometimes it’s just that a case spoke to them on a visceral level. As Joy put it:
I was drawn to write about Jacob’s case for reasons I’ll never fully understand. The more I learned, the more I cared. The more I cared, the more I craved answers. Like every other Minnesotan who lived through the horror of his abduction, I wanted to know what happened to Jacob. And with each passing moment, it felt like time and opportunities were slipping away. I thought if I could just get his story out there, people might start paying attention. Maybe they could even add details that might help. More than anything, I just didn’t want people to forget.
You might not have ever heard of Joy, and you’ve certainly never heard of many others like her, but they’re out there doing slow, careful, exacting work. They are not the story, and they don’t want to be. In fact, you’ll probably never hear about their contributions.
Unfortunately, they’re often not the norm. I wish they were, but the online sleuthing community has also been beset by people for whom clicks are king, and the destruction they leave in their wake tells you something about their own psychology and unmet emotional needs. What’s more, there’s an operational lesson to be had.
The Failures
In 2013, a Reddit community set out to identify the Boston Marathon bomber, and within hours its members seemed to consider it open season on any young man with dark hair and a backpack. They fixated on innocent people, spread their faces across the internet, and pushed so far that Reddit had to make a public apology for it later, after its members tormented one family whose son was missing and later found to have committed suicide, potentially before the bombing even occurred.
The Idaho College Murders in November 2022 provided online sleuths with a smorgasbord level almost unheard of previously. Instead of one victim, there were four: Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin. All of them were popular and attractive, and their roommates and friend circles offered even more rabbit trails to go down.
There was no private detail left unturned in their lives, right down to the nitty-gritty details of the coroner’s report. While I refuse to link to some of the more salacious things posted, I’ll point out that some literally used AI to model how Bryan Kohberger could have carried out his bloody rampage, wound by wound. Some even used it to “prove his innocence.” Kohberger admitted to the murders in a plea deal in July 2025, but has recently asked to vacate his plea and get a trial. That is basically chum in the water for those who are already making money off of the life-changing horror that the families are enduring.
That’s not even remotely the worst of it, however.
A simple YouTube search shows hundreds, even thousands of videos from true crime podcasters discussing their various theories and picking apart every jot and tittle they can find. I don’t use TikTok, but I’m aware that there are thousands more there. They’re monetized, which means the more views and comments they get, the more cash they make. Having to compete in such a crowded space means having to come up with something no one else has.
Enter the “exclusive.” Exclusive interviews. Exclusive new “data.” I have new information, so come watch my stream. Make sure to like and subscribe! There is no limit, it appears, to what can be considered “true,” or what listeners are willing to act on. The Spokesman-Review, based in Spokane, reprinted a Washington Post article discussing one such streamer show where a veteran suffering from mental health issues became a target for the mob.
In one January video, a listener called in to claim a knife used in the stabbings belonged to [Brent] Kopacka. In a rambling, confusing list of accusations, she alleged – without evidence – that the veteran had been in the victims’ house before.
After several minutes of wide-ranging speculation, host Daniel Jay remarked: “Everything that you’re saying makes a lot of sense.”
Rolling Stone also weighed in on the phenomenon.
While some users have issued apologies for the various allegations, hundreds more videos making unfounded claims are still available to watch on the app. And at least five people—including close friend Jack Showalter, a victim’s boyfriend, a Door Dash driver, a food truck worker, and University of Idaho professor Rebecca Schofield[sic]—have all been accused by random accounts of murdering the students, with zero official evidence to back up the claims.
Scofield went on to sue one TikToker named Ashley Guillard, who touts herself as a “psychic” who solves crimes using her readings and tarot cards.
…Guillard says Scofield was having a relationship with one of the victims and then planned the murders with another student because "(the victim) wanted a break in the relationship" and wanted to "keep from making the relationship public," court filings said.
Scofield won her defamation lawsuit against Guillard, to the tune of $10 million. Whether she sees any of that money remains to be seen. Her win also won’t help the many other families and friends of people who either were close enough to the crime to suffer real loss, or merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were dragged into it by internet sleuths looking for their next “exclusive.”
Even Netflix has gotten into the game, and their 2015 ten-part documentary Making a Murderer built a case for the innocence of Steven Avery, convicted of the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach. It sent a lot of viewers away thinking Avery had been framed, but it also left a lot out. It drew heavy and specific criticism for selective editing and even omitting evidence that pointed to Steven Avery’s guilt. While the Netflix producers stood by their story, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear his case in 2025.
The concept that all of these theories and unproven assertions could cause genuine harm to real people is apparently not as important as making that big money. When asked by Rolling Stone about it, Ashley Guillard’s answer was telling:
“I don’t care what harm has happened to Rebecca Schofield[sic] because it has nothing to do with me.”
This brings us to the more disturbing aspects of the machine behind it all.
The Need to Be Right
A good investigator goes where the evidence goes. They can be corrected by new information. They have theories, but they allow the evidence to prove or disprove them. For people like Joy Baker, the truth was the goal regardless of where and to whom it led.
Ashley Guillard, however, started accusing Rebecca Scofield only a few weeks after the murders, and continued to do so until well after Kohberger was arrested, pled guilty, and was sent to prison. In fact, after the verdict in March, Guillard addressed the defeat in a 21-part series of new TikToks, and said, “I still believe my readings.”
This type of attitude says something: I need to be right. Podcasters, pundits, and others who make their living on the internet based on views are often wrong. Maybe they get new information and have to update what they’re telling the public. If they have integrity, they do it. They straight up say, “Hey folks, turns out that what I told you on Monday wasn’t factual, and here’s the info I have now.”
When the truth is the only goal, being wrong is merely a stepping stone to getting it right. Sometimes that means you don’t make the big money, or no one knows your name. Maybe you have to sit on information that you’re pretty sure is true while you double and triple-check it, and when you do that, sometimes someone else will beat you to the punch because they checked faster or didn’t check at all. If you care about truth above all else, that kind of thing stings, but it’s a price you’ll pay willingly.
If your goal, however, is clicks, notoriety, and/or a paycheck, truth will often take a back seat. Sometimes you can’t have it all, and when forced to make a choice, your priorities and values will win out over whatever else is jockeying for attention.
Protecting the Self
The mechanism at play is something I’ve written about before. Identity-protective cognition is the individual version. It’s when a belief becomes part of who you are, or part of the group you belong to. Your reasoning will shift from finding the truth to defending your belief. Instead of weighing the evidence, you’re guarding a piece of yourself.
Once that happens, you’ll keep getting deeper into your beliefs, doubling down until your work is a caricature that anyone can see has long let go of reality. At that point, no claim is too absurd, as long as you’re very certain about it. Someone, somewhere, will buy it and pay you to keep saying it. They’ll even spend an inordinate amount of time online trolling and even threatening anyone who disagrees with you. It’s like having your own little mob.
Of those who said their main podcast is about true crime, the most common major reasons for listening were for entertainment (85%) and to have something to listen to while doing something else (84%).
I follow certain cases myself, so I’m not throwing stones from across the street. Am I learning something, treating the victim as a person and the case as something to understand or guard against? Or am I just filling the silence with someone's worst day? I aim for the first, and I still have to check myself, because the pull toward the darker side is real for all of us, even when it’s part of our professional field.
The greater industry, however, treats a murdered five-year-old as background noise, something to half-listen to while folding laundry, or a story to narrate while the host finishes her eyeshadow. Rape, murder, and oh, this shade is to die for; I’ll leave the product links in the description.
In some cases, they even find reasons to support the killer rather than the victims.
The Lindsay Clancy trial going on now (or should I say, the furor around it) is a classic example. I won’t weigh in on the case itself because Holly MathNerd already did a fantastic job breaking all of it down.
For some people, a case like Clancy’s isn’t even about her, but about the principle her absolution would set. If an act like killing your children can end with no personal accountability for the person who actually committed the act, then accountability itself becomes negotiable. Anyone who fears or even strongly dislikes being held responsible for their own conduct gains something from that outcome.
This is identity-protective cognition at its root, where the belief that’s being guarded has nothing to do with a stranger’s situation, but the personal hope that responsibility can always be escaped. You can hear it in the arguments being made online; it moves straight to the conclusion that she could not possibly have been responsible.
To be fair, there are two separate groups at play here. One is made up of people genuinely advocating for maternal mental health while still not absolving Clancy of the blood on her hands. The other, however, is not-so-secretly defending a principle that would cover them too; namely, the choices we make are not our responsibility.
Some people even support fellow family annihilators Chris Watts and Scott Peterson, as well as other killers, but for other reasons. Wade Wilson (known as the Deadpool Killer) has received nearly 4000 letters from fans wanting to connect. That doesn’t count the many women who actually wrote to the judge in the case asking for leniency.
The Engine
The Clancy trial, you might argue, has nothing to do with amateur investigators going off the rails, but it’s all the same machine underneath: the attention economy. Incentives drive systems; what a system rewards is what it’ll get more of. Like it or not, society doesn’t reward truth anymore; not like it should. We do, however, reward loudness, certainty, and emotion.
If you don’t believe me, then ask yourself why the phrase “rage bait” is a thing, or why a social media video showing someone cooking some absolutely horrifically bad food gets thousands of views and comments, even if 99% of them are slamming the original poster.
If there’s one thing humans like even more than sharing their own opinions on something, it’s trashing the opposing view. This even ties into the need for “specialness,” which is just the validation engine.
Let’s tie this back to the true crime industry. If I’m a podcaster who knows full well that Bryan Kohberger pled guilty, the evidence shows he did it, and yet I still post my theory (with exclusive info) that there is some conspiracy afoot, I know that I am going to get two entirely different viewer types: one will agree, and one will come just to rage about it. Either way, though, I get paid, so does it matter? If I also trash the victims’ families, I get bonus points because now the supporters of those families will come trash me back. Maybe I even get the families themselves to release a statement or go on a podcast to “expose” me…which will send even more people to my channel.
The system rewards poor behavior. The more outrageous I am, the more narcissistic and uncaring I am, the nastier I am, and the more ridiculous I act, the more money I’ll make. It doesn’t even matter what the topic is; true crime is just one of the many topics that have a high rate of rage return.
What’s the Fix?
Does it even matter? I’d argue that it absolutely matters to Rebecca Scofield, who spent three years having to watch a stranger tell the entire world that she ordered the murder of four college students. It matters to Kevin Gosden, whose son Andrew vanished in 2007 and who now wakes up to AI-generated videos of his boy, made by strangers for sport. It matters to every family who has been targeted by violent crime, only to be trolled, harassed, and even threatened by some rando on the internet who fancies themselves an “investigator.”
You can’t fix the incentive, unfortunately. As long as attention is lucrative, someone will manufacture whatever earns it. Even this article is, to some extent, pointless moralizing because they already know what they’re doing is wrong, and they don’t care.
What you can fix, however, is your position in the machine. You can stop feeding it. You can stop restacking the rage bait or wanting to hear every gory detail of some other human’s suffering. Most importantly for operational purposes, you can learn to recognize the machine at work, even in the arenas where you already live and work.
The true crime mob is merely a visible part of a general-purpose machine. The machine itself can be aimed at your company, a political candidate, a neighbor, or even you and your family. You can recognize it by how it rewards certainty and punishes correction while getting paid either way.
The operational lesson is to turn all of this on yourself. The same standard that Joy Baker chose to hold herself to can be applied to all of us. When a story grabs you, ask what would change your mind. Go look for evidence that proves you wrong. Pay attention to whether the information you’re about to rage-restack is causing an emotional reaction, and whether you’re feeding the machine. Be willing to be wrong; in fact, LOOK for reasons why you might be wrong. Discuss with other truth-seekers. Ignore the ones who obviously have melded their identity with their positions.
Seek truth as the only honorable goal, regardless of the arena…and regardless of the cost.