Secrets of the citizen sleuths: How wave of real-crime fanatics are causing chaosBy Dana Kennedy
July 8, 2023
Blame it on Adnan Syed.
He was the star, so to speak of the wildly popular “Serial” podcast, which launched in 2014 and centered on the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee in Baltimore and Syed’s arrest and conviction for her death. In 2022, due in part to the renewed focus brought to the case by “Serial,” Syed’s conviction was overturned.
A heady new genre—the true-crime podcast—was born, and with it the rise of citizen sleuths.
Lacking only trench coats and fedoras, they fire up their own podcasts, launch massive Facebook true-crime groups or go it alone like post-modern Miss Marples and Sam Spades in their quest to track down killers or crack open cold cases.
Even after Bryan Kohberger, 28, was arrested and charged in December for the November slayings of four University of Idaho students, the more than 220,000 members of one Facebook group about Kohberger were still posting rumors and conspiracy theories about the case as were some members of a 123,000-member strong Reddit group.
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Armed with online tools such as data-scraping site BeenVerified or PimEyes, a facial recognition site, Google Earth and even Ancestry.com, obsessive citizen sleuths often dedicate hours to doing detective work.
Sometimes their work put them ahead of the cops — but just as often it muddies the waters and can even put innocent people in danger, a number of people familiar with the online sleuth world told The Post.
In December, Rebecca Scofield, a history professor at the University of Idaho sued a TikTok tarot-reader-cum-cyber-sleuth, Ashley Guillard, for defamation after the would-be detective accused her of involvement in the college slayings. The case is ongoing; Guillard has doubled down on her claims in her TikToks.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2023/07/08/secrets-of-the-citizen-sleuths-how-wave-of-real-crime-fanatics-are-causing-chaos/
