The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber

satisfying as the solution.
    Through a site that included official photographs, maps, forensic evidence, and copies of original missing-person reports, ColdCases users in the early part of the millennium second-guessed the police investigation into the Green River serial killer and other famous cases. Not only did the site provide an insider’s perspective into how cases should be investigated, visitors could see where police completely dropped the ball.
    The late James Q. Wilson, author and public policy expert, believed that cold cases are especially appealing precisely because early efforts to solve them have failed, intensifying the challenge. It’s exactly the kind of game—trying to outsmart a clever murderer—Agatha Christie set up so irresistibly in tale after tale.
    For generations weaned on Christie, John Grisham, Sue Grafton, and dozens of others, this was heady stuff. If Betty Brown or Troy More or Todd Matthews—or any of the other accomplished web sleuths I’d meet, such as determined Ellen Leach, eagle-eyed Daphne Owings, and sharp-thinking Bobby Lingoes—managed to match a missing person with unidentified remains, there was glory in accomplishing what no one else had managed to do. There was the exhilaration of outsmarting the police, who may have been uncooperative and dismissive, if not downright rude, when the web sleuth called with a question about that very case. There was fifteen minutes of fame if the local paper or 48 Hours came knocking.
    Sometimes, if a financial reward accompanied a solution, there was even money in it. No need to live vicariously through some fictitious detective; you could dabble in real deaths, complete with the occasional dismembered or torched corpse or serial killer victim.
    Creating ColdCases was like throwing a fishing line into a pitch-black pond on a moonless night. But More built it, and many, including Todd Matthews, came.
    It quickly became apparent to More who the regulars were. He enlisted Todd—who was researching missing women for chatty church ladies from Indiana who’d met and befriended him at Tent Girl’s grave—to keep a lookout for inappropriate comments on ColdCases; frequent contributor Jennifer “Stormy” Marra to keep up E-clipse’s website and answer e-mail; and an avid member named Helene Wahlstrom, who lived in Sweden, to populate the site with cases from around the world. Wahlstrom came across ColdCases and Marra’s Doe Network at a time in her life when she was unable to leave her house alone. A rape and stalking survivor, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had been forced to terminate her studies at a Swedish university. At the time, using an e-mail address in which the word “turtle” stood in for her name, Helene was clearly hiding in her shell, living a quiet life at home with her father while scouring theInternet for cold cases.
    When I tracked down Wahlstrom in Sweden, she told me that at first she was mystified by the power the missing and unidentified exerted over her. Later, she could see that she had identified with all those victims. By volunteering to help others who had suffered a loss, she said she hoped something good would emerge from her pain and self-imposed seclusion.
    Meanwhile, Todd, recognizing that Jennifer Marra’s site was more polished and technologically advanced than his own, joined the Doe Network in 2001 and closed down The Lost and the Found. That year, Marra decided to spend more time with her family and turned the day-to-day maintenance of the Doe Network over to Wahlstrom, who not only posted daily on ColdCases but who had also become Marra’s second in command.
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    With no need to divulge one’s identity, background, or motivation, it was hard to know exactly who these web sleuths were and why they flocked to sites like ColdCases, Websleuths, and Official Cold Case Investigations. Voyeuristic? Creepy? Sociopathic? Were