The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber Page A

these Sherlock Holmes wannabes doing a good thing or a bad thing?
    The doubt stemmed in part from the cloak of anonymity the Internet conferred on its users; there was no way of knowing who wickedprincess222 really was. You needed a Sherlock Holmes just to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. “It’s like the KKK,” Todd once commented. “You can post anything you want wearing that hood.”
    One exchange I unearthed went a long way toward illustrating the disturbing anonymity of those who read and contributed to cold case forums.
    In July 2007, a member of Websleuths sat at her computer in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. The users of the forum typically gave themselves screen names—Magnum P.E., momtective, Twindad, latenightRN, MidwestMama—or some version of a real name, such as Darlene735. The one near Philly called herself Gina M. She threw a question out into cyberspace about a mystery almost four decades old: Whatever happened to Elizabeth Ernstein?
    In 1968, officials in Scott County, Kentucky, focused for a time on a missing teenager who seemed to fit Tent Girl’s description —around five foot five; 105 pounds; short, dark bobbed hair—who had disappeared almost exactly two months before Tent Girl was found. Nearly fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Lurene Ernstein lived in Mentone, a town near Redlands, California. On the morning of March 18, 1968, she set out for school wearing a blue dress with a white flower print, a small gold chain necklace, and tennis shoes, carrying a red algebra book and a blue notebook, with a quarter in her pocket. Friends would say later that Elizabeth, called Liz by her friends and Betty Lu by her family, had seemed depressed for the past few days.
    She had said something about joining a “hippie colony” near San Francisco, but her mother knew her daughter to be so meticulous about personal hygiene that even if Liz had decided to run away, which was unimaginable, she would have taken along a change of clothing. Liz left school at 3:40 p.m. to walk home two miles through blossoming orange groves. Someone had spotted her that afternoon on a palm tree-lined street amid the groves, the blue notebook and algebra textbook under her arm. She never arrived home.
    Her parents, a Lockheed chemical engineer and a psychiatric social worker, offered five thousand dollars for any information that would help them find their daughter. They sent word of her disappearance to a reported ten thousand newspapers. An Associated Press photo datelined San Bernardino shows the couple—both dark-haired and slender, their faces tense and drawn—gazing up at a towering pile of boxes containing the circulars about to be mailed nationwide. Dozens of papers, in Texas, Massachusetts, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and other states, including Kentucky, ran the story. The Georgetown, Kentucky, papers ran breathless headlines anticipating a solution to the Tent Girl mystery, but no proof materialized that Liz Ernstein was Tent Girl.
    After an initial flurry of coverage, no further details emerged. That silence would not be broken for almost forty years, and when it was, it would be through a medium no one living in the era of black-and-white television in 1968 had envisioned.
    It wasn’t unusual for a post such as Gina M.’s to be followed almost immediately by speculative comments from fellow users. If someone dug up a scrap of information—a newspaper story or some other tidbit—they’doften post it. As the more experienced web sleuths knew, missing children who returned home unharmed didn’t generate press coverage, so it was conceivable that Liz had come home with little public fanfare, or with fanfare that had been obliterated by time. On the other hand, Liz had never been reported dead. That would have made the papers.
    A few months after Gina M. posted her query and rehashed the details of Liz’s disappearance, she received an answer