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00:00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:00:29 Sometimes what the internet does is it makes you think you can understand somebody,
00:00:34 or you know what somebody's intentions were.
00:00:37 But you don't.
00:00:39 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:00:42 Call your county 911.
00:00:56 What is the address of your emergency?
00:00:58 I'm at Big Cypress National Preserve.
00:01:02 We just found a dead body.
00:01:05 Are you on the trail?
00:01:07 Yeah, I'm on the trail.
00:01:08 And the dead body is at the Camp Noble site.
00:01:11 It's in a tent.
00:01:12 I just-- and it's kind of curled up like it was trying to get out.
00:01:18 And did you check on it to see if it was breathing or anything?
00:01:21 Yeah, I mean, I didn't touch it.
00:01:22 I looked at it.
00:01:23 We yelled, hello.
00:01:25 He looked really skinny and really like, I don't know,
00:01:30 like a weird color.
00:01:31 Sorry.
00:01:32 Thank you.
00:01:32 This is southwest Florida, well known for the wildness, the swamp lands.
00:01:47 July is a very wet, extremely hot month.
00:01:53 Not the time of year you typically have people camping.
00:01:58 It is out in the middle of the Everglades.
00:02:02 We responded out to the area.
00:02:06 We approached the tent.
00:02:10 When we discovered the decedent, we
00:02:19 observed that he did appear to be very thin, thin to the point
00:02:25 that it's unnatural.
00:02:29 But we found that he did have food.
00:02:32 And we found a considerable amount of cash.
00:02:35 So it was not like this person was indigent
00:02:39 or had no resources available.
00:02:41 There were notebooks that had several pages of what
00:02:49 appeared to be code.
00:02:52 You don't know if it's the ramblings of a madman
00:02:54 or if it's the writings of a genius.
00:02:56 We quickly found that there was nothing there with a name on it,
00:03:06 no wallet, no credit cards, no photo ID.
00:03:11 There was no cell phone, no tablet.
00:03:13 We've got a guy out in a campground.
00:03:19 We don't really know who he is.
00:03:21 But you assume that it's a local person.
00:03:25 How difficult is this going to be?
00:03:27 Two or three days, we'll have this guy IDed.
00:03:29 We'll get him back home where he belongs.
00:03:31 And that certainly turned out not to be the case.
00:03:34 The Puritan Cleaners team has earned
00:03:44 over 4,000 five-star reviews.
00:03:47 They are the reason we can say at Puritan, it's right,
00:03:50 it's ready, or it's free.
00:03:51 If it gets too hot or too cold, say something.
00:04:16 Because there's no happy medium in here.
00:04:20 This job is not for the faint of heart.
00:04:25 I've actually been in three wrecks.
00:04:28 I've been bitten by a dog.
00:04:30 Basically, by day, I'm the mild-mannered delivery person
00:04:36 who leaves clothes at your door.
00:04:39 And at night, I'm on a laptop or my iPhone
00:04:45 trying to get unidentified people identified.
00:04:52 In this country, there are anywhere from 30,000
00:04:56 to 80,000 unidentified people.
00:04:59 Most don't have anybody fighting for them.
00:05:03 They're forgotten about.
00:05:04 Well, they have me.
00:05:06 This is my first case.
00:05:11 I went on to Facebook.
00:05:12 And I remember seeing that there's a group about him.
00:05:16 And I was like, oh, cool.
00:05:17 So I hit Add.
00:05:20 And I got in.
00:05:23 I felt like maybe I could help.
00:05:26 I never thought it would get this far.
00:05:40 The medical examiner's office was unable to determine
00:05:44 the cause of his death.
00:05:45 He was at approximately 83 pounds total body weight.
00:05:53 That is beyond extremely thin.
00:05:58 He was into the malnourished territory.
00:06:01 There was no trauma, no injuries, no noted diseases,
00:06:09 no illicit drugs in his system.
00:06:11 The only thing that it did come back to was Tylenol.
00:06:15 That can stain your system from 24 to 72 hours.
00:06:19 So we thought that within the last day or two of his passing,
00:06:23 he was still fully functioning.
00:06:24 There's a truck stop that was probably within five or seven
00:06:30 miles from where he was located.
00:06:33 He could have walked out to I-75.
00:06:35 And he could have flagged somebody down if he
00:06:36 needed assistance that badly.
00:06:38 We ran fingerprints, DNA through local, national,
00:06:48 and global databases.
00:06:50 No DNA, no fingerprints, no dental records.
00:06:54 At this point, it gets passed over
00:06:56 to our criminal researchers.
00:07:00 My name is Kristen Adams.
00:07:01 I'm the-- do you want me to say criminal research
00:07:04 investigator or investigative specialist, which one?
00:07:07 I'll restart, but which one do you want me to use?
00:07:08 When we have an unidentified person,
00:07:14 we do check our missing persons reports first.
00:07:16 When the traditional ways of identification were exhausted,
00:07:23 a flyer was completed in an effort
00:07:25 to obtain some assistance from the community.
00:07:29 We put characteristics, height, weight.
00:07:32 He did have a faint scar on his abdomen, but no tattoos.
00:07:38 We tried to edit the photographs that we had of our decedent
00:07:43 to have something that wasn't graphic to the point
00:07:46 that would be disturbing.
00:07:47 Well, it kind of reminded me of the caveman in the Geico ad,
00:07:56 basically, with his mouth gaping wide open.
00:07:59 It's not a glamour shot.
00:08:00 We had to work with what we had so that if somebody had saw him
00:08:05 even with a full head of hair looking like Grizzly Adams,
00:08:09 they would recognize him.
00:08:11 We released it to the local media,
00:08:15 and then we also released it on our social media.
00:08:18 We reached out to the hiking community.
00:08:24 They posted it on their websites.
00:08:27 We had a lot of people start to reach out to us.
00:08:30 [PHONE CHIMES]
00:08:32 That's when we found someone that recognized him.
00:08:36 Hi.
00:08:37 Hi.
00:08:38 [LAUGHS]
00:08:40 I guess I never really paid much attention to composites before,
00:08:42 but August 2, I was at work, and I decided to take a quick break
00:08:48 and sat down and opened up Facebook.
00:08:50 And as soon as I saw the composite,
00:08:54 I knew who it was immediately.
00:08:58 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:09:00 I met him six months prior to him
00:09:02 being found deceased on the trail.
00:09:03 At the time, I was a trail angel.
00:09:09 Trail angel is just someone who provides
00:09:11 an unexpected act of kindness to a hiker on the trail,
00:09:16 whether it be water or a snack or just something unexpected.
00:09:22 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:09:26 That morning, I put together a little baggie of things--
00:09:29 crackers, Kool-Aid mixes.
00:09:34 And I found a hiker.
00:09:35 He was walking towards me.
00:09:42 It looked like an older man.
00:09:44 His eyes gave away that he wasn't that old.
00:09:47 He had younger-looking eyes, very beautiful eyes.
00:09:49 Oh, yeah, he was cute.
00:09:51 [LAUGHS]
00:09:53 I introduced myself to him as Kelly,
00:09:56 and he said, well, I'm mostly harmless.
00:09:58 I just recognized that as a trail name.
00:10:03 Didn't think twice about it, because every hiker
00:10:06 has a trail name.
00:10:07 It's usually given to them by another hiker.
00:10:10 Based on something that happens on trail
00:10:12 or something they did on trail, a name comes up and it sticks.
00:10:17 I heard that he got his trail name when he was walking
00:10:20 into a campsite one evening, and there were people
00:10:23 sitting around a campfire.
00:10:25 And they invited him to join them,
00:10:27 as long as he didn't bite.
00:10:29 And he told them that he was mostly harmless.
00:10:31 I asked him if he was using the Florida Trail app.
00:10:38 And he said, well, I'm not carrying a phone.
00:10:40 And I said, what do you mean you're not carrying a phone?
00:10:42 He's like, I just wanted to disconnect.
00:10:45 Sometimes people want to do that.
00:10:47 I thought it was kind of reckless and dangerous.
00:10:51 People who want to get off the grid typically
00:10:53 still have a cell phone.
00:10:54 The fact that he had no means whatsoever to gain assistance
00:10:59 was something that we thought was intentional and unusual.
00:11:03 I had a bunch of stickers to promote the Florida Trail.
00:11:11 And I said, if you don't mind, can I take a picture of you
00:11:13 with the sticker?
00:11:14 And he's like, not at all.
00:11:15 So he held it up, smiled, and clicked his picture.
00:11:18 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:11:22 We had a sense of hope.
00:11:31 Oh, somebody knows this guy.
00:11:33 I immediately went to the Florida Trail group,
00:11:40 posted my pictures.
00:11:43 I started tagging names in the comments.
00:11:45 It just blew up.
00:11:47 The trail community is like family.
00:11:53 So there was shock that this was our hiker and he was deceased.
00:11:59 Other trail angels were tagging people that I hadn't tagged.
00:12:03 It moved fast.
00:12:04 People were throwing out ideas.
00:12:05 Check here, check there.
00:12:07 Then it started branching out to the Appalachian Trail groups.
00:12:09 The hikers kind of flooded in.
00:12:11 And they gave their pictures and what they knew.
00:12:15 There was a GoPro video that someone had shot.
00:12:17 There had to have been 25, at least, people that
00:12:24 definitely crossed his path.
00:12:26 He was seen in Georgia.
00:12:27 He was seen in North Carolina.
00:12:30 I was shocked.
00:12:31 It was like, cat, holy shit.
00:12:32 Like, look at this.
00:12:33 This is Denim.
00:12:34 This is the guy I camped with.
00:12:37 He introduced himself to me as Denim.
00:12:39 And I had never heard mostly Hormuz
00:12:40 until after everything came out.
00:12:43 He had a good feel about him.
00:12:44 He was quiet, though.
00:12:46 I remember thinking he's friendly, easygoing.
00:12:51 It came out that he had worked in IT
00:12:54 and that he was really great with computers.
00:12:56 His backpack, it was huge.
00:12:58 That was kind of unusual.
00:13:02 There was small bits of personal information
00:13:05 that he would reveal.
00:13:06 We connected over Dr. Who in sci-fi.
00:13:09 It came up that he probably was from a different planet.
00:13:11 That he probably was from Brooklyn.
00:13:13 Somebody would say Brooklyn.
00:13:15 Somebody would say the Bronx.
00:13:16 He said that he was from Louisiana.
00:13:18 I would get Sarasota and Saratoga.
00:13:20 Each contact, each bit of information that we had
00:13:28 was very repetitious.
00:13:29 Yeah, I met him.
00:13:30 Yeah, here's a picture.
00:13:31 Yeah.
00:13:32 But no, I didn't get a name.
00:13:34 What's his name?
00:13:35 And I'm like, I don't know.
00:13:38 I think we figured, at some point,
00:13:39 someone's going to say, oh, sure, that's so-and-so.
00:13:42 No, we didn't get a name.
00:13:43 No, we didn't get a name.
00:13:44 No, we didn't get a name.
00:13:45 He never seemed to give that information.
00:13:48 I was like, hopefully somebody has something
00:13:51 so we can identify this guy.
00:13:52 Oh my gosh, this is so easy.
00:13:54 What's his name?
00:13:54 Somebody had to get his name.
00:13:57 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:14:00 The hiking community helped us develop a history
00:14:13 from where he was first seen to where he wound up.
00:14:19 We began to realize that he had been traveling the Appalachian
00:14:24 Trail from the north area towards Florida.
00:14:29 This wasn't just a Florida hiker.
00:14:32 He traveled it for thousands of miles.
00:14:34 This is pretty unusual.
00:14:37 We started researching the trail, the AT, as they call it.
00:14:41 I believe over 3,000 attempt the Appalachian Trail
00:14:45 alone itself every year.
00:14:48 There are portions of it that are heavily traveled,
00:14:50 and then there are portions where it's very desolate.
00:14:53 You have to have a certain level of fitness,
00:14:55 a certain level of determination that you want to do this,
00:14:58 and you're going to reach this goal, regardless of what
00:15:00 is standing in your way.
00:15:03 It's a very close-knit community.
00:15:05 The trail is full of people who have made time in their lives
00:15:10 to be introspective.
00:15:13 People do come to the trail.
00:15:14 It's a way to escape.
00:15:16 A lot of hikers come from all over,
00:15:17 and they end up in what they call bubbles.
00:15:20 And they end up hiking together for short term or long term.
00:15:23 He crossed paths with a lot of people.
00:15:26 We figured out who he was as a person
00:15:29 could give ideas of how he got to where he was
00:15:33 and where we could possibly look.
00:15:37 I noticed that there was a hiker in the Facebook group, Magpie.
00:15:41 He kept coming in contact with her,
00:15:48 and I got the impression that they bonded.
00:15:51 I love it, you know.
00:15:52 I want to make it fun.
00:15:53 [DOG BARKING]
00:15:56 I think all the times I met him were in October of 2017.
00:16:02 They like to bark.
00:16:03 I don't think they're attack dogs or anything.
00:16:06 [DOG BARKING]
00:16:09 [INAUDIBLE]
00:16:15 Kitty.
00:16:16 She's dead.
00:16:17 She won't come.
00:16:18 Kitty, kitty.
00:16:19 Well, I talk a lot.
00:16:21 I built that porch, too.
00:16:22 I probably bragged about that already.
00:16:25 Most people hiking are in a big hurry, especially the young men.
00:16:30 I am never surprised that an old lady like myself
00:16:33 is easily dismissed as irrelevant.
00:16:37 So yes, I was pleasantly surprised
00:16:41 that this young man would talk to me.
00:16:46 [DOOR SLAMS]
00:16:49 I was 68 when I said, oh, I'm going to do
00:16:52 about half the Appalachian Trail.
00:16:54 And I had friends who kind of laughed and acted like,
00:16:59 that's just really hard.
00:17:00 I wanted to see if I could still do it.
00:17:06 And that's when I met him.
00:17:13 I was just walking up the trail, and this guy was coming down,
00:17:17 and he stopped.
00:17:19 I noticed his pack was abnormally large,
00:17:21 which is a little bit unusual for a hiker, a through hiker
00:17:24 especially.
00:17:26 He asked me why my name was Magpie.
00:17:29 I said, oh, because it's a big, noisy bird,
00:17:31 but I don't like shiny objects.
00:17:35 He said, that sounds like something a magpie would say.
00:17:39 So he immediately reached into his trash bag,
00:17:42 and he handed me the shiny gum wrapper.
00:17:45 I wish I'd saved it.
00:17:49 I live for the connection with people,
00:17:55 and I don't always have it.
00:17:58 I just felt like I knew him, knew him from the inside,
00:18:02 his soul, if you will.
00:18:04 I felt that in my spirit, it's like in my heart.
00:18:11 He was kind to me.
00:18:12 What can I say?
00:18:13 I don't say that any better.
00:18:15 He was kind.
00:18:16 I did not know him as mostly harmless.
00:18:23 I knew him only as Denim.
00:18:26 That was his early trail name.
00:18:30 I said, was that because you were hiking in blue jeans
00:18:33 when you first started?
00:18:35 And he readily said yes.
00:18:38 Later on, I met him again at this little cafe.
00:18:42 I saw him sitting there with a young woman.
00:18:46 I didn't expect to see him, but he did kind of call me over.
00:18:51 After we had chatted for a while,
00:18:53 I came up with the idea of, well, what's your real name,
00:18:56 Denim?
00:18:57 And he acted like he didn't want to say.
00:19:01 And so I said, well, if we guess it,
00:19:04 will you tell us?
00:19:07 Oh, yeah, he'd do that.
00:19:08 So it just went down the alphabet.
00:19:10 It was just for fun.
00:19:14 But I think he did tell me his name.
00:19:17 But I could not remember.
00:19:23 He started the trail wearing jeans.
00:19:29 That's a no-no.
00:19:31 You want the thinner cloths that wick away moisture,
00:19:34 that kind of thing.
00:19:36 For experienced hikers, they would know not to wear jeans.
00:19:39 They would know not to carry a very heavy backpack.
00:19:42 This is somebody who, for whatever reason,
00:19:45 decided to start hiking in the recent past.
00:19:48 Doing the Appalachian Trail on the fly
00:19:53 is like going from walking around the block
00:19:56 to running the Boston Marathon.
00:19:58 You just don't do it.
00:20:01 And when you take into consideration
00:20:03 that he had fairly expensive gear
00:20:06 and that the gear seemed fairly new,
00:20:08 you think, oh, wait a minute,
00:20:10 there's something here that we can look into.
00:20:12 We released another bulletin, additional photos of him,
00:20:16 including one of his tent.
00:20:18 We were always hopeful that one more person would contact us.
00:20:23 I just needed that one tip.
00:20:27 And then a gentleman called and said that he recognized his tent
00:20:31 from the flyer on Facebook
00:20:33 and said that he had sold that to our decedent.
00:20:36 So we looked through receipts
00:20:40 to see if anything could give us a clue to his identity.
00:20:43 We determined he used cash,
00:20:47 but the business owner realized
00:20:49 that he must have stayed at the hostel next door.
00:20:52 And that hostel would not allow the hikers
00:20:55 to sign in under a trail name.
00:20:58 They required an actual name.
00:21:01 We looked through the logbook of everyone that stayed there
00:21:08 and found that he had signed in under a name.
00:21:21 And we thought, okay, we have something to work with.
00:21:25 We located several Ben Bellemys,
00:21:28 we reached out and made contact.
00:21:30 Obviously they were alive and they were not my deceased hiker.
00:21:34 We came up empty-handed,
00:21:36 and we knew at that point that he had just chosen
00:21:39 to use an alias for signing in.
00:21:41 He was definitely trying to stay anonymous.
00:21:50 A fake name and a trail name, and that's all we had.
00:21:53 If he's going to this extent,
00:21:55 putting this much effort into leaving no footprint,
00:21:59 maybe there's a reason for him not wanting to be identified.
00:22:03 This person may have been a suspect
00:22:10 in a crime that occurred somewhere else.
00:22:18 Anytime somebody said he was a criminal, I thought,
00:22:21 I don't think so, they don't think so.
00:22:24 It just didn't fit anything I knew about him.
00:22:27 He let people take pictures of him.
00:22:32 How can this guy stay hidden?
00:22:34 We began to realize that any possibility
00:22:38 was in play for this case.
00:22:44 Initially, we attempted all traditional methods
00:22:47 of identifying our decedent.
00:22:50 We were grasping at anything we could at that point.
00:22:54 The notebook, which had computer code,
00:22:57 it was mathematical equations,
00:22:59 things that, frankly, we looked at and didn't understand.
00:23:03 We knew it was a long shot, but at that point,
00:23:07 we wanted to exhaust every possible resource.
00:23:13 All right, let's release the notebooks.
00:23:15 Let's see if anybody can recognize it.
00:23:18 My name is Nicholas Thompson, I'm the CEO of The Atlantic,
00:23:26 and I was formerly the editor-in-chief of Wired.
00:23:29 I was checking my email, and I got a note
00:23:33 in the secret tip jar I keep for story ideas,
00:23:37 saying, hey, there's an interesting case
00:23:40 about a hiker who disappeared.
00:23:43 It was sort of this incredible tale.
00:23:46 Wired is a magazine about the big issues in tech,
00:23:49 for example, privacy.
00:23:52 Recognizing just how hard it is to disappear in 2020,
00:23:57 I thought, this is really interesting.
00:24:00 So I said, you know what? I can make this a story.
00:24:05 As I started investigating,
00:24:07 the authorities had released the notebooks publicly,
00:24:09 and no one knew what it was.
00:24:12 Could he be mining Bitcoin? Could he be writing JavaScript?
00:24:17 And then the notes were posted online, and it turned out
00:24:21 these were instructions in code for a game called Screeps.
00:24:25 It's a programming game for programmers
00:24:29 where you basically create worlds and fortresses.
00:24:33 But it's not like a game where you go in
00:24:36 and you try to shoot the robots.
00:24:38 You write code which will both protect your fortress
00:24:42 and attack other people's fortresses or raid them.
00:24:45 And even when you're not playing the game,
00:24:47 your code is running.
00:24:49 So this hiker had built a world and a game
00:24:53 that was still playing even while he was gone.
00:24:56 There was the sense that you could reverse engineer,
00:24:59 that you could figure out, oh, this is the code,
00:25:02 so we must find a character who plays like that code.
00:25:05 And so people went into Screeps, and they tried to find
00:25:08 the identity of Mostly Harmless.
00:25:11 But they weren't able to get anywhere.
00:25:17 And then people in the Facebook group
00:25:20 contacted Screeps administrators.
00:25:22 But people who invented it are programmers,
00:25:25 making a game for programmers.
00:25:27 Programmers tend to care a lot about privacy.
00:25:30 So yeah, they protect it as privacy.
00:25:34 But it ended up being a dead end.
00:25:36 I have no doubt that part of the reason
00:25:41 it was so hard to find Mostly Harmless
00:25:43 was because he was very good at tech
00:25:45 and worked very hard to not create a digital trail
00:25:48 and to erase whatever he had left.
00:25:50 Someone somewhere was missing him,
00:25:55 but they didn't know he was gone.
00:26:02 He had to have family somewhere.
00:26:04 The longer it got, the less likely it was
00:26:07 he was going to be named.
00:26:09 So I had to do something.
00:26:11 Basically, I clock out, and I'll sit down at the computer.
00:26:16 I come here because the Internet's better.
00:26:24 I spend most of my life here.
00:26:28 I, myself, read pretty much physically everything
00:26:31 on the Internet that I can find about him,
00:26:33 and I memorized it.
00:26:35 And then the person that owned the group,
00:26:39 she came to me and said, "You know the case very well."
00:26:42 I go, "Thank you, yes."
00:26:43 And she goes, "Would you like to be a moderator?"
00:26:45 And I'm like, "Yes."
00:26:49 When I was younger, I wanted to join the FBI,
00:26:55 and I wanted to be a profiler.
00:26:58 And then my family's house burned to the ground.
00:27:01 We lost everything we had.
00:27:06 My dreams had to be put on hold.
00:27:10 I couldn't afford to go get a college degree.
00:27:13 I just channeled all that energy
00:27:21 into finding a name,
00:27:26 finding a loved one,
00:27:28 finding that person.
00:27:30 He was not getting Internet famous fast enough for my taste.
00:27:35 And I figured I had to start somewhere.
00:27:40 We went literally from Maine to Florida,
00:27:45 county by county,
00:27:47 calling and emailing every police agency,
00:27:51 every media outlet,
00:27:53 trying to get some attention.
00:27:56 I'm here to do a job,
00:27:58 and that's to get him his name back, no matter what.
00:28:01 The first six months were busy,
00:28:15 a lot of activity, a lot of information.
00:28:18 By this point in the investigation,
00:28:21 we've had hundreds of tips.
00:28:24 The vast majority were not helpful.
00:28:29 The frustration just started to set in.
00:28:38 We had exhausted all of our traditional tools in our toolbox.
00:28:45 We didn't have any new doors to open.
00:28:47 Shit, what else can we do?
00:28:52 At a certain point, you have to look outside the box.
00:28:55 The Colliery County Sheriff's Office,
00:28:59 under the direction of Sheriff Kevin Rambosk,
00:29:01 presents Sworn Statement,
00:29:03 a podcast covering local cases and public safety issues
00:29:06 all unfolding right here in Southwest Florida.
00:29:09 And then the great idea for the podcast came up.
00:29:12 It's not something that I'm aware that we have done before.
00:29:15 Let's say we're in a situation where we have a case
00:29:18 that's not something that I'm aware that we have done before.
00:29:21 Let's say you wanted to disappear tomorrow.
00:29:23 What would you do?
00:29:25 Well, for starters, you'd ditch your cell phone.
00:29:27 Everything from your name to your location
00:29:29 and bank accounts are tied to it.
00:29:31 And you'd want to get rid of your social media accounts too.
00:29:34 I know that true crime is a huge genre.
00:29:37 Let's try to reach out to that community
00:29:39 to try to kind of put the pieces together.
00:29:41 The first three episodes of this podcast
00:29:43 will focus on the mystery of the deceased hiker
00:29:46 known as Mostly Harmless.
00:29:48 If I wanted to disappear tomorrow, it would be impossible.
00:29:51 I cannot scrub the Internet of my likeness.
00:29:55 He was such a mystery,
00:29:57 and I think that that was something
00:29:59 that kind of piqued everyone's interest.
00:30:01 The group grew because the word was getting out.
00:30:07 We got 10,000 or 12,000 listens that first couple months.
00:30:13 When we hear stories like this of a man who died alone,
00:30:16 not having breathed his real name to a single soul
00:30:19 for the last year of his life,
00:30:21 we want to know why.
00:30:23 I do not identify as a member of the true crime community.
00:30:31 The outdoor world, like, is just, to me, it's...
00:30:36 Like, it's home, you know?
00:30:39 (birds chirping)
00:30:41 There is a commitment in the outdoor world.
00:30:45 Like, we take care of each other.
00:30:47 We're not going to leave each other behind.
00:30:49 If someone gets hurt, you get them out.
00:30:52 And I think that played a big factor
00:30:55 in how I felt about this case.
00:30:57 This was a member of my community.
00:31:00 This was an outdoor person, and I had to take care of him.
00:31:03 I don't know anything about sleuthing cases.
00:31:07 I didn't think I was a person who could do that.
00:31:10 But I had been home with COVID
00:31:13 and not sure what to do with myself.
00:31:15 And I started digging further on Google,
00:31:18 and that's how I ended up finding the Facebook group.
00:31:21 So I joined the group,
00:31:25 and it was chaos.
00:31:28 Christy Harris was the sole moderator for the group,
00:31:34 and everyone was just kind of coming in
00:31:36 and doing these weird random posts.
00:31:38 His case brought the crazies out of the woodwork.
00:31:42 There were theories that he could have been an international spy.
00:31:47 Oh, yeah, the time traveler.
00:31:49 Someone thought he may have been an alien.
00:31:51 Okay, let's just work with what we have.
00:31:54 I don't want to dissuade people from calling.
00:31:56 We want any and all information.
00:31:58 We hope for good information.
00:32:00 Another person thought he may have been a ghost.
00:32:03 Like an actual reincarnated ghost
00:32:06 that was walking the Earth.
00:32:08 I remember one woman saw a picture of him
00:32:11 standing in front of those billboards.
00:32:13 He's standing too close to it,
00:32:14 so she decided he couldn't see.
00:32:16 And he couldn't find the food in his tent.
00:32:19 Yeah, this is kind of dumb.
00:32:22 Sometimes the leads weren't actionable,
00:32:25 though they believed in them very strongly.
00:32:28 A lot of that stuff, it was just distractions
00:32:31 from accomplishing the task.
00:32:34 Figuring out who the hell this guy is.
00:32:37 I think we really, really thought
00:32:39 we were going to get the solution
00:32:41 from something that he told a hiker.
00:32:43 So I read an account by a hiker named Brandon Dowell
00:32:46 who met Mostly Harmless in Georgia.
00:32:49 I think there's a lot of hurt people on the trail.
00:33:01 There is an interesting dichotomy of people
00:33:04 having the time of their lives
00:33:06 and people also having this time of growth and healing.
00:33:10 And, you know, if you're looking for that kind of companionship,
00:33:14 I think you'll find it.
00:33:16 And I think that's what happened with me and Denim.
00:33:19 [laughing]
00:33:21 Don't rush me.
00:33:25 Everybody's rushing.
00:33:27 I first started going to the trail when I was 17.
00:33:33 I was just dealing with so much, like, anger,
00:33:37 and I felt it would solve my problems
00:33:40 to kind of pack up and go,
00:33:42 and just go hike and restart and maybe not come back.
00:33:47 The trip where I met Denim,
00:33:55 I wanted to go out for a couple days.
00:33:58 I got to Amicalola,
00:34:05 hiked out that morning,
00:34:08 and ended up at Springer Mountain Shelter.
00:34:12 Maybe an hour or two after I got there,
00:34:15 I see this scraggly man walking up,
00:34:18 and I'm like, "Oh, gosh,
00:34:20 he looks like he's been out for a long time."
00:34:23 [footsteps]
00:34:25 I was glad to see him,
00:34:27 because, you know, you just want someone to talk to, hang out,
00:34:32 have some friends around the fire with you,
00:34:35 'cause I didn't have a lot of friends in school.
00:34:39 And we talked about a lot of things over dinner.
00:34:45 It was a lot of sci-fi girls and childhood.
00:34:52 He told me, you know,
00:34:54 "I just went through a breakup not too long ago."
00:34:57 It seemed like it was fresh in his mind, you know,
00:35:01 to mention one specific breakup.
00:35:04 As the night continued, you know, things did get deeper.
00:35:08 You know, we talked more about childhood.
00:35:12 The only story in particular that I remember
00:35:18 is his dad took him out into the yard one day
00:35:22 and tried to fight him.
00:35:24 I remember him telling me that he just walked away.
00:35:28 Seems like he wanted to get away from them, you know.
00:35:34 I understood.
00:35:36 When I was 3, my stepdad, Rob, came into the picture.
00:35:41 I don't know if I'm allowed to say his name,
00:35:44 but fuck that guy, so whatever.
00:35:47 He immediately just began this campaign of terror
00:35:52 in the household.
00:35:54 Denim.
00:35:56 He had been there.
00:35:58 Same place.
00:36:00 To connect with somebody on that level was really special.
00:36:07 And we had breakfast together the next morning.
00:36:13 I just remember he ate a lot.
00:36:16 He ate and ate and ate.
00:36:19 We packed up and we walked to the junction
00:36:25 of the Appalachian Trail and the Benton Mackay Trail.
00:36:29 And I asked him if he was sure that, you know,
00:36:34 he didn't want to keep in touch.
00:36:36 And he just kind of looked at me real sad
00:36:39 and shook his head no and we shook hands
00:36:43 and that was it, we parted ways.
00:36:46 You always think that somebody is going to say,
00:36:59 "Hey, you know, I had a friend, I had a brother, I had a son,
00:37:03 and I can't find him, can't get in touch with him."
00:37:07 And it was about maybe a year,
00:37:10 and nobody had come forward.
00:37:13 He's broken up with his girlfriend
00:37:15 and he was abused by his father.
00:37:17 A lot of people started speculating then
00:37:20 because of the history of abuse
00:37:22 that he may not have family looking for him.
00:37:25 So if no one is looking for Mostly Harmless,
00:37:28 the hikers were the only people we knew
00:37:30 that actually had talked to this person.
00:37:33 And I became obsessed with, like, finding new hikers
00:37:35 and talking to new hikers.
00:37:37 I was immediately told by Christy Harris
00:37:40 that that was not something I could do.
00:37:42 I had decided that the hikers were pretty much useless.
00:37:48 Everything had to be done through Christy.
00:37:50 Posts had to be Christy approved,
00:37:52 searches had to be Christy approved.
00:37:54 If you want to submit something to Collier County Sheriff's Office,
00:37:56 guess who you have to tell you're going to do that.
00:37:58 Sometimes you have to be the hammer
00:38:00 and frankly not be nice to get stuff done.
00:38:03 She sent me a message and said, "You should go fuck yourself.
00:38:06 I've already heard from people that say they don't like you."
00:38:08 I was trying, in my opinion, to keep order.
00:38:12 I can't get the job done of what I want to do
00:38:16 if I've got, "Blah, blah, blah, Natasha's doing this.
00:38:19 Blah, blah, blah, Summer's doing this."
00:38:21 The atmosphere was hostile.
00:38:23 I felt like I was a babysitter, a referee,
00:38:27 and in some cases a punching bag.
00:38:30 I was told I was stupid. I was told I was an idiot.
00:38:34 That's the red line for me.
00:38:36 I hated being treated like I was nothing.
00:38:40 And I just said, "I've had enough of this.
00:38:42 Bye. Fuck you."
00:38:44 I cruise through those groups occasionally
00:38:50 to see if there's any new threads or any new information or whatnot.
00:38:53 When it starts to get, you know, days of our lives like that,
00:38:57 I just, I move on.
00:38:59 Christy quits, and the group is a burning dumpster fire at this point.
00:39:05 So I messaged the woman who had started the group
00:39:08 and said, "You know, your group doesn't have a moderator.
00:39:10 You might want to get one so that it can, like, actually function."
00:39:14 And she responded back that the group could then pick
00:39:17 who was going to be the next moderator.
00:39:19 Within two days, I was the moderator
00:39:21 because the group had selected me to be the moderator.
00:39:25 [music]
00:39:29 For 17 years, I was the operations manager of a canoe and kayak company.
00:39:34 A lot of people often would think I was the owner of the company
00:39:38 just because of the amount of leadership I would take.
00:39:41 But I wasn't listened to as much.
00:39:46 My ideas were passed over more.
00:39:49 And I came to find out that all women's pay at that company
00:39:53 was suppressed.
00:39:54 Men were making $5 more an hour.
00:39:57 I had been feeling greatly underappreciated.
00:40:03 So when I first joined the group,
00:40:07 I felt like this was the opportunity to try something new.
00:40:10 I wanted to approach this from a standpoint of, like,
00:40:14 this is my person I care about.
00:40:16 How would I want that case treated?
00:40:18 Let's get organized.
00:40:19 What's been done, what hasn't been done.
00:40:21 Let's create an album,
00:40:23 not just a scattering of photos throughout the group
00:40:26 that is all of our people who we still need to talk to.
00:40:29 That was the moment that I realized
00:40:33 no one has talked to Mike Gormley.
00:40:35 He was the last person that we know of that saw Mostly Harmless alive.
00:40:41 [music]
00:40:48 [music]
00:40:54 Bow to the partner.
00:40:56 In the corners, two, all four ladies, chain across.
00:41:00 My name is Mike Gormley.
00:41:06 Sides face your partner.
00:41:08 My trail name is Waterboy.
00:41:11 Grand square, one, two, three, turn,
00:41:14 and a one, two, three, left, four.
00:41:16 Back in 2015 and 2016, I attempted to hike the Appalachian Trail.
00:41:21 Ladies, center the men's sachet.
00:41:23 That's where I first experienced what trail magic was.
00:41:27 Wheel around, lines forward, up, and you come on back.
00:41:31 Supposedly I was the last hiker to see Mostly Harmless
00:41:36 before he was found.
00:41:38 Promenader there, promenade, go walkin' 'round the square.
00:41:43 When you get back home, bow to the partner,
00:41:47 corner by the hall, that's it, that's all.
00:41:50 Thank everybody in your square, and we'll take a break.
00:41:53 Thank you.
00:41:55 Thank you, thank you, thank you.
00:41:57 [crickets chirping]
00:42:03 Around April 13th or so is the day I ran into him.
00:42:07 It was like 85 degrees out that day.
00:42:11 I just decided it was best that I get off the trail.
00:42:15 I got to the roadway, took the chance,
00:42:21 and stuck out my thumb and tried to hitch a ride,
00:42:25 and this guy stopped in a pickup truck.
00:42:28 We were driving along, and all of a sudden
00:42:32 he saw someone along the roadside.
00:42:34 He says, "Well, there's a hiker right there.
00:42:36 "You want to go back and talk to him, chat a little?"
00:42:39 I says, "Sure."
00:42:41 And here's my first picture that I took when I met Mostly Harmless.
00:42:47 I noticed his cheeks are quite pudgy,
00:42:52 you know, like he's well-fed.
00:42:55 When I observed that his pack was awful large,
00:43:00 I says, "What do you got in there that weighs so much?"
00:43:03 He says, "Well, I got winter clothes in there."
00:43:06 I'm thinking, mid-April in Florida,
00:43:09 you're not going to need winter clothes anymore.
00:43:12 I says, "Just give me your winter clothes,
00:43:16 "I can send them back for you."
00:43:18 And he declined.
00:43:20 He says, "I'll just keep them a little bit longer,"
00:43:23 which seemed a little bit strange to me.
00:43:25 When we were talking, he wanted to know
00:43:27 if there was any campsites up ahead.
00:43:29 And this is the view at Noble's campsite.
00:43:32 The campsite that I mentioned to him is where they found him,
00:43:36 some 2 1/2 months later.
00:43:39 The last picture known of him before he was found.
00:43:46 When I realized that maybe he had just only hiked 5 miles further
00:43:52 and that was the end of his hike for 2 1/2 months,
00:43:56 it made me a little curious as to, "Gee, what's going on here?"
00:44:02 Was it foul play or just what was it, you know?
00:44:07 People started to wonder, "How could you go from being this person
00:44:14 "to the person in the tent who is completely skeletal?"
00:44:19 He had food with him.
00:44:21 We were unable to determine if it was an intentional act on his part
00:44:25 not to eat.
00:44:27 I would say if he was planning on keeping his winter clothes
00:44:30 that he was not planning on dying.
00:44:33 I didn't think he was the type that would just commit suicide
00:44:37 or starve himself to death.
00:44:39 I just thought something went wrong.
00:44:41 Maybe he got sick or maybe, you know, he caught some bug.
00:44:44 Maybe a snake bite. Did somebody harm him?
00:44:49 I didn't know. I didn't have a theory that made sense.
00:44:52 But the sheriff's office said, "We don't suspect foul play."
00:44:56 My little brain went, "Are you sure?"
00:45:00 All of this leads back to the idea of, like, "Oh, how did he die?
00:45:03 "We still don't know."
00:45:05 Most people don't just lay down in a tent and die, you know?
00:45:11 He left this world utterly alone.
00:45:19 No one should ever be alone.
00:45:25 For me, with Shane and John Does, it's the story.
00:45:30 It's about the story of the person.
00:45:33 It's really the underdog.
00:45:39 I've always felt like an underdog.
00:45:45 Everything I have in life I have fought, kicked, punched
00:45:49 and scratched my way to.
00:45:53 Up. Up.
00:45:56 I live with my sister in an extended-stay hotel.
00:45:59 Let's get your shoes off.
00:46:01 There you go.
00:46:03 And we've been there for about nine years.
00:46:08 Do you need a drink?
00:46:14 No.
00:46:16 Do you need me to stand on my head?
00:46:19 No.
00:46:21 Can you say anything besides no?
00:46:23 No.
00:46:25 When I can, I jump into the world of true crime
00:46:32 to escape from everything else.
00:46:35 You can do anything.
00:46:37 You have a new child.
00:46:48 I couldn't deal with the fact of him sitting in a basement
00:46:51 waiting for someone to identify him in some way.
00:46:55 It didn't sit right with me.
00:46:59 I decided that I'm just going to open my own group
00:47:07 and go for it.
00:47:09 A few people came with me from Natasha's group,
00:47:14 but with the new group I had more power, more control.
00:47:18 The group was also smaller,
00:47:20 which made it a lot easier to handle.
00:47:23 And then we had someone in the group
00:47:28 file the FOIA request to get the case file.
00:47:32 I got it all at once.
00:47:37 I got the case file and the autopsy report
00:47:39 and the autopsy photos.
00:47:42 I was horrified the first time I saw them.
00:47:46 It looked like a bag of bones with skin over it.
00:47:54 On the first flyer that the Collier County Sheriff put out,
00:47:59 it included what they called a small scar on his abdomen.
00:48:04 But then I saw the picture with the autopsy report
00:48:09 and I'm going, "What in the world?"
00:48:13 That was the understatement of the century.
00:48:21 Small abdominal scar, yeah.
00:48:25 It's not a small abdominal scar at all.
00:48:28 I was utterly outraged when I realized
00:48:32 that his autopsy was an afterthought,
00:48:35 that if they missed this, what else did they miss?
00:48:40 The scar really led me down the road of,
00:48:44 "Okay, what was wrong with him?
00:48:46 What happened to cause that scar?"
00:48:49 People started saying, like,
00:48:51 there had to have been a significant surgery.
00:48:54 And there was this belief that he has cancer.
00:49:00 Cancer's never mentioned in the autopsy report.
00:49:04 It's never mentioned in the autopsy.
00:49:06 So that leaves it wide open.
00:49:09 But you can't go calling hospitals and say, like,
00:49:12 "Did you diagnose someone with cancer?
00:49:14 Who was it? We're trying to identify this guy."
00:49:17 So people did searches for Appalachian Trail and cancer
00:49:22 and found this blog.
00:49:27 This blog was about hiking the Appalachian Trail
00:49:33 and finding out about cancer diagnosis.
00:49:36 It was, "Okay, I'm sick.
00:49:39 I'm taking control of my life,
00:49:41 and I'm going out on my own terms."
00:49:44 The only picture on the blog is the back of a body.
00:49:49 And the blog does just randomly end.
00:49:52 People then circled back around on the fact
00:50:02 that he was in a youth hostel.
00:50:04 Everyone assumed this Ben Billamy could be Ben Reynolds
00:50:08 using Ben Billamy as an alias.
00:50:11 I saw that blog, and I'm like, "That's him."
00:50:20 But there are a few rules to sleuthing.
00:50:23 You never, ever go real life,
00:50:26 because it is not your job to tell a family member
00:50:30 that their loved one may be deceased.
00:50:33 With Ben Reynolds, other people really went real life.
00:50:39 [dog barking]
00:50:42 Shh!
00:50:44 My name is Bill Powell, a.k.a. Ben Reynolds.
00:50:50 I am still alive.
00:50:52 In 2012, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
00:50:59 I hit the trail.
00:51:01 That blog was mainly for me.
00:51:03 It was really my little therapy journal.
00:51:06 To protect my identity, I hiked under the name Ben Reynolds.
00:51:11 Ben Reynolds I pulled out of a hat.
00:51:13 I think I was listening to a lot of Ben Folds 5 at the time.
00:51:17 Got back, and then all this starts.
00:51:20 January of 2020, a bunch of years later,
00:51:25 I started getting messages, "Do you know Mostly Harmless?"
00:51:28 "Are you Mostly Harmless?"
00:51:30 "Are you dead?"
00:51:32 The inbox started filling up.
00:51:35 The social profiles started filling up.
00:51:38 I was getting messages, e-mails, all week long, weekends,
00:51:42 asking me, "How can you prove you're not this dead guy?"
00:51:46 There was no logic. It just became insane.
00:51:50 My father was getting messages.
00:51:53 My sister, my friends, anyone that liked any of my posts.
00:51:57 Things get crazier and crazier.
00:51:59 By June of 2020, it was 887 people.
00:52:03 No, no, no!
00:52:05 There was definitely a concern that this could leak over to my family.
00:52:10 And that's when I really dove headfirst into it.
00:52:15 I'm going to have to get real deep and proactive
00:52:18 and take it to these groups and say,
00:52:20 "Look, I'm Ben Reynolds. This is my story. Stop it."
00:52:26 So I joined all the Facebook groups I could.
00:52:29 That was super eye-opening.
00:52:31 Eight to ten Facebook groups, multiple Reddit, subreddits,
00:52:35 websites dedicated to this guy.
00:52:38 I went, "Wow, this is insane."
00:52:41 That I'd have to go in and, you know, debunk it all,
00:52:45 admonish everyone that tried to do this, explain that I'm alive.
00:52:49 This admin says, "How do I know that you're Ben Reynolds?"
00:52:53 And my response is, "Oh, for fuck's sake."
00:52:57 Despite me telling them that I'm not dead,
00:53:01 they would tell me, "Well, we can't rule you out."
00:53:04 Things get crazier and crazier.
00:53:06 It was like, "Oh, here's a picture from the blog,"
00:53:09 and deconstructing my body language and, you know,
00:53:12 looking for the types of cancer and extrapolating that
00:53:16 to the body position of mostly harmless in the tent.
00:53:21 People wouldn't take my word for it because my name said Bill Powell.
00:53:25 And so splinter groups formed that dove into the Ben Reynolds mythos.
00:53:30 And they post this picture of a Ben Reynolds in Australia.
00:53:37 And they started going down the path of harassing this guy.
00:53:41 Anything can happen with the Internet and sleuths.
00:53:45 Anything. And they're crazy.
00:53:47 The consequences that were playing through my mind.
00:53:51 Someone will show up at my daughter's school. Who knows?
00:53:54 Finally, I posted to Natasha's group and said,
00:54:00 "This is what I go through on a daily basis."
00:54:02 When I finally met Bill, his life had been turned upside down for a long time.
00:54:07 I would shut that shit down so fast.
00:54:10 There are people on the other end of these investigations.
00:54:14 This is not a competition. It is not a reality show.
00:54:17 The online sleuth groups, they get caught up in the romance of it,
00:54:26 the mystery of it.
00:54:28 They get very gunman on the grassy knoll.
00:54:32 We didn't want to open more possibilities on why he died or how he died.
00:54:39 We wanted to narrow our focus to identify who he is.
00:54:43 [♪♪♪]
00:54:46 I'm David Middleman, CEO of Authorum.
00:55:02 I'm Kristen Middleman. I'm the Chief Business Development Officer at Authorum.
00:55:07 DNA is pretty much all we've ever done.
00:55:11 My wife is a biochemist by training,
00:55:14 a little bit different than the genetics background I have.
00:55:17 Authorum's a company that supports law enforcement investigations.
00:55:23 Basically, we focus on human identification from crime scenes.
00:55:27 Is there anything else you know about it?
00:55:29 Strategizing business-wise, I thought we should take some more notorious cases.
00:55:33 This case was really unique in that there was a lot of attention drawn to the case.
00:55:38 There was an online Facebook group with thousands of folks that were working on it.
00:55:42 Do you know what evidence we got?
00:55:45 The skeletal remains.
00:55:47 Does it look awesome?
00:55:52 Can you see the little DNA thing on my hat?
00:55:54 It's very important to me.
00:55:56 If you just wanted to look at a bunch of DNA, it looks a lot like this.
00:56:01 And these are basically the positions along what's called the human reference sequence.
00:56:05 You can cluster them using principal component analysis and figure out...
00:56:08 Wait, you go back.
00:56:10 Can you say that in the dumbest way possible?
00:56:13 All right, sure.
00:56:15 There's three billion positions that describe your DNA.
00:56:22 Traditional forensic testing right now that the police use to identify people
00:56:27 looks at ten markers in someone's DNA.
00:56:30 The sequencing that we do here at Authram looks at tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of markers.
00:56:35 The technology that Authram is using is new.
00:56:38 The ideas are new.
00:56:40 They look for similarities between the DNA you have stored and the person you found.
00:56:45 And you can say, "Oh, his DNA is pretty close to people from this region."
00:56:50 Or, "It's pretty close to this family."
00:56:52 So you don't get a precise match.
00:56:55 You get a clue.
00:56:58 When we got a hold of law enforcement, we offered to develop a DNA profile
00:57:03 to get a few more clues about who this person might have been.
00:57:06 Authram is private.
00:57:08 My understanding, this particular DNA profile testing would cost $5,000.
00:57:15 The police department doesn't have funding for this.
00:57:17 This is not something that cities and municipalities have funding for.
00:57:20 We thought it over, and we figured there's enough people that are really interested
00:57:24 in who this guy was and in trying to help him get back to family.
00:57:28 I think it's a little unorthodox to recommend crowdfunding a case, but we threw it out there.
00:57:35 And I gave an assounding yes.
00:57:37 "You want us to fundraise for this? We can do that. That's something tangible we can do."
00:57:41 It ain't my money, and it's a tool I can use to solve a crime.
00:57:45 It's worth it.
00:57:46 They quickly built a website for people to be able to donate.
00:57:53 This all happened so fast.
00:57:55 Everyone within the group was really caught up in this energy.
00:57:58 We're really doing this.
00:57:59 And I believe it was eight days later, we had $5,000 raised.
00:58:05 And the energy was out the roof.
00:58:08 Like celebratory posts and people popping champagne and all this type of thing on the group.
00:58:15 And so they sent us a skull to our mains, and we got started.
00:58:22 I thought, "Authrum will solve it. Finally, there's going to be a solution."
00:58:26 At the same time, we were getting outside negativity.
00:58:30 Like, there were haters who were hating on the process.
00:58:33 No, I didn't care what they did, honestly.
00:58:35 Um, yeah.
00:58:37 And then we had to wait for the DNA to run.
00:58:43 It takes Authrum about six to eight weeks to create a profile.
00:58:48 It became this intense waiting game.
00:58:51 That's when everyone got really, really stir-crazy.
00:58:55 Kristi's group post would be created saying, like, "Power-hungry Natasha is doing this,"
00:59:03 or "Natasha and all of her minions are doing that."
00:59:05 She was feeding this "you've all been led into a trap.
00:59:11 They took your money, and they're not going to deliver."
00:59:15 There was public shaming of me, where Kristi tells people publicly that I'm an idiot,
00:59:20 and I don't know what I'm doing.
00:59:21 People saying, like, "Oh, this cow who, like, is trying to do this so that she can be famous,"
00:59:27 or, you know, "I'm in love with Mostly Harmless."
00:59:30 Then some horrible things were said to me through private message.
00:59:44 I got a message saying that Kristi Harris knew what she was doing,
00:59:47 and I didn't know anything, and that I should kill myself so that the case could get solved.
00:59:52 And that, that, that hurt really bad.
01:00:03 Okay, there you go. There you go.
01:00:08 I've dealt with suicidal ideation throughout my life.
01:00:11 Actually, since I was a young child.
01:00:14 You want to think you're doing something good for this person.
01:00:17 You want to think you're doing something great.
01:00:19 I tried to pull back, actually, from the case a little bit,
01:00:24 but I'm too hard-headed for my own good.
01:00:27 I wanted to see this through, and then all of a sudden,
01:00:32 there's this message of, "Kristi Harris has solved the case.
01:00:35 Kristi Harris has figured out who Mostly Harmless is."
01:00:40 I was hoping that I would beat the science.
01:00:43 I thought posting him in a "lost loves" form wasn't a bad idea.
01:00:50 And we happened to get a nibble from someone.
01:00:57 She gave me the name of Ronald Newman.
01:01:01 The story I was told was that Ronald Newman had been in a relationship with a woman
01:01:08 and the story I was told was that Ronald Newman had been disowned by his family
01:01:13 because he was gay.
01:01:15 When I opened the email with the picture in it, I looked at it,
01:01:20 and I stared at it.
01:01:22 It looked like him. It looked like Mostly Harmless.
01:01:28 Kristi Harris called me very convinced that it was this particular person.
01:01:32 Like, almost like talking in hushed tones, she said, "I know who he is.
01:01:36 I know who Mostly Harmless is." I'm like, "Okay, great.
01:01:39 What can you tell me?"
01:01:41 So this is the picture that Kristi has sent to everyone
01:01:47 to prove that Ronald Newman is Mostly Harmless.
01:01:51 This is the picture.
01:01:57 Who draws a beard on a yearbook photo to prove someone is someone that they're not?
01:02:06 It certainly was odd, I think, to see it, but I said, "Okay. All right.
01:02:12 I will look into it, and I will call you back."
01:02:14 Mr. Newman, he ended up calling me and talking to me,
01:02:18 and he was very confused, obviously, as to why I was looking for him
01:02:22 and wondering if he was missing.
01:02:25 [sighs]
01:02:27 It's that moment, "Oh, damn it."
01:02:41 I thought it was over.
01:02:46 I felt like a joke. I was afraid I was going to look like an idiot.
01:02:53 Misidentifications happen every day.
01:02:56 Law enforcement misidentifies people.
01:02:59 But I was trashed.
01:03:02 Have you had someone go, "You're a fucking stupid idiot.
01:03:08 You've made yourself look stupid," and go kill yourself?
01:03:12 I was so done.
01:03:15 I had been called so many names. I couldn't see straight.
01:03:22 I was done.
01:03:24 You get pulled in. You get excited.
01:03:30 And you want to solve it so much, you can go right through that stop sign.
01:03:34 People are drawn to this. People want to read this story.
01:03:39 So at some point, I thought, "You know what?
01:03:41 I'm just going to write this story, and let's just run it."
01:03:44 The presidential election was coming,
01:03:49 and I wanted a break from the politics for at least a couple of hours.
01:03:54 It was wonderful to be able to work on something
01:03:58 where it wasn't Team Blue and Team Red.
01:04:00 All of these different Americans from all of these different states
01:04:04 and all of these different backgrounds
01:04:06 were using the Internet and using technology to do something good.
01:04:10 And then, you know, the story goes live.
01:04:14 And then it went banana cakes.
01:04:18 And then suddenly it was, you know, massively
01:04:20 the most read thing we'd had in a while.
01:04:22 Over a million people viewed the article, and the group blew up.
01:04:28 Literally thousands of people joined the group
01:04:31 in just a short period of days.
01:04:33 The assumption was, if he really did work in tech,
01:04:38 someone who worked with him or knew him will read Wired,
01:04:41 and we'll figure out who he was.
01:04:43 After that story ran, and it became this big viral hit
01:04:47 and had more than a million readers, a million and a half readers,
01:04:50 then I was kind of stunned that his identity wasn't found.
01:04:53 It showed that his act of disappearing was even more deliberate,
01:04:59 carefully crafted, and effective than I had thought.
01:05:03 It's hard to disappear and create an identity
01:05:07 that a hundred people who meet you can't figure out, right?
01:05:10 It's somewhat harder to create an identity
01:05:12 that a thousand people hunting on Facebook can't figure out.
01:05:15 But how on earth can a million people read a story in Wired
01:05:20 full of photographs about a guy who's probably in the Wired community
01:05:25 fairly closely and not find the guy?
01:05:29 I don't know what you're capable of hiding or not hiding on the internet,
01:05:36 but I can tell you that if there's DNA, we can identify you.
01:05:42 When you have a person that's unidentified
01:05:44 and you know their DNA markers,
01:05:46 and you can kind of cluster them around known populations of people
01:05:50 that have a similar set of markers,
01:05:53 that gives you a clue as to where this unidentified person is from.
01:05:57 In this case, we had run the laboratory work,
01:06:00 did the DNA testing and the research, and we had an update.
01:06:05 We have a couple really good stories that we can share.
01:06:10 We have a couple really good leads.
01:06:12 We were able to build a really great profile.
01:06:14 And what I can tell you is that there are a good number of matches
01:06:18 that tie us back to Louisiana.
01:06:20 Six thousand people watch the Facebook Live,
01:06:29 and people are over the moon excited.
01:06:36 We now know that he actually does have family in South Louisiana.
01:06:40 The verification was what we needed to get people to take action.
01:06:44 The DNA results were released in a Facebook Live in Natasha's group,
01:06:50 which I had no access to.
01:06:52 I had a group member who came and told me.
01:06:57 And then I go, "I can't let this go. I can't. I won't let this go."
01:07:03 I walk back into my group and I go,
01:07:05 "I'm going to pick up the case of Mostly Harmless again."
01:07:07 All I got was yes.
01:07:10 And I was back in it again.
01:07:13 Anything related to Louisiana, we were going to flood it.
01:07:19 We put a lot of flyers out towards news stations
01:07:26 and their missing persons pages, things like that,
01:07:29 so they can get the information out to the people that may have known him.
01:07:32 Why did Mostly Harmless start hiking?
01:07:34 I started running Facebook ads for my Wired story,
01:07:38 targeted at people in Louisiana.
01:07:40 All of a sudden, every single Facebook group related to South Louisiana
01:07:45 in any way, shape, or form was bombarded.
01:07:48 Enough.
01:07:52 This has to end.
01:07:55 And then, December 16, 2020,
01:08:02 I picked up my phone and I go over to the Post
01:08:05 and the group missing in Louisiana.
01:08:07 There was a comment there that said...
01:08:11 It said, "Christy, I know who this is.
01:08:20 I know this story and I'm going to email you right now."
01:08:24 And I'm like, "What?"
01:08:26 And there it was.
01:08:29 It says, "Christy, his name is Vance Rodriguez.
01:08:34 My husband worked with him in Shopper's Choice."
01:08:37 And there you see...
01:08:40 a picture.
01:08:43 I looked at his eyes and I knew...
01:08:50 it was him.
01:08:53 [♪♪♪]
01:08:56 I can see it with my own eyes,
01:09:06 but I still-- my brain doesn't truly believe that it's the case.
01:09:10 Yeah. Wow.
01:09:16 Message just came in. This is him.
01:09:21 Poor guy.
01:09:23 And I was like, "Oh, my gosh, he did it."
01:09:26 So there were two people who basically hit on the same day.
01:09:31 A person he had worked with and a former roommate.
01:09:34 I screenshot it and sent it to law enforcement
01:09:37 with an email that said, "I think we got him."
01:09:40 Heard from multiple people that it was him.
01:09:47 It was a collective effort of thousands of people to solve this case.
01:09:52 Christine located contact information for the family of Vance Rodriguez,
01:09:59 and we closed the office door and we just called the family.
01:10:03 There seemed to be some disbelief, just kind of shock.
01:10:11 We explained the situation to them.
01:10:13 They responded that they, in fact, did have a son
01:10:17 by the name of Vance Rodriguez.
01:10:19 They didn't know he was missing.
01:10:22 They thought he had moved to New York
01:10:25 and they had no contact with him for several years.
01:10:28 He was telling the truth.
01:10:31 He told people that he had originally lived in Baton Rouge
01:10:33 and was from Louisiana, that he worked in tech.
01:10:36 He told a lot of things about himself.
01:10:41 I thought he was maybe 30 at the most, and it turns out he was 41.
01:10:46 Your hope as a journalist is that when we figured out his name,
01:10:55 you would find out some incredible redemptive story.
01:11:00 But when we found out his name, we didn't realize
01:11:04 that all the things that we would learn about Vance.
01:11:10 I immediately went into full-on reporter mode.
01:11:15 I did a public record search of where Vance Rodriguez,
01:11:19 of that age range, had lived and found his building.
01:11:22 Spoke to the landlord of the building.
01:11:25 He had paid six months of rent.
01:11:28 He had left his passport, his wallet, everything inside of his old apartment.
01:11:31 It's absolutely, "I'm walking away from my life.
01:11:34 I'm closing the door on my life, locking it,
01:11:37 and walking away from my life."
01:11:40 I found a woman who appeared to have lived in the same building.
01:11:46 Turned out it was his girlfriend.
01:11:50 They had broken up.
01:11:53 I learned that he had been abusive in ways that I didn't probe on.
01:12:00 I don't know exactly the contours of.
01:12:02 But he seemed like a bad, bad man.
01:12:09 It seems like there was trouble with women for a long time.
01:12:13 There were at least three women who have come forward
01:12:16 and said that they were abused by him.
01:12:18 There's another girlfriend from Louisiana.
01:12:21 His mother posts on Facebook that he was so cruel
01:12:24 that he broke her daughter.
01:12:26 Yeah. I don't really know what to say about these articles.
01:12:31 You know, it's a lot of information to digest.
01:12:37 There's a quote from his ex.
01:12:40 She wrote on a Facebook page, "Apartment, $9.50 a month.
01:12:44 Bills, $300 a month.
01:12:46 Standing up to the monster that beat you up emotionally
01:12:49 and physically for five years? Priceless."
01:12:52 He seemed sincere, and he seemed compassionate to me.
01:12:59 Like he understood, you know.
01:13:06 But he was abusive, it seems,
01:13:09 and that was certainly very shocking to me.
01:13:12 100% unacceptable.
01:13:16 You can't hit anybody.
01:13:18 Women, men, nobody gets hit.
01:13:20 Nobody gets hit or abused or hurt or whatever.
01:13:24 It doesn't happen, or it shouldn't happen.
01:13:26 Being in a relationship similar to what was described
01:13:29 about Mostly Harmless,
01:13:31 I hated to be in a relationship with him.
01:13:35 I hated to know that he was an abusive person.
01:13:39 It's not my job to judge whether he abused those women or not.
01:13:42 I don't know.
01:13:43 I was shocked and appalled by the number of women
01:13:47 who just inherently did not believe his former girlfriends.
01:13:51 Vance was... Vance was a bad guy.
01:13:55 I believe the women that say that he did the abusive things.
01:13:59 Yes.
01:14:00 Did I project who I wanted him to be?
01:14:03 Probably, a little, because I always see the best in people.
01:14:07 We drew this image of this guy who was kind of a lost soul.
01:14:16 The group made him into some kind of a handsome hero.
01:14:21 He just had this familiar face to him,
01:14:25 and I guess people just made it personal.
01:14:28 People want to project who they want someone to be.
01:14:33 You don't know this guy.
01:14:35 You only know the pictures that you have seen.
01:14:38 You only know the stories you've heard.
01:14:40 You've never met this guy.
01:14:42 I tried to come up with my own mental composite
01:14:46 of who is this man, what I knew about him already,
01:14:49 and what I was just finding out about his past.
01:14:52 I guess there was more to him, a dark side I didn't know about.
01:14:55 It was a gut punch.
01:14:57 Honestly, I stopped wanting to know a lot more about who he was.
01:15:02 The great mystery is, why did no one find him?
01:15:05 And part of it is because he did a really good job of erasing his tracks.
01:15:09 And the sad part of it is because no one was looking for him,
01:15:13 because he was an asshole.
01:15:15 One of the great questions was why this guy had been known
01:15:22 as mostly harmless out on the trail.
01:15:24 And once Vance's name was discovered,
01:15:26 we realized that his Screeps username was Vahor,
01:15:29 which is a combination of Vance, John, Rodriguez.
01:15:33 We had assumed all along
01:15:36 that he had gotten the trail name Mostly Harmless in Georgia.
01:15:40 But here we are on Screeps, on the Screeps slack,
01:15:44 and he's saying, "I'm mostly harmless."
01:15:47 And this is January 2017, shortly before he started out on this hike.
01:15:55 And there's a book called Mostly Harmless
01:15:57 that's a part of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
01:16:00 I think he chose the name.
01:16:06 It may have just been that he read the book.
01:16:09 He liked the book.
01:16:11 He recognized that "mostly harmless" is a pretty great phrase.
01:16:15 It's because if you're mostly harmless, you're also partly harmful.
01:16:19 It suggests someone who knew something about his past
01:16:22 and was trying to move away from it, but was also aware of it.
01:16:26 I've talked to people who are abused.
01:16:35 If someone in your family abuses somebody and it's not resolved,
01:16:39 you end up doing some abuse yourself.
01:16:42 I never spoke with his parents.
01:16:44 I sent several messages to his sister
01:16:46 after I knew that she had been notified by the police.
01:16:49 And she said she just didn't want to talk, and the family wouldn't talk.
01:16:53 All of his friends knew that he had a terrible relationship with his family.
01:16:59 He spoke of abuse from his father,
01:17:02 though they didn't know what kind of abuse.
01:17:05 I learned from court records
01:17:07 he had been legally emancipated from his family at age 17.
01:17:11 You become independent when you're 18.
01:17:14 So what exactly has to happen to have yourself
01:17:16 want to be emancipated from your parents at that age?
01:17:20 I never talked to anybody who knew the answer to that.
01:17:23 Talking to the one friend from college who knew anything about the family,
01:17:29 his mental health was pretty much a dominant part of his life.
01:17:34 He would have these moments where he would just stop interacting with people.
01:17:38 He would go to his room, he'd go to other places,
01:17:41 and he would stop eating, he'd stop showering,
01:17:44 he would stop caring for himself for days, weeks, and even months.
01:17:48 The phrase that made the most sense was "outages,"
01:17:51 where he would just shut down.
01:17:54 And then this friend, Shelly, she told me when he was a teenager,
01:18:00 he had gone into a field and shot himself in the stomach.
01:18:05 While he was laying there bleeding, he changed his mind
01:18:09 and was able to drag himself out of the field and go get help.
01:18:14 The scar was not cancer, it was not from any disease.
01:18:18 The scar was from a trauma, it was from a gunshot wound.
01:18:22 My understanding was that his parents wanted to get him
01:18:28 mental health assistance after his suicide attempt,
01:18:31 and that was the reason he no longer wanted to have a relationship with his family.
01:18:36 It's very possible this fistfight that we hear about
01:18:41 had to do with wanting to get their son assistance,
01:18:44 wanting to get him help.
01:18:46 I can only assume that his parents cared about him.
01:18:49 At the beginning I thought, "Oh no, he wouldn't have committed suicide."
01:18:58 Sort of like, "That's not the image I have of him."
01:19:00 When I read that he had tried it when he was 16, and the depression,
01:19:04 I said, "No, he did."
01:19:06 I really didn't think it was suicide. I never really did, to be honest.
01:19:09 I really didn't think it was suicide. I never really did, to be honest.
01:19:11 In my opinion, he took to one of his outages,
01:19:18 and it just went too far.
01:19:20 Maybe he starved himself.
01:19:24 It seems like a terrible way to go, but I mean,
01:19:28 I don't know. I don't know why he died.
01:19:31 Maybe the whole trip was about penance, you know,
01:19:34 paying back for the stuff I had done. I need to suffer.
01:19:38 If I kill myself, is it enough?
01:19:41 I think he killed himself.
01:19:43 I think he intentionally starved himself to death.
01:19:46 The book Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
01:19:52 starts to come back up in your mind.
01:19:55 It's one in a series called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
01:19:59 And the main character is traveling around the galaxy,
01:20:02 making an atlas for other travelers.
01:20:06 The book ends with the destruction of the world.
01:20:09 The main characters are kind of coming to their peace
01:20:12 with the imminent end of life as they know it.
01:20:16 "This is not your home," said Trillian Steele, keeping her voice calm.
01:20:21 "You don't have one. None of us has one.
01:20:23 Hardly anybody has one anymore.
01:20:25 They don't even have any memory of who they are or what they're for."
01:20:29 A tremendous feeling of peace came over him.
01:20:33 He knew that at last, for once and forever,
01:20:36 it was now all finally over.
01:20:38 It feels a little bit like his trail name
01:20:45 was his suicide note to a certain degree.
01:20:48 I feel like we could have been pals, you know?
01:21:01 And that just really stinks.
01:21:03 You know, someone who offered me so much compassion and kindness.
01:21:09 Hey Bennett, can you rejoin the group, please?
01:21:12 What kind of story? A true story?
01:21:18 It almost feels like a parallel me
01:21:21 that just happened to go in a different direction.
01:21:25 I don't think Denim got the support he needed
01:21:30 to really heal.
01:21:32 I think he felt really isolated
01:21:36 and felt like no one wanted him around.
01:21:39 So I'm going to play a song that is called
01:21:45 "I've Been Thickin'" from my band Bombadier.
01:21:48 And it's about Denim
01:21:53 and the time I spent with him.
01:21:55 And also about myself
01:21:57 and how I relate to him.
01:22:00 acoustic guitar plays softly
01:22:04 He was a person that died too soon,
01:22:12 and it's sad to see he had a lot to offer.
01:22:16 I've been thinking
01:22:19 about running away again
01:22:23 About calling all my friends
01:22:27 Just to tell 'em that I'm never coming back
01:22:32 There is Mostly Harmless.
01:22:35 And then there's Vance Rodriguez, right,
01:22:38 who exists until the moment he goes into Harriman State Park.
01:22:41 And Mostly Harmless is a compelling character,
01:22:44 even if Vance Rodriguez is less so.
01:22:47 I've been thinking
01:22:49 Today I'm pleased to announce
01:22:51 that after more than 2 years,
01:22:53 we now know the identity of the deceased hiker
01:22:56 who went by the trail name Mostly Harmless.
01:23:00 The family made arrangements
01:23:02 with the medical examiner's office.
01:23:04 Vance was brought home.
01:23:06 They had a ceremony for him.
01:23:08 Walk on Monday, walk on Tuesday
01:23:12 I think I could see the real him.
01:23:17 It was the eternity that was in that moment.
01:23:20 I knew him then, so I think a lot of us miss him,
01:23:24 miss the one that we knew.
01:23:26 Maybe he's looking down and laughing at all this now
01:23:30 or saying oh wow, I wish I had stayed alive.
01:23:33 These people really loved me.
01:23:35 I would encourage him to live on.
01:23:39 I would probably say hang in there, get some help.
01:23:44 What you said to me last week
01:23:47 How you wanted me to leave
01:23:50 Goodbye for now, Denim,
01:23:52 but since coincidence let us meet 4 times already,
01:23:56 I will look for a 5th chance encounter.
01:23:59 I believe that is quite possible.
01:24:01 Walk on Monday, walk on Tuesday
01:24:05 Within sleuthing, there are people who feel unseen
01:24:09 and feel unheard and feel invisible in the world.
01:24:13 This is a way that they can be seen through these people,
01:24:18 and this is a way to get closure in your life
01:24:21 for things that you're never going to get closure for.
01:24:25 Walk on Monday, walk on Tuesday
01:24:28 I don't plan on sleuthing again.
01:24:31 Like, I want more real-life experiences.
01:24:35 But sleuthing for this case showed me I'm unstoppable.
01:24:39 And so I decided then that I was going to do this thing
01:24:43 that I've been dreaming of doing my whole life,
01:24:46 which is opening my own company
01:24:48 and bring the outdoors to everybody
01:24:51 who wants to go outside.
01:24:54 I am glad I did not quit.
01:25:02 I am glad I saw this to the end.
01:25:06 I really am.
01:25:10 I think when I found him, I found me
01:25:16 and realized this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
01:25:22 And that's a very powerful thing.
01:25:28 This is what I'm supposed to be doing.
01:25:32 [music]
01:26:00 Oh, my gosh.
01:26:03 [music]
01:26:07 Now, I saw that message.
01:26:19 I'm going to tell you this.
01:26:21 I'm in front of a filming camera right now.
01:26:28 What?
01:26:30 I gotta walk out.
01:26:37 They've got a story.
01:26:48 Tabitha was decapitated.
01:26:56 Oh, God.
01:26:59 Hey, Mrs. Young, what's going on?
01:27:03 [music]
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01:28:28 [music]
01:28:32 (dramatic music)