Cyber sleuths...or toxic busybodies?
The internet age has spawned an army of armchair detectives trying to solve the world’s most confounding mysteries, sometimes with success. But, as our investigation reveals, their keyboard crime-busting can also have disastrous and even deadly consequences
ON A blazing hot August day in 2002, a mother called Anya Chand realised with a stab of panic that her three-yearold son Robin had gone missing. At the time Anya, then 32, was on a ferry which was about to leave the Italian port of Ancona to sail to Split in Croatia, but her little boy, who had been by her side moments earlier, was now nowhere to be seen.
‘It was Ferragosto, a national holiday in Italy and the ferry was teeming with people,’ Anya recalls now. ‘It was chaos. I was panic-stricken, terrified that he’d fallen into the sea.’
Nearly an hour of frantic searching by passengers and Italian police followed before Robin was found hiding in a corner of the ferry’s restaurant.
‘It felt like forever,’ Anya says now. ‘It was really traumatic.’ And so when, five years later in May 2007, a blonde-haired girl named Madeleine McCann disappeared from her bedroom in a holiday resort in the Algarve fishing village of Praia da Luz, Anya’s memories came flooding back.
‘Madeleine was three just as Robin had been, but my terror had only lasted an hour,’ she recalls. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I wanted to help.’
Anya wasn’t alone. All around the globe, people had been mesmerised by the unfolding horror of a girl who had, to all intents and purposes, vanished into thin air, to the anguish of her parents Gerry and Kate McCann.
By day three of Madeleine’s disappearance, galvanised by the ongoing mystery, a rudimentary message board had been created in an online chat room – in an era before the first iPhone and when social media messaging apps were in their infancy. Users began congregating from far and wide to share their theories, and Anya quickly signed up.
‘There were thousands of us on there,’ she recalls. ‘At the time everyone was just interested in finding Madeleine and sharing as much information as possible.’
WHAT none of them could possibly know in those early days was that nearly two decades after her disappearance, and in the year that she would have turned 21, her case would remain one of the greatest unresolved crime mysteries of modern times – and the dawn of the era of the internet sleuth. Despite investigations by police in the UK, Portugal and, latterly, Germany, no one has yet been charged with Madeleine’s abduction or murder – but this has not stopped millions of amateur detectives from all over the world sharing their views on not just her case but, over time, any mystery with a public profile.
Specialist crime sites now have hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, among them the Reddit Bureau of Investigations – 500,000 users strong – and websleuths. com, which has up to 5,000 users every day turning their attention to everything from cold cases to identifying abandoned babies.
Today, there remain dozens of active threads dedicated to Madeleine’s case. Back in 2007 however, few could at first envisage the global explosion of interest that would follow the news of Maddie’s disappearance while on holiday with her parents, twoyear-old twin siblings Sean and Amelie, and family friends.
While rare, the incident was not unique (in 1991, 21-month-old Ben Needham had gone missing on the Greek island of Kos, and to date he has not been found).
What was entirely new was that the drama unfolded against a backdrop of a rolling 24-hour news cycle, coupled with a burgeoning number of online platforms where anyone could share theories of the events of the fateful evening of May 3, when Maddie disappeared.
In the aftermath, police were deluged with information. Anya contacted them after watching news footage filmed outside a petrol station in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh, where there had been a possible sighting of Madeleine.
‘Behind the police were these very new, white lorries with a particular branding,’ she recalls.
‘I had seen the same lorry in news footage from Praia da Luz. I told the police about this, but I will never know if they followed up.’
What drove thousands of people to become amateur sleuths in the ‘Maddie case’?
Criminologist Nic Groombridge, a retired senior sociology lecturer at St Mary’s University in London, says: ‘There’s nothing new about people trying to help police, or, indeed, naming suspects. During the Jack the Ripper case, one of the problems the police had wasn’t a lack of leads – it was too many.’
What has changed, he believes, is the sheer volume of theories discussed on open platforms which, as Anya recalls, quickly deteriorated into infighting.
Within two months, the formerly co-operative message board she joined had split into two camps, labelling themselves the ‘proMcCanns’ and the ‘anti-McCanns’ – the latter convinced it was Gerry and Kate’s negligence which was responsible for their daughter’s abduction. ‘There were lots of nasty fights online in these groups and they still go on today,’ says Anya, a self-confessed ‘pro’ McCann. ‘Many were very vocal. I realised some of them were lonely and would do anything to be part of the group. They found the more they bashed the McCanns, the more popular they were.’
Then Twitter, which launched in 2006, provided another outlet for public theorising which for some descended into vicious trolling.
Hidden behind a cloak of anonymity, some members of the public relentlessly attacked the McCanns as ‘negligent’ and undeserving of children.
Among them was a Leicestershire woman called Brenda Leyland, who lived just 15 miles from the McCanns’ home in Rothley, and who had become convinced that they were responsible for Madeleine’s disappearance.
Under her Twitter handle @ sweepyface, she posted hundreds of vitriolic and potentially libellous messages accusing them of being ‘evil’ and ‘conniving’.
In October 2014 she took her own life after being approached by a reporter about her activities.
Her son Ben, 39, later revealed
that his mother did not think of herself as a troll, but as an ‘investigative journalist’ – the term she had used to describe herself in her will. ‘I think she lost sight of [the McCanns’] humanity, and they were just the target of the “investigation”,’ he said.
The McCanns, in response to some of the newspaper articles at the time which suggested, falsely, that they were responsible for Madeleine’s death, began a libel claim which saw them paid more than £500,000 in damages. The money was given to the Find Madeleine campaign.
Many others who consider themselves ‘investigators’ have also found that the line between sourcing information and vigilantism – or ‘digilantism’ as it has been labelled – can be wafer-thin.
Because what’s clear is that the McCann story sparked a new and arguably sinister trend, in which members of the public attempt the work of professional investigators, with potentially disastrous results.
In the aftermath of the 2013 Boston marathon terror attack, for example, in which a bomb near the finish line killed three and wounded hundreds of others, Reddit users combed through CCTV footage and Facebook for suspects.
Those of young Asian or Middle Eastern appearance were particularly singled out, among them 22year-old student Sunil Tripathi.
In less than a day, his Facebook page was inundated with hateful messages, his family receiving threatening anonymous calls. A week later, Tripathi’s body was found: he had drowned himself.
Then in January 2023, social media reached new depths of ghoulishness following the disappearance of Nicola Bulley while walking her dog in the Lancashire village of St Michaels on Wyre. Using the hashtag #nicolabulley, ‘influencers’ and others made many videos speculating about the 45-year-old, retracing her steps and even digging up areas near where she went missing.
On TikTok, Nicola’s name racked up nearly 400million views, with nearly 160million further views on Instagram Reels. Eventually, three weeks after her grieving husband had reported her missing, Nicola’s body was found by two walkers – later a clairvoyant claimed to be one of them.
A coroner ruled that Nicola had drowned accidentally. Following the case, Lancashire’s Police and Crime Commissioner Andrew Snowden ordered a review of the police investigation, saying he wanted to understand more about how social media conspiracy theories took hold in the search for Nicola, following criticism by officers that the public response had hindered their investigation.
One person who profoundly refutes that sentiment is TikToker @dhbreincarnated (10,000 followers), who publicly speculated about the case, posting more than 50 videos about Nicola’s disappearance. ‘They can take it with a pinch of salt, or they can sit and watch these videos and think “actually, we didn’t pick that up”,’ he says, insisting that knowledge of both true crime and fictional crime shows can make someone more perceptive than the police.
‘What happens in soaps and similar situations helps people to see the slip-ups.’ That sentiment seems to be shared by many others: two years ago, a survey revealed that 70 per cent of true crime fans in the UK supported the idea of ‘internet sleuths’ helping to solve crimes. And certainly, armchair sleuths have conjured some success. Take the case of 22year-old American influencer Gabby Petito who went missing on a van trip with her fiance Brian Laundrie in August 2021.
The couple had documented their travels on social media, and as the Mail reported this week, web sleuths plotted their final movements from TikTok videos, Instagram posts and by geolocating Petito’s blog posts.
Eleven days after she was reported missing, and helped by information gathered by the public, police discovered her remains. Laundrie disappeared; he later shot himself in the head. In his notebook, he wrote that they had argued and he had killed Petito.
Nine years earlier, an internet manhunt helped to track down a Canadian porn actor called Luka Magnotta, who in 2010 had posted a grim video of himself killing two kittens by suffocating them in a vacuum bag, and feeding another cat to a python in a later video.
A Facebook page was set up to try to catch the ‘cat killer’ who later went on to murder and dismember Chinese student Jun Lin in Montreal in May 2012.
The online search in 2019 was immortalised in the award-winning Netflix hit Don’t F**k With Cats. Magnotta was jailed for life.
Cases like this inevitably continue to whet the appetite of crime aficionados, although as Anya points out, advances in technology have made the theorising of some amateurs redundant. ‘Almost all modern cases are solved using technology: telephone towers, GPS and CCTV evidence,’ she says.
It is the absence of the latter in particular – together with the bungling of early forensic examinations of the McCanns’ apartment – that Anya believes hampered the early search for Madeleine. Having diligently read all of the 11,000 pages of case documents released by Portuguese police in 2010, she has her own questions.
‘On May 4, the second day after Madeleine went missing, the police brought in sniffer dogs and they were given a towel that had Madeleine’s DNA on it,’ she says.
‘The first dog left the apartment, went around the block and the swimming pool, crossed the road outside the resort, and stopped next to a lamppost in the parking area. They tried with a second dog, and it followed the same route, stopping at the same lamppost.
‘The police then brought two different dogs in four days later, and they did exactly the same thing. For me this was the most fascinating aspect of the whole case. What happened at that lamp post?’
Over on websleuths.com, meanwhile, countless threads focus on the possible guilt of Christian Bruckner, 47, a German paedophile and drug trafficker who is believed to have been living in a VW campervan in the Algarve at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance.
Bruckner is serving a prison sentence in Germany for raping a 72-year-old American pensioner in the Algarve, having previously been convicted of unrelated counts of child sexual abuse and drugtrafficking. He is also currently on
She had lost sight of the McCanns’ humanity
I worry about people’s fascination with crime
trial for five other sexual offences committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017. He denies any involvement in Maddie’s case.
None of this, of course, seems likely to bring Madeleine back. Earlier this month, Kate and Gerry McCann issued a moving statement to mark the anniversary of their daughter’s disappearance, speaking of their disbelief that 17 years had passed since she was taken from them.
‘While we are fortunate in many ways and able to live a relatively normal and enjoyable life now, the “living in limbo” is still very unsettling. And the absence still aches ... We know the love and hope for Madeleine and the will to find her, even after so many years, remains and we are truly thankful for that.’
Their statement will do little to quell the endless speculation of the amateur sleuths still fascinated with the case, to the discomfort of Nic Groombridge.
‘As a criminologist I recognise everyone’s right to an opinion about crime,’ he says, pointing out that most crime is ‘mundane and not newsworthy’. ‘But I worry about people’s fascination with it.’