‘Is he a good guy or a bad guy?’: an online hunt to solve a shocking death
Sometime before 23 July 2018, a man later known to millions as Mostly Harmless died in his tent in a Florida swamp. His body was found in the morning by hikers in Big Cypress natural preserve, whose 911 call opens They Called Him Mostly Harmless, a new Max documentary on the case and the internet sleuths who sought to reunite the hiker with his loved ones. The caller described him as unnaturally thin, discolored, alone.
The man was, indeed, emaciated; at 5ft 8in, he weighed only 83lb. An autopsy found no drugs in his system other than Tylenol, no tattoos and what was described as a “small scar” on his abdomen. He had food in his tent, plenty of cash and relatively expensive camping equipment. He had a notebook full of what appeared to be code, or maybe the scribblings of a madman. He died a few miles from the highway – presumably, if he needed help, he could have walked a short distance to find it. The official cause of death was inconclusive.
There was no missing persons report in the area, so authorities in Collier county, Florida, Photoshopped an image of his face to look less like a corpse and released it publicly. “It kinda reminded of the caveman in the Geico ad,” says Christie Harris, an internet sleuth who took up the case, says in the film. Nevertheless, the sheriff’s office assumed someone – a friend, a family member, an acquaintance or one of the many people who frequent the Florida trails – would recognize him from the jarring composite and provide a name.
This proved more than bedeviling, and that’s where They Called Him Mostly Harmless shifts from a story about a mystery body found in the woods to a story about the internet, the things we project on to other people and the razor’s edge between healthy and unhealthy obsession. And in particular, the experience of true crime communities. The film doesn’t fully embrace the conventions of a genre often maligned, fairly or not, for exploitative tactics. But it also deeply understands the human desire for answers, and to help find them.
“I make films that are easilyidentified as true crime, but I don’t feel like a true crime film-maker,” Patricia Gillespie, the film’s director, told the Guardian. “Most of the people I’ve spoken to who are supposedly in that community, they don’t feel like a part of the ‘true crime community’, they just feel it’s an interest. No one says action film community, or the romance film community, or the horror film community. So I was really interested in looking at that ‘community’.”
Numerous micro-communities – state park enthusiasts, internet sleuthing groups, local hiking organizations – crowd-sourced clues to the mystery. It turned out that many people had seen the man, who went by the trail name Mostly Harmless, over the course of a year-long trek down the Appalachian Trail. He appeared, looking healthy and ruggedly handsome, in numerous photos and videos with transient hiking friends. Several described him as notably kind and open, if not forthcoming about his life.
As the calls for help spread through Facebook groups, Twitter and a Collier county-produced true crime podcast, more and more people recalled snippets of information he revealed on the trail – that he once lived in Brooklyn, had worked in tech, had been abused by his father, started off with the trail name Denim. But never his real name. Mostly Harmless was good at hiding his tracks. He had no wallet or ID or digital trail, used a pseudonym in trail hostels. The scribblings in his tent – code for Screeps, a game by programmers, for programmers – led to another dead end of anonymous usernames. The more people learned, the more it seemed like Mostly Harmless wanted to remain anonymous.
Given the dime-a-dozen true crime mysteries on streaming services, there’s been a handful of documentaries in recent years which could be described as “anti-true crime” – selfconsciously deconstructing narratives, drilling into subjectivity, interrogating the audience’s interest in violence or suffering. They Called Him Mostly Harmless is more agnostic and deliberately non-judgmental; the film talks in depth with many, many people who contributed their time and efforts, predominantly women and predominantly online, to solving something that was not obviously a crime. “I think it’s good to be critical of us makers, because sometimes the mark is missed on ethics in this genre, and that is something we have to continue to talk about,” said Gillespie. “But it really grinds my gears when they criticize our
audience” – dismissed as a female interest, as gross fixation on the morbid, macabre or dark.
There is that, to an extent – see: the vicious cycle of Ted Bundy appetite and content on Netflix. But Gillespie sees many sleuths as “engaging in an exercise of empathy” who “come to these stories because they want to see people who are facing darkness or a tragedy or ‘evil’, and maintaining their humanity and trying to make the world a more just place, and trying to be good in the face of tough stuff”. (Not that such effort is evenly applied – “there are a lot of people who are not young, good-looking white men, who don’t get the amount of shares and attention that somebody like Mostly Harmless does,” said Gillespie. “That’s something we can do something about.”)
Gillespie was particularly drawn to Harris, a dry cleaning delivery driver in Richmond, Virginia, by day and internet sleuth by night, who moderated a Facebook group on Mostly Harmless with an iron fist – “I’m here to do a job, and that’s to get him his name back no matter what,” she says. And Natasha Teasley, an outdoors enthusiast in Durham, North Carolina, who took over the group once an embittered Harris splintered off, motivated more by the tradition of helping others outdoors than any interest in Facebook sleuthing.
The two women’s experiences (and at times toxic rivalry) power the latter half of the film, in part because “Christie and Natasha are women we don’t see on TV a lot,” said Gillespie. “These are working-class women who work really hard, that donate their time to try to help other people.” They are, Gillespie notes, easily derided and dismissed – the work of their groups is sometimes helpful, often circular, occasionally farcical (some theorized he was a time traveler), and at times very damaging, as in the case of a blogger misidentified by the group as Mostly Harmless and bombarded with harassment. Still, “I hope the response to them is kind,” said Gillespie of Harris and Teasley. “The internet is not always kind, and I can’t control that. But I tried to make a film that was really kind, and I hope that people meet it with kindness, as well.”
The internet can also be a site of great projection. This is not an openended mystery, and many were more content with the idea of Mostly Harmless than the troubling answers finally provided in January 2021. I’m keeping details vague, as the film’s approximation of sinking time into a search only to be shocked and disappointed by the answer is part of the point. But safe to say Mostly Harmless was not the angelic folk hero lost to the wilderness that many hoped to save. “That was the thing that disturbed me,” said Gillespie. “Where is that line between what you’re seeing online and what’s real and what’s not? And what happens when the person we create in our minds turns out in reality to be something totally different?”
They Called Him Mostly Harmless lands in an unsettling spot, untethered from the stark conclusions encouraged by talking online. Mostly Harmless was a benevolent trail presence to some, a monster to others. Someone’s life for a few years, a mystery, a call to action, a time suck, a meaningful connection at camp. Someone to be helped beyond the grave, someone who helped others on the trail, someone who caused immense hurt. “People are left saying ‘is he a good guy, or a bad guy?’ And like, he’s a human being,” said Gillespie. “You can have a meaningful connection with somebody on one hand, and have done something really wrong. You can be both a good person and a bad person. And the internet at this moment is struggling to contain that.”
They Called Him Mostly Harmless is now available on Max in the US with a UK date to be announced