Murderer confesses on Anandtech forum By: Kieren McCarthy Posted: 18/05/2001 at 11:41 GMT

Anandtech community member Dennilfloss has dramatically confessed to the murder of another member, single mother Nowheremom, on the tech site's forum.

Dennilfloss developed a relationship with Nowheremom over the Internet and arranged to meet her in real life. He did so and the two hit it off. Members were shocked, however, when Dennilfloss announced the death of her and her daughter on the site in January last year. He claimed they had been knocked down by a car in bad weather.

However, following some detective work by other members on the site, it soon became apparent that the truth was a lot darker and Dennilfloss confessed to the murder on the site earlier yesterday.

The twist is that Dennilfloss was in fact Nowheremom. In his confession, he said the creation of a female alter-ego started as a joke because he wanted to see what it would be like for a woman to post on the forums. Nowheremom made her first appearance in October 1999. But it all started getting out of hand when he started getting approaches from other men on the forum, so he created a relationship with Nowheremom and himself.

Forum members were completely taken in and the situation became more and more involved over the course of the two-month romance. Dennilfloss said though that when one member mentioned marriage, it all got too much and so he decided to kill her off.

The resulting teary message on 5 January 2000, in which Dennilfloss said Nowheremom - real, fake name Lili Marlene - and her daughter Agnetha had been run down and killed by a car taking a downhill corner too fast.

With hindsight though, it all got a bit twisted. "Agnetha was killed instantly but that Lili Marlene survived for a little while and that she died on the way to the hospital. Too many internal injuries, she haemorrhaged internally," he wrote.

He went on a bit and then received hundreds of genuine expressions of sorrow while pumping out red, angry emoticons.

Dennilfloss' snivelling apology yesterday has found few supporters however. "You Denis, have lost all of my respect," said one. "Wow, you're a sick dude. Get a life buddy," another. "Jesus man, that is intollerable," another.

Denis cropped a picture of a soft porn star to use as Nowheremom's picture on the site - leading to the frankly hilarious confession by another member that he had seen others pictures of "Nowheremom" in porn mags but was worried about getting flamed if he mentioned this on the site.

The same picture was used on a memorial site set up for Lili Marlene by forum members. Since Dennilfloss' confession, the original text in which Nowheremom was described as "a treasured friend and respected member of AnandTech Forums" has been superseded by an angrier message: "We all cried for this woman, who doesn't exist. We showed our sympathy for this worthless person we call a 'man'. I am very upset I am sad that Denis did this, and I don't know if we can forgive him."

We don't have time to get into the virtual/real emotional mix-up that the Internet has made possible - instead we'll leave that to Julian Dibbell and his excellent "A Rape in Cyberspace" article.

It's easy to understand why members are angry and hurt, some of it genuine, some of it pride. And you do have to worry about Denis' mind. It was quite an extraordinary piece of deception - he even introduced consistent spelling and grammatical errors into Nowheremom's postings. Had he been a writer/novelist though, this would be applauded. Perhaps he should write a book about it.

And, apart from all that, the whole situation is simply hysterical - both in humour and reaction. To build a female persona, make her go out with yourself, continue a relationship for several months and then announce her death to strangers who had become friends is certainly warped. But then we like warped.

Oh, and all the best to the poster that wrote in the discussion "I bet The Register will have something on this scandal tomorrow. They always report on crap like this". We aim to please :-).

Update We've just noticed a posting by an Anandtech moderator, informing forum goers that Dennilfloss has been banned from the forums. The moderator has also told users that any future threads on the issue will be locked. This is because "he made a grave error in his deception, but since he can no longer post here, we will not allow any further attacks on him". ®

The Confession Thread

The "death" of Nowheremom

There was a memorial site for Nowheremom, but since the hoax has come out, it's been deleted.... twisted, huh?

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

Answers

And Another One

May 22 — At least hundreds, if not thousands of Webloggers and other Netizens spent the past year rooting for 19-year-old Kaycee Nicole, who was battling leukemia and chronicling her incredible efforts online. They sent hats when her hair fell out. They sent Amazon gift certificates so she had reading material. They even sent money when mom lost her job to be at Kaycee’s bedside. There was a worldwide groan May 14 when Kaycee’s passing was announced, followed by an online wake. Only one problem: There was no Kaycee Nicole.

IT’S THE INTERNET, so no one really seems sure of what happened — but this much seems beyond doubt. An Internet Weblogger has confessed to an elaborate hoax involving the life and death of a beautiful 19-year-old leukemia-fighting girl. Internet message boards are being pounded with hundreds of notes full of emotional outrage; a few gift-givers are making noises about pursuing a mail fraud case. In Peabody, Kan., ground zero for the hoax, police are investigating, according to chief Jeff Pohlman.

By all accounts, Kaycee’s popularity almost gave her Internet phenomenon status. There are dozens of Web pages devoted to her struggle — even a few laden with photographs of the girl growing up, or playing basketball in high school. Now, no one is sure who was in those pictures.

“I sent 20 phone cards, a package of pens, a teddy bear, Beanie Babies,” said one victim of the hoax named Amber, who asked to remain anonymous. She also sent a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate. “And I really think other people out there gave things of higher value.”

It all began when Kaycee’s alleged mom, identified as Debbie Swenson of Peabody Kan., befriended another Weblogger named Randall van der Woning, who lives in Hong Kong. The way van der Woning tells it on his Web site (he didn’t respond to a request for an interview), he fell hard for Debbie’s story and agreed to publish the girl’s daily musings online. The site, dubbed “Living Colors,” caught fire. Soon, Kaycee’s struggle was highlighted all over the Net.

“This is a difficult story that will take some time to read through, but trust me, you will be changed forever after reading about KC,” wrote one adoring Kaycee fan.

What followed was an old-fashioned barn-raising, Internet style. It inspired the sending of hundreds of Christmas cards and hats; the purchase of mugs and T-shirts to support Kaycee’s cause; and possibly, outright donations. It all went to a post office box in Peabody.

But the hoax was an elaborate attention-getting scheme; some participants got return thank you notes, and a few even got care packages back from Debbie when they were sick.

It’s not hard to see how Kaycee’s popularity grew. The close-knit Weblog community has a penchant for rallying behind causes. Moreover, her writing was exquisite; the drama as intense as any episode of “West Wing” — like this prose, written after Kaycee supposedly was released from the hospital after a difficult round of chemotherapy:

“I stood by the window this morning. My little piece of sunlight inched its way into the room. Just a sliver of promise touching my cheek. I stood there but didn’t feel alone. It was like a million smiles were shining on me, and I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t ever alone...”

Web sites following Kaycee Nicole's saga posted photographs of this unidentified woman portrayed as the 19-year-old leukemia sufferer. The photograph appears to have been pilfered from a family home page.

But in the end, it wasn’t real. Just days after the alleged May 14 death, a few dispassionate observers started looking into Kaycee’s journal entries and the circumstances around her death. Facts didn’t line up. No local newspapers in Kansas had heard of this 19-year-old’s struggle with leukemia, a story that surely would have been constant front-page fodder. Suddenly, the mother didn’t want gifts any more.

Freelance writer Saundra Mitchell published a Web page with her doubts on May 17, risking public vitriol.

“I got 250 e-mails overnight. Two or three were really angry or nasty. Some questioned my motives. But most mail was from other journalers who also had questions,” she said.

Within a few hours, the hoax unraveled.

Van der Woning posted a note on his Weblog, allegedly authored by Debbie, saying Kaycee was fictional — but based on real characters. Hundreds of bulletin board posts later, Kaycee admirers are still sorting out their grief in public.

"I followed this blog every day since around last September or so and believed every word of it,” penned a writer identified as “digital_insomnia.” “I sent ‘Kaycee’ a few e-mails, and even referred a friend who has a real daughter with cancer to the blog, hoping that it would give her some strength and inspiration to get through her fight. How silly I was, apparently.”

Amber, who thinks the value of the gifts she sent to Kaycee wasn’t much more than $100, said she was much more concerned with the emotional theft perpetrated by the hoax.

“My daughter is 10. We would go places, and she would say, ‘We should send something to Kaycee.’ That’s why we sent the bookmarks, the Beanie Babies. She cried when Kaycee died,” Amber said. “Now I have to tell my daughter it was all a hoax ... I really want the person behind all this to be kept from doing it again.”

Serializing and fictionalizing have a longstanding tradition in publishing, and even in journalism — in 1998, for example, Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith was fired for presenting fictionalized stories as real.

But to carry out such an elaborate hoax — interactively — for such a long time is remarkable. Some fear it will hurt the Weblogging community, which had just reached phenomenon status this year with a wave of media coverage. Blogger.com, one popular Blog site, now claims nearly 200,000 regular journalers.

“A lot of people are reacting like that,” said Mitchell, herself a blogger. “There will be some people who quit entirely, people who say they’ll never trust anyone again. But there are a lot of people who take heart from the fact that this person lied and lied, but somebody else on the Net eventually figured it out.”

Either way, it is yet another cautionary tale about not believing everything you read, a maxim that is probably no truer online than in any other place in life. But perhaps the story does offer a lesson about anonymity, and the trouble of seeking emotional comfort from the masses by deception. Among the hundreds of outraged messages written in response to the admission of the Kaycee hoax was the following dramatic confession:

“The discussion has struck a personal chord. For the last two years, I have impersonated a married woman with children who was unhappy, and who had emerging bisexual fantasies,” the writer admitted. The male writer then described his own, elaborate two-year hoax, complete with fabricated photographs of his/her childhood. The Kaycee story embarrassed him to come clean, he said.

“What has struck me in my reading today is that people do get hurt in their online relationships and that I have both abused their trust and jeopardized their worldview. As I delved further and further into KayCee and the response over these last days, I increasingly felt guilty. When I got home tonight, I deleted my log, the persona’s email and ICQ accounts, and all references on my computer. I apologize to those I have deceived.”

So perhaps, some good has come of the Kaycee saga. Or perhaps, he just made the whole thing up.

-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001

I looked through a number of the pages on that site, just found it so difficult to understand that the same group that could post such superficial banalities as were there in the 24 pages of responses, yet get emotionally involved on any level. With most of the responses it seemed like a personals ad with "Likes long walks on the beach at sunset" would be the height of their emotional awareness.

Part of it was having my first years of online experience in a very warm religious online community, where we talked about some very deep and profound experiences. Most of the people who know me on my deepest levels are those I met through that group, and that bond is a very precious one. My use of the Net was born through that filter -- that we use the Net to get closer, to get deeper, to heal the hurting and comfort the afflicted. I know at least 3 couples who are still together from that time and place.

I can see a trick like that getting out of control. I thought Dennilfloss showed integrity in his ending of it. I don't condemn him.

But yes, there are predators out there, and the usual board dynamics are pretty dysfunctional about handling them. There are always a lot of noises about rights of free speech, but those same people are usually pretty silent about the responsibilities one has to their online community.

Thanks for posting these, I think they may be relevant to this article on how your death affects the Web that I'm working on. It's another aspect I hadn't thought of.

-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001