Speaking in Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

with names like Websleuths. Official Cold Case Investigations. Justice Quest.
    I clicked through page after page, intrigued. At one point Birdie joined me and curled on the desk. His steady purring provided a tranquil backdrop to the staccato clicking of the keys.
    There was a similarity from one site to the next. Chat rooms. Forums. Discussion threads following particular cases or lines of inquiry. Unsolved homicides and missing persons seemed to attract the most attention.
    The rules varied. Some sites required “verification” of persons claiming to be professionals and having inside information—doctors, journalists, cops, et cetera. Others did not. Some prohibited “inviting”—a request from one poster to another for private contact. Others allowed it.
    I scanned an article about Websleuths.com, learned that the site was started in the 1990s as an online forum for discussion of the JonBenét Ramsey murder. That it took credit for uncovering a vital clue in the Casey Anthony case, and for helping solve the murder of Abraham Shakespeare, a Florida laborer killed after a lottery win of $30 million. According to one comment I read, the hosts claimed 67,000 registered members, and up to 30,000 daily hits. No telling if those numbers were true.
    I provided the information needed to join and chose a thread at random. The discussion concerned a twenty-nine-year-old hairdresser missing from Lincoln, Nebraska. The MP, Sarah McCall, had left her place of employment the previous January intending to have drinks with friends. Her car was found two days later in a rest area on Interstate 80. No purse. No keys. No sign of McCall.
    The number of people tracking the case was truly astonishing. As was the amount of intel they claimed to have gathered. Over the course of two months, websleuthers had found McCall’s Facebook page and online videos, and figured out her various Twitter handles, including @singleandfree, @silverlining, and @curlupanddye. An IT specialist named candotekkie had retrieved thousands of deleted Twitter posts. Other websleuths had waded through the content to sort what was relevant from what was not.

    And these guys were thorough. A Websleuths.com member named R.I.P. had mailed a copy of McCall’s missing-person poster to every women’s shelter, hospital, and medical examiner facility in Nebraska. Unfortunately, Sarah McCall had yet to be found.
    As I made myself tea, I couldn’t help but think how McCall had unknowingly helped in her own investigation. The woman was a prodigious user of social media. The polar opposite of Cora Teague.
    Returning to the keyboard, I linked over to CLUES.net. The site was less user friendly than Websleuths.com, the mark of a creator less skilled in the use of web design templates. But Strike was right. No info was required to become a member.
    It took some trolling, but I finally located a forum on Cora Teague. Compared to the other cases I’d perused, there were very few threads and only a handful of participants, most of whom had quickly dropped out.
    The first thread was initiated on August 22, 2011, by someone calling him- or herself OMG. The post stated that Cora Teague was missing and in danger due to poor health, and claimed a lack of interest on the part of family and local law enforcement. She or he described Teague as a white female, five feet six inches tall, of slender build, with green eyes and long blond hair.
    OMG stated she or he had last seen Teague on July 14, 2011, outside the Teague family home in Avery County, North Carolina. Teague was wearing a long-sleeved blue tee, jeans, a lightweight white jacket, and leather boots. OMG did not describe the circumstances of that sighting, and no detail came out in the brief interchanges that followed.
    A websleuth using the name luckyloo joined the thread on February 24, 2012. By that time no one had posted a comment for over six months. I guessed luckyloo was Hazel Strike.

    There was some uptick in posting