Online armchair investigators – friends or foe? by N V Peacock

When I research my thrillers, I’m often propelled head first down rabbit holes, and there was never one so long, winding and dark as that of online armchair investigators, sometimes known as citizen sleuths.  Let’s begin by defining what, and who, these people are. First, they are not necessarily from police backgrounds, but are mostly everyday people who take it upon themselves to investigate a crime from afar. They will have rarely attended crime scenes and will have limited access to police reports. As a whole, they work as part of a team and become a collective who utilise their time and internet skills, which means their evidence and resources are wider - sometimes even than the police.

Since the inception of the internet, online collective intelligence has been used on websites and social media to dig out the truth of people and situations. On the face, it can feel like a dedicated community of do-gooders, however more often than not, crowds of people will swing on the lowest common denominator, thus those with dark intentions can influence others into a mob mentality; making even the most noble of people descend into a spiral of gossip and hate that ultimately goes against their true natures.

Being part of important investigations can offer a false sense of grandeur along with an almost addictive form of validation akin to seeing likes gather on social media posts – this then fuels a behaviour that might have otherwise dissipated.  Pitchforks and torches in hand, righteous folks storm forward on a mission, without paying heed to where they tread and on who they tread upon. To a degree, this can be observed in The Stanford Prison Experiment that was conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. Normal young men were recruited to re-create a prison environment and were randomly selected as either prisoner or guard. The whole thing was called off after just six days as the guards were suddenly employing cruel and out of character behaviour towards the prisoners – give someone a bit of power, and a group to remain faceless and in, and darkness can seep through even the most gentle of souls. 

The most recent example I can give of online armchair detectives is the Netflix documentary Don’t F*ck with Cats. An online group from the USA banded together on social media to identify a sick man who posted disturbing videos of animal abuse on YouTube before graduating to killing his first human victim.  Although not stopping said killer start his spree, they were, in my opinion, instrumental in saving further lives. They were tireless in their efforts and a prime example of those hard-working people who use all the tools at their disposal and leave no digital rock unturned to solve the puzzle of the killer’s identity. Ironically, if the evidence in the documentary is to be believed, the online armchair investigators didn’t actually identify the killer, but simply lured him into the spotlight, and so although not technically unmasking him, gave him the perfect ego-tripping opportunity to unmask himself. But; well, there’s always a but isn’t there, on their journey for justice, they also pointed a finger at the wrong man. This man had mental health issues and tragically committed suicide.

Another famous case is the 2013 USA Boston Bombing. When news hit that a bomb had been detonated at the Boston Marathon, people were shocked and justifiably outraged. With so many photos being taken on the day of runners and crowds, it didn’t take long for potential online investigators to start crowdsourcing photos to try to spot the man carrying the suspicious bag. And spot them they did. They even identified them. Then they doxxed them online, exposing names and addresses of innocent people to justice-hungry crowds, ruining lives and creating situations just as dangerous as the bomb itself.  The authorities eventually caught the bombers. They were not anyone named online.

In my newest thriller, The 13th Girl, a band of online armchair detectives come together to identify a serial killer calling himself the Righteous Wraith. Naming themselves Wraith Finders, they set about pointing the finger at suspect Andy, who they are certain is the killer. They’ve crowd sourced evidence, they have created believable timelines and, after all, he is a little creepy. But the police are not interested in their ‘evidence’ so they being to turn up at his work and home. Losing his job and wife, and with the wraith still dropping bodies, Andy seeks the professional advice of a psychologist. This is where he meets our loveable oddball protagonist Dee, who has her own tragic back story of mental health issues. Knowing what it’s like to be accused of something she didn’t do, Dee sets about filming a true crime documentary to prove Andy’s innocence – but there’s no smoke without fire, and the deeper down that rabbit hole she gets, the more alone she feels. After all, if she finds out who the wraith is, who would believe her?

Even after writing the book, I still haven’t decided on whether online armchair investigators are friend or foe. They can do good, but can also cause trouble. Mob mentality can taint efforts. However, if we were to all stop caring what is happening in the world, and getting involved, where would that leave us?

The 13th Girl by N V Peacock (Hera Books) Out Now

12 girls gone. Can she save The 13th Girl? After decades in a mental health hospital, Dee knows that people find her creepy – because they tell her so. Once the reluctant star of an infamous documentary, she is trying to blend back into the outside world. But when a string of local girls disappear, only to be found dead days later, she becomes fixated on the case and decides to film her own True Crime documentary There is a serial killer on the loose - The Righteous Wraith. Girls are being found one by one, their bodies gruesomely staged in the most innocent public spaces. With the killer taunting the police and public fear mounting, the armchair detectives begin pointing fingers at one suspect. But for Dee, something isn’t adding up. She knows what it’s like to be accused of something that you didn’t do. She resolves to prove his innocence, unmask the real killer, and save The 13th Girl. But who will believe her?

N V Peacock can be found on FaceBook and she can also be found on X @NickyP_author.

Wish You Were Here: A Journey from Expensive Holiday Resorts to the English Seaside

My novel Wish You Were Here borrows its title from an 80s holiday programme. This featured middle-class presenters who travelled to exotic destinations and reported back to the cold, wet UK. For most people I knew, this was aspirational telly, none of us having anywhere near the money to travel to these places. This didn’t stop us from watching and fantasising. Wishing we were there. They travelled to Praia de la Luz or, as the presenter called it ‘Luge’. I remember the strangeness of the town’s name on her tongue and her incredible tan and how hot and ridiculously foreign the beach looked. It looked like paradise. 

The next time I saw the resort, though, it was not paradise but the scene of a worst nightmare; the disappearance of a young child. The resort felt vaguely familiar as I watched but I didn’t make the connection right away. That came, years later, when I watched a documentary about Madeleine McCann as part of the research for my novel about a missing girl and it included a clip. My memories of watching it at the time came flooding back and from that moment onwards, I knew the title of my book. There’s an 80’s TV connection in the storyline, too, so it made perfect sense. 

The longer I lived with the title, the more it meant. My fictional child was a working-class girl from a single parent family and disappears from the English seaside, a deliberate contrast. So, my title references those English seaside postcards, too. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write about a missing child from this kind of background. As a writer, you’re encouraged to show rather than tell and I wanted people to feel this experience, to feel the injustice that I felt about the way society, the media and, these days, people on social media treat and judge people differently based on a number of prejudices. I’d read Chavs by Owen Jones years before and was struck by the stark contrast he highlights between the way Madeleine’s disappearance was covered compared to that of Shannon Matthews. He even puts a number on the concern shown for the two girls, pointing out that the rewards offered for information leading to their return valued Madeleine’s life fifty times higher than Shannon’s. 

Madeleine had been missing nine months when Shannon disappeared and yet still dominated the front pages, with Shannon featured in minor columns of the same newspapers. The shameless and not entirely unconscious class bias of opinion columns at the time is chilling to read back on. The general take on Madeleine’s case appeared to be ‘this shouldn’t happen to families like us’ and there was even a revealing comment about the resort itself not being a place you would expect to meet ‘the kind of people who wallop their weeping kids in Sainsbury’s’. Apparently, not. Just the kind of people who leave their kids home alone while they go out drinking with their mates, then. 

Inequalities in our society play out in a heartbreaking way via the efforts we make to find our missing children. This was shown starkly in one of the documentaries I watched, a stream of photos of local children who’d gone missing in Portugal around the same time as Madeleine, whose names and photos I had never seen before. Recent research found that missing persons cases in the UK where the victim was Black or Asian were significantly less likely to be solved, the victims less likely to be flagged as at risk or vulnerable even when they clearly were. Such things fall sadly for me under the heading ‘shocking but not surprising’. Systemic racism has been an issue in the UK police force for years, and it’s something I explore in my books via Sian’s partner Kris, a serving Black police officer. 

Of course, what happened next in the Shannon Matthews case neatly fitted the media’s narrative of a ‘shameless’ underclass. But that doesn’t change the stark contrast in the way the girl’s disappearance was covered by the media before any of this was known. An even starker contrast is seen when you look at the lack of column inches given to the disappearance of five-year-old Elizabeth Ogungbayibi, who disappeared the year before the two white girls. I’m sure we care about all the missing children but it’s also a fact that we continue to demonstrate that we care about some of them more. 

Nicola Monaghan is the author of Wish You Were Here published by VERVE Books

DNA doesn't lie. But what if the truth is dangerous?DNA expert Dr Sian Love has settled into running her own investigative agency and living with her partner, Kris. She's also started seeing a therapist to work through her traumatic history - a big step for Sian. Then a teenage girl brings chaos to Sian's office door. She claims to be Courtney Johnson - a child who went missing from a Brighton beach over fifteen years ago - but refuses to let Sian test her DNA. Wary but intrigued, Sian reluctantly revives the undercover skills she learned during her police force days and begins investigating. But revisiting the past has consequences...

John Dryden on Passenger List - From Podcast to Novel

 

It all started with a missing plane…

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was most expensive search operation in aviation history. It had been a regular scheduled international passenger flight that took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to its planned destination, Beijing on the evening of 8th March 2014. Everything seemed normal. The crew communicated with air traffic control around thirty eight minutes after take-off when the flight was over the South China Sea. And then it just disappeared from the radar screens. Later military radars revealed that the plane had deviated westwards from its planned flight path towards the vast India Ocean. Over the coming weeks there were new theories every day about what might have happened and who was responsible. Was it the pilot, who had recently gone through a religious conversion? Was it the two passengers travelling with fake passports? Had the plane been hijacked and diverted? Were the passengers being kept hostage in a hanger somewhere? It was a global mystery. 

What impacted me most was the relatives of the passengers, the pain they were having to endure in the gaze of the media. Imagine being told you had lost a precious child or partner or parent without any further information or knowledge of how or why, of what had happened. The pain was etched into their faces as they turned up to the many briefing and press conferences and as they gradually lost confidence in the official investigation. Without facts, whilst the fate of the plane was still a mystery, they had one thing they could cling on to; hope. Hope that their loved-ones may still be alive out there somewhere.

Air travel has always fascinated me. As a child I was a regular “unaccompanied minor” flying from the Middle East where my parents worked, to school in England. I used to dread arriving at Heathrow where my aunt would meet me and dutifully deliver me to a small boarding school in Eastbourne. It all seemed so dreary to my eight-year-old self. On the flight I’d looked down at the vast empty desert and pray that the flight would have to make a crash landing and that I’d join a tribe of Bedouins and go on a great adventure. It never happened and thankfully I’ve never been involved in an air crash. They are incredibly rare. Maybe that’s why they are so fascinating. Cock-pit recordings of doomed flights are striking by the lack of panic. Flight crews always sound so calm and professional, doing what they’ve been trained to do, or maybe they are clinging to the one thing left to cling to; hope that they will make it out alive.

A career in writing stories and scripts and producing audio dramas followed, and after the disappearance of MA 370 I became quite obsessed with plane disappearances of which there are a few – flights that have simply disappeared with no conclusive answers as to where, how or why. 

So to my podcast series Passenger List, which is now a novel… It’s a mystery thriller about a plane, Atlantic Flight 702 that goes missing between London and New York. Six months after the disappearance, Kaitlin Le, a college student whose twin brother Conor was one of the passengers, goes on her on a quest to discover the truth. She has long lost faith in the official investigation which has concluded that a bird-strike caused the plane to crash in one of the deepest parts of the Atlantic, and against the wishes of her parents, puts her degree course on hold to obsessively pursue her own personal investigation. She makes contact with other relatives of the passengers on board and becomes increasingly convinced that there are darker forces trying to conceal the truth. It’s a very human story of grief and coming to terms with the sudden loss of a loved one, but it’s also a deep mystery, circling in on itself as the truth becomes harder and harder for Kaitlin to find.

The idea of making a fiction podcast using just “found sound” was immensely appealing. The whole story was constructed from tapped phone calls, cock-pit recordings, FBI interrogations and, of course, Kaitlin’s personal recordings – she meticulously records everything she does and every encounter in the hope of going over it again and again and finding some nugget of information that may lead her to the truth. I saw it as a story about a fruitless quest for answers where, in the end there are none. But I found myself also going down the same rabbit hole as Kaitlin, and the further I went the more real the world of the story became and I didn’t want to let go until I had all the answers. This wasn’t something just I experienced but, to my surprise, the podcast gave birth to a global community of amateur investigators picking through every clue and piece of evidence in the podcast, as if the story were real.

Working on the novel helped me complete the journey. Having only “found sound” in the audio series was compelling but it was also limiting. It meant there was could be no “interior” Kaitlin. In the novel, I could let the reader experience the very personal journey she goes on. The one thing that keeps Kaitlin going is hope; hope that, despite all the odds, her investigation might lead her to finding not just the truth about what happened to Flight 702, but finding her brother alive. 

Passenger List by John Dryden (Published by Orion) Out Now

A missing plane. A cabin full of suspects. One woman's quest for the truth. When Atlantic Airlines Flight 702 disappears mid-flight between London and New York, the world is stunned. With the public clamouring for answers, authorities seem at a loss as to how to explain the plane's disappearance. There were 256 passengers on Flight 702, with many carrying dark secrets on board with them. Could one of them hold the truth behind the plane's disappearance? College student Kaitlin Le's beloved twin brother Conor was on that plane. She refuses to believe the official statements, or to join her parents in their blind acceptance of Conor's death. But as she journeys deeper into the murky heart of what really happened on board that plane, it becomes clear she's drawing attention to herself. And there are some people who would rather the truth behind the fate of Flight 702 stayed buried...