When Carey Mae Parker didn’t show up for her son’s sixth-birthday party in Hunt County, Texas, in 1991, her family was puzzled but not entirely surprised. Parker was young and had a turbulent life, and they assumed she’d appear eventually. But she never did. Parker’s daughter, Brandy Hathcock, was five at the time. She and her two siblings had spent time in foster care; later, they moved in with their grandfather. The household was chaotic, fractured by abuse. “I hadn’t heard the term ‘intergenerational trauma’ until pretty recently, but as soon as I heard it I knew, O.K., that’s exactly what I’ve experienced,” Brandy told me.
Brandy was initially led to believe that her mother had abandoned the family, but as she got older she began to reconsider. Maybe Parker hadn’t left her children; maybe something had happened to her. Her relatives shared their own ideas: cinematic theories involving drug deals gone wrong, Mexican cartels, crooked cops, and a vast, countywide conspiracy. The uncertainty was “like living with a ghost,” Brandy said. “I wanted to give up hope, because that kind of hope is so heavy. I didn’t want to carry it anymore, but I couldn’t put it down.” When Brandy was in her early twenties, she and her aunt, Patricia Gager, tried to fill in the gaps left by local law enforcement, which they said had done little to find Parker. (Gager had informed police in a neighboring county of Parker’s disappearance in 1991, but Hunt County had no record of it until 2010, when Brandy filed a missing person’s report. The local sheriff’s office then began investigating the case.)
A few years ago, George Hale, a public-radio reporter from Dallas, produced a podcast on Parker’s disappearance. The program zeroed in on her ex-boyfriend, who, according to local gossip, had dug a large hole on the grounds of his family’s septic business around the time she vanished. But the show ended with no conclusive answers. “I really thought I would go to my grave not knowing what had happened to her,” Brandy said.
Then, in December, 2020, Brandy’s husband showed her a video he’d seen on YouTube. It was made by a group called Adventures with Purpose, volunteer salvage divers who investigated cold cases by searching for cars in lakes and rivers, and shared their exploits with millions of YouTube followers. Brandy spent the evening binge-watching their videos, including one about Nicholas Allen, a North Carolina teen-ager who had disappeared a few months earlier, and whose submerged vehicle and body had been recovered by A.W.P. divers. The video showed Allen’s mother, Judy Riley, standing on the shore of a muddy river, sobbing. “I’ve known he was here. I’ve known and I’ve begged and I’ve asked, and today you guys got me my answers,” she said in the video. This was the third case that A.W.P. had helped solve since the group was founded, two years earlier, by Jared Leisek, an Oregon entrepreneur. Brandy had often wondered whether the reason that her mother and her car had never turned up was that they were under water. That evening, she sent A.W.P. a Facebook message: “I’m hoping to find out how you determine which missing persons cases you work? My mother and her car have been missing without a trace since 1991.”
Two months later, a handful of men from A.W.P. showed up in Hunt County. Leisek, a restless man in his mid-forties, stepped into a small inflatable boat and cruised alongside the causeway that spans Lake Tawakoni, which was on the route to Parker’s father’s home. He scanned the lakebed with sonar for hours with another diver, Sam Ginn. Eventually, they spotted an upside-down car. Ginn squeezed into a drysuit and ducked under the surface. When he popped up, he seemed frustrated. “I can’t see nothing,” he said. “I’m ridiculously cold.” But he’d managed to pry off a piece of the car’s body. It was pale blue, the color of the Buick that Parker had been driving when she disappeared. Then Leisek went into the water, returning with a bumper. When Gager saw it, she began to weep. Leisek also retrieved a section of a door panel. It had a Smurf decal stuck on it; as a child, Brandy’s brother, Brian, loved the Smurfs. In the resulting video, Ginn tells him, “This is more than likely put there by you when you were a kid.” Parker’s family stood at the water’s edge, accommodating their new reality. It seemed that Parker hadn’t run off or been murdered, but that she had got into an accident and her car had sunk in the lake, trapping her.
Leisek kept diving, attaching chains to the vehicle. It was dark by the time a tow truck hauled part of the dripping car onto shore. It was Parker’s Buick, but her remains weren’t inside. Leisek, his hair still damp, shook his head, visibly disappointed. “Unfortunately, today,” he told the camera, “we have the answers as to where Carey is at—we just don’t yet have Carey home.” In the video, which now has more than three million views, he adds, “Thank you for being with us, and, if you’ve not done so, please do subscribe.”
The Internet has added a new dimension to the persistent fascination with crime stories: it has made the genre participatory. Tricia Griffith, the owner of Websleuths, a true-crime discussion forum founded in 1999, encountered the online sleuthing community in the late nineteen-nineties, when she was “incredibly bored” following the birth of her son. The JonBenét Ramsey case was all over the news. “I read something in the paper about a six-year-old beauty queen found dead in her basement, and I thought, Well, that’s a misprint. There’s no such thing as a six-year-old beauty queen. So I got on the Internet to check it out. And then I was hooked,” Griffith said. On Web forums and discussion boards, strangers pooled their expertise to analyze Ramsey’s death in far greater depth than the nightly news had. The participants might include a nurse who could offer opinions about Ramsey’s injuries, someone who purported to have insider information about her family, and a paralegal who knew how to parse court filings.
These days, the patchwork group of Facebook detectives, crime commentators, self-trained DNA analysts, and curious onlookers has come to be known as the true-crime community. It has helped solve cases and brought attention to wrongful convictions. (After a formerly homeless man who won the lottery was murdered, posters on Websleuths helped find his killer.) But it has also been an engine of misinformation, vitriol, and harassment. (Redditors identified a missing student as a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, and his family was hounded relentlessly; it turned out that he had died by suicide.)
When Griffith purchased Websleuths, in 2004, it was “a snakepit,” she said. Forum members, angry when others didn’t agree with their pet theories, often turned their detective skills on one another: “People would be, like, ‘I know where you live,’ ‘Screw you, I know where you live.’ ” Griffith instituted content policies—no name-calling; no unfounded rumors—and the tenor of discussions improved. But, elsewhere on the Internet, the moderation was often less strict. Griffith was particularly concerned by what she saw on YouTube, where users could build a brand by discussing dramatic subjects with variable adherence to the truth. When the Covid lockdowns left people stuck at home, hungry for drama, the true-crime community grew in size and intensity. “There were always rumors and crazy stuff going around. But nothing like today,” Griffith told me. “People are just accusing people of murder in these videos, and it spreads like wildfire. Because you can make money. It’s maddening.”
When Jared Leisek founded Adventures with Purpose, in 2018, he didn’t intend to solve cold cases. At the time, Leisek was a Web marketer with two bankruptcies on his record, looking for his next opportunity. For fun, he pursued high-adrenaline hobbies like powered paragliding; for edification, he enjoyed self-help-inflected business books and seminars (“Rich Dad Poor Dad”; anything by Tony Robbins). His first experience of the viral potential of crime stories came when he was hired to help produce videos for a YouTuber known as Patty Mayo, who played a bounty hunter capturing fugitives in a staged, partially scripted series. Mayo’s videos, which are designed to look like reality TV, have been viewed more than a billion times.
Leisek came up with the phrase “Adventures with Purpose” by using a business-name generator. He thought the name sounded catchy, like something people would want to be a part of. But he wasn’t sure what the adventures, or the purpose, would be. Leisek first attempted to build his YouTube channel around powered paragliding, but it was difficult to capture good sound while the glider’s motor was running. Then he came across a channel devoted to underwater treasure hunting. Since he was already scuba-certified, he decided to give it a go. He assumed that the videos were staged and planned to do the same. “I went to a yard sale, got a bunch of antiques, and I’m getting ready to put them in the water,” he told me. “But, before I do, let me just get in and do a river float and see what I can find. And it was just, like, there’s all my content right there.”
Leisek enlisted his wife and one of his daughters to film him as he submerged himself in the lakes and rivers of central Oregon and came up with phones, watches, and sunglasses. Although he did his best to make these activities sound like exciting escapades—“Found 2 iPhones and a BABY OCTOPUS while Diving for Lost Valuables!”—his views lagged behind other diving channels. “I’m doing the exact same things they are, with better filming, in my opinion,” he said. “But I’m not gaining the traction. They’ll put up a video and get a million views for it, and I’m getting, like, three thousand.”
Then, in 2019, he found two stolen guns in a lake. “The YouTubers really liked that part of it, seeing the possibility of crime evidence thrown into rivers and lakes,” one of Leisek’s former diving partners told me. The resulting video became the first by A.W.P. to get more than a million views. In another popular video, from later that year, Leisek used inflatable bags to lift a sunken vehicle from the bottom of the Willamette River and float it down to a boat ramp, where a tow truck pulled it out of the water. It was a bold stunt, and one that appealed to YouTube viewers who appreciated old cars and D.I.Y. logistics. (At the time, Leisek told me, only about nine per cent of his channel’s viewers were women.) Leisek began working regularly with a group of men, including Ginn, a rescue-boat captain in Seattle, and Doug Bishop, a tow-truck driver in Portland. They helped him locate cars under water, pull them onshore, and power-wash them to remove the river gunk.