Making Something from Next to Nothing

How internet sleuths hinder investigations

Just more than a week ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited by the University of Arizona’s Museum of Art to speak about art theft as part of the programming surrounding the return of Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre. The painting, valued at upwards of $140 million, was stolen in 1985 and recovered in 2017 when an antiques business (owned by some truly honest people) purchased it as part of an estate. The museum has a terrific exhibition dedicated to the painting featuring the story of its purchase, donation, theft, recovery, and restoration.

With Woman-Ochre and the museum’s security chief.

During my visit, I spent considerable time talking with the museum’s dedicated and knowledgeable staff about the whole affair. One of the things I admired most about them was their hesitancy to offer any conjecture about what happened and why. They stuck to the facts as they were known, much to their credit and that of the institution.

They have good reason to be circumspect. Last year, I filed a FOIA request with the FBI for information about the investigation into the theft. They responded by informing me that the case file included approximately 70,000 pages of investigative material. When I narrowed my search down to a limited number of documents, they came so heavily redacted as to be nearly useless.

All this makes perfect sense. I know that in my own work alongside the FBI in the Gardner Museum case, we have accumulated at least that much material. And I know that safeguarding the identities of many of living individuals is paramount. We have given our word to those who have provided information that their identities won’t be shared without their permission, and we intend to keep it.

The lesson to be taken is that while some information is known to the public about major investigations, what is out there is but a speck of what the actual investigators in the cases know. The vast majority of information cannot be shared, for reasons ranging from confidentiality to safety to—and this is perhaps the most important—the integrity of the investigation.

Nevertheless, great mysteries invariably lead to great interest, and with that comes the armchair sleuths. These are the folks who read every available word on a case. They watch every newscast, every interview, every documentary, and every podcast. They populate Reddit discussion threads, make social media accounts, write blogs, and fill the comment sections of online newspaper stories with long, bizarre rants. From the little they know—maybe 5% of what investigators know—they form theories. Often, the theorists become so wedded to their theories that they become obsessive. They send their theories to the investigators’ bosses. They send them to politicians. They formulate conspiracies to explain why their theory has not resulted in an arrest. In the most troubling cases, these theorists harass the investigators and hurl wild accusations at them, building them into the conspiracy of secret criminal activities they suspect. They damn every news story or public statement as a lie, every minute public detail as a cover-up, every player involved as compromised. And, worst of all, point the finger at otherwise innocent people without any connection to the matter at hand except in the mind of the theorist.

We are witnessing this in real time with the case of the four murdered college students in Moscow, Idaho. Internet sleuths are formulating their own uninformed theories and giving them life online, naming as murders family members, neighbors, even distant associates of the deceased. All this from the comfort of their armchair, with a cup of coffee, a history of viewing Law & Order marathons, and internet access their only investigative tools. None of them have seen the crime scene. They haven’t been privy to the countless interviews police and federal agents have conducted. They hungrily await the latest news story, as if an investigation is a reality show and they are entitled to access to clues.

The media fuels the fire in their bellies. 24/7 news coverage requires that the beast be fed. If it goes a day without eating, the media asks, “Is this a cold case?” A Boston Globe opinion writer recently expressed the belief that secret investigative information should be turned over to the public if the case is interesting enough, confidences be damned. The lack of a neat and fast resolution is portrayed as incompetence.

This leads to precious resources being wasted working on dispelling rumors. In high-profile cases, political pressures force investigators to work to debunk theories that catch hold with the public, no matter how baseless they might be. Innocent people have their lives derailed by harassment, as online sleuths contact them, post assumptions, accusations, and lies about them. These attacks live forever on the internet and have potential repercussions on the victims of this libel for untold years.

This is why authorities in Idaho are wise to have warned of criminal charges for web sleuths engaged in harassment amid misinformation. In this era of true crime obsession, some at-home obsessives have become a real problem for investigators, and have become a hinderance, rather than a help, to solving crimes.