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[man] Sometimes, what the internet does
is it makes you think
you can understand somebody
or you know what somebody's intentions were.
But, you don't.
[911 operator] Collier County, 911.
What is the address of your emergency?
[man] Um, I'm at Big Cypress National Preserve.
Uh, we just found a dead body.
[911 operator] Are you on the trail?
[man] Yeah. I'm on the trail
and then the dead body
is at the Camp Nobles site.
It's in a tent, like, I just... Like,
and it's, kind of, curled up,
like it's trying to get out.
[911 operator] And did you check on it
to see if it was breathing or anything?
[man] Yeah. I mean, I didn't touch it,
I looked at it.
We yelled, "Hello?"
He looked really skinny
and really, um...
Like, I don't know, it's like a weird color.
[911 operator] All right. Thank you.
[David H] This is Southwest Florida,
well-known for the wildness,
the swamplands.
July is a very wet, extremely hot month.
Not the time of year
you typically have people camping.
It is out in the middle of The Everglades.
We responded out to the area.
We approached the tent.
When we discovered the scene,
we observed that he did appear
to be very thin,
thin to the point that it's unnatural.
But we found that he did have food
and we found a considerable amount of cash.
So it was not like this person was indigent
or had no resources available.
[lizard croaking]
[David H] There were notebooks
that had several pages
of what appeared to be codes.
You don't know if it's the ramblings of a madman
or if it's the writings of a genius.
We quickly found that there was nothing there
with a name on it.
No wallet, no credit cards,
no photo ID.
There was no cell phone, no tablet.
We've got a guy out in a campground,
we don't really know who he is,
but, you know, you assume that it's a local person.
How difficult is this gonna be?
Two or three days, we'll have this guy ID'd,
we'll get him back home where he belongs.
And that certainly turned out not to be the case.
[man] The Puritan Cleaners team has earned
over 4,000 five-star reviews.
They are the reason we can say,
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[car engine starts]
[voice prompt] At the next light,
turn right.
[Christie] If it gets too hot or too cold,
say something.
Because there's no happy medium in here.
This job is not for the faint of heart.
I've actually been in three wrecks.
I've been bitten by a dog.
Basically, by day, I'm a mild-mannered delivery person
who leaves clothes at your door.
And at night, I'm on a laptop or on my iPhone...
[car door closes]
[Christie] ... trying to get
unidentified people identified.
In this country, there are anywhere
from 30,000 to 80,000 unidentified people,
most don't have anybody fighting for them.
They're forgotten about.
Well, they have me.
This is my first case.
I went onto Facebook and I remember seeing
that there's a group about him, and I was like,
"Oh, cool." So I hit "add,"
and I got in.
I just felt like maybe I could help.
I never thought it would get this far.
[David H] The medical examiner's office
was unable to determine
the cause of his death.
He was at approximately 83 pounds total body weight.
That is beyond extremely thin.
He was into the malnourished territory.
There was no trauma, no injuries,
no noted diseases,
no illicit drugs in his system.
The only thing that it did come back to was Tylenol.
That can stay in your system from 24 to 72 hours.
So we thought that within the last day or two
of his passing, he was still fully functioning.
There's a truck stop that was probably within
five or seven miles from where he was located.
He could have walked out to I-75
and he could have flagged somebody down
if he needed assistance that badly.
[David H] We ran fingerprints,
DNA through local, national,
and global databases.
No DNA, no fingerprints, no dental records.
At this point, it gets passed over
to our criminal researchers.
Hi.
Uh, my name is Kristin Adams.
I'm the...
Do you want me to say Criminal Research Investigator
or Investigative Specialist, which one?
I'll restart, but which one do you want me to use?
When we have an unidentified person,
we do check our missing persons reports first.
When the traditional ways of identification
were exhausted, a flyer was completed
in an effort to obtain some assistance from the community.
We put characteristics, height, weight.
He did have a faint scar on his abdomen
but no tattoos.
[David H] We tried to edit the photographs
that we had from the scene
to have something that wasn't graphic
to the point that would be disturbing.
Well, it, kind of, reminded me
of the caveman in the GEICO ad, basically,
with his mouth gaping wide open.
It's not a glamor shot.
We had to work with what we had
so that if somebody had saw him,
even with a full head of hair
looking like Grizzly Adams,
they would recognize him.
[Kristin] We released it to the local media,
and then we also released it on our social media.
[David H] We reached out to the hiking community.
They posted it on their websites.
We had a lot of people start to reach out to us.
[monitor beeps]
That's when we found someone that recognized him.
-[producer] Hi. -Hi.
[laughs]
I guess I never really paid much attention
to composites before, but, um, August 2nd,
I was at work, and I decided to take a quick break
and sat down and opened up Facebook.
And as soon as I saw the composite,
I knew who it was immediately.
I met him six months prior to him being found
deceased on the trail.
At the time, I was a trail angel.
A trail angel is just someone who provides an unexpected act
of kindness to a hiker on the trail,
whether it be water or a snack or, um,
just something unexpected.
That morning, I put together a little baggie of things,
crackers, Kool-Aid mixes.
And I found a hiker.
He was walking towards me.
It looked like an older man.
His eyes gave away that he wasn't that old.
He had younger-looking eyes, very beautiful eyes.
Oh, yeah, he was cute. [laughs]
I introduced myself to him as Kelly,
and he said, "Well, I'm Mostly Harmless."
I just recognized that it's a trail name,
didn't think twice about it
because every hiker has a trail name.
It's usually given to them by another hiker
based on something that happens on the trail
or something they did on trail.
A name comes up and it sticks.
I heard that he got his trail name
when he was walking into a campsite one evening,
and there were people sitting around the campfire,
and they invited him to join them
as long as he didn't bite.
And he told them that he was mostly harmless.
I asked him if he was using the Florida trail app
and he said, "Well, I'm not carrying a phone."
And I said, "What do you mean you're not carrying a phone?"
He's like, "I just wanted to disconnect.
You know, sometimes people wanna do that."
Uh, I thought it was kinda reckless and dangerous.
[David H] People who wanna get off the grid
typically still have a cell phone.
The fact that he had no means
whatsoever to gain assistance
was something that we thought was intentional and unusual.
I had a bunch of stickers to promote Florida Trail,
and I said, "If you don't mind,
can I take a picture of you with the sticker?"
And he's like, "Not at all," so he held it up, smiled,
and I clicked his picture.
[David H] We had, uh, a sense of hope.
"Oh. Somebody knows this guy."
[Kelly] I immediately went to the Florida Trail group,
posted my pictures,
and start tagging names in the comments.
It just... It just blew up.
The trail community is like family.
So there was shock that this was our hiker
and he was deceased.
Other trail angels were tagging people
that I hadn't tagged. It moved fast.
You know, people were throwing out ideas,
"Check here, check there,"
then it started branching out
to the Appalachian Trail groups.
The hikers, kind of, flooded in
and they gave their pictures and what they knew.
[Kelly] There was a GoPro video that someone had shot.
There had to have been 25, at least, people
that definitely crossed his path.
He was seen in Georgia,
he was seen in North Carolina.
[Brandon] I was shocked
because I thought, "Holy shit.
Like, look at this, this is Denim,
this is the guy I camped with."
He introduced himself to me as Denim,
and I never heard Mostly Harmless
until after everything came out.
[MJ] He had a good feel about him.
He was quiet, though.
[Mike] I remember thinking he's friendly,
easygoing.
It came out that he had worked in IT
and that he was really great with computers.
[Mike] His backpack, it was huge.
That was, kind of, unusual.
There was small bits
of personal information that he would reveal.
[Brandon] We connected every Doctor Who in sci-fi.
They came up that he probably was from Brooklyn.
Somebody would say Brooklyn, somebody would say The Bronx.
He said that he was from Louisiana.
I would get Sarasota and Saratoga.
Each contact, each bit of information that we had
was very repetitious.
"Yeah, I met him. Yeah, here's a picture.
Yeah." But no, I didn't get a name.
"What's his name?" And I'm like, "I don't know."
I think we figured at some point,
someone's going to say,
"Oh, sure, that's so and so."
"No, we didn't get a name. No, we didn't get a name.
No, we didn't get a name."
He never seemed to give that information.
[Kelly] I was, like, "Hopefully, somebody has something
so we can identify this guy."
"Oh, my gosh. This is so easy. What's his name?
Somebody had to get his name."
[David H] The hiking community helped us
develop a history from where he was first seen
to where he wound up.
We began to realize that he had been traveling
the Appalachian Trail
from the north area towards Florida.
This wasn't just a Florida hiker.
He traveled over thousands of miles.
[David H] This is pretty unusual.
We started researching the trail,
the AT, as they call it.
I believe over 3,000 attempt
the Appalachian Trail alone itself every year.
[Kristin] There are portions of it that are heavily traveled,
and then there are portions where it's very desolate.
You have to have a certain level of fitness,
a certain level of determination
that you wanna do this, that you're gonna reach this goal
regardless of what is standing in your way.
[David H] It's a very close-knit community.
[MJ] The trail is full of people who have made time
in their lives to be introspective.
[Kelly] People do come to the trail
as a way to escape.
A lot of hikers come from all over
and they end up in what they call bubbles,
and they end up hiking together
for short term or long term.
[Christie] He crossed paths with a lot of people.
We figured out who he was as a person
could give ideas of how he got to where he was
and where we could possibly look.
I noticed that there was a hiker
in the Facebook group, Magpie.
He kept coming in contact with her,
and I got the impression that they bonded.
-[dog barking] -[MJ] I love it, you know, I wanna make...
[dogs barking]
[MJ] I think all the times I met him
were in October of 2017.
[dogs barking]
[indistinct chatter]
[woman] Come on.
[MJ] CJ. He won't come.
Kitty, kitty.
Well, I talk a lot.
Most people hiking are in a big hurry,
especially the young men.
I am never surprised that an old lady like myself
is easily dismissed as irrelevant.
So, yes, I was, um, pleasantly surprised
that this young man would talk to me.
I was 68 when I said,
"Oh, I'm gonna do about half the Appalachian Trail."
And I had friends who, kind of, laughed
and acted like, "That's just really hard."
I wanted to see if I could still do it.
And that's when I met him.
I was just walking up the trail
and this guy was coming down and he stopped.
I noticed his pack was abnormally large and...
Which is a little bit unusual for a hiker...
A thru-hiker, especially.
He asked me why my name was Magpie, and I said,
"Oh, because it's a big noisy bird,
but I don't like shiny objects."
He said, "That sounds like
something a magpie would say."
So he immediately reached into his trash bag
and he handed me
a shiny gum wrapper.
I wish I'd saved it.
I live for the connection with people
and I don't always have it.
Oh, I just felt like I knew him,
knew him from the inside, his soul, if you will.
I felt that in my spirit,
it's like in my heart.
He was kind to me. What can I say?
I cannot say that any better. He was kind.
I did not know him as Mostly Harmless.
Uh, I knew him only as Denim.
That was his early trail name.
I said, "Was that because you were hiking in blue jeans
when you first started?"
And he readily, uh, said yes.
Later on, I met him again at this little cafe.
I saw him sitting there with a young woman.
I didn't expect to see him.
But he did, kind of, call me over.
After we had chatted for a while,
I came up with the idea of,
"Well, what's your real name, Denim?"
And he acted like he didn't wanna say.
And so I said, "Well, if we guess it,
will you tell us?"
Oh, yeah, he'd do that.
So I just went down the alphabet.
It was just for fun.
But I think he did tell me his name.
But I could not remember.
[Kelly] He started the trail wearing jeans.
That's a no-no.
You want the thinner cloths,
the wick-away moisture, that kind of thing.
For experienced hikers, they would know not to wear jeans.
They would know not to carry a very heavy backpack.
This is somebody who, for whatever reason,
decided to start hiking in the recent past.
[birds chirping]
[Christie] Doing the Appalachian Trail on the fly
is like going from walking around
the block to running the Boston Marathon.
You just don't do it.
[David H] And when you take into consideration
that he had fairly expensive gear
and that the gear seemed fairly new,
you think, "Oh, wait a minute.
There's something here that we can look into."
We released another bulletin, additional photos of him,
including one of his tent.
We were always hopeful
that one more person would contact us.
I just needed that one tip.
And then a gentleman called and said
that he recognized his tent
from this flyer on Facebook
and said that he had sold that to our decedent.
So we looked through receipts to see if anything
could give us a clue to his identity.
We determined he used cash,
but the business owner realized that he must have
stayed at the hostel next door.
And that hostel would not allow the hikers
to sign in under a trail name.
They required an actual name.
We looked through the logbook
of everyone that stayed there
and found that he had signed in
under a name.
[David H] And we thought, "Okay.
We have something to work with."
We located several Ben Bilemys.
We reached out and made contact.
Obviously, they were alive
and they were not my deceased hiker.
We came up empty-handed.
And we knew at that point that he had just chosen
to use an alias for signing in.
[David H] He was definitely
trying to stay anonymous.
A fake name and a trail name, and that's all we had.
If he's going to this extent,
putting this much effort
into leaving no footprint,
maybe there's a reason for him not wanting to be identified.
This person may have been a suspect
in a crime that occurred somewhere else.
[crows cawing]
[eerie music playing]
[MJ] Anytime somebody said he was a criminal,
I thought, "I don't think so.
I don't think so."
Just didn't fit anything I knew about him.
He let people take pictures of him.
How can this guy stay hidden?
We began to realize that any possibility
was in play for this case.
Initially, we attempted all traditional methods
of identifying our decedent.
We were grasping at anything we could at that point.
The notebook which had computer code,
it was mathematical equations,
things that frankly we looked at
and didn't understand.
We knew it was a long shot, but at that point,
we wanted to exhaust every possible resource.
All right, let's release the notebooks.
Let's see if anybody can recognize it.
[Nicholas] My name is Nicholas Thompson.
I'm the CEO of The Atlantic.
And I was formerly the Editor-in-Chief of WIRED.
I was checking my email
and I got a note in the secret tip jar I keep
for story ideas,
saying, "Hey, there's an interesting case
about a hiker who disappeared."
It was the sort of this incredible tale.
WIRED is a magazine about the big issues in tech.
For example, privacy.
Recognizing just how hard it is
to disappear in 2020
that I thought, this is really interesting.
So I said, "You know what? I can make this a story."
As I started investigating,
the authorities had released the notebooks publicly,
and no one knew what it was.
Could he be mining Bitcoin?
Could he be writing JavaScript?
And then the notes were posted online,
and it turned out, these were instructions in code
for a game called Screeps.
It's a programming game for programmers
where you basically create worlds and fortresses.
But it was not like a game where you go in
and you try to shoot the robots.
You write code,
which will both protect your fortress
and attack other people's fortresses or raid them.
And even when you're not playing the game,
your code is running.
So this hiker had built a world and a game
that was still playing even while he was gone.
There was this sense that you could reverse engineer,
that you could figure out, "Oh, this is the code,
so we must find a character who plays like that code."
And so people went into Screeps
and they tried to find the identity
of Mostly Harmless.
But they weren't able to get anywhere.
And then people in the Facebook group
contacted Screeps administrators,
but people who invented it are programmers
making a game for programmers.
Programmers tend to care a lot about privacy.
So yeah, they protected his privacy,
and it ended up being a dead end.
I have no doubt that part of the reason
it was so hard to find Mostly Harmless
was because he was very good at tech
and worked very hard to not create a digital trail,
and to erase whatever he had left.
Someone somewhere was missing him,
but they didn't know he was gone.
He had to have a family somewhere.
The longer it got, the less likely it was
he was gonna be named.
So I had to do something.
Basically, I clock out
and I'll sit down at a computer.
I come here because the internet's better.
I spend most of my life here.
I myself read pretty much physically everything
on the internet that I can find about him
and then I memorized it.
And then the person that owned the group,
she came to me and said, "You know the case very well."
I go, "Thank you. Yes."
And she goes, "Would you like to be a moderator?"
And I'm like, "Yes."
When I was younger, I wanted to join the FBI
and I wanted to be a profiler.
And then my family,
the house burned to the ground.
We lost everything we had.
My dreams had to be put on hold.
I couldn't afford to go get a college degree.
I just channeled all that energy
into the finding a name,
finding a loved one,
finding that person.
He was not getting internet famous
fast enough for my taste.
And I figured I had to start somewhere.
We went literally from Maine to Florida,
county by county,
calling and emailing every police agency,
every media outlet,
trying to get some attention.
I'm here to do a job,
and that's to get him his name back,
no matter what.
[David H] The first six months were busy,
a lot of activity, a lot of information.
By this point in the investigation,
we've had hundreds of tips.
The vast majority were... not helpful.
The frustration just started to set in.
We had exhausted
all of our traditional tools in our toolbox.
We didn't have any new doors to open.
Shit. What else can we do?
At a certain point,
you have to look outside the box.
The Collier County Sheriff's Office,
under the direction of Sheriff Kevin Rambosk,
presents Sworn Statement,
a podcast covering local cases and public safety issues,
all unfolding right here in Southwest Florida.
And then the great idea for the podcast came up.
It's not something that I'm aware
that we have done before.
[Kristine] Let's say you wanted
to disappear tomorrow.
What would you do?
Well, for starters, you'd ditch your cell phone.
Everything from your name to your location
and bank accounts are tied to it,
and you'd want to get rid of your social media accounts too.
I know that true crime is a huge genre.
Let's try to reach out to that community
to try to, kind of, put the pieces together.
[Kristine] The first three episodes of this podcast
will focus on the mystery of the deceased hiker,
known as Mostly Harmless.
If I wanted to disappear tomorrow,
it would be impossible.
I cannot scrub the internet of my likeness.
He was such a mystery,
and I think that that was something
that, kind of, piqued everyone's interest.
[Christie] The group grew
because the word was getting out.
[Kristine] We got 10,000 or 12,000 listens
that first couple months.
When we hear stories like this
of a man who died alone,
not having breathed his real name
to a single soul for the last year of his life,
we wanna know why.
[Natasha] I do not identify as a member
of the true crime community.
The outdoor world, like, is just to me, it's,
like, it's home, you know.
There is a commitment to the outdoor world,
like, we take care of each other.
We're not gonna leave each other behind.
If someone gets hurt, you get them out.
And I think that played a big factor
in how I felt about this case.
This was a member of my community.
This was an outdoor person
and I had to take care of him.
I don't know anything about sleeping cases.
I didn't think I was a person who could do that.
But I had been home with COVID
and I'm not sure what to do with myself.
And I started digging further on Google
and that's how I ended up finding the Facebook group.
So I joined the group, and it was chaos.
Christie Harris was the sole moderator for the group
and everyone was just, kind of, coming in,
doing these weird random posts.
[Christie] His case brought the crazies
out of the woodwork.
There were theories
that he could have been an international spy.
Oh, yeah. The time traveler.
Someone thought he may have been an alien.
Okay. Let's just work with what we have.
I don't wanna dissuade people from calling.
We want any and all information.
We hope for good information.
Another person thought he may have been a ghost,
like, an actual reincarnated ghost
that was walking the earth.
Whenever one woman saw a picture
of him standing in front of those billboards,
he's standing too close to it,
so she decided he couldn't see,
and he couldn't find the food in his tent.
Yeah. This is, kind of, dumb.
[Kristin] Sometimes the leads weren't actionable and...
Though they believed in them very strongly.
[Natasha] A lot of the stuff, it was just distractions
from accomplishing the task,
figuring out who the hell this guy is.
I think we really, really thought we were gonna get
the solution from something that he told a hiker.
So I read the account
by a hiker named Brandon Dowell
who met Mostly Harmless in Georgia.
[Brandon] I think there's a lot of hurt people
on the trail.
There is an interesting dichotomy of people having
the time of their lives and people also
having this time of growth and healing.
And, you know, if you're looking
for that kind of companionship,
I think you'll find it.
And I think that's what happened
with me and Denim.
[woman laughs]
Don't rush me.
[Brandon] Everybody's Russian.
I first started going to the trail
when I was 17.
I was just dealing with so much, like, anger
and I felt it would solve my problems
to, kind of, pack up and go
and just go hike and restart
and maybe not come back.
The trip where I met Denim,
I wanted to go out for a couple days.
I got to Amicalola.
I hiked out that morning
and ended up at Springer Mountain Shelter.
Maybe an hour or two after I got there,
I see this scraggly man walking up
and I'm like, "Oh, gosh.
He looks like he's been out for a long time."
I was glad to see him because, you know,
you just want someone to talk to, hang out,
have some friends around the fire with you,
because I didn't have a lot of friends in school.
And we talked about a lot of things over dinner.
It was a lot of sci-fi girls and childhood.
He told me, you know, "I just went
through a breakup not too long ago."
It seemed like it was fresh in his mind, you know,
to mention one specific breakup.
As the night continued, you know,
things did get deeper.
You know, we talked more about childhood.
The only story in particular that I remember is
his dad took him out into the yard one day
and tried to fight him.
I remember him telling me that he just walked away.
It seems like he wanted to get away from them, you know.
I understood.
When I was three,
my stepdad, Rob, came into the picture.
I don't know if I'm allowed to say his name but,
fuck that guy, so whatever.
He immediately just began this campaign of terror
in the household.
Denim, he had been there, same place.
To connect with somebody on that level
was really special.
And we had breakfast together the next morning.
I just remember he ate a lot.
He ate and ate and ate.
We packed up and we walked to the junction
of the Appalachian Trail and the Benton MacKaye Trail.
And I asked him if he was sure that,
you know, he didn't wanna keep in touch.
And he just kind of looked at me real sad
and shook his head no,
and we shook hands and that was it.
We parted ways.
You always think that somebody is going to say,
"Hey, you know, I had a friend,
I had a brother, I had a son,
and I can't find him, can't get in touch with him."
And it was about maybe a year
and no one had come forward.
[Natasha] He's broken up with his girlfriend
and he was abused by his father.
A lot of people started speculating then
because of the history of abuse
that he may not have family looking for him.
So if no one is looking for Mostly Harmless,
the hikers were the only people we knew
that actually had talked to this person.
And I became obsessed with, like, finding new hikers
and talking to new hikers.
But I was immediately told by Christie Harris
that that was not something I could do.
I had decided that the hikers
were pretty much useless.
[Natasha] Everything had to be done through Christie.
Posts had to be Christie-approved.
Searches had to be Christie-approved.
If you wanna submit something
to call your county sheriff's office,
guess who you had to tell you're gonna do that?
Sometimes, you have to be the hammer
and, frankly, not be nice to get stuff done.
She sent me a message and said,
"You should go fuck yourself.
I've already heard from people that say they don't like you."
I was trying, in my opinion, to keep order.
I can't get the job done of what I want to do
if I've got,
"Blah, blah, blah, Natasha's doing this.
Blah, blah, blah, September is doing this."
The atmosphere was hostile.
[Christie] I felt like I was a babysitter,
a referee,
and in some cases, a punching bag.
I was told I was stupid.
I was told I was an idiot.
That's the red line for me.
I hated being treated like I was nothing.
And I just said I've had enough of this.
Fuck you.
I cruised through those groups occasionally
to see if there's any new threads
or any new information or whatnot.
When it starts to get, you know,
Days of Our Lives like that, I just...
I move on.
Christie quits
and the group is a burning
dumpster fire at this point.
So I message the woman who had started the group
and said, you know, "Your group doesn't have a moderator.
You might wanna get one so that it can, like,
actually function."
And she responded back that the group
could then pick who was gonna be the next moderator.
Within two days, I was the moderator
because the group had selected me to be the moderator.
For 17 years, I was the operations manager
of a canoe and kayak company.
A lot of people often would think
I was the owner of the company
just because of the amount of leadership I would take.
But I wasn't listening to as much.
My ideas were passed over where...
And I came to found out that all women's pay
at that company was suppressed.
Men were making $5 more an hour.
So I had been feeling greatly underappreciated.
So when I first joined the group,
I felt like this was the opportunity
to try something new.
I wanted to approach this from a standpoint of, like,
this is my person I care about.
How would I want that case treated?
Let's get organized.
What's been done, what hasn't been done,
let's create an album,
not just a scattering of photos throughout the group,
that is all of our people who we still need to talk to.
That was the moment that I realized
no one has talked to Mike Gormley.
He was the last person that we know of
that saw Mostly Harmless alive.
[bell ringing]
[country music playing]
[Mike] ♪ Bow to the partner And the corners too ♪
♪ All four ladies, Chain across ♪
My name is Mike Gormley.
♪ Sides, face your partner ♪
My trail name is Water Boy.
♪ Grand square, One, two, three, turn ♪
♪ And a one, two, three ♪
Back in 2015 and 2016,
I attempted to hike the Appalachian Trail.
♪ Ladies, center The men, sashay ♪
That's where I first experienced
what trail magic was.
♪ Wheel around ♪
♪ Lines forward, up And you come on back ♪
♪ Join your... ♪
Supposedly, I was the last hiker
to see Mostly Harmless before he was found.
♪ Promenade right there, Promenade ♪
♪ Go walking around The square ♪
♪ When you get back home ♪
♪ Bow to the partner, Corner by the hall ♪
♪ That's it, that's all All right ♪
Thank everybody in your square and we'll take a break.
[all] Thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
[creatures chittering]
[Mike] Around April 13th or so is the day I ran into him.
It was like 85 degrees out that day.
I just decided that it was best
that I get off the trail.
I got to the roadway, took the chance,
and stuck out my thumb and tried to...
Tried to hitch a ride and this guy stopped
in a pickup truck.
We were driving along and, all of a sudden,
he saw someone along the roadside.
He says, "Well, there's a hiker right there.
You wanna go back and talk to him,
chat a little?" And I said, "Sure."
And here's my first picture that I took
when I met Mostly Harmless.
I noticed his cheeks are, um, quite pudgy,
you know, like he's well-fed.
When I observed that his pack was awful large, and I say,
"So what do you got in there that weighs so much?"
He goes, "Well, I got...
I got winter clothes in there."
And I'm thinking, mid-April in Florida,
you're not gonna need winter clothes anymore.
And I said, "Just give me your winter clothes.
I can send them back for you." And he declined.
He says, "Oh, I'll just keep them a little bit longer,"
which seemed a little bit strange to me.
When we were talking, he's... He wanted to know
if there was any campsites up ahead.
And this is the view at Nobles campsite.
The campsite that I mentioned to him
is where they found him,
some two and a half months later.
The last picture known of him before he was found.
When I realized that maybe he had
just only hiked five miles further
and that was the end of his hike
for two and a half months,
it made me a little curious as to,
"Oh, gee. What's going on here?"
Was it foul play or just what was it, you know?
[Natasha] People, like, started to wonder,
"How could you go from being this person
to the person in the tent who is completely skeletal?"
[David H] He had food with him.
We were unable to determine
if it was an intentional act on his part not to eat.
I would say if he was planning
on keeping his winter clothes
that he was not planning on dying.
[MJ] I didn't think he was the type that would just
commit suicide or starve himself to death.
I just thought something went wrong.
Maybe he got sick or maybe, you know, he caught some bug.
[Natasha] Maybe a snake bite. Did somebody harm him?
I didn't know.
I didn't have a theory that made sense.
[MJ] But the sheriff's office said,
"We don't suspect foul play."
My little brain went, "Are you sure?"
All this leads back to the idea of, like,
"Oh, how did he die?" We still don't know.
Most people don't just lay down in a tent
and die, you know?
He left this world utterly alone.
No one should ever be alone.
[Christie] For me, with Jane and John Does,
it's the story.
It's about the story of the person.
It's really the underdog.
I've always felt like an underdog.
Everything I have in life, I've fought,
kicked, punched, and scratched my way to.
[Kelly] Up, up.
[Christie] I live with my sister
in an extended stay hotel.
Let's get your shoes off.
There you go.
And we've been there for about nine years.
Do you need a drink?
[Kelly] No.
Do you need me to stand on my head?
[Kelly] No.
Do you say anything besides no?
-[Kelly] No. -[laughs]
When I can, I jump into the world of true crime...
[woman] Somebody takes your daughter.
[Christie] ... to escape from everything else.
[woman] You'll do anything...
to find your child.
[somber music playing]
[Christie] I couldn't deal with the fact of him sitting in a basement
waiting for someone to identify him in some way.
It didn't sit right with me.
I decided that I'm just gonna open my own group
and go for it.
A few people came with me from Natasha's group.
But with the new group, I had more power,
more control.
The group was also smaller,
which made it a lot easier to handle.
And then, we had someone in the group
filed a FOIA request to get the case file.
I got it all at once.
I got the case file and the autopsy report
and the autopsy photos.
I was horrified the first time I saw them.
It looked like a bag of bones with skin over it.
On the first flyer that
the Collier County Sheriff put out,
it included what they called a small scar on his abdomen.
But then I saw the picture with the autopsy report
and I'm going, "What in the world?"
That was the understatement of the century.
[Natasha] Small abdominal scar?
Yeah, it's not a small abdominal scar at all.
[Christie] I was utterly outraged when I realized that
his autopsy was an afterthought.
That if they miss this, what else did they miss?
The scar really led me down the road of, "Okay,
what was wrong with him?
What happened to cause that scar?"
[Natasha] People started saying like,
there had to have been a significant surgery.
And there was this belief that he had cancer.
Cancer's never mentioned in the autopsy,
so that leaves it wide open.
But you can't go calling hospitals and say like,
"Did you diagnose someone with cancer? Who was it?
You know, we're trying to identify this guy."
So people did searches for Appalachian Trail and cancer,
and found this blog.
This blog was about hiking the Appalachian Trail
because of a cancer diagnosis.
[Christie] It was, okay, I'm sick.
I'm taking control of my life
and I'm going out on my own terms.
[Natasha] The only picture on the blog
is in the back of a body,
and the blog does just randomly end.
[Natasha] People then circled back around on the fact
that Ben Bilemy was the name used in the youth hostel.
Everyone assumed this Ben Bilemy could be Ben Reynolds
using Ben Bilemy as an alias.
[Christie] I saw that blog, and I'm like, "That's him."
But there are a few rules to sleuthing.
You never, ever go real life,
because it is not your job to tell a family member
that their loved one may be deceased.
With Ben Reynolds,
other people really went real life.
-[dogs barking] -[Bill] Shh.
My name is Bill Powell, aka Ben Reynolds.
Uh, I am still alive.
In 2012, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
It's why I hit the trail.
That blog was mainly for me.
It was really my little therapy journal.
To protect my identity,
I hiked under the name, "Ben Reynolds".
Ben Reynolds I pulled out of a hat.
I think I was listening to a lot of Ben Folds Five at the time.
Got back and then all of this starts.
January of 2020, a bunch of years later,
I started getting messages, "Do you know Mostly Harmless?
Are you Mostly Harmless?
Are you dead?"
The inbox started filling up,
the social profiles started filling up.
I was getting messages, emails all week long,
weekends, asking me,
"How can you prove you're not this dead guy?"
There's no logic.
It just became insane.
My father, who's getting messages from my sister,
my friends, anyone that liked any of my posts,
things get crazier and crazier.
Right by June of 2020, it was 887 people.
-Hold it up like this. -No, no, no.
[Bill] No, you got it. No, you did it on your mom.
You... There was definitely a concern
that this could leak over to my family.
And that's when I really dove head first into it.
I'm gonna have to get real deep and proactive
and take it to these groups
and say, "Look, I'm Ben Reynolds.
This is my story. Stop it."
So I would join all the Facebook groups I could.
That was super eye-opening,
eight to ten Facebook groups,
multiple Reddit, Subreddits,
websites dedicated to this guy.
I went, wow, this is... This is insane.
That I'd have to go in and, you know, debunk it all,
admonish everyone that tried to do this,
explain that I'm alive.
This admin says,
"How do I know that you're Ben Reynolds?"
And my response is, "Oh, for fuck's sake."
Despite me telling them that I'm not dead,
they would tell me, "Well, we can't rule you out."
Things get crazier and crazier.
It was like, oh, here's a picture from the blog
and deconstructing my body language
and, you know, looking for the types of cancer
and extrapolating that to the body position
of Mostly Harmless in the tent.
People wouldn't take my word for it
because my name said Bill Powell.
And so splinter groups formed
that dove into the Ben Reynolds mythos
and they post this picture of a Ben Reynolds in Australia.
And they started going down the path
of harassing this guy.
Anything can happen with the internet and sleuths,
anything, and they're crazy.
The consequences that were playing through my mind,
someone will show up at my daughter's school.
Who knows?
Finally, I posted to Natasha's group
and said, "This is what I go through on a daily basis."
[Natasha] When I finally met Bill,
his life had been turned upside down for a long time.
I would shut that shit down so fast.
[Bill] There are people on the other end
of these investigations.
This is not a competition.
It is not a reality show.
[David H] The online sleuth groups,
they get caught up in the romance of it,
the mystery of it.
They get very gunman on the grassy knoll.
We didn't wanna open more possibilities
on why he died or how he died.
We wanted to narrow our focus
to identify who he is.
[David M] I'm, uh, David Mittelman, uh, CEO of Othram.
[Kristen] I'm Kristen Mittelman.
I'm the Chief Business Development Officer at Othram.
[David M] DNA is pretty much all we've ever done.
My wife is a biochemist by training,
a little bit different than the genetics background I have.
Othram's a company that supports law enforcement investigations.
Basically, we focus on human identification
from crime scenes.
[Kristen] Is there anything else you know about it
that's strategizing business-wise?
I thought we should take some more notorious cases.
This case was really unique and that there was a lot
of, uh, attention drawn to the case.
There was an online Facebook group
with thousands of folks that were working on it.
[Kristen] Do you know what evidence we got?
-The skeletal remains. -[man] Yeah.
-[producer] Okay. -Does it look awesome?
Can you see the little, uh, DNA thing on my hat?
-It's very important to me. -[producer] Yes, I can.
If you just wanted to look at a bunch of DNA,
uh, it looks a lot like, um, like this.
And these are basically the positions along
what's called the human reference sequence.
You can cluster them using principle component analysis and figure out--
[producer speaking]
All right, sure.
There's 3 billion positions that describe your DNA.
Traditional forensic testing right now that the police use
to identify people looks at 10 markers in someone's DNA.
The sequencing that we do here at Othram looks at tens
of thousands to hundreds of thousands of markers.
The technology that Othram is using is new,
the ideas are new.
They look for similarities between the DNA
you have stored and the person you found.
And you can say, oh,
these DNA is pretty close to people from this region
or it's pretty close to this family.
So you don't get a precise match, you get a clue.
[David M] When we got ahold of law enforcement,
we offered to develop a DNA profile
to get a few more clues about who this person might have been.
Othram is private.
My understanding, this particular DNA profile testing
would cost $5,000.
The police department doesn't have funding for this.
This is not something that cities
and municipalities have funding for.
You know, we thought it over and we figured
there's enough people that are really interested,
uh, in who this guy was and then trying to help him
get back to family.
I think it's a little unorthodox to recommend
crowdfunding a case, but, uh, but we threw it out there.
And I gave an outstanding yes.
You want us to fundraise for this? We can do that.
Like, that's something tangible we can do.
It ain't my money and it's a tool I can use
to solve a crime, it's worth it.
[Natasha] They quickly built a website
for people to be able to donate.
This all happened so fast.
Everyone within the group was really caught up
in this, like, energy.
We're really doing this.
And I believe it was eight days later,
we had $5,000 raised.
And the energy was out the roof,
like celebratory posts and people popping champagne
and all this type of thing on the group.
And so, they sent us the skeletal remains and we got started.
[Nick] I thought Othram will solve it.
Finally, there's going to be a solution.
At the same time, we were getting outside negativity,
like there were haters who were hating on the process.
No, I didn't care what they did, honestly.
Um, yeah.
And then, we had to wait for the DNA to run.
It takes Othram about six to eight weeks
to create a profile.
[Natasha] It became this intense waiting game.
That's when everyone got really, really stir crazy.
Christie's group post would be created saying like,
"Power-hungry Natasha is doing this
or Natasha and all of her minions are doing that.
She was feeding this, "You've all been led into a trap.
They took your money and they're not gonna deliver."
There was a public shaming of me
where Christie tells people publicly that I'm an idiot
and I don't know what I'm doing.
People saying like, "Oh, this cow who, like,
is trying to do this so that she can be famous,"
or, you know, that I'm in love with Mostly Harmless.
Then some horrible things were said to me
through private message.
I got a message saying that Christie Harris knew
what she was doing and I didn't know anything
and, um, that I should kill myself
so that the case could get solved.
[sighs]
And that hurt really bad.
Okay. There you go. There you go.
I've dealt with suicidal ideation throughout my life,
actually since I was a young child.
You wanna think you're doing something good for this person,
you wanna think you're doing something great.
And I tried to pull back actually
from the case a little bit, but I'm too...
I'm too hardheaded for my own good.
I wanted to see this through.
And then all of a sudden,
there's this message
of Christie Harris has solved the case.
Christie Harris has figured out who Mostly Harmless is.
[Christie] I was hoping that I would beat the science.
I have thought posting him in a lost loves forum
wasn't a bad idea.
And we happened to get a nibble from someone.
She gave me the name of Ronald Newman.
The story I was told was that Ronald Newman
had been disowned by his family because he was gay.
When I opened the email with the picture in it,
I looked at it and I stared at it.
It looked like him.
It looked like Mostly Harmless.
Christie Harris called me very convinced that it was this particular person.
Like, almost like talking in hushed tones.
She said, "I know who he is.
I know who Mostly Harmless is."
I'm like, "Okay, great.
What can you tell me?"
So this is the picture that Christie has sent to everyone
to prove that Ronald Newman is Mostly Harmless.
This is the picture...
who draws a beard on a yearbook photo
to prove someone is someone that they're not.
It certainly was... It was odd, I think, to see it.
But I said, "Okay. All right. I will...
I will look into it and I will call you back."
And Mr. Newman, he ended up calling me.
So... And talking to me, and he was very confused,
obviously, as to why I was looking for him
and wondering if he was missing.
[sighs]
Hang on.
It's that moment, oh, damn it.
I thought it was over.
I felt like a joke.
I was afraid I was gonna look like an idiot.
Misidentifications happen every day.
Law enforcement misidentifies people.
But I was trashed.
Have you had someone go,
"You're a fucking stupid idiot.
You've made yourself look stupid,"
and "Go kill yourself."
I was so done.
I had been called so many names.
I couldn't see straight.
I was done.
[Nick] You get pulled in, you get excited,
and you wanna solve it so much,
you know, you can go right through that stop sign.
People are drawn to this.
People want to read this story.
So at some point I thought, "You know what?
I'm just gonna write the story and let's just run it."
The presidential election was coming.
And I wanted a break from the politics
for at least a couple of hours.
It was wonderful to be able to work on something
where it wasn't team blue and team red.
All of these different Americans
from all of these different states,
all of these different backgrounds
were using the internet and using technology
to do something good.
And then, you know, the story goes live.
And then it went banana cakes.
And suddenly it was, you know, massively
the most red thing we'd had in a while.
[Kristen] Over a million people viewed the article
and the group blew up.
Literally thousands of people joined the group
in just a short period of days.
The assumption was if he really did work in tech,
someone who worked with him or knew him will read WIRED
and we'll figure out who he was.
After that story ran
and it became this big viral hit,
and had more than a million readers,
a million and a half readers,
then I was kind of stunned
that his identity wasn't found.
It showed that his act of disappearing
was even more deliberate,
carefully crafted, and effective than I had thought.
It's hard to disappear and create an identity
that 100 people who meet you can't figure out, right?
It's somewhat harder to create an identity
that 1,000 people hunting on Facebook
can't figure out.
But how on earth
can a million people read a story in WIRED
full of photographs about a guy who's probably
in the WIRED community
fairly closely
and not find the guy?
[Kristen] I don't know what you're capable of hiding
or not hiding on the internet,
but I can tell you that if there's DNA, um,
we can identify you.
[David M] When you have a person that's unidentified
and you know their DNA markers
and you can kind of cluster them around known populations
of people that have a similar set of markers,
that gives you a clue as to where
this unidentified person is from.
In this case,
we had run the laboratory work,
did the DNA testing and the research.
And, um, we had a update.
We have a couple really good leads.
We were able to build a really great profile.
And what I can tell you
is that there are a good number of matches
that tie us back to Louisiana.
[Natasha] Six thousand people watched the Facebook Live.
And people are over the moon excited.
We now know
that he actually does have family in South Louisiana.
The verification was what we needed
to get people to take action.
[Christie] The DNA results were released
in a Facebook Live in Natasha's group,
which I had no access to.
I had a group member who came and told me.
And then I go, I can't let this go.
I can't.
I won't let this go.
I walked back into my group and I go,
"Do you wanna pick up the case
of Mostly Harmless again?"
All I got was yes.
And I was back in it again.
Anything related to Louisiana,
we were going to flood it.
We put a lot of flyers out towards news stations
and their missing persons pages, things like that
so they can get the information out
to the people that may have known him.
[man] Why did Mostly Harmless start hiking?
I started running Facebook ads
for my WIRED story,
targeted at people in Louisiana.
[Natasha] All of a sudden, every single Facebook group
related to South Louisiana in any way, shape, or form
was bombarded.
[notification dings]
[Christie] Enough.
This has to end.
And then December 16th, 2020,
picked up my phone
and I go over to the post
in the group Missing in Louisiana.
There was a comment there that said...
It said, "Christie, I know who this is.
I know this story
and I'm going to email you right now."
And I'm like, "What?"
And there it was.
It says,
"Christie, his name is Vance Rodriguez.
My husband worked with him in Shoppers Choice."
And there you see...
a picture.
I looked at his eyes and I knew...
it was him.
[Natasha] I can see it with my own eyes,
but I still... My brain doesn't truly believe
that it's the case.
[Nick] Yeah.
Wow.
Message just came in. This is him.
Poor guy.
And I was like, "Oh, my gosh. I did it."
[sobs]
So there were two people
who basically hit on the same day.
A person he had worked with and a former roommate.
I screenshot it and sent it to law enforcement
with an email that said, "I think we got him."
[keyboard clicking]
[Kristin] Heard from multiple people
that it was him.
It was a collective effort
of thousands of people to solve this case.
[David H] Kristin located contact information
for the family of Vance Rodriguez.
And we closed the office door and we just called the family.
[phone rings]
[Kristin] There seemed to be some disbelief,
just kind of shock.
We explained the situation to them.
They responded that they in fact did have a son
by the name of Vance Rodriguez.
They didn't know he was missing.
They thought he had moved to New York,
and they had no contact with him for several years.
[Natasha] He was telling the truth.
He told people that he had originally lived
in Baton Rouge and was from Louisiana,
um, that he worked in tech.
He told a lot of things about himself.
[Nick] I thought he was maybe 30 at the most,
and it turns out he was 41.
Your hope as a journalist is that when we figured out his name,
you would find out some incredible redemptive story.
But when we found out his name,
we didn't realize
that all the things that we would learn about Vance.
I immediately went into full-on reporter mode.
I did public record search of where Vance Rodriguez
of that age range had lived and found his building.
Spoke to the landlord of the building.
He had paid six months of rent.
He had left his passport, his wallet,
and everything inside of his old apartment.
It's absolutely, uh, I'm walking away from my life.
I'm closing the door on my life,
locking it and walking away from my life.
I found a woman who appeared to have lived in the same building.
Turned out it was his girlfriend.
They had broken up.
I learned that he had been abusive in ways
that I didn't probe on.
I don't know exactly the contours of,
but he seemed like...
a bad, bad man.
It seems like there was trouble with women
for a long time.
There were at least three women who have come forward
and said that they were abused by him.
[Nick] There's another girlfriend from Louisiana,
his mother posts on Facebook
that, you know, he was so cruel
that he broke her daughter.
[Brandon] Yeah. I don't... I don't really know
what to say about these articles.
You know, it's...
a lot of information to digest.
Uh, it was a quote from his ex.
She wrote on a Facebook page,
"Apartment 950 a month,
bill's 300 a month,
standing up to the monster that beat you up
emotionally and physically for five years.
Priceless."
He seemed sincere and he seemed...
compassionate to me.
Like, he understood, you know.
But he was abusive it seems.
And that was certainly very shocking to me.
100% unacceptable.
You can't... You can't hit anybody.
Women, men, nobody gets hit.
Nobody gets hit or abused or hurt or whatever.
It doesn't happen or it shouldn't happen.
Being in a relationship similar to what was described
about Mostly Harmless,
I hated to know that he was an abusive person.
It's not my job to judge
whether he abused those women or not.
I don't know.
I was shocked and appalled
by the number of women
who just inherently did not believe
his former girlfriends.
Vance was... Vance was a bad guy.
I believe the women that say
that he did the abusive things.
Yes.
Did I project who I wanted him to be?
Yeah, probably a little
because I always see the best in people.
[Nick] We drew this image of this guy
who was kind of a lost soul.
[MJ] The group made him into some kind of a handsome hero.
[Christie] He just had this familiar face to him.
And I guess people just made it personal.
People want to project who they want someone to be.
You don't know this guy.
You only know the pictures that you have seen.
You only know the stories you've heard.
You've never met this guy.
I tried to come up with my own mental composite
of who is this man?
What I knew about him already
and what I was just finding out about his past.
I guess there was more to him,
a dark side I didn't know about.
It was a gut punch.
Like, honestly,
I stopped wanting to know a lot more about who he was.
The great mystery is why did no one find him?
And part of it is 'cause he did a really good job
of erasing his tracks.
And the sad part of it
is because no one was looking for him
'cause he was an asshole.
One of the great questions
was why this guy had been known
as Mostly Harmless out on the trail.
And once Vance's name was discovered,
we realized that his Screeps username was vaejor,
which is a combination of Vance John Rodriguez.
[Natasha] We had assumed all along
that he had gotten the trail name
Mostly Harmless in Georgia.
But here we are
on Screeps, on the Screeps Slack,
and he's saying, "I'm mostly harmless."
And this is January, 2017
shortly before he started out on his hike.
And there's a book called Mostly Harmless,
that's a part of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
[Nick] I think he chose the name.
It may have just been that he read the book.
He liked the book.
He recognized that Mostly Harmless
is a pretty great phrase.
It's because if you're mostly harmless,
you're also partly harmful.
It suggests someone who knew something about his past
and was trying to move away from it,
but was also aware of it.
[MJ] I've talked to people who are abused.
If someone in your family abuses somebody
and it's not resolved,
you end up doing some abuse yourself.
[Nick] I never spoke with his parents.
I sent several messages to his sister
after I knew that she had been notified by the police.
And she said, she just didn't wanna talk
and the family wouldn't talk.
All of his friends knew
that he had a terrible relationship
with his family.
He spoke of abuse from his father,
though they didn't know what kind of abuse.
I learned from court records,
he had been legally emancipated from his family
at age 17.
You become...
independent when you're 18,
like... So what exactly has to happen to have yourself
want to be emancipated from your parents at that age?
I never talked to anybody who knew the answer to that.
[Natasha] Talking to the one friend from college
who knew anything about the family,
his mental health was pretty much
a dominant part of his life.
He would have these moments
where he would just stop interacting with people.
He would go to his room, he'd go to other places,
um, and he would stop eating. He'd stop showering.
He would stop caring for him himself,
um, for days, weeks, and even months.
[Nick] The phrase that made the most sense was outages
where he would just shut down.
[Natasha] And then, his friend Shelly,
she told me when he was a teenager,
he had gone into a field
and shot himself in the stomach.
While he was laying there bleeding,
he changed his mind
and was able to drag himself
out of the field and go get help.
The scar was not cancer.
It was not from any disease.
The scar was from a trauma.
It was from a gunshot wound.
My understanding was that
his parents wanted to get him mental health assistance
after his suicide attempt,
and that was the reason he no longer wanted
to have a relationship with his family.
It's very possible this fist fight that we hear about
had to do with wanting to get their son assistance,
wanting to get him help.
Um, I can only assume
that his parents cared about him.
[MJ] At the beginning I thought,
"Oh, no, he wouldn't have committed suicide."
Sort of, like, that's not the image I had of him.
When I read that he had tried it when he was 16
and the... And the depression. I said, "No, he did."
I really didn't think it was suicide.
I never really did, to be honest.
In my opinion, he took to one of his outages
and it just went too far.
[Brandon] Maybe he starved himself.
It seems like a terrible way to go,
but I mean, I don't know.
I don't know why he died.
Maybe the whole trip was about, uh, penance.
You know, paying back for the stuff I had done.
I need to suffer.
If I kill myself, is it enough?
[Natasha] I think he killed himself.
I think he intentionally starved himself to death.
The book Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
starts to come back up in your mind.
[Nick] It's one in a series
called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
and the main character is traveling around the galaxy,
making an atlas for other travelers.
[Natasha] The book ends with the destruction of the world.
The main characters are kind of coming to their peace
with the imminent end of life as they know it.
[Nick] "This is not your home," said, Trilian Steel,
keeping her voice calm. "You don't have one.
None of us has one.
Hardly anybody has one anymore.
They don't even have any memory of who they are
and what they're for."
[Kelly] " A tremendous feeling of peace came over him.
He knew that it lasts for once and forever.
It was now all finally over."
[Christie] It feels a little bit like
his trail name was his suicide note
to a certain degree.
[Brandon] I feel like we could have been...
Could have been pals, you know,
and that just really stinks.
You know, someone who...
offered me so much compassion and kindness.
Hey Bennett, can you rejoin the group, please?
[Bennett speaking]
What kind of story? A true story?
It almost feels like a... Like a parallel me
that just happened to go in a different direction.
Go, go, go, go, go.
I don't think Denim got the support he needed
to really heal.
I think he felt really isolated
and felt like no one wanted him around.
So, I'm gonna play a song that is called,
"I've been Thinkin'" from my band, Bombardier.
And, uh, it's about Denim
and the time I spent with him
and also about myself
and how I relate to him.
[guitar plays]
He was a person that died too soon,
you know, and it's sad to see.
He had a lot to offer.
♪ I've been thinkin' ♪
♪ About running away again ♪
♪ About calling off My friends ♪
♪ Just to tell 'em That I'm never coming back ♪
[Nick] There is Mostly Harmless.
And then there's Vance Rodriguez, right?
Who exists until the moment
he goes into Harriman State Park.
And Mostly Harmless is a compelling character
even if Vance Rodriguez is less so.
♪ I've been thinking... ♪
[man] Today, I'm pleased to announce
that after more than two years,
we now know the identity of the deceased hiker
who went by the trail name, Mostly Harmless.
And the family made arrangements
with the medical examiner's office.
Vance was brought home.
They had a ceremony for him.
[Brandon] ♪ Walk on Monday Walk on Tuesday ♪
[MJ] I think I could see the real him.
It was the eternity that was in that moment.
I knew him then.
So I think a lot of us miss him,
missed the one that we knew.
Maybe he's looking down and laughing at all us now
or saying, "Oh, wow, I wish I had stayed alive.
These people really loved me."
I would encourage him to live on, I would probably say, "Hang in there,
um, get some help."
[MJ] Goodbye for now, Denim.
But since coincidence,
let us meet four times already.
I will look for a fifth chance encounter.
I believe that it's quite possible.
[Brandon] ♪ Walk on Monday Walk on Tuesday ♪
[Natasha] Within sleuthing, there are people
who feel unseen and feel unheard
and feel invisible in the world.
This is a way that they can be seen
through these people.
And this is a way to get closure in your life
for things that you're never gonna get closure for.
[Brandon] ♪ Walk on Sunday What was my name? ♪
[Natasha] I don't plan on sleuthing again,
like I want more real life experiences,
but sleuthing for this case showed me I'm unstoppable.
And so I'm deciding then that I was going to do this thing
that I've been dreaming of doing my whole life,
which is opening my own company
and bring the outdoors to everybody
who wants to go outside.
[Christie] I am glad I did not quit.
I am glad I saw this to the end.
I really am.
I think when I found him,
I found me...
and realized this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
And that's a very powerful thing.
This is what I'm supposed to be doing.
[laughs]
Oh, my God.
Um, now I saw that message.
I'm gonna tell you this.
I'm in front of a filming camera right now.
Uh...
What?
I gotta walk out.
[door opens]
We've got this story...
that Tabitha was decapitated.
[phone ringing]
Oh, God.
Hey, Mrs. Young. What's going on?