May 23, 2001

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Earlier this evening Sandy posted an entry laying out her feelings on the Kaycee Nicole hoax. In it, she mentions that she and I had talked about this situation months ago. Sandy wrote me in February, after I wrote this piece about being skeptical. She had figured it out on her own, and wrote to ask me if the Kaycee saga were perhaps what I meant, too. Upon reading her note, I wrote back, telling her that this was indeed what I had been writing about, and why. We both cared about a lot of people who were believers, though, and were loathe to start casting our doubts in their path, until we had a lot more to go on. And during this weekend, when so many of us were working on digging through the slime, Sandy sent lots of supportive e-mail, which was deeply appreciated.

Something I want to make absolutely clear here is that I do not think "everyone" should have picked up on the things I did on the Kaycee and Debbie sites that made me think someone was playing fast and loose with the truth. The main reason I came to my conclusion is that I read the archives in one sitting. With enough time lag, any of us are likely to lose the thread of something. So something that is said in February that's inconsistent with a September comment on the same thing would not necessarily sound wrong unless you were going through the archives.

Whoever actually wrote these sites (and I'm not sure exactly what I believe about the authorship, except I'm positive I didn't write them) did a fairly decent job. But even before I was deeply suspicious, there were things that did not ring true for me---among them, the complaints about the social worker who was supposedly coming in and discussing death with a Kaycee who didn't care to discuss it. And it bothered me that many of the men described in the story were either emotionally distant or flat-out abusive.

It has been asked why we didn't bring this to light before the "death" of Kaycee. Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I wasn't quite sure how to go about it. I know a whole lot about online research, but most of what I do online is search for material people intend to have found. I don't spend much time trying to prove or disprove the veracity of things. And I certainly didn't begin to have the sort of money it would take to hire someone to investigate.

It is, in lots of ways, a fluke that Saundra and I got started looking into this last week. I had written to Saundra about something else entirely, and happened to ask if she had been following the Kaycee story. She replied that she hadn't, but had seen it mentioned. She asked what I knew.

I wrote back, outlining my suspicions. I was willing to do that since she seemed to have no deep feelings about Kaycee. Truth be told, had she written anything sympathetic, I would not have told her what I thought, but would have made a polite response along the lines of "I heard she had died." While I was writing, Saundra remembered where she had seen a recent mention of Kaycee, and followed that link. She read some of the material on the sites while I was writing to her. As soon as she got my e-mail, she caught up with me on instant messenger, and the hunt was on.

I am grateful that her skills and talents and mine could work together on this. I am grateful that her Friday entry was so widely read and that discussion started. I am grateful that the discussion proved fruitful and the truth came out. And I am grateful that other people continue to spread the word.

I have read e-mail from people who were duped but who say they are doing their best not to let their faith in humanity be destroyed by this. And I have written back to say I hoped they would not let it be---because there are far more good, honest people in the world than we realize, until something like this comes up and people the world over pull together to get to the truth.