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Published: Saturday, July 24, 2010, 10:50 AM
Updated: Saturday, July 24, 2010, 10:52 AM
Kimberly A.C. Wilson, The Oregonian

No sooner did word break Thursday that authorities were putting the squeeze on a close friend of the stepmother last known to have seen missing second-grader Kyron Horman, a parallel investigation kicked into gear far from Tualatin where DeDe Spicher lives.

In real time, members of true crime Internet forums around the country began searching for the woman's footprint in the public domain.

Forget Googling. Online sleuths unearthed Spicher's health and gardening page on blogspot.com (she's a fitness junkie!), then her Twitter account was revealed. Next came a two-year-old photo on Flicker from a fundraising race, and finally, Spicher's post on Terri Horman's Facebook page 36 hours after Kyron was last reported being seen outside his Skyline Elementary classroom: "Thinking of you and Kaine and praying for Kyron's safe return."

By dawn, the vetting was in full swing. Members of ScaredMonkeys.net and Insessiontrials.com crime forums outed Spicher's father as a member of the Klamath County Sheriff's Office, one of scores of agencies that helped search for Kyron. And threads by commenters on other sites were exploring Spicher's tax, real estate and ancient online records.

"The crime blogs are like Monday morning quarterbacking, only it's everyday, all day and all night," said Michael Vallez, a former Florida police officer turned social media strategist who blogs about the intersection of law enforcement and social media.

Click on sites where meet fans of true crime mysteries, online home to lay criminologists, forensic aficionados and opinionated snoops, and the quarterbacking is more aerobic than armchair. Feverish Web site owners and their volunteer acolytes tap in theories, plot time lines, parse media reports, truthsquad comments and study aerial maps, all in an effort to solve what has baffled the pros: What happened to little Kyron? And the hobbyists' work raises a larger question: has it helped or hindered the real police work?

That depends who you ask. And entering the eighth week since Kyron was seen alive, it may not even be a fair question.

Or even the right question

No one inside the inner circle of the local, regional and federal task force searching for the seven-year-old is answering such queries, although the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office says it is received more than 3,300 tips and welcomes insights on its dedicated tipline.

But online, it takes effort to avoid a whisper campaign playing out along the sidelines of the county's official investigation. Prayers for the boy float in an ocean of suspicion and speculation. In the crimeblog universe of truTV's True Crime Library, Websleuths, Blink on Crime and The Hinky Meter, mystery buffs spoke the conventional wisdom first about TH, as commenters have shorthanded Kyron's stepmother's name, long before sheriff's deputies or the family began raising accusatory eyebrows at Terri Horman. On Facebook, a few dozen supporters of the woman Kyron Horman called "Mom," point fingers elsewhere.

But denizens of the crime sites have their opinions -- and they're doing the virtual legwork to try to prove they're right. Meet "Kimster," a 51-year-old Eugene-area emptynester with a penchant for Ann Rule's psychological true-crime thrillers. Or "ValHall," a 46-year-old aerospace engineer and grandmother from Oklahoma who got snared by the criminal justice bug during the O.J. Simpson trial. Or Tricia Griffith, a 51-year-old former rock radio DJ-turned unsolved mystery message board owner, eking out a living for herself, her 13-year-old son and a menagerie of birds and dogs in Utah.

Griffith is a hobbyist whose Websleuths site has logged over 5 million posts since she bought it in 2004. Her crimeblog doesn't tolerate blatant namecalling and nitpicking and her critics complain that rulebreakers are often banned. But if you have a theory of who did what to whom in the Kyron Horman case, your chatter is welcome, she said. For her part, Griffith is unabashedly suspicious of Terri Horman.

"The stepmother knows more and her whole story doesn't make sense," Griffith said.

What the public is thinking

Trying to make sense of the morass is nothing new for veterans of unresolved mysteries. Look to the head-scratching surrounding the 1997 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in Colorado, or the 2008 disappearance and murder of little Caylee Marie Anthony or the 2009 disappearance of 5-year-old Haleigh Cummings, both in Florida.

The brigade of crimebloggers who continue to mine the public record in those cases shifted their energies to Skyline, just north of Portland within hours of Kyron's June 4 disappearance.

"We act as a giant spitballing session," Griffith said. "Then what we can do is write what you, the journalist, are thinking but can't write, and what the members of the public are thinking."

Sometimes the unorthodox sleuthing yields results. Last year, Abraham Shakespeare, a homeless man whose incredible $31 million lotto win in 2006 turned his life upside down, vanished along with a chunk of his lump-sum $17 million payout. When police named Shakespeare's friend Dorice Donegan Moore as the last person to have seen him, Websleuths members began to slog through public bankruptcy records and monitor online scanners. Others posted photographs of the properties on threads where property records were mulled. Volunteer sleuths determined that Moore had purchased two houses, side-by-side, placing the home that turned out to be the crime scene in her boyfriend's name.

Moore reportedly logged onto the Websleuths forum to mouth off anonymously. Griffith checked the IP address against an email Moore had sent and confirmed that it was the prime suspect. "We were talking about her. And she came on to defend herself," she said.

Her protests didn't help. In January, detectives found Shakespeare's body buried at the boyfriend's house, five feet below a concrete slab, and charged Moore with capital murder.

An investigator called to thank Griffith, Websleuths' owner, for saving him the work of having to get a subpoena to determine who really owned the house.

"Law enforcement can get anything they want with a subpoena. But we just dig and search, dig and search and our members culled the information from public files," said Griffith.

More good than harm?

Veterans of high-profile manhunts disagree whether extra eyes do more good than harm.

On the thumbs-up side is former Green River Serial Killer Task Force supervisor Frank Adamson.

Adamson spent 31-years working for the King County Sheriff's Office, the last six overseeing the task force as the department's chief of detectives. Since retiring in 1998, he has volunteered with S.T.A.L.K. Inc., an online team of ex- investigators, profilers and medical professionals that works to help police solve murder cases.

Attention -- online or not -- keeps a marathon case alive with fresh energy and interest, he said. "So from my perspective, I don't think these groups are bad," Adamson said. "I don't think it hurts to have people out there thinking about the case, calling in and sharing their tips."

Here in Oregon, the county sheriff's office responded to emailed questions on Friday, saying "the media attention has helped to keep Kyron in the public’s eyes and minds." But investigators have guarded all but a few case details.

Shy behind a pair of narrow wire-rimmed glasses, Kyron wasn't known as the kind of kid who would wander off in the damp woods outside his school.

It took a week for the missing child case to become a criminal investigation and a few more weeks for the boy's blended family to fall apart. His father, Kaine Horman, has sued for divorce from Terri, accusing her of plotting to have him killed. Kyron's mother, Desiree Young, has accused Terri of failing a pair of polygraph tests and stubbornly refusing to cooperate with authorities. First Michael Cook, a high school classmate of Kaine Horman's, and now Spicher, a close friend of Terri's, stand implicated by association.

Enter Kyron Horman's name in a search engine and nearly 10 million hits come back in seconds.

Michael Vallez, the street cop turned mobile media guru, points out that Facebook this week surpassed 500 million members worldwide, 150 million in the United States.

Watering hole for the mob

Meanwhile, the discussion is brisk at The Hinky Meter, a crime forum run by an aerospace engineer who exchanges emails with Kaine Horman when she needs extra details for her blog posts.

The moderator known as ValHall types out long lists of confirmed facts, debunked rumors and unanswered questions. She is a stickler for walking the fine line between rank speculation and reasonable certainty.

And while she doesn't mention him by name, a specter hangs over her carefully modulated discussion board -- and it isn't Kyron's.

ValHall keeps in mind the late Richard Jewell, the security guard at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics whose journey from hero to bombing suspect and back began when he was named in an Atlanta Journal article as the focus of police attention.

The Justice Department formally cleared Jewell of involvement in the bombing, and another man, Eric R. Rudolph, was eventually convicted of the explosion that killed one and injured 111 others. But Jewell went down as the man wronged by hasty judgement.

And the blogosphere is nothing if not a watering hole for hasty judges.

"I'm not out to solve a crime, I'm out to discuss it. I hate false rumors," ValHall said in a phone interview. "I'm gonna be careful about what I say, because I don't know."

For what it's worth, she says she, too, is skeptical of Terri Horman.

Then she offers a quote she can't identify: "Fear the man who claims to know the truth, follow the man who seeks it."

Google it.

-- Kimberly A.C. Wilson

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