How wave of real-crime fanatics are causing chaos

Blame it on Adnan Syed.

He was the star, so to speak of the wildly popular “Serial” podcast, which launched in 2014 and centered on the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee in Baltimore and Syed’s arrest and conviction for her death. In 2022, due in part to the renewed focus brought to the case by “Serial,” Syed’s conviction was overturned.

A heady new genre—the true-crime podcast—was born, and with it the rise of citizen sleuths.

Lacking only trench coats and fedoras, they fire up their own podcasts, launch massive Facebook true-crime groups or go it alone like post-modern Miss Marples and Sam Spades in their quest to track down killers or crack open cold cases.

Even after Bryan Kohberger, 28, was arrested and charged in December for the November slayings of four University of Idaho students, the more than 220,000 members of one Facebook group about Kohberger were still posting rumors and conspiracy theories about the case as were some members of a 123,000-member strong Reddit group.

Kohberger himself was even suspected of posing as a citizen sleuth prior to his arrest and using an alias to join social media discussions on the case.

Some citizen detectives even find themselves the stars of some of the dozens and dozens of true-crime documentaries that have sprung up in the last few years.

In 2019, Netflix released a three-part series “Don’t F–k With Cats,” which chronicled the story of amateur sleuths who spent time hunting a cannibal killer named Luka Magnotta, a Canadian man who was captured in 2012 in Berlin after a worldwide manhunt. 

Amateur sleuthing has reached such critical mass that there are even parody shows like Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” which began in 2021 and Peacock’s new true crime satire “Based On a True Story” starring Kaley Cuoco, which launched earlier this month.

Armed with online tools such as data-scraping site BeenVerified or PimEyes, a facial recognition site, Google Earth and even Ancestry.com, obsessive citizen sleuths often dedicate hours to doing detective work.

Sometimes their work put them ahead of the cops — but just as often it muddies the waters and can even put innocent people in danger, a number of people familiar with the online sleuth world told The Post.

In December, Rebecca Scofield, a history professor at the University of Idaho sued a TikTok tarot-reader-cum-cyber-sleuth, Ashley Guillard, for defamation after the would-be detective accused her of involvement in the college slayings. The case is ongoing; Guillard has doubled down on her claims in her TikToks.

Another tactic: seeking official documents.

“Sometimes these amateur sleuths who make a lot of FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests can be helpful and shed some light,” said Joe McCullough, a SC lawyer who knew Alex Murdaugh and represents Connor Cook, one of the young men in the infamous fatal 2019 boat crash involving Murdaugh’s son, Paul.

“But most of the time they come as advocates for one side over the other without announcing their subjectivity. Many of these people gravitate to high-profile cases to either monetize the tragedy or advocate for one side. Often they do both. It can become very narcissistic.”

Unlike law enforcement officers or legacy journalists, whom citizen sleuths often scorn, the amateurs don’t have to contend with bosses overseeing them or editors and lawyers vetting their work prior to publishing or broadcasting it.

They can just pick up their microphones or pen and let fly over the Internet — often in a livestream.

But when it goes wrong for an amateur detective or “citizen journalist” in real life, it goes very wrong.

Just ask Emily Nestor, the 31-year-old star of “Citizen Sleuth,” a new documentary from director Chris Kasick which examines the ethics of the true crime genre and how the power of narrative can impact the truth and communities. The film was shown at South by Southwest in March.

The film follows Nestor and her Mile Marker 181 podcast as she conducts an amateur investigation into the 2011 death of 20-year-old Jaleayah Davis of Marietta, Ohio.

Davis was found dead a handful of miles from home on an interstate near Parkersburg, WV. Her body was beside her crashed car, and she had been decapitated.

Authorities concluded she had been ejected from the car when it crashed — but her mother, other relatives and members of the close-knit Appalachian community thought there had been foul play.

Enter Nestor, from Parkersburg, who had no prior experience as a detective or podcaster — but who was struck by some of the mysteries surrounding the case.

Nestor’s Mile Marker 181 podcast, which launched in the summer of 2018, became so popular and gripping that it attracted the attention of filmmaker Kasick — who came to West Virginia to see Nestor in action, and to unwittingly watch as the case unraveled.

Nestor admits now that her closeness with Davis’ mother colored her own perceptions of the case — but then she realized the direction her chart-topping podcast had taken was incorrect and that in this case, law enforcement had had it right all along. Davis’ death had been an accident.

Nestor was forced to do an abrupt about-face on her podcast in 2019 and apologize for leading her audience astray — and it didn’t go over well.

“I had Nancy Drew hopes and the best of intentions but in the end it was such an embarrassing lesson learned the extreme hard way,” Nestor told The Post. “I was totally canceled and the community really turned on me. They thought I was turning on a murder victim’s mom.

“I’ve seen other podcasters push false narratives but they don’t realize how dangerous they are and what could happen in the end. There’s the rare citizen investigator who really uncovers something of value or breaks a case but they’re the exception to the rule.”

Nestor left for New Orleans where she works as a dancer because of hostility in her hometown — and now misses it deeply.

She’s turned her back on true crime: Nestor’s Instagram account now describes her as a “true crime pariah.”

Nestor regrets that the three people who were with Davis not long before she was killed became the object of public suspicion because of her podcast and the attention it received.

“These podcasts are borne out of trauma and tragedy,” she added. “But we’re adding more trauma to the mix without looking at the ethics of any of this. Like, Crime with Cocktails! Coffee with Murder! It’s OK to have morbid curiosity about this stuff but innocent people can get caught in the mix and made to look like criminals.”

Said Kasick, who filmed the debacle in real time: “It was a perfect storm for the ethics of citizen journalism. Emily had no credentials but the family handed the entire police file over to her. She had no sense of journalistic ethics and the story eventually caved in on her.”

At the same time, Kasick added, Nestor “filled a vacuum because of the loss of local journalism and the sense of community it engenders.”

Kelly Niklason, 44, who now lives in Fort Lauderdale, found she had a knack for background research when she moved to Fla. from SC and tried dating apps. More than one potential suitor, she learned, was either married or had a criminal record.

“I started doing background checks just for my own safety and found out I was good at it,” Niklason told The Post. “I did it for girlfriends and then I found myself expanding into true crime.”

In Sept. 2021, Niklason started the “Original Murdaugh in the Low Country” Facebook group – three months after the sensational murders of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh in Colleton County, SC, in June 2021.

Maggie’s husband, Alex Murdaugh, was eventually tried for the double homicide of his wife and son and found guilty last March. He is currently serving two life sentences in prison.

Niklason said she’s proud of information uncovered by her and another podcaster involving the death of Stephen Smith, a young gay man found dead in the road near the Murdaugh home in 2015.

Niklason added that all the “middle school drama” caused by competing sleuths in social media groups may have confused the public but believes that members of her Facebook group were effective in unraveling aspects of the tangled Murdaugh case.

But Smith’s case is still very much unsolved: his body was exhumed and a second autopsy conducted in April, and a homicide investigation remains open.

She now focuses primarily on her true-crime YouTube channel, “The Icon Next Door,” and her TikTok account.

Callie Lyons, a journalist, author of “Stain Resistant, Nonstick, Waterproof and Lethal: The Hidden Dangers of C8,” and a respected true crime researcher, knows Nestor, the ex-true crime sleuth, and worked for a while for the “Murdaugh Murders” podcast.

“Citizen sleuths do have the power to bring a subject to the public’s attention,” Lyons told The Post. “They can add real value. But they often don’t know what they’re getting into and the harm they may be doing is not always apparent. If you get too close to the victim’s family it can be a problem.”

A successful podcast can cloud the truth in some cases, Lyons said.

“Every podcaster wants their show to be the next ‘Serial,’” Lyons said. “Inmates want to be showcased like the inmate was on ‘Serial’ too.

“Emily’s podcast shot right up to the top of the charts in no time at all. But then where do you go after that, especially when the facts turn out to be not what you thought. It’s a very tricky business.”