Free The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber Page B

victim’s dental records matched Todd Smith’s.
    For days, Carol and Todd’s family walked around asking one another: “Flippers and a flashlight? What was he doing?”
    Looking for a document among Todd’s things soon afterward, Carol found snapshots of her ex perched on a motorcycle in a parking lot surrounded by palm trees. Then she remembered that after they separated, Todd had gone to Aruba on one of his jaunts. In the next photo, date-marked July 1988, less than a year before he went missing, he was pictured underwater in full snorkeling gear.
    When Todd left his car behind, Carol guessed he was embarking on one of his solo trips, this time to Daytona Beach, where he’d decided to snorkel, apparently alone and—given the fact that he had a flashlight—at night. The Atlantic was not the serene Caribbean, and Todd, an inexperienced ocean swimmer, was likely no match for the unforgiving waves and riptides.
    After Todd’s remains were positively identified, his sister and daughter flew to Florida to retrieve them. In New Jersey, they collected the suitcase containing his cremated remains from the baggage carousel. His sister put the suitcase down, fell to her knees, and said, “Todd, you’re home.”
    When, as a little girl, Ashley had asked about her father, Carol told her that her father loved her and wished he could be with her. She was relieved when Ashley, who grew up tall, athletic, and blond like Todd, seemed to accept her vague reassurances. When she learned Todd’s fate, Carol was relieved that he hadn’t abandoned his child or his family after all, and that nobody had hurt him. But as Carol and I sat in her living room among papers and photos that pieced together strange truths about lives that would never have intersected if it weren’t for MPCCN and the Doe Network, Carol told me a story that indicated that she hadn’t really been aware of what was going through Ashley’s head.
    Ashley once heard Carol remark about a friend, “It’s like she fell off theface of the earth.” Eight-year-old Ashley pictured the ground opening up in a yawning abyss. That, she thought with satisfaction, finally explained what had happened to her dad: Todd was walking along, minding his own business, when he took one false step and whoosh , he was gone.
----
    In the decade after the first newsgroups appeared, Yahoo! groups such as Troy More’s ColdCases logged tens of thousands of posts and signed on thousands of members seeking to play armchair detective with the burgeoning amount of information becoming available online. The web forum became their sitting room; its members played Watson to incarnations of Holmes. The new breed of sleuths spent hours a week, sometimes hours a day, surfing sites, typing “unidentified remains” and “missing persons” into search engines. Some forums were logging thousands of hits while Google and Wikipedia were in their infancy and YouTube didn’t even exist.
    In the 1940s, psychologist Harry F. Harlow discovered that monkeys would solve simple mechanical puzzles even if offered no rewards at all. They seemed to do it for the sheer fun of it, and Harlow speculated that human motivation also operated by what he called intrinsic drive. The clues people found on the fledgling Internet provided them with opportunities to use their powers of deduction in a public forum. Like Holmes, armchair detectives appreciate an admiring audience. Real-life mysteries are rarely clear-cut or resolved as neatly as fictional ones. But, like the monkeys’ puzzles, they fascinate, maybe because of their ambiguity and complexity. Some amateur sleuths say working on a challenging case is like exercising a strong muscle. A twenty-three-year-old musician, posting on a blog, noted that he once thought he did puzzles because of the euphoria he experienced when he solved them, but then realized the process was just as