Read The Skeleton Crew for Free Online

were unknown to the kindred souls they encountered online.
    On Websleuths Crime Sleuthing Community, users commented on celebrity fiascos such as Lindsay Lohan’s latest woes, reports of serial pedophiles, Oscar Pistorius’s arrest in the shooting death of Reeva Steenkamp. Among the many topics being tossed around at any given moment was the unidentified. The last time I checked, Websleuths contained almost 85,000 separate posts in more than 3,500 topic threads dedicated to the unidentified. Far fewer, admittedly, than the one-­million-plus posts about Caylee Anthony, but at least some of those who spent their time in the realm of the unidentified were actively trying to match faces with names rather than simply rubbernecking at human train wrecks. When new users described how they found their way to the forum, their words made them seem benevolent, socially conscious—and a tad fanatical.
    I’ve been fascinated with true crime stories for years . . . If I ever find a match [for] just one [unidentified corpse], I’ll know I made a difference in the world.
    â€”FLMom
    i have been surfing cold cases on the internet for a few years now . . . it started when i read about a jane doe in upstate new york. I couldn’t believe that one so young was still not identified after all that time—on one site i saw the photos from the morgue and they just burned in my brain—i keep checking sites for young girls missing from the 1970s to see if i can find a match—nothing yet. but her case haunts me.
    â€”Jeanne
    Then there’s Paul, who works for a medical examiner and wants to provide identities to the “many unfortunate subjects who have as yet no name.” Scott, another budding addict, wrote a paper for a college English class about Princess Doe, an unidentified young girl found in 1982 at Cedar Ridge Cemetery in Blairstown, New Jersey, and kept coming back to the websites. I’d always thought of the dead, as, well, dead, yet I had come across a community that embraced deceased strangers like long-lost loved ones who happened to be more likely to get in touch via Ouija board than cell phone.
    By solving Tent Girl, Todd Matthews had unwittingly tapped into a like-minded posse who began to call, text, or e-mail one another almost daily, across time zones and often late at night when their families were asleep. They compared notes on cases, dug through archives, posted on true-crime forums and online bulletin boards. Websleuths.com, Can You Identify Me?, the Charley Project, JusticeQuest, and Porchlight International for the Missing and Unidentified joined the earlier sites such as the Doe Network and the Missing Persons Cold Case Network. They forged a growing commonality while keeping a low profile among the uninitiated, because it’s hard to work human remains into cocktail conversation.
    Over the years, as the posse grew, outside his trusted inner circle Todd found himself negotiating a minefield of politics, not always successfully. Unleashing the web sleuths, Todd had created a monster: an army of gung-ho volunteers demanding sensitive information from police and clamoring to pass along their proposed solutions. Police investigators dismissed the early amateur sleuths as busybodies, hung up on them, refused their calls, ignored their messages, and generally disparaged the people they called the Doe Nuts.
    At first, it seemed to me that the cause attracted a stalwart band of do-gooders, impervious to the gruesome nature of the work like macabre Robin Hoods. I was unaware back then that this subculture was no more immune from backstabbing and vindictiveness than Wall Street. In the web sleuth world, achievement could be measured by posting the most information, say, or by attracting hundreds of members, but everyone agreed that matching a missing person with unidentified remains was the Holy Grail. In pursuit of the grail, web sleuths of vastly different