Internet Freakshow - Stories of Internet Mysteries, Trolls, Weirdos, and Freaks

You can’t really have a podcast that discusses the internet without talking a lot about Google. So this episode is all about Google’s role in real-life missing persons cases and other crimes. We’ll start with the story of William Earl Moldt.

Moldt was a 40-year-old man with a pretty average life. He was a mortgage broker. He was about 6 feet tall, and about 225 pounds. He disappeared back in 1997. He’d been out drinking at a strip club the night before, calling his girlfriend from there at about 9:30PM, telling her he was going to be leaving soon. He was confirmed as leaving the bar at 11PM.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a band originally formed in Canada in 1994. They’re an experimental rock group who has had quite a bit of success. Their most popular song is called East Hastings, and it was featured in the 2002 film, “28 Days Later”. Anyone who has seen the movie likely remembers that haunting song as the film’s protagonist wanders around a deserted city.

That’s not the only success the band has had though. Throughout the years, and despite the various drama that bands have with members leaving and hiatuses to pursue other projects, they’ve collected quite a cult following and they still produce music today. So while you may not have heard of this band, all you need to know for the purposes of this podcast are that the band is popular in many circles with rabid fans dying to hear their music.

In 1994 shortly after forming the band, they assembled at a small studio in New Brunswick to record an album. This album had a very small run. Just 33 copies of this cassette tape were created in total, and over the years all cassettes vanished. Despite the best efforts by the fans to track down the missing album, they were unsuccessful. The album was destined to be lost forever. Even the band didn't have a copy.

This is the story of Bianca Devins, a young woman who put too much trust into a man she’d met online, and a man who used a murder to elevate his social media clout. We’ll go over the role technology played in this crime and the distribution of the horrific photos taken at the crime scene, how always looking for more internet influence can sometimes lead to bad decisions, and how the internet was used to stalk and ultimately murder a young Instagram Influencer. But if we dig a little deeper into this freakshow, I think we’ll find that this story is also about how, sometimes, the good of the internet can overpower the bad.

This is a story about how the internet played a part in both the propagation and the collapse of a large, multinational network of child pornographers.

We know from shows like To Catch a Predator that, sometimes, law enforcement will pose online to bait potential or active predators into a trap. And that’s how this story starts as well. An agent chatted online with a group of people who fantasized about kidnapping, raping, killing, and eating small toddlers and infants.

n October of 2009, a user on the internet took to comment sections on various blogs and articles and started leaving comments about key lime pies from a restaurant named Kutchie’s Key West Cafe. Comments like this are one of the reasons the internet is so great. In fact, entire social networks are devoted to leaving reviews like these, like Yelp. Even Google and Apple Maps have restaurant reviews built into the respective apps. If you find a restaurant or a dish you enjoy, it makes sense to take to the internet and spread that advice.

Jennifer Ringley made history on April 3, 1996. At the time she was a junior attending Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Like so many college kids, she wanted to use technology to share her life with friends, family, and strangers alike. This was years before social media and instragram, so Jenny had to get clever if she wanted to share what was going on in her life.

Without access to smartphones and constant internet connections, Jenny instead hooked up a webcam to her computer and set up a website that would update every 3 minutes with images taken from that webcam.

In 1999, Kaycee Nicole created an account at an early social media network called CollegeClub.com. Social media networks and CollegeClub were quite new at the time, and Kaycee, an eager, smart and ambitious high school senior from Kansas, was ready and willing to help the small, but growing, site. She offered her help with administrative tasks and quickly made friends with the staff there. In fact, she quickly made friends with just about everyone, including other users on the site.

In 2006, a user on 4 chan accidentally stumbled across a live stream of a Korean woman’s apartment. The woman on the camera was sleeping so deeply that the 4-chan user believed her to be dead, but she did awake and quickly hid behind some hand-written signs, written in Korean. He posted his discovery to 4-chan and thus begins the story of Chip Chan.

This internet freakshow begins on Angelfire of all places. Back as the web was evolving, services like Angelfire and Geocities provided web space and hosting that enabled anyone to create their own websites. These days, the services have faded away to other, easier services. For most people, social media serves their needs to get their stories out to the public. If you’re interested in longer-form blogging, Wordpress sites are a good way to publish your story. But back in 2001, if you had a story to tell, you were likely opening an Angelfire or Geocities account, learning basic HTML, and publishing your story via FTP. And that is the internet world in which we find Ted the Caver. Published in December 2000 and up until May of 2001, the site is set up as a very primitive blog, updating users on the journey of a caver named Ted, along with his associate, known only as ‘B’.

In some ways Sharon Lopatka was an extremely ordinary woman. Classmates would later describe her as “as normal as you can get”. At age 30, in 1991, she married a construction worker named Victor. Sharon was interested in the internet early, and made her living with various businesses online. She created websites for selling home decor booklets, writing ad copy, and several websites devoted to psychic readings.