Kaycee, Dave, and Bob

May 30, 2001

No need to talk much about the Kaycee Nicole deal since others have already covered it enough. But Kaycee is far from the first identity hoax on the Net. The Anandtech hoax comes to mind first. But there are a couple that I was directly involved in back in the earlier days of online computing, when it was only weirdos that had modems.

Dave P....

I started BBSing when I was in 7th grade, about 1989. A year or so after I had established myself as a regular on a couple of local systems, a friend of mine told me that he met a guy in the computer section of K-Mart (which should have been a tip-off of things to come, I think). When I was over my friend's house one night, he was talking on the phone to K-Mart guy, who also ran a local BBS. He was a very animated personality and was excited that there were a couple of kids with our enthusiasm. I became a regular user on his bulletin board and generally enjoyed it, but noticed some occasional strange things, like different members with extremely similar posting styles (WORDS IN alternating ALL CAPS and lower-case). But I was only 14 and ignorant, so I shrugged it off.

A few months later, this guy decided to have a picnic for the various users of his BBS to meet face-to-face. My parents let me go to this picnic and I was kind of psyched to meet some of the people I had only talked to online. Most of them turned out to be my age, except for Dave P., the enthusastic man who ran the BBS. I don't remember much about that day, but I do remember him taking a couple of us for a ride in his car. What made this memorable was that Dave weighed in at a solid 450-475 pounds (I was barely 100 pounds) and drove a car that was clearly designed for a much smaller man. He also sweat profusely and had an odd habit of drinking ice water not out of a water bottle, but out of one of those plastic cereal containers.

Anyway. The day was pretty uneventful and things went on as usual. A few weeks later, I was talking on the phone with a guy I knew from online named Scott. Now, Scott was a bona fide oddball in his own right... he was, shall we say, unbalanced. One particular story I remember was when he took his sister's teddy bear, put a knife through it, and stuck it in the freezer. Why? To piss his sister off. These are the type of people that were online a decade ago.

So Scott proceeds to tell me that Dave P. (the last name is being withheld because the last thing I need to be brought up on libel) was actually an assumed name. Apparently, Scott had run across a newspaper article with Dave's picture, and he related to me that Dave was a convicted child molester. Scott told me of several confrontations with Dave once he had this information and reported Dave seriously losing his temper. Scott also confirmed my suspicions that Dave had dozens of different accounts on his own system and posted under their guise in an attempt to make the board look more popular.

I backed off of Dave and his BBS. To say that I was creeped out would be an understatement. Dave contacted me once or twice to find out why I wasn't calling his BBS anymore and I just blew him off and made it seem like I wasn't really involved with computers at that point.

A month or two later I get this super-pissed off call and it's Dave. "Let me talk to your parents." I was a tad confused. "Why?" "Because someone just tried to hack into my system and the phone number he put in was yours. Let me talk to your parents." Of course, Dave didn't think first that perhaps someone was trying to set me up. I told Dave to back off, that I wasn't calling his board and I had no reason to hack it. I also told him I had no idea who did it (though I was 95% sure it was Scott, who I had also stopped talking to).

That was pretty much the last I ever heard from that freak.

Bob Williams...

In 1990/91 I joined up with GEnie, a national online service that was like a miniture Internet. It had shopping, it had communities, it had downloads. Just that most everything moved at 2400 baud. I had a lot of good experiences on GEnie and am still friends with many of the people I met there (including Paul, Terry, Elly, and Mandy), but one person really sticks out in my memory. And I think that most of the previously listed people would remember him as well: Bob Williams.

Bob and I met on the Education RoundTable's teen section (I was 15 at the time). Bob was a 16-year-old guy from California and though we didn't have a lot in common, we talked a fair amount on e-mail and in chat rooms. Over a nine month period, he and I got pretty close. That is, until he came clean and told everyone on the ERT that he wasn't actually 16, but in his 50s.

This really bugged me out in a number of ways, leading me to distrust a lot of people, especially those I met online. Perhaps it was a good thing in that it made me more wary of getting to know people online, but also perhaps not in that it made me more cynical.

Bob and I talked a couple times after he came clean, but at 16, I wasn't really up to being friends with a 50-year-old guy who had deceived me. Truth is, to this day, I feel sorry for Bob. I don't think he was sick in such a way that he would be malicious... I just think he had a lot of mental and emotional issues to deal with connected to a mid-life crisis and his 90-year-old mother's failing health. Since I haven't gotten to that age yet, I can't pass judgement, but I would imagine that if you haven't lived a life you're proud of up to that point, life might start to become a scary thing. Our mortality is the hardest thing we have to deal with and I think Bob's case is one that shows how far out there someone can be driven by emotional problems.

I last heard from Bob five years ago when I got a postcard from him after several years of being out-of-touch.

Because of these two significant identity hoaxes that I was a part of, I was pretty surprised that I was fooled by the Kaycee Nicole debacle. While there were one or two times the thought crossed my mind (breezed right past it, really), I never seriously doubted that there was a girl named Kaycee who was dying of cancer. And there were a hell of a lot of others that didn't doubt it either (Zeldman, Ev, Haughey, etc. etc. etc.). It truly is amazing how long people can live these alternate identities... so long that they actually become these new personalities.

But don't worry. I am who I say I am. Just ask the guy who runs the UA Journal or HalfPintMusic.com, they can corroborate my story.