Afterthoughts…
Hello readers. First, let me introduce myself, and correct a minor misunderstanding that exists in the #vanish community. I am not Robert Basil, and until Jeff Reifman identified me as him, I’d never heard of Robert. I’m also not Evan, even though a lot of people, especially early on, seemed to think so. I’m better known to the #vanish community and all Evan trackers as @mescad. I really do live in Kentucky, as @mescad claims, and not Houston, as @TrackEvan claims. I’ll explain Houston in a bit. There is no “team” and most of the “tipsters” I credit in my articles are actually just me, funneling information through the website. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
My search for Evan began when I heard about the contest on the 100th episode of the ARG netcasts. I’m a casual ARG (Alternate Reality Game) player, and a longtime fan of Wired, so I thought maybe I’d check out the site. I was instantly hooked. I’m often complimented on my “google fu” so this seemed like a good test of my abilities. That, and $5,000 would do a lot of good in my family right now, so I had to try.
I found a lot of information in those early days. I mean I found tons. I got a little worried, for everyone, when I saw how easy it was to piece Evan’s life together in only a few hours. At one point I joked that I don’t know where Evan is right now, but name a date ten years ago, and I’ll tell you where he was then. Had I been willing to spend six dollars on a public records search, I think I could have found a lot more. I uncovered a lot of info about his family members (including nicknames, secondary email accounts, etc) and took a lot of care to not accidentally let any of that information out. Not only did I want to follow the “no contacting family” rule, I appreciated why he had established that rule in the first place.
Eventually, new information started becoming more difficult to find (had we found everything there is to know about Evan Ratliff?) and the hunt seemed to be slowing down. I had a good idea where Evan had been for the first week (see my theories here) but completely lost him when he left Venice Beach, CA. Reading through Evan’s article, Gone Forever: What Does It Take To Really Disappear? gave me a new idea.
In the article (page 3) Evan wrote about how an investigator established a missing persons website, in an effort to catch Patrick McDermott. The site claimed to be asking for tips, but the real purpose was to gather IP information from McDermott. I too had been struggling with an IP Address problem. Scattered info about Evan’s IP’s had been coming in, but I needed direct access to his browsing habits. Thus TrackEvan.com was born.
I thought at first it would be a site where I as @mescad would post my latest theories and thought that I might provide a wiki to collect all of the random tidbits trackers had been posting to twitter. I installed the WordPress publishing system, and looked for a simple theme to make it look pretty. Then I stumbled onto the awesomeness that is the Revolt Basic theme by NenadK. With only a tiny bit of image editing, I could make this simple blog site into a full fledged fake missing person website. Coincidentally, this same theme is used on one of Robert Basil’s websites, so that’s why Jeff thought I was him.
Missing person websites need a tip line, right? So I registered an 888 number (available for $14.95 per month, but I only needed one month) and pointed it at an old Google Voice account that I’ve had for years. Next I found a great royalty free stock photo website, and launched the site. My first article was a no-brainer…we needed Missing Person posters. I put my new number on them, and no mention of the contest, hoping that people would put them up nationwide, and I would someday get a call saying Evan was spotted. The plan was then to travel to Evan and “fluke” him myself, instead of letting a ‘civilian’ win the money.
As luck would have it, @labfly, who I knew through twitter from a previous ARG adventure, had just invited me (@mescad) to sit in on an interview with @NxThompson and @EvansVanished. I had a previous engagement that day, but I discretely passed along the address to TrackEvan.com and asked her to give out our number. During the interview the site was mentioned. Nick hadn’t yet seen the site, and loaded it up live. He loved it, and tweeted about it and added a link to the Wired vanish blog. I went from 4 pageviews on day one, to around 900 views on day two. The site was an instant hit.
For the next week or so, I posted content, from the point of view of one of Evan’s friends. Other than linking to interviews I never mentioned anything about the contest, playing it completely straightforward. I actually received several emails from distraught passersby who couldn’t tell if the website was real or not. I usually replied saying that in fact Evan was missing, and that the site is silly because I’m looking for a silly guy.
One day, an email came in from a producer of Charles Gibson’s ABC News program. They wanted to interview someone from our team for the national news. The hardest thing I’ve done in this contest is declining that interview. It was too early to reveal my identity as @mescad, and I never broke character as TrackEvan, ever. I told myself that I’d agree to an interview after I found Evan.
When the trackers on Twitter got into a frenzy about possible Evan impostors, @nxthompson started getting a lot of pressure from people asking if Evan ran the site. Because I wanted to keep a good relationship with him going, I revealed my identity to him. To his credit, I’m pretty sure that he didn’t tell anyone. I emailed Evan on the evening of his capture to let him in on the secret, and I told my fellow trackers from IRC about ten minutes before i wrote this article.
So I continued, playing the part of a double agent really. @mescad was jovial and found lots of good clues (the real me). I would post those to IRC first, then to twitter an hour later, so that my close colleagues would get a head start on the news. Then, about half a day later, I’d post the same info to TrackEvan.com. As @TrackEvan I was kind of a short-tempered fellow, who just wanted to get the story, and didn’t like anyone questioning his sources.
The leader of the Vanish Team and I got into a lively debate via Twitter Direct Messages one night, and each of us accused the other of hoarding the good info for ourselves (he through his facebook application, I through my tip line.) I completely agreed with his point of view, but in no way could I reveal that my tipline was useless (nobody ever called) and I needed to protect my identity, so I feigned disgust and broke off our relationship. Sorry Jeff, that was a little twisted of me, but it opened the door for @mescad to join your group, so I had to do it. In the end we found Evan, so hopefully that will comfort you if you’ve got any hard feelings.
One day I received an email from “Henry’s Shadow” which contained a link to the video I posted of Evan on Venice Beach. Immediately I suspected that Evan was working with the Sometimes Daily show creators, but when I realized that he wasn’t, I knew that “Henry’s Shadow” was actually Evan. Evan pulling off that appearance without Amanda knowing was my favorite part of the whole experience! Later when Evan tried to send me some disinformation about him going to Atlanta instead of Salt Lake City, I decided to go ahead and post it. I knew it was false, and that Evan wanted it posted to throw people off. However, since I knew better, and it had the potential to throw off some of my competing hunters, I put it on the site. Sorry for lying folks – we all know now that Evan was in Salt Lake City at the game.
But then, Evan actually did go to Atlanta! I had almost written off my chances of Evan coming close enough to Kentucky for me to catch him. I was willing to drive up to six hours from home, which included Atlanta, so I began to get excited. Unfortunately Atlanta was as close as Evan came, and I wasn’t about to drive that far just to stake out a bookstore, so I lost my chance.
By this time I was in the Vanish Team’s inner circle group, and had good details that Evan was going to be in New Orleans (See: “The Big 49Across” article, where 49-Across refers to a crossword puzzle with the answer of “EASYA.”) I heard about the Pizza Plot to catch him, and knew that it was going to work. I came very close to calling or writing Evan to warn him about the pizza guys waiting for him in New Orleans. If I thought it would have driven him north into my clutches, I would have done it.
Unfortunately I thought he would be going west instead, so I made a last ditch effort to scare Evan away by saying that I was in Houston, waiting for him to come to me through New Orleans on Tuesday. Evan didn’t scare easily, so he ended up being caught by Jeff and his guys at @nakedpizza. In the end, I’d rather that someone catch Evan than nobody catch him, so I’m satisfied with the outcome.
Congrats to Evan for lasting so long. Congratulations to the team who tracked him down. As I mentioned on Twitter this evening, I have this domain for 11 more months, so I’ll probably update it from time to time. I have a ton of other great stock photos that were just waiting for a story to be attached to. Stay Tuned!
Post your comments below, or feel free to email or call me with any feedback. The tip line will stay up for another week or two.
Evan has permission to put any of this in his article. If anyone else uses it, please just shoot me an email and credit TrackEvan.com or Mescad. If you need a real world identity to credit, email me and I’ll send you my name.
P.S. I’m without a job right now, so if you need someone with any of my skills that can telecommute or work from Kentucky, I’m available!
3 Comments to “Afterthoughts…”
Also a number of employed folks, losing sleep-time or using work-time to track Evan!
I think there were number of highly motivated unemployed people chasing Evan! Myself included!
Revolt Basic theme by NenadK. | Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).
I love that you were willing to drive six hours for this! I actually considered moving up a New York trip to take part in chasing Evan around the city (booked hotel room at Algonquin and everything). Kinda bummed it ended before that, but absolutely amazed at the brilliant online work Jeff and others have done. Kudos on having the initiative and skills to build this site!