Chapter 24

THIS WEBSITE HAS BEEN SEIZED

03/09/14

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Comments (22,456)

jamiebmaher The Wall Street Journal just wrote an article about Gottie:

Enterprising High School Student Solves Mysterious Celebrity Disappearance

Late last night, the internet exploded. If you frequent certain types of conspiracy theory communities on sites like Reddit and Tumblr, you are probably aware of the name ‘gottiewrites’. She’s infamous, already on her way to becoming an urban legend at the age of seventeen. If you live outside of the internet, you will never have heard of her. Yet her actions have real-world implications that have rippled far beyond a sub-reddit.

Gottiewrites’ is the self-proclaimed obsessive fangirl of a niche RBC series that has only aired 13 episodes. She helped uncover the body of a missing person last night.

Gottie is part of a fandom of ‘real person shippers’, who are convinced that two actors are hiding a secret romantic relationship. This is nothing new in the world of C-list celebrities, except that in this unique case, her beliefs were the catalyst needed for Gottie to start writing an online essay about the two actors. This essay has since been taken down by the FBI.

The essay went viral. Each chapter was viewed upwards of ten million times, according to WordPress, who hosted the blog on their site. Their spokesperson told us that, ‘we became aware of what was happening very quickly. It was an unprecedented growth of traffic. We started monitoring the posts when we first began to receive reports of inappropriate or illegal content. There wasn’t enough evidence of law-breaking to require action on our part until the FBI interceded.’

One reason for the popular success of the essay was the sheer level of fact-checking and research that the anonymous blogger put into analysing every aspect of the actors’ lives. For someone outside of the fan community, this could be seen as an outrageous and terrifying intrusion of their privacy. For a fangirl, this was business as usual – until everything went downhill, very quickly.

The focus of her attention, O’Donnell, went missing a week ago. This tragic event would appear outwardly to be unconnected with Gottiewrites’ blog. There is no evidence she has ever interacted with the actors in any way.

However, she claims otherwise. She places herself directly into the action, anticipating his disappearance long before it was ever announced by the police. In an eerie act of clairvoyance, she wove a mysterious web of fact and fiction that mirrored real life events. For most of which, it is impossible to separate out the lies from the reality.

Gottiewrites claims to have broken into O’Donnell’s home and overheard an argument with the other actor involved, Rob Hennings, only days before his disappearance was announced publicly. She recounts these events on her blog in a dramatic, attention-grabbing fashion both before and after O’Donnell’s disappearance was announced. The recounted details vary wildly based on the date of posting.

This claim should rightly be dispelled as internet hearsay, if not for one fact: yesterday, Gottie livestreamed herself arriving at the house in question. Inexplicably, it seems that Hennings recognised her and referenced some mutual history between himself and his fan. He was arrested for O’Donnell’s murder later that day, after a body was discovered in Hennings house. Did Gottie discover the body? Did she report him to the police? We may never know.

In one iconic moment of internet history, a fan’s out-of-control speculations about the inner lives of their role model collided with the real world in spectacular fashion. We still don’t know the truth of the connection between Gottiewrites, Hennings and the late O’Donnell, but what we do know is this: part of the teenager’s online accounts are true, in some form. Nathan O’Donnell was killed around the time that Gottie started posting his home address on the internet, where over ten million people saw it. And she knows far more than she is telling any of us.

For now, this is where the story ends. However, the intrigue continues on a second-by-second basis. No doubt more updates will have been posted before this article goes live.

One thing is for sure: Gottie will continue to spin her intricate web for our collective entertainment. This tragedy is nothing more than fresh fodder for the on-going narrative of her life. If ‘pulp non-fiction’ were a genre, then she would be the pioneer.

FantasticBooksAWTFT what. the. heck.

Anonymous it’s been days, has anyone heard any news?

Anonymous click – gottie

RosaRodel I clicked but the link was broken??

Anonymous it was a blog post, she only left it up for thirty seconds. I saved it:

Hi, everyone. Sorry I’ve been away so long. I went into hiding after Rob was arrested. An anonymous fairy godmother helped hook me up with a new identity. But I couldn’t not explain what happened. Don’t like, send this to the NYT or anything though. I’m trusting you.

This site is hosted on a website hosted on servers in Vietnam, so it doesn’t come under US jurisdiction. They shouldn’t be able to throw any lawsuits my way if they track this down, because it’s not on their soil. (Besides, what proof do they have that this wasn’t written by someone else? So much shit about this case has leaked online, I think I’m safe.)

As soon as I saw on the news that Nathan was missing, I knew it was Rob. I know a lot of you don’t believe me, but I really did break into Rob’s house. I really did overhear them fighting. Rob sounded so livid. The amount of anger and rage in his voice was terrifying. I’ve been having nightmares about it ever since.

I managed to get hold of the coroner’s report (ask no follow-up questions, please). It says that Nathan had blunt force-trauma to the skull. Rob was carrying a bag of golf clubs. They’d just played a game. That seems so sinister to me now. I went into hiding as soon as I heard the news, because I can’t risk Rob coming after me too. Especially because I know why he did it. I know what they were fighting about. It’s all about silentwakes. About what I’ve been revealing on this blog.

We know that Rob was doing something illegal online, even if we never managed to work out what it was. He had bitcoin. He was into something suspicious. There were some weird financial documents on his laptop. He was involved in something huge, I’m sure of it. There must be a way to crack it open, but I don’t have the information I need yet.

But based on what I do know, here’s my current theory about what happened.

Back in 2010, he must have needed to find a way to get some Bitcoin into his real-life bank account in USD, with an excuse for where it came from, just in case the tax man came knocking.

I bet that as soon as he started brainstorming ways to launder his illegal earnings, the LiveJournal community occurred to him. Rob was already in the Loch & Ness fandom, and he had enough followers to make a big donation look plausible if you weren’t paying too much attention. He knew what a tight-knit community fandom was. He would have seen people seeking donations to replace broken equipment or fund trips to conventions.

But he got caught on the first attempt – not by the IRS or the police, which he would have been prepared for. But by the fandom he was trying to take advantage of.

He had to call it quits after the first try. He probably moved on to another method that involved less nosy people than the Loch & Ness fans. I’m sure it worked for him, and I’m guessing no one IRL knew what he was doing – until I came along.

I’m wondering if maybe Nathan read my blog and confronted Rob about this stuff. If so, it’s no wonder they were fighting. Maybe Rob killed Nathan to keep him quiet.

I’m sorry if this is hard for you all to hear. It’s hard for me to write. I’ve loved Rob and Nathan very deeply. But I can’t ignore the evidence. That golf club is going to haunt my dreams.

The only thing I don’t understand is why he just left Nathan in that office closet for so long. Nearly a week! How could he be so cruel to someone he cared about? These are the things I keep thinking, over and over, in an endless loop. I don’t have an answer. I don’t know how to feel about any of this.

I have something else I need to tell you all, but I’m not putting it here. Go to the site that sw used and find the account with ll’s real name.

Anonymous she means lillyletters’ real name on livejournal! Only gottie could put a scavenger hunt in a murder document

Anonymous how bad even is this, really?! So what, rob did something using bitcoin? Who cares?

housemartins and murdered his partner to keep it quiet? Besides which, we don’t know what he was even doing. It could have been something to do with human trafficking or smuggling exotic animals or guns or drugs or something worse.

Anonymous rob wouldn’t do that.

babycakes how do you know? You don’t know anything about him. Just because you’ve seen him joke around on camera, or give a funny interview to a journalist, doesn’t mean you’ve seen the real him. It’s all part of the job, his public persona. it’s not real. He could be anyone and anything in real life, and we’d have no idea.

Anonymous rob is so dumb though. Is he really clever enough to have done all this?! this whole thing gives me a bad taste in my mouth.

Anonymous I’m not sure he is dumb. His LJ posts are quite clever. His Achilles heel seems to be people. He can never anticipate how much they’re going to guess. He always underestimates their cleverness – like with effiemeral and gottie. his plans are good, but not quite good enough. And when he’s questioned, he panics, and everything falls apart.

Anonymous rob didn’t do it! He can’t have done! They were in love!

Anonymous if gottie is just a normal girl then where the hell is she now? has she posted anything else yet? no. she’s completely disappeared. BECAUSE SHE’S BEEN LYING TO US ALL THIS WHOLE TIME. when are you gonna tell us the truth, gottie? Rob’s a murderer, yeah, whatever. We want to know about YOU. Who are you, really? What happened with the laptop? What are you hiding????? Are you a publicist? when you are going to explain what was going on in that twitch livestream? What were you talking about with rob? Why did he know you?

Anonymous i can’t believe i used to run a fanblog for a murderer

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