Epilogue

Posted on by Wren James

thetruth-atlast.dreamwidth.com

01/08/24

Comments (15,092)

Anonymous So, this essay is ten years old now and I don’t think anyone except internet conspiracy theory fans have looked at it in years. But I was reading it over, and . . . I think Gottie was lying the whole time. I don’t have any proof, and I don’t even know if anyone will read this comment.

But I think Gottie killed Nathan. It just makes so much more sense than Rob’s ineffectual behaviour after the murder. Why did he never dispose of the body in the days after?

If he knew Nathan’s body was upstairs, why would he invite Gottie over and beg her to tell her where Nathan was?

Plus, this is a girl who posts everything she hears online. He must have known what a risk he was taking by inviting her to his house. He knew that she was effiemeral too, at that point. He even called her ‘Effie’. If he knew how badly she wanted revenge on him, why would he bring her into his house?

That’s the behavior of a man who is absolutely desperate to find someone they love. There are too many loose ends. The story is incomplete. The whole case is just too tangled and complicated to see the holes in the narrative.

I don’t believe Nathan would report Rob to the police for money-laundering. Not if he really loved him. Even if they were fighting, and Nathan was angry. So I don’t believe that Rob killed him to keep his secrets, whatever they were. I think he’d have been able to convince Nathan to stay quiet.

Here’s my theory. What if the murder happened when Gottie was inside their house, hiding under the desk in the office?

Gottie told us that she tried to escape out the window with her laptop and Rob’s own laptop. What if Nathan caught her before she could get out? He would have recognised her as the girl scout he’d bought cookies off.

He could have tried to grab her. Maybe she kicked him to the ground – or knocked him away with one of the laptops she was carrying. He could have hit his head on the corner of the desk.

Whatever happened, he hurt his head badly enough that he passed out. He collapsed to the floor, and Gottie panicked. She thought that he was just unconscious, that he would wake up in an hour. She dragged the body over to the office cupboard and hid it inside, to give her a chance to get away before Rob found him. She even locked it, just in case he woke up quickly.

Nathan bled out, unable to get out of the cupboard or call for help. He died, alone and trapped in the dark.

Rob was next seen searching for him on the street a few hours later, frantically calling his name. He barged past some fans, who filmed him. He was already looking for Nathan, even then.

Meanwhile, Gottie must have gone home to write up the next chapter of her essay. She had to have been hoping desperately that Nathan wouldn’t say anything when he woke up. But to her surprise, he never said anything at all. In fact, no one saw him for days.

RBC delayed filming on the show when Rob told them that he’d gone missing. They started searching secretly for him, hoping that he’d just gone driving for a few days. Meanwhile, Rob focused his attention on trying to stop Gottie posting about the money-laundering (leaving fake comments, etc). He didn’t even think to check inside his own house to find Nathan.

As more time went on without a sighting of him, Gottie’s suspicions grew deeper. What if Nathan hadn’t just been unconscious? What if there had been some kind of internal bleeding inside his brain? What if it had been life-threatening?

She told herself that Rob would have found him and got him to the hospital in time, if that was the case. But would he? Had Gottie made his chance of survival worse by locking him in the cupboard?

Days passed, and still Nathan wasn’t seen. Gottie probably started to panic even more. Because Rob was acting like Nathan was missing, not just sick. He was searching for him, according to a conversation which was overheard by a fan – he asked Bradley Saffitz if he’d seen him. He was offering a reward to anyone who found him.

Gottie became convinced that she’d murdered Nathan by accident somehow, and she was going to get arrested. And she’d stupidly posted about being in his house on the night it happened. She knew that as soon as the body was discovered, everyone would connect it with her. So she had to beat them to it – plant a story in their minds, before her readers could get there first. She had to make sure no one thought it was her. They had to think it was Rob instead.

So she made up a story of a fake argument she’d overheard between Rob and Nathan, posting it online alongside that short video of Rob in the street, upset about Nathan disappearing. She never had any proof of this argument.

She rearranged the evidence to make it seem like they were on the brink of breaking up. It must have been so easy to give Rob a motive – he had such a good one already, with the bitcoin illegalities (I believe that was all true. It’s too insane not to be.)

When Nathan still didn’t get in touch, Rob got more desperate. He invited Gottie over to his house to beg her to help uncover where Nathan had gone. Gottie took the chance to check the office. Nathan’s body was still there, where she’d locked him up.

She quickly left, and reported it to the police anonymously, making sure there was clear evidence online that proved Rob had the motive and the means, and that he’d been witnessed fighting with the victim. She did a good job.

One of the things she included was reference to Rob with a golf club. This helped cement her version of events in peoples’ minds: that Rob was a killer, and Gottie was just an innocent bystander.

But remember, Gottie has a motive too. She wanted revenge on Rob for driving her off LiveJournal. She wanted everyone to know at last what he’d done to her, and make sure he was punished for his money-laundering.

A murder was the convenient way to make sure he was punished. Even if he didn’t kill Nathan himself, when a body presented itself, she took the chance to get revenge. She had been desperate for someone to punish Rob for what he did for years.

I don’t know what Gottie is doing these days. She must be nearly thirty. Maybe she hasn’t mentioned Loch & Ness to anyone in years. Maybe she’s managed to make herself forget all of this even happened.

But there’s one person who won’t have forgotten. Rob Hennings is going to be released on parole next year. I’m very interested to find out what he does when he leaves prison. Because I’m pretty sure that somewhere out there, a woman is walking free who should be in jail for murder.

They’re going to tear each other apart.

This comment has been deleted by the moderator. Your IP address has been blocked from posting on this site again.

THE END

Author’s note

This blog will stay online permanently, but it is also being published by Walker Books in August 2024 with the title Last Seen Online. It will feature Gottie’s blog posts, alongside new chapters taking place over a decade later.

If you preorder before 1st August, you can get a goody bag with a signed art postcard by filling out this form.

Preorder the book now

If you’d like to be notified of future additions to Gottie’s toxic co-dependant misadventures, the easiest way is to sign up for my mailing list.

You can find more about my other books here:

– wren

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< Chapter 27 | Contents page | Goodreads 

101 thoughts on “Epilogue”

  1. This is SO interesting! And to see you’re writing a sequel is so exciting!

    The story is so binge-able and truly reflective of fan culture and how creepy it can be, from the way MLM is fetishized to how stalking celebrities seems normal. Gottie’s writing tone and the comments—whether skeptical, blindly believing, or comedic in nature—feel so real.

    It’s really cool how modern this is. It starkly highlights how our perceptions are influenced on social media. Even knowing gottie inserts her own biases and conjecture into her posts, many of us readers were mislead by her.

    Excited for Last Seen Online x

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    1. man oh man oh man. from the snapewives to rainbow rowell to the ‘zines of old, this warmed the absolute cockles of my heart. i was cackling at every new reference. and the way my eyes got bigger and bigger with every update. had me guessing with every twist!! just like gottie herself, this story is way too incredible to be believed. and you put this on the internet for free!!! gotta scrounge up a spot to buy you a coffee. and absolutely i’m nabbing the paper copy of the book, stat. incredible from top to bottom.

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  2. Yet another Tumblr rec! I’ve been reading this in-between my training shifts for work, and man I’ve been HOOKED. I adored the batshittery of the MsScribe story (and reading your work made me want to go revisit it so I’m going to do another read-up on it after this lol) and the thoroughness of the author, all the detective work laid out with IP addresses and how everything lined up – there’s something so satisfying about it all, somehow. So I was so, so delighted to see that kind of write-up replicated here, and even better! with MURDERRR. Murder mystery with an unreliable narrator AND super detailed analysis/detective work in a dedicated Tumblr essay breakdown format let’s goooooo, ticking so many of my boxes!! Love how wild this concept is, it’s so tasty and intriguing.

    I’m so impressed by this and have some of your other works bookmarked to start reading too because the summaries sounded awesome too. I’m blown away by how well you captured obsessive toxic fan behavior (THAT PERSON WHO WROTE AN RPF H/C FIC IN RESPONSE TO ROB GETTING ARRESTED FOR MURDERING NATHAN AHHHHHHH) and the different sections of the fanbase (lmao at the Anya fans commenting in one chapter about them living their best lives while all this drama is happening, that’d be me babe, I’m too gay to NOT be in the drama-free lady fanbase, we’d all be sipping our drinks and lifting our sunglasses at the literal murder case going on over yonder). ALSO the FORMAT is so good I adore this choice for this story, it’s SO intriguing and adds SO much to the story, from seeing everyone’s reactions as the story unfolds and the swing of public opinion against Gottie and then against Rob (and I LOVE some of the pitch-perfect snarky comments, the “weirdest case of gender inequality” one was my favorite), and the addendums from the court case putting us on our guard before we even know what to be looking for! God, such a nice little murder mystery wrapped in such a cool little package.

    All the careful little hints about what’s REALLY going on, with Gottie foreshadowed as being Effie from like the 1st chapter shaking out to be real, the bit by bit unveiling of the shady shit Rob pulled as silentwakes, and the dawning realization of her story about Rob killing Nathan not adding up (Rob’s behavior in the livestream not matching a murderer esp since the way it was shot [up her sleeve, it seemed like] meant he wouldn’t have known the stream was happening and wouldn’t have needed to put up an act, inviting her into his house and letting her go without doing anything to threaten or hurt her [I wonder if Gottie was DISAPPOINTED he didn’t try anything? why else broadcast a livestream where her lies could be exposed if she wasn’t half-hoping he’d undeniably incriminate himself on camera by going all bad guy on her? all she ended up with on the livestream was her getting outted as Effie and him seeming genuine in not knowing where Rob was, then she had to recoup her losses by “finding the body” in his house. idk, in my head the way Gottie is, I think she would’ve been vindictively pleased if Rob HAD lost his temper and attacked her, it would’ve played into her narrative and the livestream would’ve sealed his fate, even if worst-case happened and she got killed]). The reveal she was probably the real killer and how it happened makes so much sense and is so chilling; the timeline for her suddenly “revealing” an argument between Rob and Nathan only once people feared Nathan was missing (only after she realized he might’ve died and panicked thinking she would be caught for it), pointing out how Nathan bled out alone in the dark in that cupboard and his body was in there for weeks with his boyfriend living in the same house and never finding it, the implication Rob is going to be gunning after her and her family again in revenge after rotting in jail for +10 years for a murder he didn’t commit… the Internet back-and-forth between these two is going to be the most intense thing ever lmao.

    And the theories! About Gottie potentially being related to people with ties in the industry and her grudge compounded by finding out Rob (unknowingly?) helped her father ruin her mother in a nasty divorce case, and the ultimate uncertainty on if who DID do it since there’s good evidence for both and Gottie might’ve deleted the last theory comment to cover her ass if she’s guilty or because she was afraid of getting wrongfully accused again like she was as Effie (is it possible that comment was Rob? lol, would he be allowed to access her website from prison??). Both are shady operators, both are known to lie and scam, and both had motive; if Rob did accidentally kill Nathan as everyone believes, why did he hang onto the body, why did he act like that in the livestream, and why invite snoopy-ass Gottie in his house and go off unsupervised where the body was? hiding it where it’s “safe” long enough for the evidence to decompose until he finds a good place to dump it to be “found”, but Gottie messed it all up by genuine accident? inviting her over and putting on a show of being a sincerely worried boyfriend with secrets plans to pin this on Gottie later and have evidence of her in his house, only it backfired? Or if Nathan was cool with Rob and Gottie was the real killer as it is laid out in the final deleted comment, then how did he not notice the smell of Nathan’s body for two weeks? Was he not spending that much time alone in the house because he was too anxious about where Nathan was (and freaked out about Gottie breaking in)? was that Nathan’s office more than his so he didn’t think to go near the room and smell anything? (in which case, why did he put Gottie’s laptop in there?) It’s fascinating how complex the case is and how I could see either side being true and how either way it’s a really interesting little murder case. One of them is a serial liar who is telling the truth for once and the other is a serial liar whose luck either ran out (Rob) or held up for now (Gottie). Either way Gottie better watch herself because Rob’s not going to be very happy with her when he gets out and we know he goes hard on people.

    EVERYTHING in this story is both so detailed and so ambiguous, it’s awesome af and I love it. Thank you so much for writing this. ❤

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  3. Wow. i’ve got so many thoughts, yet i can’t really seem to form them into words.
    i decided to check this out after seeing a bit of fanart on Tumblr, and it had me hooked from beginning to end! you did such a good job capturing the creepy, toxic, sometimes sickening side of fandom. i try my best to avoid fandom drama when i can (i’m mostly in it for the art and the fics), so there were parts of this that totally freaked me out lol.
    i had definitely gotten some weird vibes from some of the stuff Gottie said (especially her waiting a while to “reveal” Rob and Nathan’s argument), yet some part of me decided not to give it much thought. i find it fascinating how even when we KNOW a character is an unreliable narrator, we’re willing to ignore some odd feelings in favor of just trusting them. brilliantly written, i can’t believe something this good is posted for free. thank you

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  4. MYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY GODDDDDDDDDDDD i need a minute to collect myself. hold on. OK WOWWW oh my god!!!!!! take tumblr recs to heart ppl gsdjfkfsd….

    list of my fav things in this story:
    – the internalised misogyny letting anya & brad be the only ppl to come out of this alive and happy and thriving 😭😭 thank u mlm fetishisation i guess!?!?! ‘weirdest case of gender inequality’ anonymouse u have my heart forever and ever and ever
    – i KNEW ITTTTT argh i feel like the mark of a good mystery/whodunnit is weaving in just enough clues that the readers are able to figure out the twists themselves, and while i didn’t see the first one coming, it’s the type u can go “OHHH how did i miss that!!!” at when u reread. SO good. i’m so hyped for the sequel, ive gotta get my hands on your other works i feel ILLLLL
    – the implication that rob didn’t just cyberbully her as a 13 yr old but fucked her mom over in the divorce?? INSANE. the LAYERS. the MOTIVES she’s had all along. it just keeps getting better. and the fact she lies about that from the beginning, saying she’s a cat person? your attention to detail is mind-blowing!!!!! msscribe could NEVER
    – margot in general can we get a moment for margot. she is the most twisted beastly WRONG girl in the world and i want to study her under a microscope. you get obsessive fandom culture so SO right in a way i don’t think ive ever read anyone else do before. i think the only unrealistic thing is that there’s no discourse about rob and nathan’s age gap SDUHSDDS. margot shrugging it off and deciding to move on with white coats? separating real rob and fandom rob in her mind??? denying that nathan is dead takes on a whole new layer after the reveal that she (allegedly, but the fact she deleted & blocked the anon who posted that theory? guilty as charged) killed him. it’s probably a twisted way of guilt manifesting for her?? oh my god. CHILLS. literal chills
    – ALICE OSEMAN!!!!!!!!!!!
    – did i mention i’m hyped for the sequel because i am SO hyped for the sequel. i would give you both of my kidneys for an ARC, i can’t WAIT to see what rob who’s been rotting in jail for 20 years does??? will he be less panicky??? will anyone actually listen to him??? ARGHH
    – the person who wrote an rpf. what the heck! your knowledge of fandom culture inside and out is sossoosos cool, i kept forgetting i was reading a fictional story LMFAOO.
    – ok i think that’s all….. ARGHHH this is so good. in conclusion i will be thinking about this story until the end of time. wow. what the heck. wow. thank you lauren james for blessing the world with ur writing…..

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  5. i’m a little absurdly late to this, but i read the entire thing within 4 hours and i don’t think i’ve ever felt as immersed in the world of a piece of media as i have reading this, except maybe potentially homestuck for some godforsaken reason (which probably dates me pretty well).
    absolutely insane props to you, for what it’s worth, because this is exactly the kind of stuff that i’d love to some day get into. it’s nice to see this sort of success, and i’ll definitely be looking into that follow-up story!

    to point out a thing that screwed me up – in a good way, i think – the story was so enthralling i had to unironically take a second to acclimate myself to the sudden FBI jumpscare, as i somewhat struggle with paranoia (in a very real sense) and it sort of set me off. but any other piece of media i’ve read would have cracked – the humor in those other pieces of media would have felt contrary to the serious tone, and “FBI jumpscare” would have turned into “FBI joke”. you’ve created a story that effortlessly interweaves humor and seriousness, while keeping itself deadly serious and in-character. it’s incredibly satisfying to get to the end and see everything wrapped up in a bow – i’ll be looking up some process vids to see if i can glean anything from your creative methods, because hot dang is that impressive.

    i know this is probably not all that much, given the sheer scale of time, but i can’t overstate enough how much this is cool to see. you’re an inspiration to [x]+1 people, as of 9/13/23!
    -7

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  6. Just binged this in an evening (thank you, Tumblr rec!) and…

    Holy cow. Watching details slot into place, little by little, across chapters was so satisfying. (‘Oh hey, her name’s Margaret– oh no.’) And then getting some of those same things upended again! Sincerely some of the most fun I’ve had reading anything in a very long time.

    I also felt like I was actually reliving Livejournal for some bits, there. Unsure if want. :V

    I have ‘Last Seen Online’ bookmarked and marked down in my To Buy pile. Excited to see what new bits get added in, and how the online blog-and-link format gets adapted to print.

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  7. That has been a blast to read. I started reading because I like mysteries and the story started with the murder trial. But the fandom drama has been so relatable and so fun, that I had forgotten about the whole ‘this is a murder mystery’ for about 10 chapters. 🙂 The the level of detailed analysis shown in the posts is also something, that I would not be surprised to find in some meta lying around. I can understand Anya feeling of being relieved, that she was not the focus of that.

    With the fake donation, I was reminded of the fanfiction declaimers in the past, how they all always had people dying, ended in the hospital and writing with the pain killers and so on. Where you were hoping it was not true, but just maybe…

    The whole detail with having gender equality of hacking the accounts of both genders stayed with me. What about not hacking anybody gender equality?

    But then I started to question – if this is the part of the murder trial, who was getting killed and then the whole murder mysteries questions. I know that at one point in the middle of the story, I was noting to myself that it is not usual for the mystery to hide the victim for that long. And that this made it very fun. I did ping Nathan as the most likely one even before the police declared him missing.

    I think the bit of familiarity with the fandom drama (as much as I avoid it when I see it) made the story better. Because this entire feeling of is it true or not was there for the entire story. Even if it is was hard to not trust the Gottie. Since we were seeing everything from her perspective. I ended up not being sure who was responsible in the end. I guess we might find out more in the book.

    Adding the book on the to-read when it is released. Because this was really fun.

    I guess the only thing I wanted to really say is that I enjoyed reading it and thank you for writing it.

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  8. god bless the tumblr recs my god!! this has eaten the entire morning of my day off and im not even a bit mad about it. frankly, i am bewildered and do not know who or what or how to believe about what really happened to nathan. its so excellently bittersweet. and the fix-it H/C for a real life crime speaks to how well you know just how deliriously consuming and unhinged fandom can get.

    im stoked to get my hands on a physical version of this

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  9. (sorry if this comes through twice, the first time i got an error message)

    called it 🙂 this was such an amazing read, and had me hooked all day. i am such an unreliable narrator lover, and this story had layers of it, from the obvious psychological problems with gottie, to the lies she admits to, to the lies she doesn’t. one thing i disagree with this anon on though is that i think gottie knew nathan was dead when she left. while she isn’t a rational person by any means (especially after accidentally killing somebody), i think that if she knew that nathan was alive and could recognise and report her, she would have fled the same way she does after meeting rob, as opposed to returning home and writing up her next chapter. but it’s entirely possible that she needed to see her revenge on rob in person, and to have him know that she was the one who did this to him, and that need outweighed the risk of staying. argghhh this is such a good story!!! i love how the little details build chapter on chapter and give you a chance to figure things out for yourself, it’s a really well-done mystery! i’ve ordered a physical copy for my big sister because she was also very much online during this era and will love this, though i will probably read the new chapters first >:)

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  10. Binged the whole thing in one go. It’s 1 am. Now I gotta find a copy of the published version bc I need to find out what happens 10 years later!!!!!!

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Published by Wren James

Wren James is the Carnegie-longlisted British author of many Young Adult novels as ‘Lauren James’, including Last Seen Online, Green Rising, The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker and The Quiet at the End of the World. Amazon MGM Studios is developing The Loneliest Girl in the Universe as a feature film. Joe Roth and Jeffrey Kirschenbaum will produce the film alongside Katherine Langford. They are a RLF Royal Fellow and the story consultant on Netflix’s Heartstopper (Seasons 2 and 3). Season 3 will guest star Jonathan Bailey, playing a role created by Wren.