Kodee Kennings - Hoax

Hoax

The story was concocted by Jaimie Reynolds, a woman who claimed to be Colleen Hastings, the caregiver for the fictional Kodee. Reynolds allegedly passed a letter written as Kodee to Michael Brenner, then a sports editor, at the Egyptian, which prompted a feature story published May 6, 2003. In the article, "Kodee" told of how upset she was by an anti-war protest at the university campus, and her worries about her father "Dan" who was shipping off to Iraq with the 101st Airborne. Kodee's mother was said to be dead.

Over the next year, the Egyptian would publish, unedited, notes and letters from "Kodee", liberally strewn with misspellings and phonetic English, to update their readers about Dan's Iraq service or Kodee's daily life. A young friend of Reynolds', Caitlin Hadley, the daughter of a Nazarene minister, was recruited to play the part of Kodee for photographs, and a nurse, Patrick Trovillion, played Dan. Both believed that they were playing parts in a movie. "Kodee" was taken to the Egyptian newsroom and other Carbondale locations. "Dan" was photographed wearing camouflage, sitting on a tank, and meeting with school children in Michigan. "Dan" also called the newsroom and maintained an e-mail address at Yahoo! "Dan" was even portrayed as having been injured in a December, 2004 explosion in a mess hall at a base near Mosul, Iraq. He reportedly returned to duty just weeks later, and was later injured by an roadside bomb which struck a Humvee in which he was traveling.

Reynolds or Brenner also apparently penned a guest editorial published in the name of a real war widow, wherein the author claimed that her late husband had been a war buddy of Kennings'.

To further attempt to turn her hoax into reality, Jaimie Reynolds would dial the Daily Egyptian newsroom and - unbeknown to DE staff - allegedly disguise her voice to pretend to be the fictional girl "Kodee Kennings" wanting to talk to staff.

Throughout the hoax, Jaimie Reynolds also passed herself off as the twin sister of the fictional "Colleen Hastings" and visited the Daily Egyptian newsroom alternating as either Jaimie or "Colleen." Reynolds was a broadcast-journalism student at Southern Illinois University and graduated in 2004, putting her in classes alongside Daily Egyptian staff.