Kaycee Nicole - Unraveling of Hoax

Unraveling of Hoax

After Kaycee's death, mourners who requested an address to send condolence gifts, cards, or flowers to were told that, despite previous acceptance of gifts by Kaycee, there was no longer a mailing address for her. Debbie also informed van der Woning when she told him of her death that there had already been a memorial service and Kaycee had been cremated.

On May 17, blogger Saundra Mitchell posted an entry to her blog mocking people who faked illnesses on the internet. Though she did not initially name Kaycee Nicole, the next day she published another commentary which did explicitly name her and suggested that in fact, Kaycee Nicole had never existed. She cited the nearly impossible haste with which Kaycee had been interred, noting that even if Kaycee had not been autopsied – which was dependent upon the manner of her death and whether there was a doctor attending – the two days that Debbie claimed that gathering of mourners, memorial service, and cremation had been accomplished in was unlikely; Mitchell also noted a number of inconsistencies in the backstory about Kaycee's cancer. Mitchell, working off Kaycee's "internet address", traced the girl's location to Peabody, Kansas. She called around the town, asking if anyone knew of someone of Kaycee's description who had died recently. No one did.

On May 18, a user on popular weblog Metafilter posted a thread entitled "Is it possible that Kaycee did not exist?", which posited, largely on the basis of Saundra Mitchell's writings, that Kaycee Nicole might have been a hoax. Commenters in the often-heated thread (even the creator of the thread stated that "I mean, I want it NOT to be true. I hate the thought that a bunch of people are grieving over somebody who did not existi! " ) made a number of observations about the story of Kaycee, among them that no one had ever met Kaycee in person – not even the internet denizens who had been closest to her – and that no obituary was available in a newspaper, anywhere, for a 19-year-old girl named Kaycee Nicole.

As the Metafilter thread progressed, users discovered that Kaycee's CollegeClub account was tied to the CollegeClub account of Debbie Swenson's teenaged daughter, and that records showed that someone had logged into Kaycee's account days after she was supposed to have died. A user investigated the photographs that Kaycee had shared on her blog, identified a school mascot pictured, and traced it back to a particular high school, then traced the jersey number that "Kaycee" was wearing to an actual player. Investigation of the player showed that the only connection she had to Kaycee Nicole was that her family had once been acquainted with the Swenson family; she was not ill, was not named Kaycee Nicole, and had no idea her photo was being used by someone else.