o/t rbbm.
Wife of missing jogger Jeffrey Boucher teams up with Websleuths
"The web forum
On Jan. 20, Durham police announced they were ending the ground search. “Mr. Boucher, quite simply,
appears to have vanished,” Det. Sgt. Mitch Martin told reporters. “We are truly stumped.”
"Feeling hopeless, Kirsten began searching her husband’s name on the Internet and came across the websleuths.com forum. She was impressed with how extensively they had discussed and analyzed the details of Jeff’s life, albeit troubled by the harsh comments some users had made about her behaviour since his disappearance."
"Kirsten, a high school math teacher and pragmatic thinker, spent hours reading through the sleuth forum, debating what to do, before deciding to write a post of her own. “They had obviously put so much time into it already that I just thought, you know, these guys deserve some answers,” she said.
Soon, she and the sleuths were conversing back and forth, with them quizzing her on the many details of her husband’s disappearance — the $3,500 found in his filing cabinet at work, a deleted tweet from his daughter the night before he went missing that said
he had gone for a run three hours ago and wasn’t back yet."
"Though the police investigation was exhaustive,
Kirsten figured it couldn’t hurt to go through it all again with the sleuths. They helped her set up a missing-person page on Facebook, and she invited them to participate in a search party she has planned for the spring, when the snow melts."
"Downey said it’s not the first time someone close to a case has joined the sleuths in conversation. The site, she said, is a victim-friendly environment, and comments that are accusatory or mean are removed.
“For the most part,” Downey said, victims or other insiders “tell me they are there to clear up some of the speculation. They find out about the site, start to read, and they find themselves compelled to (make) sure information that is incorrect can be corrected.”
Overall, Kirsten said, conversing with the sleuths has been a positive experience. Knowing other people care means a lot to her. She is learning things and, slowly, readying herself to accept hard truths. On the subject of suicide, for example, Kirsten has said in past interviews there is a zero per cent chance her husband would have taken his own life. Her perspective has shifted lately.
“I’m open to discussing it,” she wrote last week in the forum, “mostly because we don’t have ANY clues, and the police seem to like exploring that area. So I’ll raise my percentage to 1%.”
“Now I don’t know,” she said at home a week later.
Through the sleuth site, she has heard personal stories from people who have experienced suicide in their family and never saw it coming. Even in retrospect, there were no signs.
“It makes you think,” she said quietly. “Makes you wonder.”
ETA..
https://www.amazon.ca/Mysterious-Death-Jeffrey-Boucher-away-ebook/dp/B00LSWEE3S