YouTubers hunt closure - and clicks - in US cold cases

WASHINGTON • A scuba diver wiped away the algae on a submerged car's licence plate and exclaimed: "It's them!" That discovery of two long-missing American teens' apparent remains was the latest tragic find for a subculture of YouTube sleuths.

Among the platform's viral hits scoring billions of views is a niche of YouTubers who use sonar devices to search waterways for vehicles linked to missing persons cases in the United States.

That formula was central to revelations last week in a 21-year-old mystery in the state of Tennessee, one of a series of cold cases unravelled with the revenue generated by the clicks that these operations' clips generate.

Experts note that the larger boom in Internet sleuthing has had a mixed impact, with high-profile misfires and the temptation for viral content, but in some key instances the crowd's contribution has been critical.

Teens Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel disappeared in April 2000 from their small central Tennessee town of Sparta, leaving family and friends to hope that they had just run away to start a new life.

But 42-year-old diver Jeremy Sides - whose YouTube channel "Exploring with Nug" focuses on finding missing property and people - posted a video on Dec 4 that has since been viewed some 1.4 millions times and which seems to have resolved the mystery.

This was the second time in about a month that Mr Sides had been instrumental in seemingly closing a case - the first was finding a car linked to a woman missing since 2005, also in Tennessee.

Officials in Sparta were still working to confirm the identities of the remains found by Mr Sides, but local police said they believed they belonged to the missing teens.

Another group of YouTubers, Chaos Divers, said they have found the remains of seven missing people in the past two months in an intense push that has seen them travel nearly 12,900km in the US.

Assistant professor of public policy Adam Scott Wandt, from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said untrained "true-crime armchair sleuths" and their efforts have become a cultural phenomenon in the past decade.

The results vary greatly. Some people said the social media swirl around slain US roadtripper Gabby Petito helped police find her body this year. At the same time, Internet sleuths tarred an innocent college student in an effort to find the bombers who killed three at the 2013 Boston Marathon.

"The public is getting better at it, but it still can be very self-serving," added Dr Wandt, referring to the temptation for seeking clicks.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE