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From New Yorker

From Vox

By many of the usual benchmarks, the United States would appear to be in the midst of a relatively robust — albeit rocky — economic recovery. GDP has bounced back, unemployment is falling, and the stock market is booming. American households added a collective $13.5 trillion to their wealth in 2020. The economy hit its pandemic-induced low point in April 2020, according to those in charge of deciding these things, and has been improving ever since. Officially, the Covid-19 recession lasted just two months. Unofficially, to a lot of people, that designation is meaningless — or, at the very least, a little hard to swallow. The term “economic recovery” is a nebulous idea not based in their day-to-day realities.

“I have a general idea of what it means, but I don’t think to us, personally, it has an individual effect,” Norris says. “Covid didn’t make us poor; we already were poor.”

For Norris, economic recovery isn’t exactly the goal — her family needs much more. So do millions of families like hers. The country’s riches were already unevenly apportioned among the haves and have-nots before Covid-19 struck, and the pandemic exacerbated those circumstances. For many, support from the government has helped them tread water. But much of that support, such as expanded unemployment insurance, has dried up, and some people have struggled to access programs that are supposed to help them, like rental assistance. America risks widening the gaps even further.

“Technically, recovery is what occurs after the economy bottoms out and then is returning to its normal state,” says Karen Dynan, a Harvard economist who served as chief economist at the Treasury Department under the Obama administration. “But a lot of people find it odd to say the recession is over when the economy is still really weak.” Or, at least, weak for some people.

The pandemic economic downturn hasn’t been as severe as some economists and observers initially feared. The impact, however, has been incredibly uneven, as has the rebound from it. What’s happening in the economy depends on where you look and who you ask. In some ways, the economy has recovered relatively quickly. In others, it hasn’t recovered at all. And for some, the baseline wasn’t that good to begin with.

In a Pew Research survey released in September 2020, 46 percent of low-income respondents reported having trouble with bills since the pandemic started, compared to just 5 percent of upper-income respondents. Just 21 percent of upper-income people said they were able to save less due to the Covid-19 outbreak, compared to 51 percent of low-income people.

As the recovery goes on, Black and Hispanic workers still have higher rates of unemployment than white workers; the same goes for less educated workers compared with more highly educated workers. According to data from Opportunity Insights, a project at Harvard University, low-wage employment (defined as making less than $27,000 a year) is still around 20 percent below pre-pandemic levels. High-wage employment (defined at over $60,000 a year) is around 10 percent above pre-pandemic levels.

There’s been a constant push- and-pull between economic concerns and health concerns, with policymakers and businesses grappling over how much to curb economic activity in the name of protecting and saving lives. On that front, the country and the world have been stuck in a sort of perpetual purgatory, vacillating between priorities and half-measures in a way that leaves no one safe or satisfied.

Before the pandemic, the US had a stronger economy than it had seen in quite some time: The country’s unemployment rate was at its lowest level in decades, and people were feeling more confident about the economy than they had since before the Great Recession. But that doesn’t mean it was perfect by any means, Dynan says. “The growth in income inequality over the decades has been substantial, and it has been associated with a lot of hardship for many households,” she said. Some households were in much more precarious spots than others, which has shaped how they’ve absorbed the Covid shock.

During the pandemic, many middle- and high-income Americans have fared the same or are better off financially. They’ve been able to work from home and even saved money during lockdowns, having skipped vacation and dining out for months. For some, their wealth has even gone up, thanks to rising home values and a high-flying stock market.

Whitney Baker, a 52-year-old estate gardener from Kentucky, isn’t wealthy, but some of his clients are, and the pandemic leaving rich people bored at home and looking to improve their surroundings has boded well for him. After the initial shock, his life has gotten better — “only in the business sense, of course,” he clarifies. One of his main clients pulled back on landscaping plans when the stock market fell, but when it rebounded, he decided to forge ahead.

“In a matter of six to eight weeks, we were back to full swing,” he says. Baker isn’t much of a spender, and he’s been able to save more. He’s empathetic to people who are less fortunate than him, and he and his client donate food from the vegetable garden they’ve built out to a local pay-what-you-can restaurant.

They’re trying to help low-income people, many of whom have struggled more during the Covid-19 outbreak. When the pandemic hit, many people lost their jobs amid forced shutdowns, especially in hospitality and service jobs that typically weren’t well paid. Other low-wage workers who didn’t lose their jobs were declared “essential” and asked to keep going in, perhaps for an extra couple of dollars an hour in hazard pay that quietly faded after a few months.

When things are getting better faster for people at the upper end of the spectrum than they are for those at the lower end, economists generally refer to it as a “K-shaped recovery.” (Those two little diverging lines form the letter K.) The higher up the economic ladder you go, the fewer people you have, said Tim Liao, a sociologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has studied inequality in the pandemic. “If a lot of people are not feeling that we’re recovered, what does total recovery mean? That means much less.”

While it is true that the pandemic has been devastating for many Americans, it could have been much worse, were it not for pandemic-related support from the federal government. It has made a real, material difference in people’s lives. Measures such as the stimulus checks, unemployment insurance, the child tax credits, the eviction moratorium, and student loan pauses likely kept masses of households from careening toward catastrophe. Overall, many people have been able to save more, and poverty rates dropped.

“This has been a very strange recession, given that this is a recession where incomes actually went up,” said John Friedman, an economist at Brown University and founding co-director of Opportunity Insights. The caveat: That’s a statement about the average, and many of those income-boosting elements, such as unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, have wound down. The federal eviction moratorium has ended, and the enhanced child tax credit is set to expire in December.

At the end of January, the pause on student loans will wind down. Conditions could rapidly change and deteriorate. Not everyone who needs help has been able to get it, either. The federal rent relief program has been notoriously difficult to access. People experiencing unemployment have struggled to navigate the US’s convoluted, out-of-date benefits programs, and some people just fall through the gaps. Norris, a stay-at-home mom, for example, doesn’t qualify for unemployment insurance, and the US doesn’t have a job-seekers benefit for people on the hunt for work.

Moreover, just because a person isn’t careening toward catastrophe doesn’t mean their situation is particularly good or stable.

Jahson Lamothe, from Baltimore, was working inconsistent hours as a bank teller when the pandemic hit — sometimes part time, sometimes full time, depending on the week. He now has a new job as a service associate at a different bank, but the money isn’t great: He’s making $17 an hour trying to support himself, his partner, and their infant son. “I have a job that used to be a career for people,” he told me. “Now it’s barely enough to afford the median rent in the state that I live in, and to me, that is ridiculous.”

Lamothe says he feels somewhat fortunate in his situation. He can keep a roof over his head and the tow truck from coming for his car. He can pay for gas, too, though he notices that it’s pricey, as are a lot of things these days. “Everything costs more, but nobody’s getting paid more,” he says. “If it’s hard for me, I think about the people who make less than me or who are in worse positions than me. So I don’t know how ‘economic recovery’ can even be mentioned.”

Wages are going up, but so is inflation. People aren’t necessarily noticing the gains they’ve made, or they’re too behind for it to make an immediate difference.

Norris’s husband recently got a small raise at work, but it’s only by a couple of dollars an hour. She’s not entirely sure how — she thinks maybe his hours changed, or his tax rate was adjusted — but she says his take-home pay is now less. Their family contracted Covid-19 last year, and he’s had ongoing issues stemming from that. In July, he had to miss two weeks of work because of it. Norris has also had legal issues in the past — in 2019, she was arrested for passing a note at a bank demanding money before fleeing the scene. (She is awaiting trial.) The economic data says things are going better, but people like the Norrises aren’t necessarily feeling it. Income doesn’t measure hardship or health or stress.

Part of what’s been so jarring about the pandemic is how precarious a situation so many people were in to begin with, even if they didn’t realize it. What seemed like a relatively stable life — a decent job, a sustainable business — was easily tossed into chaos if you were unlucky enough to be in certain sectors.

Brandy Flores, a single mother from Texas, doesn’t describe her situation as a catastrophe, though she could. Instead, she tells me over and over again that it’s “horrible,” as she intermittently breaks into tears. “What I’ve been through I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I don’t even know how else to say it,” she says.

Flores lost her home health business when the pandemic struck — patients, understandably, didn’t want her coming in and out and potentially exposing them to Covid. She was able to collect unemployment insurance through June, before Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ended expanded federal benefits early. She’s looking for a job now and has tried to get government loans to build back her business, but hasn’t had any luck on either front. Her savings are completely depleted; luckily, she’s been able to receive some public assistance, and her landlord is understanding.

The financial setbacks she’s endured pale in comparison to the personal tragedies she’s experienced: Both her mother and stepmother died suddenly during the pandemic, one of Covid-19. Both were 58. Flores has tried to find solace in that her mother had been an organ donor.

There’s plenty to say about how the pandemic has forever changed us, how there’s no going back to a new normal, how trends such as remote work and revised work-life balance priorities might stick. But it’s also important to notice how things have stayed the same, and that the old “normal” wasn’t necessarily good for everyone.

Trevon Logan, an Ohio State University economist and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, pointed to the example of low-wage work. Many employers in service and hospitality have complained they can’t find workers — for myriad reasons, people aren’t eager to hop back into those poorly paying, front-line jobs. Employers “are familiar with a labor market that allows them to pay not even living wages and have people sign up for employment that way,” Logan said. “There are workers who were familiar with that system who are rejecting that.”

What’s not clear is how long that rejection will last, or how set this newfound sliver of increased worker power is. “I’m not sure how comforted we should be by this,” Dynan warned. “It’s fair to say right now that demand is booming for many people who haven’t done well so far in the pandemic, but I don’t know whether that demand is going to be enough to allow all of them to experience a full recovery.”

Indeed, part of the overall economy’s improvement hinges on the recovery of an exploitative system built on the backs of some people and not others. The typical capitalistic vision of growth (one that many progressives chafe at) has inequality baked in.

The reason many higher-income, and often white, people were able to stay at home and remain relatively safe, financially and physically, during the pandemic was because low-income essential workers, who were likelier to be people of color, kept the economy going. They delivered food and packages and worked at grocery stores and gas stations, putting themselves at risk for a supposed broader good, which often benefited people who had more advantages than them in the first place. Now, getting the economy going again, in part, depends on low-wage workers supporting supply chains and getting back into restaurants and bars to serve everyone else.

The growing inequality that predated and exacerbated the pandemic hasn’t gone away. The US economy isn’t recovering its way out of a deeply divided society. “When you think about it from the perspective of inequality, it doesn’t make sense anymore to ask if the economy overall has recovered. Rather, you have to think about how it’s playing out across distribution — who has recovered, who may actually be doing better than before, and who is still suffering,” said Friedman, the Brown economist.

Flores certainly hasn’t felt it. “I’ve not had an economic recovery,” she says. “How does it make sense that our economy is getting better when people are dying?”

Throughout the pandemic, there’s been a tension between how much to sacrifice the economy in the name of public health. But that debate misses the mark. There’s not a direct trade-off between health and the economy — the economy can’t get entirely back to normal when there’s a dangerous virus spreading. Ultimately, this all comes down to what’s happening to people. In August, the S&P 500 doubled from its pandemic low in March 2020. At least 4 million people have died of Covid-19 worldwide in that time. The S&P continues to hit record highs; people are still dying. There’s a recovery story to be told, but is it the right one?

I’ve spent much of the pandemic writing about what it means for the economy — the recession, recovery, and everything that’s happened in the middle. This is the basic story: The overall economy contracted sharply when Covid-19 hit, it’s gradually been improving, and some groups are doing much better than others. The stock market has been stellar; the landscape for Black workers, not so much. But the data can be messy, we’re in an unprecedented situation, and nobody is entirely sure what’s going on.

I’ve talked to a lot of economists, but I’ve also talked to a lot of regular people, and what they say and experience are often things that would never show up in the data. A Dollar Tree worker who was using a Kindle for a phone. An unemployed massage therapist who was showering less to save money. A Target associate who was dumbfounded that shoppers were suddenly desperate for yeast. Walgreens workers who laughed at the company’s mid-pandemic move to change the dress code, “Cuz who wants extra money over jeans days, right?” one joked on Reddit.

It’s good for everyone when the economy is good. After the Great Recession, a strong macroeconomy did start to help many people. “Looking at household finances, we finally saw some of the traditionally low-wealth groups start to build some wealth after some terrible years following the financial crisis,” Dynan said. This recovery also appears to be different from the one following that last recession, which was stubbornly slow. It could be more inclusive, depending on the policy choices ahead and how the pandemic and the response to it continue to play out. In many places, though, it will be all but invisible.

Norris and her husband are trying to figure out a way for her to go to work. She says she’ll take “whatever job can get me out of the house first,” though she is hoping that the job offers some help with child care. What she needs isn’t an economic recovery — she needs an economic future that is better.

Emily Stewart is a senior reporter for Vox covering the intersection of business, politics, and the economy.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), center, has in the past blocked majority Democratic-backed legislation.

Beyond Obamacare, Democrats also want to add new dental benefits to Medicare. It’s a particular priority for Sen. Bernie Sanders, who chairs the powerful budget committee in the Senate.

Right now, the traditional program doesn’t cover those benefits; Medicare Advantage, a growing private alternative, usually does. As a result, nearly half of Medicare beneficiaries (47 percent, 23.6 million people) don’t have dental coverage and about half have not seen a dentist in more than a year.

The budget reconciliation bill would also, as currently written, add vision and hearing benefits for Medicare’s beneficiaries. This would make a program that has a lot of gaps more comprehensive. There has also been speculation that these proposals would be a political boon to Democrats by extending new benefits to a reliable voting bloc.

But all of these proposals cost money. Dental, vision, and hearing, for example, could cost around $350 billion over 10 years, depending on when exactly benefits are set to kick in.

That is why the prescription drug savings are important for the legislation’s financing. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated a previous iteration of what Democrats are proposing in the reconciliation bill would have saved Medicare more than $450 billion over 10 years.

Enough to cover new Medicare dental and vision benefits — and then some.

The Democrats’ prescription drug plan is in trouble

The plan saves a lot of money because Democrats are proposing significant changes for prescription drugs, proposals they have been running on in campaigns for years now.

The bill includes a plan for Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies that would set a ceiling for what Medicare would pay for certain medications: no higher than 120 percent of what several other wealthy countries pay. Pharmaceutical companies that did not participate in the negotiations would be subject to a severe excise tax.

The proposal is not just an accounting mechanism. Affording prescription drugs is a problem for a lot of Americans. As of 2016, Medicare beneficiaries spent $650 per year on average out of pocket on prescription drugs, with people who have serious conditions spending significantly more, and there is no cap on what patients can be asked to pay for drugs if they require a lot of them.

Medicare beneficiaries would see premiums for their Part D plan fall by 10 to 15 percent under such a plan, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate. The new lower prices would also be available to private insurers, which could lower premiums for those plans too.

But those savings come out of the drug industry’s pocket, and so drug makers strongly oppose such a plan. They warn that the spending cuts would lead to less investment in research and development to find innovative drugs. Independent analysts like the Congressional Budget Office agree that fewer drugs would likely be approved as a result of the Democratic plan but also make clear there is a lot of uncertainty in these projections.

Regardless, the drug industry’s opposition has found receptive ears in Congress. Reps. Scott Peters (D-CA), Kurt Schrader (D-OR), and Kathleen Rice (D-NY) voted against the drug plan in the Energy and Commerce hearing. Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) voiced concerns in the Ways and Means Committee and opposed the final product. Those four alone would be enough to sink the proposal on the House floor.

For now, the prescription drug reforms are still in the bill and the moderates have said they’re interested in finding a compromise. The story isn’t over yet. But it may be a similar situation in the Senate, where Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) reportedly told the White House she wasn’t comfortable with the plan as written either. In that chamber, one senator could stop the reconciliation bill.

That is the riddle congressional leaders and the Biden White House have to solve in the coming weeks and months — in the face of fierce industry opposition and with the fate of their health care agenda, with serious consequences for American patients, hanging in the balance.

Spread Creek near Moran, Wyoming, where law enforcement authorities found a body on September 19.

Petito, a former pharmacy technician, met Laundrie at Bayport- Blue Point High School on Long Island. The couple began traveling around the western US in a small van in June, chronicling their journey on Petito’s Instagram account using the popular hashtag #VanLife. The tag unites nomadic communities around the globe — wanderers who live out of their vans while documenting their travels on social media. (Petito also has a YouTube page, though the account has just one video from the trip.)

In their social media content, the couple looked as though they were enjoying a blissful summer road trip and camping out under the stars. But in late August, Petito’s regular social media updates stopped abruptly and her family lost communication with her — and on September 1, Laundrie returned to his family’s home in North Port, Florida, alone.

Petito’s family reported her missing on September 11, and the ensuing search to find her garnered widespread public and media attention. Amateur internet detectives publicized her case over the last week, leading to an unusually intense nationwide search that focused primarily on the vast stretches of wilderness between Petito’s last known whereabouts, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton National Park, where she and Laundrie were believed to have been heading before his sudden return to Florida.

As interest in the case grew and spread, so did the flood of information that emerged about Petito and Laundrie’s relationship, along with a deluge of tips from people who had learned about the case online. Although other missing persons cases have gotten significant public and media attention well after the fact, Petito’s case seemed to be unfolding in real time, with an unprecedented number of eyes on the ground trying to locate her.

Among the many tips that came in to authorities was one that may have been crucial: A couple driving through Grand Teton National Park on August 27 — two days after Petito’s mother last spoke to her — captured video footage of a van quickly identified as that of Petito and Laundrie. The footage provided a major clue that may have helped authorities narrow down a search area that otherwise would have been impossibly large.

On September 18, news broke that Laundrie had apparently fled police and gone on the run. The next day, the FBI announced that authorities had located a body “consistent with the description of” Petito, reportedly very close to the location in Grand Teton where her van had been caught on video in August before Laundrie drove it home alone. Authorities continued to search for Laundrie, who remained missing as of Tuesday.

Police body cam footage of Petito and Laundrie prompted viral discussions about the case

On September 16, authorities from the Grand County Sheriff’s Office in Moab, Utah, released over an hour of body cam footage of police responding to a 911 call in Moab on August 12. (The 911 call was later released on September 20.)

The 911 caller reported seeing a man, later identified as Laundrie, slapping a woman repeatedly, as well as chasing her down and hitting her. The caller was extremely concerned for the safety of the woman, later identified as Petito, and described the scene as a “domestic dispute.”

As seen in the body cam footage, police who responded to the incident worked to separate the couple and successfully convinced them to spend the night apart. But in one portion of the video, which has since been heavily criticized by the public, the officers seemed to bond with Laundrie, at one point explicitly joking with him about histrionic women and identifying him as “the victim.” They ultimately took no further action, reporting that “insufficient evidence existed to justify criminal charges.”

The footage spread across social media, showing up in Instagram stories and TikToks where every second was duly analyzed for clues to the couple’s relationship and Petito’s mental state leading up to her disappearance. The attention helped boost broader public awareness of Petito’s case, and made an already viral sensation even bigger. The social media response to the body cam footage was threefold, with users joining in a discussion about the warning signs of toxic abuse, gaslighting, and coercive control that the cops apparently missed. Still others argued that the discussion was missing the real point: that we should be teaching boys and men not to abuse women.

Some have used Petito’s case to discuss the phenomenon of “missing white woman syndrome,” in which young, white women — particularly middle- and upper-class white women — receive lots of media attention and publicity when they go missing, compared with less publicized cases of poorer, nonwhite women who vanish.

Another common adjacent topic within the true crime community is the phenomenon of “missing and murdered Indigenous women,” a collective term created to emphasize the highly marginalized status of these victims. Among them are more than 700 missing Indigenous people, mostly girls and women, who have vanished over the past decade in Wyoming, the same state where the body matching Petito’s description was recovered.

The fact that this high number of victims isn’t more widely known has been an unsettling part of the Petito case, and the ensuing discussion has drawn attention to other missing persons cases and murders, including the double homicide of newly married couple Crystal Turner and Kylen Schulte just days before Petito was last spotted in Moab. That case is so far unsolved and is apparently unrelated to Petito’s disappearance.

While most true crime communities gather on localized internet forums or subreddits like r/UnresolvedMysteries, the Petito case is notable for its multiplatform spread, especially across TikTok, where many burgeoning web sleuths flooded the site with updates and speculation about the case. Other amateur investigators built on one another’s information, tried to create working timelines based on eyewitness sightings, and shared detailed photos of both Laundrie and Petito for identification purposes, leading to backlash and satirical responses about the true crime community’s overreach:

@bloodbathandbeyond

que up the spooky music guys we got another update #truecrime #psa

♬ original sound - Chaotic Stupid

As helpful as some of this information seems to have been in finding Petito, much of it was a deterrent. The same online activity that turned the case into a media sensation has also prompted ongoing discussion about whether internet sleuthing is ultimately a help or a hindrance.

This case may be unusual, but it’s part of an online sleuthing trend

Over the past two decades, missing persons cases have slowly become a major staple of internet “web sleuthing,” where amateur online detectives congregate and try to solve cases or assist in police investigations. If there is one case associated with web sleuthing’s rise, it’s arguably that of college student Maura Murray, who went missing in New Hampshire in 2004.

Murray’s disappearance slowly became a subsequent true crime phenomenon, as more people learned about her disappearance and became curious about her case. Though Murray has not been found, her case is still a touchstone for viral true crime cases in which entire communities join together in sustained efforts to solve the mystery.

Many similar incidents have become major cases for web sleuths, from viral missing persons cases (Lauren Spierer, Asha Degree, Brian Shaffer, Brandon Lawson, and countless others) to the infamous Delphi murders in 2017. While each of these cases has attracted plenty of social media attention, they don’t seem to have garnered the same intense interest that the Petito case has received in a relatively short period.

Part of the urgency around Petito’s disappearance stemmed from the possibility that she was lost alone in a vast wilderness and in need of help. Petito’s family “implore[d] Brian to come forward and at least tell us if we are looking in the right area” in the early stages of the investigation. But given that many missing persons cases have involved people in similar potential danger that receives very little attention, that’s likely not the only factor involved.

Another aspect concerned the transparency of the event and Petito’s social media presence. Like the 2018 murders of Shanann Watts, her two daughters, and her unborn son, Petito’s case had an undeniable hook due to her use of social media to present a carefully curated, positive image of her life, one that turned out to be an illusion. In fact, some people have been quick to draw comparisons between Brian Laundrie and Chris Watts, who appeared to be an attentive husband and partner, until he wasn’t. (Chris Watts later pleaded guilty to murdering Shanann and her children.)

Petito’s social media presence drove other users’ interest in the case, but much of the information coming from social media was predictably confusing or misleading. Many social media users claimed to have seen the couple in a variety of disparate locations, while others — including a couple who said they gave him a ride and a chef who thought he talked to him — claimed to have interacted with Laundrie while he was alone.

Possible witnesses also claimed to have seen Laundrie walking near his house on September 17, days after his parents said they had last seen him. That same night, a large public protest took place outside the Laundrie family home, where attendees called Petito “America’s daughter” as police pleaded for them to disperse. The protest was livestreamed.

It’s unusual for a missing persons case to generate so much emotional intensity that it results in not only the more typical candlelight vigils but also an outright protest against a person of interest. And as alarming as that might be, the situation continues to get thornier; a conspiracy theory has surfaced claiming that Laundrie is actually not in his early 20s, though his yearbook photos have reportedly confirmed he is, and Laundrie “age truthers” seem to be spreading the debunked theory wherever they can. This is the kind of internet activity that can hamstring a police investigation, especially in a case receiving so much media attention.

Petito’s case has generated disinformation and misinformation, but it also seems to have benefited from the millions of eyes scouring the countryside for Petito. Without the uncovered footage of her van parked on the side of the road in August, it ostensibly would have been difficult to pinpoint a reasonable search area. And had news of Petito’s disappearance not been so widespread, the couple who shot the footage might never have noticed the evidence they had inadvertently captured.

This is the kind of thing that changes the role of internet sleuthing. Some have accused true crime sleuths of capitalizing on cases for clout, overriding the wishes of victims’ families, and treating tragedies as public spectacles, all while potentially hampering investigations. (“We’re not characters in a story,” Maura Murray’s sister Julie Murray commented recently when the case once again made headlines following the discovery of human remains near where Maura went missing.)

Yet in the years since web sleuthing first began — arguably around the time the Websleuths forum was created in 1999 — this same brand of amateur sleuthing has played a major role in solving, or helping to solve, numerous crimes and missing persons cases. Among these sleuths are trained forensic artists who have assisted police in successfully identifying John and Jane Does around the globe. In recent years, “crowdsolving” has been floated by some investigators as a positive collective resource.

Just as the capture of the Golden State Killer served as a major tipping point for the use of ancestry websites and familial DNA in criminal cases, Petito’s case could become the tipping point for reframing web sleuthing, often seen as an obstruction and a nuisance in solving cases, as a potentially crucial public resource waiting to be used in similar cases in the future. Even now, other viral true crimes, most notably the labyrinthine saga of the Murdaugh family in South Carolina, are vying for the public’s attention and attracting new eyes to the case.

With Laundrie still missing — the search for him has focused on wetlands in southern Florida, as well as his family home — this case isn’t over yet. What remains to be seen is what role, if any, the internet will play in its conclusion.

Correction, September 21: An earlier version of this article misstated a connection between false internet rumors about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and a man’s death by suicide.

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