| Jared Leisek carved a lucrative niche in the YouTube sleuthing community. Then the sleuths came for him.  Illustration by Clément Thoby Last August, the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old named Kiely Rodni from Truckee, California, became the latest story of its kind to captivate the Internet’s horde of true-crime obsessives. Yet, despite all the attention, and roughly twenty thousand hours of searching by law-enforcement agencies, no sign of Rodni had turned up two weeks after she had first gone missing. Then a group called Adventures with Purpose came to town, led by an amateur diver named Jared Leisek, and discovered Rodni’s car, with her body inside it, at the bottom of a local reservoir. The group announced that they’d made the discovery after less than an hour on the water. Exploits such as these have earned Leisek millions of followers on YouTube, who eagerly watch along as he travels the country, seeking to solve cold cases by plumbing the dark depths below the water’s surface. But as Rachel Monroe writes in a fascinating investigation in this week’s issue, while Leisek rose to fame, he and his team were accused of taking dangerous risks in the field and furthering conspiracy theories online. And then far more serious allegations against Leisek emerged. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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