Seth Rich was shot early on Sunday, July 10, 2016, not far from his apartment in northwest Washington, DC. In their grief and exhaustion, Seth’s family bleakly joked that, upon dying, he got an immediate promotion.

Seth was twenty-seven years old, just starting a promising career at the Democratic National Committee as voter-expansion data director. He was on his way home at around 4 a.m. when he was hit by gunfire. He’d last been seen at 1:30 at a bar a forty-minute walk from his apartment. Phone records show that he called his girlfriend at around 2 a.m., and they spoke for more than two hours before he hung up abruptly. Police on patrol in the neighborhood, responding to the sound of gunshots, found Seth alive and breathing and discovered evidence of a struggle, including damage to his watch and bruises on his hands and face. Seth died later that day at an area hospital. Police told his family that they suspected a botched robbery, but nothing was taken from him, including his wallet. The perpetrator was never caught. It took less than thirty-six hours after Seth died for the situation to go from simply tragic to something much darker and more bizarre.

The story of Seth Rich—the way his murder became worldwide news, a set of interlocking accusations, suspicions, and purported schemes—illustrates a few things: One is the role of conspiracy entrepreneurs, those people who make a living and a name for themselves hawking speculation about Rich’s death and Hillary Clinton’s health and John Podesta’s pizza habits. A lot of people used Rich’s death for commercial ends, peddling a particular conspiracy narrative about how he died to boost their own fame, enhance their public profiles, and get themselves on TV, all of which they did quite successfully.

More important, Rich’s death became a particular and gruesome illustration of the political usefulness of conspiracy theories in America. For a variety of reasons, Trump supporters—and quite possibly the president himself—were deeply invested in promoting their own version of how Rich died. His death shows the way in which self-interested political actors can lift a conspiracy theory out of obscurity and work to legitimize it, inspiring further “investigation” into a bogus idea. They use the results of that investigation to push the idea even farther, and what results is an endless feedback loop that creates an alternate reality.

The conspiracy entrepreneurs are by now well known to us. But what about the people who buy the information they’re selling? What do these consumers choose to do with their newfound knowledge? In the New York Times, writer Jonathan Mahler dubbed the activity of serious conspiracy consumers as “not quite investigating” but “self-investigating.” (The phrase comes from Pizzagate gunman Edgar Welch himself; not long after he was handcuffed and pinned to the pavement, he told police he’d come to Comet Ping Pong to “self-investigate” the Pizzagate allegations. In a jailhouse interview with the Times, a depressed and exhausted Welch said the same thing in a different way: he had gone there to “shine some light.”) The Seth Rich story, an unsolved murder in the heart of DC, with its connections to the Democratic Party and a heated election, was tailor-made for the self-investigators and the people who profit from them.

“It had to have started on Sunday,” the same day Seth was killed, his brother Aaron Rich told me almost a year later. When Seth died, Aaron’s wife was out of town, and so his aunt and uncle and then a cavalcade of friends came to sit with him in Denver, where he lived. They followed the news in a daze.

“We’re watching these stories come out, and it starts out as ‘DNC staffer killed,’” Aaron said, remembering the news headlines. “Then it becomes ‘DNC official,’ then ‘top DNC official.’ We’re watching this progress as he’s moving up the ranks in the DNC in each article.” Aaron thought bitterly that by the end of the day, Seth would be Hillary Clinton’s running mate.

The next day, a friend looked on Reddit and told Aaron with alarm that Seth’s death was the subject of speculation on a long thread. He said it was split about 50 percent condolences and 50 percent conspiracies, Aaron remembered. A little later, as the thread stretched to three pages, the balance had shifted all the way over to one side. The thread was reposted on several subreddits, including r/conspiracy and r/the_Donald, a place where alt-right Trump supporters hang out to swap conspiracies as well as racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic memes. One r/conspiracy thread was titled “Young DNC voter database employee shot and killed with two shots to his back. Nothing was taken, no witnesses. He had allegedly talked about Hillary Clinton trying to buy voting machine companies with money and threats before.” It linked to a New York Daily News story that accurately reported on Rich’s death and didn’t contain a word about him supposedly speaking about Clinton.

The thread garnered hundreds of comments and thousands of upvotes, even as numerous commenters noted the discrepancy and labeled it, in one person’s words, “ridiculous speculative bullshit.” At some point, Reddit moderators archived the thread, preventing anyone new from commenting, and flagged it as “misleading.”

But the skeleton of a theory was there, in the suggestion that Rich’s death was suspiciously and inextricably linked to Clinton. Other comments implied that perhaps Rich had been a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter or even—absurdly—a disaffected Trump fan who somehow found himself working for the DNC. Didn’t it make sense that Clinton would stop at nothing to silence him? After all, someone noted, echoing dozens of others, “this is not the first person who has died with suspicious Clinton ties.”

The whole thing struck Aaron Rich and his family as “insane.” “Just the amount of loose connections people were pulling together, based on the fact that he worked at the DNC and his LinkedIn profile,” he said. “It wasn’t just a random wrong-place, wrong-time thing to them.” Eventually, Rich’s parents stated that Seth had just accepted a job with the Clinton campaign before he died, making it even less likely that he would be a leaker or the target of a Clintonian contract killing.

The family tried at first to cope with it all through “morbid humor,” Aaron recalled. “We were joking that Seth would be happy if he envisioned a parade of people, his friends and family on one side of the street and conspiracy theorists on the other.” But on July 13, three days after Seth died, the conspiracy theories started to coalesce into a more coherent story when a site called WhatDoesItMean.com claimed that he had been on his way to testify against Clinton before the FBI when he died. (Again, Rich was shot at around 4 a.m., and he was on his way home from a bar.)

WhatDoesItMean is almost indescribably weird. Visually, it’s a chaotic riot of hyperlinks, Masonic symbols, and poorly photoshopped pictures. Textually, it contains the most farfetched allegations you can possibly think of—“FACEBOOK DECLARES ITSELF A RELIGION”—sitting next to perfectly sober aggregated headlines about world news. WhatDoesItMean claims to be authored by the “Sisters of Sorcha Faal,” a purported ancient Christian order of nuns; archived versions of the site from 2004 identify its author as someone named David Booth, an “internationally known psychic, researcher, and author.”

The site’s most outlandish information is often attributed to “a Foreign Intelligence Service Report circulating in the Kremlin,” which was also cited as the source for its Seth Rich information. (The Foreign Intelligence Service is a real entity, Russia’s intelligence service for matters outside the country, although the site’s purported reports often don’t seem to show up anywhere besides WhatDoesItMean.)

The site’s Seth Rich story had a special twist: the FBI agents Seth was on his way to meet were really hit men working for Clinton. And although WhatDoesItMean seems like obvious and crazed nonsense to most people, it gave the true believers on Reddit a sober conceptual framework on which to hang their Clinton body count, a story citing an official-sounding source. People shared the posts without adhering to basic fact-checking standards or noting the site’s disclaimer, which reads, “Some events depicted in certain articles on this website are fictitious and any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental. Some other articles may be based on actual events but which in certain cases incidents, characters and timelines have been changed for dramatic purposes. Certain characters may be composites, or entirely fictitious.”

It’s possible that the Seth Rich story would have stayed permanently in the distant, verdant jungles of the wildest conspiracy sites. To go truly viral, conspiracies need a famous name or a big media outlet as an accelerant, the connective tissue that connects the fringe with the power players, the obscure with the mainstream. Things began to feel “fully fucked up,” as Aaron put it, a month later, when out of the blue Julian Assange of WikiLeaks began to imply that he knew something about Seth’s death. Assange was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he had received asylum when he gave an interview to a Dutch TV station. In the interview, he strongly suggested that Rich had been a mole for WikiLeaks, giving them hacked emails from the DNC and John Podesta that appeared on the site soon after Rich had been killed.

“Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material, and often very significant risks,” he told his interviewer. “There’s a 27-year-old that works for the DNC who was shot in the back, murdered, just a few weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was walking down the streets in Washington.” WikiLeaks then offered a $20,000 reward for information on Rich’s murder without confirming or denying that he was their source but hinting at it at every opportunity.

It is more likely, according to the American intelligence community, that WikiLeaks received the hacked emails from a Russian-backed Romanian hacking group going by the alias Guccifer 2.0. But the Rich story was instantly convenient for Assange, letting him distance himself from the accusation that WikiLeaks was little more than a conduit for damaging Russian information about the Democrats and Clinton. Over time, WikiLeaks’ Twitter account found reason to comment on every tiny development in the Rich case, although its only official statement on the matter read, “As a matter of policy, we do not confirm or deny whether any person has ever been a source for WikiLeaks.” The organization “treats threats toward any suspected source of WikiLeaks with extreme gravity,” the statement continued. “This should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source to Wikileaks or to imply that his murder is connected to our publications.”

Until this point, the Rich family had readily spoken to the media, mostly local DC outlets, emphasizing their desire to find any information that might help solve Seth’s murder. That changed after Assange’s involvement. “When WikiLeaks happened, we realized we would get completely different kinds of questions and that it would be a whole new world,” Aaron said.

Sensing that they were out of their depth, the family asked Seth’s friends if someone was available to help field media requests. Brad Bauman, the former executive director of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who had represented various progressive and Democratic causes, volunteered to work with the family for free. WikiLeaks immediately attacked him as “Seth Rich’s new ‘family spokesman,’” with heavy sarcastic emphasis. Reddit detectives also smelled a rat. “The Clintons have gotten to Seth Rich’s parents (Joel and Mary) and have completely silenced them,” one wrote on r/Conspiracy. “They thought we’d been assigned a handler to keep us quiet,” Aaron said dryly.

In just a few short weeks, the Rich family had been forced to grieve the loss of their son and brother while simultaneously processing a bizarre new reality. Seth—whom they knew as goofy, sweet, and talkative—was now at the center of any number of sinister schemes, and everything they themselves did looked suspicious. Then came the hucksters. Before long, private “investigators” and “journalists” of every stripe emerged from the woodwork with offers of help. One Republican lobbyist, Jack Burkman, put up a $130,000 reward for information on the case, papering the neighborhoods near where Rich died with posters reading, “Do you know who killed Seth Rich?”

Before the Rich case, Burkman was best known for claiming in 2014 that he was working on legislation that would “ban” openly gay players in the NFL—legislation that never actually materialized—and for working on both pro- and anti-Trump initiatives during the election. He wasn’t habitually known as a conspiracy theorist, but it soon became clear that he was interested in promoting a baseless claim that Rich was killed by the Russian government, which he insisted on airing on several local news programs. “Somebody whacked him,” he told a Mother Jones reporter. At one point, Burkman announced his curious intention to solve Rich’s murder by staging a public reenactment of it with six to ten actors, something he eventually carried out on the street where Rich died, as Rich’s disgusted neighbors clustered to watch.

For Aaron and the Rich family, the involvement of people like Burkman was the point at which it became hard to determine who sincerely wanted to help, who might have a real tip, and who was peddling self-interested, publicity-hungry snake oil. “We want to trust everyone and we can’t,” Aaron said at the time. The Riches had to accept that some people might have been offering a lifeline, but the family could not “necessarily trust them enough to take it anymore.”

The Rich family was right to be wary, as the strange moths flitting around the morbid light of Seth Rich’s death got a little more numerous over the next year. They included a former Playboy model named Robbin Young, who claimed to be in contact with Guccifer 2.0, purportedly a lone Romanian hacker (but who was, as US intelligence said, much more likely to be a Russian-backed hacking group). Young said that she and Guccifer 2.0 had long conversations about Seth Rich, and she published the purported chat logs (to which WikiLeaks helpfully tweeted a link). Young did not seem aware that she probably wasn’t speaking to who she thought: in an interview with Vice, it became clear that her Mr. 2.0 did not speak Romanian, which seems like a real hitch for someone believed to be from Romania. At some point, Young decided she was at the white-hot center of something very dangerous, tweeting that the FBI wanted to talk to her and imploring her followers to avenge her if she died or disappeared.

Alt-right blogger Mike Cernovich got involved, too, as did Jack Posobiec, a slightly lesser-known ideological traveler. Posobiec shot to Twitter mega-stardom when he started working for a group called Citizens for Trump, which brought him into contact with the campaign. He had actively trafficked in hoaxes and disinformation from the election onward, at one point self-investigating Comet Ping Pong, that is, getting kicked out of the restaurant for videotaping himself harassing and interrogating staffers. Posobiec particularly latched onto the Rich case, promoting a fake story that the DC police chief had resigned and taken a job with the NFL as a cushy payoff for covering up the details of Seth’s murder. In May 2017, he made it into an Oval Office group photo op and tried to yell a question about the case at Donald Trump.

A conspiracy that Cernovich and Posobiec promote will spread far and fast among their fanbase of alt-righters and Trump Reddit trolls. And the new hucksters joined with the old: the Rich stories were also spread by Roger Stone, who’s made political hay for decades out of claiming the Clintons orchestrate the murders of their political opponents. “Clinton body count” is Stone’s term, and he’s promoted one of the oldest Clinton conspiracies, that White House staffer Vince Foster, who died by suicide in 1993, was killed by the Clintons to cover up a corruption scandal. (These days, Stone’s allegation seems to be that Foster killed himself but the Clintons “moved the body.”) Thus, Seth Rich’s death joined a towering mountain of moldering garbage pushed by some of the worst people ever to open a Twitter account.

It’s not an accident that interest in Seth Rich’s death accelerated in right-wing news outlets in the spring of 2017. They were spurred by the biggest conspiracy megaphone there is: Fox News, specifically Sean Hannity, the network’s biggest Trump defender. We have some reason to believe the White House, or possibly Trump himself, was invested in promoting the Seth Rich murder story, both as an indirect way of rallying his base and to distract from a new problem: in May that year, the Department of Justice appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to lead a special investigation into “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”

Sean Hannity’s wholesale fall into Seth Rich trutherism began with Rod Wheeler, another private investigator who briefly worked for the family. (He’s also a semifrequent Fox News contributor, who once memorably claimed that gangs of lesbians were stalking the streets, recruiting children.) In a story on Fox 5, a local DC affiliate, Wheeler claimed that he had a source at the FBI who could prove Rich communicated with WikiLeaks. Fox News then ran its own version of the story nationally, which exploded in a spray of bullshit across every right-wing outlet there is.