But Wheeler backtracked almost immediately. He vaguely told Fox 5 there had been a “miscommunication,” as it announced on May 17, and that he didn’t actually have any such proof. In a defamation and discrimination lawsuit he later filed against Fox, he argued that he never said any of the quotes attributed to him. Fox 5 retracted its story within two days, but it took national Fox News a full week to issue its own weak-kneed retraction, which said only that the story “was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.”

In that week, Hannity devoted an increasing amount of time to Rich conspiracies. Fox personalities Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs also gave airtime to the Rich case, but Hannity was by far the most fervent. He even announced plans to interview Kim Dotcom, an eccentric Internet maven who lives in New Zealand (and who was resisting extradition to the United States, where he was wanted on charges of fraud and racketeering), after Dotcom dubiously claimed that he had known Rich was the source of the WikiLeaks emails all along. Hannity was giddy. “Stay tuned,” he tweeted. “Public invitation Kim Dotcom to be a guest on radio and TV. #GameChanger Buckle up destroy Trump media. Sheep that u all are!!!”

A day after Hannity’s invite to Dotcom, Mary and Joel Rich published a raw editorial in the Washington Post. “Seth’s death has been turned into a political football,” they wrote. “Every day we wake up to new headlines, new lies, new factual errors, new people approaching us to take advantage of us and Seth’s legacy. It just won’t stop.”

Why would it not stop? Why the mounting Seth Rich fervor? A possible explanation came via Wheeler’s lawsuit against Fox News, in which he said that the White House had encouraged him to push the Seth Rich conspiracy theories to draw attention away from the administration’s alleged Russian collusion. Wheeler claimed that he had been paid by a wealthy Trump supporter, Ed Butowsky, who cooked up a plot with the administration and Fox News to “help put to bed speculation that President Trump colluded with Russia in an attempt to influence the outcome of the presidential election.”

According to Wheeler’s suit, Butowsky had claimed that Trump was eagerly awaiting the Rich story, texting Wheeler, “Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article,” allegedly referring to the Fox News national story. “He wants the article out immediately. It’s now all up to you. But don’t feel the pressure.” The suit noted that Butowsky and Wheeler had met with the press secretary, Sean Spicer, to apprise him of the Rich story. That was, staggeringly, true, confirmed by Spicer, showing a startling level of cooperation between Fox and the White House. Spicer told NPR that Butowsky and Wheeler merely briefed him on the progress of the story: “It had nothing to do with advancing the president’s domestic agenda—and there was no agenda.” (Butowsky, meanwhile, claimed to NPR that he had been “joking” in his text to Wheeler.)

Other Trump media supporters also weren’t particularly interested in the accuracy of Fox 5’s report. Between May and June 2017, conservative outlet Breitbart ran at least twelve articles about Rich’s death, many of them heavily implying that it was suspicious, and castigated “left-wing media” like CNN and the New York Times for ignoring the story in favor of “conspiracy articles about Russian hacking.” That line of thought was echoed by former Speaker of the House and Trump loyalist Newt Gingrich, who attacked the focus on the Russian collusion allegations. “We have this very strange story now of this young man who worked for the Democratic National Committee and who was apparently assassinated at 4 in the morning,” Gingrich declared, “having given WikiLeaks 53,000 emails and 17,000 attachments. Nobody is investigating that. And what does that tell you about what was going on? Because, it turns out, it wasn’t the Russians. It was this young guy who, I suspect, was disgusted by the corruption of the Democratic National Committee. He’s been killed, and apparently nothing serious has been done to investigate his murder.”

The Russian embassy in London—another political entity eager to distract from any potential Russian hacking—got in on the action, too. “WikiLeaks informer Seth Rich murdered in US,” the embassy’s verified Twitter account tweeted. “But MSM was so busy accusing Russian hackers to take notice.”

The reason that Trump’s media supporters clung so tightly to the Rich case was not just for its political value, but because it worked on some sector of the public. Outrage over the murder served as a useful focal point to organize a Trump base, a straightforward alternate story that could be picked up and rallied around: a brave truth-teller speaking out against DNC corruption was murdered. We can see the cycle clearly at work: the speculations and insinuations of conspiracy peddlers were amplified until they made their way into the mainstream, first via Julian Assange, then Fox News. That attention gave the conspiracy peddlers more grist for their various mills, which in turn gave the self-investigators already sniffing around the Rich story even more material and motivation to continue.

The effect on the public was visible: as the story spread aloft on the wings of smaller conspiracy sites and Fox, every word was carried further by a pliant mob of followers, who tweeted under the hashtag #WhoKilledSethRich and followed each development on Reddit and other message boards. Those folks were neither swayed or convinced by, or even particularly empathetic to, the Rich family. After all, who could say if they were really the ones pleading for mercy or whether a nefarious entity was working their mouths like they were compliant Muppets?

Caitlin Johnstone, a popular independent writer who mostly releases her work on the self-publishing site Medium, embodied the sentiments of the self-appointed Rich detectives. “Speaking for myself I am not pushing any political agenda at all by reporting on the Seth Rich case,” she wrote. “I’m pushing the prevention of a world-ending nuclear holocaust.” Johnstone argued that nothing less than the fate of the world depended on the story. “If Rich was the DNC leaker,” she added, “the life of every single living organism on earth may depend upon the public gaining access to that knowledge. This is infinitely more important than one family’s feelings about American public discourse.”

The chaos all this unleashed on the Rich family is indescribable: the dubious tips and offers of “help” soon turned to vitriol when the family didn’t behave in the desired way. On his radio show Roger Stone accused Seth Rich’s parents of engaging in “suspicious” behavior and told the Miami New Times that the family didn’t have a right to grieve in private. “Their right to privacy is important, but not as important as the public’s right to the truth,” he said. “Frankly, at this point, the parents should be charged with obstruction.” In July, he tweeted a suggestion that they’d been paid off and didn’t want to solve their son’s murder.

Cernovich and Stone and Posobiec and even Johnstone, then, were the conspiracy entrepreneurs peddling theories to a receptive audience on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and Medium. It’s an extremely canny publicity tactic, a way for such people to adeptly leap from one issue to another, to whatever happens to be capturing the public’s attention at any moment. Right-wing conspiracies helped Cernovich transition away from the no-longer-fashionable world of men’s rights and juice peddling; they brought Posobiec out of TV-recap obscurity; and they gave Roger Stone the constant negative attention he requires in order to stay alive.

But the self-investigators are just as important, since these theories would not serve the entrepreneurs’ purpose if there were no groups of people who were swayed by them. What really motivates the self-investigators? Not many people set out intending to harass a grieving family or add to their pain. Viewed more charitably, self-investigators seem to find meaning, excitement, and purpose in banding together online to solve tantalizing mysteries and cover-ups. For those reasons, they’re the bread and butter of conspiracy entrepreneurs.

“Millions of people … are abandoning traditional sources of information, from the government to the institutional media, in favor of a D.I.Y. approach to fact-finding,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in the New York Times, referring to Pizzagate gunman Edgar Welch. In my travels through the far reaches of conspiracy America I, too, met countless people who told me they had uncovered the truth about Seth Rich or Pizzagate or September 11 by doing their “own research,” as virtually every person put it. Tellingly, nobody pointed to Mike Cernovich, YouTube, Reddit, or sites like WhatDoesItMean as their source. Instead they cite “primary documents” or more vaguely “a variety of sources.”

Online self-investigation has roots as deep as the Internet. It arguably began as blogs became more popular at the turn of the century—Blogger was created in 1999 and WordPress in 2003—and took off in 2005 with the founding of YouTube. In Real Enemies, Kathryn Olmsted points out that a variety of 9/11-oriented websites popped up in 2002, dedicating themselves to questioning the real story and advancing the truth movement.

The purpose of the 9/11 truth movement—and virtually every “research community” that’s sprung up since—isn’t necessarily to advance a complete, coherent, agreed-upon alternate narrative about what happened. As Olmsted notes, many people simply “contented themselves with pointing out the weaknesses of the official story.” Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, once again.

That certainly happened with Pizzagate, where the number of alternate theories about what really took place reached a dizzying multitude. The Seth Rich story was slightly more streamlined—most of the online investigators seem to agree that he was killed by someone affiliated with the Clintons—but still had a number of competing factions, each with its own narrative and claims to have done the most exhaustive research. And the DNC and Podesta leaks proved invaluable for aspiring self-investigators, providing an actual third-party source, albeit not one that proved the existence of a global sex ring or the murder of a DNC staffer by a crazed presidential candidate. But that’s the thing about self-investigation: it only confirms what the investigator thinks she already knows. It’s a closed loop, confined to the Internet and to ideas that the investigator finds believable or plausible from the outset.

Mahler likened the phenomenon to a washing machine: “Proceeding from the assumption that the so-called experts are not to be trusted, self-investigators are pushed and pulled by the churn of memes and social media, an endless loop of echoes, reflections and intentional lies,” he wrote. “With only themselves and their appetites as a guide, they bypass any information that doesn’t suit their predisposition and worldview. The self-investigator’s media diet is like an endless breakfast buffet, only without the guilt: Take what you want, leave what you don’t.”

This seems like an Internet-specific phenomenon, but not everyone agrees. “I’m generally skeptical of claims that say the Internet has changed conspiracy theorizing,” Joseph Uscinski, coauthor of American Conspiracy Theories, maintained. “I mean, they were burning women at the stake four hundred years ago, long before the Internet. Facebook didn’t tell them to do it.” He points out, too, that the number of people who visit conspiracy sites is far lower than those who visit non-conspiratorial, traditional news sites. “There’s tons of everything on the Internet,” he said. “When I put in the words ‘duck confit recipe,’ I get half a million recipes. But nobody’s racing home to cook duck confit. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean anyone cares. The things people look at are things they’re predisposed to look at.”

Uscinski’s position doesn’t take into account the role of social media, however. Through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, more and more people who might not be predisposed to reading about the Clinton body count or pedophiles in the pizza parlor will nevertheless run across that content. More important, Facebook and Twitter have a way of flattening information, making every source look the same or appear equally plausible. And YouTube has been criticized for the way its algorithm promotes conspiracy videos, pushing them into viewers’ suggested items to watch next.

That has been a long-standing issue with recent, halfhearted fixes. Facebook rolled out a tag flagging misleading news sources several months after the election and even then only in response to criticism that hoaxes had been allowed to flourish unchecked. YouTube said it would add Wikipedia links to videos touching on “contested” topics, a strangely half-formed proposal that was announced without telling Wikipedia about it. (I have never personally seen a YouTube video with a Wikipedia link attached; by the summer of 2018, though, a few search terms, like “Sandy Hook hoax,” would show a link to an encyclopedia article about the shooting at the top of the search page. Other search terms, such as “9/11 inside job,” did not trigger a similar result.)

Twitter had no particular mechanism for flagging or questioning fake information. At one point, to widespread outrage, CEO Jack Dorsey suggested that journalists using the site should act as its watchdogs and fact-checkers. Permanent Twitter bans are rare and usually spurred by acts such as inciting virulent harassment mobs or making death threats against celebrities. In the winter of 2017, Twitter started removing verification badges from such people as white nationalists, out of concern that its blue check mark implied endorsement of the author’s position; it even deleted a few people’s accounts, but this was largely too little, too late. YouTube and Facebook’s trending topics and videos continued to feature conspiracy sites and channels, although Facebook eventually killed the trending topics feature entirely.

However, social media sites did turn their focus on one particularly prominent conspiracy peddler: Facebook, iTunes, music-streaming service Spotify, email marketing service MailChimp, Pinterest, and eventually Twitter banned InfoWars content; Facebook also barred Alex Jones’s personal profile page. Twitter was slow to take action, finally lowering the boom only after Jones appeared on Capitol Hill during a series of congressional hearings into social media companies’ efforts to police their content and filter disinformation. Jones picked a fight with Florida senator Marco Rubio in a hallway (“frat boy” and “go back to your bathhouse” were among the jeers) and separately with CNN journalist Oliver Darcy (a “rat”). Twitter said in a statement that a video InfoWars uploaded of the confrontation with Darcy violated its ban on “abusive behavior.”

That’s not to say, though, that banning conspiracy peddlers from these services is a long-term fix or one without challenges. Social media sites are private companies and free to ban whomever they like. But where to draw the line? Who decides what constitutes hate speech? And surely, in part, some of these services are hamstrung by a grim, darkly funny logical endpoint: Trump is the best-known political figure on earth to use social media to spread conspiracy theories. Any banning policy would, in the end, have to cover him, too.

Social media’s minor fixes arrived too late for the Rich family. As they discovered, social sites give enterprising self-investigators access to the subjects of their conspiracies as never before. Investigators can tweet at them, leave hateful messages on their Facebook profiles, and follow their movements. That is what happened to the Riches, who by the spring of 2017 had largely retreated from speaking publicly: every interview was the impetus for another round of vitriol, another chorus of accusations and threats.

Self-investigation is a series of little bonfires, all over the country. With the accelerants of fame, media attention, and politically motivated actors, those bonfires can turn into infernos. The implications of Seth’s death kept getting bigger and darker until eventually—perhaps inevitably—they conflated with Pizzagate. The Pizzagate Voat board became engulfed by Seth Rich speculation: Rich’s death, once solved, would explain a grand unified theory of diabolical deeds perpetrated by the government, from sex trafficking to murder to global enslavement. “If his murder is tied to the DNC and people go down for it I think we’ll have a mass awakening to the evil that is our ruling elite,” one user opined.

The speculation and anticipatory excitement only continued as every month brought a new and more bizarre Seth Rich development. In June 2017, a group calling itself the Profiling Project announced that its investigation of the primary evidence concluded that Rich’s death was the work of either a serial killer or a gun for hire. The volunteers on the Profiling Project were George Washington University forensic psychology graduate students and instructors. One of them, Kevin Doherty, told Newsweek, “The fact that this person has gotten away with it shows a level of proficiency.” Crucially, the group was wholly funded by Jack Burkman, the Republican lobbyist hell-bent on proving that Russians killed Seth, who pledged that he would never stop his quest, even though the Rich family had long since stopped speaking to him and begged publicly for an end to “partisan narratives.”

In the end, the one thing that the Rich family wanted most—to solve the mystery of Seth’s death—remained frustratingly out of reach. And while they weren’t resistant to hearing theories about what had happened, none of what the self-appointed investigators came up with sounded remotely related to his brother, Aaron told me. “I would be extremely surprised to find out that Seth did any of the things people seem to think he did. I don’t think he had the IT skills to do it,” he said, referring to the DNC hacking. “I don’t think he had the personality to do it.” (In interviews, friends and colleagues said that Seth wasn’t particularly tech-savvy. He couldn’t understand, for example, that companies he would lodge complaints with on Twitter never responded because his account was private.) “You have to point to some proof.”

Aaron ultimately sued several people for making what he calls false claims about his brother’s role in the DNC email theft, including Ed Butowsky and the Washington Times, a right-wing paper that had absurdly blamed Aaron himself for the hacking, writing that it was “well known in intelligence circles that Seth Rich and his brother, Aaron Rich, downloaded the DNC emails and was paid by WikiLeaks for that information.” The Rich family also sued Fox News, a lawsuit that was dismissed (for failure to state a claim) at the same time as Rod Wheeler’s suit against the media giant was dismissed. And Brad Bauman, the family spokesperson, sued the Washington Times, a company called America First Media Group, and America First’s founder Matt Couch for defamation.

The constant volley of speculation and threats and harassment and misinformation did not only discredit Seth and dishonor his memory. It made it harder for the family to grieve Seth’s death and process their loss. “I want to be with my family, but instead we’re having to see what’s the next article that comes out,” Aaron told me. “Because of the claims being made, unfortunately we can’t just ignore it, we can’t be silent.” Instead of mourning, the family was forced to respond to the seeming endless waves of faux investigators. “It’s hugely detrimental. It literally is taking—” Aaron stopped and had to take a long breath.

“None of us have any spare emotion,” he finished, finally. “And this is taking all the emotion we have instead of it being put into grieving.”