![]() ![]() The founder of the company, David Mittelman, went on Facebook to talk about the case. They learned that the hiker had Cajun roots that his family had come from Assumption Parish, Louisiana and that there were family members with the name Rodriguez. Collier County had sent them a bone fragment they had extracted the hiker’s DNA and then begun searching for genetic similarities among people in a database called GEDmatch to build a tree of potential relatives. A genomics company, Othram, had taken his DNA and started to do cutting-edge genetic analysis to identify him. Meanwhile, a woman named Sahar Bigdeli had arranged for one of the country’s leading isotope analysts to study the hiker’s teeth in hopes that clues could be discovered about where he had lived. And so a group focused on digital forensics went through the accounts of every possible user who had been on Screeps up until April 2017, the date Mostly Harmless had given other hikers for when he’d begun his journey. On the trail, Mostly Harmless had carried a notebook full of ideas for Screeps, an online strategy game for programmers. Meanwhile, the dedicated Facebook hunters kept going. He had never been bowling in Newport News. The photos in my story didn’t look at all like her friend, who was indeed a hiker but who was alive and well in Los Angeles. She should take her time and call me back whenever, if she even wanted to. I told her that I was sorry to have broken such terrible news so suddenly. But I hadn’t focused on all the pain that could bring. I’d wanted to help identify the missing hiker. “Oh, no, Daryl,” she said as her voice quavered. I’d written about his story and posted it online. ![]() I contacted one of the friends and explained that a hiker had disappeared and that his name might have been Daryl McKenzie. McKenzie had just four Facebook friends and his only posts were photos of the wilderness. I told my editor, who got obsessed too, and she found a Facebook page for a Daryl McKenzie that hadn’t been active since 2017, the year Mostly Harmless started his trek. I began searching for details to validate the tale. Daryl had supposedly said, “I came into this world without a name and I’m going to go out of this world without one.” My correspondent told a moving story of befriending the man in a Newport News bowling alley and hearing that Daryl had terminal cancer and planned to hike to his death. But by far the most enticing tip came from a man in Virginia who persuaded me, briefly, that he had known the hiker and that his name was Daryl McKenzie. A man was convinced the hiker had played in a hardcore punk rock band in New Orleans. One Louisiana woman sent me a photograph of her brother, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the missing man, and told me she suspected Mostly Harmless was the illegitimate son of her drug-dealing uncle. ![]()
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