To listen to Olivia Vitale tell it, she had never paid much attention to how her father earned his living. The fact that he’d been a hard-driving crime reporter in his native Chicago and then had gone on to a career as both a reporter and editor in Los Angeles had not made much of an impression on her when she was growing up in Washington State. Her parents had divorced, and her dad’s occupation in a distant city was an irrelevancy.
Or so she had thought. For as a precocious twenty-two-year-old working in real estate in Florida, Vitale had been inexplicably drawn to the flurry of stories in the media recounting the brutal murder of Gabby Petito by her fiancé as the freewheeling young couple had vanned across the country.
Not constrained by any formal journalistic training or experience, Olivia posted personal, empathetic, yet carefully researched videos about the case on TikTok and YouTube. And she didn’t stop posting when this mystery was put to rest and had vanished from the front pages.
Inventive and persistent, Vitale hitched a ride on the comet tail of the zooming true-crime business. She chased one confounding case after another. Within a year or so, “The Chronicles of Olivia” was pulling in tens of millions of viewers. By the time she was twenty-five, Vitale was one of the go-to sources for a generation who got their crime stories—down, dirty, and dishy—from the Internet. And one of her avid followers had been Kaylee.
Steve had discovered this connection when he had been checking out Kaylee’s phone for clues. And it got him thinking.
OLIVIA ASSUMED IT WAS A hoax, one more Internet fabrication. She did not believe that Kaylee’s dad had actually contacted her. And so she didn’t respond.
But the email kept nagging at her. Was it possible it had been sent by Steve Goncalves? And if so, she could be on the verge of a scoop. With a diligence that belied her twenty-five years, she tracked down Alivea Goncalves, who confirmed that it was in fact her father’s email address. Excited, Olivia wrote back.
It was a pragmatically brief courtship; both would benefit from the Goncalveses’ appearance on “The Chronicles of Olivia.” And more serendipity—Olivia, hot on the case from the onset, was already in Moscow. It’d be just ninety minutes straight up US-95 North to the Goncalveses’ home. The meeting was quickly arranged.
Vitale was filled with trepidation as she and her producer, “Bullhorn Betty” (that was her “nom de Internet”) set up inside the family’s daffodil-yellow living room for the interview with Steve, Kristi, and Alivea. Without any network imprimatur, Vitale had landed the sort of scoop that, a generation earlier, would have gone to Barbara Walters. But the Idaho murders was a news story owned by a new breed of journalists, an event sustained by the nonstop fulsome attention it received on the Internet.
And for the citizen reporters, it was a burgeoning, often very profitable business. YouTube segments produced by intrepid social media journalists who had scurried to Moscow to film events on their cell phones or DSLR cameras were routinely followed by appeals. “Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe. Please consider making a donation to PayPal, CashApp, or Venmo.” “Printing money” was how Bullhorn Betty had described the lucrative success of the various YouTube segments she had independently posted online before she had joined up with Olivia.
So perhaps it was unsurprising that the stakes—money as well as celebrity—fueled resentment. The sense of injury over someone’s getting more likes, of racking up more subscribers, made the internecine Internet squabbles a nasty, sneeringly competitive business.
Sydney Norton, as Brat Norton on TikTok and YouTube, had succeeded, without leaving her home in North Carolina, in landing a series of scoops: access to family members of the victims and, impressively, probing interviews with authorities involved in the case. A glamorous thirty-two-year-old, she also had star power; she was getting a lot of attention. As a consequence, perhaps it was inevitable that one of her envious Internet competitors decided to take her down a peg.
Norton received an incredible video. It had been recorded by a King Road neighbor, and it revealed the “real” story of what had happened that night. The neighbor, in fact, had witnessed the events from a distance. The tape, however, just laid the groundwork for the next part of the exclusive. There was an overwrought barrage of late-night calls to Norton, each an emotionally charged plea, each filled with a rising level of hysteria, the caller wailing that her secret tape and her secret knowledge had made her “a target.” “I’m not safe,” she pleaded to Norton. “Help me!”
Norton, caught up in the drama, convinced that her source’s fear was genuine and that she was sitting on a colossal scoop, reached out to the FBI and to the authorities in Idaho. In the process, the case became no longer an abstraction, a distant news story. Its terror was now her terror. Norton grew to believe that her access to this secret knowledge had put her own life, as well as that of her young son, in jeopardy. Dangerous events were closing in on her. But in time, the videotape, while artful in its re-creation, even ingenious, was revealed as a clever fake. The hoaxer’s vindictive plan: once Norton had gone public with her scoop, the embarrassing reality would’ve been revealed, and Norton would be discredited.
But Olivia did not have such problems. The envious competitors who had gone after Norton would not be able to impugn her work. For she was staring at the real thing—a genuine scoop.
THE GONCALVESES SIT SHOULDER TO shoulder on the couch in their living room. Vitale, who has positioned herself off camera, is a polite, disembodied voice asking the questions. But there’s a hesitancy to her probing; it’s as if she’s acknowledging that she’s intruding, that she doesn’t belong in this house of grief. And her reaction is understandable. Steve’s face is grim, solemn, and expressionless—as blank and flat as an empty piece of paper. Watching the tape of the interview, one can feel the harsh tension in the room. Will the Goncalveses reconsider and order Vitale and her producer to turn off the cameras?
Then something remarkable happens. The Goncalveses seem to surrender, perhaps accepting the absurdity of the situation, of their sitting in the living room talking to a stranger young enough to be one of their children about their innermost feelings with a video camera aimed at them like a weapon. A restraining wall comes tumbling down. And like all mourners, they begin to talk about the past. The heartfelt memories of Kaylee pour out.
Yet Steve recovers. He has not forgotten his agenda, and he is soon back in the present. He wants to let the ineffectual authorities know what they can expect from him. He wants them to understand that if they can’t get the job done, then he will.
Staring into the camera, he proclaims with an earnest passion, “We are not going to bed and wait for other people to solve a family problem. This is a family problem.” He continues to drive home the point that he’s on the case: “We are not going to sit here and let someone else do a job that we can add value to.” He determined, as he puts it, “to make an impact,” to “listen to what people are saying,” to be “a part of solving it.” He needs to feel, he volunteers with an affecting candor, that “I gave it my all. I did everything that I could.”
He also acknowledges his limitations, his inability to have an insider’s knowledge of the furtive currents swirling through Moscow in the weeks preceding the murders. He openly appeals for help in his hunt to find the killers. “This takes a whole community. It takes all of us to solve.”
The camera has now become his ally. He’s staring full-faced at it, focusing directly at his audience. “This is on us,” Steve declares. “Are we going to let these people exist?” And then it’s as if the entire hour-long interview has built to his uttering a single terse, yet unflinching pronouncement. With his face as somber as a graveside mourner’s, he promises: “I’m telling you right now, we’re coming for you.”
It is as much a warning to the killer as it is an ineluctable vow to himself.