Kiely Rodni, Part 2

The Case, and the True Crime Content Creators, Have Gotten Weirder and More Vicious

Many people hoped that Adventures With Purpose, the volunteer underwater dive team that was called in to search for missing Truckee teen Kiely Rodni, would be able to find her in the Prosser Creek Reservoir, even after law enforcement dive teams had failed.

Not only does AWP have specialized skills that they use much more often than local law enforcement, meaning they might be expected to succeed even after others failed, but the reservoir is where Kiely’s phone last pinged at about 12:30 am on August 6, when she and her car vanished after she attended a party at a nearby campground.

It was just common sense, really, that Kiely and her car would most likely be found somewhere near there. (See The Banality of Evil, if you want to see what I wrote about this case earlier.)

Not only would finding Kiely in the water give her family and friends some answers, but if it was an accident, I was happy to think this would put a stop to the 24/7 sensationalized speculation from true crime content creators (TCCCs).

TCCCs Gone Wild

The TCCCs, for whatever reason, fixated on this case, and no hypothesis was off limits or too outlandish to consider: Kiely was abducted by sketchy older men at the party, no maybe she was trafficked by a rival TCCC who is secretly a pedophile, no maybe she was killed Fight Club style at the party, no maybe she and Sami Smith were enemies and Sami killed her, no maybe it was another friend who killed her, or another friend or another, no maybe it was an accidental overdose that 300 teens conspired to cover up, along with their parents, yeah that’s it, along with local law enforcement who are clearly corrupt, that’s why they’re not finding her, they don’t want to find her, no maybe her ex-boyfriend stalked her and killed her, no maybe her current boyfriend stalked her and killed her, no maybe her mother killed her after she came home and is just pretending to be sad and worried.

Every one of these was really considered, with no evidence to support it, by various TCCCs. (I’m not supplying links because they don’t need the attention.) And now, as a result, there are people who believe every one of these outlandish things.

If you have a group of people hungry for more content (and I raise my hand, guilty as charged, because every day I look for more news about Kiely), but there is no new content, the content creators create it.

Some of the TCCCs treat their channels as harmless entertainment. Some seem to think they’re really going to apply their special insights or solve the case, even without having any of the evidence that the investigators have. Some, no doubt, cynically want to generate revenue and don’t care what they have to say to get it.

But regardless of the TCCCs’ reason for churning out meaningless, sensationalized content untethered from reality, the TCCCs seem to have no regard for the harm they’ve caused to every person who wandered into the public eye as a result of Kiely’s disappearance.

Every friend of Kiely’s has been accused of foul play and online-bullied at some point — even the friend with whom Kiely spent the afternoon before the party making crème brûlée (is there anything more tame?) who didn’t attend the party at all.

Sami Smith, who put herself so firmly in the public eye, has deleted her social media accounts, changed her phone number, and dropped out of sight.

Even the entire town of Truckee, yes the whole damn town of 17,000 people, has been accused by the TCCCs of a “cover-up.” So have all the local law enforcement agencies.

And who better to victimize than the missing girl’s mother? When Kiely’s mother wasn’t being accused of killing or trafficking her, when she was wasn’t being accused of not crying—despite the fact that she was filmed doing a lot of crying—she was judged and shamed for letting Kiely attend the party. So many smart YouTubers would never let their child attend a party, you see, and their children are still alive. QED.

No one is beyond the grubby reach of the TCCCs. When AWP found Kiely and her car in the reservoir on August 21, I was relieved for her family, and I hoped the furor would die down so her family would be out of the spotlight and left alone to grieve.

But No. It’s Still Going.

To be fair, after Kiely’s car was found, everything that was revealed about her disappearance seemed weirder and more suspicious, not less so. When Kiely was found in the reservoir, it seemed to support my idea that Kiely was an inexperienced driver who was out at night on treacherous roads, had a car accident, and ended up in the water.

But when the car was being pulled out on August 21 and I saw exactly where she went in, it seemed very weird. It didn’t seem like a place where a car would “accidentally” go in.

I used to live in a Sierra Nevada mountain community, and from my time driving those roads at night, it’s easy to imagine an inexperienced driver, especially an impaired one, taking a curve in the road too fast and going over the edge. Something like that would be commonplace — fatal car accidents happen all the time in mountain towns.

But the place where Kiely’s car was found was not like that.

First, you have to go in a really obvious wrong direction to go that way. But let’s suppose Kiely wanted to go that way for some reason, or let’s suppose she was so impaired that she went a different direction from all the other cars full of drunk teens who were also leaving the party at 12:30 according to witnesses at the main campsite. It seems very unlikely that she would go a different direction from everyone else who was leaving the party, especially when this was a place she was familiar with. But it could happen.

If you go that direction, you have to drive really slowly on the heavily rutted narrow dirt road that leads to the water — you couldn’t drive fast if you tried. There are ruts and potholes and big stones and roots. You’re creeping along and evading obstacles. Along that route to the water, as you got closer, you would see water on three sides for a while before you got to the edge of the water, i.e., even a heavily impaired person would likely think, “This is not right. I’m heading directly toward the water.”

You might think, “Maybe she was so impaired she forgot to turn her headlights on so she didn’t see the water.” But no. In those mountain communities in the middle of nowhere, without headlights it is pitch black. Completely. Even a drunk person would notice that. No one, sober or drunk, could drive in pitch darkness. So we have to suppose, if she was driving at all, her headlights were on and she could see the water on all three sides.

So the unlikely things are starting to pile up at this point. Suppose despite all this, Kiely kept going. She’d get to the sandy mud.

Going from rock-hard rutted road to mud would be another opportunity for Kiely to think, “This isn’t right.” Then she’d be in an inch of water, then a foot of water, and she’d have plenty of time, even if drunk, to think “Oh shit” and get out. She’d have plenty of time to slam on the brakes, stop the car, save herself and reflect on her bad driving and bad judgment before the car was submerged, even if she was very impaired.

When I saw where she went in, it was just so, so hard to suppose that there was any way that someone, even a drunk teenager, could have accidentally driven in there and drowned, that I thought there was probably more to this tragedy than an accident. But no one knows these answers yet. We have to wait for the investigation.

TCCCs Gone Wilder…

If the TCCCs were wild with their speculations before Kiely and her car were discovered, they went into a frenzy after.

Law enforcement took a lot more hits — a lot of TCCCs seemed to think it very suspicious that they hadn’t found the car, even though Adventures With Purpose has very specialized skills and routinely finds cars in the water that others have not managed to find.

There have been a lot of speculations that someone — “the killer” — came back and drove the car into the water days or weeks later, even though every law enforcement agency in four counties, the public, and the FBI were all looking for this car. Who would risk driving it?

Even AWP, who you might think would be treated as the heroes in this, came under heavy criticism. They are accused of attention-seeking, clout-chasing, greed in seeking reward money, lying, and even participating in a “hoax” of a non-existent (!) Kiely. Yes, the new hypothesis in some TCCC circles is that Kiely never existed, or had a different name, or was her grandfather’s daughter. It just gets weirder every day.

Law enforcement has kept very quiet and offered no new details, except that the remains in the car were positively identified as Kiely’s.

Like anyone else interested in the case, I want to know what really happened to her, but it’s hard to think that the TCCCs, who are filling all the empty spaces with wild accusations and baseless ideas, are doing anything but making it harder to solve this case.

TCCCs have been speculating on what it all means — the wheels of her SUV were rolling when it was pulled out of the water. Does that mean the car was in neutral? (Apparently not.) One of the windows was broken. The broken window provided days’ worth of content:

Does that mean someone else was in the car with her, someone who escaped? Suddenly there were “rumors” — rumors no one had heard before then — about Sami Smith being drenched at the party and having to change clothes. (She had a change of clothes with her? Really?) Or that Kiely’s ex-boyfriend, Jagger Westfall, wasn’t really on a fishing trip with his dad that weekend, but rather he snuck to the party to carry out a suicide pact with Kiely, and chickened out, saving himself but leaving Kieli to her fate. (Suicide pact? With her ex? Really?)

…And Wilder

But then the AWP video came out, “How We FOUND Kiely Rodni: MURDER or ACCIDENT?” and the TCCCs lost their damn minds.*

It’s 47 minutes long, but long story short, this is the new information:

Nick, the Roadside Assistance Guy

AWP met, seemingly randomly when they were looking for places to search for Kiely, a roadside assistance guy named Nick, who claims to have seen Kiely Rodni and a man who looks a lot like Jagger Westfall that Saturday morning at 11 (the morning after the party) when he responded to a call for a car that wouldn’t start.

Nick says he didn’t know anything about a missing girl at time, and he lives in Reno, but a week later when he saw a flyer in Reno about Kiely, he thought this person he’d seen the previous weekend was Kiely, and the car was Kiely’s car, and he informed local law enforcement, who in turn would have been able to contact the towing company for records of the service call, and their stored dash cam footage.

The phone call for assistance was made from the man’s phone because “Kiely” said her phone was dead (even though there was a charging cable found in the car when it was recovered, and even though Sami said they’d been charging their phones in her car the night before).

According to Nick, “Kiely” seemed nervous and asked a lot of questions, such as how to secure a seat belt the right way. He said there was nothing wrong with the car and it started fine. He also says “Kiely” kept as much space as possible between her and the guy she was with.

Nick, the AWP Guy

The AWP diver who found Kiely’s car and remains the next day in the reservoir, also named Nick, described the condition of Kiely’s car’s windows. One window was broken (which could have happened at any time), and another was rolled down, meaning Kiely could have escaped the car, especially because the car was only 10-14 feet underwater. Nick also said that Kiely was “in the back” (subsequently clarified in interviews to mean, the very back cargo area, not the back seat). Nick said that this looked “suspicious” to him, and he truly looks very shaken in the video just after this discovery.

We haven’t heard much else about what was in the car, because as soon as AWP realized they’d found the right car, they alerted local law enforcement, who took over the scene and recovery and continued their investigation.

The TCCCs couldn’t get enough of this story of a possible “Kiely” sighting the morning after the party, and their spotlight started to shine more brightly on Jagger, who already seems to have been struggling with the loss of his ex-girlfriend.

Everything Jagger’s said to reporters or posted online has been picked apart anew. For example, a video he’d posted earlier as a tribute to how much he missed Kiely, where he and Kiely were hugging and dancing, formerly called “sweet” by some TCCCs, was now called “cringe” by others, saying it looked like Kiely was trying to get away from him, just as Nick the Roadside Assistance Guy described during his interaction with the mystery couple.

The TCCCs have also focused on every blond friend of Kiely’s. Maybe it was Jagger and Mags whom Nick saw. Maybe it was Jagger and the Creme Brulee friend. Maybe they killed Kiely and had her in the trunk, and then inexplicably called for roadside assistance even though there wasn’t anything wrong with the car. Does any of it need to make sense? No, not for the TCCCs. They just need a new video every day.

So how credible is Nick the Roadside Assistance Guy’s story? If he was right about spotting Kiely at 11 am on August 7, and law enforcement had been informed of this by August 14 (and were able to request the business records of who called, from whose phone, from whose car, with what make and model and plate number; and were able to request dash cam video to confirm who it was), then why was law enforcement’s last confirmed sighting of Kiely still 6 pm August 6, when she was seen in a store’s security camera video? If the girl on Saturday morning had been Kiely, she would have been seen in the dash cam footage.

Even if Nick the RA Guy is completely sincere, it seems likely that law enforcement probably already ruled this out as a “Kiely sighting,” or else they would have updated the public on where she was last seen, as part of the effort to find her. I think the info from Nick the RA Guy is probably a dead end, and I feel sorry for Jagger and for Kiely’s blond friends that the bullying and accusations are more vicious than ever.

Likewise, the TCCCs have worked overtime talking about the fact that Kiely’s body was found in the small back cargo area. One of the AWP guys in an interview said while it wouldn’t have been completely impossible for Kiely’s body to have floated back there naturally, he compared it to “lightning striking.”

The AWP guys clearly think the location of Kiely’s body is evidence of foul play, and I think they’re probably right. But should they have told the public about this? Was it OK with local law enforcement that they share this detail in their video? I hope so.

TCCCs in an Ideal Universe (Or Not)

In an ideal universe, the TCCCs would take this new information and say, “It does seem odd, the place where Kiely’s car went into the water, and the place in the car where her body was discovered. Even if this was foul play, though, we have no idea who did it, and we have no right to speculate publicly or harass strangers who are mourning their loss. We will have to wait for law enforcement to complete their investigation.”

But we are not living in an ideal universe. We live in a universe where people make money from young girls who died tragically, destroying as many other lives and reputations as needed to keep their viewers satisfied.

*As happy as I am for the family that they have answers now, and as grateful as I am that AWP found her, I question AWP’s judgment in putting out a video, especially one with a provocative clickbait-y title like this one, in the middle of an active investigation. If we give them the benefit of the doubt, we can say that this is the first active investigation they’ve been part of. Until now, they’ve recovered people who’ve been missing in cases that are long cold.