Bay Blogger alum The Legal Reader's got quite a claim to fame now -- he helped capture Darren Mack, that guy in Reno who stabbed his wife, shot the family court judge that ruled against him, and then fled to Mexico. Dang, the Blotter does nothing.
So an innocuous post of the Reader's from 2004, about George Bush's bad federal judicial nominees, somehow turned into one of the top places for people to post comments about Nevada state judge Chuck Weller. Oh, the Internet really is magic. Anyhow, when Mack shot Judge Weller, the comments page (much like Mack himself) totally took off.
Looks like law enforcement reads the Internets too -- in reading the comments, the Reno police and the FBI noticed that the Reader had two comments from a person calling himself "Mark" who posted a lot of information about Mack's finances, and accidentally referred to Mack as "I" in the body of the text. Doh! After some hand-wringing, the Reader decided to voluntarily give commenter Mark's IP address to the feds (which indicated a location in Mexico or Latin America). Shortly afterwards, Mack surrendered -- from Puerto Vallarta.
Now that Mack's been caught, our next burning question is: how like Reno 911! were the cops, Legal Reader?
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Actually, they weren't very "Reno 911" at all.
Reno PD Robbery/Homicide Detective John Fergusen found me first, but within hours Reno-based FBI Special Agent Michael West contacted me as well. Interestingly, they each found me separately, although by the time I got back to them they were working together at the Reno PD and I spoke to them via speakerphone.
The were both very polite and competent. The FBI guy was particularly tech-savy. I told him that my web host maintained detailed "raw access logs" containing info about what IP addresses had accessed certain parts of my website and when, but that I didn't know how to access or decipher them. When I suggested that the FBI probably had a forensics person who would know all about these files, he said: "If we don't have one, we'll get one." Shazam!!
Anyhoo, I don't think I actually helped to apprehend Mr. Mack, as he turned himself in a few hours later. But it was kind of exciting for a minute there . . . .
[If they had found him through The Legal Reader, I'd have been on all the morning news shows, and maybe even taken over Star Jones' place on "The View" . . . . Instead I'll just have to be famous here.]
Cheers!