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For about two years, both real detectives and amateur detectives tried to find out the real name of a Appalachian Trail hiker whose body was found in a tent in Florida. Hikers who met him along the way said he’d introduce himself as “Mostly Harmless” (though the exact origins of the nickname are unknown). Some knew him as “Denim,” like the jeans he was wearing.
A new HBO documentary They Called Him Mostly Harmless, out Feb. 8, profiles the men and women on Facebook who volunteered their khbrknews to search for the mysterious man’s real identity. The documentary aggregates all of the information found about this person, and features interviews with the Internet sleuths and the hikers he socialized with on the Appalachian Trail, tracing how his real name, “Vance John Rodriguez,” was eventually identified.
Internet sleuths try to figure out the identity of “Mostly Harmless”
The hiker’s journey is believed to have started in April 2017, when he headed south on the Appalachian Trail from New York. He didn’t bring anything that would identify his real name, like a phone or credit card. Instead, hikers he met along the way identified him by the unusual belongings he carried with him: an overstuffed backpack and a notebook filled with code later discovered to be designed for the online programming game Screeps. He never gave out his real name.
On July 23, 2018, two hikers came across his deceased body. A medical examiner could not determine a cause of death, so exactly how he died will never be known. The Collier County Sheriff’s office couldn’t find any identifying features like tattoos, and posted a sketch of his face on its Facebook page that was shared widely. People who had seen the hiker along the way sent in the photos they had taken of him.
In 2020, a Facebook group formed of users who spent their free khbrknews outside their day jobs searching for this hiker’s identity. The Facebook users helped keep sustained attention on the case, even…
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