Jul 1, 2026 · 49 min · 16 segments
A married, middle-aged man lies about his age online to chase a girl he thinks is eighteen. But he's not the only one catfishing. The girl he thinks is eighteen isn't exactly who she says she is…
Megan AldaHost
So when I first read about this case, I kind of thought I understood the shape of it.
A middle-aged man lies about his age online to prey on a teenage girl, gets jealous, kills his rival.
And then you get to the bottom of it, and the floor drops out from underneath of you.
And by the time you figure out who was really typing those messages, you kind of have to sit back and ask yourself, what falling in love even means when nobody in the conversation is who they say they are? Now, this one takes place in the mid-2000s, so you have to remember it was kind of the golden age of the internet, so to speak, you know, before we got all cynical about it.
Before catfish was really a word, before MTV made a whole show of it, and before we'd all been warned a thousand times that the person on the other end of a screen might not be who they say they are.
Back then, a lot of people genuinely believed that what someone typed to you in a chat room was just true.
Because why would you make it up? Who would do that? And the platforms didn't help either.
There's actually a line from a CBS technology analyst at the time that really stands out because he said, we hear a lot about protecting children online, but that much of the same advice should really apply to adults too, because adults were just as exposed, just as easy to fool.
He's married, he has two teenage daughters, and he works as a machinist, basically grinding metal for a living.
So when I first read about this case, I kind of thought I understood the shape of it.
A middle-aged man lies about his age online to prey on a teenage girl, gets jealous, kills his rival.
And then you get to the bottom of it, and the floor drops out from underneath of you.
And by the time you figure out who was really typing those messages, you kind of have to sit back and ask yourself, what falling in love even means when nobody in the conversation is who they say they are? Now, this one takes place in the mid-2000s, so you have to remember it was kind of the golden age of the internet, so to speak, you know, before we got all cynical about it.
Before catfish was really a word, before MTV made a whole show of it, and before we'd all been warned a thousand times that the person on the other end of a screen might not be who they say they are.
Back then, a lot of people genuinely believed that what someone typed to you in a chat room was just true.
Because why would you make it up? Who would do that? And the platforms didn't help either.
There's actually a line from a CBS technology analyst at the time that really stands out because he said, we hear a lot about protecting children online, but that much of the same advice should really apply to adults too, because adults were just as exposed, just as easy to fool.
He's married, he has two teenage daughters, and he works as a machinist, basically grinding metal for a living.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.