Trevor then turned his attention to Chris Wilson, the owner of Documenting Reality, who agreed to speak with Trevor over a brief email exchange. Wilson previously ran the controversial website nowthatsfuckedup.com between 2004 to 2006, which was initially a site for user-contributed pornography.

During the US-Iraqi War, Wilson began to allow U.S. military personnel to gain access to the site in exchange for “trophy photos”, or graphic depictions of corpses and other disturbing imagery submitted from the kill zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The site became known for its disturbing model of “bodies-for-porn,” and as a result, Wilson soon found himself in the middle of the Abu-Ghraib scandal. Wilson was later arrested on 301 charges, 300 misdemeanors and one felony, under Florida obscenity laws. Working with a legal team which specialized in First-Amendment cases, Wilson worked out a plea deal and was ordered to close his business and not work on any adult websites for five years. Wilson founded Documenting Reality exactly 5 years later, in 2011.

The presence of “feds” on Wilson’s site wasn’t just a rumor. Bob Sr. told me the FBI had outright admitted to him that they had agents on the forum. This same information was parroted by Chris Wilson in the days and weeks following the shooting as he lamented attempts by the feds to persuade him to shut down the site.

Wilson also acted suspiciously in the aftermath of the shooting, removing several posts made by Bobby in the early morning hours of July 4, 2022. Trevor didn’t ask Wilson about any of these things. He did, however, ask Wilson whether or not he had ever met Bobby in person. Wilson also lived near Jacksonville, and Bobby had once told Jamie in a phone call that the two had met. Wilson denied this, and Trevor moved on.

The next user to be questioned by Trevor was Todd Rhodes. Trevor didn’t record the conversation, he only narrated what he claims Rhodes told him. And of course, what Rhodes told him is that he didn’t know a thing about Bobby’s personal life, nor did he have any suspicions that Bobby may commit a violent act in the near future. He had already told the FBI everything he knew and was completely without fault in the matter.

Again, Trevor moved on.

Trevor was able to successfully track down the user Aphid Lip, a man named Brian who Jamie believed was responsible for grooming Bobby, and he was also able to track down Fletcher Stiles. Both men claimed they never met Bobby in Oregon.

Fletcher told Trevor, “I never attended anything with Bobby. Your information is false.” Brian backed this up, telling Trevor he knew who the two people in the Oregon photo were, and that they were actually two different people from the site. He then offered to ask those two people, who were unnamed, to contact Trevor. They never did. Trevor moved on.

Most of the Documenting Reality users that Trevor interviewed were also interviewed by the FBI, an important fact that we wouldn’t learn until later, well after we had identified them as people of interest in our own, independent investigation.

But Trevor seemed determined to use his interviews as irrefutable evidence of the point he’d been attempting to make all along—that we were all crazy conspiracy theorists, our minds warped by conservative media into seeing things that weren’t really there. Realistically, the fact that the gore and violence obsessed miscreants on that website denied their involvement in a mass killing that the FBI had already questioned them about isn’t really surprising or revealing.

Trevor used his conversations with Jamie to form an erroneous conclusion:

“During one of those livestreams, Brian mentioned the Highland Park shooting, the Skype group, and the FBI’s interest in it. Reed clipped the video and took to Twitter with a wild claim – Brian had groomed Bobby to commit the Highland Park shooting. Jamie stalled upon that tweet, and it became a key piece of her theory that Bobby had been manipulated or coerced, possibly by an undercover law enforcement agent. If all of this sounds absurd, well, it is. But the real absurdity is how common this kind of story is becoming. Tweets from internet randos like Reed are feeding conspiracy theories and spreading misinformation through American society. Every single day. Take for instance, this claim from President Donald Trump during a 2024 Presidential debate…”

Trevor claimed that Jamie’s entire “conspiracy theory” was based on a single tweet from another Documenting Reality member, Reed, who had claimed on Twitter that Brian (Aphid Lip) groomed Bobby. In reality, we were already following in the footsteps of the FBI’s own investigation into the matter based on a combination of non-public information provided by Bobby’s family and posts made by members of Documenting Reality. The tweet he was referring to, where Reed accused Brian of grooming Bobby, wasn’t posted until July of 2023, one full year into our investigation. Trevor was attacking a strawman in his attempt to debunk all of our hard work, and he was revealing his political bias in the process.

There was another Documenting Reality user that Trevor curiously neglected to mention in his series. A prolific user of the site named Yanni ranked as one of the highest people of interest in our investigation due to his close relationship and proximity to Bobby.

In my conversations with Bob Sr., he mentioned that Bobby had called a number immediately after the shooting before heading to a home in Northbrook, according to phone records that Bob pulled for investigators that same day. The call was made at 11:06am local time. It took Bob a while to dig through his records and find it, but he eventually sent me the phone number. I was able to trace that number to a person named Joshua Rangel in Northbrook, Illinois.

According to an FBI affidavit released in support of a search warrant of Bob’s home, Bobby fled the scene of the shooting and traveled on foot to his mother’s house to pick up her vehicle. Bobby then stopped by his father’s house prior to driving to the residence of a person in Northbrook, who the FBI identified as “Individual A”, which confirmed that Bobby visited Rangel after the shooting. When asked about this visit, Bobby allegedly stated that he stopped for a drink of water.

The evidence that Yanni is Joshua Rangel is strong. Yanni and Bobby both confirmed in Documenting Reality posts that they knew each other in real life and that Yanni lived near Bobby, close to O’Hare airport. On Joshua Rangel’s Facebook page was a recent Marketplace listing that placed him at a location only a few miles away from O’Hare. Yanni also claimed that he was interviewed by the police right after the shooting, and we know for certain that Joshua Rangel was interviewed due to Bobby calling his number and stopping by his house after the shooting.

The activity of Yanni on Documenting Reality was by far the most suspicious with regard to the shooting. Yanni and Bobby had been posting on the forum on July 3^rd and 4^th, in the late night and early morning hours before the shooting, but Chris Wilson scrubbed the majority of these messages. When the news broke, a Documenting Reality user posted a thread in the Water Cooler titled, “??? Awake ???” referencing Bobby’s username on the site, Awake47.

The original poster wrote, “Did Awake just kill a lot of people in Chicago? Super nice guy.. I wonder what made him do it..” In response, Yanni wrote, “what. I was just joking,” to which the original poster replied, “I thought you were too. what. the. fuck.”

My research partner Paul said that Jamie got cagey whenever Rangel was brought up. She once told him that she knew him and that he was just a college kid who was harmless and had nothing to do with anything. This raises the possibility that Jamie didn’t even mention it to Trevor, perhaps due to some sort of personal bias, or perhaps for another reason.

Also missing from Trevor’s analysis are several other users of interest, including one woman who sent Bobby money via CashApp prior to the shooting. Despite all of the suspicious characters involved in the mystery, Trevor limited his research to the individuals on the Motley Crue Skype call who all plainly denied involvement, leading him to conclude that there was absolutely no evidence that anyone from Documenting Reality had anything to do with the shooting. I strongly disagree with this conclusion.

Interestingly enough, the Facebook activity of Joshua Rangel had become increasingly bizarre, even threatening, in the build up to Bobby’s trial. On February 16, 2025, Rangel posted:

The man that I loved… Robert Eugene Crimo III is innocent. Falsely accused in some federal plot to control the populace so that the rich get richer. The poor get poorer. And the dumb blind idiots? Get feasted on by the wolves among them like the sheep they truly are.

Jamie’s dodgy attempts to distract investigators away from Rangel suddenly made a lot more sense.

The Honeypot

Trevor had succeeded in painting Jamie as a crazed conspiracy theorist. On Audible, the description for his podcast read:

Into the Madness is a deep dive into the events leading up to the mass shooting and the story of a woman who became a confidant to Crimo and the final player in his game. Drawing from dozens of interviews and more than 48 hours of recorded calls with Bobby, investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson tells a story that will challenge everything you think you know about mass shootings, conspiracy theories, and the fragile boundary between reality and illusion.

48 hours of recorded calls with Bobby—calls which were recorded non-consensually by a woman named Jamie Borchardt. Trevor was quick to respond to criticisms over his use of the recorded calls by asserting that Jamie lived in a one-party consent state.

But the black and white legality of the matter didn’t answer for the extremely gray-area ethical dilemma posed by publishing such content. I have to admit, the recordings that Trevor included in his podcast were eye-opening. They exposed Jamie as far more than just a “fan girl”, she was a highly deceptive and manipulative woman who contacted Bobby with a purpose.

Sometime in 2023, Jamie uploaded some pictures of her and Bobby in an intimate bedroom setting, where Bobby appeared to be naked. She used these photos to bolster the claim that she had been romantically involved with Bobby in the past.

But, as mentioned previously, Jamie also claimed to have met Bobby in 2016, when he was only 16 years old, and she was much older. Then, she clamed that she and Bobby had an online-only relationship up until the shooting. Bob looked at the photos and immediately dismissed them.

“These can’t be real”, he said. “They look photoshopped.” He was right. The pictures showed Jamie with her typical Snapchat filter, while Bobby was relatively filter-free. Bob continued to insist that Jamie never met Bobby prior to the shooting. Maybe she had been a fan of his music, but Bobby never mentioned her, and Bob had never seen her before.

Jamie pounced on the opportunity to become a prison girlfriend to Bobby, and Bobby seemed happy to oblige. That said, recording 48 hours of phone conversations with her boyfriend without his knowledge seemed like a strange thing to do. I don’t recall Trevor asking Jamie why she chose to record all of those calls. He selectively played clips of the recordings, probably less than 5 minutes total in the entire 4-1/2 hour podcast. The tiny portion of clips that were selected allowed Trevor to paint a neatly curated picture of a killer. That is, if you aren’t listening closely.

The recordings were bizarre and unnatural. Jamie wasn’t really talking to Bobby; she was talking to the voice recorder. I have heard Bobby talk before, both online and in phone calls with his dad, and I can attest that his demeanor while on the phone with Jamie seemed completely different. He sounded softer, more vulnerable, but also guarded.

Trevor concluded that Bobby was manipulating Jamie into playing his game, but the version that I heard was the complete opposite. Jamie’s soft, playful tones were juxtaposed by jarring, interrogational questions. She sometimes seemed to be trying to fabricate things for the recording, for example, by asking Bobby to recall something and then massaging his memory.

Other times her demeanor was controlling, manipulative and interrogational.

Towards the end of the podcast series, Trevor acknowledged that Jamie was an unreliable narrator, and he also attempted to claim she wasn’t actually a hybristophile, but he stopped short of considering an ulterior motive.

In reality, Jamie Borchardt, the woman who claimed to be a nursing student in her 20s or early 30s, was actually a 44-year-old mother of two, information that she desperately wanted to hide. Who was this mysterious woman who fabricated a fake identity in order to record phone calls with a high-profile defendant in jail, only to hand them over to a podcaster for release a mere 4 days before the trial date?

This is just one of many unsolved mysteries in Highland Park.

The Tape

Although I’d already mentally tossed the entire podcast series in the garbage, I was determined to patiently listen to the entire four and a half hours before saying anything publicly. When I got to Chapter 6, titled, “The Confession,” my general annoyance quickly changed into disbelief when Trevor admitted the following:

In the course of investigating all this, I met someone close to the case who had access to some of the evidence, including the video of Bobby’s FBI interrogation. This person allowed Jamie and me to watch the video under one condition – we couldn’t make any recordings. I want to see the interrogation video myself out of professional curiosity. But I want Jamie to see it for a different reason. Bobby confessed during this interrogation. We know that much. I hope that by watching that herself, Jamie might come to the same conclusion that I have. That Bobby is guilty, and that whatever relationship she has with him, to Bobby, is just part of a game.

It was already public knowledge that Bobby Crimo had confessed not long after his arrest during an interrogation with Lake County police, but the specific details of the confession were still under a strict gag order.

In March of 2023, an FBI affidavit was made public detailing the search of the house that Bobby shared with his dad. The search uncovered bomb making materials in Bobby’s bedroom. This news was sensational enough to grab a few headlines, but the most interesting parts were buried within the 31-page affidavit, where the FBI Special Agent included mentions of Bobby’s confession in support of the search warrant.

It’s clear that Trevor borrowed heavily from this FBI affidavit in his section on the confession, but he also included specific, word-for-word quotes from both Bobby and the police interrogators which were not found in the affidavit, or anywhere else, meaning he had to have seen the full tape.

Who was the person responsible for violating the gag order by granting access to both a journalist and a mentally unwell stalker, a woman who was deemed so untrustworthy by Lake County that she had eventually been banned from contacting Bobby in jail? I was reeling.

Trevor quoted the interrogation tape alongside his own scathing commentary about Bobby’s certain guilt. According to Trevor, the tape was proof that Bobby was a soulless, evil murderer who had exploited the media, the investigators, and his “fan girls” in furtherance of his own twisted game. Not only that, but Trevor also made it a point, went out of his way, even, to assert that Bobby acted alone and that no one else could have possibly helped him.

I’m not a legal expert by any means, so I reached out to a lawyer friend and explained the situation. His response was as follows:

That would be illegal and should be directed to the judge. The judge could sanction the prosecution and criminally punish someone if they actually did that. Could subpoena the podcaster. It’s a clear violation of the gag order. It’s also [a] violation of due process for Bobby. If the judge thinks its bad enough, could be grounds for mistrial.

How was it possible that a professional journalist like Trevor could make such a severe misstep?

Spinning Out

In my search for explanations, I asked myself a simple question: Who, aside from Trevor, would benefit from the strategically timed release of this podcast, which painted Bobby as a nihilistic, soulless murderer beyond a reasonable doubt, and painted anyone who questioned the official narrative as a conspiracy theorist?

The obvious answer was the prosecution. So-called “Perception Management” techniques are always a key part of any solid legal strategy, and it’s not unprecedented to learn of scandalous or even illegal measures taken by corrupt state prosecutors in the build-up to a high-profile trial.

In a recent landmark case, Jennifer Crumbley was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter after her son, Ethan Crumbley, killed four students at a high school in Michigan.

The trial and eventual conviction of Crumbley’s parents was compared by the media to the criminal case against Bob Crimo Sr. After her conviction and sentencing, Jennifer Crumbley’s defense attorney filed a motion alleging that state prosecutors paid upwards of $100k to PR firms in order to orchestrate a smear campaign against her. The motion elaborated that as part of the smear campaign, the prosecution violated a gag order by opening up access to media outlets prior to the trial.

One thing that had become increasingly obvious throughout my Highland Park investigation was that Eric Rinehart, the Lake County State Attorney in charge of the case against Bobby, was as dishonest and corrupt as they come. Not only had Rinehart repeatedly made misleading statements to the press, but he also railroaded Bob Crimo Sr. into a last-minute plea deal, forcing Bob to abandon his not-guilty plea and submit to 60 days in jail (The details of the unconstitutional legal case against Bob is outlined in two Rumble videos here and here.)

Rinehart had been committed from Day 1 to exploit the tragedy for political reasons, namely, to enact stricter gun control laws. Was it possible that Trevor’s podcast was part of a PR campaign engineered by Rinehart? Of course, at least in the present moment, this was only a conspiracy theory.

After completing the entire podcast, I made a post on X to Trevor, accusing him of relying on an unreliable narrator, Jamie, to debunk my own research, and potentially breaking laws in the process.

I am simply reeling over this. I really don't want to have to make this post.

Trevor, I tried REPEATEDLY to contact you with information regarding this podcast project. I tried contacting you for over 2 years!! When I finally got in touch with you a few months ago with the help… https://t.co/RvU6ftkpNm pic.twitter.com/7vap7d4CHa

— Bx (@bx_on_x) February 21, 2025

Trevor responded:

3/ — The series — again, had you finished it, you would know this — makes it clear that Jamie is an unreliable source.

There are other distortions in your claims, but these are the most egregious. I won’t be responding further.

— Trevor Aaronson (@trevoraaronson) February 21, 2025

It was bad enough that Trevor called my detailed criticism “attention-seeking behavior,” but even more appalling was his accusation that I was trying to take credit for Jamie’s research.

He wasn’t just accusing me of lying, he was sending me a veiled warning not to proceed with my investigation. Trevor’s seemingly bad intentions began to glow.

***

My next call was to Bob, who had already heard the news and was at a loss for what to do. His main concern had to do with his own recorded interview, which he claimed he asked Trevor to only narrate rather than to include in Bob’s own voice.

To this, Trevor simply responded, “You consented to being recorded.” Bob also took particular offense to Trevor’s portrayal of Bobby’s mother, Denise, as a conspiracy theorist. Denise had suffered greatly in the years following the events of the shooting, causing her mental health to deteriorate. This deterioration was so severe that it was readily apparent to even the most casual observer. Bob felt Trevor had exploited her weakened state to support his overarching narrative about mass shooting conspiracies.

I had never intended to release any of my investigative work prior to the conclusion of Bobby’s trial. I wanted to analyze all of the evidence before making up my mind as to Bobby’s guilt, and I worried that by putting my information out before I had all of the facts, I may be swayed by public opinion myself.

However, I now had to consider the possibility of a deliberate effort by Trevor to debunk my research and harm my reputation. As the unexpected complexity of the current situation started to sink in, I came to a realization. If Trevor is releasing information to sway the public opinion in the direction of Bobby’s guilt, then that leaves me in a unique position to balance the scale.

I woke up after a night of restless sleep to another call from Bob. He called to inform me that the trial wouldn’t have any remote viewing sessions available.

“Good,” I said. “Hopefully that means they will be livestreaming it.”

I quickly pivoted the conversation to the more pressing topic: Trevor’s podcast. I had gone back to the confession part and screen-recorded it. I sent it to Bob via email and urged him to get it to the court. It took some time, but I was able to convince Bob that it did matter. The prosecution had been putting the Crimo family through the wringer for months, and now Bobby’s constitutional rights hung in the balance. The interrogation tape was the prosecution’s key piece of evidence. A piece of evidence so important that the defense had been fighting to get it thrown out on constitutional grounds.

Now, four days before the trial, the information in that tape had been strategically leaked to the media and released to the public. I told Bob that it was possible the confession could be thrown out as a result. This seemed to light a fire under him, and he agreed to talk with the investigators on the following Monday, the day that jury selection was scheduled to begin.

“Hey by the way,” Bob continued, “I talked to Bobby earlier today, and I mentioned the girl in Texas. That’s what he knows you as: the girl in Texas. And he said he knows how your YouTube got banned.”

“Yeah”, I laughed. “Shit happens, I guess”.

“Well Bobby said, ‘tell her I appreciate her.’” I sat quietly for a couple of brief moments to let that sink in. It was a confusing feeling. “Well,” I managed to sputter out, “you can just tell him I said, ‘hang in there.’”

Up Next: Part 4…