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Rochester, New York

I t’s a cold, gray morning in upstate New York. The sun won’t rise for another hour at least.

Many of these are fake accounts, but as page administrators, the duo has learned on the fly that it’s essential not to reject people out of hand.

It turns out that many of the local kids in Moscow who think they saw something important during the relevant time frame want to report that anonymously.

They haven’t used Facebook until now, preferring Instagram and TikTok.

So they create Facebook accounts with fake names in order to reach Kristine and Alina personally.

The administrators have helped put many of these students in touch with the FBI.

“We had one girl contact us [via her aunt] and talk to us and tell us that she was hanging out with Kaylee and Maddie that day,” Kristine said.

Alina took the call. “They got ready together, they went to the football game together. They came back and they got ready together. They went to the Corner Club with the girls. They were hanging out, they were drinking, were having a great time. And then when it was time to go, Maddie and Kaylee left, went to the Grub Truck, and they went and they left and went home.” Their house was kitty-corner to 1122 King Road.

“The amount of guilt that you could hear in their voices,” Kristine said, “and how they were talking and ‘Oh, I wish I would’ve stayed with them. Oh, I wish they would’ve come over to our house.’”

Kristine and Alina have founded and administered true-crime Facebook pages before.

In fact, they have ten of them. They have one about the 2007 disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

Another about the 2021 murder of Gabby Petito.

Others about the 2022 killing of toddler Quinton Simon and the 2019 so-called doomsday-cult murders committed by Lori Vallow Daybell and Chad Daybell. And more.

Their goal is to create an audience for a true-crime podcast they hope to start. Alina has had several high-level meetings about it. So far, their pages have attracted a few thousand followers each.

It had been Alina, based in Prosper, near Dallas, Texas, who pushed to create a page about the Moscow murders because she’d seen someone else start a Facebook page and quickly garner 4,000 members.

This struck a nerve with Kristine, who knew the founder of that group and who describes herself as “supercompetitive.”

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll do it.”

She’d known right away that the Idaho case was “different,” in a league all by itself when it came to attracting Facebook followers.

Four victims meant four times the chance that someone might sympathize or connect with one of them.

Plus, the victims were particularly appealing.

Bright, smart, attractive; “four young people that had their whole lives ahead of them,” Kristine said.

“And they were so insanely popular and they were on social media and their house was so lively and… they were like the life of the party anywhere.”

But the speed at which the page took off shocked even the two administrators.

Within ten days, they found themselves interviewed on NewsNation by Ashleigh Banfield about the findings and discussions on the page around the Venmo activity of the four victims, including one transaction from the sister of a guy Ethan had Venmoed that was time-stamped 3:30 a.m.

Kristine attributes the success of the page to the vacuum created by the police.

In the Gabby Petito case, “you’d see the police [asking], has anybody seen this girl?

Does anybody have any videos? Does anybody have any pictures?

The police were out asking for public help and assistance, whereas this case was very different.

The Moscow police were very tight-lipped.

They held all of their information close to the vest.”

Their Facebook page seems to fill the void left in the narrative by the Moscow police’s reticence. On it, no stone appears to have been left unturned based on the few nuggets out there. Almost everyone has an opinion about Hoodie Guy, about Bethany, Dylan, Jake, Jack, Emily, Hunter…

There are so many different theories as to who committed the murders and why that people are getting into fights.

“You had to deal with people [fighting] in real life,” Kristine recounted. “And when I say real life, I mean people going onto other people’s pages, people going into people’s messages and threatening them.”

Somebody on the page phoned Kristine’s employer and accused her of being inappropriate online. Her boss called her in: “What did you do? What did you say?” And her boss wanted to see the page.

Another time, she was asked to call the HR department of a guy’s workplace after a woman on the page claimed she was underage and that he (also on the page) was soliciting her. (He was not.)

It has become all-consuming for both of them. Alina is in the midst of getting multiple procedures for an injured back, but she works on the page day and night and gets to know some of the members personally.

Kristine wakes up at five a.m. so she can work on the page before going off to school. Even there, she sneaks in more work on the page, and when she gets home, she doesn’t even try to handle the house or the kids. She leaves all that to her husband.

There’s more to do than anyone might guess. Behind the scenes, Kristine and Alina are flooded with messages and calls from young people claiming to be friends of the victims—and who do not want to post.

“So now those people who are talking to us, all right, they’re not posting about that.

They don’t want the fame… They would private-message us and say they would talk to us.

They wanted somebody to talk to and they didn’t want to talk to police.

They didn’t want to talk to their other friends.

They wanted an adult to talk to, to just go through what they were going through.

They needed somebody to talk to. Literally, we were therapists.

We were a go-between, between police and the FBI.

We were Facebook starters. We were page starters. We were everything rolled into one.”

One person is watching all the Facebook chatter with more than idle interest.

On the other side of the country, Alivea Goncalves asks to join the page so she can monitor all of it from her parents’ house in Rathdrum.

She reads all the frenzied speculation blaming Jack DuCoeur.

She reads that people think Kaylee and Maddie had secret OnlyFans accounts.

She reads all the theories about Kaylee’s Range Rover, about how she afforded it.

She reads that people believe her dad, Steve, must be promoting something because he’s on TV so often.

She reads that there is a rift among the victims’ families.

Even though it doesn’t seem terribly effective, she appreciates the firm hand that Kristine and Alina try to take as administrators: STOP the name calling, STOP the belittling , they wrote in a post to their tens of thousands of members on December 3.

!!This is a space to discuss and theorize NOT attack other members!! !!You will NOT agree with everyone and most likely will not change their mind so politely disagree or MOVE ON!! We will no longer warn you. You will simply be removed.

As Alivea reads and reads, an idea starts to form in her mind.

This page could be a great resource. A great place to ask people for tips. A great place to send videos. And a great place to start setting the record straight.