This story starts on September 16, 2001.

Marcella was a housekeeper doing her rounds at the Lake Canalt Inn,

a small motel near Olympic National Park in Washington State.

It was an otherwise average day until she knocked on the door of room number five.

No one answered, and typically that meant that she could just let herself in and start cleaning the room, so she did.

But as she started cleaning, she jumped back in surprise when she realized that she was not alone in the room.

See, there in the closet was a man who was kneeling down, not moving.

He didn't react at all to her presence. She called out to him,

but he just kept kneeling there completely still. At first, she thought that maybe the man was

deep in prayer, but there was this growing pit in her stomach. Something about this wasn't right.

Marcella ran and grabbed one of the hotel owners, a man named Gabe,

and when he got to the room, he realized what was going on right away. He approached the kneeling

man and put his hand on his shoulder, and it was instantly clear that this man was dead.

Now, Marcella and Gabe had no way of knowing this, but finding this man's body was the

beginning of a years-long mystery, one that would go so viral on the internet and would bring

together sleuths from all over the world. Thousands tried to answer what should have been a

very simple question. Who was the dead man in room five?

Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore.

Today, I want to tell you a story. It's about a mystery that was solved in part by the internet.

And while looking into this story, I really felt two sides

of myself playing tug of war the whole time I was researching. There was this side of me that saw

this case as, I guess, kind of an anthropological study about how the internet can band together for

...