They Called Him Mostly Harmless
(Don’t read if you don’t want to find out how this thing ends)
I’ve occasionally joked that I was into true crime before true crime was cool, and in a way, that’s probably right. I started reading true crime when I was a teenager in the late 80s/early 90s, long before there was any outlet to discuss it with other people. While I would often get burned out and stop for a while, I’d always return to it.
I’m not sure what drew me in. It wasn’t the forensic science or legal aspect of it, in fact, if anything I was more interested in the events leading up to the crime, and the lives of victim and killer beforehand. I suppose, even now, it occasionally scratches a morbid “this could happen to anyone” itch for me.
I have never, not once, believed that reading true crime books qualified me to solve a murder.
They Called Him Mostly Harmless is the rare true crime documentary that isn’t really about the crime, if there was even a crime in the first place. I’m unsure what director Patricia Gillespie intended when she began filming it, but what it ended up being was a sad, undeniably funny at times, and deeply unsettling story about internet amateur sleuths, and the parasocial relationship they formed with a corpse.
Said corpse was found in a Florida nature preserve in 2018. Discovered in a tent, the body was too decomposed to either readily identify, or determine a manner of death. DNA and fingerprints turned up no match. Gradually, enough information was gathered to determine that the man had been hiking down the Appalachian Trail in the months leading up to his death, and had made friendly conversation with a number of other hikers along the way, though without ever giving any information about who he was or where he was from. A rare thing by 2018, the man hadn’t left much of a digital footprint giving clues to his real name either.
A call to the public went out to help identify the man, and the case drew the attention of a Facebook group for true crime buffs, who took it upon themselves to try to solve the mystery. “Solving the mystery” meant coming up with increasingly presumptuous, if not downright bizarre theories, ranging from “he was dying of cancer and committed suicide” to “maybe he was a time traveler.” An entire narrative of the dead man as a gentle, poetic soul innocently finding himself on the trail before meeting his doom was built on just a handful of photos and a few minutes of conversations with strangers.
Eventually, a bitter rift developed within the Facebook group, particularly its mods, Natasha Teasley and Christie Harris, who look and sound so much alike they might as well be sisters. Both of them took their roles as unofficial (and untrained, and unqualified) FBI agents very seriously, particularly Harris, in what might be one of the most pathological cases of Main Character Syndrome ever captured on film.
Given how much time is devoted to it, Gillespie is clearly more interested in that aspect of the story than the mystery of the unidentified man, but it’s unclear if the viewer is supposed to find these people sympathetic, pathetic, or horrifying. Teasley at least demonstrates some self-awareness, stepping away from amateur sleuthing after a while to start an outdoor guide business. Harris, however, is so convinced of her own heroic dedication to the case that when the man is eventually identified, she takes credit for it, even though it happened by way of DNA profiling and a former co-worker writing in a tip.
As it turns out, the man was named Vance Rodriguez, and while much isn’t known about his background, he apparently had a history of domestic violence. That’s less shocking than Harris’s reaction, which is to dismiss Rodriguez’s alleged victims’ claims in favor of the image of Rodriguez as a sensitive nature boy incapable of hurting anyone: an image that, let me reiterate, she created entirely in her own head.
They Called Him Mostly Harmless is at least the third documentary in the past few years to shine a spotlight on amateur sleuths, who seem to consist mostly of people who believe they’ve watched enough episodes of Forensic Files to make them a regular Sherlock Holmes. It seems like a cute, harmless little hobby until it’s invariably revealed that their crack detective work often results in getting in the way of actual police work, or worse, harassing people completely unconnected to the case.
Here, it’s revealed that at one point Harris’s group became convinced that Rodriguez matched the profile of a man who posted online about having cancer, based mostly on the fact that they vaguely looked alike, and that Rodriguez had a scar on his stomach. When the man responded that he, in fact, was still alive, rather than move on to the next dubious “clue,” Harris’s group accused him of lying about his own identity.
It’s admittedly funny to see a bunch of people who couldn’t recognize a blood spatter from a spaghetti sauce stain if they were held up in front of them talking about how someone’s body language clearly means they’re lying, or, in one embarrassing scene, Harris’s proof that she found an old high school photo of Rodriguez being a hastily scrawled beard on it.
On the other hand, such like-minded individuals also make a habit of libeling and harassing people they believe are suspicious in a murder case, even if they’ve already been cleared by the people who actually do this shit for a living. It’s also worth noting that the true crime cases amateur sleuths get the most deeply obsessed with tend to only involve attractive young white people, as if their deaths are inherently more tragic, and worth a closer look.
As a true crime documentary, They Called Him Mostly Harmless is fairly dull: for one thing, there’s no proof, even by the end, that a crime actually took place. There’s still too little information about Rodriguez to make him come off as anything but a couple of photos and the impression he made on a few people who only spent at most a couple hours with him. It’s empty in that regard. But as yet another look at sad people who need to get the fuck off the internet before they do real harm, it’s a wild ride.
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