We are very good at naming people: Silver Alert. Legend. Trespasser. We are less good at saving them. The news cycle ends neatly. The police file does not.

The night he vanished, a balcony door wouldn’t stay shut, a neighbor pocketed the gun “for safekeeping,” and a ransacked safe gaped open. These are facts that read like clues but never added up to an answer.

Earlier that day Hobo Shoestring walked out of the hospital with the same hallucinations he walked in with, a script in his hand and no admission band on his wrist. Nine days later they found him in the lake behind his apartment. Months pass and they still can’t say how a body with no drugs, no alcohol, no internal or external injuries came to rest there.

Abby Ellin is the author of "Duped: Double Lives, False Identities and the Con Man I almost Married," the executive producer and host of the podcast "Impostors: The Commander" (season 2), and producer/reporter on The New York Times Presents documentary "To Live and Die in Alabama." She is a frequent contributor to the NY Times and a former columnist for the New York Times Sunday Money and Business section. Her greatest claim to fame is naming Karamel Sutra for Ben and Jerry's.

Who was really to blame? The woman who built the lie — or the world that made her need it? Was John foolish to believe, or just early to a kind of faith the internet would come to demand from all of us?

And when Facebook, MySpace, and Instagram soon arrive, when connection becomes currency and confession becomes content, the pioneers of CollegeClub look at it all and think, with bleary-eyed certainty: See? We weren’t wrong. We just came too soon.

Somewhere in Kansas, Debbie Swenson carries on — as the world she built online fades quietly into pixels. When she dies on April 3, 2020, in Peabody, Kansas, at the age of 59, some part of the truth dies with her.

But on the internet, nothing ever really goes. The story lingers — cached, copied, reassembled by strangers decades later. And maybe that’s the real illusion: that anything, or anyone, can ever truly disappear. Twenty-five years on, the questions remain the same. We’re still reaching for each other through screens, still chasing truth through connection, and connection through lies.