Wired Women: Beautiful Cancer Victim a Hoax

May 30, 2001 -- There's a sucker born every minute. And on the Internet, maybe two.

Take, for example, the thousands of faithful Web fans duped into believing in the tragic tale of Kaycee Nicole, a young, beautiful Kansas teen dying of leukemia.

For the past two years, hundreds of perfectly reasonable peopletracked the girl's illness in her daily Web-log postings, suffering each setback and rejoicing over each remission.

They passed around her musings like so many feel-good trading cards.

"I know what a miracle is," Kaycee enthused after a particularlygruesome hospital stay. "As I look out into the morning light, I know how totally blessed I've been. I shouldn't be here, gazing at the awesomeness of it. But I am here because love carried me on its wings to this moment …"

Kind of tears you up, doesn't it?

Gifts, Cards, and More

And there was more. People sent gifts, condolence cards, andbaseball caps when Kaycee confessed that the chemotherapy had made her hair fall out.

They e-mailed her. They called the family home in Kansas and carriedon telephone conversations with the ailing teen.

Randall van der Woning, a Canadian Web designer living in Hong Kong,met Kaycee in a chat room. Intrigued, he offered to create a site, "Living Colours" where she could share her experiences with the Web. For two years, van der Woning spoke regularly with Kaycee, online and by telephone, fully convinced that she was real — and dying.

Like dozens of others, van der Woning helped create online tributesto the teen, posting her childhood photographs, a Kaycee collage from toddler to homecoming queen.

Little wonder, then, that when her mother, housewife Debbie Swenson,announced Kaycee's unexpected death from an aneurysm two weeks ago,the Web community mourned. Hundreds gathered in chat rooms to share their Kaycee stories and their grief.

But the sad fact wasn't that a 19-year-old had died. The realtragedy was that she'd never existed at all.

Within days, the truth emerged: Kaycee Nicole was a fabrication, afigment of Swenson's imagination, and the star player in an intricate,detailed, and extended hoax.

No Comment

After commanding center stage for nearly two years, Swenson's nottalking.

Her new telephone number is unlisted, her e-mail address is adead-end.

When it was clear the gig was up, she posted a statement to Kaycee's"Living Colours" site. The girl was a composite character, she explained, the synthesis of three friends who had suffered and died of cancer.

"I chose to share their voices as one rather than three separately,"she said. "I wrote their thoughts, their humorous sides, theirstruggles, their fears."

The gifts, she said, were returned "to the appropriate families."

And those charming snapshots of "Kaycee"? They're photographs of oneof Swenson's former neighbors, a young, beautiful, blond — and very much alive — woman who until two weeks ago had no idea she was being represented as somebody else.

Julie Fullbright, who just finished her first year at SouthernNazarene University, says Swenson called her last week to apologize. "She said she was sorry, that she didn't know why she'd done it," Fullbright said Tuesday.

She has no plans to sue Swenson for misappropriating her image,Fullbright said. "I just want to drop it," she said. "I just want to forget the whole thing."

Van der Koning's sentiments, exactly. He's taken down the "Living Colours" site and posted in its place a long, detailed description of the ordeal.

His conversations with Kaycee? It was probably Swenson all along. "Whom did I speak with on the phone when I thought I was speaking with Kaycee? I now feel it was Debbie. Anyone who can convince me of severe emotional distress can certainly change the pitch of her voice to sound younger," he wrote.

Lessons Learned

When former Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith fabricated characters, it cost her her job. She, like others who've lost their jobs for similar transgressions, was a high-profile journalist, bound by professional rules of accuracy and objectivity.

Swenson's imagination suffers no such restrictions. Peabody policesaid Tuesday the case had been turned over to the FBI in Kansas City. But FBI special agent Jeff Lanza said the FBI would not open an investigation because "total damages are estimated at only a couple hundred dollars. The FBI is not usually involved unless losses are much higher than that, like in themultiple thousands of dollars."

Still, legality's not the point here. Common sense is.

How do thousands of people get suckered into an emotional relationship with somebody else's fantasy?

John Dominik, Minnesota father of two and a Web logger himself, wasone of the people who believed in Kaycee Nicole. His online journalanswers the question as well as anybody has:

"Last night, I found out that someone I mourned, someone I had greatrespect for, and someone who I thought was gone, never really was," he wrote on May 17.

"I couldn't do anything about it at the time, so I went to bed.To quote that great American Philosopher, Bartholomew J. Simpson, 'Intimes of trouble, you go with what you know, man.'"

What Dominik knows, he says, is that he's learned a lesson aboutliving life online.

"That e-mail from 'Kaycee' I have?" he wrote. "Still saved. In the'dumb things I've done' folder rather than the 'inspirations' file. Thememories I'll take from this? Friends pulling together to honor a spirit that showed great courage, great compassion, and great hope for the future.

Good, real people who are trying, hard, to make a new 'medium' work."

Good, real people who understand better now that what you see isn't always what you get. Especially on the Internet.

A teacher and a journalist, Dianne Lynch is the author of Virtual Ethics. Wired Women appears on alternate Wednesdays.