Category: true crime

Wann ist Kiely?

A partial solution to the Google Trends enigma

On December 2, 2022, Kas Thinks examined search results for Kiely Rodni’s name. To her surprise, people were searching for Kiely Rodni months before she made the news. How did Kas know this? She put Kiely’s name into Google Trends:

So, is something nefarious going on? The first two things I thought of were:

  • Psychics had visions or dreams about Kiely, and wanted to see if those were about someone who had already died
  • Google Trends is corrupt and has serious flaws with its database

Both of those could be true. All of us are psychic, to some degree. ESP, or extra-sensory perception, exists in everyone. Most people don’t have particularly strong ESP, but some do. However, could it be that there are that many people who had visions about Kiely? I am not so sure.

As for Google’s database, it might seem unlikely that a team of experienced programmers don’t know how to index HTML pages or YouTube videos. Remember that YouTube and Google have the same parent company. But, the sum of the codebase that comprises Google is very large and complex. Also, programmers may create perfectly stable code, while at the same time not considering that the choices that they made are the most appropriate ones.

Have you read or watched Jurassic Park? Without spoiling anything, some of the characters found that, although the computer code that automated various functions in Jurassic Park was solid per se, it didn’t take into account anomalous scenarios. In other words, the programmer, Dennis Nedry, made one too many assumptions.

Dennis Nedry wrote all the software for Jurassic Park

It’s worth making a very important point here, which applies to software and to life in general: it’s impossible to predict if your assumptions are the correct ones, because you can’t be presented with every single scenario that could ever happen. Climate models, for example, are notoriously unreliable. But not because the programmers don’t know physics. To start with, their fundamental assumptions may not be appropriate. Secondly, because while they understand known unknowns, they cannot understand unknown unknowns – by definition.

And so, if there is a flaw in Google’s code, we didn’t discover it by looking at the code, but by using it in an anomalous fashion. Were it not for Kiely Rodni, we may not have stumbled upon this problem for a long while – if there is a problem with the code to begin with.

I think that there is a flaw in Google’s code, but I can only solve half of the equation. If people were searching for Kiely Rodni’s name before she died, what information would be returned? Her Instagram account? Her Facebook account? Why not just search social media platforms directly? Isn’t that how you would search for someone?

Also, if potential kidnappers or traffickers knew who she was, why were they searching for her? Surely they already knew where to find her.

Kas has already shown us worldwide results for “Kiely Rodni”. Below is a result just for my country, Australia, for the past 12 months:

You can see that there is a spike that occurs in early 2022. Now let’s try “Kiely Rodni cause of death” just for Australia:

Look at that huge spike in early 2022. It’s bigger than any of the spikes in August. What the hell is going on here? Let’s try that search term, but for the entire world:

That’s more like it, although we still see small spikes around March 2022. But then I looked at search engine results for more clues. And I think I found something. Let’s try Bing first:

See that crappy spam website at the top, next to the date, Feb 15, 2022? Keep that in mind. Now let’s try Duck Duck Go:

Hmm. More spam sites. It looks like they have created search term magnets, where they include any date that you search for, plus your search term. This shouldn’t happen though, surely? Because any website, no matter how crappy, has a creation date. Right? Finally, let’s try Google:

We don’t get those crappy spam sites. So that’s nice. But we get ABC, Fox, and Apple Podcasts. Those sites are used by millions of people every day. And yet those results are being returned with dates before August 6th. But when you click on them, it turns out that those Web pages were not actually created on those dates – 2 August, 5 August, 4 March, etc. It turns out that they just mention those dates somewhere on those pages. And, in one case, ABC writes that she went missing on August 2nd, in an article published in October:

ABC news incorrectly reports that Kiely went missing on August 2nd

But it gets better. I think I found a single clue that can help us understand why our search results are dated earlier than August 6th. Have a look at the last one, dated March 4th. Guess where that links? You might think that it links to the YouTube page of Adventures With Purpose, the group who found Kiely and her car on August 21st. But no, you would be wrong. It links to this video by EWU Crime Storyline:

This video does not mention Kiely Rodni at all (as far as I can tell). The above video has over 5.5M views as of December 7th, 2022. The video by AWP which documents their search for Kiely has 3.4M views. But, look again at the Google result. Do you see what is going on with the search terms? Give yourself a minute.

Notice that the AWP video has 3.4M views. And the link is dated 4 March. Do you see it yet? Google saw the term “3.4” and assumed it was the date, March 4th. For whatever reason, Google doesn’t take into account the creation date of a page, but the text inside the page that might indicate a date. This is not very helpful, because we are not searching for dates, we are searching for terms in a given time bracket. Those are different concepts, and it seems that Google does not differentiate between the two.

As for the problem with Google Trends, perhaps the solution is tied to the above problem, common to Google Search as well as Duck Duck Go and Bing. In other words, what might have happened is this: people searched for “Kiely Rodni” after August 6th, but their searches returned pages with dates that were earlier. Those pages weren’t created before August 6th, they just mentioned dates before August 6th. And Google Trends counts those pages as being created in the past.

So if my hypothesis is true, that Google’s code is flawed, then that explains why it appears that people were searching for Kiely long before she went missing. There is absolutely nefarious activity surrounding Kiely Rodni: the cover-up of her death and disappearance. But there were no traffickers or criminals searching for Kiely Rodni before August 6th.

As for the psychics, I don’t doubt that some people did have visions of Kiely. But from what I understand about ESP, not that many people would have sensed her disappearance. If they did, they might have documented it on a blog somewhere. If you know of such a blog, do let me know.

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The Girl in the Water

Compiling the footage of Prosser Reservoir from the Alder Hill fire camera


Heads up
Tails up
Running to your scallywag

Night falls
Morning calls
Catch you
With my death bag

Prosser Reservoir and its surrounds are beautiful, melancholic and haunting. Most people would not have heard of Prosser were it not for the death of Kiely (pronounced exactly like ‘Kylie’) Rodni, a girl who was a month away from her 17th birthday. From what we know about Kiely, she was happy, vibrant, and musically gifted. Truckee itself, though, is somewhat well known as being one of America’s most haunted towns.

Kiely and her car, a silver 2013 Honda CR-V, went missing after midnight on August 6th. Law enforcement, including local police, CHP and the FBI, supposedly scoured Prosser Reservoir, in the case that Kiely had driven her car into the water. After all, her phone last pinged right near the water. Surely, but sadly, this had to be a typical case of a driver who took a wrong turn and drove straight into the water.

They found nothing, although it came out later that the diving teams were instructed to go no further out than 25 feet. Nonetheless, her car was seen in the water by several people, including Stoney Stone, who used satellite sonar imagery. He found the car on August 7th, and reported that fact. Yet, nothing was done.

CORRECTION: I just discovered that Stoney Stone did not in fact located Kiely’s car. He interpreted an artefact on Google Maps as a sonar image of the car. But in fact this artefact is still there on Google Maps:

Further, this spot is not where Kiely’s car was found.

Nothing, that is, until the Internet called upon Adventures With Purpose (AWP) to investigate. Their claim to fame was locating cars in bodies of water, often related to missing persons cases. Their good work has helped many families find closure when they otherwise would have had none. However, AWP has never before involved themselves with open cases.

AWP was told that Prosser had already been searched, so they searched all the surrounding bodies of water where Kiely’s car might be found. They came up with nothing, and so they decided that they would search Prosser after all. It was their last shot.

They found her car on 21st August, around the middle of the day, 50 feet out from shore and 14 feet down. To give you an idea of how deep the water was, the 2013 CR-V is a little bit longer than 14 feet (slightly more than 4.5m). If you stood the car vertically on the bottom of the reservoir, at the spot where the car was found, the other end would stick up a few inches out of the water.

Not long after that, it was revealed that footage existed of the car going into the water. As it turns out, there are firewatch cameras all over California. The one that captured Kiely’s car going into Prosser is located on Alder Hill. It doesn’t always face Prosser, but thankfully it did on the night of August 5th and the morning of August 6th.

The footage is actually 0.5 fps – one frame taken every two seconds. The images from the firewatch cameras are archived and can be accessed publicly. That is where I got the frames from. You can download the frames yourself from here.

There are a few problems with the footage. One is that it’s a wide shot. Remember that these cameras are firewatch cameras, not surveillance cameras. They exist solely for the public to help in spotting fires before they grow too big. So it’s nobody’s fault that we can only see pinpoints of light at night.

Secondly, and infuriatingly, there is a red light near the site of the Alder Hill camera which turns on and off all night. And it spills into the camera, causing annoying flares. It doesn’t obscure what we need to see but it really is annoying.

Thirdly, the cameras often lose focus when it gets dark. This makes it slightly more difficult to see precisely where light sources are located. It also doesn’t help that the camera is not completely rock steady, and there is a slight about of ‘gate weave’ (even though digital cameras don’t have gate weave per se).

The footage may not seem to reveal much, except to confirm the exact time that Kiely’s car hit the water. However, a reasonable estimate of the speed of the car was calculated by several observers, and that speed was about 10mph. We don’t know if the airbag deployed, but based on the estimated speed, it’s not likely that the impact with the water was enough to trigger the airbag. And in that case, it’s not likely that the car’s Event Data Recorder was triggered (it only records 30 seconds worth of data around an event).

From page 21 of the Honda 2013 CR-V Online Reference Owner’s Manual

We can see a lot of other activity occurring before and after Kiely’s car was submerged. We can see what seems to be people – i.e. car headlights – meeting for non-trivial periods of time. Were they trying to figure out where Kiely was? Did they suspect that she drove her car into the water? If so, everyone knew she was dead not long after half past midnight.

And if people knew what happened to Kiely, nobody said anything to police or to the press. And the search parties, the Teen To Teen talks, all of it, was a smokescreen.

I don’t really want to go into the conspiracy of how Kiely’s friends and family failed her. This is just a place to share my time-lapse videos of the Alder Hill camera. However, make no mistake, even if Kiely simply drove her car into Prosser purely by accident, there is absolutely a conspiracy of silence and deception about it. That is the best case scenario. But I think it’s worse that that.

There are two time-lapses that I have prepared. The first is all the frames from 5th August 4pm to 6th August 6am. The second is all frames from 4th August 3:15pm to 6th August 9am. In both cases, I have overlaid a daylight frame, where appropriate. I have also prepared a blink comparison video, which covers 3.5 minutes up until Kiely’s car’s headlights are no longer visible.

The shorter time-lapse:

The longer time-lapse:

The blink comparison:

I have made my observations, and I will let you make yours. Perhaps in the near future I will make a post about what I think are noteworthy moments.