A Vincent Foster for Usenet liberals? (Salon, 1999)

One fact about Steve Kangas is indisputable: This proud veteran of years of political argument in Internet discussion forums, and creator of an award-winning Web site devoted to liberal issues, is dead. On Feb. 8, his body was discovered in a men’s room on the 39th floor of a building in Pittsburgh — just outside the offices of conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

But that’s where the certainty ends — at least on the part of those discussing Kangas’ death in the very same Usenet newsgroups that Kangas, a dogged debater who championed liberal causes with formidable persistence, once participated in. Was Kangas, as press reports in Pittsburgh papers declared, the drunken victim of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head? Had he really become obsessed with Scaife to the point that he had traveled all the way from his home in Las Vegas on a deluded mission to assassinate him? Could it possibly be true that this lifelong foe of right-wing ideology had been found with a copy of “Mein Kampf” by his side?

Or was something more sinister at work? In newsgroups such as alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater and alt.society.liberalism, longtime virtual acquaintances of Kangas picked apart odd discrepancies in the story. Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas’ past?