Chapter 1: What is the Warrior Eli hoax and why is it significant?
True Story Media. Hello, it's Andrea, and we're back today with a brand new episode, our very first of 2026. I hope your new year is off to a good start. I know things remain chaotic in the world, to say the least. But we've got a great episode for you today with someone I have been wanting to have on the show for a while. And I think some of you will be familiar with her work.
Today, we are talking to hoax hunter and writer Taryn Harper Wright, who broke a number of stories about Munchausen by internet back in the 2010s. including the Warrior Eli hoax, which we're digging into today. In the meantime, we're hard at work on Season 7, which is coming to you very soon.
As almost always happens, there were some surprises along the way that moved our timeline a bit, but that's the show, and we think the end result will be well worth the wait. And while we are working on that, we've got a lot of ground to cover week by week here in our Case Files episodes. And we have a really special guest coming up. We love to hear from you.
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Chapter 2: How did Taryn Wright discover the Warrior Eli story?
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I've been familiar with your work for a while. There are many adjacencies and crossovers, and I'm really excited to dig in. If you could just start by telling us who you are and what you do in the context of what we're talking about today, which is the Warrior Eli hoax and Munchausen by Internet. So 12 years ago, I kind of stumbled into this... weird world of Munchausen by internet.
I had kind of been interested in it for a while. I had always sort of like, if something came up on AOL, I mean, I'm old to like ask Jeeves and stuff, if it popped up and it was like some big hoax that somebody had like been exposed to, I was always sort of interested in it. But I really never thought that I would sort of find one or, you know, be writing about it.
I completely stumbled into this entire thing. um so I had a hip injury that was pretty severe and I ended up on bed rest for almost two years so I was so bored and one night I was on Facebook and it was Mother's Day and I was on Facebook just kind of flipping around and one of my friends had written um you know everyone should be counting their blessings you know I've
heard women complain about the gifts their children gave them for Mother's Day.
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Chapter 3: What were the initial signs that the Warrior Eli story was a hoax?
And this poor family just lost their mother. And she gave birth after her death. And not only that, they have a child who has cancer. So I'm as nosy as they come. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna start Googling this. And I found like a Facebook prayer group. I found a CaringBridge site, all kinds of websites that were updating on this poor little guy's battle with cancer.
So they had had 11 children. What I first noticed was that I'm from a big family. I have like 31 cousins on one side. And our prize pictures are just the pictures of us all together because it looks like a crazy cult or something like that, you know, like all these tiny little toddlers. And this family had no pictures of all their children together. So I thought, well, that's kind of strange.
So I just sort of started Googling the family name. They had a gigantic internet history where they had a Zanga journal. I mean, we're really going to go back there. A live journal. Journals, I mean, like stuff that they had written about bands and things that they had been in. The one thing that I did not find during my Google search was any kind of
record of a home that they bought, any kind of job website. I mean, their entire internet search history was just things that they had written themselves. So I was like, well, that's kind of weird, you know, but it's Canada. Who knows? I know Chicago. I don't know Canada. But I thought, okay, well... And this was, you know, this was like the 2010s. Yeah.
So we were online, but maybe not to the degree that, you know, for our younger listeners that we are in the 2020s where, you know, there's just a record of everything. Right. And this was the age of blogs, which was amazing for me.
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Chapter 4: Who were the real victims of the Warrior Eli hoax?
I'm much more a reader than I am a video watcher when it comes to like information. So... I don't think I would have ever been able to do what I ended up doing with hoax stuff if it was just like watching two hour videos. I mean, like I just I arrived at that sweet spot where people were like uploading everything about their lives, but not video.
So anyway, I Googled thinking, OK, this is Mother's Day, like no matter what country, this is going to be a big story that this poor woman who's a trauma surgeon is. had been in a head-on crash, but was brought to the hospital that she worked at, gave birth to a baby after her death, and her Canadian Mountie husband arrived with her child that had cancer. I mean, that would be a news story.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So I thought, well, that's also very strange. And then I thought, oh, my gosh, what if this is a big, gigantic hoax? I started putting pictures through Google image search. Again, like I am the nosiest human. I started putting pictures through Google image search.
And that's when I realized that they were taken from other places on the Internet, from bloggers in different countries. And that first day of the hoax, I was really adamant to find out where the pictures came from. Like to me, that seemed like the real victim. people who had had the pictures of their child with cancer stolen, you know, to use for this blog.
Later on, I realized that other people were affected much more heavily than that. But that's kind of how it started.
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Chapter 5: What was the impact of the hoax on the online community?
So I was going to, again, like the pictures were my important thing at the time. So I started emailing the people whose pictures had been taken. And it was kind of a pain in the butt to have to retype the same thing over and over again. So I just made a WordPress site just to send to people who I found their pictures. And it went viral overnight.
I mean, people were, this family had, I mean, they had 6,000 followers of their Facebook prayer page. They were raising money for Alex's lemonade stand after this woman's death. So they had a really big footprint in the childhood cancer community.
And so to back up just a minute, you know, so as you kind of get like this, you know, feeling something's up and you start digging in, but this family had been, you know, they were very active online. They had a community online. They had a history online. So what did the world understand about the Deer family and about Dana and Eli and the father?
What was the story as most people who were following it understood it at the time that you got involved? So obviously this post chronicling Dana's untimely death was the thing that brought it to your attention, but they had quite a history. So what did the world understand these folks to be before you started on this debunking journey? They did.
They had a long history on the internet, and especially in the childhood cancer community. Their little boy, Eli, who I believe was like eight, maybe seven, he had been struggling with cancer for two years. And they chronicled this little guy's struggles, you know, all his treatment plans and like pictures of him undergoing chemotherapy and radiation and surgeries.
They were asking for, you know, prayers and support, actually not prayers, just support really on their Facebook page. And they had a community of several thousand people that kind of followed everything that they said. The husband was JS and he was a Canadian Mountie and the wife was Dana and she was a trauma surgeon at a hospital in Saskatchewan.
But they had interacted with so many parents and family members of, of kids with cancer who it's this big gigantic support network that they use head on Facebook where they, you know, held each other's hand through these procedures and things like that, talked on the phone, um, texted stuff like that. And, um, It had been going on for years and years.
So they had quite a community that they had put together of people that believed every word that was written. And this was not the family's first tragedy. So you mentioned that obviously their son had been struggling with cancer.
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Chapter 6: How did Taryn Wright gather information to expose the hoax?
Were there other sort of unusual tragedies that this family had been through? Well, again, as I started kind of digging in and like what I want to really say, it sounds so goofy when I put it all out there that it this this family had this and this happened. But keep in mind this these journals and things like that were going on for 11 years.
So it wasn't like every single day there was this gigantic tragedy. But so people, you know, like I've had people that kind of say crazy. who could have fallen for this? I mean, this is the craziest story, but if you know somebody day to day, people have crazy things happen in their lives.
Like, and again, if it's spread out over a long period of years, I don't think that people are idiots for believing it. That being said, JS's twin brother was murdered because he came out as gay and somebody didn't like that. I'm trying to think of what else happened. I mean, it was, JS had, he was a single father when he met Dana.
So he had three or four mothers of his children who had either like succumbed to drug abuse or they had just kind of abandoned their children very conveniently. So this gigantic family could kind of exist. He had I mean, there really were a lot. There's always twins I've noticed. So I think they had two sets of twins in their family.
There was a car accident involving the twins where they posted very graphic pictures of a car that was smashed by a semi. Just things like that, like just always a lot of drama happening. Yeah. So when you started reaching out to and I think, you know, something that's interesting about this story being, you know, I'm 43. And so it's like I lived through these evolutions of the Internet.
And this is a very like 2010s story, you know, because I think this is an era where we were quite a lot more naive and innocent about the idea that the things we put online were
were safe to share right and like the idea I think the idea back then that someone would like steal your photos of your children for nefarious purposes which I which I think is like pretty accepted among parents now I mean like I don't put any pictures of my kids anywhere um Like would was more shocking then.
And so what was the reaction from the people, you know, these sort of unsuspecting victims from whom these photos had been pillaged? What was their reaction when you reached out to them? I mean, just completely stunned, especially one of one set of twins belonged to a South African blogger. And she was just shocked that somebody across the world had claimed her children as their own.
um the mother of the actual cancer patient who doesn't want her name used or anything like that but she was super concerned because there were so many pictures taken of her little son that she was worried that it would lead to a custody battle between her and her ex-husband um just because it seemed like an unsafe thing to do all of a sudden you know like to document your kid's cancer battle
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Chapter 7: What were the reactions of those involved when the hoax was revealed?
So it had effects on people. I mean, I think people were some people were completely not bothered. Other people, it was just kind of funny to them that I mean, especially J.S. was like a financial bro in his like 20s or something. I mean, he was just like, OK, and, you know, like somebody took my pictures.
But, you know, like I think that it again, like the poor mother whose child actually had cancer was the most stunned of all. Yeah. I mean, and that's just, you can imagine what a horrible violation that would feel like. And so you were talking about, you put together this blog really for the purposes of sort of not having to, you know, recreate the same email over and over again.
And then that people started getting involved. So tell us about this community that formed around, uh, the warrior Eli hoax, the blog. So for the first hoax that I wrote about with the warrior Eli one, I had thrown everything on WordPress. I included an email address for people to send me information as it, as it came to them.
So, um, the person, the family sent out care packages or packages of plastic bracelets, like the live strong bracelets that said warrior Eli on them. Um, they sent out pictures like printed pictures of their kids. They sent out, um, coloring book pages and drawings that the cancer patient Eli had done. And they sent this to tons and tons and tons of people all over the world at great expense.
And so people started sending me pictures and things like that of these care packages. And other information. I mean, just people that were like, okay, I, I was in a relationship with JS that Dana didn't know about that was online only. I mean, like this, there were long, long, long, long tendrils that this family had had on the internet for years and years.
And I just kind of heard about all of them through this email.
this email account um and then after the heat died down over the warrior eli thing i made a facebook group of all the people that had kind of helped me find information and um at first we just were just any like group on the internet that were just like joking around and making memes out of stuff but then as people continued to send me different uh blogs and things to look at
we started kind of investigating them together. Okay. Yeah. And so I want to get a little bit more into that community and what it became. But before we get there, what did you discover about who was behind the Deer family? As you obviously, you know, the fact that these photos belong to people throughout the world and are not actually photos of the people they're claiming.
So obviously, we know that this is that this is a hoax. Yeah, spoiler alert. What did you discover? Yeah, to the shock of I'm sure no one listening. But what did you discover about the person who is behind all of this? Well, it was apparently because J.S. had a top secret Mountie job with the Canadian Royal Police, as it happens.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from the Warrior Eli hoax?
had his sister in Ohio send out the care packages. And it turned out that this person was behind the entire hoax. Again, spoiler alert, sorry, everybody. JS and Dana and Eli and the twins and the twin brother, nobody really existed.
It was all something that this woman, Emily Deer, had come up with and had been working on for 11 years since she was a very young child, really, like a preteen child. Wow. That's so extraordinary. And so it sounds like you traced this through these care packages that were going out. Yes. And did you get a chance to speak to Emily? I did.
I emailed her and I didn't want to, I mean, the whole, again, like I was kind of making up rules for myself as I went along and I was very hesitant to expose somebody. I mean, if you knew me in real life, I am like the least dramatic human. Like the fact that I was at the center of all this is kind of like, okay. And I had to come out of the closet again as like this nosy, nosy human.
All my friends were like, okay, Taryn, like how many hours? I was up the first day, like 36 hours, you know, like working on this thing. And now everyone I went to high school with knows it. And it's just like, okay. Um, but anyway, I mean, listen, I'm a true crime podcaster. So like I find this highly relatable, but yeah, you get it.
I mean, like you're one of us, but it was like, I mean, and that was a concern the first couple of hours. I was like, this is going to be, you know, like I didn't know what was going to happen with it. Obviously. I just thought that like somebody on my Facebook feed would undoubtedly find out about this. And just because so many people were looking, I had put it like a tracker.
I think I had 175,000 hits, like the first evening, which is crazy. Which and also, again, in 2013, like that is, I mean, that's massive numbers. Yes. I mean, on like a WordPress blog. This is not like a, you know, this is not in the current ecosystem. Sorry, we had these things called hits that were...
like there is things have really changed I mean it is crazy to think of that it and you look at my blog I mean like I have the default like WordPress uh background I mean I did like no work on this other than the writing whatsoever because I don't have any kind of skill with any of that um but anyway oh yeah we got back to did I talk to her um so I was like well before I expose this person or like
write about who it is. I want to talk to them, you know, like I want to find out what's going on. I wanted to make sure I was like 100% right. So I emailed Emily and I was like, Oh, actually, I wrote on the blog, can ED or something of Youngstown, Ohio, please email me at this address. And it took a couple hours. And then I got this email that was like, what is going on?
My brother, who is a Mountie, told me that he used pictures of other children that were around his children's age because he didn't want to use pictures of his real children on the blog. And he's he's grieving right now. His wife died and his son is going to die any minute.
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