The theories began swirling within hours of police announcing that they had found a body on a quiet lake in a small Maine town.

Police said little about the death of 48-year-old Sunshine “Sunny” Stewart, of Tenants Harbor, who went missing while paddleboarding. They set up a tip line and warned residents in the Union area to be cautious and stay on the lookout for anything unusual.

Almost immediately, people latched on to theories that Stewart’s death was connected to a serial killer they are convinced is active in New England. TikTok creators, internet sleuths and true crime fanatics posted video after video about the case, racking up millions of views with speculation about what might have happened near Crawford Pond on July 2. Facebook commenters dug into her life and the campground where she was staying. The national media quickly picked up the story.

“One of the things I noticed in this case is everyone had a theory,” said Maine State Police Maj. Scott Gosselin, who oversees the Major Crime units that investigate nearly all homicides in the state. “I read a thousand different theories of the case prior to us making an arrest. None of them were based in fact whatsoever.”

The attention became even more intense after police announced last week that a 17-year-old boy who was staying at the same campground had been arrested and charged with murder.

Experts say the investigation perfectly fits the profile of a case likely to capture the public’s attention and attract frenzied coverage in a country that has become increasingly obsessed with true crime and skeptical of police.

So it’s not surprising that the level of interest is so high, but they warn that such widespread speculation could create challenges for investigators and prosecutors.

“The creation of online communities around violence and around murder means that many, many more cases now come to the general public’s attention than they would have in the past. And I would put this Maine murder sort of in that category,” said David Schmid, an associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo who researches Americans’ fascination with murder and serial killers and the popularity of true crime.

Schmid said the public’s obsession with murder is rooted in anxiety about being the victim of a violent crime, even though there has been a dramatic decline in homicides nationwide since the 1990s. At the same time, the creation of online communities centered on violence and murder has led to a cultural phenomenon of amateur sleuthing that can lead to harmful speculation, he said.

“On the one hand, the motives of the people who get involved in this type of activity are, for the most part, benign and well-intentioned,” Schmid said. “However, I think there are some people whose interest in the subject is much more questionable and much more morbid.

“Even for those people who are well-intentioned, they can end up doing a great deal of damage to ongoing cases.”

RUMORS BEGIN TO SWIRL

From the start, the Union homicide had all the markers of the type of case that would go viral.

It took place in a small town not associated with violent crimes. No one was immediately arrested, and police did not say whether they had identified any suspects. And the victim was a white woman who was, by all accounts, a capable person simply out enjoying summer vacation activities, Schmid said.

Then came a few grisly details about Stewart’s killing — her cause of death was strangulation and blunt force trauma — and the shocking arrest of the young suspect from Frankfort. That prompted further speculation about the teen’s background, his family and his interests.

When the arrest was announced, police did not release any information about the suspect other than his age, but by the following day, his name and hometown had been released in court. The Press Herald has declined for now to name him unless the state succeeds in its motion to try him as an adult.

Social media sleuths who found Facebook profiles for the suspect and his parents shared screenshots from the pages, analyzing each photo the teen posted and his comments below it. In a public Facebook group about the alleged New England serial killer that has more than 10,000 members, there were dozens of posts about the suspect’s history, possible links to other deaths and speculation about a motive. Some of those posts have hundreds of comments.

Posters also spread comments they said were from people who knew the teen that described him as a bully.

The teen’s grandfather and aunt last week disputed those characterizations and said the boy has been treated for a mental illness.

“I know they’re painting him as a monster, but he’s not,” the teen’s grandfather told the Press Herald. “He’s a 12-year-old boy in a 17-year-old’s body.”

The lack of information from police has likely fueled the rumors and speculation on social media. It’s not uncommon for police in Maine to release very few details about a case before it goes to trial — in this case, as with most homicides in the state, a judge has sealed documents written by investigators that typically show why they believe a suspect should be arrested — and information is even slower to come out in juvenile cases, which have their own complex rules.

“If the connections aren’t there, people will just invent the connections. And unfortunately, speculation very, very quickly comes to take on the status of fact for some people,” Schmid said. “Once you have a situation like that, you’re in trouble.”

SOCIAL MEDIA IMPACT

Gosselin, the major crimes leader, said state police have kept a lot of information close to the vest so they don’t compromise their investigation, which continues even after an arrest is made. It is common for police to withhold certain details of a crime to help verify the veracity of witness statements and tips, he said.

When rumors are widespread, people start to treat speculation as fact, which can affect how accurately witnesses remember what they saw, Gosselin said.

“Oftentimes, stories like that end up taking on a life of their own through the social media platforms and end up influencing witnesses and what their recollection was of a certain event,” he said. “They end up hijacking an investigation.”

Social media interest in a case can have serious impacts on both police investigations and court processes, said Michael Alcazar, a retired New York City police detective and adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

In high-profile cases where police are asking for tips from the public, the interest can generate extra leads that police need to sort through, Alcazar said. But in some cases, the heightened interest can lead to critical information.

Alcazar said that’s what happened in the case of Gabby Petito, a travel blogger who documented her cross-country van trip with her boyfriend on YouTube. She was reported missing on Sept. 11, 2021, and her disappearance immediately went viral. A tip from someone who heard about the case led police to Petito’s van and, ultimately, to her body in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest.

But Alcazar said intense coverage of a case can also be harmful, as it was in the investigation of the murders of four University of Idaho students in 2022.

Before Bryan Kohberger was arrested and charged with killing the students, online speculation was rampant. Social media sleuths, determined to solve the case, publicly identified suspects who police later determined had no connection to the killings. But the sleuths’ accusations still damaged the reputations of the suspects who were cleared.

Once a suspect has been charged in a high-profile case, it can be difficult to find a jury pool that has not been tainted by all of the online speculation and media coverage, Alcazar said. That played out in the Massachusetts trials of Karen Read, who in June was found not guilty of murder in the death of her boyfriend.

Read, whose first trial ended in a mistrial, developed a fervent TikTok and Facebook following. The circus-like atmosphere around that case prompted concerns from both prosecutors and defense attorneys about witness intimidation and the ability to ensure Read got a fair trial.

Alcazar said the high-profile nature of the Union homicide is something that investigators and prosecutors will have to keep in mind as the case moves forward.

“Everyone is seeing it and is influenced by what they see on social media, whether it’s true or bad information. They take it as evidence,” he said. “That’s something I’m sure prosecutors will need to figure out, because it can bias jurors and undermine the trial.

“People see these social media posts, and they think it’s good evidence. They’re basically trying it on social media.”