THE SUBSTACK MURDERS
Episode One: Jaime
The free sample was a butterscotch pudding cup, and Mel had eaten three because nobody was counting and her break wasn’t for another forty minutes.
Costco had rules for everything except hunger.
Between customers, she checked her phone. Habit. The Substack app crawled on the warehouse Wi-Fi, which was fine. Nothing on there moved fast unless it wanted money.
Her own feed sat at 340 subscribers. Same as last week. Same as the week before that. After month eight, hope had turned into a maintenance task. Now she checked the number the way you check a bruise.
Jaime’s post should have been at the top.
New one every Tuesday. Sometimes Wednesday if the poem was giving them trouble.
Mel had read every post going back fourteen months. Not because she was trying to learn something, though she had. Because Jaime wrote about parking lots, laundromats, all-night pharmacies, and the dead hour between closing and opening in a way that made ordinary loneliness feel documented.
The account loaded as a string of characters.
Mel refreshed.
Same string.
She typed Jaime Lester into the search bar and got nothing that wasn’t a LinkedIn profile for a guy in Scottsdale who sold insurance.
The customer in front of her tapped the sample tray.
“Any good?”
Mel looked at the pudding cup in his hand. Looked at the phone. Put her thumb over Jaime’s missing name.
“Really good,” she said.
The customer took two. Fair enough. Nobody was counting.
Mel had worked around platforms long enough to know the difference between a system failing and a system doing exactly what was intended.
At 4:47, her phone buzzed.
Reminder: Jaime Lester collab stream. 6 days.
The notification sat there in its little white box, clean and helpful and already wrong.
Mel read it twice.
The customer said the pudding was excellent and asked if she knew when they’d have the coconut ones back.
“I don’t,” Mel said. “Sorry.”
She put her phone in her pocket and finished the shift.
The drive home took forty minutes on a good day. That day it took an hour ten because of an accident on 75, everyone funneled into one lane, everyone pretending their car was the important one.
Radio off. Phone on the dash. Jaime’s URL refreshed every few minutes.
Still a string of characters.
Still nothing.
Mel opened their DMs. Four months of them. Before that, Jaime had just been a name at the top of a post every Tuesday. The collab stream pitch in October. Jaime taking three days to answer, then saying yes with a row of exclamation points that felt genuine instead of brand-managed.
You learned the difference after long enough online.
The last message was eight days old.
Still on for the 14th. I have a new batch. Fair warning some of them are weird even for me.
Mel had answered with a thumbs-up.
Traffic moved six feet and stopped again.
She put the phone face down on the passenger seat and kept it there until she got home.
The search took three hours.
Jaime Lester the poet. Jaime Lester with 31,000 subscribers fourteen months into publishing on a platform that told everyone the average growth timeline was three to five years and somehow expected them to find that encouraging.
A few cached pages. Half-loaded screenshots. A comment thread on a writing forum where someone had posted one of Jaime’s poems without attribution and been corrected by three separate strangers who knew exactly whose it was.
That told Mel something about Jaime’s readers.
No obituary. No family post. No announcement. No “taking time away from the platform.”
Just the string of characters where the name used to be.
Mel opened a new document and typed Jaime Lester at the top. Under it, everything she knew. Under that, everything she didn’t.
The second list got long fast.
She didn’t call it an investigation. That would have been embarrassing.
Mel lay there with the phone beside her, screen down.
Eight days ago, Jaime had sent her the last message.
Some of them are weird even for me.
Mel had sent back a thumb.
At 11:38, the county records search returned one result.
By midnight, Mel had stopped pretending these were just notes and opened the draft for Stack Attack.
STACK ATTACK
Episode 4: Jaime
[Transcript. Lightly edited for clarity.]
If you’ve been with me since the beginning, you already know I don’t do preambles. Preambles are where people hide the part they’re afraid to say.
Jaime Lester’s last post went live on a Tuesday. A poem about a gas station at 2 AM. Fourteen lines. No rhyme scheme. The kind of poem that reached into your chest, moved one small thing three inches, and left before you could ask who let it in.
It got 4,200 hearts.
Three days later, the account was gone.
The name became a string of characters and the archive returned nothing.
Jaime Lester had 31,000 subscribers when the account vanished.
Thirty-one thousand people woke up three days later and the thing they looked forward to reading wasn’t there anymore.
Some noticed.
Most didn’t.
The feed filled the gap because the feed is good at that.
I noticed because Jaime was in my stack.
I want to be careful here because this is the part where true crime gets gross and starts calling itself empathy.
Jaime is more than a case. Jaime is more than content. Jaime was a person who wrote poems about places people passed through, remembered strangers’ names, and built an audience of thirty-one thousand people in fourteen months doing something the platform could not classify, could not monetize cleanly, and apparently could not leave alone.
I know how that sounds, by the way.
I know I’m saying Jaime wasn’t content inside an episode with ad breaks.
Put a pin in that.
I have.
I don’t know everything that happened.
But I know this.
Cincinnati PD filed an incident report under Jaime Lester’s legal name three days before the account disappeared.
Case Type: Homicide.
Location: Rear service alley, former Marathon station, Queen City Avenue.
Time body located: 2:14 AM.
Personal effects recovered: wallet, keys, one paper receipt, no phone.
Status: Open investigation.
The report does not mention Substack.
It does not mention that six hours after Jaime Lester was pronounced dead, their feed posted Jaime’s final poem.
Fourteen lines.
No title.
No comments.
Just a button that said Subscribe.
I know Jaime isn’t the only one.
I know that when I started pulling the thread three weeks ago, I got an email from a Substack address I’d never seen before welcoming me to a reader tier I hadn’t signed up for.
Subject line: We think you’re ready for more.
I don’t know what that means.
Stack Attack drops every Thursday. If someone sent you this episode, subscribe. If you’re already subscribed, you know what to do.
I’m Mel Simmons.
Stay in the feed.
Ya hooked me again, Carnegie!!
I haven’t even read this yet but this is already a brilliant idea. And you’re just the person to do this well. Can’t wait to read.