By Shivani Khanna, Andrea Park, Sarah Pfander & Jessica Stark
Gargoyle staff reporters
Published Friday, Dec. 16, 2005, Gargoyle, features

EYES GLUED TO the frivolous pink-and-blue background of the Uni High Gossip Girl's blog, we read and reread the numerous entries, looking for any clues that might help us identify the mysterious writer who had captivated the student body's attention earlier this year by divulging the private lives of unsuspecting Uni students. Although her postings have stopped for the time being, the mystery remains: Who is Gossip Girl? That is what Detectives Khanna, Park, Pfander, and Stark set out to solve.

We began with a phone call to William Gaines, professor of journalism at the University of Illinois, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for investigative journalism with the Chicago Tribune, and author of “Investigative Reporting for Print and Broadcast,” a textbook explaining the process of investigative reporting.

Several years ago Gaines, along with his students, decided to investigate the identity of Deep Throat, the man who anonymously fed information about the Watergate scandal to Bob Woodward, a reporter for The Washington Post.

The project got the class a good deal of national attention, and despite the fact that they wrongly identified Fred Fielding, a Nixon aide in the White House, we felt that advice from Gaines would be invaluable as we began this case to uncover the anonymity that shields Uni's Gossip Girl from the public eye. Gaines launched us off to a good start by giving us many useful tips that we would use later in our investigation.

The first step was to examine the content of the blog and discern which class the author would most likely be from. The focus of many entries was on underclassmen, especially freshmen. For example, the Nov. 4 entry mentioned Maddy Levin's new hairdo, the budding relationship between Annie Machesky and Holden Bucher, and the absence of Jessica Stewart and Kaylie Dastrup that day.

The extensive amount of attention on this class led us to believe that Gossip Girl was a member of the freshman class. Although the author identified herself as a girl, we could not exclude males from our investigation.

Following Gaines' recommendation to use the process of elimination, we began to recognize people who obviously could not be Gossip Girl. An anonymous source gave us a tip that Uni Gossip Girl 102, the counter-blog to the original Gossip Girl's blog, was written by members of a group of freshman girls identifying themselves as the BC (which may stand for the Beautiful Children or Bitch Clique, to name a few possibilities). Another freshman girl, Lauren Piester, also helped start Gossip Girl 102.

Our source discovered this after stumbling upon the BC's “secret” clique blog on one of the Mac lab's computers, which stated the password to the Gossip Girl 102 blog. Thus, we eliminated the members of the BC from our suspect pool, figuring that they would not contradict their own blog.

We then eliminated all boys from the suspect list because the layout and language of the blog was very feminine. Also, much of the gossip focused on freshman girls. However, we would have to second guess this move later on.

We then considered extracurricular activities, which included mainly Uni sports and the fall play, “Rumors.” After eliminating the BC, we had a list of 23 girls. We then identified their involvement in any extracurricular activities and compared their practice schedules to the times of postings.

The entry we mostly concerned ourselves with was the one posted on Friday, Nov. 4, at 4:53 p.m. This entry did not follow the trend of late-night posting by Gossip Girl, and it also coincided with that day's girls basketball practice and the girls cross-country team's trip to Peoria for the state meet. Detective Khanna, who competed at the state meet, confirmed that no teammate brought a laptop to the meet, and Detective Pfander identified the girls present at basketball practice. With this information, we eliminated all but 12 girls.

Armed with this fairly narrow list of suspects, we proceeded to interview numerous members of the freshman class and question them about our suspect list. We started by asking questions such as who they thought Gossip Girl was, why they thought it was that person, and if the names of our top suspects sounded plausible.

Based on information we obtained from these interviews, and also from observing general personalities of the top 12 suspects, we were able to narrow our list down to four girls. We thought that would be it, but then we had to add a final person, James Smith. This addition was made because of many suspicions toward him and his involvement with the blog.

Our top five suspects listed in alphabetical order by last name are Deborah Ladd, Hannah Leskosky, Annie Machesky, Laura Sligar, and Smith. Some of the people remain on the top five list not because there is specific evidence that led us to believe that they were Gossip Girl, but rather there was a lack of evidence that they were not Gossip Girl.

Ladd is a prime suspect because when we were calling her for an interview she was very quick to assert that she was not Gossip Girl, and proceeded to hesitate and avoid answering our questions. Also, after our first phone conversation she would not pick up the phone until we were able to contact her online and tell her that we urgently needed to speak with her.

Machesky is another prime suspect because of the many entries about her on the blog, as well as information that we gathered from a source who wishes not to be named.

Sligar is also on our top five list because during tech week of “Rumors,” the play in which she served as a technician, the blog was not updated.

The last step of our project was confronting and interviewing our top suspects. We met with all five people in a private meeting to first get statements and then possibly obtain further information.

We entered the meeting with a tape recorder and a camera. We slyly turned on the tape recorder and recorded the small talk of our suspects, hoping to see if we could gather any clues from their comments. Then, we asked for statements from each of the suspects, telling us why they were not Gossip Girl.

“I'm not Gossip Girl. I have a life, and I'm not that stupid,” said Machesky. “I'm not a loser. It's a waste of time.”

“I really don't care,” said Ladd. “I don't go to sporting events, and honestly, I stopped gossiping. … Well, I tried.”

“I don't have fourth free, so I don't know who goes out to lunch,” said Leskosky, referring to numerous entries about lunch dates between members of the freshman class. “Also, I don't go to Steak n Shake,” referring to an entry about the Gossip Girl seeing several Uni students at that restaurant.

“Well, even though I'm not Gossip Girl, because I don't have enough time because I'm always doing bio homework, you can blame it on me because I totally want to take credit for it,” said Sligar. However, she then went on to accuse Smith.

In his own defense Smith stated, “I don't have fourth free, and I was out of town [during one of the postings].” Smith also accused another student, Holden Bucher, his reasoning being that since Holden's parents banned him from the Internet, there hasn't been an update.

However, these interviews, rather than answering questions, raised more. James' statement about being out of town made us wonder how he knew he was out of town during a posting, and whether he had access to a computer.

Also, we now had to consider Holden Bucher as a suspect. But, another perusal of the gossip blog caused us to find an entry about counselor Sam Smith's all-girl gatherings that took place in November. The meetings provided pizza, and the discussion focused on eating disorders.

Detectives Park, Pfander, and Stark attended these meetings and confirmed that there were no boys there. Thus, it was at this point in our investigation that we eliminated all boys from serious consideration. It was also at this time that we also realized that Gossip Girl had attended the Kanye West concert on Oct. 19. As we were unable to discern which of the freshmen had attended the concert, we decided to leave that clue aside.

At this point we ended our investigation. Unable to narrow our list of suspects further, and, in fact, with the arrival of new clues, facing the issue of having to expand it, we hung up our trench coats and put away our magnifying glasses. Maybe detective work isn't really in our future.