A Deadly Web of Deceit

When she got home from school the next day, Megan rushed to check for messages from Josh. Heading out the door for an appointment, Tina ordered her daughter to turn off the computer. Ron was napping upstairs.

"I called 15 minutes later to see if she was off, and Megan was crying," Tina remembers. Nasty messages apparently were flying back and forth with Josh. Annoyed, Tina told Megan again to log off. Again Megan ignored her.

Fifteen minutes later, Tina's cellphone rang. This time, Megan was hysterical, and begged her mother to come home: She had to see what was happening online.

When Josh had refused to say who was supposedly telling him Megan was a bad friend, Megan had begun guessing, tossing out names from her old school. Some of those girls, also on MySpace, jumped into the fray. One, who had since moved to Ohio, rallied her new friends to attack Megan, too. Soon, "bulletins" were going out, linking friend-list to friend-list, broadcasting over MySpace that Megan Meier was fat, that Megan Meier was a slut, that no one should be friends with Megan Meier.

Tina found her daughter sobbing over the computer. Glancing at the screen, she saw that Megan had also sent foulmouthed messages. Tina reprimanded her and shut the computer off. "You're supposed to be on my side!" Megan shrieked before storming upstairs. Her father caught her on the landing. Those kids don't know you, he tried to soothe.

Neighbors heard Tina's scream that night over the rain outside.

A crowd gathered at the sound of sirens. The Drews were among those watching as an unconscious Megan was loaded into the ambulance, her heart barely beating. Lori Drew turned to someone and asked what happened.

Another neighbor would later remember a conversation with Drew that night, too. Drew had called and asked to speak to Michele Mulford's daughter as the emergency vehicles screeched up to the Meiers'.

"Just keep your mouth shut," the girl said she was told.

Crushing News

The next day, while Megan was on life support, Mulford broached the subject of suicide gingerly with her daughter, who, like Megan, was just 13. The girls had known each other since kindergarten but hadn't really moved in the same circles.

"As a parent, you panic," Mulford says. She told her daughter she didn't know what would have caused Megan to do something like this. Her daughter's reply stunned her:

"Mom, they had a MySpace account and were playing around with Megan. I sent an e-mail to Megan, too."

Mulford furiously called Lori Drew and demanded an explanation: What had she gotten her child involved in?

"She said: 'Okay, here's the deal: We created a MySpace account and found a good-looking boy on the Internet and named him Josh Evans and played with Megan,' " Mulford recounts, adding that Drew admitted she had "panicked" and removed the Josh profile the night Megan hanged herself.

Investigators confirmed that the "Josh Evans" account was deleted and that, as the message trail began evaporating, only some of the exchanges with Megan could later be recovered from the Drews' or Meiers' computers.

Mulford learned that the Drews had told her daughter about the prank while carpooling one day, and gave her the password. Believing that the goal was to determine whether Megan bad-mouthed the Drew girl, the Mulford girl sent the message saying Josh had heard Megan treated her friends badly.

Michele Mulford didn't really know the Meiers when her daughter revealed the hoax. The day after Megan's death, she called the middle school's crisis counselor, sobbing. The counselor urged her to come to the school, and Mulford remembers parking her car halfway on the sidewalk and running into the office in her pajamas, where she collapsed on the counselor's floor and cried for two hours while pouring out the story.

While Mulford was agonizing over how to approach the Meiers, the Drews apparently were having no similar qualms.

They sent a huge spray of flowers to the Meiers and attended Megan's funeral. The Drews' daughter's birthday fell just three days after Megan's, and the Drews implored the Meiers to come to the party. "They started to sing 'Happy Birthday' and I left because I couldn't handle it," Ron recalls. Later, the Drews had Megan's younger sister over to bake cookies, and asked to hide their kids' Christmas surprise -- a foosball table -- in the Meiers' garage.

Mulford finally arranged to meet the Meiers at her own counselor's office. Tears mixed with rage and the Meiers hugged her and thanked her for coming forward. Everyone headed home to Waterford Crystal Drive. "I was maybe five minutes behind them, and as soon as I got on the street, I could see Ron with the foosball table," Mulford remembers. He and Tina were smashing it to bits.

Hearing the commotion, neighbors began to gather and watch.

Elusive Facts

"Tina and I drug that foosball table out of the garage and started going at it with an ax and a sledgehammer," Ron recalls. "We loaded it up in my pickup truck and dumped it on the Drews' driveway. It was in about 5,000 pieces. Tina spray-painted 'Merry Christmas' on the cardboard from the box."

When Curt, Lori and their daughter walked up to the Meiers' some 15 minutes later, saying they needed to talk, neighbors had to restrain Ron.

Later that day, sheriff's deputies knocked on the Meiers' door. The Drews had called about their demolished foosball table. It was one of many complaints they would lodge against the Meiers.

In her first formal complaint, Lori Drew put Megan's suicide into the public record with an explanation that would later outrage Web surfers who discovered it on TheSmokingGun.com. Accounts of the hoax by the Drews and Ashley Grills would later change so often and so drastically that the county prosecutor eventually issued a two-page list of facts and disputed facts, and conceded to reporters that getting the real truth was impossible by now.

But in her initial story barely a month after Megan's death, Drew told sheriff's deputies that the neighborhood had grown hostile because people had "found out her involvement in Megan's suicide," the report says. It also recounts Drew's admission that she "instigated and monitored" the fake MySpace profile. The sole purpose, she told the deputy, was to find out what Megan was saying about her daughter.

Drew told deputies she "just needed" to talk to the Meiers to relieve herself of "responsibility" and guilt. She said she and her husband had tried three times already, "banging on the door" on Thanksgiving, and writing a letter of condolence. But the Meiers wanted no contact. She wanted the tension in the neighborhood documented, in case anything happened. It did.

Ron Meier was accused of driving his truck across the Drews' lawn and causing $1,000 in turf damage. "I didn't do it," he says. He estimates he has spent $3,000 in legal fees so far.

The only criminal charges filed in the wake of Megan Meier's suicide would be against her own father.

The Wreckage of Lives

In cyberspace, a blurry line still flickers between social justice and mob retribution.

Today, the Drews' phones ring unanswered, and video cameras mounted on the roof of their white rambler pan the property for trespassers. Curtains remain drawn, and a weary-looking man who answers the door politely refuses to comment, saying only that "we need to tread very softly right now."

Neighbors say they often see strangers drive slowly past the Drews' house and hear shouts in the night: Murderer! Burn in hell, Lori!

The sheriff's department increased patrols in the neighborhood, and Drew went into hiding with her daughter. The Drews' advertising business was forced to close, and Curt Drew's affiliation with a local realty firm was severed. Their daughter, now 15, has been too shaken to return to school, and Ashley Grills is under psychiatric care after threatening to hurt herself, according to county prosecutor Jack Banas, who decried the "vigilante mentality."

Michele Mulford and her daughter both remain in counseling because of Megan's suicide, Michele Mulford says, and her daughter does not want to publicly discuss what happened. The Meiers acknowledge the girl's remorse and say they have forgiven her.

The Meiers' marriage crumbled under the strain of the past year, and they have filed for divorce. Ron still lives in the same house, where two fairy-light angels glow each night from Megan's bedroom window onto Waterford Crystal Drive below.

A hundred or so people, many of them teenagers, gathered for a candlelight vigil one night this winter. Everyone stood in a green space across from the Drews' dark house. No one seemed to be home. Megan's family handed out pink polka-dotted fliers that demanded "Justice for Megan Taylor Meier" and vowed to fight to "change the laws -- one city, one state, and one country at a time." So far, only local ordinances have been passed, making cyber-bullying a misdemeanor.

Josh Evans exists now only as a closed FBI file. In a MySpace survey, he said he wore size 13 1/2 shoes, preferred cappuccino to coffee, didn't smoke or take drugs and had never shoplifted. He sometimes swore. He liked girls with long brown hair and said weight didn't matter. The final question asked what things in his past he regretted. The answer was typed in capital letters, a shout from a nonexistent boy in a virtual world.

"NONE," he said.