Sunday’s 11:00 Law and Order: Criminal Intent was an episode about a book by a 14-year-old author about her experiences with ALS. The author turned out to be a fake and her “foster parents” had invented her in order to get some royalties and the such. The crime the show focused on originally was the murder of a publisher who was skeptical about the girl’s existence.
Before the episode, there was one of those disclaimers about how the show was based on a true event, but the characters were changed, so on and so forth. Does anyone have any recollection of an event like this actually taking place?
Sure, there’s the case of Kaycee Nicole, a hoax in which a young girl kept an web diary chronicling her fight against cancer, which garnered free hosting for the site and numerous gifts and outpourings of love and affection. After Kaycee “died,” members of the MetaFilter community weblog did some very simple research and discovered that there is no evidence that Kaycee Nicole ever existed and eventually, the woman who was supposedly Kaycee’s mother admitted that it was all a fabrication. There’s also the case of Anthony Godby-Johnson which was questioned early on and is almost completely disbelieved now.
The story on Law & Order had elements of both of these stories and others, and was likely an amalgam of many.