Word that Sgt. Dan Kennings had been killed in Iraq crushed spirits in the Daily Egyptian newsroom. The stocky, buzz-cut soldier befriended by students at the university newspaper was dead, and the sergeant’s little girl–a precocious, blond-haired child they’d grown to love–was now an orphan.
They all knew that Kodee Kennings’ mother had died when Kodee was about 5. The little girl’s fears and frustrations about her father being in harm’s way had played out on the pages of the Daily Egyptian for nearly two years, in gut-wrenching letters fraught with misspellings, innocent observations and questions about why Daddy wasn’t there to chase the monsters from under her bed.
It turns out Daddy didn’t exist. And neither did Kodee.
The Tribune went to southern Illinois to learn about the bond between Kodee and Dan Kennings, and the life Kodee would face without her hero.
Instead, eight days of reporting revealed elaborate fabrications and intricate lies. There is no soldier named Dan Kennings. The charming girl people came to know as Kodee Kennings is someone else entirely, a child from an out-of-state family led to believe that she was playing a part in a documentary about a soldier.
Using role players who say they were duped–including an employee of a local Christian radio station–the woman at the center of the hoax spun a remarkable wartime tale so compelling it grabbed the hearts of young journalists, university faculty members and readers, leaving them blind to the possibility it could be a ruse.
The reasons behind the lies remain unclear. There appears to have been no monetary motive, but the scope of the deception is staggering.
The woman involved used an acquaintance to play Kennings, going so far as to take him and the little girl to a church in Detroit this spring, where they spoke to a group of children inspired by their story.
The acquaintance–Patrick Trovillion, a registered nurse from Marion–said he was led to believe he was playing a cocky soldier in a legitimate movie. He was shocked to learn Thursday night that it was a farce and that his character had died.
“This really chaps me a little bit,” Trovillion said. “That ain’t no way to treat our armed forces.”
This wasn’t the first time someone has spun lies involving a soldier and the Iraq war. In a case in March, a Colorado woman pleaded guilty to felony criminal impersonation for creating a story about her husband dying in an Iraqi gun battle.
In southern Illinois, the tale began in 2003, when student reporter Michael Brenner said he was handed a letter from a little girl saying she saw an anti-war protest on the Southern Illinois University campus and that it bothered her because her dad was a soldier. Brenner e-mailed the little girl and, as he learned more about her situation, decided to tell her story.
The story appeared in the Daily Egyptian on May 6, 2003, detailing an 8-year-old’s struggles saying goodbye to her father, who was shipping off to Iraq with the 101st Airborne. According to the story, Kodee had lost her mother years earlier, so Kennings was her only blood relative.
“I don’t have a mom,” Kodee was quoted saying in the newspaper story. “If he died, I don’t have anywhere to go.”
Upon Kennings’ departure, Kodee supposedly came under the care of a young woman named Colleen Hastings, the wife of Kennings’ adoptive brother. Outgoing and affable, the woman forged a friendship with Brenner, and, he said, she seemed to think the attention was helping keep Kodee’s mind off her dad.
Brenner, editor of the Daily Egyptian at the time, started publishing unedited notes that Kodee would write about her dad or about things happening in her life.
Last week, Hastings contacted the student newspaper and said Kennings had been killed in action in Iraq. A professor in the university’s journalism school who was familiar with the Kennings story called the Tribune Aug. 17, and the Tribune had a reporter on the road to Carbondale that night.
But no details of Kennings’ death could be confirmed. His name did not appear on a Department of Defense Web site that lists U.S. casualties.
By the next day, the story was falling apart. Military officials could find no one named Dan Kennings in the Army or any other branch of the military, and no deaths in Iraq fit the time frame Hastings had described.
Hastings refused to speak with Tribune reporters, saying through Brenner, who had graduated in 2004 and was living with his family in West Chicago, that she wanted to shelter Kodee from the media.
On Saturday morning, cars began pulling into the gravel parking lot of a one-story American Legion hall in Orient, Ill., about 30 miles northeast of Carbondale, for a memorial service. Hastings and Kodee got out of a red Pontiac Grand Am, the little girl wearing an Army uniform shirt that hung down to her knees.
People inside the memorial service said both Hastings and Kodee were in tears. A video showed Kennings in his fatigues speaking with a group of children at a church, and there was a scrapbook filled with pictures of Kennings straddling a tank cannon or huddling with other soldiers.
Tribune reporters continued asking questions, and some students and a faculty member were growing increasingly hostile because of suggestions that Kennings did not exist. By Tuesday night, however, Brenner was pacing nervously outside a Dairy Queen in Carterville, Ill., talking to Hastings on his cell phone. He handed the phone to a Tribune reporter, and Hastings said she would come to the Dairy Queen and listen to questions.
Brenner, 25, said he was still convinced of Kennings’ existence and defended Hastings for trying to protect a little girl.
Hastings pulled into the parking lot in the same red car she’d driven to the memorial service. She was told that the military denied Kennings’ existence and that the name Colleen Hastings appeared in no public-records databases in Illinois. She was asked for a driver’s license and for a death certificate for Kennings. With each question, Hastings shook her head no.
After Brenner spoke to her for a minute alone, she drove off.
State records show that the car is registered to a woman living in Marion, and on Wednesday a reporter was there looking for the woman’s granddaughter, Jaimie Reynolds.
When she came out of the house, Reynolds was the same woman who had been at the Dairy Queen as Colleen Hastings.
Sitting on the back porch and wearing a long-sleeved Southern Illinois University shirt, her face flush from crying, Reynolds admitted that she had pretended to be Hastings. She said that Kennings was an invention, and later explained that those who met him actually had met Trovillion, the acquaintance who believed he was acting in a film.
She said, and the Tribune confirmed, that she had been a radio and television production student at the university. She graduated in 2004, putting her there alongside the very people she was deceiving.
Reynolds acknowledged the little girl is the daughter of friends and said she persuaded the parents to let her bring the child to Carbondale regularly by saying she was filming a documentary about a soldier killed in Iraq.
“We told her it was for a movie,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds alleged that the scheme was Brenner’s idea. She also said she fell in love with Brenner, making it that much harder for her to stop the lie.
“Mike is my best friend,” she said. “In the last couple of years, he’s had a hard time with his career. He asked me if I would help him out. I said I would. It just got a little bigger than he told me it would. I went with it because supposedly he was my best friend. This needs to be over with. I don’t want to lie anymore. He just wouldn’t let it go.”
Brenner denied Reynolds’ accusation and said her claims were outrageous.
“Jesus Christ, that is completely not true,” Brenner said when he heard about the allegations. “Obviously, she is making that up. I swear I’m telling the truth. The last two years of my life, I don’t know what to believe. It’s ridiculous. I feel stabbed in the back. They had an elaborate hoax. I’m telling the truth.”
On Thursday, 10-year-old Caitlin Hadley sat between her parents on a couch in her mom’s office, retelling the two-year odyssey that began with her belief that she was going to be the star of a documentary film about a little girl named Kodee.
“It was sort of weird, but I had a lot of fun,” Caitie said.
Her father, Richard Hadley, is a pastor at a Nazarene church in Montpelier, Ind., and her mother works for the church’s regional office. Both said they felt they’d been scammed by Reynolds.
“I just realized that I didn’t know this girl,” Tawnya Hadley said. “In the profession that my husband is in, we move and meet new people all the time. What if she’d never brought Caitie back? We feel like we’re idiots.”
The Hadleys lived in Buffalo, Ky., during most of the time Reynolds was making the four- to five-hour drive from Carbondale to pick up Caitie and bring her to southern Illinois.
Caitie said that when she and Reynolds were with other people, Reynolds told her they were “ilming.” Caitie was to pretend to be Kodee, and “she said I needed to act like a tomboy because Kodee was a tomboy.”
Caitie’s understanding was that everybody she met in Carbondale was in the movie, which was being filmed by hidden cameras. So when they went into the Daily Egyptian newsroom the first time, she pretended to be Kodee and believed that the reporters and editors were playing along as characters.
“I met all the people she had in the movie,” Caitie said. “We were always on camera, but I didn’t see any cameras.”
As Caitie’s involvement continued, the Hadleys began asking why the documentary had not been finished.
About a month ago, after a long silence, the Hadleys heard from Reynolds.
She said a new group of students wanted to finish the documentary, and they needed to borrow Caitie again for a memorial service because Dan Kennings had been killed in Iraq.
The parents agreed, and Reynolds drove Caitie down for one last experience.
Walter Jaehnig, director of the Southern Illinois journalism school and an ethics professor, said the Daily Egyptian would be publishing an apology regarding its coverage of Dan and Kodee Kennings. He said the university is embarrassed by the ruse but hopes to use it as an opportunity to teach.
“I think my other concern here,” he said, “is that we find a way to ensure that this incident is a learning experience for our present students and that they understand the importance of fact checking and verification of everything they write.”
In her home in Indiana on Thursday, Caitie reflected on Jaimie Reynolds, the woman who during the past two years became like a “big sister” to her.
“I feel sad for her,” Caitie said. “And I feel like she betrayed me.”
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ocasillas@tribune.com
dheinzmann@tribune.com
rhuppke@tribune.com
