[MURDER MASTERMIND UNCOVERED: Web Review investigates Tom Arriola]
Did you purposely design Crime Scene so that people would wonder if it was true?
Right from the start. I wanted to have no questions about it: that this was real. I'm trying to come up with a name for this kind of entertainment, which pretends to be real -- maybe this is faction. It represents itself as fact, it's as factual as it can be, but it's fiction. I want to make people think this is real, at first. Then they have to do a little work to find out that it's not. I guess I could also call it "an interactive event." But I mostly call it a thing.

In some ways it recalls 'War of the Worlds'.
Quite a bit. Thanks, that's a compliment.

It's pretty easy to pretend you're real on the Internet.
That's true. And most of the information in Crime Scene is true. There's only one major thing that's not true: there was never a dead woman on my kitchen floor. The biographical information is true for the most part. I've made things a little more dramatic, sometimes, but it's all as true as can be. If someone wanted to call up information in Nashville and ask for Greg Giblin, they would probably find him. I think he's listed. Or Valerie Wilson in Oxford, or Tom Arriola, any name that's listed. These people really do exist. Those driver's licenses are real. I had to gray out the registration numbers.

And you're on the site?
Oh yeah, I'm the roommate and I'm also the bald guy on the refrigerator. That's a production still from somewhere; it just happened to be on the refrigerator when we spattered the blood, so it became part of the crime scene. My cat is also in there, and she really is a mean, angry cat. You can't pick her up without her biting you.

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