Serious: A Conclusion

The following is Serious, part of a year-long investigative series by Coma News Daily into the disappearance of a former Coma News Daily editor, Don Johnson Michaels.

By Johnny Reynolds, who is a news reporter and not Ryan Reynolds

Don Johnson Michaels was either a WhipIts addict or running from oppressors and/or ghosts.

He ran away from town nearly two years ago to escape a commitment to shovel snow for elderly residents in the town.

Or Michaels found out the town’s buzzard infestation was actually a conspiracy to steal local children and was eliminated by said buzzards.

Or the horse he rode off on was actually his love interest and took him—possibly against his will–to live in Mexico.

Or perhaps the missing editors’ erratic behavior was driven by an embarrassing case of swamp shorts.

After 12 months of reporting by Serious, including interviews with every local kook who knew Michaels, reviewing various documents that were generally unrelated to Michaels and even looking at heavily redacted police reports, we shook it all out, and saw what sticks.

The questions remain maddening. What do we know? What do we not know? Is what know that we don’t know actually known or unknown? Knowing now what we know versus what we knew we’d know at the beginning would we still have spent a year doing this?

The answer I believe to all of those questions is yes.

But from the beginning, this investigation was never really about Michaels. It was about this town. About us. And about me. This investigation has filled this reporter with so many emotions: sadness, despair, joy, terror and mostly nausea.

Sure we’ve learned interesting facts, like the middle aged Michaels lived in one of the stables on the estate of his boss, Davis Montgomery III, publisher of Coma News Daily.

Where are the facts that matter? Facts like where Michaels is now, how drunk is he or where that prize stallion he rode off on is now?

In so many ways the facts that matter were not known one year ago. And somehow we know even less one year later.

This is Serious.

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