It’s hard to fathom that Topix forums, of all places, could hold a key to finally finding the murderer of Yolanda Bindics.

The Jamestown woman was last seen the night of Aug. 10, 2004, and her body found in September 2006 by hunters in a heavily wooded area in the town of Charlotte. Bindics family has kept the case in the public eye over the past two decades, and the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office Unsolved Crimes Unit has apparently made some headway in the past couple of years.

And now, apparently, Topix forums may help provide the Bindics family with some answers. Unsolved Crimes Unit detectives are trying to find several Topix users: Judge It, Knowledge Is Power, Sam the Sham, Don and/or Larry from Fredonia, Point and AOL. Those users posted information years ago that has since been found factual – and investigators want to pull on those threads to see if they can finally unravel the mystery surrounding Bindics’ disappearance and murder.

For those who don’t know, Topix forums in the early 2000s were a crazy place. It wasn’t uncommon for posters to engage in spirited, no-holds-barred debates on any topic of the day. Those topics included serious local issues and the type of rumormongering that used to be featured in gossip magazines on supermarket shelves. It was a free-for-all that was easily dismissed, both because some of the posts were so outrageous they couldn’t be true and because it was hard to track down the brains behind interesting ideas or points that were made. The anonymity made posters feel invincible and gave license to say things they wouldn’t dream of saying in a face to face conversation.

That will be the problem for investigators who think the old Topix forums may hold clues to Bindics’ murder. It can be hard to track down anonymous posters on systems that are still live. Topix was shut down in 2018, which just makes a difficult job harder. That’s what prompts the call for the posters to come forward voluntarily.

But if the forums hold a nugget of truth that can bring Bindics’ murderer to justice, or even provide closure to the Bindics family, this is a thread worth posting.

And it makes you wonder, what else did Topix posters get right two decades ago that was discounted because of the forum they chose?