By Ella Dorn
Copyright newstatesman
Two weeks ago, police were called to an impounded Tesla Model X emitting a foul odour in a Los Angeles tow park. They found a body decomposing inside. The owner of the car was David Burke, a 20-year-old otherwise occupied by a world tour. In 2022, he shot to TikTok fame, gaining millions of followers under the stage name D4vd as a singer of mellow bedroom pop. Fans reacted in horror as news outlets identified the body. It was Celeste Rivas Hernandez, a teenager who had been reported missing in Southern California in April 2024 at just 13.
Local police have already raided Burke’s home in the Hollywood Hills; they are likely digging through the mounds of available evidence. But he has been charged or taken into custody. Burke is reported to be cooperating with the police investigation. Some online sleuths believe the authorities aren’t acting fast enough. A Reddit community dedicated to D4vd was once a home for fans, with the singer as its only moderator. But over the past week the forum has turned into ground zero for comment and analysis on the discovery, with tens of thousands of people online at any given time.
Ex-fans with access to the singer’s old Discord chatroom have unearthed messages about underage girls that seem to come from members of his crew; an as-yet-unverified series of screenshots appears to make the case that the victim was pregnant. They’ve spotted Hernandez hiding her face in selfies with Burke, sitting next to him in public livestreams, and sporting luxury items they think he must have given her; one eagle-eyed amateur sleuth has managed to eke out the pair’s precise location from one of her Instagram stories.
The trouble begins when the sleuths attempt to assemble a coherent narrative. Celebrity life has been tantalising since time immemorial, and glimpses of it hold real financial value; paparazzi photographers are able to turn the public’s guilty pleasure into a viable business. Now the flies on the wall have the moral high ground: they imagine they are detectives in a procedural drama, stringing together people and places on an evidence board to make sense out of something shocking.
D4vd has been laying a trail, the most invested theorists claim. They point towards what they believe to be an artistic conspiracy, with eerie hints layered into songs, videos and merchandise. A leaked demo from two years ago is called “Celeste”; both the victim and alleged perpetrator have finger tattoos that say “Shhh”. Burke’s biggest hit, the eerily named “Romantic Homicide”, came out on Hernandez’s birthday. One TikTok theorist points to an old video in which the singer raises and lowers four fingers. Burke, she says, is a sworn anime fan, and in Japanese the number four sounds like the word for “death”.
Shows on the first portion of his world tour featured pallbearers lifting a prop coffin; merchandise came with printed bloodstains. If you’re a D4vd fan, it seems, you’ve been made an inadvertent Cassandra; he’s been sending signals all along. The whole thing is redolent of the old Beatles theory about MI5 stepping in to swap a deceased Paul McCartney with a lookalike. But that urban legend was merely camp fun – here, someone is actually dead.
Onlookers are also fixated on the idea of a “second Celeste”. Hanging around the singer in more recent footage is a young Hispanic woman with the same first name and hairstyle as the victim. In one video she wears an identical hoodie to the one in Hernandez’s Missing Person notice. Evidence of an enduring obsession, say some. An organised cover-up, say others: the double is of age, and could pull onlookers away from useful evidence. Both theories are actually plausible. But they attract an audience for a reason, one of more utility in works of melodramatic fiction than in criminal investigations. Charlotte Brontë, Du Maurier, Hitchcock and Nabokov would all concur.
There is a clear emotional draw to all this theorising. Everything must happen for a reason; a long-term criminal conspiracy is at least marginally more comforting to read about than murder in cold blood. Imagine being a teenager and trying to come to terms with the shocking idea that your favourite singer has committed homicide. To retain your own moral standing you will need to disown all past attachments to his music, no matter how emotionally intense – some ex-fans have posted photos of their D4vd albums sitting in rubbish bins, or getting torched with a lighter. You can’t club together with other young ex-fans to get over the betrayal and shock in a supportive environment. “Dear people who are making it about themselves, stop,” reads the all-time most popular post in the D4vd subreddit. “No one cares about your merch, no one cares that you lost your idol, no one cares that you can’t listen to your favourite music anymore. A little girl is dead…”
This sentiment is counterintuitive. It has forced a version of empathy on the group that has quickly turned into something so parasitic as to feel inhuman. A relative of Hernandez has been grilled unceremoniously over Instagram message; there’s a photo circulating of the victim around the time she may have met their alleged perpetrator. As comments echo, she looks confused and is very clearly a child; the only drive here, it seems, is to visualise the full extent of the crime. Some Reddit users have gone even further, raiding the Facebook pages of family members to find photographs of Hernandez at three or four years old. Another post shows us the tiny size of the boot of a Tesla Model X. Its comment section is full of the kind of gory speculation nobody would ever want printed about a loved one.
Timestamped messages from soon-to-be-deleted chatrooms will at least be useful to police; so will selfies and livestreams. But none of this extraneous detail is needed for online sleuthing.
In the average procedural drama, there is a low ebb when the protagonist stands back to comprehend the gravity of the crime – the youth and humanity of the victim, the heartlessness of the accused. The same sort of personal photographs are usually involved. So awful, she thinks. The scene is written in to grant her some purpose and motivation before she can get on with the details of the case; the rest of the drama usually comes from the problem-solving itself.
The internet’s detectives are living out a self-conscious procedural, too. But they’ve got it the wrong way round. More forum inches are taken up in mulling over the evil than in putting an end to it. Nothing can bring the victim back; the first prize here is not a punishment for the accused, or even the praise one might receive after uncovering a criminal conspiracy. It is a voyeuristic route into someone else’s grief; D4vd’s ex-fans, who are already perfectly entitled to their own sadness, now feel as if they have a duty to spirit themselves into the scene of the crime. Points go to whoever can assist in assembling the most accurate mental recreation of a young girl’s final moments on earth.
