I wasn’t always Old Man Trench.
I published my first website in 1997. I was in my late 20s at the time. The HTML was typed by hand as I was creating the site on a WebTV, and there was no copy and paste function at the time.
What’s more important is the screen name I chose. Ya see, back then it was strongly advised not to use your real name on the internet. So, late 20s, just newly born onto the internet with a lot of things to say, and I wanted what I thought was a cool name to go with all of that.
I’ve been reading comic books most of my life, and my favorite comic book character of all time is The Question. For those who may not know, The Question doesn’t have the typical spandex-style super suit. Instead, he wears a fedora with a trench coat and has a mask that makes it appear like he has no facial features at all.
So, I needed a name like The Question, but I didn’t want to copy the name entirely. Since I had been wearing a trench coat occasionally since I was 17, I decided on The Trenchcoat. That eventually morphed into TheTrenchcoat, all one word with two capital Ts.
The website itself was your typical Geocities-type affair. It had animated gifs and overly detailed backgrounds. But since I’ve been into heavy metal since I was in my teens, the website had a heavy metal look to it, which could be easily misconstrued as goth.
For example, a friend of mine at the time created the picture at right that I used for my online icon.
Anyway, since I was really into heavy metal, I had also been writing heavy metal lyrics since my teens. Some may have seen them as poetry.
One of those poems/songs was called “Death of a Jester,” and it went a little something like this.
“Death of a Jester”
There will be no performance today
There will be no curtain call
He can no longer perform for you
So witness the grandest spectacle of all
It’s a one-night engagement
So make your way to the front row
It’s the death of a jester
It’s a one-dead-man show
There are no mourners today
Only spectators at the scene
Relishing in this bizarre event
Witnesses to the obscene
Twisted smiles on their faces
Dark humor in their minds
Expecting him to rise again
To be amusing one last time
No setup in the eulogy
No punchline in the pain
He lived for your acceptance
And died from no acclaim
I heard his dying words
As his final breath he gave
He wanted to be taken seriously
Now he’s taken to the grave
April, 1998
I couldn’t have possibly realized how much this poem would alter my life in the coming year.
What I’ve left out of the story so far is that I’ve suffered from depression and anxiety since my teens. The lyrics/poems I wrote in that year became darker with frequent references to suicide.
Then April 20th, 1999, happened. I was sitting on my couch watching TV when the news broke of the Columbine High School shooting. It was mistakenly reported early on that the gunmen were supposedly goth kids who called themselves “The Trenchcoat Mafia.” While I was obviously horrified, I never thought this tragedy would affect me personally.
After I went to sleep that night, a few news outlets reported that my site had something to do with Columbine. Most notably was the Washington Post, which implied that my website was part of some larger trench coat-clad goth suicide cult, even quoting the aforementioned “Death of a Jester,” taking it completely out of context. I woke up to a torrent of hate mail.
Even after posting a disclaimer saying that my website had nothing to do with Columbine, the hate mail became too much for me in my fragile mental state. So I took the website down and deleted it for good. As far as I was concerned, TheTrenchcoat was dead.
Over the next year, I tried starting new websites with new names, but nothing resonated with me as much as TheTrenchcoat.
So in mid-2000 I launched a new website that was more in journal form than its predecessor. It had a blog-like feel to it, but this was years before services like Blogger and WordPress were widely available.
On this new site, I would write about crime, politics, entertainment, religion, and news, but mostly crime. The crime I wrote about most? School shootings, of course.
In 2002 I launched my first proper blog, TheTrenchcoat Chronicles. The subject matter was usually split between politics and crime.
Then in 2004, I met a real crime blogger by the name of Steve Huff. While I merely spouted opinions, Steve had real investigative skills that have actually aided in cracking some major crimes. Yet when someone asked someone of his stature who the first crime blogger was, Steve always said it was me. I was more than humbled by that. It was at that time I decided to mostly dump politics and increase my focus on crime.
If I was going to be serious about crime blogging, I couldn’t keep calling myself TheTrenchcoat. I needed a new moniker that sounded like an actual person’s name. Every one of my internet friends was already calling me Trench for short. Simultaneously, I was running a short-lived blog called Tin Foil Hat under the pseudonym of Reynolds Rapp. When one of my online friends discovered I was both bloggers, he called me Trench Reynolds, and it stuck.
With the advent of social media, I noticed that a lot of kids were being arrested after posting their school shooting threats and plots on MySpace. So in 2006, I launched my second successful blog, MyCrimeSpace. As you can probably tell by the name, it focused on all matters of crime as they related to social networking. It was because of this that I was interviewed by both TIME Magazine and Rolling Stone.
In 2007 I launched my third successful blog, and it was born out of MyCrimeSpace. In the realm of social networking crime, not only did I post stories about MySpace and Facebook, but I also included craigslist because in many circles it’s considered to be the very first social networking site. Crime was getting so bad on craigslist that they started to outnumber the MySpace stories on MCS, so I decided to devote a blog fully to Craigslist crimes. That blog was called CraigsCrimeList. Notice a pattern?
CraigsCrimeList was probably my most successful blog. I got to be on news shows like 48 Hours on CBS and AC 360 on CNN. At the time, I was blocked on Twitter by both the founders of Craigslist and Backpage.
As the saying goes, though, all good things must come to an end. With the decline in popularity of MySpace, the name MyCrimeSpace felt dated. Also, with the rise of crime on craigslist competitor Backpage, it seemed a little unfair to single out craigslist in the CraigsCrimeList name. So I took all 3 of my remaining blogs and combined them into a blog called Trench Reynolds’s Crime News, which then eventually evolved into Real Crime with Trench Reynolds.
Now, it’s 2026, almost 30 years after my website journey began. I’m in my late 50s, and hardly anyone reads or writes blogs anymore. The youngsters are too busy on the TikToks, while people my age refuse to leave the walled garden of Facebook. In the past two decades, I’ve dabbled in podcasting but never got any feedback, so I always returned to writing. Plus, I find it hard to just delete over 25 years of my content from the internet.
So recently, after 22 years, I decided to change my pseudonym from Trench Reynolds to Old Man Trench. I took the name not only from the comic book Old Man Logan but also from the pro wrestler Sting, who trademarked the name Old Man Sting after his recent retirement.
I wanted a name that not only reflected my years of experience in content creation but also something that showed me as an elder internet statesman. So Old Man Trench it is.
Politics has also returned to the blog. For most of my voting life, I was a conservative Republican. However, in the mid-to-late 2010s, I took a hard turn to the left after the obvious rise of authoritarianism and the ever-loosening gun laws that led to one too many school shootings.
So please join me, Old Man Trench, as I continue to lay truth smackdowns on the ignorant fools who need it well into my twilight years.
—Old Man Trench, FKA Trench Reynolds, March 29, 2026.
