National Public Radio: A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had the headline: “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.

We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it only had one news story — the fake one.

We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. The site was registered anonymously. So, we brought in some professional help.

By day, John Jansen is head of engineering at Master-McNeil Inc., a tech company in Berkeley, Calif. In the interest of real news he helped us track down the owner of Denverguardian.com.

Jansen started by looking at the site’s history. “Commonly that’s called scraping or crawling websites,” he says.

Jansen is kind of like an archaeologist. He says that nothing you do on the Web disappears — it just gets buried — like a fossil. But if you do some digging you’ll find those fossils and learn a lot of history.

The Denver Guardian was built and designed using a pretty common platform — WordPress. It’s used by bloggers and people who want to create their own websites. Jansen found the first entry ever for the site was done by someone with the handle LetTexasSecede.

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