CARBONDALE, Ill. — Word that Sgt. Dan Kennings had been killed in Iraq crushed spirits in the Daily Egyptian newsroom. The stocky, buzz-cut soldier befriended by students at the university newspaper was dead, and the sergeant's little girl, a precocious, blond-haired child they'd grown to love, was now an orphan.

They all knew Kodee Kennings' mother died when she was 5. The little girl's fears and frustrations about her father being in harm's way had played out on the pages of the Daily Egyptian for nearly two years, in gut-wrenching letters fraught with misspellings, innocent observations and questions about why Daddy wasn't there to chase the monsters from under her bed.

It turns out Daddy didn't exist at all.

The Chicago Tribune went to Southern Illinois to learn about the bond between Kodee and Dan Kennings, and the life Kodee would face now without her hero.

Over seven days of reporting, the Tribune learned the real story, one of elaborate fabrications and lies intricately spread out over two years.

There is no soldier named Dan Kennings. The charming girl people came to know as Kodee Kennings is someone else entirely, a child from an out-of-state family led to believe she was playing a part in a documentary about a soldier.

Using role players, including an employee of a local Christian radio station, the woman at the center of the hoax spun a remarkable wartime tale so compelling it grabbed the hearts of young journalists, university faculty members and readers, and left them blind to the possibility it could all be a ruse.

There appears never to have been a monetary motive. In fact, the reasons behind all the lies remain unclear.

Started with letter

The tale:

In 2003, student reporter Michael Brenner was handed a letter from a 7-year-old girl saying she had seen an anti-war protest on the Southern Illinois University campus and that it had bothered her because her dad was a soldier.

Brenner e-mailed the little girl. As he learned more about her situation, he decided to tell her story.

The story appeared in the Daily Egyptian on May 6, 2003, detailing an 8-year-old's struggles to say goodbye to her father, who was shipping off to Iraq with the 101st Airborne. Kodee, according to the story, had lost her mother years earlier, so Kennings was her only blood relative.

"I don't have a mom," Kodee was quoted saying in the newspaper story. "If he died, I don't have anywhere to go."

Upon his departure, Kodee supposedly came under the care of a young woman who called herself Colleen Hastings, who said she was the wife of Kennings' adoptive brother. Outgoing and affable, she forged a friendship with Brenner and, he says, seemed to think the attention was helping keep Kodee's mind off her dad.

Brenner, then the editor of the 24,000 circulation paper, started publishing unedited notes that Kodee would write about her dad, or about things happening in her life.

Last week, the woman contacted the newsroom and said Kennings had been killed in action in Iraq. A professor in the journalism school who was familiar with the story called the Chicago Tribune last Wednesday, and the newspaper had a reporter on the road to Carbondale that night.

However, no details of the soldier's death could be confirmed. His name didn't appear on a Department of Defense Web site that lists U.S. casualties.

By last Thursday, the story was falling apart. Military officials could find no one named Dan Kennings in the Army or any other branch of the service, and no deaths in Iraq fit the time frame "Hastings" had described.

Refusal to speak

The woman refused to speak with the Tribune, saying through Brenner — who had graduated in 2004 and was living with his family in West Chicago — that she wanted to shelter Kodee from the media.

On Saturday morning, cars began pulling into the gravel parking lot of a one-story American Legion hall in Orient, Ill., about 30 miles northeast of Carbondale. The woman and "Kodee" got out of a red Grand Am, the little girl wearing an Army uniform shirt that hung down to her knees.

People inside the memorial service said both the woman and the girl were in tears. A video was playing, showing "Dan Kennings" in his fatigues speaking with a group of children at a church, and there was a scrapbook filled with pictures of him straddling a tank cannon or huddling with other soldiers.

By Tuesday night, Brenner was pacing nervously outside a Dairy Queen in Carterville, Ill., east of Carbondale, talking to the woman on his cellphone. He handed the phone to a Tribune reporter, and the woman said she would come to the Dairy Queen and listen to questions.

Brenner, 25, said he was still convinced of the soldier's existence and defended "Hastings" as a woman trying to protect a little girl.

Same car at service

The woman pulled into the parking lot in the same red car she'd driven to the memorial service. She was told the military was denying the soldier's existence and that the name Colleen Hastings appeared in no public-records databases in Illinois. She was asked for a driver's license and for a death certificate for Kennings. With each question, the woman shook her head no.

And then she drove off into the night.

The Tribune traced the license plate of the car. By Wednesday afternoon, a reporter was outside a home in Marion, Ill., looking for a woman named Jaimie Reynolds.

Reynolds agreed to talk.

Sitting on the back porch of her house wearing a maroon, long-sleeved Southern Illinois University shirt, her face flush from crying, Reynolds admitted she had pretended to be "Colleen Hastings." She said Dan Kennings was invented, and those who met the soldier had actually met a friend of hers who agreed to play the role.

She said, and the Tribune confirmed, that she was a broadcast-journalism student at Southern Illinois. She graduated in 2004, putting her there alongside the very people she was deceiving.

Reynolds acknowledged the little girl actually is the daughter of friends. She said she persuaded the parents to let her bring the child regularly to Carbondale by saying she was filming a documentary about a soldier killed in Iraq.

"We told her it was for a movie," Reynolds said.

Reynolds said the scheme was Brenner's idea.

"Mike is my best friend," she said. "In the last couple of years, he's had a hard time with his career. He asked me if I would help him out. I said I would. It just got a little bigger than he told me it would. I went with it because supposedly he was my best friend. This needs to be over with. I don't want to lie anymore. He just wouldn't let it go."

She also said she fell in love with Brenner, making it that much harder for her to stop the lie.

Brenner denied Reynolds' accusation and said her claims were outrageous.

"Jesus Christ, that is completely not true," Brenner said when he heard about the allegations. "Obviously, she is making that up. I swear I'm telling the truth. The last two years of my life, I don't know what to believe. It's ridiculous. I feel stabbed in the back. They had an elaborate hoax. I'm telling the truth."

The real girl

Yesterday, 10-year-old Caitlin Hadley sat between her parents on a couch in the Nazarene church they run in Montpelier, Ind. She retold the two-year odyssey that began with her believing she was going to be the star of a documentary film about a little girl named Kodee.

"It was sort of weird, but I had a lot of fun," Caitie said.

As for Brenner, the director of the Southern Illinois journalism school said he supports the young reporter.

"Just from knowing him personally, I don't have any sense that this is something that he would have done," said Walter Jaehnig, who also teaches an ethics course at the university.

Jaehnig said the Daily Egyptian would publish an apology regarding its coverage of Dan and Kodee Kennings.

He said the university is embarrassed by the ruse, but he hopes to use it as an opportunity to teach.