CARBONDALE, Ill. - For two years, Carbondale residents have been riveted by the writing of a little girl imploring her father in Iraq: "Don't die, OK?"

The Daily Egyptian, Southern Illinois University's student-run newspaper, today will admit to its readers that the saga - of a little girl's published letters to her father serving in Iraq - was apparently an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a woman who claimed to be the girl's aunt.

In fact, the newspaper will report today, the man identified as the girl's father was never in Iraq, and it was the woman who apparently wrote the letters and regular columns that were published under the little girl's name - and even impersonated the girl in telephone interviews.

But in hindsight, several staffers said Thursday, the girl was painfully shy in person, and would seldom talk. Yet when she called the newsroom on the phone, said current student editor Zack Creglow, "she talked so much that we'd pass the phone around the newsroom."

"That part creeped me out so much last night that I couldn't sleep," Creglow said Thursday. "No one really knew what Kodee's voice sounded like, she was so shy (in person). Now it looks like it was this woman (on the phone) talking in a little kid's voice."

Already suspicious, several staffers and former staffers - including Brenner, the former reporter, and Creglow, the current editor - attended a memorial that Kodee's "aunt" arranged in the Carbondale area. At the small, informal event, they looked at photos of a man presented as Kodee's father - but who, they noted, looked nothing like the man they'd once met in the newsroom.

By Tuesday night, Michael Brenner was pacing nervously outside a Dairy Queen in Cartersville, Ill., talking to Hastings on his cell phone. He handed the phone to a Tribune reporter and Hastings said she would come to the Dairy Queen and listen to questions.

Hastings pulled into the parking lot in the same red car she'd driven to the memorial service. She was told the military was denying Kennings' 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, Hastings shook her head no.

And then she drove off into the night.

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

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 him 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 said the scheme was [reporter] 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.

"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."

On Thursday, 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 documentary film about a little girl named Kodee.

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

"I just realized that I didn't know this girl (Jaimie Reynolds)," said [mother] Tawnya Hadley. "In the profession that my husband is in, we move and meet new people all the time. What if she'd never brought Caitie back? We feel like we're idiots."

The Hadleys lived in Buffalo, Ky., when Reynolds started making the five- or six-hour drive from Carbondale to pick Caitie up and bring her to southern Illinois.

Caitie said that when she and Reynolds were with other people, Reynolds said they were "filming." Caitie was to pretend to be Kodee, and "she said I needed to act like a tomboy because Kodee was a tomboy."

Caitie's understanding was that everybody she met in Carbondale was in the movie, which was being filmed by hidden cameras. So when they went into the Daily Egyptian newsroom the first time, she pretended to be Kodee, and believed the reporters and editors were playing along as characters.

"I met all the people she had in the movie," Caitie said. "We were always on camera, but I didn't see any cameras."