Thomas Gounley

TGOUNLEY@NEWS-LEADER.COM

About 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, two people showed up at Matthew Byerlee's Springfield home.

They weren't in uniform, but one began telling Byerlee that he and his partner were detectives with the Springfield Police Department.

"I stopped him and said, 'Oh, you probably want to know about the fake body in the trunk," Byerlee, 35, recalled

Three days earlier, Byerlee had posted a 37-second video to YouTube. It went viral. And now the detectives were nodding and saying yes, that's exactly what we want to know about

The video, "Never Lose Your Car In a parking Lot Again!", was, ostensibly, a tip about how to do just that, although it was an unpractical and ridiculous one. Who wants to carry around helium-filled balloons in the trunk of their car all the time, and deploy them every time they park?

Nobody called Springfield police because it was a lame tip, though. They called because, as Byerlee filmed himself opening his trunk to release the balloons, he revealed something that sure looked a lot like a body.

The trash bags were tightly bound with duct tape. The mass was human-shaped. And there were shoes sticking out of one end. All in the back of a car parked in a lot on Glenstone Avenue.

A fairly monotone Byerlee narrated the whole video — "Open up the trunk. Boom. Out go the balloons." — but he didn't address the mysterious mass in the middle of the trunk. No mention at all.

By the morning after Byerlee posted it to YouTube, the video already had more than a million views. It made the front page of Reddit, the ultra-popular internet forum that directs a firehouse of online traffic at everything from serious news stories to memes.

Most Reddit users responded with jokes. But a few seemed a little unnerved. On YouTube itself, in the comments under the video, a similar scenario played out:

"Anyone else notice how all those bags and those shoes mimic a dead body﻿"

"Fun fact: dead corpses are the perfect paper weight for trunk balloons﻿."

"what if he wants us to THINK this is a joke so he can really get away with having a dead body in the trunk. hmmmm﻿"

Byerlee's license plate was visible in the video. That appears to have been enough to help the people not entirely convinced Byerlee wasn't a murderer figure out where he lived.

In a Tuesday afternoon phone interview, Byerlee said the detectives told him that Springfield police had received multiple calls from around the country about the video, and that the FBI had received one as well. A spokesperson for Springfield police, however, said he was aware of only one call to Springfield, although he couldn't speak for the FBI.

"Our detectives made contact with the guy and determined it was a hoax," Lt. Grant Dorrell said.

Byerlee said he showed the detectives his car. The balloons, now deflated, were still in the trunk, as were the shoes. The rest had already been disassembled.

Byerlee found directions online regarding how to make a fake body. He stuffed a pair of coveralls with clothes, stuffed that in trash bags and wrapped the whole thing with duct tape. He stuffed a hat with more clothes to make a head, then added the shoes.

Byerlee said the detectives were satisfied with his response, as well as the fact there wasn't any blood in his car.

Byerlee said he hadn't intended police to have to respond to his house. But otherwise, it played out about as well as he was hoping for. He wanted people to be unsure about what was in the trunk.

"Surely anybody that has a body in their trunk isn't going to make a video, and if they do, they probably won't show their license plate," he added.

"Never Lose Your Car In a parking Lot Again!" has already netted more than $1,000 for Byerlee, he said, because YouTube shares a portion of advertising revenue with video creators.

Byerlee said his original idea for the video included the balloons, but he "knew it wasn't enough" and that there needed to be something else in the trunk.

He thought about taxidermied animals, he said, but "quickly realized I'd have a hard time finding that many taxidermied animals." Then he thought about having a real person in the trunk, but "for some reason, I couldn't find somebody to let me tie them up and put them in the trunk."

Posting videos on YouTube has been a hobby of Byerlee's for "almost exactly one week," he said Tuesday. In that time, he's uploaded 14 videos. He films them all himself. Each is fairly short and fairly bizarre.

"Always Hide A Knife for the Mailman" has been viewed more than 895,000 times. It's a 19-second clip of Byerlee advising viewers to leave a pocketknife in their mailbox so "the mailman can kill somebody if he needs to." He said he was inspired to make the video because he accidentally dropped his knife in his mailbox one day while retrieving the mail and that he doesn't have any specific creative process.

"How to fix a hole in the wall using bread" has been viewed more than 200,000 times. It consists of Byerlee nailing a piece of bread to a wall to conceal a hole.

Nowadays, you can find lots of slickly produced videos on YouTube. Heck, there are YouTube celebrities. But Byerlee sees what he's doing as a throwback to the site's infancy — and he plans to keep posting.

"I feel like YouTube in the last couple years has gotten away from zany, funny video," he said.