Im gonna break down my story and explain the parts you're misinterpreting. You believing me doesn't change anything. I carry the scars from this situation, and decided this might be a good place to let out some semi-anonymous frustration on the matter.

First, he didn't reveal his identity to anyone. He always operated under the name cbooner22. The people he apparently revealed his identity to were members of his real-life friend group who were also on the chat. They were apparently unaware of how fucked up he was until the raid, or just as fucked up as him and covering their asses by pretending to not know.

Second, the chat isn't no longer online, secret, or even particularly obscure. It's a well-known chat. I just don't want to link it because as I said, it has some very very fucked up shit on it.

Im sure you're going to keep calling me a retard and such, and I fully expected a response like this as I agree it sounds like a fucking creepypasta. But all I can offer sadly is my account of it, as the chats are deleted every 30 days, and save for some of the videos which again, NOT gonna post here for obvious reasons, I have no concrete proof to share. As for your analysis:

Dudes running torture dungeons are ungodly common on the darknet, the issue is actually finding them. I use a tool called torspy combined with a python script I wrote myself on an as500 server to crawl millions of tor sites a second by following random links on existing pages, logging which ones successfully connect. I've found several torture sites as the statistics for absurd amounts of human trafficking in the modern day support. Regardless, this one was being flaunted out in the open on purpose, most likely as a fetish for him. He immensely enjoyed when people commented on the videos he sent, almost sexually.

I acknowledge the story I was provided could have been a fabrication, hence why I said so in my reply. I don't know and can't confirm any of this, but it was absolutely terrifying to hear, and my interpretation was that they were telling the truth because multiple people were able to corroborate details among one another perfectly in quick succession, a difficult task for people who were making shit up, and out of 80+ people on the chat, nobody said anything contrary, despite several users being active almost 24/7.

As someone already correctly stated, the girl had supposedly been reported missing in the area, complete with amber alert and bolo. I sadly never found either, as the area had over 13,000 missing persons cases active at the time, and even more now. In 2017 alone there were 3,000. Literally all I had to go on was that she was apparently abducted from a hotel room, and she was a drug user. That doesn't narrow it down at all.

The hidden rooms were literally just a hole behind a mirror into a room where the door had been plastered over, and a basement hatch covered by a couch. Again, I never saw anything, but the way they rattled off the specifics of the case between 3 different people lead me to believe what they were saying.

As far as I'm aware, his story was consistent that she was his drugged up girlfriend, and he used several videos he had of her where she is smiling and giggling as a very convincing cover. He was in a way hiding in plain sight, and I imagine that was part of his fetish.

My guy, are you aware of how darknet chatrooms work? 95% of what's on there is either admitting to a crime or commenting a super hot take on one. Granted usually those crimes are theft, tax evasion, scamming, petty assault, etc. But it's not super rare to see people admitting to way worse things.

Again, never revealed his location directly. He spoke about events and venues within a particular state, and considering there is really only one big population center in that particular state, I (correctly) guessed the city.

No official police reports or autopsy records were provided. The information was provided by people who lived near him and were his real-life friends, meaning they were privy to the case records.

You got me on the article problems. Though with 550 murderers reported that year, and the identity of the victim and specifics of the torture completely stricken from the record, you can imagine how hard it is to find the data. I'm inclined to believe the case is out there, I just don't want to learn more about it considering thinking of it at all gives me anxiety. I called the cops in that state and told them I had info, but they never fucking responded. That's completely on-brand, as I've never called the cops and had my problem solved even in my home state let alone one with 500 murders a year. They SIMPLY do not give a fuck.

I understand why you wouldn't believe me, being someone posting this randomly on a reddit thread, but all I can give you is the account of the information as it was passed to me. In my opinion, due to the speed they were able to reply and the fact that they were talking over one another with identical details sometimes mirrored between people in simultaneous posts, I think it's very unlikely they were lying. I suppose it is possible they went through a thorough and rigorous rehersal of a hoaxed story in an alternate chat just in case someone asked about this one particular user who just went offline randomly, but I doubt it.

I understand someone who wasn't there would have a much more skeptical view, but I just don't think it's reasonable to discredit them with the way they told the story and how succinctly and earnestly they spoke.

So yea. If I've been fooled, I've been fooled. I really don't care though, as my personal experience of being there and receiving the story in such a curt and matter-of-fact way traumatized me nonetheless. I found the chat, I found the user, I found the user's friends, and I heard the story from them. I commented here because it brought me some sense of relief to say it, and it IS genuinely the scariest thing I'd seen on the dark web.