What oddities!

CARBONDALE, Ill. - The student newspaper at Southern Illinois University was taken in by an elaborate hoax in which a child, tricked into thinking she was playing a movie role, posed as the daughter of a man serving in Iraq, the publication said Friday.

"In the course of checking out the details, a troubling problem appeared: The story wasn't true," The Daily Egyptian wrote Friday in an editorial. "What began as a nightmarish possibility became impossible to deny."

A woman who pretended to be the child's guardian is a 2004 SIU graduate who says she concocted the story with a former Daily Egyptian editor who denies that allegation and claims he, too, was duped. A man who posed as the serviceman father also says he was an unwitting participant.

Jackson County's prosecutor did not immediately return messages Friday asking whether the hoax could result in criminal charges.

The hoax stretched back since an article appeared on May 6, 2003, told of motherless, 8-year-old "Kodee Kennings" and how she struggled to cope with the fact her father, "Sgt. Dan Kennings," was being shipped off to Iraq.

The staffers took the girl's plight to their hearts, the newspaper said. Over the following year, it published letters and columns allegedly from Kodee about being separated from her father. Kodee's guardian was "Colleen Hastings," purportedly the wife of Kennings' adoptive brother.

Jaimie Reynolds, the 2004 SIU graduate, acknowledged acting as Hastings when confronted by Chicago Tribune reporters Wednesday.

Kodee was played by 10-year-old Caitlin Hadley, who was from out of state and was driven to Carbondale by Reynolds, a friend of the family.

"It was sort of weird, but I had a lot of fun," Caitlin said. She said Reynolds told her that everybody she met in Carbondale was in the movie.

"We were always on camera, but I didn't see any cameras," Caitlin told the Tribune.

Reynolds said she and student journalist Michael Brenner, who wrote the original article, invented the story because "he's had a hard time with his career. He asked me if I would help him out. ... It just got a little bigger than he told me it would."

Brenner vehemently denied concocting the story and said he was taken in by Reynolds, whom he had befriended.

Sgt. Kennings was played by Patrick Trovillion, a Reynolds acquaintance who said he believed he was portraying a cocky soldier in a legitimate movie.

"This really chaps me a little bit," Trovillion said. "That ain't no way to treat our armed forces."

Walter Jaehnig, an SIU ethics professor and director of the university's journalism school, said the hoax is embarrassing but he hopes it will teach students "the importance of fact checking and verification of everything they write."

The girl's father, Rich Hadley, said Caitlin is having trouble coping with what happened.

"She's very sad. She will just burst into tears out of the blue. At one point she turned to me and asked, `Did Jamie like me?'" he told the Daily Egyptian.

He said the parents had become skeptical earlier this year when the movie wasn't completed, and then the girl was asked to go to Carbondale to shoot one last scene, a memorial for the soldier.