Merrill, who started out as on-the-fence SoCal, eventually moved into the Terri-is-guilty camp. When she disappeared from Oregon Live, she moved on to GLP, and then, after threads at GLP got shut down, she moved to her own forum(s).
In the process, Merrill had contact with Insintel, aka Marybeth Schaeffer. Their collaboration continued from Oregon Live to Chana's "Truth will save your soul" (puke at the name) blog. Somewhere along the way, Chana lost interest in her blog, and basically handed it over to Marybeth, who also apparently lost interest. I guess Marybeth was too busy posting at Websleuths and keeping up her Heidi Brooks persona to continue working on a blog for which she could take no credit.
In the beginning of my introduction to this whole clusterfuck a couple of weeks ago, I often confused Chana with SoCal, because their writing was so similar. It took me a week to separate the fact that SoCal and Chana were two different people. Once I did, I was able to identify SoCal as Tamara Merrill. Then I set my sites on insintel. And then to Chana. Once you weed out all of the players, you realize that there really aren't that many, just manipulative people using an array of alts to stimey the readers.
The final character to be revealed is Chana. It is my opinion that Chana is none other than.... drumroll....
Tamara Merrill.
There isn't much left of Chana's writing to compare to, except for her blog. The blog, though is more often than not a full-scale rant - a morality soapbox from which Chana (and sometimes Marybeth) insult, bully, and intimidate Cindy Butcher Smalley. (I must say that Cindy has her own problems. The ways she behaved like DeDe Spicher's and Terri Horman's starstruck groupie is repulsive - BUT she did not deserve what was done to her on that blog.)
The first page of Chana's blog is the only page where she's not ranting like a braying mule. I used her opening post to compare to others' writing styles, choice of words, and so forth. I was able to exclude many people involved in this thing. The only person I could not exclude was SoCalDreamer.
As I read more and more, it became solidly obvious that, even though Chana tried to disguise her writing, SoCal still shone through. Each observed by itself is no conclusive indication. But all together, I believe it's pretty obvious that Tamara Merill was not only SoCalDreamer and SoCalRockerChick, but also Chana.
Below are a few excerpts:
"at the end of the day"
"catch a clue"
"do the right thing by Kyron"
"her cohorts"
"I genuinely"
"schoolmates ... loss of innocence"
"making a mockery"
"to the best of their ability"
There are many more examples like this out there. When people try to disguise their writing, they often don't realize that the words and phrases they use can't be disguised. That is the case with Tamara Merrill.
There are no gotcha email addresses or similar anecdotes to show, because Chana didn't emerge until several months ago, and she was a brand-new creation of Tamara. She didn't have a history on the internet, because she was new. But when you look at the words that Tamara chose to use with both SoCal and Chana, the truth emerges that they are figments created by the same author.
