On March 25, Barbara Rogers shuffled into the Court of Commons Pleas in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, with her dark hair parted neatly down the middle. She wore a plain cardigan and skirt over stockings with flats. Lowering her head between hunched shoulders, she averted her eyes from the scrum of snapping cameras. The 44-year-old looked more like a dazed child than what she was alleged to be: a doomsday cultist who murdered the love of her life.

The events that brought Rogers to court unfolded two years prior. In the early hours of July 15, 2017, Rogers shot 32-year-old Steven Mineo in the head, at point-blank range, in his Coolbaugh Township home. The wound was fatal. “My boyfriend had a gun,” she told a 911 dispatcher, about 20 minutes later. “He told me to hold it here and press the trigger. Oh my God, he’s dead!”

Later, Rogers told police that the pair had recently been ousted from an online cult, and that Mineo had become so distressed as a result that he lost the will to live. According to reports, Mineo handed Rogers a .45 caliber semi-automatic Glock, sat cross-legged on the floor, and asked her to put a bullet in his skull. The truth of this account remains in dispute—the sole corroborating witness, after all, is dead—and his admitted killer reportedly changed her story several times afterward. None of it was sufficient to convince a jury of Rogers’s innocence. On March 29, she was convicted of murder in the third degree.

What is certain is this: Rogers and Mineo were, at one time, in love. Mineo called Rogers his wife and she referred to herself as “Barbara Mineo,” though the two were never married. Their relationship was bound up with an online community of radical Christian eschatologists, digitally native harbingers of the end times who infused their fire-and-brimstone faith with elements of nearly every contemporary conspiracy theory popularized on the web. The community’s foundational belief is that a race of sentient, devil-worshipping, shape-shifting reptiles from outer space has infiltrated human civilization. Through mind control and body-snatching, these “reptilians” purportedly seek to install totalitarian world government, thereby bringing about rule of the Antichrist.

If that sounds kooky, well, it is. But it’s only slightly less outlandish than the conspiracy theories that have gained sizable followings on the online right, including many of President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. What connects the lizard-headed reptilians and Trump’s army of ghoulish trolls is YouTube, which promulgates this cottage-industry in conspiratorial speculation with little oversight or regulation. Like other internet giants, YouTube has struggled to differentiate between fact and fiction, between legitimate media outlets and manic peddlers of disinformation—and there are few reasons to believe that it will resolve any of these first-order problems of basic online legitimacy any time soon.