Older viewers obsessed online as to the veracity of her postings, scrutinizing her room decor, debating recurring motifs, even investigating the registration of her Web site.
Despite the fact that Bennett was a housewife living in North Carolina with no legal training whatsoever, her prolific online postings established her as an authority in the case.
One of the first postings on her @cornellpresident Instagram account was of her and her husband, Ken Gottschlich, conducting one of the ice cream taste tests, she said.
The terror group has been keen to talk up her role, with online postings praising her as "our dada mzungu" (white sister in Swahili), "an example to us all" and claiming she has trained an all-female terror cell.
In many of her postings, she included her email address, which public records link to Ms. Harper.
She struck out for Turkey from New York last month, trailed by a digital horde of hundreds, who followed her online postings, and by her family, who spoke to her regularly by Skype on her iPad.
Sanchez, who is in her 30s, has emerged in recent years as an important independent voice with lyrical postings on her website, "Generation Y," in which she describes life in communist Cuba, sometimes criticizing the government directly, and sometimes by implication.
Later postings took her to Japan and to Kenya, which at the time was a British colony, where her future husband was a legislator and owner of a 100,000-acre ranch near Mount Kenya.
Edwards's O's postings on her Facebook page get only a few likes.
Blog postings ridiculed her expectations as unrealistic: a degree does not guarantee a job, especially in a recession year.
