*This is book number one in the Killing Killers True Crime series by Eponymous Rox
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Written and illustrated by EPONYMOUS ROX © 2012
ISBN 10: 1438223903 – ISBN 13: 978-1438223803
The subject matter of this investigation
is derived from a variety of public records and databases including police and
forensic reports. It may therefore contain themes and content not suitable for all
audiences. The drown cases featured herein were originally classified by law
enforcement agencies as accidents and, although a few have since been reclassified
as ‘undetermined’ or as homicides, all of them, per the date of this
publication, remain unsolved and inactive. However, a number of victims’
families are soliciting support from the public to overturn prior ‘accidental’ rulings
so the deaths can be reinvestigated as murders, and are even offering
substantial rewards for any information that will lead to the arrest and
conviction of the party or parties responsible. Wherever available, active links
to websites and other reading material for further study of specific victim
profiles have been provided at the conclusion of each relevant chapter as well
as in the comprehensive resource index at the end of this publication. The
views and opinions expressed in THE CASE OF THE DROWNING MEN are based on private,
independent research and consultations. As such, the findings and conclusions contained
in it are considered speculative in nature and do not necessarily reflect the views
and opinions of the publisher, the individuals or agencies who have been quoted. Some data/sources limited via fair usage percents are only
extracts.
This book is dedicated to all who have died in vain or too young. May you
find, and rest in, peace.
C O N T E N T S
Chapter
1: Dead Certain
Chapter
2: Anatomy of a Drowning
Chapter
3: Corridor of Death
Chapter
4: More Than a Little – Less Than a Lot
Chapter
5: Cowboys and Indians
Chapter
6: Horses of a Different Color
Chapter
7: Profile of a Murderer
Chapter
8: Gradual and Not Swift Moving
Chapter
9: Drowning Out the Opposition
Chapter
10: Smiling Faces
Chapter
11: Prime Time for a Killing Theory
Chapter
12: Mud and a River
Chapter
13: Signs of Foul Play
Chapter
14: Profile of a Serial Murderer
Chapter
15: Sinking Fears
Chapter
16: Profile of a Mass Murderer
Chapter
17: Whitewash
Chapter
18: A Brother, Friend, and Son
Chapter
19: Probable Causes and Statistics
Chapter
20: “You Can’t See What You’re Not Looking For”
RESOURCE INDEX
“Justice delayed is justice denied.”
William Gladstone (1809 -
1898)
Chapter 1: Dead
Certain
Since
the mid 1990’s, in the northernmost district of America where Interstates 90
and 94 merge to cut a scenic route toward the west, crossing nearly a dozen states
along the way and skirting the border with Canada, scores of young men are
vanishing every year without a trace. Only to turn up days, weeks, or months later
in nearby bodies of water, dead.
Occurring
mainly between the months of September to April, it’s the same story repeating itself
every time, with little variation: A young man goes out for the evening with
his friends, gets separated from them some time after midnight, and, despite
massive search efforts by his loved ones to find out what became of him, is
never seen alive again.
For
local law enforcement officials the hunt for lost men over the past fifteen
years has become an all too familiar tale of woe as well, not the least because
it’s costly and disruptive. But as far as police are concerned, even before
they launch an investigation, even before a body’s been recovered from the
water and an autopsy performed, it’s always a cut-and-dry case: “No signs of
foul play.”
Young
people are simply drinking too much, the authorities claim. Young people will do
crazy and stupid things when they’re inebriated. They’ll even throw themselves
into an icy river or lake and drown.
Seems
a reasonable enough explanation on its face, if only one or two fatalities occurring
every once in awhile, and a scenario that’s not totally impossible to imagine
either. But by the hundreds?
And
why only males then? All matching the same description? Washing up in places
thoroughly searched before…?
I
first stumbled upon the case of the drowning men in early 2012, and quite by
accident. Indeed, whatever it was I’d originally been researching at the moment,
it was undoubtedly not related to death or dying, and I’m also positive it had
nothing to do with H20 and its cold-weather hazards. But the brain
is an efficient machine and though its focus may be directed to one particular matter
it’s still constantly processing everything else on the periphery; sorting, analyzing
and connecting all the data-bytes it comes across. Like pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle. Like dots on a map.
Scientists
say one of the things the human brain is very quick to detect is a pattern. If
so, that must be the reason why, when I glanced at the February article concerning
yet another youth who had wandered away from his buddies and whose corpse was found
shortly thereafter floating in the Mississippi, I blurted aloud, “What, not
again,” and clicked on the news link. Before that day, before I began to consciously
pay attention to this issue, I can honestly say I’d never known of anyone, young
or old, male or female, to drink and drown in autumn, winter or spring. Not in
all the time I’ve lived in this, the affected area.
Like
my fellow citizens who are also lifelong residents of the Great Lakes region—growing
up here, going to school, working, vacationing, socializing—I can attest that these
two things, drinking and drowning in cold weather, have never been synonymous
with each other. Drowning after a night out on the town with your friends during
the chilly months of September through April, with nobody else around to help,
with no witnesses, just isn’t as inevitable as the police would have us all suddenly
believe it is. It’s not, regardless of what age you are or your close proximity
to the water, an ordinary way to perish.
This
is probably because in these parts, even when people are drunk out of their
minds, they don’t usually drown outdoors unless they’re in the act of swimming,
or else involved in some other form of water recreation like waterskiing or
boating. Activities which, because of our cold, northern climate, are only safely
executed in rivers, lakes and ponds approximately three months out of the calendar
year, in June, July, and August.
The
rest of the time the water’s simply too cold to go in, and most everybody (native
and transplant alike) understands that if water is at or below 65 degrees
Fahrenheit, it’s not only brutally uncomfortable, it can kill you—a body cools
in water twice as fast as it does in air, losing an approximate rate of five
degrees per hour. Death from hypothermia only takes about three hours in 40 to
60 degree water; less than two hours at 35 to 40 degrees; and less than
three-quarters of an hour at temperatures below 35 degrees.
Those
deadly equations are fairly easy to master and, in the land of lakes and rivers
and ponds and streams and brooks, youngsters are taught them early on. As for
the rare and reckless few who fail to grasp the math, to be perfectly candid, they
don’t usually make it to their early teens, let alone full adulthood.
The
average age of the males who go missing and are later found drowned in the Interstate
90 and 94 Corridor is between 19 and 23 years. In the entire grouping perhaps a
handful have been only 17 and a few others as old as 30, although it must be
said, in the case of the more mature victims, they didn’t look anywhere near their
true age in posters or photographs.
Grown
men drowning in cold weather on their way home at night. That’s become a strange
new fact of life and the weird new math those who reside in the northern
corridor have now had to learn, based upon figures which have been accumulating
for nearly the past two decades.
We’re
fond of and rely on facts and numbers to inform us here in the northland
because, overall, we’re an educated people. Our extensive waterways, highways,
railways, large cities, major industries and fertile farmlands have contributed
to make the region one of the most affluent in the country. As a result, many
of the world’s finest universities can be found in this region as well, and an
overwhelming majority of us have attended them. We’re a schooled and highly trained
bunch of skeptics we are, and even a bit conservative leaning.
Which
is to say, we tend to mull things over long before we act. We don’t jump to
conclusions…
In
2004 the April drowning of yet another popular, athletic, and bright 21-year-old
male of medium build, at the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse, provided the
tipping point for that community’s stoical tolerance of the matter. In terms of
these events La Crosse is one of the hotspots, and by that year there’d been way
too many of the same type of men dying under identical circumstances for the
public to view it anymore as coincidence. With the inexplicable disappearance
of honor student Jared Dion the city was up in arms, and when his body was
eventually discovered downriver, the once-whispered suspicions of murder instantly
morphed into full blown allegations of a serial killer or a gang of serial killers
stalking college-age men in the area, not to mention accusations of police involvement
and a cover up.
There
were roughly 51,000 people living in La Crosse in 2004, according to the U.S.
Census, and, to be sure, they weren’t all hapless students; city officials and
the police department were late to acknowledge a crisis at hand, and, when they
did finally react to it, the town-hall meetings they commandeered to dismiss the
public’s fears as unfounded did little or nothing to calm things down again. Every
public debate concerning the river deaths was jam-packed and rapidly descended
into a shouting match.
It was
probably in a last ditch effort to restore the peace as well as to mitigate harm
to the university’s reputation that an open letter from faculty members at the University
of Wisconsin in La Crosse was penned and then distributed to the student body. Co-authored
by the Chairs of the Psychology and Sociology departments and titled Why we are 99.9% sure it is NOT a serial
killer - a data based explanation, this urgent communiqué implored students
to use their “critical thinking skills” to evaluate what was really going on in
their town. A levelheaded analysis would prove these were only drownings, not
murders, the professors assured them. A string of terribly tragic and utterly
preventable accidents:
1.
Students
are drinking too much and incapacitating themselves, a condition which drives
some to seek out the river to refresh themselves, during which they slip and
fall in.
2.
Only
men are drowning as a result of intoxication because women are more savvy these
days and don’t wander around alone at night, especially not if they’ve been
partying.
3.
Annually,
almost ten times as many males die during water recreational activities and in
other types of accidents than females do. Alcohol plays a role in a number of
these cases.
4.
There
are no drowning deaths at nearby universities like Madison because their
campuses are beside lakes. Whereas La Crosse’s campus is situated right on the
river’s edge, and rivers, being suddenly deep and fast flowing, are far more dangerous.
5.
The
similarities between the victims constitute “illusory correlations” which can readily
be explained through other qualifying factors.
Stepping
into the middle of a community’s fray and trying to mediate it was highly unusual
for a university, and, in light of the dire subject matter of their “data based
explanation” and the negative impact advertising it might have had on future
enrollment, a rather risky PR move, too. But the professors’ treatise was also an
intelligent, compassionate, and methodical approach to debunking the serial
murderer theory before it could take root—the first of many—so the gamble was well worth it. Moreover, this strategy
appears to have been quite successful. At least for awhile.
But in
2005, 2006 and 2007, drunk and sober young
men continued to go missing along the interstates, sometimes two or more in the
very same time span. Their corpses eventually to be retrieved from such rivers as
the Calumet, the Hudson, the Charles, the Mississippi, the Milwaukee, the
Wabash and the Wisconsin, as well as a number of area lakes, including Great Lake
Michigan, Lake LaVerne, and the University at Madison’s nearby Lake Mendota. These
latter deaths occurring in seeming defiance of the UW-L professors’ sweeping assertion
that a lake doesn’t pose the same risk for drowning because “it becomes
gradually deeper and is not moving swiftly.”
Also
helping to rekindle the flames of conflict between believers and nonbelievers
of a serial killer, new information had begun trickling in from reliable outside
investigators which suggested that dozens of the questionable drownings could
be linked now not only by an identifiable victimology and a distinct manner of death,
but also through cryptic symbols like smiley faces and other taunting messages left
at the scenes of a some of the suspected murders.
A
subsequent inspection throughout the region confirmed that there was in fact
sinister-looking graffiti of this sort at many a river’s edge or lakefront, and,
as with the ruckus at La Crosse Wisconsin just a few years prior, a large
percent of the student populations in these locations, together with their families
and the local citizenry, became understandably very worked up about these findings.
Terrified.
It
was investigative reporter Kristi Piehl from KSTP-TV out of Minnesota who first
broke the story in 2008 of serial killers drowning men along Interstate 90 and
94, and of the doggedly determined pair of retired NYPD detectives in hot
pursuit of them. The segment ultimately earning her an Emmy but apparently costing
her a job. From that special report, the concept of a “Smiley Face Killer Gang”
was born and went instantly viral, not just on websites and in chatrooms, but also
in the major media outlets.
ABC,
MSNBC, CNN and the Associated Press, among others, picked up the local news
item and carried it nationwide, in so doing, widely broadcasting the seeds of what
would become one of the most hotly-contested conspiracy theories of our time.
Once
again, pandemonium broke out as anxious citizens began mobilizing and actively trying
to bypass their own police departments’ authority, demanding instead that
federal assistance be provided in order to apprehend a fiendish network of
elusive serial murderers stalking, abducting and drowning specific types of
young males across the northland.
Experts
in criminology and forensic pathology studied the various case profiles as well,
and, noting the telltale spikes in certain localities, they also began expressing
similar opinions.
"The
probability is virtually zero that five intoxicated students just happened to
walk similar or even different routes and end up on the riverbank." Dr. Maurice Godwin, criminal investigative
psychologist, commenting on the La Crosse Wisconsin cluster
"They
could have been murdered but the person was just so good at doing it that they
didn't leave any physical evidence…[they] could sedate and drown him in a tub
or something like that and then throw him in the river." John Kelly, psychotherapist and profiler
“The
statistics are so stacked against this number of men, young men, Caucasian
males, found in bodies of water in that cluster of states, within that period
of time.” Dr. Cyril Wecht, forensic pathologist
“If
you actually look at the statistics on drownings, most drownings occur during
the summer and they're related to water activities like boating and water
skiing and things like that. Very few drownings actually occur during the
winter.” Lee Gilbertson, Professor of
Criminal Justice at St. Cloud University
The
supporting evidence for those conclusions was so compelling, in fact, that two
high-level state representatives joined in the furor. Senator Sensenbrenner
from Wisconsin and U.S. Congressman McNulty from New York both submitted requests
directly to the FBI urging the Bureau to formally investigate the serial
murders being perpetrated in their states and to take swift actions to end
them.
“Yes,
there’s a serial murderer—alcohol,” La Crosse’s flustered chief of police,
Edward Kondracki, retorted when confronted with these latest developments. But,
“a rogue cop…or national smiley face gang…there is no serial killer!”
In
this growing war of words, rival local-news networks who had failed to show any
real interest in the story before felt obliged now to weigh in, some seeking to
ridicule the award-winning reporter who had intrepidly launched the Smiley Face
Murder Theory into the national spotlight.
Veteran
columnist Steve Perry from the Minnesota
Monitor unabashedly said of her, "Let the record show that Kristi
Piehl of KSTP has done her part to bring the yarn to the huddled masses
yearning to breathe the vapors of another massive conspiracy.” And reporter Brian
Lambert at Minneapolis St.Paul Magazine
angrily proclaimed that a story depicting serial drownings as actual serial
slayings in disguise going on to earn a coveted journalism award was
“ludicrous,” and that the very idea of a serial murderer being responsible for
the spate of area deaths, "boggles every rational instinct."
But
because a homegrown rumor, many years in the creation, had suddenly spiraled
into a legend overnight, it would now require much more than scorn and carefully
constructed editorial pieces to slam the lid back on the can of worms it had
opened. The American public’s imagination and its keen interest in the case had
been ignited, and it would take a multi-pronged effort to fully squelch the
serial killer theory this time. In that process, a number of reputations would necessarily
have to be sullied, a few investigations closed, and taxpayers’ monies liberally
spent in order to increase security, and a sense of security, in communities close
to water.
Fences,
river patrols, safe buses, surveillance cameras, targeted campaigns of every
variety aimed at damage control― these costly measures could be justified because
public officials knew that, to govern properly, people couldn’t be living in
fear day and night, and they couldn’t be distrustful of their law enforcement
officers, either. Most importantly, university towns couldn’t expect students
to continue flocking to them in droves, as many in this region have been
accustomed to for over a century, if they’re suddenly afraid they’ll end up
victims of violent crimes there. When it comes to social strife and chaos, in the
end the end always does justify the
means employed, and, as can be seen today, these strenuous attempts to solve “the
problem” have been effective in crushing the ugly stories and criticisms that
were running rampant not so long ago.
All
throughout the northern corridor now, a truce appears to be in place and
holding, and, for the most part, it’s been pretty quiet these past couple of
years.
But
then there is that plaguing issue of a steadily rising body count.
“With regard to
Patrick McNeill, we have a young man who is found [with] a blood alcohol level
of 0.16. Probably a third of that is postmortem putrefaction…a relatively low
level of alcohol. There's no way in the world that this man then is accidentally
going to fall into a body of water, [and] I’m saying that the fly larvae have
been laid in the groin area. It's an indoor fly—could not have been an outdoor
fly―it was an indoor fly. And the larvae were there, did not move ahead into
the later stage. So we have a body that was already dead before it was placed
in the water…I would call it a homicide, yes.” Dr.
Cyril Wecht, renowned Forensic Pathologist
"Circumferentially around the neck there is a pattern
which consists of numerous vertical lines evenly spaced (1/16") around his
neck as if to suggest some type of binding." from the McNeill autopsy
report by Dr. Charles Hirsch, then Chief Medical Examiner for the city of New
York
“Yes, regarding
that particular case in New York, that certainly does sound like it was a
homicide.” Candice Delong, career FBI
Profiler, speaking of Patrick McNeill’s drowning
“Patrick's death was not an accidental drowning. He was
stalked, abducted, held for an extended period of time, murdered, and
disposed.” Kevin Gannon, NYPD homicide
detective investigating the McNeill case since 1997
