CLASSIC: The Smiley Face Murder Conspiracy

Could a group of serial murderers be kidnapping, drugging and drowning young men across the United States? Scores of young male college students have been found dead in what law enforcement calls accidental drownings -- but a team of retired detectives believe there's something more sinister at work. Join Ben, Matt and Noel as they dive into the strange, twisting story of the Smiley Face Murders -- the fact, the fiction, the controversy and more, in tonight's Classic episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist friends and neighbors. Tonight's classic episode may
not be appropriate for all listeners. The headline simply put,
could a group of serial murderers be kidnapping and drowning
young men across the entirety of the United States?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Yeah? I remembering like pools were involved in this one.
Bodies of water, for sure, went the pools. There weren't pools.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
I think it's more lakes rivers.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Okay, I just remember I remember a graffiti situation, like
where they were tagging this smiley face and from my mind,
I'm picturing one in like a drained pool that I
could be maybe it was like a canal or something.
I think it was a canal.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Yeah, we kept talking about this specific episode while we
were making that one.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's right, that's right. There are parallels. And this is
not to be confused with The Happy Face Killer, a
series that both Ben and I worked on, which is
also good and now a TV show weirdly on Lincoln
Peacock or something.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yeah, this is instead, and I appreciate that point because
it's easy to confuse the two. This is the Smiley
Face Murder conspiracy. The idea that these what appear to
be accidental drownings do perhaps to implement weather, simple bad luck,
or perhaps intoxication, or instead the result of an active

(01:23):
group of straight up maniacs. And for the people who
believe in this theory, retired detectives among them. The giveaway
is that there is always some kind of trademark graffiti
of a smiley face. And I don't know, man, this
is deep stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
And guys, I'm having a hard time remembering how this
one results. I feel like there was a twist we'll
find out shortly. Here we go.

Speaker 4 (01:52):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
You to know.

Speaker 4 (02:03):
A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Name is Noman. They call me Ben.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
We are joined as always with our super producer Paul.
Mission control decands, most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
I'm going to start out with something very very honest,
and it's one of the great commonalities.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Of our species is this.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
People die, whether due to accident, injury, disease, or crime.
The unexpected loss of a loved one is one of
the most harrowing events in human experience. It doesn't matter
who you are, prince, a popper. We love people, and
at some point they or we are gone. And when

(03:02):
people are struggling in the wake of these these terrible,
indescribable tragedies, we often find ourselves desperately searching for answers.
You know, questions haunt us. Was there something I could
have done differently? We might ask, Or out of all
of the billions of people in the world, why was
my child, my partner, my parent, or my friend the
one to pass away? And this intense pain worsens when

(03:28):
survivors are left with missing pieces to their stories. You know,
we always hear about We always hear about legal proceedings
maybe for a disappearance or a crime or murder, that
go on for years or decades after the event. And
in many ways it's driven by surviving family members or

(03:49):
loved ones, not because they believe this will somehow, you know,
bring someone back. It's because the experience of closure is
so much better than the experience of wondering what happened
to a child, or a spouse or a loved one.
But then there's this other chilling situation, which is, what

(04:13):
do you do when authorities have ruled the death of
a loved one accidental, but you feel they got it wrong.
I mean, we've seen examples of that, and we know
at least we can't speak for every country, but we
know that here in the US there is a clear
and systemic problem with things being with causes of death

(04:35):
being misidentified right or with some kind of malfunction in
the justice system leading to the wrong person being convicted
of a crime. The real criminal walks away and they
get caught, you know, four assaults, five murders later.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
Yeah, Well, we also know there are real problems within
institutions where sometimes in This is certainly not true of
all cases, and this is certainly not speaking ill of
any individual out there who may be listening or who
is working in any of these fields. But sometimes it
is more beneficial to have a let's say, a case

(05:15):
be classified one way rather than the other. That will
prevent a major investigation from occurring, because.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
As far as the authorities are concerned, that closes the
book on it. They can devote resources elsewhere and we
all know that law enforcement agencies are often quite strapped
for resources, and every agency is every agent.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
We all human beings out here are trying to do
the best we can with what we have, right, I mean,
I think that speaks to most of us, especially you listening,
because you're awesome, who are Yeah? Well, I mean, it's
just the nature of large systems like that. Sometimes you
have to you have to at least attempt to make

(05:54):
it function at its highest level. And to do that,
you have to pick and choose, basically what priorities.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
And by its very nature, I'm not saying it's inherently callous,
but it has to take a little bit more of
a clinical approach to these things then would be taken
on the family side, which is obviously a much more
personal and emotional approach to this idea of closure. So
while the book might be closed on a case as
far as law enforcement is concerned, that would be far
from the case if a family member thinks they got

(06:21):
something a little off.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, And all of this doesn't change the way those
family members or those loved ones feel in what they believe.
None of this, none of the realities change the way
that experience at that level.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
Right.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
We can all think of specific cases where the where
in law enforcement, municipal, maybe even on federal level, said Okay,
we've figured out what happened is what happened, and the
family says, no, this is not a satisfactory explanation. As
a matter of fact, in the past, we've covered many
examples of this, often with journalists who found something they

(06:58):
don't want you to know and then later somehow died
and before we go on. You know, this reminds me.
I recently rewatched some clips of one of your favorite shows, Matt,
The Wire.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
I believe it is. That is everybody's favorite show, right.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
One of the best shows. Then right, backstory, Matt introduced
me to The Wire.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
So we would not have Luther if we didn't have
The Wire. Okay, that's also true, that's all.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
That's all. We also wouldn't have Macavity in the latest
iteration of Cats, which is a thing of monstrosity and beauty,
and then everyone should experience it for themselves, just putting
that out.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, I saw it too, it and I think it
is the true spiritual successor to the Wire.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
It's basically the last season of The Wire. Stringer Bell
pirouetting around in a weird anthropomorphic CGI cat suit with
ripped abs yep, yep.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
In the before the Cat season of The Wire, you
guys will recall there was a there was an ongoing
plot and I think maybe season four.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
Slight spoiler alert, you mean with the vacance where there
were bodies that were just kind of disappearing, and I
think they're the newspaper essentially created a narrative of their
own to explain this.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yes, yes, full spoiler alert. Now McNulty is.

Speaker 5 (08:21):
Involved using bodies, yeah, yeah, yeah, and is creating essentially
or or working with this narrative, right, the idea of
creating a sort of false narrative to get some more
resources put into solving some of these murders right right.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
Right now that I think about it, I believe was
season five, McNulty, one of the main characters full spoiler alert,
creates a serial killer essentially and does this by working
with the press, and he's they're getting there, They're essentially
getting more funding through doing this. And one thing that
I think struck a lot of people about that about

(09:01):
that move was that The Wire had always been praised
for its realism and so for something like that to
occur in a very grounded show. The implication is that
this happens, you know what I mean. Now, of course
critics didn't universally love that plot line, but it shows
us how common this debate is, this idea that there

(09:24):
might be some greater pattern to the tragedy that surrounds us.
Here are the facts. Unfortunately, there are no shortages of
real life cases, not on the wire, real life cases
where in parents or partners of a deceased individual are
certain that authorities, through either incompetence, indifference, or even corruption,

(09:47):
have misidentified a cause of death, essentially that they've ruled
a homicide and accident. And over recent decades in the US,
we've seen hundreds of these stories. One that's still with
me that I've been doing some outside research on is
the Kendrick Johnson case in Valdosta, Georgia. That's the basketball player,

(10:09):
the high school kid who was who was found dead,
rolled up in the rolled up in a Jim Matt
Yeah yeah, and his parents say that, you know, bullies
killed or accidentally killed him, and the authorities argue otherwise,
They say he accidentally killed himself.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
Story for another day, maybe maybe we'll do a whole
podcast series on it one day. But this might surprise
some of us in the audience. Also, over the recent decades,
we've seen one surprising source of controversy for these debates
over accident versus homicide, and it comes in the case

(10:50):
of drowning, which is an unpleasant way to.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
Go, of course, it really is.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
But I do think it's surprising that, you know, when
you would think of accidental death versus homicide, you would
think of things like maybe firearm related deaths.

Speaker 3 (11:08):
Yeah, exactly, Well that's not the case. In this country.
There are a lot of fairly large bodies of water
and smaller ones too.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
They're everywhere water, it's everywhere, raging rivers, you know.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
They they are, and people every year die, whether accidentally
or not accidentally, in these bodies of water, and to
a lot of people. According to the CDC, from two
thousand and five to twenty fourteen, there were an average
of three thousand, five hundred and thirty six fatal unintentional drownings.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
And those were not related to boating.

Speaker 3 (11:51):
No, no, so not like drinking and boating and that
kind of thing, and that that occurs annually within the
United States. So every year. That is that's pretty crazy.
It translates to about ten deaths a day.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
You know.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
I just have to say, I grew up near Lake Lanier,
which is a fairly large man made lake here in Georgia,
and it is it would be surprising, maybe it would
be surprising to you, certainly surprising to me the number
of people who would accidentally drown in.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
That lake every year, for sure.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
And I was unaware of it as a kid, but
now when I see statistics about it, it's just it
blows my mind. And to be fair, a lot of
those do they end up having to do with drinking
and swimming, or drinking and boating, something like that. And
today's case that we're going to get into a little
later also involves perhaps drinking, perhaps drug use, and being

(12:45):
in a body of water.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
I have a very tangentially related, perhaps fun fact.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
For okay, I'll take some fun right now, which.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
You probably already know and you probably already know. No,
it's this Georgia has no natural lakes. They're all man made.
Oh so that's that's a little palate cleanser we do.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
I'm okay with that. Yeah, yeah. The ingenuity of mankind
you know, on full display here in Georgia. Yeah, but
we do have some swamps, that's right, we do have
some some swamps.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
Not the best for swimming though, no, no, just for shwimmers.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
Ross David Swimmer, is that the one he notoriously loves
a good swamp.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
Okay, yes, swamp Ross used to was his name in
the pilot. They changed his character a little bit, but okay,
so that palate cleanser just helps us get further into
the rabbit hole here. Because of those drowning deaths. When
we look at drowning deaths, an additional three hundred and
thirty two people died each year in deaths that were

(13:47):
the linear esque ones voting related. Of the people who
die about one from drowning, about one in five are
children fourteen or younger. And that sadly makes brutal sense,
which is.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
Why life fests are the law, you know, I mean,
kids under a certain age are required to wear life.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
Fests and lifeguards, even in kiddie pools.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
For sure.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
And here's something that was surprising to me. Eighty percent
of drowning victims, according to the CDC, are male. That
doesn't make sense to me, but let's continue on down here.
Because almost fifty percent of drownings can be attributed in
some way or to some extent, to intoxication of some
kind or another.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
How do you differentiate between a purposeful drowning and an
accidental drowning?

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Ah, there there's the rub. It turns out that proving
a drowning was purposeful intentional a homicide. Proving that is
very very difficult. A lot of evidence can be washed away.
And because drowning is tragically common, and because fifty percent

(14:57):
of drownings in this country can be attributed to some
sort of inebriation, law enforcement is often it's easy to
assume it was an accident because the odds against it
being a homicide statistically or very high.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Yeah, short of there being like a cinder block tied
to someone's leg or the like, or maybe you know,
choking marks around a neck or something like that, or
some sign of trauma that someone was thrown or held
down or whatever, it could very easily be ruled an
accidental death. And again that benefits. Again, we're not saying
they're doing it on purpose of being lazy, but that
absolutely is probably a desired outcome for law enforcement to

(15:35):
say Okay, close the book on that. Let's move on
to the million other cases that we have.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
I'm just jumping through here, and I know we're going
to hit on this, but the concept of your thinking
in your mind of, Okay, we found a drowning victim,
but there is blunt force trauma, Like there's evidence of
blunt force trauma to.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
The head or something.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
Sure, how how can you fully rule out that that
didn't occur or when a fall happened or you know
there it just becomes it becomes a labyrinth of you
have to basically work to say this was a homicide.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
Rather you yeah, the order of conclusions or operations, the
sort of the decision tree yeah does have when it
comes to drowning. Uh, the best way to say it
is that medical examiners have to rule out every other
possible explanation as to why someone ended up dead in

(16:31):
the water. And they have to think of, you know,
drug overdoses, right, maybe maybe a heart attack, maybe a
slip and fall and that caused blunt injury to their
head and they were unconscious and couldn't get out of
the water, And only after saying it was definitely none
of those things, are they able to say maybe it
was murder.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Not to mention the fact that unless a body is
weighted down, which would be clear indication of foul play,
it's gonna drift some distance, so it's harder to tie
it to the location where the fall maybe actually happen,
or say, oh, this is definitely where they hit their head, etc.
So it really is kind of a perfect storm of
being able to declare it an.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
Accident, yeah, depending in which body of water they are recovered.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
And then it gets more complicated because all of that
if all of those things somehow happen and a medical
examiner is able to say this indicates that it could
only be a murder if that very rare set of
circumstances occurs, then the next step is to prosecute or find,

(17:35):
you know, someone who would have done this, And like
a lot of violent crime, in homicide murders that we
know of and that are proven, the criminal is usually
someone familiar with the victim.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
It's not just a random right.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
But prosecutors have to prove that. They have to prove
a drowning was intentional, which means they have to build
a case on circumstantial evidence. They have to be able
not just to say, okay, the flow of the river
is this, or we know that the lake works this way.
They have to also say, you know these people were fighting,

(18:11):
Tammy and Tamara or whatever were angry at each other outive. Yeah,
they have to do motive exactly where there was money,
There were money issues, there was an insurance policy that
just got taken out forty eight hours before, there was
trouble with the law. And because of all of these factors,
it's very difficult to know how many homicides involving drowning

(18:34):
actually exist, and there's not much research on it. Local
police statistics, of course, are not always as well documented
as people would hope. Like consider this, Matt, you give
us the statistics of drowning. Overall proving cases of drowning.
According to the FBI in twenty seventeen, we just pull

(18:57):
one year from their uniform crime report, there were only
eight homicides by drowning. And that's out of what more
than three and a half thousand, thirty five hundred per year,
So they were out of those that were only able
to prove that eight were homicides. And this bothers people
in multiple aspects of law enforcement.

Speaker 3 (19:18):
There's a diver that's less than an average number of
drownings that occur per day.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's a great way to
look at it. So according to people like a diver
named Andrea Zaferis, who began assisting homicide investigators with cases
involving drowning way back in nineteen ninety eight, this diver says,
we're absolutely missing more than we're catching in homicide drowning cases.

(19:46):
A vast majority of drownings are accidental, but many which
can be the result of foul foul play, are overlooked.
So they're saying they're not They're saying, look, I'm not
saying that everybody who drowned was murdered, but I'm saying
we are missing stuff, and behind the scenes, everybody knows it.
Because also a lot of a lot of professionals like

(20:08):
that it's their career to investigate this stuff don't receive
the training they need.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
But what if a killer knew that too, Like knew
those stats and knew how easily these things can go
under the radar and be ruled an accident. Because if
you ask me, drowning someone wouldn't necessarily be the first
way you might choose to kill somebody. It's a little tenuous, right, Like,
unless certain things are in place, how are you going

(20:35):
to know if the person actually died or not. It's
an interesting question. But what if someone did know and
was able to kind of fit this into their plan? Right?

Speaker 1 (20:46):
What if some of these accidental drownings are in fact murders,
And furthermore, what if these murders are related.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
We'll talk about that right after a word from our sponsor.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
Here's where it gets crazy. We are entering the realm
of what is commonly called the smiley face murder theory,
the smiley face murders, the smiley face killer, or slight
spoiler alert here killers.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
This theory argues that more than forty cases I think
forty five or so of fatal drownings between nineteen ninety
seven and at least two thousand and eight were mistakenly
labeled accidental when they were in fact homicides.

Speaker 3 (21:39):
And that number, by the way, as we go through
this has the number of suspected cases of fatal drowning
related to this case hasn't necessarily grown, but the possible
cases identified by some of these guys has risen up
into the three hundred something range.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Right in this that number comes often from people who
later came to the theory and started finding what they
felt were commonalities.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
And some of the original investigators.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
And some of the original investigators, So here's the gist.
These cases of fatal drownings involved young men, college age
dudes who were found dead in bodies of water across
several different Midwestern states in the US over the last decade,

(22:31):
and the investigators eventually started using the term serial killer,
which a lot of professionals hate because it feels a
little alarmist and hyperbolic. But why smiley face? Did they
just pick that one? We all know what as smiley faces.
We don't have to overthink that. It's like, we all
know what drowning is. Smiley face, two dots, bottom half

(22:53):
of a circle.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
Oh, it looks like a face. Well, in this case,
the idea of the smiley face because and connected to
this alleged string of murders cluster of murders. When it
was announced publicly that police had discovered graffiti depicting that

(23:14):
ubiquitous two dots and half a circle smiley face near
the locations where they believe the killer or potentially killers
dumped bodies in at least a dozen of these cases. Also,
a phrase sinsinewa was also cited as being found near

(23:36):
some of these areas that were being investigated in connection
with bodies found floating in water.

Speaker 3 (23:43):
I would like to point out here that the smiley faces, again,
it's only in thirteen of these identified forty something cases,
but it changes a lot. You can go online and
see pictures of several of the alleged smiley face connected
graffiti's and they really like one of them looks like
a little version of a devil or demon. They're in

(24:05):
varying colors, varying sizes and styles. It's interesting that it's
not a single symbol. You know, if that was going
to be just a serial killer, you'd think that it
would just be a symbol. But perhaps as we get
through here, it'll make more sense of why it would change, right.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
We'll talk about that in a few minutes as well,
the differing interpretations of what a smiley face might be
or what the import of it is. Let's look let's
step back, let's look at the proponents, the creators of
this theory. To do so, we journeyed to New York
where we meet New York Police Department detectives Kevin Gannon

(24:45):
and Anthony d'Arte now retired, now retire, both retired and
private investigators. In two thousand and eight, they announced that
they believed one Patrick McNeil, a twenty four year old
accounting major at the time of his death, did not
drown accidentally. But Okay, what happened to McNeil at the time,

(25:08):
by the way, Gannon was, Gannon was a working detective.
He wasn't retired yet.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
Correct.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
So McNeil was hanging out in the East Side, the
Upper east Side of New York City. He was having
a night of it. He was drinking. It was February sixteenth,
nineteen ninety seven. He's at this place called the Dapper
Dog that's on East ninety second Street there in New
York City, and he's hanging out, he's doing his thing,
he's having a night of it. He disappears, and then

(25:38):
later on April seventh, nineteen ninety seven, his body is discovered.
He's discovered near the sixty ninth Street pier in Brooklyn.
He is floating in the water.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
Yeah, so Gannon at the time is specifically working and
missing persons and he catches the case.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
It's in the East River, by the way, the.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
Case is ruled unintentionalental and this is one of those
things that, you know, it's weird. A lot of a
lot of people in law enforcement or in related jobs
tend to get a case or certain cases that that
stay with them, that haunt them, you know, And this

(26:18):
was it for Gannon. He did not agree with the
official findings, and he spoke with the parents of McNeil
and he said, you know what, job aside, I am
not giving up this investigation until I find the real
story of what happened to your son. And this stays

(26:40):
with him throughout his career. When he retires, he enlists
Anthony d'Arte, who is his old partner, and he says,
let's let's do this full time. It's similar to in
a way of want to do another fictional comparison, it's
similar to Marty and rust Coal in True Detective season one,

(27:03):
right when this doesn't really spoil a story, but there's
a segment where neither of them are working for law enforcement,
but there's a case they can't let go and they
become they're working as pis essentially that's what these guys
do in real life, and Gannon mortgages his house, spends
his savings researching this, chasing these cases, and they start

(27:28):
linking McNeil's death to other cases that they feel have
disturbing things in common, because it turns out that McNeil
is not the only person in this part of the
world who went out for a night partying with their
friends and was later found dead in the water.

Speaker 3 (27:52):
Yeah, let's jump right back quickly, just to talk about
how McNeil is a college senior. He is, like a
lot of the people were going to talk about, he's
pretty athletic. He's kind of at the top of his game, right,
He's a young white male, And that is one of
the things that ends up linking a lot of these

(28:12):
cases together, just one of the top level things. So
they noticed that McNeil's death was similar to that of
a gentleman named Lawrence Andrews. This guy was twenty two
years old. He was New Year's Eve in two thousand
and six. He was drinking near Grand Central Terminal and
he vanished, and then later his body was discovered on

(28:34):
February twelfth, two thousand and seven, also off the sixty
ninth Street Pier, close to where McNeil was.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Found, and Gannon.

Speaker 1 (28:46):
Says that he and his partner studied the water flow
of the area and the contours of the land, and
he said, look, the similarities between these two cases cannot
just be accident. He believed that in both cases, is
the victims were drugged with GHB.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
Was the dayreak drug right right right?

Speaker 1 (29:07):
That makes you know, insensate, unconscious, unable to.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Fight back or defend yourself. Is it essentially like a
sedative or is it more like maybe you know, what
they would call a benzodiazepin, like a xanax or something
where it kind of makes you black out almost where
you don't remember what's going on.

Speaker 1 (29:24):
I do know it affects. It does affect memory, I believe,
and people have used it as a party drug. But
I always learned about it as as I always learned
about it as you know, a drug that creeps give
to people to sexually assault, and technically I believe it

(29:45):
is a central nervous system depressant. Anyhow, he says, this
specific substance has been given to these guys. They were
drugged and then they were placed in the water after
some amount of time, which will become very important later.

Speaker 4 (30:00):
And then.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
These two guys learn that four young men had vanished
in Minnesota and Wisconsin over a forty day period in
two thousand and three, and that they, like McNeil and
like Lawrence Andrews, had a lot of the similar things
that you had just described. Mat somebody's out, maybe partying
with their friends, and then they walk off, perhaps not

(30:27):
seeming to be in a state of distress, and then
they disappear. The detectives did something interesting here, and it
goes to a point you made earlier, nol. They started
looking not to where the bodies were physically found, but
to where, according to their best guests, the bodies had
entered the water right and that's where they found the

(30:50):
smiley faces. And again, as as established earlier, not they
didn't find forty five different smiley face icons for every
you know, every body that was discovered. They only found
twenty two or twenty something at the time.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
I know we're gonna get there, but I do want
to say that that is a as we mentioned, a
pretty ubiquitous, very low key graffiti. Everyone knows how to
do it. You know, any of your fair weather taggers.
That would be a pretty easy go to to just
do a circle, two dots and a half a circle.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
You know.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, and the guy who made this smiley face.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Work of genius. Really, I imagine doing something that important.
It's three lines.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
It's one of those things too, where it's like such
a parallel thinking type thing and such a simple thing.
I don't I almost guarantee there's no one like credited
with the smiley face. Actually, I think there might be.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
Actually I think there might be, and it may be
just because of just because that's the person who got
it on a T shirt that was have a nice day, maybe, right, Yeah,
maybe that's what I'm thinking of.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
Harvey ross Ball, yep. Interesting fifty years ago in Worcester, Massachusetts,
an American graphic artist. He's credited as creating this. Okay,
that's right, I did.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
I think I did an episode of Maybe Stuff of
Genius about that. A lot of people in the US
learn about that through the film adaptation of Forrest Gump
when the guy's going on his running streak and then
he wipes his face.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
With the right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
Yeah, but that aside, it is a very very very
very common. Dare I say ubiquitous icon.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
It's funny not to get a too off talk, but
you guys know, I worked on a show called Happy
Face about the Happy Face serial killer, and he was
given that moniker because he signed his letters to the
press with that very same icon. And when you google
Smiley Face Killer, happy Face Killer comes up a lot too,
so they're often kind of conflated because of the similarities

(33:01):
in the in the monikers.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
Right, Yeah, that's that's a very important distinction. These are
These are, as far as we know, not related, and
I don't think Gannon or d'artay are arguing that they are.
But they are arguing that they found copious evidence suggesting
that McNeil, who again is sort of the genesis the
origin point for this theory, that McNeil didn't just walk

(33:27):
off a few sheets to the wind and then fall
in a river and drown. They're saying that someone intoxicated him,
they drugged him. There was a car seen following him
after he left the bar, the Dapper Dog. They're also

(33:47):
saying he had ligature marks on his neck, charring on
his head and torso, and that the way his body
was positioned was inconsistent with normal drowning. So someone tortured him,
drugged him, tortured him and then placed him in the water.
They said he had been stalked, drugged, abducted, bound burned,

(34:10):
and then killed and then dumped in the water.

Speaker 3 (34:14):
Well, and it you know, the one major thing that
makes sense there is that he was missing for a month,
you know, so it's he dropped off the map, he
was somewhere, and then forty days later he was found dead.
And he you know, he doesn't seem like he was
sitting in the water for forty.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Days exactly, right.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
It seems like he had been in the water for
a relatively short amount of time, right, And we see
that that's another commonality they look for in some of
these cases is the the the amount of time, the
gap between when a victim was last seen and when
their body was discovered. And in some cases that's that's
quite a stretch, you know. They said that McNeil was

(34:58):
murdered by what they called this Miley Face gang. See,
because they don't believe it's just one person. They believe
there is a group doing this. That's the only way
they think you can explain the regional distribution of the
murders twenty five cities across eleven states since nineteen ninety seven,

(35:22):
maybe even continuing today according to them, and we talked
a little bit about the commonalities they use to link
these cases, But what are they other than the method
of murder, which would be drugging and drowning.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
One of the big things they noticed is that these
guys were very similar with regards to their demographics. These
are young men, a lot of them college age, who
disappeared after a night of drinking, specifically going out and drinking,
and they did end up dying. They also noticed that
these guys are athletic, a lot of them, at least

(35:57):
the majority of these cases.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
Were young white men who were athletic, and this purported
symbol of what you could call, I guess, a gang
or a cell of potential killers. The smiley faces were
drawn on walls around just twenty two of the crime
scenes in five different states, including Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania,
and Ohio. We also have the size and shape of

(36:22):
the smiley faces varying, and the paint used also varying.
Some of the faces, for example, might have had horns,
which is a popular variation on that like you can
think of like an emoji like the kind of wicked
and having, you know, like sort of dastardly fun, mischievous
emoji smiley that has sort of like a smirk in

(36:44):
the horns. I think we of hot topic in Gatzu.
Totally cool. Yeah. I actually remember when I was a kid,
a huge Smashing Pumpkins fan, and there was a Smashing
Pumpkins T shirt for that Melancholy the Infinite Sadness album
and it said the world is a vampire and it
had a kind of iconic smiley vampire with fangs and
little horns drawn in this exact same style. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:06):
And Gannon, the investigator there, even he has a quote
I think we mentioned this, but he calls it an evil,
happy smiley man.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Right, And just for a second when you said Gannon,
I was thinking of the antagonist in Zelda.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
I know me too different Gannon Kevin.

Speaker 1 (37:22):
Gannon turned a new corner and he left High Rule
and became a p I because he's got a lot,
he's got a lot of skeletons, and he's a tortured
anti hero.

Speaker 6 (37:31):
Wait.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
The character, yeah, he's the main bad guy.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
Was from from the beginning of the series.

Speaker 3 (37:40):
From the ones that I played.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yes, yeah, you're talking about like early Nintendo versions or
like more like recent ones like the Windwalkers. Yeah, for me,
it was the early.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
Nintendo h but but but our Gannon in this story
is Gannon with G A ed N O N.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Spelling, yet ken in front of it and with a
Kevin in front of it.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
Kevin's the important distinction there, really quick, another little pellet cleanser.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
Did you hear they are? It seems like it's such
a missed opportunity. They're making a Zelda series. Yep, Yeah,
it's gonna be a stream took long enough, right, doesn't
it seem like that one is rife?

Speaker 3 (38:12):
There was a Zelda series, right, I.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
Don't think so. There may be a cartoon, but this
will be live action. Yeah, whoa really? Uh oh shit,
it's like one of the few video game adaptations that
actually could be really cool.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Yes, I do remember watching the legend of Zelda cartoons. Okay,
I just wanted to make sure I was remembering that correctly.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
Matt, you had mentioned earlier that idea that the idea
of the differentiation between the icons, and again the idea
that there's a very common icon but from now, let's
just let's approach it this way. If this theory is true,
it is profoundly disturbing. And again, if it's true, there

(38:50):
are terrifying implications here. First, there's the possibility of multiple
killers working in concert. The reason that is disturbing is because,
despite what fiction would have you believe, it is incredibly
rare for investigators for anyone to find a proven case

(39:12):
of serial killers operate cooperating. Really, it's the kind of
mental disfigurement that leads someone to become a serial murderer,
doesn't really doesn't really predispose them to group work or
group projects. There are some, of course, there are exceptions there.

(39:34):
Lake and Ing would be one famous case rough Henry
Lee Lucas an oddis tool which you may remember from
our Hand of Death episodes, and he got a recent
mention under Samuel Little episode. So for that to exist,
for a group like that to exist, this would be
one of the first proven cases. The second terrifying implication

(39:57):
they have a long career, you know.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
What I mean, almost twenty three years, right.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
And that's just that's that we know about, right, that's
just assuming what Gannon and d'Arte have found is legit.
The third is, if you think about it, this is
technically organized crime at that point, because it denotes a
level of organization that serial killers have not been proven

(40:26):
to have. Lake and Ing weren't doing this. Lucas and
Toole certainly were not. In fact, Gannon has described this
as a a nationwide group that functions in terms of cells,
similar to a terrorist group. The weird thing about that

(40:48):
is it is possible for it is possible for people
to operate in a decentralized way like this just by
using Internet forums to communicate, similar to the what is
the thing with old Dutch? The Lake City Quiet pills?

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah, similar to that.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
You know, it's very easy to start a group and
if you're careful with your language, to communicate things from
point A to point B without ever pinging law enforcement,
you know what I mean, or anyone else, or anyone
else that you don't want them to know.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
You could do it right under the nose of somebody.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
I mean, have you ever gone to a form and
found some stuff that seemed like it was a code?

Speaker 2 (41:31):
I don't know. No, Okay, all right, well, I don't
want to put you in a bad spot there or
a Facebook group, right, right, right, But let's say it's
all true.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
If this is all true, then that means those implications
are necessarily true. It logically follows, and then the next
question is why aren't the authorities doing more? Well, that's
because it's a controversial theory and not everyone agrees. And
what's happening here we'll dive into the problems with the narrative.

(42:04):
After a word from our sponsors, we're back. So, as
we've said, there are problems with this narrative. This exploring
these problems, of course, should in no way be interpreted
as disrespectful to the families, or the victims or the

(42:26):
investigators involved. We're just looking at all the different explorations.
There's a nonprofit group called the Center for Homicide Research,
and they attempted to scientifically debunk the smiley face murders
or killers theory. They came up with. They came up
with a They had a report that you can find

(42:48):
online that has a laundry list of reasons why they
think this narrative described by Gannon doesn't hold water. And honestly,
they they have some good points, like we do not
have solid evidence that the smiley faces were drawn at

(43:08):
the same time the bodies were put in the water, right.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
That makes sense. They also know that graffiti exists everywhere,
especially I mean if you think about a place that
isn't visited a whole bunch, even if it's down by
a river or somewhere, you know, you will find graffiti.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
Well, that's where your run of the mill novice tagger
is going to cut their teeth is out of like
you know, the public eye, like under a bridge, or
on a retaining wall like around like the La River
for example, or any other body of water that's in
a municipal type area, you know, like up here, like
in New York City, where several of these cases took place.

Speaker 3 (43:45):
Well, they also make the exact same point that we
were just talking about, how ubiquitous smiley faces just are
as a symbol and.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
What a dashed off thing a kid might do. You know,
I want to be a graffiti artist. You know what's
the first thing that's going to come to mind. The
most simple iconographic thing you could do is that circle,
two dots and a half moon. You know, it's it
takes very little forethought, the easiest thing in the world
just to dash off from the top of your head,
you know.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
Yeah, and it also pretty clearly doesn't seem to be
a you know, a gang sign because it's not matching, right,
they're so dissimilar. But they also noticed that that other
word that we mentioned earlier in Sinewa, since Sinewa, they
they note that that is a common use of graffiti,
a common thing to be written, so it appears to

(44:32):
be also a red herring. They're saying both the smiley
face and that her.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Red hearing then made the point that, you know how
a lot of you'll see single words written on overpass bridges,
et cetera. That is typically a signature of a particular
tagger or a graffiti artist. So since Sinewa could be
one individual who travels around, maybe a train kid or
something who travels around and just does this tag.

Speaker 1 (44:55):
Or it could or it could be multiple people who
think that's a cool name, super creepy sounding, right, you know,
because graft heads and painters they get they take that
name stuff very seriously, absolutely, you know it. Also, it
also reminds me of one of my favorite taggers over

(45:15):
the years in Atlanta. There was for a time a
guy or girl or person who did the tag goat Ravisher.
And they didn't do it in a stylistic way. They
did a really bad job, so bad that you would
think it's on purpose. They it just looked like they
have found something, and in shaky block letters, spray painted

(45:37):
the goat Ravisher, and they were all over little five
points they had. They had some spots on the bridge
right outside of our office, and I kept.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Thinking, man, I love I love this.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
In my head, there's always some weird college doom like
I love this dude's energy because it was real. It
was right next to really really nice ornate tags and pieces,
and this guy would come by and be like, oh,
that probably took them like six hours. Anyway, the goat
Ravisher strikes again.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
I also, like, you know, I also love the idea
that this person is clearly romancing the goat. You know,
it's really like, you know, whining and dining the goat.

Speaker 3 (46:14):
I'm pretty sure it's like greatest of all time.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
I think it's pretty good. So it's the greatest of
all time Ravisher.

Speaker 1 (46:19):
So goat Ravisher. If you're listening, nice work man, miss
on the streets. Yeah, we see you, we see you.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
But Sinswa is a since Cinewa that's s I N
s I N I w A is also common graffiti.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
So this nonprofit Center for Homicide Research dismisses that as
a red herring.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
A lot of people I've never seen it.

Speaker 1 (46:41):
A lot of people who are yeah, it's not common
here in Atlanta right. A lot of people who are
proponents of the theory feel like this list is somewhat dismissive.
But they raise another great point, which is estimating where
the body might have entered the water. If it's you know,
X number of yards up or even a mile up

(47:04):
river from where the body was discovered, it's just that
it's an estimation. It can be it can be an
estimation with a high degree of sophistication, but it's still
it's never going to be a definite, or it's it's
gonna be rare for it to be a definite. There
will always be that question. They also disagree with Gannon's
findings on McNeil. They say there's no evidence of victim

(47:26):
trauma and the vast majority of recovered remains don't show
that the victims were recipients of trauma, that they didn't
have some you know, egregious signs of a beating or something.
They also point out that homicidal drowning is incredibly rare.
Again this, this is this, This is a statement you

(47:48):
could you could pick a bone with. You could have
a problem with this one, because they're saying that homicidal
drownings account for two tenths of one percent of all
US killings point two percent. How that number has to
be based on the very rare proven cases of homicide
by drowning, and to be a proven case of homicide

(48:10):
by drowning, remember that entire checklist of things that investigators
have to go through first. So odds are I mean,
there's no question about odds. Are more people have died
by homicidal drowning than the official numbers would suggest.

Speaker 2 (48:23):
Can we double back really quickly to Gannon's obsession and
where you think this? What the seeds of this were?
It was that one particular case.

Speaker 3 (48:32):
Yeah, of the family, that's it, right, family, that case.
I mean think about that, I think just think about that.
Somebody comes to you and you know you're working, let's say,
with them for some reason and in some ways working
for them as a public servant, as a part of
the NYPD, trying to find their son. It's because it's

(48:53):
a member. It's a missing person's case for him in
the beginning, so he's learning everything he possibly can. I'm
just this is me projecting to Kevin Gannon, but he's
he's so invested in that family, aid in this person
that he's trying to locate for days and days and days,
and then all of a sudden shows up dead and drowned.
And I mean, you can imagine the effect that I

(49:15):
would have on you if the family is like pleading
with you to figure out what happened.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
You absolutely can And this is why I could never
do that job. But does this not seem like a
classic example of someone getting a little too close to
what they're investigating. You think he got lost in the case,
and got lost in the case, and got lost in
the emotion of it all and needed to build another
narrative and maybe was looking for things that weren't necessarily there,

(49:41):
because when you see this list all gathered together like this,
it really does seem like he was making quite the
leap of judgment. Well, that's that's the question.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
So there's more I'm gonna say, We're gonna bring up later.
There's there's one or two major things that make me
lean a little closer to thinking their something going on.
But let's continue on this list of why it's probably not,
at least according.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
To this one.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
Right, well, the idea that water washes away all evidence
is somewhat of a myth or misleading. They argue that
the drownings do not fit a serial killer motive. I
do also want to point out that I this might
be a hot take, but I don't think Harvey Rossball,
the inventor of the smiley face, is directly related.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
You know, I think his hands are cleaning this one,
pretty sure. Yes.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
And then they also have confessions of confessions of people
who are incarcerated that are saying something was a murder,
right or saying that saying that they saw something, they
witness something leading up to one of these disappearances. The

(50:51):
problem with that is that it's you have to be
really skeptical when you hear the confessions of inmates. Right
the again, the Lucas conundrum, right with Henry Lee Lucas
confessing to hundreds of murders he could not have possibly done,
not have physically accomplished, in exchange for you know, perks
in lifeline Bob.

Speaker 3 (51:12):
Even goes back to the same mule little case.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
Yeah, oh, absolutely yeah, which is the whole reason we
found out about America's most prolific serial killer. So they
also say that, in their opinion, the general environment of
the disappearances sound like they're more related to accidental or
unintentional drownings. They occurred at night, they were in areas

(51:36):
not far from bars or college towns, and they said that,
you know, people who have been drinking who stagger away
from bars are more likely to walk or stagger downhill
because it's easier. I get that, but that's like, this
is not an open sandbox game when when you're walking
home from anywhere, you have a specific direction, and if

(51:57):
it's uphill, you still have to go uphill. I don't
think anybody is like, ah, my apartments at the top
of that hill, so I guess I'm going the other way.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
And then they also say that, you know, rivers also
are downhill, and there are only a few blocks away
from the bars where these cases occur, and that there's
there there's a dearth of barriers. There aren't very many
fences or railings, so intoxicated people who are having tough
time coordinating their ambulation might just slip and fall.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
That is a really fancy way of saying walking. I
love it. Well, yeah, I just said walking so many times.
It's fair. No, it's great, you're a wordsmith.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
It just stinks because they're saying, look, drunk people, when
they're super super drunk, are just gonna stumble away from
that bar and maybe fall down the hill land in
a river because there's no barrier there.

Speaker 2 (52:49):
Oh yeah, no, I love that point about it being
downhill because that's just gravity's gonna like take its course,
you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (52:55):
But these people were missing for a period of time
from a week to who you know, a month, in
a quarter or something.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
It's like.

Speaker 3 (53:05):
And I take issue with it, but it's okay.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
It feels a little victim blame me, right, Yeah, no, no,
I see your point there. I see your point there.
Map I agree.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
And they also say, you know, saying that only males
are drowning in these cases, does it necessarily mean a
serial killers evolved, which is true. They also say that
in Wisconsin, particularly the town of Lacrosse, foot patrols and
police have stopped over fifty plus drunk people walking essentially

(53:34):
and they've stopped them because they were about to walk
into the area where the river is late at night
and there are no barriers that can slip and fall.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Or into traffic. I mean, you know, who knows. There's
any number of things. But again, not no victim blaming
here at all. I do want to point out too
that I maybe got this a little wrong early on
when I was leaning on the idea of killing someone
by drowning them is not really a sure thing, right, Like,
if you're just pushing someone into a river, like, how
do you know they're not just gonna swim away or
you know, get out. But part of this theory is

(54:04):
the idea that they were drugged and potentially killed in
advance of being thrown into the river. That's that's part of.

Speaker 3 (54:10):
It, or you know what I mean, Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. Yeah,
and that point is one of the things that bugs me.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
And so but there's no evidence of that though, right.

Speaker 3 (54:20):
There's some there's some weird stuff going on. We're gonna
talk there.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
There's some weird stuff. I want to hit this.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
They also report on the actions of law enforcement in
the same town, saying that they've they've documented the circumstances
of at least twenty different people who would have drowned
but have survived. And they said, you know, in every case,
we tried to figure out what got them to that

(54:45):
point where they almost drowned. Most of the time these
would be accidents. Sometimes they were dares because college kids, right,
we were all we were all there before, or they
were attempting to commit suicide, or they were again this
is the most victim blamey thing they were involved in
aspects of auto assassination.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
This is a first for me on this term, but
I get it.

Speaker 3 (55:09):
It's it's Darwin's h what is it? The Darwin Award,
that's what that's what auto assassination is a Darwin Award. Yeah,
doing something so stupid or like, you know, reckless, that's
what they're saying.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Well, it's also just a lifestyle that involves utter disregard
for one's own longevity or personal well being, your safety, right, Yeah,
like you just throw all caution to the wind, and
you clearly are not looking out for yourself.

Speaker 1 (55:35):
People who weren't searching for a victim blamey euphemism would
have just said self destructive.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
And I think sometimes you know, as the guy who
just said ambulation a few minutes ago.

Speaker 2 (55:47):
We have to be careful, especially.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
In law enforcement reports or government reports, when you start
to see the jargon words, you know, when you start
to hear I don't know, it's like it's the reason
that sixful cults always go into acronyms. Have you guys
ever read behind the scenes, like actual leaked scientology documents.

(56:09):
They're riddled with acronyms. They're like military writing from the
nineteen fifties.

Speaker 3 (56:14):
Yeah, I've watched all of George Carlin's specials, and in
every one of them he's always got a great section
on euphemisms and how we like whitewash everything.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Ac Yeah, you're right. It is a clinical way of
referring to something that potentially is a little darker. Or
it's a way of maybe normalizing concepts that are a
little more outlandish or a little more troubling by giving
them a nice pithy you know, like unsub for example,
that's the unidentified subject in a murder investigation. When you
say unsub, it sounds a lot more digestible, maybe, you.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
Know, sure, yeah, or conspiracy theorist. That way, you can
ignore what kind of drug money in international bank is
moving whoa, whoa.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
The old thought terminating cliche exactly.

Speaker 1 (56:59):
But these points they also say, as I think we
mentioned earlier, that presence of GHB in a victim's body
does not indicate whether they were maliciously drugged or whether
they did it themselves. That's true if we're exercising skepticism.
But they also say, we don't have enough evidence to

(57:19):
say that they were drugged by offenders prior to their abduction.
These points have some validity, but let's just let's talk
about Let's talk about the other side, because there are
several things here that are incredibly I don't want to
say they're deal breakers, but they're problematic for anyone who
thinks that Gannon is completely just reading tea leaves. And

(57:42):
the first one is the one I keep coming back to,
is the length of time, Like you said, Matt, the
length of time between when they were last seen and
when they were discovered. We didn't have great statistics that
we could dig up.

Speaker 2 (57:56):
Love to read them. If you are listening, you can
find them.

Speaker 1 (57:59):
Have great systicks on how long on average it takes
to find the victim of the corpse of a drowning victim.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
Right, yeah, well here's the deal for me. I'm just
gonna lay it out really quickly. In the Rolling Stones
article on this subject that I think it came out
in September.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
Of last year, Yeah, September thirteenth.

Speaker 3 (58:20):
Yeah, exactly, it names several victims. In particular, we talked
about Patrick Neil. If you go to this person William
Hurley that I don't think we actually mentioned on air here.
He was a guy who was hanging out of Boston
Bruins game in two thousand and nine October two thousand
and nine, and his cell phone battery was really low.

(58:41):
He's he calls his girlfriend drunkenly, he's very intoxicated and says, hey,
come pick me up. She goes out to meet him
and he's gone. He's not there. She can't get in
touch with him. Six days later, his body's found in
the Charles River and his cell phone is smashed nearby.
They recover that, like, okay, So that's one right, that's

(59:03):
one instance. Here we talked about McNeil.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
Dakota James, Yes, Dakota James. So Dakota James is interesting
in that if we link him to the Smiley face theory.
He's a case where something almost went wrong, where something
did go wrong for the criminals, because on December fifteenth,

(59:28):
twenty sixteen, he called his friend Shelley. He said he
was terrified. He was wandering around Pittsburgh. He was cold,
he was he didn't know where he was. He asked
that he couldn't remember what happened. He just sort of
came to and he was walking around the area and
the police wouldn't help him. So his friend freaks out.

(59:50):
Did he get mugged? Was he in an accident?

Speaker 2 (59:53):
Where are you? I'll come find you.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
And then she actually does find him, and he's not
where he said he would be. She was able to
use her phone to find him, and then when she
got there, she saw a dark suv in the wrong lane,
facing the wrong direction. He was walking out of the hotel,
headed toward the suv and she caught him. She yelled

(01:00:19):
at him, hey, I'm over here, and he goes to
his car. He goes to her car, got in with
her and left. He didn't seem drunk, didn't seem drugged.
He was emotional, but he wasn't, you know, wet, dirty,
hadn't been beaten. He said, he just became aware he

(01:00:40):
was walking on the street, had no idea where he
was or how he got there. And the last thing
he remembered was leaving his work Christmas party and then
going to an after party with some of his coworkers
around seven fifteen pm. And the rest of it he
didn't remember. He was traumatized at want to go to
the hospital. He just went home. And then the next day,

(01:01:03):
you know, I must have just had a crazy hangover,
living wild and they may have just forgotten it. Just
one friend helping out another, except that five weeks later
he vanished after a similar night out with some coworkers
and his body was found forty days later. Going back

(01:01:24):
to your point, so this sounds like someone almost got.

Speaker 3 (01:01:27):
Him, Yeah, exactly, so he almost he knew this person
or he encountered this person early on, it feels like.
But the craziest thing, at least according to Kevin Gannon,
Anthony Duarte, and Lee Gilbertson, a criminal justice professor, his
body when it was recovered only showed decomposition for two
and a half days and he was gone for forty days.

Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
Okay, so like that's a weird one, but maybe that's
Why isn't that just an outlier? Maybe sure, maybe that's
a weird one.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Okay, that's a weird one. How about Todd geeb Geib
He was missed for twenty one days and according to
these three guys, he showed decomposition of two and a
half days.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
But I still don't see the connection. They're trying to
hang like hundreds of murders on this theory, and there's
maybe two or three outliers that like are suspicious, and
we know that people dispose of bodies and bodies of
water all the time. I mean, it's the oldest trick
in the book.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
But they haven't They've said they believe there could be
hundreds of related murders, but they admit they can't prove
it eat at least for that. And I see the point, Yeah,
because for one thing to be for one case to
be a case of murder, we have to realize one
case or two cases isolated cases could be cases of

(01:02:43):
murder without inherently tying this all in together. For law
enforcement overall, people are still pretty skeptical about this. You know,
at this point, honestly, the majority of l eos don't
think the has a lot of sands the police department
in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, which is in their theory, it's one

(01:03:06):
of the primary sites for this. They were in charge
of eight of the investigations. They released a statement reiterating
their initial conclusion that the deaths were accidental or non
intentional drownings of inebriated young men, and they said that
they have found no smiley faced symbols in connection with
their cases. And so we see other agencies saying that

(01:03:32):
the FBI released a statement in twenty two thousand and
eight denying any sort of killer or group of killers.
That multiple sources who disagree with Gannon and d'arte's theories
say that we are creating a pattern where none exists,
perhaps as an emotional reaction to the indescribable pain expectedly

(01:04:00):
losing a loved one. At this point, Gannon and Darte
still stand by their findings and their research. They insist
the case or linked. They think the smiley faced killer
or killers is or are still at large.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
And I'm with you, guys.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
There are specific cases where the official explanation leaves something
to be desired.

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
Yeah, you know, we didn't even get into things that
Gainan believes about the lividity lividity of some of these victims,
and that's a term that's describing the pooling of blood
in a dead body, like after death has occurred within
a body. And you know, I mean, I get this

(01:04:45):
exactly right. But around sixty hours after death, lividity occurs
where blood pools, it just goes toward it uses gravity
and heads towards the ground, right, and then there's discoloration
on the body where the blood has pooled. And he
at least you know this team Gannon and then the rest.
They're saying that the lividity within these dead bodies is

(01:05:08):
not matching up, and it appears that they were killed
on land and then dumped in the water. So and
here's here's the deal for me. Even if these cases
aren't linked and it's not a single killer or a
single group or something killing these people, there are individual
cases out there that appear to have enough questionable things
about them that Gannon and those guys have identified that

(01:05:30):
some of these cases maybe should be expanded upon or
could be expanded upon. That's where I'm sitting with it currently.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
I see what you're saying, absolutely, and we have an
abundance of.

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
Other theories.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
This is pretty much an intro episode to the concepts,
right sure, because we can deep dive into other theories,
such as the once popular belief that the killer or
killers was traveling via their their work right, and they
were able to use that as a cover because, of course,

(01:06:10):
as we all know, if you want to successfully get
away with committing crimes against strangers, or if you want
to if you want to murder someone and be a
ghost and never be connected to it, one very efficient
way to cover your tracks is to already have been

(01:06:32):
traveling for work. And that's our classic episode for this evening.
We can't wait to hear your thoughts.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
That's right, let us know what you think. You can
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