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?
Yeah? I remembering like pools were involved in this one. Bodies of water, for sure, went the pools. There weren't pools.
I think it's more lakes rivers.
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.
Yeah, we kept talking about this specific episode while we were making that one.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
You to know.
A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Name is Noman. They call me Ben.
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.
Of our species is this.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 be classified one way rather than the other. That will prevent a major investigation from occurring, because.
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.
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 it function at its highest level. And to do that, you have to pick and choose, basically what priorities.
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 something a little off.
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.
Right.
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 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.
I believe it is. That is everybody's favorite show, right.
One of the best shows. Then right, backstory, Matt introduced me to The Wire.
So we would not have Luther if we didn't have The Wire. Okay, that's also true, that's all.
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.
Yeah, I saw it too, it and I think it is the true spiritual successor to the Wire.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, yes, full spoiler alert. Now McNulty is.
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.
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 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 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, 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, 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.
Yeah.
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 of drowning, which is an unpleasant way to.
Go, of course, it really is.
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.
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.
They're everywhere water, it's everywhere, raging rivers, you know.
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.
And those were not related to boating.
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.
You know.
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.
That lake every year, for sure.
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 in a body of water.
I have a very tangentially related, perhaps fun fact.
For okay, I'll take some fun right now, which.
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.
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.
Not the best for swimming though, no, no, just for shwimmers.
Ross David Swimmer, is that the one he notoriously loves a good swamp.
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 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.
Why life fests are the law, you know, I mean, kids under a certain age are required to wear life.
Fests and lifeguards, even in kiddie pools.
For sure.
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.
How do you differentiate between a purposeful drowning and an accidental drowning?
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 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.
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
say Okay, close the book on that. Let's move on to the million other cases that we have.
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.
The head or something.
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.
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
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.
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.
Accident, yeah, depending in which body of water they are recovered.
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, 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.
It's not just a random right.
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,
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 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 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.
There's a diver that's less than an average number of drownings that occur per day.
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. 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 that it's their career to investigate this stuff don't receive the training they need.
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 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?
What if some of these accidental drownings are in fact murders, And furthermore, what if these murders are related.
We'll talk about that right after a word from our sponsor.
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.
Yeah.
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.
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.
Right in this that number comes often from people who later came to the theory and started finding what they felt were commonalities.
And some of the original investigators.
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, 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 of a circle.
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 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 some of these areas that were being investigated in connection with bodies found floating in water.
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 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.
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 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, by the way, Gannon was, Gannon was a working detective. He wasn't retired yet.
Correct.
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 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.
Yeah, so Gannon at the time is specifically working and missing persons and he catches the case.
It's in the East River, by the way, the.
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 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 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, 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 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.
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 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 February twelfth, two thousand and seven, also off the sixty ninth Street Pier, close to where McNeil was.
Found, and Gannon.
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.
Was the dayreak drug right right right?
That makes you know, insensate, unconscious, unable to.
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.
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 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.
And then.
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 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 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.
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.
You know.
Yeah, and the guy who made this smiley face.
Work of genius. Really, I imagine doing something that important. It's three lines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With the right. Yeah.
Yeah, but that aside, it is a very very very very common. Dare I say ubiquitous icon.
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 in the in the monikers.
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 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 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, and then killed and then dumped in the water.
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.
Days exactly, right.
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 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, 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.
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 the majority of these cases.
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 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 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.
And Gannon, the investigator there, even he has a quote I think we mentioned this, but he calls it an evil, happy smiley man.
Right, And just for a second when you said Gannon, I was thinking of the antagonist in Zelda.
I know me too different Gannon Kevin.
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.
Wait.
The character, yeah, he's the main bad guy.
Was from from the beginning of the series.
From the ones that I played.
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.
Nintendo h but but but our Gannon in this story is Gannon with G A ed N O N.
Spelling, yet ken in front of it and with a Kevin in front of it.
Kevin's the important distinction there, really quick, another little pellet cleanser.
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?
There was a Zelda series, right, I.
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.
Yes, I do remember watching the legend of Zelda cartoons. Okay, I just wanted to make sure I was remembering that correctly.
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 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 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.
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 they have a long career, you know.
What I mean, almost twenty three years, right.
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 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 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?
Yeah, similar to that.
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.
You could do it right under the nose of somebody.
I mean, have you ever gone to a form and found some stuff that seemed like it was a code?
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.
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. 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 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 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 the same time the bodies were put in the water, right.
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.
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.
Well, they also make the exact same point that we were just talking about, how ubiquitous smiley faces just are as a symbol and.
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.
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 be also a red herring. They're saying both the smiley face and that her.
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.
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 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 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.
Thinking, man, I love I love this.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure it's like greatest of all time.
I think it's pretty good. So it's the greatest of all time Ravisher.
So goat Ravisher. If you're listening, nice work man, miss on the streets. Yeah, we see you, we see you.
But Sinswa is a since Cinewa that's s I N s I N I w A is also common graffiti.
So this nonprofit Center for Homicide Research dismisses that as a red herring.
A lot of people I've never seen it.
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 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 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
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 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.
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.
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 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 would have on you if the family is like pleading with you to figure out what happened.
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, 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.
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.
To this one.
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.
You know, I think his hands are cleaning this one, pretty sure. Yes.
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 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.
Even goes back to the same mule little case.
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 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 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.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But these people were missing for a period of time from a week to who you know, a month, in a quarter or something.
It's like.
And I take issue with it, but it's okay.
It feels a little victim blame me, right, Yeah, no, no, I see your point there. I see your point there. Map I agree.
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 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.
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 the idea that they were drugged and potentially killed in advance of being thrown into the river. That's that's part of.
It, or you know what I mean, Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. Yeah, and that point is one of the things that bugs me.
And so but there's no evidence of that though, right.
There's some there's some weird stuff going on. We're gonna talk there.
There's some weird stuff. I want to hit this.
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 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.
This is a first for me on this term, but I get it.
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.
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.
People who weren't searching for a victim blamey euphemism would have just said self destructive.
There you go.
And I think sometimes you know, as the guy who just said ambulation a few minutes ago.
We have to be careful, especially.
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. They're riddled with acronyms. They're like military writing from the nineteen fifties.
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.
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.
Know, sure, yeah, or conspiracy theorist. That way, you can ignore what kind of drug money in international bank is moving whoa, whoa.
The old thought terminating cliche exactly.
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 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 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.
Love to read them. If you are listening, you can find them.
Have great systicks on how long on average it takes to find the victim of the corpse of a drowning victim.
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.
Of last year, Yeah, September thirteenth.
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. 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 one instance. Here we talked about McNeil.
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, 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. Did he get mugged? Was he in an accident?
Where are you? I'll come find you.
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 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 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, 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 to your point, so this sounds like someone almost got.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
And I'm with you, guys.
There are specific cases where the official explanation leaves something to be desired.
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 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 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 some of these cases maybe should be expanded upon or could be expanded upon. That's where I'm sitting with it currently.
I see what you're saying, absolutely, and we have an abundance of.
Other theories.
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, 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 traveling for work. And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts.
That's right, let us know what you think. You can reach you to the Hamil Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook x and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
If you want to call us dial one eight three three std WYTK that's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes, give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we can use your name and message on the air. If you got more to say then can fit in that voicemail. Why not instead send us a good old fashioned email.
We are the entities that read every single piece of correspondence we receive, be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.