There's three or four hundred cases. They're still happening, guys, these strange things and bodies being found all over the place. So be careful out there, don't get drugged, and stay safe in you if you're in that kind of like a range of young men, you know, stay together, you know,
go out together and come home together. Women do that, they are living a fear of being assaulted or being drugged, and men some men don't, and they have to change their kind of sensibilities because there's some very nefarious people out there.
In today's new episode, we speak with William Ramsey of William Ramsey Investigates and he wrote a great book called The Smiley Face Killers, and we get into that in this conversation, Lance, what'd you think of this interview?
Well, I thought that we went on quite a ride here with mister Ramsey. He has been somebody who has been on our radar for a little while now and we finally were able to connect with him to get him on the show for an interview. I got to say, right off the top, a lot of his views on the Smiley Face Killer go many layers deep, and they're
very very interesting. They don't necessarily align with mine, and I'm assuming they don't necessarily align with your views either, Tim, given the questions that we asked him in some clarifications that we wanted him to provide. But I will say again, this is quite a ride the listeners are about to go on.
Yeah, I do think there are several suspicious cases inside this large story, but certainly not every case is a murder in my opinion. But yeah, no, this is this is a fun one. I hope the audience enjoys it. Please let us know what you think on Spotify or YouTube and check out William Ramsey Investigates on YouTube and also on his podcast feed.
And you can go to William Ramseyinvestigates dot com if you want to check out any of the books that he has written. He's got many books to choose from there, so you can go right to that website and order your copy today. Again, no matter your views, you'll still be entertained by all of the ideas that he has about all of the topics that he writes about.
Okay, so please follow us on social media at Cross Based Podcast or Cross Based Pod. We're gonna break quick for commercial here and we'll be right back with William Ramsey.
And we're back with mister William Ramsey.
We are being joined now by William Ramsey. William, how are you today?
I'm doing well, Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Yeah, we're so glad to finally get you on. We've been talking for what feels like half a year. I think it actually might be almost half a year that you know, we first made a connection and decided that we were going to collaborate and have you on the show, and maybe we could be on your show. But then you had jury duty.
That's right, that's right.
Can you just let us know a little bit about your jury duty? Well, actually, before you do that, can you introduce yourself to the listeners anyone who doesn't know who you are, and then we'll get into your jury duty.
Hi. My name is William Ramsey. I'm an author.
I became a podcaster later, but I started out as an author literally fifteen years ago is when I published my first book, Profit of Evil. I've written five six books actually now one is kind of a lesser known book. It's called Alistair Crowley, a visual study, which is a lot of pictures about Crowley. But I've covered a lot of different topics, mostly stuff that people weren't really talking about for one reason or another. Crawley the West, Memphis Three,
Occult Crow. I'm a lot of a cult Hollywood. I did Smiley Face Killers, and then I have five documentaries on my Patreon. Amazon wouldn't let me post them off to try to post them again, I was interviewing people for YouTube, and then my YouTube channels got taken away, I think in twenty twenty, and so I started kind of podcasting over COVID, and now my podcast, William Ramsey Investigates, which is really a general investigative reporting podcast, is in the top point five percent of the world.
So I guess that's the top eighteen.
Thousand podcasts or seventeen thousand or something like that.
That's it.
I post a lot of stuff, you know, on a lot of different topics whatever it kind of finds my interest or whatever. I'm researching a lot. So I've had a lot of guests who are knowledgeable about those subjects on my podcast.
All right, well, let's talk about one of your books. Now, as you mentioned, you wrote several really interesting books. One of them is called The Smiley Face Killers, and this is a story that's kind of been around, and I guess been in our orbit, been in the true crime sphere for years. Back in the early days of this podcast, crawl Space, we actually did do some episodes on Boston's
Vanishing Men back in twenty seventeen. I feel like we may have done some parallel work on this story way back then, but we have not looked into it since then, and it seems like a situation that I guess comes up every once in a while. And then recent stories like the New England serial killer and the Lady Bird Lake, those stories remind me of this story. So long way of asking you to just describe your work into this, and I understand you've been looking into these cases for a long time.
It's been a while.
I really started, probably in twenty sixteen or twenty fifteen. My first case was a young man by the name of Joey LaBute in Columbus, Ohile. Now I was in the alternate media. I was always listening to Coast to Coast and I remember that there was one Coast to Coast about a smiley face killer by a woman. I'll call her Christy P. I don't want to mention her last name. She was talking with Annet Orghana. I forgot
the guy's last name, the host. It was this rumor, so it was kind of like an urban myth to me, like I thought this was the thing. And she talked about these cases. There were forty cases at the time, and they were happening in the kind of Pacific Northwest.
That was the perception.
And the phenomenon is young man not woman, goes out at a bar, separated from friends, maybe starts acting strength, disappears to later be found in water. And it got the name smiley faced killers for people who don't know is because the original investigators, Kevin Gannon and Jeff Gilbertson, they found a correlation between this phenomenon and spray painted smiley faces in their original book, which is called Case
Studies and Forensic Drawings. So I had heard that on coast to coast and as I was researching kind of the occult, I was doing a lot of research in Ducrolea. I kept seeing the smiley face in common culture. So I saw in fight club, I saw it, and watchmen and other places and kind of curious things and clothing and things like that. So anyway, I was online and I followed some of these people. One guy's name is
Jim Smith. And then I followed this one case where a young man disappeared, Joe Labie, like I mentioned, and he was I think he was gay, and he was in a bar. The Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic was happening that weekend, so a lot of bodybuilders weren't down, and I said, if this guy ever ends up in water, I'm gonna freak out. So he was missing for nineteen days. I followed all of the television stuff I could find online,
you know, kept like the investigations continuing. We have his phone, we don't know why he didn't go to his car. Where was he seen last fuzzy you know CCTV video which is suspicious from the night he disappeared out of the bar. He was known not to be a heavy drinker. He fit the profile of the other victims, usually a skinnier guy, kind of in the body body you know, size index or whatever on the skinnier side. So he kind of felt and Gilberton's notice this too. They're not fat,
like most of the victims aren't fat, they're athletic. And Joey Lebute was on that so then nineteen days later, the huge searches fits all of the same phenomenon. Huge search. Young guy found later in the Seoda River not too far from where he disappeared, in kind of an eddy of the main river. When a place previously searched, which is very common, they're usually massive searches and the rivers are followed. So that was really where it triggered for me.
It clicked, Okay, this phenomenon isn't a urban myth, this is actually happening. And then I just followed these other researchers, Like I said Jim Smith, there may be a couple others on Facebook. I'm not on Facebook anymore, but there were other people interested in really researching and categorizing, and that led to my first documentary on the Spiley Faced killers, who's abducting, torturing, and murdering college aged men in the US.
So the original perception that there's this kind of smaller area in Northwest where it was happening was false once I really started researching, because I found cases in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, a lot of water areas. It just was on my radar with other things because I really saw it. So then I kept following. I read all of Gilbert and gin and stuff. I kept abreast of
things and was trying to follow cases. And then I just like, I think I've followed ten ten young men who've disappeared later to be found in water, Like I just couldn't know, Oh he's out, it's like Halloween and he disappeared from a bar. He's gonna be found in water in two or three days, and sure enough, found in water. So then I made a second documentary which was available on my Patreon. It's called Smiley Face Killers. The Global Slaughter continues because it was happening in the UK.
There's a lot of these things in bath Manchester outside of London, the Thames River, and some.
Of these cases I can't follow because.
I'm unfortunately, you know, mono lingual, so I don't know, you know, whether he's happening in Spain or Germany or some of the other but I could follow somebody. There have been a team effort. There's other people who sent me stuff from France and Netherlands and Germany in Austria, so these cases are happening. And then I just kept writing, and I always wanted to put it in book format because it's really kind of a saga of different researchers.
Like you mentioned you did something in twenty seventeen with cryptid Antiquarian. I think that's a very important point in the research because after she Eliza Jeger posted on there, it created this huge firestorm of interest. There's so many posts. I think there were two thousand posts, and millions of people looked at that. Yeah, I live in Boston, it's happening all the time. Really opened and expanded my understanding to these cases, and then it led to the publication
of my book in twenty twenty four. I already have a second edition of it, so I've kind of cleaned it up, but it's like four.
Hundred pages of like knowledge.
And I tried to include all the other researchers and all the other shows that I've done and the places where it showed up, like Gilberson and Gann and they did a six art series for Oxygen, so I thought that was important.
It wasn't for me.
It wasn't broad enough. There were other articles like I did a Daily Beast article, things on fill and Oz, doctor Phil and doctor Oz excuse me. And then just like so many things happened in I think twenty twenty four there was just this rampage these Austin dusts they called the Ladybird Killer or whatever, but just this swath of like water dusts that are incredible. In Chicago there were like twenty in like a three or four month period and I can't really keep up. And there was
some in New York City. There was like a lunar cycle disappeared in Texas became a hot spot. It was really something else. And then you know, finding some of these people who were doing it, Like I literally found a guy who committed the perfect It's kind of a perfect crime, right, the smiley faced killers. Like if you put in water, it's like people.
Call it a drowning.
There's evidence that could be lost, it's an easy close to a cop. So a lot of things that inhibit kind of people seeing it. But then you like see the families like this guy would never do that.
This is suspicions. But I followed a.
Guy by the name of Scarlett Blake, that was he was a trans sexual in Oxford, UK who committed the perfect crime on a guy who a krano. If he hadn't admitted he would never have been arrested and he would have got away with a perfect crime. So that's the motive. Like, that's what people don't get, Like, what's the motive. This guy had no motive other than to just be a murderer. That's what people don't get. Why would you do this? They fit the same crime. This
guy w A. Krano was a Spaniard in Oxford. He was out with friends. He worked at BMW at a factory. He was partying. He got separated from the group. He was drunk and a predator in the guise of a woman. It looked like a woman and very covered like faces covered, no distinguishing characteristics. All in black takes this guy Hore Krano into a place away from CCTV. It's all been speculatd like this premeditation. They're thinking, like I'm not going
to get caught. And then Cranio shows up in a little kind of river dead and they just said he must have tripped and fell in and then he found They found out that this guy was formerly a man, now a woman was involved based on the testimony of another person, So of course he gets arrested. The trial is done in the UK and they never asked him if he had ever did it before.
It says like, okay, you got you.
For one and you're going to jail and that's it. Nobody seemed to have asked him, like are you a serial killer? Like what is going on if you've done this other places? And the interesting thing about Scarlet Blake is he came from it seems like he came from a well off family. He's able to travel around. He came to the US, and he seems to be in Texas around like some of these other deaths happen. Wouldn't
that be the perfect crime? And that goes all the way back to Joey La Butte, which seems to be at the perfect crime too, because somebody's like these thousands and thousands of body boulders come into town and then maybe commit a crime and leave. Some people have speculated that this is a type of like thrill kill, and I think that there's some element of truth to that. This guy, Scolar Blake, you know, was a thrill killer. So there's a lot of information to take.
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Really interesting stuff yeah, I would love to break down some of these aspects here. The first thing I would like to talk about is the graffiti. The smiley faces certainly a common image in pop culture and certainly a common piece of graffiti for decades. I guess, where is that line on what constitutes as one of these killings when we're talking about like graffiti, Like you if there's one scene like under a bridge, like a half a mile away, does that count? Where is this line?
There are some that are very prominently sprayed. Seemed like the most recent case was a guy his name was a shamous I forgot his name, but it was in kind of the Chicago area, but he had one sprayed kind of on the wharf where he was found. And there's one other guy heart who had it above like the river. Zach Maher had one on the bridge where he disappeared. So those are the more recent ones that I can think of. It seems to be a calling card, and it seems to be an occult associated with cults,
So there's an esoteric and an exoteric understanding. It just could be a smiley face. But if you follow some of these like pop artists and occultist, they use the smiley face. Like one of the interesting things is like that song Bad Habits by Ed Sheeran, Like he's got characters in there with the smiley face. He's got smiley face insignia on balloons and he's re enacting kind of a smiley face killing. But also this kind of deep occultist group, the Order of Nine Angles, who advocates going
out and calling innocent people. And so like I've done, say, you know, segments on the Order of Nine Angles. I actually wrote a book of my book before this book was a book about the Order of Nine Angles that believes in human sacrifice. That's just how this phenomenon got its name. I liken it too, like a black widow name where the woman's always killing her husband or other types of crimes. It just got that moniker and it's
never gone away. Another guy online, he's really good. He studies these cases, but he's called them stage drowndings, and so I like that term stage gam grounding too. And so you know, the cops aren't looking for it. It's usually the public. So the public will find it, or somebody will send the name in or if you read the book by Gilbertson and Gannon. They have very prominent pictures of these spray painted smiley face so something really was happening in the regions where they were studying it.
Are you trying to suggest that Ed Sheeron is the smiley face killer on these airwaves?
I'm suggesting that whoever's around him or knows him knows a lot about the occult and has put it into his music videos and lyrics and and go look at his tat is too.
He has got a.
Prominent yellow smiley face right around his chest. A lot of these guys do, like I mean, you see them weird places and weird like insignias and tattoos. So people say, like, is this smiley face killers? Like the happy face killer? Like Jess Person who was a trucker. There's a lot of slaughter of like innocent women with truck driving. It's
completely different, Like the phenomenon is completely different. And I don't think it's like one guy, Like people want to get stalted and like, oh, so you think that there's one. I think this is a phenomenon that people are involved. They're communicating, it's their kind of interest and they're into very dark stuff BDSM and it's some kind of really dark underground, and there is a correlation between these people
and the BDSM. There's really is they're into very dark practices, like BDSM gets dark, and there's like I think I had one victim in DC. He was at a club that sided as a BDSM club. There seems to be a connection. Well, there's one guy, his name was nas Muhammad in Georgia. He's associated with BDS. I'm in these very dark clubs in Atlanta. I'm not saying that there's one guy at all. I think there's people like this guy scrab Up Blake. I think he was network. They did a sloppy, lame job on him.
Yeah, I want to get into this idea of a network and the smiley faces being a calling card. But first, if you don't mind, can you take us through the idea of the staged drownings, because a lot of these cases,
looked at individually, are very suspicious. I will say not all of them, in my opinion, but a good amount of them very suspicious look when looked at individually, and it seems like and correct me if I'm getting any of this wrong, but it seems like the people go missing, there's a search they are later found deceased in the water in the area that has been searched already, and their cause of death isn't necessarily drowning.
Sometimes right, sometimes the medical examiner either doesn't know or just attributes to drowning even in certain situations. But I think the phenomenon is really disappeared at night. So there's standard drownings. People go to a lake. Hey mom, I'm going to the lake with my two friends, and some mishap happens during the day. These are different. Almost every case that I've covered is the case of a young man out at a bar. They're drinking, or something's going
on at a bar. They act strange, they disappear. Of all the cases that I've correlated, I'm at like four hundred or three hundred, nobody sees them go into the water. This is a huge tell, Like why doesn't somebody see them splashing around or say like, hey, John, I'm gonna go don't jump in the water. So zachmar leaves a bar in downtown Boston at two am. He doesn't get led in by the bouncer back in, which is weird. He texts and says like I'm going to do my
own thing. Then he disappears and later to be found in water. That's one example. So all these people are not found, then they're just attributed to drowning when they're found a week later, some are forty days later. That's very, very, very very unusual, is that these people pop up. Dakota James and Pittsburgh is that he was found literally forty days after he went missing from downtown Pittsburgh, and his
body was in pretty good shape. There was no slippage on his body, which would should have happened if he had been to the water. Where was he for forty days? What was he doing? Was he kept alive? This phenomenon has the same parameter. So all of the cases I've studied, nobody sees them go into the water. They never say that they're going to go jump in the water. And then a lot of them I think are given poor jobs by the medical examiner. I've had in a number
of cases. I've probably had three cases off the top of my head of where the medical examiner clearly bungled the case. Dakota James is one of them. The original case that I studied is a guy by the name of Patrick McNeil doubt case was actually never divulged to the parents that he had injuries consistent with a blow torch. And then there was I think a more recent case of Riley Strain in Nashville. They said they had water in his lungs and just said, oh, he drowned. I
mean he said he had air in his lungs. Excuse me, So if he drowned with the air, they just called it to dry drowning. And a lot of these investigators, like these analysts just to make these conclusions with no evidence.
There are very like there's very obtuse criminal investigators online who've made a career talking about people who disappeared, and they just said, well, Riley Strain must have went down to the river and to take a leak and fell in and drowned, Like they literally believe that that's their excuse. Like I've known a lot of men who you know, don't have to use the bathroom inside of a formal structure, and I've never heard of them like accidentally falling and
then just choking on their own water and dying. And Riley Strain has tons of problems too, because they didn't find his boy for a week, two weeks after extensive search, very sophisticated professionals.
By the way, that is a huge part of this mystery because the time between when this person, you know, all in all these cases goes missing and then they're unaccounted for for several days or set up to you know, forty days, and then they are found in water. Where could they be if this is some kind of network that is following I don't know, some kind of guidelines or trying to recreate the same type of disappearance and murder that flies under the radar. How do they pull it off?
It's a great question, just exactly like Scarlett Blake. Blake in Oxford, UK pulled it off. He pulled it off. The conclusion of the court was that he drowned him in this room and then they just the local police just said it was a mysterious drowning. And so I think that's happening over and over. I think that's the intent that this kind of mo has been shared. It goes back to the mob. The mob has been dumping people in water and stuff like that, or drowning people
or tying weights to them. So it's just another means. But some of these cases are like Montgomery, this guy out of Philadelphia, he's found in like three feet of water. He should have just stood up. And this guy, Tommy Booth the same thing. You know, he's around sketchy people. He's telling his mom like I'm afraid for my life or I'm afraid of these people. And then he's found in a place that he's already has already been searching,
like a foot of water. It doesn't make sense. So people don't understand how dark some of these people can get. That's they're very dark. One of the cases that I looked into, which really didn't fit into the smiley faced killings is the death of a He was an LGBT type person. His name was He's easy name to remember, Kevin Bacon, the same name as the actor. The actor actually got up. The famous actor got involved in this case because he disappeared outside of I think Lansing, Michigan.
But he was online, like a lot of these guys are on the gay apps and stuff. But he was on this gay app and he met some person that they were scheduled to meet. He was last seen at this guy and this guy had him in a dungeon. You know, he was found in the dungeon hanging from his ankle. I mean super dark. Kevin Bacon was found in the dungeon and this character who did it to him cut off his testicles and fried him almost like something from Silence of the Lamb Lambs ate his testicles. Like,
that's super duper dark. I mean, this is all validated. The guy's name was Liatunsky wrote about it in I think the section was potential Killers. I think it's the section that I had in that Offender Typology. Yeah, chapter nineteen.
I read about that.
So this is something that's, in your opinion, based on your theory, that is very well organized by very dark people who are very secretive and sort of wily. You know, they're able to elude CCTV footage or it becomes fuzzy, so they're able to manipulate it. How far up does this go though? Did they operate on the dark web? How far up the like law enforcement or political systems do they go?
Great question? I don't know.
One of the things that's scary about the Dakota James case is it seems like he was selected. He was pre selected, he had gone through something where he had amnesia, and he was in some kind of black kind of van car and he called a frent and says, I don't know where I am, come get me. And then I think six weeks later he disappeared. So it seems like he was kind of a pre selected person. So how far up it goes, how far the cover up goes.
If you look into kind of like Jeffrey Dahmer as an exemplar, like drugging and GHB, he got kicked out of a couple of bathouses because he got caught drugging victims. He was into drugging people. And I think that that's the same thing with these so called drowning victims, is that they're pre drug with GHB or something like that and they're either not checked for. And that was really one of the main themes of the Cannon and Gilbertson's book is this, so this network they might be learning
from each other. If you look at like pedophilia, another very dark subject, a lot of these guys are in like groups like I've done Sandbort trials and there were online things where these guys trade things, they tell stories they've met up in the dark web and exchange things and so the BDSM people, I think, do that too. And I think that this is kind of like a very dark subset of the bda SM community of ballgags
and gimps and weird stuff like that. I think I included it in my documentary, but not in the book. Was this kind of idea of kink this documentary that I saw, I think it was on Netflix, but you'd literally had a room and you had people all over the world could watch this streaming. So it's not like a stream like this or something else that's live, but streaming like people getting you know, chained and whipped and like horrible stuff. Well, imagine those people with that interest
where they go into snuff films and stuff. Films have been validated like they're real, Like we know, stuff films have been made, whether it's Leonard Lank and I think Richard Ang or Robert ng or the guy Mignotti from Canada who killed somebody live, you know, So something like that very dark maybe happening yet.
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So there also is a very dark side too, like all sexuality Yeah, I'm wondering if you think that there's any sort of crossover or carryover between Jeffrey Epstein's network that he developed the people that he manipulated into helping him out, or maybe not manipulated, they volunteered. I don't know, but there was a network there that was facilitating those acts.
Is their overlap here, It's.
A great question. I think that some of these guys who are doing an outwardly are heterosexual. They have kind of a heterosexual persona, but they married or have a wife, and I haven't cocluded a couple of those guys.
In the book.
There was this guy, Edward Landfeir who externally had you know, a heterosexual wife, but he had two dudes locked up in his house and one of them got out. And it's from that area of where a lot of these smiley faced killings happen. So it's another instance of like men are captured and kept for a while alive happens, but then those are the only things he gets busted for.
Is land fear.
Another guy was a guy out of Perth who externally was like married and had girlfriends, and then he goes out at night and hits on drugs and rapes men. But another one of the interesting things is, like you come across people who've like done research from There's one I included in my last chapter, this psychic Sloan Bella, who did great work on the West Memphis three too,
Like she kind of caught she understood it. Like a lot of people think that the cover story is real, but she could kind of see through that.
Well.
She did some kind of reading in May four, but she talked about how this phenomenon goes all the way back to record executives in Chicago, something I never had heard before, Like, and it kind of makes sense because the smiley faces known as kind of this acid house symbol going back to the seventies and eighties used in a lot of like motifs.
Or a lot of album covers and things like that.
Her kind of take on this kind of network idea makes sense. And how far up this I mean, like I said, look up toafar As Campbell if you want to have a bad day.
So what's the purpose of this culture organization to.
Abduct and rape man? Yeah, cast them away? I mean I don't think that. I don't think that there's a higher political purpose. Maybe some of these guys really are dark magicians and high level occultists who just want to cause misery and you know, do a colling like the own order of nine ang order of nine angles. I wouldn't know. I don't know. I know the phenomenon's happening. I think I think my book proves that the phenomenon's happening.
Yeah, And I think some of the men had like bars, we're drinking, So I think the idea of many of
these men being drugged is interesting. I wish there was some kind of federal task force that would look into this, but it's got to be challenging when you consider, you know, these are jurisdictions from all over the country and all over the world really, and like medical examiners that are different and they have, you know, their own conclusions, different interpretations on the science and the waters being cold warmer in different areas, things like this. So I'm saying there
are a lot of variables. You mentioned that they are drugged and raped. Is that something that's being found in many of them.
No, No, there's not a lot of evidence. I think that something's going on, something dark, which is why I put this whole thing like this picture of broken that was a video by nine inch Nails. What's why I use that picture for my documentary in twenty seventeen. They're not even looking for it. There's evidence of torture in some of these people, clearly Dakota James. I'm not a medical examiner, but I could tell he had a rope
around his neck from his autopsy pictures. Same with McNeil, like very credible analysts have looked at his autopsy report and said, this guy's been hit with a ballpeen hammer like this doesn't make any sense. So whether they're being sexually abused, I don't know. But one of the interesting things, and included in the intro of my book in two thousand and eight, is that the FBI made a statement
that these are all alcohol related drownings. You know, that's that's really They got drunk and fell in the water and died, which I think some people do, that happens to them. The problem with these ones is that sometimes their bodies aren't found for like two weeks, very obvious to anybody who studied drownings, like most of the body's surface within about two or three days due to decomposition, depending on water temperature current, things like that.
This smiley faced killer concept has been sort of disregarded by the FBI. What is the purpose of the FBI disregarding this when they could be addressing it and you know, helping increase public safety or public awareness?
Right, great question, It's a good question. I don't know.
When you watch the mechanics of the FBI, sometimes they're not exactly up and up. And some of the ex FBI agents are not on the up and up either. I mean, I've studied John Douglas and Wow or Ken Lanning or some of these other guys who, in my opinion, kind of use their FBI credentials for not good aims. As a way to put it, I think the overwhelming amount of evidence is that something is going on, that there's there's I mean, I'm almost at like five.
Hundred cases at this point.
You have these like situations in like Austin that Beggar belief. I mean, there's other ones like that. He didn't die. His name was Christian Pew, but he was clearly drugged. He was found like three days later close to the river, and he had a lot of injuries. He went into the hospital. He doesn't remember anything. So these amnesia, it's usually caused by something, maybe not alcohol, but something else, like maybe they're blackout drunk. Some of these guys are
not drinkers. Like one of the deaths in Austin, Texas, I think his name was Martinez Beca. His brother knew him, like they worked out every day together and said like he would only drink one or two drinks.
I feel like that could be countered with well, that would cause the person to blackout quicker.
I've never heard of anybody to take one or two drinks in blackout.
Yeah.
What I'm saying is if they're not drinkers and they go to a bar and maybe being encouraged, the effected alcohol are going to be a lot heavier on a non drinker if they go one or two more than what they were used to going.
He was also out of character, he said to his brother, said that he was acting strange. And there's like a spade in these downtown areas, whether it's Nashville, New York or Austin of drugging in other instances, So not just like people disappearing, but people getting drugged and rolled and having their belonging stolen and ghb'd for one reason or another.
These incidences of the smiley face killing phenomenon are taking place in a larger place of like either people at the establishment or the bartenders drugging people for one reason or another for the various reasons. You know, some of these guys wake up at a strip club and they don't remember anything, and their credit cards are max taut. They don't know how it happened, and somebody you know, caught their credit card and did this, so there's financial gain.
But think about if you're like one of these other guys, like I mean, Jeffrey Dahmer.
Would do that.
He would keep people there, right, he would kill them and drug them and try to rubatize them. There was another guy outside the UK. He was into GHB and he would drug people and then fake their death. They called it. In the UK, the most successful rapist in UK history was this very unassuming guy who was from like Indonesia. He looked like an accountant. He looked like the least threatening person you'd ever seen in your life. And they say he drugged like over one hundred and
two hundred guys. And what he would do is he would wait until the bars went out so he would sleep all day like and that he was a predator. He was basically his Serengetti was Manchester after the bars came out, and he would go look for people to try to get him back into his home and drug him. What was his name, I can't remember it now. The average person isn't thinking on those terms. Yeah, I agree.
I think a lot of people, you know, the average person are not expecting crime to be committed near them, to them, in front of them, but it does happen, as we know. One other variable. I do just want
to mention this isn't a question. I do have a question, but the legalization of marijuana and edibles are something that could be I don't know that maybe he could be considered in this story to some degree because a lot of that if you buy it from a dispensary, is regulated, but if you're not buying it from a dispensary, it is not regulated, and the effects can be wild and can be exacerbated by the use of alcohol. So I
just want to point that out. But this Ladybird Lake story out of Austin, tell us what you know of this area, and this is kind of almost like becoming its own story or own part of this larger Smiley Face Killers story.
It's an incredible story, like it was a place that wasn't that busy, which is also kind of an interesting aspect, is like Austin was never on that map. You know, I wrote about it in my book. I have a full chapter on it. Then all these people started popping up one after another in Austin. I mean, there's even more documentaries online about it, like people have gone down like famous kind of YouTubers and things like that have checked it out.
But it got its.
Own name, the Lady Bird Lake Killer or something like that. It really was a remarkable series of cases, and it made the national media. I called it the Austin Waterduts. But there was like all these guys I've been in contact with some of them. People started showing up. Gutierra's was the guy's name, I said, Martinez, But Martin Gutierres, Christopher Pooh, I mentioned Axtel, Jason, John Jonathan Honey, John
Hayes Clark. These are all right back to each other, all in kind of like twenty twenty three, twenty four, and so it's gotten that name, the Ladybird Killer but it's within the larger context of these phenomenon happening in Chicago, Houston, Like there's a lot of deaths actually in the Houston Bayous end this year, well actually late twenty twenty five, so it's not exactly a water death, but it seems like there's a lot of bodies being dumped in Houston
men recently. They see it only you know, within the local area of where these things happen, and not the big picture that, hey, this phenomenon is happening all over the place, Boston, New York, Chicago, Austin, and he plays a major city.
Why is the calling card a smiley face when it could be something a little bit more significant, something that isn't going to be considered so common.
That's a good question.
I don't know. It's kind of a mystery. Like I'm not an occultist. I don't hang out in secret societies or leave calling cards or try to tell somebody that this is actually really what happened, or this was a human sacrifice or something like that, So you'd have to find out the purp. Like I think that somebody should go talk to Scarlett Blake and see what else he knows he's in jail for the rest of his life in the UK, and he might divulge what he was
really into and he was hanging out with. In the recent cases, there haven't been a lot of the smiley faced symbols found, not to my knowledge. So it's really something that moniker is something that really Gilbertson and Gannon applied to all this stuff. I've found some other on the somewhat recent cases, maybe within the last ten years. But yes, I don't know. I don't know why they use that or that it's a it's a mystery to me.
Well, William, this has been a really interesting conversation.
I really am akimbly fifty minutes went by.
I know, I am really glad that we have spoken with you about this story and about your book. I know our audience is going to appreciate that we have gone into this deeper than we had in years past. And yeah, we appreciate your time. This is a really, really fascinating topic.
You have to promise to come back on because like this barely scratched the surface of the questions that I have for you. And when we just came to the time, like again, fifty minutes went by so fast here, so truly fascinating.
Thank you, Yeah, thanks for having me. There's three or four hundred cases. They're still happening, guys. You can go watch my two documentaries and read my book which is over four hundred pages of all the cases that include like the cryptid Antiquarian and all these other people saying these strange things and bodies being found all over the place.
So be careful out there, don't get drugged, and stay safe in you if you're in that kind of like it, that range of young men, you know, stay together, you know, go out together and come home together. Women do that. They are living a fear of being assaulted or being drugged, and men some men don't, and they have to change their kind of sensibilities because there's some very nefarious people out there.
I've included them in my book.
My A Fender typology section kind of lays it out pretty openly. The family, even adelaide and all this stuff, drugging, abduction, keeping them home, you know, keeping people alive for a bit. It's unbelievable.