Since the 1990s a rash of mostly white, college-going males who were in very specific majors and involved in athletics were last seen leaving bars and later found floating in nearby rivers. Face up. With signs of lividity and other telltale signs that drowning was not the cause of death, and their bodies had not been in the water for the days to months during which they were missing. The causes of death were labeled accidental drownings...but that doesn't explain the ligature marks. Three retired detectives and a criminology professor have taken notice, and they think there is organized crime afoot. Are the Smiley Face Killers real? And if not, just who is killing all these jocks?
This episode was produced with support from:
M. Dante and friends' erotic anthology Cin Sado Noir, a time capsule tribute to sadomasochistic, femme fatale, and neo noir romance.
Genre-busting, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Neriah Stone Hart. Check out his music on YouTube, Apple Music, and Pandora, and follow him on Facebook at Neriah Stone Hart to keep up with his new tracks, upcoming albums, and live performances.
Critically acclaimed musical comedian and one-mom-band Jessica Delfino on Instagram and Twitter @JessicaDelfino and on TikTok @JustSomeMom.
Want to support CrimeJuicy? Join our Patreon community at www.Patreon.com/CrimeJuicyGang for access to ad-free episodes, unaired episodes, bonus content, exclusive expert interviews, and more!
Since the 1990s a rash of mostly white, college-going males who were in very specific majors and involved in athletics were last seen leaving bars and later found floating in nearby rivers. Face up. With signs of lividity and other telltale signs that drowning was not the cause of death, and their bodies had not been in the water for the days to months during which they were missing. The causes of death were labeled accidental drownings...but that doesn't explain the ligature marks. Three retired detectives and a criminology professor have taken notice, and they think there is organized crime afoot. Are the Smiley Face Killers real? And if not, just who is killing all these jocks?
This episode was produced with support from:
M. Dante and friends' erotic anthology Cin Sado Noir, a time capsule tribute to sadomasochistic, femme fatale, and neo noir romance.
Genre-busting, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Neriah Stone Hart. Check out his music on YouTube, Apple Music, and Pandora, and follow him on Facebook at Neriah Stone Hart to keep up with his new tracks, upcoming albums, and live performances.
Critically acclaimed musical comedian and one-mom-band Jessica Delfino on Instagram and Twitter @JessicaDelfino and on TikTok @JustSomeMom.
Want to support CrimeJuicy? Join our Patreon community at www.Patreon.com/CrimeJuicyGang for access to ad-free episodes, unaired episodes, bonus content, exclusive expert interviews, and more!
Smiley Face Killaz!
[00:00:00]
Krista: Hey, welcome to CrimeJuicy Cocktail Hour.
Becca: Krista’s cat is definitely the smiley face killer or at least one of them.
Krista: He's a jerk.
Carrie: We were about ready to start talking about it and he just gave Krista the evil eye
Krista: That's what he does.
Becca: Is he the smiley face killer? One or of the smiley face killers? You're by the Mississippi river, right by that dam.
Krista: The first dam before the main.
Becca: Smiley Face killlings - before we get started this is our second time recording this because the first time got lost. We do have this odd habit at CrimeJuicy Cocktail Hour of whatever something gets accidentally deleted or lost something major breaks on it. So, y’all keep an eye out about the smiley face killers or any drownings of athletic college age men. You know, yeah. Frat boys along the 94 corridor ending up in rivers months after they vanished from a bar, not as drunk as one would expect.
Krista: Or, or people that are known to drink heavily.
Becca: Yes.
Krista: But also fit that aesthetic as well.
Becca: And then another thing about the smiley face killers, they are not the happy face killer Keith Jesperson. We are not talking about Keith Jesperson tonight. I know Keith Jesperson would love for us to talk about Keith Jesperson, but we're not doing that tonight.
Krista: Not today, Keith.
Becca: Not today, Keith, probably some other time, but not tonight.
Krista: There's enough about him out there.
Carrie: And there’s going to be more.
Krista: I know it just never stops.
Becca: The smiley face killings started in the 1990s. The theory is that they are still going on today. The detectives and gang crime professor that are investigating this, they've got some really compelling arguments and credentials, they have researched this up and down. As we’ll mention, they have more resources to contribute to individual investigations than the law enforcement agencies that were first called to investigate. These alleged drownings or alleged drownings bodies were found in water. It started in the 1990s, a rash of white male college students that are all doing very well in school and athletics are being found drowned in rivers nearby to the bars that they were seen at last. They're found weeks to months after leaving bars intoxicated, and they're telltale signs in their bodies they didn't die of drownings. All of the drownings that are involved in this case were classified as accidental drownings which came at odds with autopsy results and just it's, it's really fishy situations that these have been labeled accidental drownings and whether or not they're all connected. They probably should be reinvestigated as such.
Carrie: We did find that those investigators all came at it from parallel intersections.
Becca: The first guy that took notice, 1997 Patrick McNeil was last seen leaving a bar in New York City and he was found 50 days later, dead in the east river, 12 miles from where he was last seen. Kevin Gannon was an investigator on this. He was a detective with the NYPD and Tony Duarte and Mike Donovan are also two of his former NYPD partners.
So Kevin Gannon's working on this case and it just doesn't sit with him that it's an accidental drowning. It was deemed an accidental drowning and, he’ll say later, the reason is because, if it's a murder, you've got to have a task force. You've got to really expend a lot of resources to investigate something as a homicide, plus they're he was a drunk college kid. He fell in. He really, really, really dive deeply into - ha no pun intended - into drowning forensics because it just didn't sit right the way that the body was found that the sky had drowned, first of all there was a lack of decomposition on the body. He'd been missing for 50 days and if he'd been in the river the whole time there wasn't the slippage that you would expect to see. There was also the presence of land insects and lividity patterns and also lack of bloating associated with the drowning death. He was found floating face up and drowning deaths are usually found at floating face down.
Krista: And with water and their lungs and yeah…
Becca: He starts looking into it. In 2006, Scott Raydell went missing from the St cloud college campus in Minneapolis and was found a month later dead in the Mississippi River. Same kind of circumstances. It was deemed an accidental or undetermined drowning, but there was lack of decomposition of the body. There was lividity on the body that wasn't consistent.
Carrie: He was also found floating face up.
Krista: Isn't the argument that they were found in winter months?
Becca: Right. There was that aspect. Patrick McNeil being found 12 miles from where he was seen, it doesn't look like they got dragged down river. The coroner reports were in…
Krista: What if it was a landslide or a mudslide.
Carrie: Landslide killings.
Krista: In Minneapolis.
Carrie: Did you research Dr. Lee Gilbertson and his angle?
Becca: He's a criminal justice professor in gang expert at the St. Cloud state university. He starts looking into this cause he's, this wasn’t accidental. He's looking into this case and he finds several other cases that were labeled as accidental drownings. They're all white college males. They all fit a very similar profile. He starts looking at them. He doesn't know that Gannon, Duarte and Donovan are also looking into this. And then they ended up meeting.
Carrie: They were just like comparing notes and they were like, oh my gosh, our theories are the same.
Becca: These are completely independent of each other, noticing the same things about the same drowning cases.
Carrie: They are connected or we wouldn't be connecting dots like this through several states.
Becca: Yeah. And October 8th, 2009, William Hurley in Boston left a Bruins, game called his girlfriend.
Carrie: He was found 60 days later.
Becca: In the Charles River, his cell phone was smashed nearby.
Carrie: There was blunt force trauma and high levels of GHB in his system.
Becca: It was ruled an undetermined drowning. Dakota James 2017, January 25th. He was in Pittsburgh. He was found 40 days after leaving a bar floating in the Ohio River, 10 miles from where he was last seen. This was determined, an accidental drowning, but he actually had ligature marks around his neck. We're seeing this repeated pattern of these cases aren't getting investigated as homicides, even though there's in a lot of, in these cases, there's GHB found in the system. There's ligature marks. There is bruising that happened before death, consistent with what blood's doing.
Dakota is interesting because he actually expressed, was he the one that expressed that he was afraid?
Krista: Yes, he was disoriented and had like no clue where he was…
Becca: This was a couple weeks before his disappearance. Right. He'd lost four hours.
Krista: Yeah. And he felt like someone was following him. Terrified.
Carrie: He was terrified.
Becca: And then was it the first one in 1997? Patrick McNeil. Was he the one where he was seen being followed?
Krista: Yeah, I believe so.
Carrie: Yeah, that was.
Becca: That was the one who left the bar, was seen being followed and it's interesting. Cause a lot of these guys, they left the bar just like shit canned, but then when their bodies were autopsied, only moderate levels of alcohol were found in their system. I guess the number, the alcohol by volume actually inflates when you die with the decomposition. It's even like lower than what a clocked in as so. It's weird. These guys are up to 300 cases that they believe are connected that have been deemed accidental drownings that they believe are part of the smiley face killer network.
Carrie: 300 folks.
Becca: Yeah. And these are potentials, they're just ones that they're, we need to look into this again. Kevin Gannon. He was saying that - Ellis was actually telling us about this when he was talking about being a homicide detective, that when you walk on a crime scene, you have to rule out homicide, that's the first thing that you’re looking to see if it is that. Gannon was saying that the NYPD was doing the opposite, cause if you don't look at something as a homicide, you miss clues.
Krista: If you just assume that it's an accident you're going to find every reason for it to be an accident. Cause it's easier.
Carrie: If you don't have the funding and you know that you you're trying to fund other cases that you've already got, that you've been trying to close for two or three years, the pressure is immense.
Krista: Yeah. It's cheaper. It's easier file. And go file and go.
Becca: Lee Gilbertson and the three detectives from NYPD got together. In 2008, they officially released their theory. And the theory as this: that this is an organized effort with gang-like attributes, that it's an organized crime thing where a like call is put out to target specifically, what they were saying were quote, unquote, the future leaders of the country, you know, college-aged white men doing really well in STEM majors. The other thing that they said was strange is that all of their majors were very, very, very similar. They were typically STEM, they were doing really good. This is an organized thing going on and that these men aren't just disappearing by accident. Graffiti has been found. This, I think is it's a part of the theory the detectives were saying that the media really lobbed on to the smiley face killer as the smiley face killers is the title for it because they liked it. But the, the symbols of it didn't really become clear to them until later on in their investigation. But they're saying, so the smiley face symbol is found by a lot of the bodies and like close [00:10:00] by is kind of variable. I mean, they've been found up to like 10 miles away. They also said there's 12 other symbols that the group has identified as indications that this was them that did it. Dr. Lee Gilbertson is a criminal justice professor and gang experts. This is coming from him and New York PD detectives.
Carrie: We had a theory that it was women.
Krista: Yeah, maybe they did. Maybe those, those gentlemen did some nefarious things that, because they were in college and the weird sexual assault rules that they have on colleges, which is a whole other topic that we can get into a few, if you would like, but not right now. And decided to serve their own justice.
Becca: They were like, we got GHB too.
Carrie: Remember how we just had Lori Loughlin go to prison for trying to get her kid into college? What if it's a group of parents just trying to get their kids in the college, into STEM class areas and, you know, get their spots.
Becca: Because they'll be like, don't send your kids to those colleges. And they're like, yes. Don’t.
Krista: And the woman in Texas who killed the captain of the cheerleading squad so that her daughter could be the captain of the cheerleading squad.
Becca: I can see that then makes sense with the smiley face graffiti to because smiley faces such like common graffiti and it's a group of parents, what's our symbol? What's our sign? Smiley face.
Carrie: No competition for my Johnny this year.
Becca: Forget to do the smiley face on the way. And it's like 10 miles later and they're, oh , pull over the SUV. Just quick. Do a smiley face out a bridge, 10 miles away and drive away. They'll know, they'll know. If you know, you know,
Carrie: A lot of the science internships are very expensive. You guys like you got to pay. And so if you don't have the money, if your family doesn't have the money, you're not going to get in on some of these really high-end high-tech internships. If you can, your career is made for life, but it's serious. It's a serious business getting up to the top of the chain in any of these, you know, and the sciences are included. Yeah. Yeah. What about the Chinese?
Becca: I think some of the men have been Asian, so which doesn't rule out as a rule it out.
Carrie: But I mean, what if they're trying to, to keep us down and killing off our STEM people?
Becca: They did a six episode series, docu-series about the smiley face killer theory it was in interviews that there has been dark web forums where they think that the hits are being called out on the dark web. There's specific places you can go to for not necessarily go, but there's specific dark websites where these murders are being planned. They claim that they've been to the sites, but haven't been able to get anyone to reveal their identities or it's very, very secretive. Well, obviously it's very, very secretive. That's a part of the theory. It's it's a lot of stuff, you know, it's a lot. Now there's over 300 cases. The goal is to get this case - these cases reopened as homicides to investigate them as homicides to see what's going on.
In 2010, the Center for Homicide Research in Minneapolis released “Drowning the Smiley Face Murder Theory.” And they put forth 18 points to debunk it. I read through it. I thought it was kind of weak sauce. I think it also came out for the whole, oh, we can't afford to have a serial killer here either. But apparently as Krista was saying, there might be a serial killer because they keep finding body parts in Minneapolis
Krista: Yeah, no, in garbage bags, just in random parts of the city. And it's summertime, can you imagine how stinky? And it’s hot and super Danby here this year. So like maybe, maybe they just got tired of the body parts being in their house. Right. They were they're consolidating.
Becca: But all the smiley face killings were during the winter - or the disappearances were in the winter and not necessarily the killings were in the winter because yeah.
Krista: They just emerge in the springtime. And yes, there is that factor that the bodies would be preserved if they were in the river. But yet again, there would still be water in your lungs and the fish are frigging hungry.
Becca: Well, the other thing too is in all these cases there were searches and the areas that the bodies were found in had been searched up and down. The area between where they were last seen and where the body was down to a searched up and down, and then all of a sudden this body shows up and it, that's the other interesting thing with this case is just the disconnect. The cases are the disconnect between the autopsy report and what law enforcement ruled because of death, the way that the case was presented.
Krista: Wasn't there one that had like a wallet on them and then of their personal stuff was taken, there was still money in it. And it was not like it had been in water for a really long time?
Becca: Yeah. And that, yeah, their wallets are found fine. One of them they had fixed lividity to what was it to the, one of the bodies it seemed as though the front had been burned. The, there was parts of the area that were like black and decomposed where the rest of the bodies weren't and there was like a ligature mark on the neck, which made it look as though they'd had been tied to a chair by their neck and burned and…
Krista: Increasingly getting more aggressive.
Becca: Right. I would definitely encourage all y'all to look this up because each is a little different than every case has a lot of the same commonalities. The other thing too, is GHB is found in a bunch of their systems and law enforcement's, well, maybe he just took GHB to get high and go to the hockey game.
Krista: Most people, I mean, there are the select few out there that enjoy that not, I had maybe met like one person in my entire life that, that was their jam. You definitely have some like huge trauma.
Carrie: Would you guys say that a jock that's in STEM would be more prone to take GHB?
Becca: Or to take GHB recreationally.
Krista: Yeah, no, maybe that's cool.
Becca: Yeah, if it was cut into some ecstasy, a very little bit for the dissociative effect, but with an upper.
Krista: I don't know. It just doesn't sound fun. If someone said, oh yeah, this is what this is. This is mixed with them. Be like, yeah, no, I'm good. Can I I'll take the other one?
Becca: We'll take the other one.
Krista: The other one. But yeah, no, I wouldn't say that somebody in the STEM program, because they don't want to forget things. If anything, like I said, they would take acid or shrooms and micro doses for, for that.
Becca: Or macro does this to see the truth.
Krista: Well, yeah, if you look up a lot of people that are in like Silicon Valley they micro dose because it helps them figure things out, you know, we'll look at things in different.
Becca: So yeah, there's this really good book called “Can't Find My Way Home,” and it talks about how LSD really informed the development of modern computers and the internet. That's cool. It's cool. Shit. It's cool. Shit. But yeah, no, I totally agree. Be like, you know, maybe he, yeah, like.
Krista: A few too many tabs. What I'm doing tonight? It's a Wednesday night. Fuck yeah. I'm going to go down and G-hole. I don't know. And sure. Somewhere out there, that's what people are doing right now, but I don't know.
Carrie: Talk about the peeing in the river as an excuse.
Krista: You would have water in your lungs.
Becca: Well, and a lot of them too, you know, it's , oh, you went to pee in the river. It's okay. The river was a mile in the wrong direction or, you know, the river wasn’t, it wasn't an easy place to draw the line. And you know, if you're a dude and you have to pee and you're drunk and it's dark and it's winter, you could just whip your dick out and pee.
Carrie: You're going to six feet away. Yeah.
Krista: Yeah, no, you're not. They're not even that guys, but like, like not even walked six feet away, depending on where you are.
Becca: Just pee in the corner. That's how we got kicked out of the bar and got fucking kidnapped by the smiley face crime syndicate.
Krista: Right. Cause I peed on a corner.
Becca: Like what? So yeah.
Carrie: The motive, then if it is lacking, what the guy said, we've got to think of what the motive is.
Becca: Peed on my chair.
Krista: That was the motive.
Becca: He peed in my chair, I had to kill him. Put it out on the dark web. In 2010, the Center for Homicide Research in Minneapolis release released the “Drowning the Smiley Face Murder Theory” to debunk it in 18 points. And points one through five were specifically about the graffiti just saying that like smiley faces are really common graffiti. So regardless of that so I don't know, the graffiti thing is pretty weak for me, but it's really strong for the detectives and for the gang expert. They haven't released with the other symbols are publicly. Based on the smiley face I'm not really convinced, but it seems like there's more going on then I know what it is.
Carrie: We have rock art that looks just like a smiley face. That's 2000 years old.
Becca: Holy shit. This conspiracy has been going on for a long fucking time.
Carrie: Krista keeps saying it it's time travel.
Becca: She's the Oracle.
Krista: I mean, how, I mean, I don't know. What if it's all just a never ending loop, but every once in a while a certain type of.
Becca: Oh, and if they're in the STEM industry is the ones that get close to discovering time travel in the future. If it is we're close, it's formulating.
Krista: Yeah. It's it's gonna happen. It's happened already, you know, but it hasn't happened already where we're in that, that phase of time where it has happened, but it hasn't happened.
Becca: No, we're just like sitting here in this podcast in the middle of it, fuck quantum physics is weird and all the guys that died or like we know exactly how weird it is and that's why they killed it.
Carrie: Yeah. Maybe we shouldn't be talking [00:20:00] about this. Well, let's just talk, but point 6. So point 6 is that there was no evidence of victim trauma, which is just tacitly untrue. There were ligature marks. One of them had a broken, a black eye, to the point where it had swollen shut. There was, and the way that the, the blood had pooled just showed that he was still alive when this happened. There were burn marks on one of the bodies. The no incidents of victim trauma thing just isn't true according to the autopsies. Number seven is that homicide drowning is rare. But according to forensic investigations drowning wasn't the cause of death for these ones.
Krista: Blunt force trauma, wasn't it? Or strangulation.
Becca: Yeah. Yeah. So that one, I'm kind of, eh. Number eight: water doesn't wash away all the evidence. And that was pretty much on number eight said it was, yes. Okay.
Krista: Oh yeah, cause the Mississippi River doesn't pump thousands of millions of gallons of water down it a day at all. And if anybody knows anything about science, you know that rivers and lakes and oceans are like self-cleaning for the most part, especially with all those rocks in it. No water does it wash it way.
Becca: Not everything.
Krista: Then on top of that, the things that eat, we got carnivorous fish in the Mississippi. Those things are crazy.
Becca: And they're hungry in the winter. And then, so at least they'd be gnawed on a little, right?
Krista: A little more mummified, the frozen type of mummified, because it's cold. Cause even though it's frozen and also the bodies, if they were put under the water, they wouldn't be found in one place. They don't necessarily freeze into the couple of feet of ice that's there. And there's still thousands of gallons of water pumping through there an hour.
Carrie: So question. Are we, are we, is our conjecture that someone had a freezer or are they putting people in snowbanks?
Krista: If you put them in snowbanks there would be freezer burned. They would have frostbite. I mean, come on. It gets to negative 60 degrees and then add some windchill on that. And it's, you would get, you get freezer burn.
Carrie: Do we have any evidence of freezer burn on any of these bodies?
Becca: I'm not sure. Let's look into that.
Krista: The one that maybe has burn marks because certain parts of your body, when it does get frostbite does turn black.
Carrie: Do you think these people are being held for a month or two in the winters.
Becca: Oh, I think so.
Krista: And then, and snow piles, if it's a snow pile, what happens in snow piles? Oh, plows dump their snow there and push it down and move the snow and don't give a shit. It's like, whew. Free for all run into this wall of shit with this thing, you know?
Becca: Some kids would have tunneled to it and been, oh my God, it's Dakota.
Krista: Yeah. Something it's not snow. Doesn't preserve your body that great. Unless you were completely untouched.
Becca: No. And I think, I think a big thing that comes up for me, it was you know, they're missing for so long and then they're found in areas that have already been thoroughly searched.
Carrie: In the one article that said a helicopter had went over the area several times before, it should have seen something.
Krista: And by police officers, because then they know where they've already searched.
Becca: Then, so nine, they said that drownings don't fit a serial killer motive because drownings aren't thrill killings.
Krista: Yeah, it is it's personal as shit. And if they really like it, it's like stabbing somebody as opposed to shooting somebody.
Carrie: Their statement was incorrect. They weren't drownings, but we all admit that that was one of the connections. There's no water in the lungs.
Becca: They're not drownings. They're not bloated, there's lividity on their bodies.
Carrie: I had a problem with the statement.
Becca: Yeah. Right. So it's like, okay, drownings, aren't thrill killings. These specific cases are being looked at because you know, the dude that wrote a freaking book about drowning forensic says that they didn't die from drowning. And then number 11 is environments are conducive to accidental drowning, which I'll give them that you know. Slippery and shit, but also, you know, where the rivers are in correlation with where they were last seen.
Krista: Like the U of M is pretty close to the river, but only in certain spots. And so is St. Cloud, there's certain spots in St. Cloud, because if anybody knows Mississippi starts in what? Crystal Lake somewhere in Minnesota, like way up north.
Becca: Lake Itasca. It's beautiful. I saw some orchids there.
Krista: So it's like, and even if these, you know, there are, there's, there's multiple points to get into the Mississippi river and Minnesota, I can walk to one like three miles, less than three miles from my house.
Becca: It's true. No, no. 1,2 males are more likely to engage in risky behavior. Like, all right.
Krista: Fair enough.
Becca: Fair enough. Again, in 2015, the CDC said that the leading causes of death for white males under 44 are accidents and suicide. And that men 18 through 34 are most likely to binge drink. So that, that fits. And I think, you know, that's another reason why these got written off so fast, you know, it's kind of like a whole blame the victim thing where it's like, oh, well they were like drunk college dudes that had to pee. Obviously they're dead.
Krista: Do you think if it were, if it were college aged women disappearing they would have made the effort and spent the money?
Becca: I don’t know, I mean, I think they would have been less like, oh, she like GHB’d herself and gave herself ligature marks or some shit.
Krista: Like if we had a killer out there right now that we had a connection to 300 girls we'd be all over it.
Becca: At least taking it more seriously, you know?
Carrie: Yeah. That's oh, so these guys are white, so they'd be white girls, maybe Asian, correct?
Becca: Yeah. I mean, I guess the other thing too is young men are more likely to engage in risky behaviors, but was it specifically these guys? Cause these guys spend a very specific profile. Then number 15. That's. Okay. So there's a word in here that I love. Number 15 was many drownings are likely to be auto-assassinations. What is an auto-assassination? It means do kill themselves from reckless behavior. There wasn't a suicidal motive. They auto-assassinated, which is a great word. But again, yes…
Carrie: We need to put this in our hashtags.
Becca: Hashtag auto-assassination.
Carrie: I don't think anybody's talked about that.
Krista: That's interesting.
Carrie: With young men, I mean, back in the day, most young men, we didn't expect them to make it past 25 you guys.
Because of auto-assassination!
Krista: Straddling your staircase to change light bulbs in a vaulted ceiling.
Becca: It was a bad ladder, bad ladder.
Krista: Oh no, he quite frequently. He does it all the time on the stairs and it makes me, you know what? I just have to walk away.
Becca: Then a 16 is they may have taken GHB themselves and they were not malicious druggings, but again, like who takes GHB to go to a hockey game? Maybe someone, I mean,
Krista: It would be hard to keep track of the puck. Even harder than it already is.
Becca: Where did it, where did it, I am the puck. And now I'm in the river.
Krista: Oh, there we go.
Becca: And then 17 was, a 17 was actually kind of a rehashing of that saying again, they might've just taken GHB themselves. So 16 and 17, maybe they drugged themselves. And then 18 was drownings are linked by climate and not by region which they kind of, they are linked by region. They're all in the same corridor.
Carrie: They're linked by climate and region, which gives them…
Krista:
Krista: Wasn't there one in New York.
Becca: Yeah. But New York still on the same…
Krista: I suppose.
Becca: Yeah. And, and about, yeah. It's, it's interesting. So I dunno, just reading over the list, there's a bunch of points where it's, ah, that's just not based on things that are true in regards to the investigations and the cases, you know.
Krista: It feels like they were paid to write that article.
Becca: It was like extra credit.
Krista: That's one of those Fox News things.
Carrie: Dude, I had to quit looking at Live Science because when I started looking at some of the people that were paid to write some of their articles, oh no, you can't. You got to look at who's writing the articles and what their angle is. That's, that's even more crucial today than it's ever been. I mean, it's so bad now.
Becca: Right? Like who are you? And who's paying you to do this. And I think the 94 corridor thing is also kind of shaky because you know, you've got people in Pittsburgh, you've got them in, it's, it's kind of wobbled, but yeah, there are, I think the most compelling part of this, I probably said this about several things, but I think the most compelling part of this is that too separate groups of people started researching the same cases for the same reasons, completely unbeknownst to each other.
Krista: Which is pretty amazing like that. If you don't believe in coincidences, how could you not really.
Becca: And in terms of the theory to stranger things have happened. You know, Israel keys was weird.
Krista: Oh yeah.
Becca: How can the other day, what were some other freaking examples of like, are you freaking kidding me? I mean like weirder murder, syndicates.
Krista: Were we?
Becca: I don’t remember, oh, I forgot who I was talking about it with.
Krista: I mean there are, yeah, there's a lot of crazier theories out there and even, well, nobody ever believed that the Jonestown thing would happen and it happened. Nobody ever thought that, you know, the, the mass shootings would happen and all of the places that they happened and it happened. Nobody thought that anything that has happened in the last, like two [00:30:00] decades, 30, 40 years.
Becca: And you got freaking Charles Manson murder. I mean, that was weird. Like Charlie, all the people Ted...
Krista: When did, there was an explosion, what isn't it between the mid-seventies? All the way into the nineties, there was just an explosion of all of these serial killers being caught all of a sudden.
Becca: That’s why law enforcement was, no, we cannot have a fucking serial killer. We can't afford this. We don't want to do this. We don't want to mobilize for this. We can't, we're not putting together a task force. He, he drowned.
Carrie: So there's, there's a, there's a theory as to why we got rid of so many serial killers. Remember the three strikes you're out? We locked up so many guys in their twenties, young, pot, all kinds of things, all kinds of reasons. You can just list them off, but we locked them up. We walked, locked them up by the thousands upon thousands and that's. There's a theory that that's why our serial killings went down is we locked up so many 20-year-olds.
Becca: It's such a shitty, a lot of though, three strikes you're out. It's are you really applying baseball to fucking freedom?
Carrie: Our, our prison system is the largest in the world. We have 25% of the prisoners on the planet. We did not have that in the seventies. We did not have that until the eighties, until we did that. What was that drug thing? What was that called?
Krista: Oh, Nancy Regan.
Carrie: Just say no, everybody on drugs went to jail. It didn't matter what it was. Ted Bundy was pulled over.
Krista: Ted Bundy was pulled over for running a stop sign. Wasn't he?
Carrie: Yeah that was one of the reasons why the cop was pissed because he was in Utah with pot and he had.
Becca: I mean Timothy McVeigh was pulled over, driving away from the Oklahoma City bombing in a car that didn't have a license plate. Even if just locking as many people up as fucking possible and maybe a couple of them are serial killers, it isn't worth it. That's not, that's not, that's not mitigating any harm. It’s not ruining any less lives.
Carrie: It was a side effect. It did go down. We do have a, a marked decrease.
Krista: Or people just got better at it.
Becca: Yeah. Or it's correlation versus causation is really dicey. You know, it's, just because two things happened at the same time, you know, it's, there's a lot of. I just can’t get behind strikes and you're out. I just can’t.
Krista: Back to the smiley face killer. There are some things that are just pure coincidental. There are things that just are…
Carrie: I’m sure. I'm sure, but there's, they've got to figure this out.
Becca: Yeah. And at least, I mean, even if they aren't connected, look at them as homicides.
Krista: It should be considered, I don't know. It's hard. Cause either depending on how you look at it.
Becca: Yeah. Well, what do you guys think is going on and what do you think is going to happen next?
Krista: Well, now that everybody's going back to school, I think we might see some, some new things.
Carrie: Do you think the body parts in Minneapolis are connected? I mean, because serial killers do accelerate over time and could add the summer in.
Becca: Oh, right. Cause everyone was all locked up for the winter.
Krista: The first, the first body found does not fit the profile. He was a 32 year old male with two children.
Carrie: We've been locked up for the pandemic though.
Krista: But you know, if people are going to be out, they were going to be out.
Carrie: Maybe they just got a hold of whoever he could catch or they could catch.
Krista: Yeah. Who knows what if it's them? They just, so…
Becca: We should do an episode on them or whatever it is, the body, the body parts. Fucking Luka Magnotta was weirder than this shit.
Krista: Yeah. That was pretty interesting.
Becca: That was weird.
Krista: Kill people on the dark web, like, I don't know, dark web’s an interest is scary, terrifying place. I've never really been there. I don't want to go, it’s terrifying from what I hear.
Carrie: That's what they want us to think.
Krista: I'm sure. I'm sure. There's. I mean, I guess it's not like terrifying, but it can be terrifying just like the regular internet. It's just a little more unrestricted.
Becca: And unpolished, I guess. You know, whenever I see anything that's got like code in the text of it, I'm uh-uh, can’t read it. Probably evil.
Carrie: It's probably even from the dark webs.
Becca: Probably some evil!
Krista: But then again, time travel. This year, time travel.
Becca: Right. I mean we’re getting pretty close to it. There's some, oh my God. We were just looking at the news and they like suspended this particle. But at first it said scientists levitated a nanoparticle, but it was a pretty big nanoparticle. But then it was, no, they didn't really levitate it they just slowed time down for it so that it was falling really, really slowly, which I think is weirder than levitation. They manipulated time surrounding this particle so that it wasn't actually suspended. It was just falling in a dilated timeline. I'm like, what the fuck? So maybe, I mean, yeah, I mean, but there was this smiley face in 2000 years ago, maybe they're back. And they're, this is a lot easier now because we have GHB.
Carrie: Stupider than even they were 2000 years ago.
Krista: Right. Pretty much, but you know, now we know all of their languages because we created them.
Becca: So smiley face killer theory: they are time travelers and they're coming either backwards, they're coming back. They gotta be coming back to take out these guys.
Krista: I apologize, guys. I think I've said this more than once in this season about time travelers, time's been weird lately.
Becca: And I think we're kind of all time travelers by this point, right?
Krista: Hell to the yes. In one way or another.
Carrie: So what was that called? Not the butterfly effect. The other one.
Krista: There's a lot of them out there.
Carrie: The one, the time, one where it's the same. Okay. Like Rod Sterling, but it's Rod Serling, but I always think it's Rod Sterling and everybody else does too.
Becca: Mandela Effect.
Carrie: Mandela Effect.
Becca: You know, we just had, me and my husband just had a Mandela Effect moment the other day. And we don't have them very often, but he knows so much about geography and stuff and he was looking something up and there was this country and he was trying to predict, pronounce it. And I was, Mauritania. And he's, what the fuck is Mauritania? That was, there's it's Mauritania. And he was, I've never heard of this place.
Krista: I had one with the Klondike Bar jingle. Right. Okay. So look it up. Look at the, look at the one from 2013 and then the one the early, newest or oldest one. It was right, What would you do for a Klondike Bar? Right. Apparently not. Look it up. It's like, I was like…
Carrie: What is it?
Krista: It's I can't, again, I can't even do it. This is wrong. It was, totally off. Music's not the same. And the sound like I'm like, does it, is it because we got older? It actually sound the way that they made it sound or does it leaves it like the Josie and the Pussycats, like thing where you hear certain things in the music…
Becca: Well and there's that other thing with what Looney Tunes is it spelled L O O N or T O O N S or T U N E S. And people remember it differently or Fruity Loops.
Carrie: Froot Loops.
Becca: Fruit loops or fruit loops. Is it like F R O O T or is it F R U I T?
Carrie: I think they spell it F R O O T Y. Right?
Becca: I thought so.
Carrie: Or fruit loops or F R O O T.
Becca: Froot Loops. Yes, it is filled with. Okay, cool. We're not in.
Krista: You know what, I think it was spelled the other way, but because there's actually no fruit in the Froot Loops and it's essentially just flavored cardboard they had to change it for FDA requirements. And then they're just telling every, you know, what? It’s FDA fucking gaslighting us all.
Becca: Oh, Fruity Pebbles is spelled F R U I T Y. Maybe I was just getting them. No, because fruit loops look different…Or the FDA’s gaslighting us. Smiley Face killings.
Krista: They're all gaslighting us. Yeah. Sorry about the tangent there. Jesus.
Becca: We’ve discovered it. It's the FDA that's behind the Mandela Effect and the smiley face killers.
Krista: Yeah. They're fucking with us all.
Becca: Oh my God. So those guys were like about to figure it out and expose the FDA. The FDA was like, Hey, you know what the FDA’s got got GHB. And they're, no!
Krista: Look at all this GHB.
Becca: They’re at the bar where they're like FDA hats, which I imagined that they have making eyes at them and the dudes, I'm a fucking God I'm dead.
Krista: Got to go! I don't know. I'm weird. Yeah. Anyways, so smiley face killers or killer and or time traveling.
Becca: Yeah, well, yeah, either way. I think, you know, I think you know, just beyond the smiley face killer conspiracy, it really speaks to you know, what agency overstretched does or not overstretch. I don't know if I want to necessarily put it that way, but it's, you know, I think just harkening back to what Ellis said in our interview last year that when you walk onto a crime scene, you got to treat it like a homicide until you rule out homicide and that wasn't done with any of these cases. And that's what this group of detectives in this criminal justice professor have been doing. They've been going back to these cases where the state of the body didn't match the cause of death and started looking at it as a homicide and looking backwards from there. And is there confirmation bias? Maybe, but these guys are fucking professionals too. So, you know, I guess, you know, it's if you find a body, don't just look for the cheapest solution to the problem, I guess.
Carrie: And it fascinated them enough that they were willing to utilize their own time, their own money.
Becca: Took out a fucking mortgage on his house again. Or, I mean, they're really throwing [00:40:00] down for this.
Krista: Yeah. Not cheap to, to do those things.
Becca: Right. Like exhumations and…
Krista: Yeah, having to…that's a hard question to ask a family.
Becca: Yeah, well, and a lot of the families too, you know, the whole accidental, drowning thing, didn't sit right with them. And you know, the re-investigation has unearthed witnesses that, you know, said they've seen some of these men being followed the night of their disappearance, or that they'd expressed that they were scared of like one thing or another before they went missing.
Carrie: And when a boy tells you he's scared of something, you need to pay attention because they, they usually won't admit that.
Krista: Yeah, very true.
Becca: Yeah. But again, then when I was listening to this too, it was like, fuck, like if I had a thought, I don't know if I want to send them to college or, I mean, not necessarily that, but just be, you need to watch your fucking drink and you know, tell them the same stuff that us women have been brought up hearing.
Krista: You know, Well, okay. If, if Jeffrey Dahmer didn't prove that to people - he drugged men, straight men, gay men, he didn't care. So…
Becca: And then he dragged himself.
Krista: Right? Like he had a grand old time.
Becca: Weirder than this.
Krista: Yeah. But I mean, no one thought that that was happening either.
Becca: So there's no way ol’ Jeffrey’s drugging people and turning them into sex zombies with homebrew lobotomies, there's no fucking way. And eating them if it doesn’t work.
Krista: Then they would never leave. They were always with him. \
Becca: Always, still are.
Krista: Yeah. They I don't know. See what happens. We'll see what this college year brings.
Becca: Yeah. I mean, everyone's coming back after what, almost two years of being away. I mean, people are so angry they don't serve like booze on airplanes right now.
Carrie: Unless you’re in first-class.
Becca: No one gets angry in first class.
Carrie: Then it's fine because you don't get angry there, but you know, if you're in the cattle car, you don't get shit no more.
Becca: No, I don't have leg room. I'm drunk. I'm pissed.
Carrie: And you can't bring it on either. You can't, you can't bring it with you if you're in the cattle car, unless you're in first class. That's where we came.
Krista: I mean, have you seen, have you seen some of the things that have been going on, on airplanes?
Carrie: Okay. I give it to you Krista, but you know, what if, what if I just needed? You know, and I can't, I don't like being not able to have a drink on the plane anymore. What if I need some champagne too? Just because I’m not first class doesn't mean I need champagne, sweetie.
Krista: Yeah. But then I'm going to get mad and start throwing luggage at you or just screaming at you, just because, and then physically…
Carrie: It's such a life changer. Can’t get drunk on the plane no more.
Becca: That’s something I did not see coming.
Krista: You can’t even show up to the plane drunk anymore.
Carrie: No, they won’t. If you even smell drunk, they're, get off.
Krista: Not today. I just want to do my five flights and go home.
Becca: Like what I can't get on my flights? Well, I'm gonna go do a drowning murder.
Carrie: back in the day I could.
Becca: And again, get the buddy system. If your buddy gets kicked out of the bar for being too drunk, make sure they get home safe.
Krista: Yeah, don't be that douche waffle who leave him.
Becca: I mean, I know sometimes people get drunk and run off and it can be hard to keep the team together, but it's hard. You got to try, it's harder to find their body 50 days later.
Krista: Hmm.
Becca: Yeah. Yeah. Before we sign off join us on Patreon for ad-free content, and this usually the ad-free content’s early release. So that's cool too. We're going to do a lot. We're going to really ramp it up with the expert interviews between seasons, because we want to talk to some people who know the fuck more than we do. JuicyBitz. JuicyBitz are fun.
Krista: JuicyBitz are always fun.
Becca: Yeah. And if you've got an idea for a juicy bit juicy bit, so just us talking about something for like 15 minutes, a current topic in the true crime world or cryptids, you know, if there's like a Yeti sighting or something, you’ll get those too. Unaired episodes, sometimes we record an episode and we're, Ooh, we can't, we can't, we can't let we get, we got to just…
Krista: Hold that one for now.
Becca: Yeah. Yep. And if you sign up for the Jungle Juice level, we will send you an annual gift handmade by us and we are all very crafty.
Krista: In one way or another.
Becca: Hell yeah. Thank you all so much, stay safe. Stay Juicy, don't go swimming in November in a river in Minnesota or New York or something.
Krista: Zero out of 10. Do not recommend.
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