THE SMILEY FACE KILLER THEORY… FACT OR FICTION?
I first heard about the Smiley Face Killer theory on Coast to Coast AM, hosted by Ian Punnett on a cold February night in 2012.. At that time Punnett hosted a guest who proclaimed some oddities of young men around the nation–mostly in clusters–who were turning up missing after attending parties or bar nights.. and then being found in bodies of waters. Rivers. Lakes… creeks.. wherever water ran the young body was found.
So often those bodies appeared days or weeks after the missing case became known.. the body itself was without any real injury.. cops chalked it up to a drowning .. college kids gone wrong, partying too hard…
Strangeness ensued. High strangeness such as the bodies being found without bodily injuries… Bodies of young affluent college kids, mostly athletic and taller than 6 feet… white.. suburban… Kids with high grade averages… sometimes names associated with wealth..
Equally weird have been tales of smiley face graffiti being found on bridges or underpasses, or carvings of smiley faces in trees.. that or other graffiti.
Back in 2012, Emmy winning reporter Kristi Piehl downplayed the graffiti sometimes connected to these deaths, she stressed that there is a very real phenomenon taking place where young men are drowning under mysterious circumstances. “These drowning mysteries, they defy logic,” she said, noting that the victims are being found fully clothed and still have their shoes and wallets. While Piehl conceded that one such death could be attributed to a demise by misadventure, the sheer number of similar cases demands closer scrutiny. “When it happens 100 times over 10 years and it’s just happening in the winter and it’s just happening in certain states,” she said, “then you have to take a second look.”
Piehl was on the case as early as 2010, when she reported of mostly Midwest young men becoming victims of .. something.. and being found in shallow bodies of water..
For years, this story was laying dormant. There is a Facebook page associated with the notion that a criminal gang of some sort is killing younger men in clusters across the United States.. every few days it highlights a young man in the same category–young, affluent, smart, and athletic–who goes missing. Eventually it turns up that the man who is highlighted is found in a body of water.
There have also been countless Reddit threads dedicated to the prospect that a serial killer group–INCELS??–is abducting young men in the highlighted group, drugging them, and subjecting to countless days of torture before they are murdered and dumped in bodies of water.
This weekend, a renewed attention was paid to the topic thanks to a DAILY BEAST article written by Nicole Weisensee Egan .. Egan wrote in depth a out captivating cases that deserve attention … and just like Piehl in 2012, Egan appeared on Coast to Coast AM hosted by Ian Punnet just this weekend where she detailed stories of the Smiley Face Killing theory in the first hour..
From her interesting and amazing DAILY BEAST article last week:
On the evening of Dec. 15, 2016, Dakota James called his friend Shelley in a panic.
He was cold, disoriented, and scared out of his mind, wandering the streets of downtown Pittsburgh, trying to find someone—anyone—who would help him.
“I don’t know where I am,” he told her, sobbing. “I’m so cold. Please help me. I’m lost.”
Shelley didn’t hesitate.
“I’m thinking, ‘Did he get mugged? Did he get beat up? Was he in a car accident?’” she told The Daily Beast this week. “I was so scared. I said, ‘Where are you?’ I’m coming.’”
“Pittsburgh’s North Side,” he told her.
She quickly hopped into her car to go get him, then remembered she could use her cellphone to figure out where he was because he’d enabled location services with her when she gave him a ride to the airport months ago.
That program was telling her he was on Pittsburgh’s South Side. But Dakota was texting her as she drove, trying to guide her. “I’m here,” he texted, sending a picture of a jean-covered leg. “Please help me. I’m so cold. The cops won’t help me.’”
Her phone’s location services told her he was at a Springhill Suites on Water Street in Pittsburgh’s South Side, not North. She texted him that with a question mark.
“I’m here^^^^,” he texted back. “I honestly don’t know.”
She got there in less than 10 minutes, arriving around 11:30 p.m. As she pulled up to the hotel, she saw a dark SUV in the wrong lane, facing the wrong direction. And Dakota was walking out of the hotel and straight toward the SUV.
“I pulled up not even 10 feet away from the SUV,” she said. “I said, ‘Dakota!’ He turns, looks back then comes over to me, got in my car, and we left.”
He wasn’t slurring his words. He was walking a straight line, not staggering at all. His clothes weren’t disheveled or wet or dirty. He was emotional, still crying, and he was scared but he did not appear to be drunk.
The next day, he thanked her for picking him up, but brushed the whole thing off, saying he had a bad hangover. And she might have, too, if he hadn’t vanished five weeks later, after a similar night out with some of the same co-workers.
Was it just an odd coincidence? Or was James being stalked in the weeks before he died? If she hadn’t shown up at the hotel, would he have vanished that December night, instead?
“I didn’t think about any of this until after he went missing,” she said. “What happened that night?”
On March 6, 2017, 40 days after Dakota James disappeared, a woman walking her dog saw his body floating in the Ohio River, about 10 miles from where he was last seen in downtown Pittsburgh—at 11:49 p.m. that January night—and about 30 feet from the shore.
His death was ruled an accidental drowning by the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office. But a team of retired detectives and a gang expert believe he’s one of about 100 victims of the Smiley-Face Killers, an alleged organized gang of serial killers that communicates on the dark web, with cells in dozens of cities across the United States. An additional 250 cases might be connected, but they can’t prove it, they say.
James fits the profile of the other suspected victims: smart, athletic, popular, college-age white men who went out drinking and never came home, they say. More recently, some alleged victims have been openly gay, like Dakota. Like him, weeks later, their bodies were discovered in lakes or rivers with smiley-face or other graffiti specifically connected to the group spray-painted nearby. So far they’ve connected about 70 deaths with similar graffiti nearby. About 30 of the men, including Dakota James, had the date-rape drug GHB in their system, according to the autopsy reports.
We have a mystery of epic proportions on our hands..
The channel OXYGEN is on the case. The station has been airing this: “Smiley Face Killer: The Hunt for Justice” …it’s a series that follows a team of retired detectives who are investigating the deaths of young men found drowned in similar patterns across the country. The investigators believe the deaths could be the work of a group that they call the Smiley Face Killers.
Diving back in–no pun intended–the death of Dakota James..
James, 23, was attending Duquesne University when he went missing in January of 2017. His body was pulled from the Ohio River that March, and his death was ruled an accidental drowning.
The “smart, outgoing” 23-year-old had been walking back to his apartment after a night out drinking with friends, and his last known sighting was caught on a surveillance camera in the downtown area. The recording captured Dakota entering an alleyway while looking down at his phone, and that was the last time he was seen alive..
Forty days after his disappearance, Dakota’s body was found floating in the Ohio River, about 10 miles from where he was last sighted.
Police believed Dakota had fallen into the river while crossing a bridge near the city center, and the medical examiner ruled his death an accidental drowning.
Dakota’s parents, Jeff and Pamela James, did not believe that Dakota, an athlete and swim team captain, could have drowned.
They told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazettein 2017 that Dakota was not an inexperienced drinker, and there is no way he would have been so intoxicated that he accidentally fell into the river.
All of the deaths just coincidence? Just chance?
“To me, this is one of the most dangerous domestic terrorist groups in the United States and somebody needs to pay attention to them,” Kevin Gannon, a retired New York City police sergeant, told The Daily Beast.
That quote is contagious in its fear… a dangerous domestic terrorist group?
Professor Lee Gilbertson told Egan for her DAILY BEAST article:
“There might be 12 in that cell and they go out one night and five of them do this,” he said. “The next time it’s a different five. The way it should be conceived is that it’s the cell that’s the serial [killer] part of it, not necessarily the individuals. Because over time the individuals in the cell will evolve. Some will age out and just keep their mouths shut. Who wants to go to prison?”
….and with all of these quotes and articles, one thing remains the same: regardless of whether a strange serial killer is performing these acts of violence or .. maybe.. just by chance a group of the same kind of kids is dying by water, people will die. People in the same age group and the same background and same financial and popular composition will perish. They will go go bars.. and they will go missing. Weeks later, they will be found. Often without any signs they were in water for weeks….
Do you really, really think each one is a solved case necessary for ignorance? Or should we look further, or dive deeper? And maybe find the solution…………? Minus the smiley face graffiti distraction..?
