The Case of the Drowning Men (13 page)

In one way or another t
he Smiley Face Murders have claimed
a great
m
any casualties
through the years
,
and
retired NYPD Sergeant Kevin Gannon
, the “father” of the Smiley Face Killer
theory,
must
surely
consider
himself
to be
one of them.

But t
he
résumé
of
Kevin Gannon’s
twenty-year career with the New York Police Department
speaks volumes about the man’s integrity, no matter how mired
in controversy
he may have become over time, and it
reads
just
like a
page from
who’s who
in
law enforcement
.

Officer Gannon was t
wice decorated with the Medal of Valor
and
retired from the
NYPD
as a Sergeant in the Detective Bureau
,
with specialties in
d
iversified security, investigative
work
,
police
management
,
major disaster preparedness,
and
electronic
and
physical surveillance.
During
his
years of
service
to the force
h
e was also entrusted with providing
travel
/
security details for
such
high-profile individuals as Mother Teresa
, Prime Minister Barak of Israel,
Prince Nawaf of Saudi Arabia,
President Putin of Russia,
President Fidel Castro
,
Microsoft executive James Allchin,
Vice President Gore
,
and President Clinton.

In the
NYPD
homicide division
back
in 1997
when
the first drown victim,
Patrick McNeill
,
had
disappeared
,
Detective
Gannon
was still working that case
in retirement
,
still
operating on
the
theory
that
the young man hadn’t died by
accident
and hoping
someday
soon
he
’
d
get the chance to
prove it
.
I
n so doing,
deliver
closure
to
McNeill’s
grieving
parents who also believed their son had been murdered
.

As things stood
in the McNeill investigation
many
years
later
,
murder
still
remained
a
fuzzy
theory
that the NYPD wasn’t buying
into
, but it
was a theory which
would solidify
considerably
for Gannon
once
he got word of
an
other
case
dating
from
200
3
almost just like
it
.
This
lat
t
er
one,
located
way out in
America’s
heartland
,
in
the northern state of
Minnesota, was
going to be
the
big
break
Gannon
was looking for.
He
had a
good
gut feeling about
this
,
and he
could
always
rely on
that
instinct
.

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to
observe an officer of the law
operating on a gut feeling, then you probably couldn’t help but notice
,
whether they’re
wrong or
they’re
right,
a cop with a hunch is like a dog with a bone
.
And
,
by
the mid 2000’s,
Gannon was especially
so
motivated because,
during
the years since
McNeill
’s
death
,
he
’
d tracked other
dubious
drownings of colleg
e
-
age men in the
area, discovering
in dozen
s
of
such cases
,
stretching
from New York to Minnesota,
an
established pattern
that
deeply
troubled him
.
A
spects that linked the
m
beyond victim profiles and
the
cause
of death.

T
he writing was literally on the wall
, Gannon
felt
.
S
crawled
in the form of
odious
song lyrics,
smiley faces
,
and
anonymous
initials
. B
y all
outward
appearances, it
very much
looked
to him
like the
northland
had a
vicious and cunning
serial killer at large
.
A
group of them
acting in concert, he
believ
ed,
who
, in classic serial killing style,
w
ere
proudly
leaving th
eir
signature
at
many of
the
murder
scenes
.

B
oasting.

Th
os
e
victim
numbers were starting to really add up,
too,
and Detective Gannon was relieved to
learn
that he was
not the only one
anymore
to
hav
e notice
d
a sudden geographical predisposition for non-recreational
drowning
s
.
M
any of the affected communities
in the northern U.S. district
had
started
voicing their
own
concerns
about a systematic slaughtering
of young men
.
S
ome
doing
it
in
hushed tones
from
private
quarters
or
hurriedly
over the
tele
phone
,
others
shouting
it
loudly
at
public meeting
hall
s
so they could be heard above
a
growing
din
.
Thus,
by the time
Chris Jenkins
’ body was recovered from the
icy
Mississippi
in
the
early
months of
200
3
,
most everyone
in that part of the
country
had
already
been
referring to
such
fatalities
as
the “I-94 Murders”.

They didn’t
yet
know
just how large an area was
afflicted by
these events, n
or anything
about
telltale,
cryptic
graffit
i
.

They didn’t know
Team
Gannon
w
as
on the case.

And what a spooky case it was
,
Gannon
thought he
’d
uncovered
.
Placing
dead men
in
to frigid
water
s
, often w
h
ere the individuals were last observed
to be socializing
,
would make
these
so called
accidents near-perfect crimes
,
he
realized
.
Ostensibly
, t
here would be nothing suspicious about a
supposed
drunk
falling through thin ice and succumbing to hypothermia.

An experienced investigator
working in one of
the
most
crime-ridden
cities
o
n
the planet
, h
e knew as well
how
quickly
water
wash
es
away
valuable
clues
such as fingerprints and fibers
. It can even
,
under some circumstances, if the bodies are
in it
long enough,
destroy any
delicate signs
of physical trauma.
That belied the
evil
brilliance of it all, because, w
ithout
evidence
of blunt force trauma or
other
internal
and
external injuries
, it would be standard protocol for
police
of any sized municipality
to rule
out
foul play
,
and
to
chalk up
incident
after
incident
as
the
unfortunate
byproduct of
binge
drinking
.

The only way
to
solve a murder is to
first
suspect it,
to
search
for
its
clues
in and
on a body until you find them,
because,
realistically
, no crime is perfect and homicide always leaves a mark. If you know where to look for it.

But
m
edical
e
xaminers
, like
cops
,
also have protocol
to follow
,
and
a
major
part of
theirs
is a reliance on the initial reports handed to them by police as to the condition of a body when recovered
and the circumstances of how
it
ended up
where it was found
.
More often than not, t
his
tepid
ap
p
roach
isn’t
out of
laziness but a necessity, since the
deeper
one digs for
evidence
in a corpse, the more
costly
the
inquest
becomes
. In short,
l
aw
men
and medical examiners
,
as with
most every
one
else, ha
ve
fixed budget
s
,
and murder
can be
expensive
.