The Case of the Drowning Men (21 page)

In March of 2010, the Woonasquatucket River was roiling from a spring melt
and
heavy
rains
, its raging waters
almost
overflowing Providence
’s
riverbanks. That means it
wasn’t
impossible
,
if someone
did
accidentally
f
a
ll in someplace
with no one close by to see or hear
them struggling
, even if they were an expert swimmer and a
licensed
scuba diver
like Hart was,
they might still
be overcome by the
fast and
freezing cold
currents
and
drown
.

And, if they did
die in
rushing
water
s
, the
ir body
might
also
sustain a broken jaw and
a
shattered
eye socket,
some
scrapes on their knuck
les and bruises on their shins.

O
f course,
it’s
also
reasonable to expect
they’d have
the same amount of
injuries on the back of
their body
too, since
, after all,
they are being
tossed about and
pummeled
against the rocks
,
with other floating objects,
indiscriminately
.

B
ut
Hart
’s body
didn’t.
Only the front
of him
was damaged.

Although
the Providence
police
cl
a
im
ed they found no evidence of the victim having been in a fight that
evening
,
the truth is
they had
just
issued a report of an altercation at the bar only slightly
before Hart went missing
.
Other reports the police
initially
made would also change dramatically as the investig
ation continued.

For instance, the PPD
originally
stated
they
’
d recovered Hart’s cellphone in the parking lot outside the Red Room
.
B
ut when the Hart family went to claim it
in hopes of deciphering his last messages
, the
police
report had been altered
. It
then
read that
the cellphone
had been on Hart
’
s person the ent
i
re
three days
he was in the water.

Moreover,
when
the
victim’s
family
demanded
t
he Providence Police Department
release the cellphone
to them so they could
access
its records
,
the PPD
finally
handed it over
in five broken pieces,
asserting
that
even the Rhode Island State Police had been unable to retrieve information from it in that decimated condition.

“This phone
definitely wasn’t
in the water,” a
data recovery specialist for TechFusion exclaimed when the Harts brought it
to
the company for
his
analysis. “Definitely, 100 percent, this was not in the water
,
”
he assured them.

Techfusion’s expert
knew this because the
particular
Apple iPhone model Greg Hart owned came with a discreet
feature in it, tiny indicators that, for warranty purposes, would signal if the phone had been submerged in liquid or spilled on, thus voiding the company’s product liability
in a replacement claim
.

These
hidden
sensors
were
nearly impossible
to
remove
evidently,
but on Hart’s phone they had been intentionally scratched off, the specialist
reported
.

Coincidentally
, while the cellphone
appear
ed
to have
never been in the water, according to
those who
’d
first
examined
the victim’s
body
at the riverside,
he hadn’t been
submerged
for very long
,
either.
By
all
descriptions, c
ertainly not for the entire
length of
time he’d been
missing
.

In fact,
Hart’s
father had already
suspected
as much, noting that only the fingertips
of his son actually
looked wrinkled
at the time he
’d been
recovered
from the river
. Three to five hours
or half a day
was the best
estimation
.
A
lthough where the victim
could
ha
ve
been before
that time
nobody
had a clue
.

The
Rhode Island
medical examiner ruled
Gregory Hart’s death
an accidental drowning
on March 23rd 2011,
but never released the toxicology finding
s.
However, Providence police
later
informed
the Harts that their son had been
extremely
in
ebriated when he died,
with a blood/alcohol level
three times over the legal limit for operating a
motor
vehicle.

There is, unfortunately, no way to confirm or deny this.

Some
people
,
such as the
officers from the Providence Police Department, might say that young men like Gregory Hart have been reaping
the
ill consequences of
too much drink
ever since public taverns were
first
created.
But one
could
also
reasonably
argue
:
how does a man learn to hold his liquor if he never loses control of the reins?

In either case,
regardless of moral belief
s
,
no
one should expect to die when
merely
out celebrating
a new job
with their friends.
Not in the 21st century.

The Hart family is still seeking answers and justice for
the death of
their loved one
, and are offering a $7
0
,000 reward
for any information that would lead to the arrest and
conviction
of
the party or
parties
responsible for his
suspicious
disappearance and drowning.
To learn more
about Greg
ory
Hart and
to
view
the
details of the
reward
terms
visit
www.JusticeforGregHart.com
.

“I miss my son every day,” Marianne Hart said in a recent
2012
interview. “I won’t give up on Greg,’’ she
promis
ed. “There are people who know what happened to him that night. We will find out. No matter how long it takes.’’

You might like to think that
,
if you happened to glance into th
o
se
scary
peepers
pictured above
,
you’d know
immediately
to walk (or run) in the opposite direction, but this
prolific
serial
killer
fooled many of his victims into doing otherwise.

Armed with a smile and often
sporting
a crutch or a
cast
so he’d appear
help
less
, Ted Bundy confessed to
batteri
ng, raping, torturing and
then
killing
nearly
three dozen
college age
women
in approximately
a
fifteen-
year
period,
taking credit for the last one
on that list as he
was being
march
ed
to the electric chair.

Truth is
,
th
e
self-
proclaim
ed “
most cold-hearted sonofabitch you’ll ever meet
,
”
who
se
own defense attorney
described as
“the very definition of heartless evil
,
”
deceived
everybody
he came in contact with
. E
ven famed criminologist and bestselling author Ann Rule, who
personally
knew Bundy
,
didn’t suspect her charismatic
associate
until officials began compiling a first-of-its-kind database
in an effort to
pinpoint
similarities
from
what
few
clues existed
about
an
elusive killer
slaughtering
attractive young
females
across
the
Pacific Northwest
.

A sadistic predator who derived
profound
sexual pleasure from
“possessing” and
abusing
his prey
while they were still alive
and after the
ir
deaths
,
Bundy was the quintessential serial
murderer
, matching th
is
criminal profile in every possible way
.
I
t’s
also
noteworthy
to the current analysis
that
he
too admitted to drowning at least one
or more
of his
young
victims.

It took nearly t
en years after Bundy was put to death
for
a federal law
to be
enacted by the United States Congress
which would
, once and for all,
attempt
to provide
a
legal
definition of serial murder.
Ti
tled the
Protection of Children from Sexual Predator Act of 1998
it formally defined
serial homicide
as a series of three or more killings
sharing
common characteristics
such as
would imply they
were committed by the same
person or persons
.
These included
the following
stringent
criteria
: