For my last blog, I decided to end it with the best one yet, multiple killers! In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a spree of college-age male killings. One of the most recent killings was 24-year-old, William Hurley disappeared on the night of October 8th, 2009. 6 days later his body was found in the Charles River with his cellphone smashed nearby. There was no evidence of foul play and Hurley’s death was ruled a drowning. In his toxicology report, there were high levels of GHB found which is a commonly known date-rape drug. More than a decade before this Patrick McNeill vanished after he was stumbling out of a bar and was later found floating in the East River. His cause of death was also drowning.

Detective Kevin Gannon, fellow former NYPD detective Anthony Duarte, and criminal-justice professor Lee Gilbertson all decided to start working together on these cases because they believe the deaths were not an accident but the work of a ganglike organization of domestic terrorists called the Smiley Face Killers because of the happy-face graffiti found at the crime scenes. But there is still one question in the air. Do the Smiles Face Killers even exist?  Gannon, Duarte, and Gilbertson have identified over 40 potential murders that they believe could be connected to the Smiley Face Killers.

The first thing that caught their eye was the inconsistency of the decomposition timelines. “The lack of decomposition on the bodies is inconsistent with the period of time that the victims are missing,” Gannon explains. One of the victims was missing for 40 days but only showed decomposition of around 3 days. Another one of the victims had been missing for 21 days but only showed decomposition of around 2.5 days. There was also evidence suggesting that the victims died on land, not in water.

The reason these deaths have not been labeled homicides is that there is a grey area between the medical examiner’s office and the police. The medical examiner is waiting for the police to let them know how the victim died and the police are waiting for the medical examiner to call it a homicide. With both of these mentalities, it really tripped up all of the cases. One of the main reasons why police have not dug past the accidental-drowning rulings is because that is it possible that all of these deaths were unfortunate accidents and that the Smiley Face Killers don’t exist. Today it is still a theory that the Smiley Face Killers still exist but do you think it is just a theory or do you believe that there is such thing as the gang “Smiley Face Killers”?