On March 3, 2016, I posted an essay titled "Are the Smiley Face Killers Back?" It was taken from my still-unpublished book about the history of the Smiley Face icon--part of the chapter I wrote about various criminals (including O.J. Simpson) who have used the Smiley Face as a signature near the scene of their crimes. The essay I posted last March turned out to be the most popular post I ever did. To date it has garnered 104,976 hits and 47 comments. (If you want to read the comments--most of them from people who believe the Smiley Face killers are real--click on this link to see the original post. https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5488052677647528167#editor/target=post;postID=698528054600824693 )
Then, last week, I read an article in The New York Times about the new season of "American Horror Story: Cult." The season begins with Trump's victory on election night and the horror involves creepy clowns and "a
rash of murders, the crime scenes marked with crimson happy faces" according to the Times. Clearly the writers of this season's episodes are familiar with the alleged crimes of the real-or-not Smiley Face killers. So I decided to re-post this essay, to see if anybody out there has evidence for or against the existence of these murderers.
I stopped watching "American Horror Story" at the beginning of the second season because it got too gory for me, but maybe I'll find the courage to watch this season. Or maybe not.
On March 15, an article appeared in the
Boston Globe that began: “State
Police on Tuesday pulled the body of a 22-year-old Central Massachusetts man
from the Charles River, ending a desperate search by family members and
officials after he went missing last month while celebrating his birthday at a
bar in Boston.”
The
name of the young man was Zachary Marr. He was a student at Mount Wachusett
Community College. As soon as I saw
this, I wondered if perhaps his death signaled a return of the fabled Smiley
Face Killers gang. I described the conflicting
theories about the group in my not-yet-published book “The Saga of Smiley” in a
chapter called “The Smiley Face Murders, the Happy Face Killer and O. J.
Simpson.” (Last month I posted about O. J.’s “suicide letter’ which he signed with a Smiley Face
symbol.)
Here’s
the section I wrote about the Smiley Face Killers:
As much as he may embody the phrase “don’t
worry, be happy,” Smiley has sometimes been used as a symbol of the dark
underside of society, appearing as an anti-hero in music, movies, even comics.
And when it comes to Smiley, life has imitated art, as the happy face has been
co-opted by some evil criminals who are all too real.
Smiley’s most famous link with crime is his
role as an identifying mark left near the spots where the corpses of more than
40 college-aged men were fished out of freezing rivers or lakes during the
decade of 1997-2007. Inevitably, the
unknown instigators of these deaths were referred to in the press and by
investigators as the Smiley Face Killers (SFK for short).
In 1997, when 21-year-old Fordham University
student Patrick McNeill wandered off from a night of bar-hopping in New York
City and was found floating in the Hudson River three weeks later, his death
was ruled a suicide, but his parents refused to believe it.
Five years after that, in a similar tragedy,
University of Minnesota student Chris Jenkins, also 21, was found dead, encased
in the ice of the Mississippi River four months after he vanished from a
Halloween Party. His death, too, was ruled an accidental drowning; yet another
college student who had too much to drink and then fell into a body of water.
But two retired New York police detectives,
who had been investigating a large number of drowned college-age men for years,
considered Jenkins’ body the missing piece in a puzzle that connected at least
40 victims, who, they believed, were victims of a gang. The young men were all found dead in winter
in a body of water after a night of drinking.
Retired detectives Anthony Duarte and Kevin
Gannon were on the track of what could be the biggest serial killing in U.S.
history, which they attributed to a gang they called the Smiley Face Killers. In
many of these cases, Smiley graffiti was found painted on a wall, tree or
sidewalk near the point where each man was believed to have entered the water.
Duarte and Gannon claimed that the Smiley
Face Gang had struck in at least 25 cities in 11 states in the U.S. since about
1997. Virtually all of the 40 victims
were athletic white college males; all were last seen leaving a party or bar
with alcohol in their systems, then found dead in rivers or streams. Many
attended colleges along the Interstate 94 corridor in the Midwest—in Minnesota,
Wisconsin and Iowa–and in 22 cases, a Smiley graffiti was scrawled nearby. Each death had been ruled accidental by
police.
Jenkins’ corpse convinced the detectives that
his death was not accidental, because, when his frozen body was dredged from the
Mississippi, his hands were folded across his chest in an odd pose that they
said was inconsistent with an accidental drowning.
The parents of each of the 40 victims were
convinced their sons had not died accidentally.
The press played up the story and detectives Gannon and Duarte appeared on television to
discuss their theory. “We believe they
[the killers] were specifically leaving a clue for us or anyone who was paying
attention to these drownings,” Detective Gannon told ABC’s “Good Morning
America.” He added that these were almost perfect crimes because the water
washed away physical evidence.
In life, as on Law and Order, serial killers often like to leave a calling card,
and criminologists told ABCNEWS.com that the sadistic Smiley is an example of
the kind of signature typically left by psychopathic killers who derive sexual
arousal from their killings and are so proud of their murders that they’ll do
anything they can to get credit for them.
But Smiley aside, not everyone was convinced
there was a pattern here. Police forces investigating the deaths disputed the
“Smiley Face Gang” theory that the deaths were linked. Criminal profiler Pat Brown scoffed that the
Smiley faces found near the water were nothing more than coincidences. “It’s not an unusual symbol,” she said to a
reporter for a Minneapolis paper. “If you
look in an area five miles square, I bet you could find a smiley face.”
On
April 29, 2008, the F.B.I. issued a statement “regarding Midwest river deaths”
which said in part: The
FBI has reviewed the information about the victims provided by two retired
police detectives, who have dubbed these incidents the “Smiley Face Murders,” …
we have not developed any evidence to support links between these tragic deaths
or any evidence substantiating the theory that these deaths are the work of a
serial killer or killers. The vast majority of these instances appear to be
alcohol-related drownings.
Their word may be law, but in this case, the
FBI’s statement was not the final pronouncement on the Smiley Murders. On June
21, 2008, ABC News reported that Bill Szostak, whose son was found in the
Hudson River, had written a
petition aimed at getting elected leaders to call on the FBI to investigate not
only his son's death, but also 43 similar cases in nine states; college men
whose deaths had been ruled accidental drownings. He got 900 signatures on his
petition the first day.
The FBI has not reopened their
investigation, but parents of possible “Smiley Face” victims still maintain a
number of web sites that post information about the nearly 100 young men who
have died in similar circumstances.
These sites include a Facebook page called “the Smiley Face Killers,”
which on April 24, 2013, posted an article from the Daily Mail saying that, “Police found the body of Brown student
Sunil Tripathi, falsely accused of being the Boston Marathon bomber, in the
Providence River in Boston.”
And just last week, a statement posted on
the Smiley Face Killers Facebook page read:
March 15th, 2016, the
body of Zach Marr, age 22, was pulled from the Charles River in Boston
Massachusetts. Zach went missing on February 13th, 2016, and the circumstances
are all too familiar. Zach was "Last Seen leaving the Bell in Hand Tavern,
where he was hanging out with friends and family" only to disappear into
the night without warning. One month later, his lifeless body is pulled from
the river. We see the pattern time and time again, young male, out with
friends, dead in water. Marr was a student at Mount Wachusett Community
College, and Zach deserved a lot more out of a life that was cut short by the Smiley Face Killers. RIP Zach Marr.
