The Case of the Drowning Men (10 page)

When
private eye
Chuck Loesch
first
took
on
the case, the MPD
officers
were already dismissing Chris
Jenkin
’ disappearance as a another likely drowning, claiming he
must have
jumped
from
,
or fell off
of,
the Hennepin
Avenue
B
ridge into the fast flowing Mississippi River
w
here he quickly drowned
.
However, video
-
feed
collected
from security c
ameras
which had been installed
at and
around
the Hennepin
proved th
is
story
to be
a flippant fabrication at best―Jenkins
wasn’t seen in any of them.

As a matter of fact, the bloodhounds
Loesch obtained for tracking Chris
Jenkins
’ scent didn’t
pick up
anything near th
e suspect
overpass
at all
, nor
below it
on the banks of
the river.
Instead,
each separately tracked a trail to
a
nearby
parking garage, and
,
from there
,
were led
toward
the I
nterstate
94
highway
ramp
not
too
far away
from it
.
A few
red feather
s
and some string
from Chris’ Indian costume
spied
in parking stalls
number 89 and 90
of the
underground
facility
grimly
foreshadowed the young man’s doom
,
even
as
, all the while,
the police kept
steadfastly
insisting
he
must have
drunkenly
toppled
into the icy waters
, either
on purpose or by
accident
,
and
there were “no signs of foul play
.
”

In all fairness a
t this point
in time
,
and
in order
to avoid a
glaring
conflict of interest or the
outright
appearance of impeding
their own
investigation
with the object of
protect
ing
a colleague
from being implicated
in it
, the Minneapolis
p
olice should
really
have handed off the
matter
to either another
police
department
. O
r, even better, to a higher agency.
But they did neither
, choosing instead to allow
the
Jenkins
missing persons
case to
essentially
stagnate
under
their watch,
while at the same time stonewalling his
family’s
private detective.

Finally,
amidst th
is
endless
wrangling, and
a
full four months after Jenkins had disappeared, his body was spotted floating face up in the Mississippi river under the Third Avenue Bridge, still wearing his Indian costume and the loose fitting shoes that came with it, his shirt tucked neatly into his trousers, his arms folded peacefully across his chest.

But
the
strands of his own hair clenched tightly in
one
fist and
other
subtle
evidence
of
physical
trauma
reveal
ed
Chri
s Jenkins’
finals hours of life to be nowhere near as serene as might be inferred from
his
frozen pose of death.
A
nd
,
with a
postmortem
blood/alcohol
finding of only 0.07 in his deep tissue and a maximum of 0.12 in his heart
, there was
very
little doubt that
, while
it
might’ve
been true
he’d
had too much to drink on the night he vanished, he sure wasn’t drunk the day he died.

And once
more
,
in a
perplexing
pattern that was emerging in
these
cases,
there
was
a drowning
with
the
unresolved
issue of exactly how long
a period of time
—or how short—
the
corpse
had actually
been in the water.

B
eing discovered
snagged
in debris
under the Third Avenue Bridge downtown was also
a bit
problematic
for the MPD
since
, a
ccording to a
police report dated November 11
th
2002,
this
specific
area had been
thoroughly
scoured
by them
before
. To wit
:
“
I
nvestigators searched the Father Hennepin Bluffs Park that encloses the bridge on the east bank of the Mississippi. Investigators also searched
in the rear of the Main Street p
ost
o
ffice and underneath the Third Avenue Bridge.”

Aggressively s
idestepping these
curious details
, t
he
Minneapolis police
quickly ruled
the matter
an accidental drowning
anyway
and closed the
Jenkins
case without further ado
,
thereafter adamantly
refusing to bend on their determination no matter how much new evidence detective Loesch
would later come
up
with.
The
officials of the
city of Minneapolis
,
just
as with
other municipal
it
ies
recently
plagued by
off-season
water
fatalities
,
would
then
go on to
devote more of their time to debunking rumors of murder than
to
investigating them,
and with
attempts
at
minimiz
ing
a
potential
public relations nightmare
which was
ever so
slowly
unfold
ing
.

Tall fence
s.
Citizen
patrols. More
cops
on the beat
. More
cameras. “
The
waterfront
is
safe
now
.
There is no serial murderer
.”

But,
Chad
,
Nathan, Glen
,
Jeremy, Matthew, Jared, Adam, Dan, Todd, Josh, Jacob, Matt
, Lucas, Nicholas, Scott, David
…
the Jenkins couldn’t
get
the
police to
reexamine
their son
’
s
death
,
and
the
police couldn’t stop
more sons from
dy
ing.

“
When
you hear hooves behind you, when you turn around you should expect to see horses, not zebras…the ‘horse’ diagnosis is
‘
alcohol
’
while the ‘zebra’ diagnosis is ‘serial killer’
[or]
a
cop and/or a cab driver..
.”
University of Wisconsin at La
Crosse officials
,
calling for
public
calm
after yet another disappearance and drowning
in 2004

“It was a classic textbook drowning."
La Crosse County Medical Examiner,
publicly commenting
in 2004
on
the
drown
victim’s autopsy

“
Why we are 99.9% sure it is NOT a serial kill
er

– a data based explanation”

“Dear Students,
We have both worked here at UW-L for over 10 years. Every time a student has died, we have grieved for the student, his/her family, and friends. We have lost students to fires, auto accidents, suicides, and illness. This semester we lost a student to a drowning. And, again, we grieved, although we did not know him.

“However, within hours of his disappearance, we started to hear theories about the ‘serial killer’ who prays
[sic]
on young men in Midwestern college towns with rivers. In response to these theories, we must now be the professors that we are trained to be, as well as the members of the grieving community that we are. Throughout your college careers, you will be asked to engage in critical thinking. Nowhere is critical thinking more important than when you apply your education and training to your own lives and experiences. We implore you to use your critical thinking skills when you look at this situation.

“When medical personnel are trained in the diagnosis of problems, they are often told this story. ‘
When
you hear hooves behind you, when you turn around you should expect to see horses, not zebras.’ In other words, the most common event should be the diagnosis you first expect. In the case of Jared Dion and other students who have drowned in the past several years, the ‘horse’ diagnosis is ‘alcohol’ while the ‘zebra’ diagnosis is ‘serial killer.’ Other zebra diagnoses include the theories that a cop and/or a cab driver are involved in the drownings.