The Case of the Drowning Men (33 page)

But, again, these aren’t necessarily group acts or even highly
-orchestrated
ones
.
And
the
y
couldn’t
account for hundreds of deaths
of
a certain
type of
victim
by a select group in a specific region over a protracted period of time
, because, thankfully, it takes just one or two such criminal
misdeeds
before these sloppy felons manage to get
arrested
.

An online gamer is a
new and
unique creature, of course, and anyone so preoccupied with violence
and
with
earning scores and prestige by
exhibiting
superior skills at being
virtually
violent,
will
understandably draw suspicion
from
onlookers
. Especially
when
people are earnestly
trying to explain
otherwise senseless
killings
.
I’m not
dismissing it as
preposterous
, but
in rating its plausibility one also has to
consider
that
a devout gamer
plays
games
and
has very little interest in the “real world”
with
just as little real world contact.
They are then the quintessential introvert, saddled with the same
heightened fears as
introverts have always had and found so socially
debilitating
.
Picturing this personality profile gearing up to cruise a bar for a victim or rendezvousing with others in a group to do the same is difficult at best.

Also, if elite gamers
could indeed conquer agoraphobia
long enough
to become real-time hunters and slayers
, the
y’d
certainly
want their
scores and ranks
to
be posted some
plac
e on
the web so
everyone
could envy and admire the
ir achievement
s
and prowess
.
Not to mention that somebody someday would
flub up and
boast
elsewhere
to the wrong person about their
new
hobby
,
and
inadvertently give
the
whole
weird
operation away
.
E
rr
ing
in th
is
manner much sooner than fifteen years.

All
of th
e
above
observations
,
in essence,
revealing
a
pretty
bad rap against the gaming community
for their
unabashedly
antisocial pred
ile
ctions
,
but
a
murder
theory that has no legs when it comes to
practical
application.

Cult Killers
:
Ritualistic killings by a coven of Satanists comes close on the heels of gamers in terms of probability and statistics. For one, I have never met a bona fide devil worshipper
and I bet you haven’t either.
In fact, I’m inclined to regard such
practitioners
—
judging
by the dearth of them—as more a product of Hollywood and certain
paranoid
religious faiths than a realistic threat to society and/or its virgin
s
.
Still
,
even if deviating from what they're trying to emulate,
what a group
subscribes to and
what they
believe the
y are
about
will
dictate
their
clandestine
activities
.
S
acrificing
young men
f
or
the glory of
Satan
can’t be ruled out entirely as a motiv
e
then
…except
for the problem that
there
aren’t
signs of
ritual evidenced on any
of the
victims.

Clergy
Killings
:
On th
is
same theme
of
religious extremism
, but for different reasons, I don’t give much credence to
a group of
serial
murdering
priests or monks, either
.
Cloistered clergy
man
are
,
I suspect
,
feared
and despised
today
much
mo
re
for the pedophiles among them
and
to whom they have frequently
give
n
safe harbor
th
a
n
for
any
secret,
diabolical
plots to serial kill
.
P
edophiles
are
a major menace
in any costume they
devise to
cloak themselves in
, but they’re
not murderers
usually
, and the drown victims are grown men not small children.
It may be worthy of delving deeper into this from a historical angle, though, since who knows that there isn’t some connection from the
victims’
distant past, but as of today I have seen no mention on any discussion board of this
remote
possibility.

Numerical
Equations
:
I have seen and tried to follow threads by
people
admirably attempting to draw parallels between names and numbers and locations to see if there is a maniacal math being employed by
the
killer or killers
.
Cryptograms, anagrams, numerical
puzzles
…this is a fascinating line of thought and sometimes I
myself
think, if only for a fleeting moment, that I can
also
detect the pattern
being
deciphered
by the poster
, or other ones on my own
. B
ut
each time
it only
prove
s
to be
another
dead end
when
formula
after formula
fail
s
to neatly link up all the victims to each other
.

Numbers are
intrinsically
important
in this matter
, I agree, and
we can
easily
count
in excess of 200
drown victims by
now
, an unprecedented
tally for
any
serial slayer
.
But i
f
there
really
is
one particular person
,
or
a
gang
,
killing
at
such a
high rate
for so long
,
then
this
has to
happen
before we can find them
.
S
omehow
a
ll
th
ose
drowning cases
must link
together
.

OTHER:

The idea of r
ogue cops
, off duty cops,
retired cops
,
or cop impersonators
killing young men and dumping their bodies in water
ha
s
also
been bandied about in
many
discussion forum
s
. I
n fact, i
t’s
one of the oldest theories within
the Smiley Face Murder
theory and is still going strong in
popular
ity
.
This
might also account for law enforcement’s hostility to
the I-9
0
and I-9
4
serial
killer concept
and their relentless effort
s
to debunk it
, as
blatant
inferences to police corruption and brutality aren’t likely to win their hearts and minds
over
.
It also complicates their job of maintaining law and order if the public inherently doesn’t trust them.

Cops k
illing
the serial
killer
theory
,
therefore
,
has become
a necessity
,
and job one in
those
areas dense with suspicious
fatalities
.

B
ut
,
regardless of the power of those who
may
oppose it,
a good conspiracy theory never die
s
because it always
ably
answers two
important
things:
why
a governing authority
desire
s
to quash it, and the unexplained.

I’ve already intimated that I don’t believe the
re are
any
serial murderers
at work
in the northern corridor
, and I also
think that
the graffiti, if genuine, is so all over the board
with borrowed “signatures”
from past
serial
killers
who’ve been apprehended
as to suggest
it’s being planted
by parties with a criminal justice
education
, and
who are
calculatingly
using
these symbols and phrases
as a
clever
diversion
.

Discounting serial murder
seem
ed
an obvious conclusion
to reach
when
fully
reviewing th
e
matter, not only
because of the
enormous
size of the
area the
drownings
are occurring in,
or
for the want of a
clear and
classic killer motif in these deaths, but because there’s just too many of them.
S
erial killers, operating individually or
sometimes
in duos, may kill a dozen people
or so
,
perhaps
two or three dozen over the same length of time we’re talking about here
―
body counts
which are nothing
to
s
coff at
or make light of
to be sure
―
but when discussing this volume of killing
,
hundreds of suspicious death
s, then
it
falls
well within the realm of mass murdering, not serial
. And mass murder, as
I’ve demonstrated
alrea
dy
,
fall
s
under
a much different category.
A broader
one
that
w
ould
tie up the loose ends
we’re seeing
in the
d
rowning
m
en syndrome,
and connect the victims
without there
ever
having to be
a
formal
connection
between them
.