The Case of the Drowning Men (4 page)

Veteran c
olumnist
Steve Perry from the
Minnesota Monitor
unabashedly said
of her
, "Let the record show that Kristi Piehl of KSTP has done her part to bring the yarn to the huddled masses yearning to breathe the vapors of another massive conspiracy
.
”
A
nd
reporter
Brian Lambert
at
M
inneapolis
St.Paul
Magazine
angrily
proclaimed
that
a story depicting
serial
drownings
as
actual
serial slayings
in disguise
going on to
earn
a
coveted
journalism
award
w
as
“ludicrous,” and that
the
very
idea
of a
serial murderer being responsible for the
spate
of
area
deaths
, "
b
oggles
every rational instinct."

B
ut b
ecause a homegrown rumor
, many years in the
creation
,
had
suddenly
spiraled
into a legend overnight, it would
now
require
much more than scorn and
carefully constructed
editorial pieces
to
sl
am
the lid back on the can
of worms it had opened
.
The
American
public’s imagination and
its
keen
interest
in the case
had been
ignited
, and i
t would
take
a multi-pronged effort to
fully
squelch
the serial killer theory
this time
.
In th
at
process,
a number of
reputations
would
necessarily have to
be
sullied,
a few
investigations
clos
ed, and taxpayers’ monies
liberally
spent
in order
to increase security
, and a sense of security, in communities
close to
water
.

Fences,
river
patrol
s
,
safe buses,
surveillance cameras
,
targeted campaigns
of every variety
aimed at
damage control
―
these
costly
measures
could be
justified
because
public officials kne
w
that
,
to govern
properly
,
people
couldn’t
be
living in fear day and night,
and
they
couldn’t
be
distrust
ful of
their law enforcement officers
,
either
.
Most importantly,
university town
s
couldn
’t expect students to
continue
flock
ing
to them
in droves
,
as
many in this
region
have been
accustomed to
for
over
a century
,
if the
y’re
suddenly
afraid they’ll
end up
victim
s
of violent crime
s
there
.
W
h
en it comes to social
strife and
chaos,
in the end
t
he end
always does justify the means
employed
, a
nd, as can be seen
today
,
th
ese strenuous
attempts
to
solve “
the problem
”
ha
ve
been effective in crushing
the ugly
stories
and criticism
s
that were running rampart
not so long ago
.

A
ll
throughout
the northern corridor
now
, a
truce appears to be in place
and holding,
and
,
for the most part
,
it’s been
pretty
quiet
these past
couple of
years
.

But then the
re
is
th
at
plaguing
issue of
a
steadily
rising
body count
.

For those who think that drowning is a
pleasant
way to
go
, think again. Drowning is a violent assault on the body during which the frightened victim fiercely, albeit briefly, battles to survive. Death follows exhaustion within only two or three minutes.

Technically, it is true that a person can drown in as little as a cup of water. A cup, a puddle, a ditch, a bathtub—anytime liquid enters the air passages and lungs, even if someone doesn’t die
immediately,
it can
still turn
fatal because there are a host of medical complications which arise that are always life-threatening, such as pneumonia and renal failure. These type of delayed fatalities are known as “secondary drownings” and, although their symptoms may develop over the course of several days, or even longer for some patients, they’re usually triggered within
only
a few hours of the initial
in
cident.

But most victims drown fully submerged in water when the nose and mouth inadvertently become covered. Sometimes, when there is an instantaneous glottal spasm blocking off oxygen
,
or a preexisting medical condition, death can be automatic without any signs of a struggle.
In
the majority of drownings, however, this is not the case. Struggling is one of the key stages leading to unconsciousness and death. In fact, so intense can this final fight for life be that, in more than ten percent of drowning fatalities, an autopsy will actually reveal bruised and ruptured muscles, particularly in the shoulders, chest and neck. Evidence of injuries of this nature suggest to a medical examiner the strong likelihood that a victim was alive in the water at the time of the
ir demise
and not placed there already dead.

The stages of a full-immersion drowning event are fairly quick and, because the victim’s airways are being blocked, either by water and/or the epiglottis, it’s often completely soundless
.
There will be panicked thrashing as the victim desperately attempts to get air and to grab onto nearby objects
for security
, and then, when they can no longer hold their breath, they’ll begin to inhale water in large quantities, gulping it into their stomach as well. This
action
also rapidly circulates water throughout their other systems
and bloodstream
with differ
ing
biochemical reactions depending on whether they’re in saltwater or in fresh. This last stage of drowning ends with coughing, vomiting, convulsions, loss of consciousness, death
,
and rigormortis.

Very shortly after the victim dies their body will start to sink. If retrieved soon thereafter, their arms and hands may display cadaveric spasm, a posture in death borne out of extreme mental anguish and which reveals the person’s final thoughts and movements as they
frantically
fought to stay alive.

If a
victim
is not promptly retrieved at death, then, without exception and no matter how deep
or how swift
the water may be,
their corpse
will continue to drift downward until it reaches the bottom.
This
is where it will remain in a somewhat fetal position until gases from putrefaction cause it to rise to the surface once
more
.
A
semi-fetal
posture
is the norm
for all
drown victims
, so i
f divers
do
locate
such
a
body before it ascends
,
but
it
isn’t
in this pose
and/or
the
head
is
seen
to be
tilted
to one side,
they will
include
these observations
in
their
police
recovery
report
,
as
it reveals
the victim died on land and was put in the water post-rigormortis.

Typically, once the body does emerge on its own, it will surface in the general vicinity of where the victim originally went under. From this location the water may then carry the corpse along for quite a distance, depending on the strength of the currents or if it becomes ensnared and is thereby prevented.

Refloat largely varies on the water’s depth and temperature, taking only a matter of hours to occur if extremely warm and up to two weeks or longer if at 40 degrees Fahrenheit or less. The timetable, therefore, is not fixed but is loosely as follows: at 40 degrees Fahrenheit it takes approximately fourteen to twenty days for a drown victim’s corpse to resurface; at 50 degrees ten to fourteen days; at 60 degrees seven to ten days; at 70 degrees three to seven days; and at 80+ degrees one to two days or sooner. In very cold and very deep bodies of water, like certain oceans or the Great Lakes of North America, it’s not unusual at all for a drown victim to never resurface, lying on the bottom in a state of suspended decomposition until their body eventually disintegrates or is otherwise destroyed.

But in temperate oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, pools, reservoirs, quarries
,
or the like, a corpse will inevitably rise again
,
sooner or later
,
occasionally
exploding to the surface if it was
deliberately
anchored
.
And w
hen it does
reappear, if the person did genuinely die from drowning, then
they will
always
be
discovered floating face down in the water, with the head drooping forward and lower than the rest of the body. Lividity, the pooling of blood and fluids, will then have permanently settled into the under regions
of
the corpse by then
, weighting
it
from beneath and
essentially
acting as a ballast so that, even when disturbed, say by a collision with a boat, it will return to this original position.

I
f one can stomach a physical inspection of the body and knows what to look for,
at this point
it becomes
relatively
easy to determine the length of time a victim’s actually been
submerged
. However, because a previously sunken body could have been
slowly
dragged along the water’s bed by currents and thereby further damaged against rocks and similar objects, or even partially eaten by marine animals, it may be difficult for the layperson to ascertain if any visible injuries happened in life or were obtained postmortem.