could be identified in court. I suppose the killer could sedate the victim and drown him in a tub or something like that and then throw him in the river.”
Such a scenario seems unlikely. But some experts are not so sure. Reviewing the cases for
Indeed, even to get to the bank, a drunken student would have to make his way down a concrete stairway and across several feet of loose rocks.
Pat Brown, an expert on sexually motivated homicide, concurs.
“More people are killed by serial killers than we realize,” she says.
True, it is not easy to lure a victim to a convenient body of water.
“So you have to bring somebody back and try to get them into your bathtub which is not the easiest thing in the world,” she says. “Unless you’re Jeffrey Dahmer.”
But then there are people who fantasize about becoming the next Jeffrey Dahmer and get sexually aroused by the act of drowning. She even has a candidate, though his name has been withheld as the man has never been charged with related offences, nor has been named as a formal suspect in the case. She says she first came across the man when she was investigating a similar case.
In 2002, 21-year-old University of Minnesota student Chris Jenkins drowned 120 miles upstream in Minneapolis after being kicked out of a Halloween fancy-dress party at the Lone Tree Bar & Grill at 528 Hennepin Avenue minutes before midnight on 31 October.
Although his car was parked just south of the Warehouse District bar, he was last seen walking north, clad in an American Indian costume. Chuck Loesch, a private detective hired by the family, believed that Jenkins intended to walk to his apartment near Dinkytown, which would involve crossing the Mississippi River.
A senior in the business school, his disappearance sparked a communitywide search. Numerous University of Minnesota students and hundreds of other volunteers scoured the area but found nothing. Then, in late February 2003, Jenkins’ body was pulled from the Mississippi River near the St Anthony Falls in downtown Minneapolis.
The medical examiner spent seven hours on the post mortem, but did not find any obvious indication of foul play. Nor was there any reason to believe that he had died from natural causes. So the exact manner of Chris’s death had been listed officially as “undetermined”. However, while the blood-alcohol level in his heart was only 0.12 percent, tests found a high level of the date-rape drug known as GHB in his system—though medical examiners maintain the body could produce this substance naturally.
At that time, the coroner did not classify the death as a crime. However, others were not so sure. One clue that it was a homicide was that Jenkins was outside without his coat, wallet or cell phone.
In November 2006, the death of Chris Jenkins was reclassified as a homicide. But police in La Crosse dismissed any connection with the drownings there and continued to consider the Wisconsin deaths as accidents.
Brown’s suspect came to her attention after he walked into the police station in St Charles, Missouri, in the late 1990s and announced that he was going to be the next Jeffrey Dahmer. Of course, neither the cops or the FBI believed him, on the grounds at if somebody says they are going to be a serial killer, they are not.
“But it’s not true,” says Brown. “We have a history of exactly that sort of thing, where they do claim it and they are it. They’re trying to practice the concept… people say, ‘I want to be something, so let me go out and say (I am) something, and then after a while I get comfortable with the concept, then I can be it.’”
The man was so persistent that the police even got a restraining order to stop him harassing them. However, one St Charles’ detective did take the man’s claims seriously, particularly when he revealed his obsession with a sexual fantasy of forcing young boy-next-door types underwater and watching them panic and struggle until they drowned. It was then he contacted Brown.
The private eye Chuck Loesch also came across the unidentified man when he was working on the Jenkins case. He lived in Minneapolis at the time of Jenkins’ death, just a few blocks from where he disappeared. Brown says that the man has also spent time in Wisconsin.
The man worked in a funeral parlour—the perfect job for a man fascinated with death. At night he was a part-time male prostitute and was a regular on a website called manunderwater.com for gay men who have a fetish about having sex underwater. The St Charles’ cop asked Brown to see if she could contact the man via the website.
Posing as a 15-year-old boy who had seen his own brother die in a back yard pool years before, Brown role- played with the man via the website’s message boards. She quickly noticed a sadistic bent to the man’s fantasy.
“Some people will present online as one who will share going under water, ‘You drown me then I’ll drown you’ that type of thing,” Brown says. “He’s not like that at all. He doesn’t like being drowned. He just lies about that so he’s not really sharing with you. Once you get to the fantasy with him, he wants to do all the drowning. I mean he’ll play at it one time or so to pretend that you get your turn, but it isn’t that way… It is more about ‘I’m holding you under the water. You’re struggling. You’re struggling. I watch the bubbles come up…’ That’s his whole thing. To watch you drown, to watch your eyes when you’re drowning.”
His emails were disturbing and graphic.
“He would take me under water in various forms of nudity or non-nudity, in different water settings and he would watch me struggle and die. That’s when he would have an orgasm,” Brown recalls.
The man was also cold and calculating, and Brown believes that he confines his activities to Minnesota and Wisconsin as they do not have the death penalty.
“He said he’d never kill in Missouri,” Brown recalled, “because it’s a death-penalty state.”
Meanwhile, the suspect was up to no good in the real world. He made sexual advances towards the teenage son of the owner of the funeral home and, when the father confronted him, he threatened to murder the funeral director’s entire family. When a detective interviewed him, he concluded: “The defendant is a danger to the community… because he goes for white males between 16 and 25… spoke of bondage and putting Saran Wrap over a victim’s face… and has serial-killer tendencies.”
The police then issued a warrant, but when they tried to arrest the man he drove into their squad car and led them on an hour-long car chase. He was jailed for seven months for resisting arrest. The problem was that he was in jail at the time of Jared Dion’s death. Nevertheless Brown believes that he was involved in the four earlier deaths, or that someone with a similar tendency is out there at work.
“There are more serial killers out there than we know about,” Brown says. The La Crosse fatalities are not necessarily all the victims of the same killer. “It could be one guy who maybe killed two of them.”
The detective in St Charles agrees and would like a chance to investigate.
“I think if I had all those cases, he’d be a great lead to eliminate,” he said.
When
A former FBI profiler told
While Brown concedes that the man from St Charles may not be the killer in the La Crosse drownings, his existence demonstrates that such a killer may exist.
Los Angeles’ South Side Slayer
Homicide Detective Jeffrey Steinhoff was moved by the death of Princess Berthomieux. On 9 March 2002, her naked body was found dumped in bushes in an alley in the 8100 block of South Van Ness Avenue in Inglewood. She had been strangled. In her short life the runaway from Hawthorne had been in and out of foster homes. The 14- year-old was working as a prostitute when she was killed. There were no further clues to her murderer and she seemed destined to be just one of the dozens of young women in her profession who died at an unknown hand in
