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#Smiley face for facebook serial#
While the Patrick McNeill case may have ignited Gannon and Duarte’s suspicions, they began working on the Smiley Face Killer theory even more intensely after discovering that four young men who fit the pattern they’d noticed had disappeared in Minnesota and Wisconsin over a 40-day period in 2003.īecause the victims were so similar and died in similar ways - not to mention the presence of the smiley face graffiti - Gannon and Duarte were now more sure than ever that they were chasing a serial killer.
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The two detectives were sure that they had a killer, or killers, on their hands - and that McNeill was far from the only victim. Therefore, Gannon and Duarte concluded that McNeill had been stalked, drugged, abducted, bound, burned, killed, and dumped in the water. In the case of McNeill, they reported finding copious evidence suggesting that he had been killed by someone and then placed in the water: intoxication consistent with drugging, a car seen following him after he left the bar, ligature marks on his neck, charring on his head and torso, body positioning in the water inconsistent with normal drowning.
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After retiring from the New York Police Department in 2001, he enlisted Duarte, his old partner, and they set out to learn what had happened to McNeill - and the other young men who died under similar circumstances - under the banner of their Nationwide Investigations firm (Gannon even mortgaged his own house to help fund the investigation). It looked like an accidental drowning, but Gannon disagreed and vowed to the young man’s parents that he would find out the truth. Police and family searched tirelessly until April 7, when his body was found floating in the water near a pier in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. That night, McNeill was last seen leaving a bar called The Dapper Dog on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The investigators responsible for popularizing the Smiley Face Killer theory in 2008, Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte, based a significant amount of their theorizing on the disappearance of 21-year-old Fordham University student Patrick McNeill in New York City on Feb.
#Smiley face for facebook archive#
Michael Appleton/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images Kevin Gannon (left) and Anthony Duarte. “They have no remorse.”īut is this Smiley Face Killer really out there or was there never any murderer at all? The Case That Started It All “They’re psychopaths,” one of the investigators said of the murderer, or murderers, at the time. Given the presence of the graffiti and the similarities among the victims, the two investigators insisted that the deaths had been the work of a serial murderer (or gang of murderers) now widely known as the Smiley Face Killer. Painted on walls near the locations of where 22 of the dead bodies were found was the same symbol over and over: a smiley face. Time and again, police understandably theorized that the men had grown too drunk, gotten too close to the water, and simply fallen in with no hope of getting out in their intoxicated state.īut in 2008, two retired New York City detectives-turned-private investigators who’d been looking into these deaths announced their eerie findings.
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Most had last been seen leaving bars of parties while inebriated. They’d mostly all been college-aged, popular, and athletic. Between 19, authorities pulled the dead bodies of more than 40 young white men out of rivers and lakes in more than 25 cities across 11 states.