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Mystery River
College students are turning up dead in the Mississippi. Police say they drowned. Locals fear it's the work of a serial killer. Our investigation has turned up a potential suspect.
Stuff,
9/9/2004
By Annemarie Conte
Rain pours down on a cold Wisconsin night as a man fights the current of the Mississippi River. It’s almost 2 A.M., and Jeff Geesey, a college sophomore in La Crosse, Wisconsin, is drunk. Lightning illuminates the sky as Geesey struggles in the violent currents until his arms and legs go numb. Exhausted, he succumbs to hypothermia and disappears beneath the water.
Back on campus, Geesey’s friends wonder why he hasn’t returned to the dorm at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. As word spreads, a rumor sweeps the town: Geesey is another victim of a serial killer who stalks young men too intoxicated to fend him off. The bodies of the other three alleged victims had turned up in the river during the past two years.
A bloodhound is used to search for Geesey. After four weeks, the dog hits on a scent that indicates Geesey experienced trauma in several locations. Someone apparently drove him
more than a mile from the bar-heavy Third Street area to Niedbalski Bridge. Penny Bell,
the bloodhound’s handler, says the dog found Geesey’s blood. “She was licking the pavement. But there was no forensics follow-up.”
La Crosse police chief Ed Kondracki remains skeptical. “Things she said those dogs could do, dogs can’t do,” he says.
On May 22, 1999, 41 days after Geesey vanished, two fishermen found his body. The medical examiner classified the manner of death as undetermined, but unofficially, some police officers consider it a suicide, based on four shallow self-inflicted scars on Geesey’s arms. But Geesey’s angry father says that an overnight hospital visit and a psychological evaluation determined that when Jeff cut himself, he was upset—but not suicidal.
To the students and the locals of La Crosse, the notion that four strapping young men drowned in the river in a span of two years seemed like too much of a coincidence—even if they all were drunk. On campus and in town, the serial-killer theory grew in popularity.
But just as the bodies in the river faded from the public’s consciousness, the town was shaken by the disappearance of a fifth young man, Jared Dion, on April 10, 2004. His corpse was found in the river five days later. Amid a public frenzy, La Crosse cops quickly deemed his death accidental. But a recent Stuff investigation determined that police might have too readily dismissed the possibility that a killer or killers were responsible for some or all of the deaths, simply because it seemed unlikely. Even worse, they failed to thoroughly investigate any of the deaths as possible homicides.
One week after Dion’s body turned up, an explosive La Crosse town meeting was broadcast live on local TV. Residents received cheers as they grilled a panel of police, university representatives and health officials.
Dan Marcou, a La Crosse police lieutenant and an uncle of one of the five dead boys, fought back tears as he chastised the crowd. “The La Crosse police department investigated all of these [deaths] thoroughly,” Marcou says. “I have to listen to people applaud at the thought that my nephew was killed by a serial killer. This community is like an alcoholic. It would rather think a killer is loose than admit that it’s got a drinking problem.”
Evasive Answers From Police
Despite Marcou’s tortured plea, the doubters at the meeting were relentless. One woman asked how Jared Dion, if he did slip and fall into the water, had time to put his white Boston Red Sox cap on a nearby post, where it was seen the next morning by a jogger. Captain Mitch Brohmer, the lead investigator, explained that the jogger had found the hat on the ground and put it on the post. However, in the police report, the woman stated that she noticed the hat on the post as she and her boyfriend jogged past, a fact confirmed by Stuff after the town meeting. “[That hat] was already on the post,” she insists. “We didn’t stop at all. We didn’t touch anything.”
Another skeptic at the meeting asked why nearby river towns—such as Winona, Minnesota—didn’t have a similar string of drownings. Chief Kondracki said Winona had better ordinances in place, but what he didn’t fully address was how Nathan Kapfer, one of the five dead boys, was ticketed for disorderly conduct, possessing a false ID and underage drinking outside a Third Street bar at 2 A.M. on the night he disappeared—yet the officer released him, rather than taking him to detox.
Like the main drag in any college town, Third Street is choked with bars serving up drink specials. Packs of undergrads from UW-L and Viterbo College stumble from one place to the next. “Everyone stays close,” says Dustin Naugle, a 21-year-old senior at Viterbo, noting that the riverfront area is easily distinguishable from the rest of town. “When someone’s wasted, we take them home or make sure to keep an eye on them during the night. It’s difficult to just wander off, especially in [the direction of the river].”
So how could the same accident happen again and again? Stuff looked at a dozen college towns by the river and found none with the high concentration of drownings that occurred in La Crosse. Mick Miyamoto, who grew up in town and is now the assistant dean of students at UW-L, thinks it’s possible that the deaths were accidental. He says the La Crosse stretch of river is more dangerous than it used to be due to the reconstruction of Riverside Park, which began in 1999. Still, any drunk who might fall into the river would first have to negotiate a cement staircase and several feet of loose rocks before his toes ever touched water.
Jim Morrison has lived in town since 1932. “It doesn’t seem logical that they’re all dying [accidentally] in the river,” Morrison says. “There are just too many of them.”
Betsy Morgan, who has taught at UW-L for more than 10 years, doesn’t buy the serial-killer theory. “It wasn’t until this last one that [the possibility of a serial killer] just seemed to be an overwhelming view,” says Morgan, who is the chairwoman of the psychology department. Along with criminal-justice professor Kim Vogt, Morgan wrote an open letter to the town and students titled “Why We Are 99.9 Percent Sure It Is Not a Serial Killer.” Citing drowning statistics and other data, the two teachers concluded: “When you hear hooves behind you, you should expect to see horses, not zebras.…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’ plays the part of the ‘serial killer.’ It was a plain old tragic accident that took the life of [Jared Dion] and the others who drowned.”
“I know of no case [of a serial killer who drowns his victims],” Vogt said in an interview. “Serial killers want to see people die.”
Psychotherapist and profiler John Kelly thought the La Crosse drownings were “pretty weird. They could have been murdered, but the person was just so good at doing it that they didn’t leave any physical evidence. If a serial killer is involved, they’re going to make sure that person is dead before they throw them in the river. They’re not going to take any chances that they 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 into the river.”
A Possible Suspect Emerges
By contacting various police agencies and criminal profilers, Stuff reporters have discovered the existence of a person who, at the very least, warrants the close scrutiny of La Crosse and Wisconsin law officials.
For years, authorities and renowned profiler Pat Brown have kept tabs on a wandering John Doe who is known to have stayed within a few blocks of where University of Minnesota student Chris Jenkins, 21, disappeared in Minneapolis on October 31, 2002. Jenkins’ body was found in the Mississippi on February 27, 2003, 120 miles upriver from La Crosse.
Doe came to the attention of police in St. Charles, Missouri, in the late 1990s, when he walked into their station and proclaimed, after being ignored by FBI, that he was the next Jeffrey Dahmer. Doe eventually convinced one St. Charles detective that he wasn’t lying by revealing detailed fantasies about drowning young men. That’s when Brown became involved.
The profiler believes that Doe, who worked at a funeral home, is capable of carrying out his fantasy of forcing young boy-next-door types underwater and watching them panic and struggle until they drown.
“[Most people think that] if somebody says he’s gonna be a serial killer, he’s not,” Brown notes. “But that’s not true.”
Brown posed as a 15-year-old boy and reportedly role-played with Doe using the message boards on MenUnderwater.com, a Web site for gay men with underwater-sex fetishes. “It isn’t supposed to be sadistic,” Brown says, “but [Doe’s] version of it is more about ‘I’m holding you under the water. You’re struggling.’ That’s his whole thing. To watch your eyes when you’re drowning.” Brown’s probe also revealed that Doe had spent time in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and that he knew those states did not have a death penalty.
While Brown chatted with Doe on the Internet, Doe was up to no good in the real world. He allegedly made sexual advances toward the teenage son of the owner of the funeral home where he worked. Police say that when the father confronted Doe, he threatened to murder the undertaker’s entire family. St. Charles police issued a warrant for Doe’s arrest, based on a statement made by the detective who spoke with Doe: “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.”
When Missouri police tried to arrest Doe, he led them on an nearly hour-long car chase that began with him slamming into a police vehicle. He was then imprisoned for seven months for resisting arrest. One thing is certain: Doe, who was released from jail in June, was incarcerated at the time of Jared Dion’s death. Still, Brown believes that Doe could have been involved in some or all of the four earlier deaths, or that someone with similar proclivities is out there hunting.
“There are more serial killers out there than we know about,” Brown says. “It doesn’t mean all of these are the same guy. It could be one guy who maybe killed two of them. Or who killed one and no more in that area.”
Brown is not alone in her suspicions. The St. Charles detective concurs, saying, “I think if I had all those cases, he’d be a great lead to eliminate.”
When Stuff alerted La Crosse police to the existence of John Doe, Captain Mitch Brohmer claimed he was unfamiliar with him, but that the department would look into the matter. Caroline Kelly, an investigator with the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation, embarrassingly acknowledged that state and local authorities were totally unaware of John Doe before she talked to Stuff. After being informed of Doe’s deadly drowning fantasies, Kelly acknowledged that he would be looked at by state investigators working on the La Crosse case.
One former FBI profiler says that, at 40 years old, “[Doe] has probably done more than just watch. If I had to vote, I’m voting killer.” Perhaps the people of La Crosse will pressure the police to either arrest Doe or eliminate him as a suspect before the Mississippi casts its vote—with another body.
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The Victims
Five fit young men were found dead in the river near La Crosse, Wisconsin. All had an excessive blood-alcohol content, went missing late at night and had no visible signs of predeath injury. Each vanished or was found in |
Name: Charles Blatz, 28
Height and Weight: 5'10", 150 pounds
Disappeared On: September 28, 1997
Body Discovered in River On: October 3, 1997
Name: Tony Skifton, 19
Height and Weight: 5'7", 130 pounds
Disappeared On: October 5, 1997
Body Discovered in River On: October 10, 1997
Name: Nathan Kapfer, 20
Height and Weight: 5'10", 160 pounds
Disappeared On: February 22, 1998
Body Discovered in River On: April 4, 1998
Name: Jeff Geesey, 20
Height and Weight: 6', 156 pounds
Disappeared On: April 11, 1999
Body Discovered in River On: May 22, 1999
Name: Jared Dion, 21
Height and Weight: 5'9", 172 pounds
Disappeared On: April 10, 2004
Body Discovered in River On: April 15, 2004 |
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