LACROSSE, Wis. — The disappearance of a 22-year-old Viterbo graduate student, Eliotte Heinz, has rekindled chatter about a serial killer on the city riverfront. Heinz was found floating dead nine miles downriver Wednesday — the latest in a string of missing college students turning up dead in the Mississippi River going back to 1997. Police dismiss the conspiracy theories as as crackpot speculation. They note the LaCrosse reputation as a hard-drinking college party town. They note too the proximity of the downtown bar district to the riverfront. In the latest death, Eliotte Heinz had been at Bronco’s bar on Front Street and was walking home about 3:30 a.m.
Dubious roots of a commonality
The serial killer theory gained currency in 2008 with a St. Cloud State University criminologist, Doulas Lee Gilbertson. He organized a student project to map and profile the cases of young men who had gone missing and drowned. Two former New York cops, Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte, weighed in with a theory connecting the deaths. The theory, no matter how far-fetched, embedded itself in a gullible public consciousness with a 2019 documentary on NBC’s crime-hungry Oxygen network. The documentary played and replayed.
Smiley Face Killer? Gang of Death Dealers?
The deaths were lumped as the Smiley Face Serial Killer Theory based on extrapolation from a smiley-face graffito near at least one victim. The Oxygen documentary broadened the theory to other drownings up and down the Mississippi and even elsewhere in the Midwest and on the East Coast. When a mysterious river death in Minneapolis was reclassified by police as a homicide, the conspiracy theories gad new life. Whether a gang really existed was never established, but the case added mass to three decades of 40-some river deaths throughout the Midwest. Now comes artificial intelligence-generated takeaways from news coverage of the Eliotte Heinz disappearance. The ghoulish conspiracy theories have new currency.
Gilbertson. Teaches criminology St. Cloud State. Still taking speaker bureau bookings.