The Smiley Face Killer by Stacy Green

Author:Stacy Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: the smiley face killers, True Crime, Serial Killers, Short Non Fiction, Crime, Murder, college boys, Smiley Face Killer
Publisher: Vesuvian Books
Published: 2016-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Dealers of Death

Milwaukee Magazine added new fuel to the inferno, stating they’d learned a gang called the Dealers of Death claimed responsibility for the deaths of some of the men. Jeramy Alford, a convicted murderer for another river homicide, reportedly told the FBI the gang had murdered forty men and even gave one of the members a name: Zmiley.

According to the magazine’s report, police in Iowa and Minnesota also had information about the gang and its involvement with Alford.

In 2005, Jeramy was arrested in Iowa branding a runaway he’d harbored with the beginnings of a five-point star. Detective Bob Knoop said Alford told the runways “he would take them to Minnesota and make them part of his gang.” Another cop mentioned the Dealers of Death.

Alford was later prosecuted for the river homicide of another young man, and the prosecutor said he falsely implicated Zmiley and another member. Zmiley was questioned in that murder and cleared, but what he told investigators was chilling.

He claimed the Dealers of Death had 300 members. “I was once a part of a little clique they had called the DOD,” Zmiley said, stating the DOD was based in Iowa. Zmiley also claimed to be taking antipsychotic meds, living at a tent in by the river and had been violent in the past. He also claimed Jeramy Alford bragged about murdering a college student in an Indian costume. Zmiley had the victim’s name wrong, but Minneapolis media also reported a female informant told police Alford bragged about Jenkins.

Lee Gilbertson, a respected Minnesota criminal justice professor, initially dismissed the theory but by 2008 had changed his mind and began working with Gannon and Duarte. A letter from the FBI to Wisconsin Rep Jim Sensenbrenner indicated that Gannon, Duarte and Gilbertson gave the FBI information on an unnamed killer in the case, but it appears authorities declined to investigate based on another inmate’s accusations.

The Minneapolis police have yet to take the idea of the Smiley Face murders as a legitimate threat, stating, “Although we have collaborated with investigators from the FBI and communicated with other jurisdictions in which similar drownings have occurred, we can neither confirm nor endorse the ‘Smiley Face Murders’ theory currently being publicized.”6

The New York Police department wasn’t convinced either.

But well before Gannon and Duarte publicized their theory, the murders in La Crosse, Wisconsin had already caused panic. In September 2007, the AP reported rumors of a serial killer in La Crosse, Wisconsin “lurking in college-area bars, waiting to drown good-looking young men.”

The La Crosse police called in the FBI, but once again, no evidence to support the serial killer theory, although the death toll was mounting long before Chris Jenkins’ murder helped Gannon and Duarte tie their Smiley Face theory together.

By April 2008, Gannon and Duarte’s theory reached the national media, with Gannon claiming they had twenty-two smiley faces at some victims’ calculated entry points into the river, along with the word “Sinsinawa,” written on a rock in East Lansing, Michigan.

Gannon believed it was a link to Matt, who was last seen on Sinsinawa Avenue.

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