Another Body Of A Missing Man Was Pulled From The Chicago River This Weekend. At What Point Do We Start Considering Chicago May Legitimately Have A Serial Killer On Its Hands?
Fox Chicago- The body pulled from the Chicago River on the North Side near The Salt Shed music venue Saturday morning has been identified as that of missing man Noah Enos, 26.
Police say the body was found in the 1300 block of North Elston Avenue at approximately 9:45 a.m.
Enos was last seen on Monday leaving a concert at The Salt Shed in the 1300 block of North Elston Avenue around 10 p.m.
His family had been searching for him tirelessly.
The Medical Examiner confirmed to FOX 32 Chicago late Saturday that the remains were indeed that of Enos. So far, there is no word on the cause of death.
Enos was last seen at The Salt Shed on Monday night for the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard show. He was attending with a coworker.
So that makes it 13 young men, all in good physical condition, all around the same age, fitting the same general physical description that have gone missing, only to be found dead via drowning in the Chicago River or Lake Michigan in the last 15 months in Chicago.
I totally get coincidences happen, and are a real thing, and I think most people with common sense are willing to chalk up 3, 4, or maybe even 5 of the victims' causes of death being nearly identical in nature to coincidence. But we're talking 13 now (we're talking as many as 20 if you include all of "Chicagoland", and we're talking as many as possibly 40 if you include females over the past two years.)
I am far from a true-crime aficionado, and even further from a detective, but I have a brain, I like to think I have common sense, and I have a nose that tells me where there's smoke there's fire. And this whole thing sounds like a bigger story than what the public is being told and lead to believe here in Chicago.
I don't know if its on the city, or the media, or if there's a pact between the two, but given how click-thirsty and eyeball-deprived the local news media is, and how "true crime obsessed" the national public in this country is, don't you think they'd be all over a story like this milking it for every last drop that it's worth?
Instead, it's been almost complete silence, until very recently when a couple of stations (NBC, and CBS in particular) started to float the possibility.
The national media has had no problem throwing the theory out there
And this guy went crazy viral over the winter by doing his own research and documenting the strange deaths that have occurred, where the missing persons went missing, and where their bodies were found.
The reason this story raises eyebrows, and smells fishy, is because of the correlating circumstances involving all the victims.
Of course people drown. It's a terrible, horrible fact, but it's not totally unheard of. What is kind of unheard of is 20 or so healthy, fit and active men in their 20s, who know how to swim, leaving bars or concert venues, intoxicated, wandering off alone, and then being found days later in the river or lake. Some with GHB in their systems.
I originally blogged this story back in December of last year (2022) after Peter Salvino, a Northwestern University student's body was pulled from Diversey Harbor.
It was the dead of winter in Chicago, nobody wants to be outside, never mind walking along the water, yet bodies were still turning up drowned and the media just attributed it to "drunk guys being drunk."
It's not an issue of Chicago Police not doing their jobs, it's the complete opposite. They are beyond overwhelmed. And nobody's throwing them a life raft (no pun intended).
1000 active duty cops left their jobs last year.
New recruitment numbers are at all-time lows.
And we have several elected officials, (Alderman), trying to slash police budgets and handcuff them even more.
If any fingers should be pointed, it should be at city officials and media for not drawing more attention to this, and warning the public to be overly cautious and more aware of their surroundings at all times. Especially when leaving bars.
Here are just a few victims from this year.
- January 2022, 23-year-old Inaki Bascaran was found in the Chicago River after disappearing from a Halloween party at Celeste on Hubbard in October.
- April 2022, three bodies were recovered in just two days, two in the River and one in the Lake.
- May 2022 , University of Illinois Chicago students Daniel Sotelo and Natally Brookson were both found just weeks apart in Lake Michigan.
- May 2022, 31-year-old Eden De La O was retrieved from the river after disappearing from the city's Brighton Park neighborhood.
The list goes on but you get the point.
These are all occurrences of young adults, impaired from alcohol, but fully capable of making it to young adulthood, walking home alone from a bar or party, and then somehow winding up in the river or lake.
If this happened once it'd be a tragedy and I'd believe it if you told me they slipped and fell in, and couldn't tread water to climb back ashore, so they drowned.
But this is happening over and over and over.
After I blogged this I received an insane amount of feedback. Lots of people telling me I'm a fucking moron and don't know what I'm talking about. Lots of people thanking me for shining light on the topic. And lots of people saying they "know a guy who knows a guy who told them xyz".
It's obviously nothing to put any stock into, but a few detectives on CPD hit me up and told me some very startling pieces of information.
According to them, there is an issue with cars driving around downtown at very late hours (1am-4am) asking drunk people walking alone if they want a free ride home. Who in their right mind who agree to this or take somebody up on an offer for this in the year 2023, in the city of Chicago is beyond me, but that's the issue, these people aren't in their right minds. And they're being preyed on.
And there's still a problem with people being drugged at bars with GHB and date rape drugs.
The last thing anybody in charge in Chicago wants to do is send out an alarm that there is a serial killer or serial killers out there murdering innocent people, but it's not like we're not extremely familiar with the subject.
Serial killing and Chicago go hand in hand. In fact, modern historians claim we invented it.
If you've never read Devil In The White City, order it on Amazon, or audible now, and listen over holiday break. Thank me later.
It's the embellished story of a notorious Chicago killer named H. H. Holmes and his serial killing in the 1890s, set against the backdrop of the Chicago World's Fair exhibition, and the architect responsible for constructing it, and the city, Daniel Burnham.
Of course everybody knows the name John Wayne Gacy and the sick killings he was responsible for in the 1970s.
And most recently, the FIFTY unsolved murders from the 2000's, where all the victims were strangled to death by, (obv) "The Chicago Strangler".
The part where this gets really fucked up, and downright scary, is where I tell you about "The Smiley Faced Killer" theory…
Fox 32 - Retired New York cop Kevin Gannon and forensics professor Doc Gilbertson are behind it. They say, groups of killers, sprinkled strategically throughout the nation, murder hundreds of people, mostly men.
The victims are similar.
"3.5 and above star athletes,” said Gannon. “From as young as 17 all the way up to graduate students.”
The killers always leave a signature smiley face near the location of the body.
“I consider this the most dangerous domestic terrorist group in the United States today,” said Gannon.
In Chicago, they believe the killers have struck about a dozen times. It all starts the same way. The pair says the killers drug the victim with GHB, a date rape drug, at a location like a bar.
“We know how they dispense it; they have it already in a visine bottle,” said Gannon.
The killers then discreetly abduct the victim, hold them for a period, kill them and finally dump the body in water. Now, the investigators are revealing they've found other graffiti nearby the scenes.
“The best way to describe it is it gives away -- it betrays their primary or overarching philosophy about life,” said Gilbertson. Gilbertson will not elaborate on the other symbols found next to the smiley face, for fear of copycats. However, he says graffiti is unique to each crew in each city.
Gannon says they think they may have found the killers in Chicago.
“We found a group that we have pictures of that were wearing, displaying the same type of clothing, ideology, smiley face, the whole bit,” said Gannon. They basically fit the pattern of who we would be looking for.”
It starts to get even darker, and more worrisome when you consider the fact that cities like Milwaukee, and Austin, and are experiencing very similar situations.
Since this is a pretty big platform, and our main target demographic (I think) is still very close to that of the victims described is I'd just like to remind everybody of some basics but things you can easily forget when you're out having fun and having some drinks.
NEVER TAKE A DRINK FROM A STRANGER.
NEVER TAKE YOUR EYES OFF OF YOUR DRINK. If you head to the bathroom, take your drink, and don't let it out of your sight. If you can't, toss it or leave it with a friend you trust.
KEEP YOUR HEAD ON A SWIVEL. As somebody who just got knocked out cold walking out of a bar without even seeing my attacker, I learned this lesson the hard way and will never not have my senses heightened walking somewhere again.
DON'T WALK HOME ALONE.
DON'T LET YOUR FRIENDS WALK ANYWHERE ALONE.
DON'T ACCEPT RIDES FROM STRANGERS.