Beneath the Surface: Houston Serial Killer

Is there a serial killer in Houston, Texas? Are serial killers in decline because the number of mass shooters are going up? Let's talk about it. 

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Trigger Warning: Death, Murder, Suicide

Transcript

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Today's episode has a trigger warning for murder, death, suicide, all of the things. So be prepared. The air's thick. The gators are restless, and something strange is bubbling beneath the surface. I'm your host, Amanda, and welcome back to Let's Get Weirdish. The media is saying that 16 bodies have been found in Houston's values this year, but did you know that numbers wrong? There's been 24 and since 2023 There's been 53 bodies found in the Houston ba. Not all of these are nefarious. Some are drownings, some are just regular old homicides. But there is speculation of a serial killer,, and I'm inclined to agree with that. Last month, five of those bodies were found in the same week. Houston's Mayor John Whitmore, is calling these deaths, quote unquote alarming, but said that drownings in the cities, bayou is not a new phenomenon. And he's right. It's not. Drownings happen every day. But if we really take a deep dive and look at this, something's not quite right. He's suggesting that drug and alcohol abuse among the homeless could be a factor. And while that may account for a few of these bayou bodies, it does not account for all of them. We don't have. Homeless people who are addicted to drugs and alcohol just randomly wandering into the river every week, especially five at the same time. He is also suggesting that homeless people are throwing the lifeless bodies of the homeless into the Bayou as a way of disposing of them Maybe that's true, but it can't be true for all of them. And even if that was the case, why are so many of our homeless dying at one time in the Houston area? Retired NYPD, Sergeant Joseph, can't pronounce his last name, but he's a criminal justice professor at Penn State Lehigh Valley. Said that the mayor's remarks were premature. And I agree with that because how can you say that this isn't the work of a serial killer? You haven't done all of the legwork yet, and I know that they are doing legwork, but you don't know until you know, you know You can't just say that everybody's dying, getting thrown into the river and everybody's homeless. You don't even know if they're from your town. And he's correct. he told this to Fox News Digital. So you can look this quote up yourself. He goes on to say, you need an individual autopsy and a full toxicology on each one of these bodies. Forensic pathologists can also determine whether the victims were dead before they went into the water or if they actually drowned. He said. Are we checking to see if there's water in these people's lungs? Are we checking to see if there was alcohol in their system? Are we checking to see if there were drugs in their system? I want the report on that. In 20 23, 9 bodies were found in the Bayou in Houston. 20, 24. 20 bodies were found in the Bayou in Houston, 20 25, 24 bodies. So far they're not reporting the correct numbers. Why? I'm not sure, because this can be fact checked. I understand not wanting to panic the community, but at the same time, people need to know what we're looking at. Is there a serial killer on the loose? I think so, but my opinion doesn't really matter. I wanna know what you think. I've been following this theory that there's been a serial killer in Houston for the past few years. I actually realized that this was happening because I was doing research into the smiley face theory, and if you haven't heard of that, let's touch on that really quick. retired NYPD Sergeant Kevin Gannon has had the theory that a group known as the Smiley face killers is responsible for hundreds of suspicious drowning deaths around the US and believes that a few of these may be connected. The connection here is that the bridges or surrounding structures usually have a smiley face graffitied onto something in that area. Now, I know what you're thinking. Smiley faces are graffitied everywhere. But when you have multiple, and when I say multiple, I mean hundreds of bodies turning up. And they're smiley faces. Somebody's going to put that connection in there. And this man did. Not only that, but the victim profile for the smiley face killers is young men, often college age, and the discovery of said smiley face graffiti near the sites where the bodies are found. There's also a documentary on this and it's called Smiley Face Killers, the Hunt for Justice. I know you can watch it on YouTube, and I'm, I'm pretty sure there's probably a few other places, so you'll just have to Google that. One of the biggest cases in connection to this theory was Riley's strain. He disappeared in March, 2024. He was 22 years old and he went to the University of Missouri, but he was in Nashville with his fraternity brothers. At the Luke Bryan Bar, which is called Luke's 32 Bridge. He was kicked out of that bar twice in that night. They said he was incredibly drunk. I am sure you saw this all over the news. They suspected that this was part of that string. Now his family and reporters and the sheriff's department came back and said it was not in connection. He did drown. But that is one case that you might recognize. Out of the 54 bodies that have been found in the Bais of Houston, 23 of those cases is still undetermined. 15 were ruled in accident, 13 of which were due to drowning. Nine are still pending. Three were ruled suicide. And three were ruled homicide. The discovery of multiple bodies being found in such a short timeframe is astounding to me, and the fact that they would write off that this is a serial killer so quickly is flabbergasting because at this point. This should be exactly what they're looking into. Not trying to sweep this under the rug and say, there's no way. Don't panic. These are homeless people throwing dead homeless people into the bayou. Do what? Excuse me. Yeah, maybe some, but even still, that doesn't make sense. if you are that deep into addiction, you're not worried about the dead body on the street, you're gonna rummage through their pockets and do what you need to do, and you're going to leave that body there. You're not going to drag that body to the bayou and throw it in. What do I know though? It seems like every other day they are pulling another body out of the bayou, and it makes you wonder why are we so quick to write off serial killers? So then of course I went on a little deep dive myself, and yes, statistically the number of serial killers has went down and a lot of people think that correlates with the number of mass shootings going. And that is what has changed that the people who were committing these serial murders are now committing mass shootings. But these people don't really seem to understand the human psyche. Mass shooters often act out of crisis. I typically motivated by personal despair, hopelessness, intense rage, following major events like job loss, romantic rejection, other major life stressors, serial killers pursue specific fantasies, whether it's psychological thrill, control gratification, sexual gratification. Those are completely different motives, and I'm not saying that in some situations the two can't be intertwined, but when we're looking on a bigger scale, it's kind of unthinkable. Mass shootings are often planned as a final act. The person who's doing it usually expects to die. Maybe not always. Maybe they somehow think they're going to get out of it, but the majority of them know that they are not going to make it out alive a lot of the time. They end up committing suicide right there at the crime scene before law enforcement can get them. Serial killers. Plan for longevity. Their mindset is fundamentally different. They're focused on meticulous planning. Think about Israel Keys. He had kill kits all over the us. That doesn't sound like somebody who's expecting to die that day. I think we're seeing a on serial killers because the advance in forensics D-N-A-C-C-T footage, cell phones, all of the things that will get you caught. Back in the sixties and seventies and even into the eighties, they did not have cell phones readily available for people to call for a ride. You had more hitchhikers, you had more parents at work while their children were left at home alone, or all of the latchkey kids, you sent your kids outside to play at whatever time in the morning and they had to be home before the street lights come on. You might not see your kids all day. There was more opportunity to nab and grab back then it still happens, but it's less common. Not all of the time, but a lot of the time with people who commit these mass shootings, they want that instant notoriety. They want people to know who they are. Serial killers, don't they want to go undetected? Now you've seen where some start writing letters to the press and giving hints. A lot of the time those people get a thrill off of that. But you don't see mass shooters doing that either. They're going to take care of what they came to take care of, and that is it. That is a wrap. And I'm not trying to be crass, I'm just trying to spit the facts at you. A lot of these mass shooters. Are motivated by intense media attention, and I think it's had a contagion effect on mass shooters that come after they see all of the media sensation. They see all of the news articles, they see all of these other kids upset. They see the attention that these mass shooters get. And they want that kind of thrill. It's sick, it's sad, but it's the truth guys. Most mass shooters, target locations, familiar to them, whether it's a school, a workplace, a park, a movie theater, but you've got serial killers who are targeting strangers.. For the most part, they're not going to target anybody that they know. Now you've got your co-ed killer who murdered his mother, but he did that at the end. These aren't things they start out with. There is a buildup and a lot of times their crimes are spread. Across jurisdictions, counties, states when they're reflecting about mass shooters and who these people were as they were growing up. And who they were at that time. We're looking at online radicalization, extremist ideologies, feelings of resentment and anger, that can push a troubled individual towards a public act of violence intended to make some sort of statement. Whereas you've got serial killers who are trying to stay in the shadows. They put on a public persona. Like Ted Bundy. A lady's man. Very charismatic, very good looking. a good time. An all All-American guy. When you wanna get textbook about it. So I personally don't think that we have less serial killers because we have more active shooters. I just think it is a lot harder for someone who is a serial killer or who has those urges to go and do the things that they want to do because of all of the technology and forensics that we have today. That does not mean that they are not active. People are still being murdered. No, not all of them are being murdered by serial killers, but you have so many missing in indigenous women, sex workers. And people with addiction who are reported missing or never reported missing, and they just never show back up. Some people never even miss'em, and it's a shame. It truly is. Take Samuel Little, for instance, okay? He has confessed to killing 93 people over 30 years. He was arrested. Over a dozen times and linked to at least eight sexual assaults, attempted murders or killings according to the Washington Post. So fact check that. But he repeatedly managed to slip through the cracks of the justice system, usually benefiting from the perceived unreliability of his victims because many of them were sex workers and people. With addictions. So when he would get out, what did he do? He would kill again. And with all of that being said, even though supposedly the number of serial killings has fallen. The rate of murder cases solved has fallen to, in 2017, it had dropped to a 61.6%, and that is one of the lowest rates in the Western world. 40% of the time murders are going unsolved. So how can we say that serial killers are in decline? They're just getting better at hiding it. They're getting better at avoiding the media. They're getting better at falling through those cracks and not for nothing. Y'all, with the media that we have in today's society, random killings and murders and missing people are not the big ticket items. They are covering mass shootings and not that they shouldn't be, they absolutely should be. They should be covering these things. But on the other hand, we've got missing people. We've got murders that are happening and they are not being publicized. So how do we know that? Say. Jane Doe in Texas isn't connected to Jane Doe in Louisiana. Yeah, we do have DNA. Yeah, there are forensics, but what if there's no body? What if it's just missing girls? What if they look similar? We're not publicizing this like we used to, so how are we going to connect the dots? Because law enforcement relies on people like you and me to say, Hey, that looks like that girl who went missing two states over. Yeah, it may be nothing but what if it is something? And as someone who always wanted to be a profiler to profile serial killers, I'm very aware of how the white woman sells. And if you know, you know, if a black woman goes missing and a white woman goes missing, the white woman is going to get the most publicity. And I think that is one of the main reasons that we are not. Seeing the numbers that we should be seeing with connection to possible serial killers. Honestly, you've got indigenous women going missing every day, and our government is chalking it up to, well, they were probably hitchhiking, so who cares if they were, well, they may have been alcoholics or addicted to drugs, so who cares? Who cares if they were, they're still going missing. They're still not being found. Where are they? Where are these women? African American women going missing? You're not going to see it on tv, like you're going to see white women. It's unfair, honestly, Hispanic women going missing. Well, who cares? Because they probably were here illegally. I care, and you should too. And it's not just women. We have men going missing. We have children going missing. Think about all of the documented numbers of children who are going missing in foster care that they've quote unquote lost. How do you lose a child? How are you losing thousands of children in foster care? So what is our government even doing about it? Nothing. They say they are, they act surprised, but there's no way that they don't know that this is happening, guys. There's no way that they don't know. Yeah, some of'em are probably being sold into trade. Some are probably being shipped to God knows where. We don't know. We don't know. But if you think for a second that our government doesn't have an agenda when it comes to what they publicize and what they hide, then you're wrong. They know that these things are still going on. They know that they're still serial killers. They don't wanna cause panic. They don't want you to know what's going on because then you're gonna question them. And even just random shootings. I worked at a hospital for a couple of years. I cannot count how many times that we would have gunshot victims, stab victims. All of the things come into the hospital. Some would live, some would die. You never saw it on the news. Maybe one out of 10, and I'm just making that up in my head. Honestly, I'm making those numbers up in my head. The majority of the time though, you would not hear about it. You would not see it on the news. there are so many things happening that are not being publicized. Houston. You should definitely be disappointed in your officials. We wanna see autopsies. We wanna see lab results. We wanna know why these bodies are turning up and somebody needs to answer that question. So guys, what do you think? Do you think there's a serial killer on the loose? I do. Thanks for hanging out with me today, guys. I've enjoyed it and I hope you did too. Don't forget if you have your own weird story. Anything from Ghost to Narcissistic parents, we wanna hear it all. Email me at Let's get Weirdish pod@gmail.com and if you can send it in voice memo form, we'd love to hear you on the episodes. Until next time, keep it weird.