The Case of the Drowning Men by Eponymous Rox Read Free Book Online

Minneapolis p olice should really have handed off the matter to either another police department . O r, even better, to a higher agency. But they did neither , choosing instead to allow the Jenkins missing persons case to essentially stagnate under their watch, while at the same time stonewalling his family’s private detective.
    Finally, amidst th is endless wrangling, and a full four months after Jenkins had disappeared, his body was spotted floating face up in the Mississippi river under the Third Avenue Bridge, still wearing his Indian costume and the loose fitting shoes that came with it, his shirt tucked neatly into his trousers, his arms folded peacefully across his chest.

    But the strands of his own hair clenched tightly in one fist and other subtle evidence of physical trauma reveal ed Chri s Jenkins’ finals hours of life to be nowhere near as serene as might be inferred from his frozen pose of death. A nd , with a postmortem blood/alcohol finding of only 0.07 in his deep tissue and a maximum of 0.12 in his heart , there was very little doubt that , while it might’ve been true he’d had too much to drink on the night he vanished, he sure wasn’t drunk the day he died.
    And once more , in a perplexing pattern that was emerging in these cases, there was a drowning with the unresolved issue of exactly how long a period of time —or how short— the corpse had actually been in the water.
    B eing discovered snagged in debris under the Third Avenue Bridge downtown was also a bit problematic for the MPD since , a ccording to a police report dated November 11 th 2002, this specific area had been thoroughly scoured by them before . To wit : “ I nvestigators searched the Father Hennepin Bluffs Park that encloses the bridge on the east bank of the Mississippi. Investigators also searched in the rear of the Main Street p ost o ffice and underneath the Third Avenue Bridge.”

    Aggressively s idestepping these curious details , t he Minneapolis police quickly ruled the matter an accidental drowning anyway and closed the Jenkins case without further ado , thereafter adamantly refusing to bend on their determination no matter how much new evidence detective Loesch would later come up with. The officials of the city of Minneapolis , just as with other municipal it ies recently plagued by off-season water fatalities , would then go on to devote more of their time to debunking rumors of murder than to investigating them, and with attempts at minimiz ing a potential public relations nightmare which was ever so slowly unfold ing .
    Tall fence s. Citizen patrols. More cops on the beat . More cameras. “ The waterfront is safe now . There is no serial murderer .”
    But, Chad , Nathan, Glen , Jeremy, Matthew, Jared, Adam, Dan, Todd, Josh, Jacob, Matt , Lucas, Nicholas, Scott, David … the Jenkins couldn’t get the police to reexamine their son ’ s death , and the police couldn’t stop more sons from dy ing.

 

    “ When you hear hooves behind you, when you turn around you should expect to see horses, not zebras…the ‘horse’ diagnosis is ‘ alcohol ’ while the ‘zebra’ diagnosis is ‘serial killer’ [or] a cop and/or a cab driver.. .” University of Wisconsin at La Crosse officials , calling for public calm after yet another disappearance and drowning in 2004
    “It was a classic textbook drowning." La Crosse County Medical Examiner, publicly commenting in 2004 on the drown victim’s autopsy

 
Chapter 6 : Horse s of a Different Color
    “ Why we are 99.9% sure it is NOT a serial kill er
    – a data based explanation”
    “Dear Students, We have both worked here at UW-L for over 10 years. Every time a student has died, we have grieved for the student, his/her family, and friends. We have lost students to fires, auto accidents, suicides, and illness. This semester we lost a student to a drowning. And, again, we grieved, although we did not know him.
    “However, within hours of his disappearance, we