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Browse us for breaking news, missing person alerts, unsolved crimes and cold cases. Plus explore interviews, photos, case updates and brand new evidence in our ongoing 'Smiley Face Murder' investigation.
Never heard of the Smiley Face Killers before?
Start here. New guests, are you investigating a loved one's suspicious disappearance and drowning? Begin with a look at the forensics of a true drowning and the complete Smiley Face Serial Killer case background. Then read in-depth interviews with families of other 'Smiley' victims, by author Eponymous Rox.


ABOUT KILLING KILLERS' BLOGGER: Eponymous Rox covers cops, curs and killers and has been featured in Crime Magazine and on NBC. The author is also a regular paid-contributor to CrimeMagazine.com, the Gather News agency and Yahoo's Associated Content. JUMP IN: The majority of cases presented on this site are unsolved so your opinion counts -- you don't need permission to start or join discussions, vote in crime polls or submit tips on Killing Killers, and can even do so anonymously if you prefer.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Victory in THE CASE OF THE DROWNING MEN

(From ABC NEWS out of Chicago)

February 25, 2013 - "The alarming number of young men drowning across the country has caught the attention of federal law enforcement...Federal authorities are said to be considering a nationwide investigation."

ABC reports that a group of former law enforcement personnel working together with independent investigators who all call themselves the "I Team" and who also run an organization called Find Me, studied hundreds of drowning men cases, many of which are covered extensively here on this weblog.
They have similarly and unequivocally concluded that there are now too many such deaths occurring throughout the United States, and that it's a statistical improbability that they are all accidents, whether or not these young men were drunk or sober.
Former federal drug enforcement agent Jerry Snyder is the founder of the not-for-profit victim-search group. He went on record as saying, "When we are talking numbers, there are 194 bodies. If half of those are homicides we have a problem here."
So, whatever beliefs people may have about THE CASE OF THE DROWNING MEN, whoever they think the culprits might be, mainstream theories or fringe, it doesn't matter. One thing is very clear now: Smiley's days are numbered.
   
                                        Special thanks to reader 'Tennessee111' for the scoop
 

Sunday, February 24, 2013

DOUBLE THE MONEY: the search for Colin Gillis

UPDATE 4/29/13 - click/read/share: "MYSTERY AT TUPPER LAKE"
 

They may have abandoned the notion of ever finding their loved one alive again, but they've never forsaken him.
 
In fact the family of missing upstate New Yorker, Colin Gillis, is as determined as ever and have even increased the reward they're offering to $25,000, in hopes of bringing him home once and for all.
 
Gillis, 18 and a pre-med student at SUNY Brockport, was visiting his hometown in the Adirondacks during Spring Break in March of 2012.

He was last sighted leaving a party in Tupper Lake on foot, heading along highway 3 toward his parent's residence in nearby Piercefield a few miles away.

But he never made it.
 
The hunt for him throughout the following days and weeks was one of the most comprehensive ever launched for a missing person in this mountainous region of woodlands, waterways and swamps.
 
In all, thousands of acres and searchers were involved in the rescue effort, and even soldiers from the neighboring military base provided tactical support. Yet all that was ever found of the young man was one shoe and a driver's license...
 
Colin Gillis is described as a Caucasian male approximately six-feet tall and 180 pounds, with blond hair and blue eyes. When last seen, he was wearing a black and white striped shirt, blue jeans and red sneakers, and was carrying (or wearing) a reversible black and red L.L. Bean jacket together with an orange and black day pack.

Anyone with any information at all as to what became of him is urged to contact the Ray Brook State Police headquarters at 518-897-2000, or the DEC dispatch at 518-897-1300.
 
NOTE: I will be covering this missing person case more extensively in the upcoming feature article titled  'Mystery At Tupper Lake" but in the interim you can read more details concerning the Gillis disappearance, as well as the reward terms, here, and by using this site's search box.
 

Saturday, February 23, 2013

MISSING PERSON REWARD: Jake Samusenko

UPDATE 3/21/13: Jacb Samusenko disappearance and drowning
"accidental" coroner says.  READ FULL NEWS STORY HERE 

UPDATE February 26, 2013: Still no leads in either the Samusenko or Shipowski disappearances, and now a third teenage male has gone missing from Pennsylvania. (More updates in the comment section.)
 
UPDATE February 27th 2013: CHRIS KING, 19, HAS BEEN FOUND - King vanished from Bensalem PA sometime in late afternoon on the 21st of February. A 2012 graduate of Neshaminy High School, he is believed to have been located safe in neighboring Philly.

UPDATE FEBRUARY 23, 2013: Police claim they have lots of "theories, but no new leads" in the Jacob Samusenko disappearance. And now a second Pennsylvania youth -- Kade Shipowski age 17 -- has also gone missing...read more in the comment section.

ALERT: Jacob Samusenko, 17 from Erie Pennsylvania, went missing from his neighborhood on the afternoon of January 29th 2013. He was last seen taking the garbage out dressed in athletic wear. His family believes he may have decided to go for a quick walk or  jog, but no one has seen or heard from him since.
 
An anonymous stranger is now aiding the Samusenko's search efforts by offering a $10,000 reward for the youth's return. Jake Samusenko is described as five-foot-five and 130 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes.

Samusenko is a very responsible and mature young man and his long absence, especially without communication, is uncharacteristic. Erie police ask that anyone with information call them at 814-870-1120
 

Friday, February 22, 2013

Screaming mad Drew Peterson declares he's innocent

I did not drown that woman! 
 
The formerly smirking and cool-as-a-cucumber Drew Peterson flipped his lid yesterday upon learning he will now have to do 38 years for the suspected slaying in 2004 of his third wife Kathleen Savio. 
 
That's a veritable death sentence when considering the sorry lot of an ex-cop in prison, and that he's hardly a young man anymore.
 
Many who witnessed the spectacle of the infuriated defendant going off the deep end in an emotional rant directed at the judge and anyone else present at his sentencing say his angry outburst was nothing but the real Drew surfacing at the eleventh hour.
 
THERE, all his diehard haters assert, was the coldblooded, serial wife-murderer who knew his day had come at last. 
 
The prosecution, victorious not through prima facie forensic proofs or evidentiary facts, but rather via Illinois's new 'Hearsay' statute enacted solely to nail Peterson for first-degree murder, even went so far as to call him "a psychopath" in their subsequent gloating statements to the media.

But is prisoner Peterson's bitter diatribe merely an example of a half-crazed killer completely losing his courtroom composure, or does this guy really have something to yell about?  find out here
 

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Disgraced Pistorius' Disgraceful Defense

Update 3/13/13- CRYING, LYING & VYING: Money Talks, Pistorius Walks
Family's campaign to discredit police pays off (more in the comment section)
Original story below MORE COVERAGE HERE
 
 
 
"It filled me with horror and fear of an intruder ... I felt trapped ... as I have limited mobility on my stumps."

With a shameful display of both crocodile tears and unabashed perjury, disgraced olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius told the judge that he gunned down his beautiful girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in cold blood because he was "afraid" for his life.
 
In a packed courtroom, and in a pathetic plea to win freedom and sympathy he doesn't deserve, the defendant repeatedly called attention to a congenital deformity he has always before demanded the world ignore:  The "stumps" that he insists made him "feel vulnerable" on the day he "accidentally" shot and bludgeoned the 29-year-old model he'd been dating for only months, as she desperately hid in a bathroom to escape his murderous wrath.   
 
Pistorius was of course referring to his defective legs in court proceedings held yesterday to determine if it would be safe to release him on bail pending his trial for premeditated murder. He was born without fibulas and at the age of 11 months both limbs were amputated below the knees.
 
Pistorius' appallingly lame excuse for killing his woman due to an overwhelming "fear of an intruder" is contradicted by the evidence collected at the crime scene--namely bullet holes shot through a locked bathroom door and a bloody cricket bat, together with a two-hour delay in calling the police during which time he urgently consulted with his friends and family as to what he should do and say.
 
Detectives testifying at the bail hearing said the high-to-low trajectory of the bullets showed without a doubt that Pistorius was not on his stumps, as he alleges, but instead had his artificial legs strapped on at the time of the shooting. They also provided witness testimony attesting to a 17-minute delay between the first gunshot issued and the subsequent volley of gunfire that resulted in Steenkamp's death.
 
As well, several neighbors overheard the couple quarreling earlier in the day, plus "non-stop shouting" in the hour or so preceding Pistorius' attack on his doomed lover. Sources also say the police had been called a number of other times to the Pistorius mansion concerning "domestic disturbances" in the past.
 
In 2009, the once-revered but now-reviled para-olympic athlete, known worldwide as "Blade Runner" for the carbon-fiber apparatus he wears during competition, was charged with assaulting another female at his home. That woman was eventually convinced to drop the matter, so he escaped prosecution.
 
Pistorius has had other significant run-ins with the law and been similarly forgiven for these offenses due to his fame and notoriety, although actually killing people has only recently been added to his criminal repertoire.
 
The morning immediately following the brutal slaying of Steenkamp, investigators searched Pistorius' lavish residence in Pretoria, South Africa and also found illegal substances, including needles, synthetic testosterone and steroids, stashed there. The use of performance enhancing drugs is banned in all major sports.
 
Which means the man is a liar, a cheater, a beater, and a murderer now as well.


 

Friday, February 15, 2013

DEAD IN THE WATER: new evidence, new rulings


In November 1981, during a dragged out and drunken argument with her husband on his yacht The Splendour, 43-year-old actress Natalie Wood "accidentally" fell overboard and drowned. Her angry, soused spouse, actor Robert Wagner, then waited almost two full hours before reporting his wife missing. Shortly thereafter rescue personnel fished Wood's lifeless body out of the Pacific Ocean--covered front to back with bruises and lacerations, some of them "fresh," some "recent," some a "day old" or more.
 
Three decades later, based upon those suspicious injuries and the tireless pursuit for justice by the victim's family, authorities finally relented and overturned the determination that Natalie Wood drowned by "accident." They are now investigating her death as a likely homicide, with Robert Wagner the prime suspect.
 
In November 2012, under circumstances yet to be determined, Joshua Swalls, 22, went missing in Indianapolis. A few days later, after one of his shoes was discovered on the bank of a nearby retention pond, divers searched the small body of water but found nothing in it. Nevertheless, three weeks later someone sighted Swalls' body floating there and the cadaver was then sent to the coroner's office for examination. He had only been in the water for approximately 7 to 10 days, they say...
 
Unlike Wood, Swalls was found to have no drugs or alcohol in his system, yet he too had a number of bruises and lacerations which he'd received before dying. Namely “contusions of the right forehead and eyebrow, bridge of nose, and right zygomatic arch in the shape of  a reverse C, continuous” with an “abrasion of tip of nose” and “abraded contusions to kneecaps, bilateral and to shins, multiple bilateral, with one underlying a tear in the left pants leg.”
 
The Marion County Coroner's Office has been asked to revisit their autopsy findings, and is pondering now whether in fact Josh Swalls' death was truly accidental. Yet the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department still adamantly insists it was and refuses to investigate.
 
As part of my continuing efforts to assist the Swalls family in obtaining justice for their murdered son, I did a comparative analysis of both the Wood and Swalls drowning events including their autopsies, which was published this week on Crime Magazine. Help keep the pressure on the Indy authorities: Read DEAD IN THE WATER, and share the info in it with everyone.
 
 
UP NEXT: 'Mystery At Tupper Lake'
 
 
A missing youth and a dead serial killer. Are they connected?
 
 

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

DORNER IN A CORNER: panicked commander of petrified posse orders "Get the gas, burn it down!"

 
UPDATE February 13th: In what is bound to be determined an illegal order, leaders of the petrified police posse trying to maintain a stranglehold around expert marksman and ex-cop Chris Dorner gave the shocking command yesterday to burn down his mountain hideout. With him in it.
 
So ended the week-long rampage the decorated soldier and former policeman had waged against his corrupt colleagues at the Los Angeles Police Department.
 
There are conflicting reports this morning as to whether a body has been found in the charred rubble or not. Some officials say they have indeed found some remains, believed to be those of the fugitive cop. Others claim the site is still much too hot to search.
 
One thing is for certain, though, Christopher Dorner has definitely proven his case against the LAPD -- all week they've been shooting at innocent passersby, conducting illegal searches and surveillance, resorting to excessive use of force, and outright lying to the media.
 
Now, with this Waco-style solution to the standoff, it will be all but impossible for the police to defend their actions in the court of public opinion.
 
Today, websites like YouTube are already broadcasting the voice of the official who demanded his men incinerate the cabin where a heavily armed Dorner was holed up in. That thus-far-unnamed individual was overheard on police scanners and by the press stationed close to the scene.
 
Witnesses said the cabin was fully ablaze within only minutes of someone ordering "get the gas, burn it down" and that a single shot then came from inside, but no one ever emerged from the conflagration.
 
Original coverage of this event is below:
 

SHOOTOUT ON BIG BEAR MOUNTAIN

A few more lawmen have learned the meaning of "sharpshooter" firsthand today, as they found themselves being airlifted to a nearby emergency room for gunshot wounds they received as they tried to surround fugitive ex-cop, Chris Dorner.
 
Dorner is barricaded in a cabin on Big Bear Mountain, 100 miles from the city of Los Angeles, and nowhere near the secret Mexican hideaway earlier reported by LAPD spokesmen and mainstream media.
 
Police had been continuing to scour the mountain range for days ever since they found Dorner's burnt out truck at its base, but at the same time they were also doing car by car searches throughout the southern California region, and had even set up checkpoints at the border with Mexico.
 
That's also close to where they had found their suspect's wallet and ID planted this week, deepening their suspicions that Chris Dorner has at least one accomplice helping him to evade capture. Somebody thus far only referred to in newly filed police documents as "JY".
 
Since he launched his bloody rampage against the corrupt LA Police Department, there have been a number of false sightings of Dorner during the week, but he was finally located this afternoon after stealing a white truck from a couple vacationing on Big Bear.

He is said to have burglarized their mountain retreat and tied them up before leaving the place ransacked, but one of them evidently managed to  get free soon after and swiftly reported the encounter.
 
Local deputies spied the stolen vehicle in question and gave chase, but Dorner abandoned it and, amidst a hail of bullets and smoke bombs, safely fled to yet another cabin to hide. He is believed to still be holed up there and heavily armed.
 
With local law enforcement agencies, SWAT teams, and federal agents rapidly descending, gunfire and obscenities can be heard echoing across the serene hilltops now, and it's doubtful the former officer and soldier will actually be taken alive...even if authorities wanted it that way.
 
Which also seems rather unlikely.
 
 
read my original coverage here and Dorner's unedited "manifesto" here
 

Sunday, February 10, 2013

MISSING PERSON REWARD: Nick Wilcox

$10,000 Reward
 
After numerous fundraising events, the family of 24-year-old Nick Wilcox is able at last to offer a monetary reward for information that will lead to closure in his disappearance last month.
 
"Bad case, good case, I hope to bring him home," the young man's sister, Andrea Wilcox, vowed when she announced the $10,000 reward to reporters this week.
 
Wilcox was last seen alive on New Year's day when he was being physically removed by unnamed bouncers from a disreputable and now defunct downtown Milwaukee bar, the Irish Rec Room. No explanation was ever provided for why his forced removal was necessary.
 
Additionally, police who were stationed in squad cars just outside the establishment that night claimed they witnessed nothing. They also say they have "no leads" regarding the Wilcox disappearance and have stopped searching for him.
 
Over the past decade or more, Milwaukee has been the scene of many similar ejections of young men from riverside pubs, which far too often has led to weird nonrecreational drowning deaths. Apparently with that in mind, police divers had immediately searched an area in the Milwaukee river where the "ice appeared to be disturbed" but reported that Wilcox wasn't in it.
 
The city of Milwaukee is also notorious for mysterious dash cam malfunctions in police cruisers -- an unbelievable 80% fail rate has been reported by patrol officers. That means valuable video feed from the specific units poised outside the Irish Rec Room to make arrests the night Nick Wilcox was ousted by security will likely never be retrieved.
 
Dash-cam failure and police brutality are two issues the residents of Milwaukee have finally decided to confront head on in 2013 as they seek once and for all to take the hiring, firing, and disciplining of cops out of the hands of police.
 
If successful,  they'd be the first in the land to implement this significant legislative overhaul -- for two  plus centuries law enforcement agencies throughout the United States have policed themselves and exercised sole discretion over who will or will not be members of the force.
 
Milwaukee citizen activists are hoping their sweeping reform proposal, combined with the mandatory installation in all squad cars of reliable dashboard cameras, will usher in a new era of 100% police accountability and guarantee greater public safety in their neighborhoods as a result.
 
In the meantime, Wilcox's loved ones will continue canvassing the particular Milwaukee neigborhood where he was last known to be in, as well as handing out and hanging up new fliers with reward information.
 
Nick Wilcox is six-foot-two, between 180 and 200 pounds, and has blond hair and blue eyes. He was wearing a grey shirt, dark pants and black shoes when he vanished. More details can be found at the Facebook page Find Nick Wilcox.
 

Friday, February 8, 2013

BACKFIRE & BLOWBACK: Why a good cop went bad (Chris Dorner's on the rampage)

UPDATE 2/10/13 (MORE UPDATES HERE): Living up to their ugly reputation, LAPD cops have begun shooting at innocent motorists now: In a deranged bid to capture and kill their former colleague, Chris Dorner, trigger-happy officers "mistook" two Hispanic women delivering newspapers for the hulking six-foot, 270-pound man, and also shot up another vehicle which didn't even match his truck's description. Equally desperate is their police chief's belated offer to reconsider Dorner's allegations of police corruption and wrongful discharge. The former cop still remains at large, despite a massive manhunt for him and a million-dollar bounty. (Original story below.)
 

Cop framed by LAPD for reporting police brutality wages "war"

 
Well, the world's most notoriously corrupt police department has got a really big problem on their hands now. A six-foot, 270 pound, sharp-shooting, mad-as-hell kind of problem that, no matter how hard top brass tries, they can't easily sweep under the rug this time.

Especially when he's considered "armed and dangerous" and gunning for them.

Officer Christopher Dorner was fired by the infamous Los Angeles Police Department a couple years ago for reporting a colleague's excessive use of force during an arrest. The officer Dorner turned in had kicked and punched an unarmed, handcuffed mental patient already in custody, and had, in fact, been flagged many times for similar acts of brutality before the incident. 

Dorner's report against his fellow officer was also substantiated by the visibly-battered victim himself as well as other parties who'd examined the man's facial injuries and recognized their origin.

Yet, predictably, it was Dorner who was punished. He was fired for his whistleblowing on the pretext of "filing a false statement."

The aggrieved ex-cop has since then tried in vain to restore his good name but exhausted all his legal venues and appeals this year without success. 

So he's posted
his manifesto  and farewell online (read it below), exposing the Los Angeles Police Department's dirty laundry in it. And he's also gone on a bloody rampage, taking potshots at and killing some of LAPD's dirtiest.

"The department has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days," Dorner reveals. "It has gotten worse. Those officers involved in the Rampart scandal and Rodney King incidents have since been promoted to supervisor, commanders, and command staff, and executive positions."

A panicked LAPD has just launched a massive manhunt for the rogue ex-cop, and tightened security around their men in blue in response. They have also vehemently denounced their former officer's disclosures as "self-serving."

Crossing the "Blue Line"
 
In general they think of themselves as a brotherhood, not as our public servants, not as our law enforcers. They think of themselves as above the law.

And as with any fraternal order there are rules all police officers are expected to abide by, secrets which must be kept, and consequences which must be paid by those who cross the Blue Line and betray another "brother" who's guilty of unlawful conduct.

Taken to the extreme, this produces a nefarious mindset leading to a culture of licensed thugs capable of organized and vicious criminality, such as in the Rodney King beating or the Rampart CRASH unit scandal which saw nearly 100 of LAPD's so called finest charged with evidence tampering, witness intimidation, murder, bank robbery, gun-for-hire schemes, drug dealing, and even the unpunished assassination of famed east coast rapper, Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. 'Biggee').

In reporting similar police abuses, Christopher Dorner unwittingly crossed that Blue Line, and although he didn't mysteriously end up with a bullet in the back, as some before him have been known to do, the man still paid a heavy price.

The lesson is clear and underscored as often as necessary: Cops aren't supposed to snitch on other cops, regardless of how crooked they may be. Period.

Drawing the red line

Cops who turn in other cops can end up either dead, derailed, or defamed. Those aren't choices, by the way; it's up to the powers-that-be to determine which penalty is appropriated.

Dead, derailed, and defamed men usually tell no tales, of course, but heavily armed ex-officer Christopher Dorner, with his red line in the sand that he's daring the LAPD to cross now, has turned that theory on its head.

Plus, he's hardly being silent:

"From 2/05 to 1/09 I saw some of the most vile things humans can inflict on others as a police officer in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it wasn't in the streets of LA. It was in the [confines] of LAPD police stations and shops (cruisers). The enemy combatants in LA are not the citizens and suspects, it's the police officers...

"They take photos of your loved ones recently deceased bodies with their cellphones and play a game of who has the most graphic dead body of the night with officers from other divisions. This isn't just the 20 something year old officers, this is the 50 year old officers with significant time on the job as well who participate... 

"I am here to change and make policy. The culture of LAPD versus the community and honest/good officers needs to and will change. I am here to correct and calibrate your morale compasses to true north."

"Armed and dangerous"

He's an idealist and reacting just as you might expect a heavily-armed, shattered idealist would. But Dorner doesn't have any delusions about his mission and his fate. He fully expects to be terminated. 

Still, the former policeman is mad as hell and doesn't give a damn anymore. He plans on taking out as many crooked cops as possible, he says, before his own annihilation.

"Suppressing the truth will leave to deadly consequences for you and your family," Dorner warns members of the LAPD currently hunting for him. "There will be an element of surprise where you work, live, eat, and sleep. I will utilize ISR at your home, workplace, and all locations in between. I will utilize OSINT to discover your residences, spouses workplaces, and children's schools. IMINT to coordinate and plan attacks on your fixed locations. Its amazing whats on NIPR. HUMINT will be utilized to collect personal schedules of targets...

"Whatever pre-planned responses you have established for a scenario like me, shelve it. Whatever contingency plan you have, shelve it. Whatever tertiary plan you've created, shelve it. I am a walking exigent circumstance with no OFF or reset button."

(Haha--best of luck to you, Sir Exigent. It's a shame to lose a good cop.)

 
 
READ DORNER'S UNEDITED MANIFESTO IN ITS ENTIRETY, PLUS ANONYMOUS' HACKED MESSAGE TO THE LAPD, ON THE KILLING KILLERS' QUOTE ME PAGE

 

Thursday, February 7, 2013

What would Sarah do?

Investigating the Lambertville canal drownings

She was the valedictorian of her 1991 graduating class at South Hunterdon High, and a superb athlete who especially loved and excelled at volleyball.

A bright, strong-willed, independent female even at that tender age, Sarah Majoras is said to have declined to give a speech at her high school graduation, remaining silent instead in order to civically object to a religious invocation delivered at the opening of the ceremony by a school administrator. 
 
That forced prayer was in plain violation of black-letter laws that call for separation of church and state throughout the USA, including at publicly-funded school systems like South Hunterdon. It was, in young Majoras' uncorrupted view, a patently unconstitutional demand which she had the inalienable right to refuse. 
 
Being required to mumble along to a benediction, to bow one's head to "God" and country, infringed on everybody's rights who were assembled there that day, believers and nonbelievers alike. So she was leading the crowd in protest of it.
 
That's after all what Sarah Majoras was, all those who knew her agree: a natural born leader.
 
"Only the good die young"
 
Sometimes as we age, as we ardently pursue a host of other liberty interests--happiness, wealth, social status, acclaim--we lose ourselves in the chase. The principles and ideals we believed in and espoused in our youth become too cumbersome to maintain, and so we toss them, one by one, along the way. 
 
And sometimes, when we finally near or reach our goals, we end up completely different people than we used to be. Not always for the better.
 
But at age 39 Sarah Majoras was still the courageous and  "extremely smart person" her friends and admirers had always known her to be. She was still the all around, dependable team player who had, in the years since silently receiving her diploma, also earned a reputation as a kind, generous, "very accepting and inclusive" human being.
 
Majoras had not sold her soul for the almighty dollar, although it's clear she certainly could have if she liked. She was not chasing after the American Dream and untold fortunes bartending for 16 years at Lambertville's local hotspot, John & Peter's, situated just across the Delaware river and roughly only a mile from her house.
 
She had become a beloved fixture of the bar-and-grill, and its patrons adored her.

But this January, walking home in the early morning hours from there, Sarah Majoras mysteriously vanished, and nearly the whole town began searching for her. Days later she was found just a few blocks shy of her destination, drowned in the shallows of an icy canal.
 
Misstep or murder?
 
The loss of an individual like Sarah Majoras is not just felt at the tiny pub she graciously tended for nearly two decades, nor is it limited to the the small village she lived in almost all her adult life.
 
Noble characters willing to stand up for what they believe are rare in this world we've created, and whether dead or alive their decency and humanity serves to inspire others to behave nobly as well.
 
You can't have too many of such types; you can't bear to lose even just one of them.
 
In many ways now the world we know has grown suddenly small over the past 15 to 20 years, and word travels fast as a consequence. We can thank satellites and cell phone technology for our shrinking universe, and, of course, the internet.
 
In the bars and alleyways and kitchens of Lambertville New Jersey, and thousands of miles away via chatrooms, blogs, and discussion forums, there is a rumor circulating that Sarah Majoras didn't fall into the water by accident.
 
All over the planet people are saying Majoras was murdered, and they want the police to investigate her suspicious death. They think that her friend David Anderson's 2000 drowning in the same area of the canal--coming from the same bar where both were employed, walking the same route, to the same place, to see the same person, at the same hour--defies coincidence.
 
And yet a small but very vocal minority are saying nay to this, opening troll accounts on busy web boards where the case is being actively debated and interjecting that such discussions "are not helpful." 

It is their mission, as they see it, to derail any and all conversations concerning the possibility of foul play in the Majoras disappearance and drowning. 

None of them leave their names, of course, or even say what sex they are, but they do identify themselves as belonging to the tight-knit group of friends that included Majoras, Anderson, and the man these two decedents were both going home to when they each went missing and then died.
 
They are grieving for their dead friend, the trolls claim, and any inquest into that death will only drive their pain deeper and divide the community in the process. Moreover, they've known the man that everybody, everywhere now suspects of wrongdoing "for years and years." Therefore he is clearly innocent.
 
Life is awkward like this at times, making it difficult for good people to decide what honorable course of action they should be taking, because, understandably, nobody wants to make waves unnecessarily. Nobody wants to unduly distress another person, especially if that person doesn't deserve it.
 
What's more, it's risky sticking to your guns in the face of stiff opposition, and if you're not used to taking that risk each and every day, if you're not accustomed to making a stand and not giving even one inch to those who oppose it, well, then, you're suddenly in uncharted territory. Leaderless.
 
It'd be great when that happens to be able to consult with someone who does this sort of thing everyday. Someone who has always known their own mind and, no matter what others may say or think, follows through undaunted each and every time.

Someone who is used to shouting "damn the torpedoes" whenever it comes to confronting wrong and doing right, even if it does make some folks initially uncomfortable and, worse, forever alienates a few of them.

Someone who's always been unwavering in their convictions their entire life. An "incredibly special person" who is "capable of bringing the whole community together" and guiding them in the right direction, and......
 
 
I wonder what Sarah would do?