Chelsea Wood

Hey, Serial Killers listeners, producer Chelsea here. I wanted to tell you about some new information I discovered since working on this episode. Just a few days after we recorded, author Hallie Rubenhold released a book about the case titled Story of a Murder, The Wives, The Mistress, and Dr. Crippen. As its title suggests, the book focuses on the women in Holly Harvey Crippen's life.

Information about his first wife, Charlotte, was sparse when I researched this episode. In Story of a Murder, Rubenhold fills in those gaps. Charlotte immigrated from Ireland in the mid-1880s and settled in New York City. She trained to be a nurse, then got a job at a homeopathic hospital. That's where she met Holly Harvey Crippen.

The couple married in 1887, and Charlotte quit her nursing career to join her husband as he jumped from job to job, city to city. Rubenhold discovered evidence suggesting Crippen may have been abusing his wife. Neighbors witnessed Crippen throwing a book at Charlotte. They claimed she lived in fear of her husband. The couple welcomed a boy in 1889, but never had another child.

Charlotte sent letters to her brother alleging Crippen had been performing unwanted abortions on her. In one letter, Charlotte wrote, "'If I die, it will be his fault.'" Charlotte's death in 1892 was officially ruled apoplexy, a stroke, but hindsight certainly raises some questions. Charlotte was only 33 and reportedly healthy.

Crippen had access to various poisons through his homeopathic practice. That would be the method he would later use to kill his second wife, Cora. Could he have also murdered his first wife the same way? Ultimately, the real answer is likely lost to time, but at least now we have a fuller picture of Charlotte's story.

Another important woman in Dr. Crippen's life was his second spouse, Cora Turner, which was just one of the stage names she used in her career. Crippen painted Cora out to be a talentless dilettante who bled him dry with her penchant for high fashion. But in her book, Rubenhold found several positive reviews of Cora's performances.

And Dr. Crippen's problems with money date back to long before he even met Cora. Finally, there's Crippen's mistress, Ethel Lenev. While she was briefly jailed after her and Crippen's transatlantic escape, she was not found to have taken part in the murder or even known anything about it. After her release, Ethel lived the next decade or so in relative obscurity.

She got married and had two children, but never told her family about her past. Rubenhold's research uncovered some interviews Ethel granted throughout the 1920s. Being acquitted of the murder didn't stop the press and locals from believing she knew something about it. She wanted to put a stop to the rumors once and for all. But Rubenholdt says the interviews only fan the flames.

Like her one-time lover, Ethel's story changed often. Sometimes she would insist Cora was still alive. Other times she claimed Cora's death was little more than an accident. She also never publicly expressed remorse or sympathy for Cora's death, only an insistence that Ethel herself was the victim, robbed of a happily ever after with Dr. Crippen.

Story of a murder does help enrich our understanding of the Crippen case, but it doesn't answer every question. If the doctor did kill his wife, what was the motive? Was it premeditated? A crime of passion? A total accident? And those questions only exist if the body in the cellar was really Cora's. Forensic toxicologist John Trestrail's examination found no genetic connection to Cora's relatives.

He discovered the body might not even be female. Turi King is a renowned geneticist who led the verification of Richard III's body in 2012. She acknowledges Trestrail's findings may be correct, but she also contends there's several issues with the way the evidence was tested. the DNA tests were done on a single sample in a single lab.

King says current standards of practice require testing at least two samples in two different labs. That helps validate the results and also buffer against possible contamination of the DNA. Technology has come such a long way in the last 15 years that King suggests the DNA be re-examined in depth to put to bed the question, whose body was in the cellar?

It's that question, the many unknowns, the cinematic chase, and the historical use of a telegraph that make this story so intriguing, even 115 years later. It's why, just a few days after we recorded this episode, Crippen's leather-bound prayer book sold at a British auction for 240 pounds, or approximately 318 US dollars.

It's why I will continue to follow the case, and if there are any updates, you can be sure to hear about them here on Serial Killers.

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Hi, I'm Chelsea, and I'm one of the producers of Serial Killers. I've been working on this show for five years, and for nearly just as long, I've wanted to cover the Smiley Face Killers story. It's fascinating to me, especially because I have a small connection to it.

I went to undergrad in North Texas, and not long after I graduated, one of my classmates drowned in Lady Bird Lake while on a trip to Austin. In the weeks after their death, I learned there had long been rumors of a serial killer in the Austin area. It was said the killer targeted young men, drugged them, and left their bodies in Lady Bird Lake.

Some believed my classmate was one of the victims of what became known as the Rainy Street Killer, named after a street near the lake where many of Austin's bars are located. Their death was ruled accidental. But a few years later, I learned about the smiley face killer's theory, and it gave me pause. Could my classmate's death be related?

There are so many layers to this theory, I feel like I need help dissecting it all. So I'm excited to bring on Kevin Greenlee and Anya Kane, hosts of the podcast, The Murder Sheet. Kevin is an intellectual property attorney, and Anya's background is in journalism, at the nexus point of business and crime.

Together, they look at cases through a legal and journalistic lens, applying what they've learned in their careers to the stories they examine on their podcasts. I asked Anya and Kevin for their initial thoughts on the smiley face killer's theory.

Researchers have long raised questions about the smiley face killer's theory. In particular, the Center for Homicide Research published a direct rebuttal of the theory. To unpack these criticisms, I asked Kevin and Anya to apply their investigative skills and help me answer some questions. One of the first questions on my mind was the importance of the smiley face symbol.

Because, well, they're everywhere.

The same group of researchers found that not only did the smiley faces differ from case to case, so too did the locations of the graffiti. Sometimes a smiley face was found in close proximity to the body, sometimes much further away.

I decided to put that idea to the test. I live in Los Angeles and know that the LA river is pretty well known for its graffiti. So on a sunny Saturday, I took a stroll along the river and kept my eyes peeled for smiley faces. I walked for just over two miles and counted seven smiley faces and luckily zero bodies. So is the smiley face a mark of a killer or just a ubiquitous image?

Kevin raised a good point, but when I looked into it, I found out that when GHB is found in a body, it could indicate any number of things. Because GHB is sometimes taken recreationally, it's possible some of the men in this case took the drug knowingly. GHB also occurs naturally.

The body produces it in small amounts, but after death, the decomposition process can actually add more of the substance into a person's system. Testing isn't really accurate enough to show whether the GHB was in the bloodstream before or after death.

There's one important thing that the global death investigators urged, that unless there is an eyewitness to the contrary, every death should be treated like a homicide. Their work has yet to definitively link all the deaths to a group of serial killers, but it did alter the outcome for one family. Chris Jenkins grew up in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

According to his mom, Jan, he was the jokester of the family, always looking to make everyone around him laugh. In 2002, he was 21, a star lacrosse player, and a business student due to graduate early from the University of Minnesota. On Halloween night, Chris put on his costume and went out to Lone Tree Bar in Minneapolis. Around 1230 a.m., he was asked to leave the bar, though it's unclear why.

According to GDI, police initially didn't put many resources toward the search for Chris. Almost a week after his disappearance, the Jenkins family was desperate, so they paid for search dogs out of pocket.

On February 27, 2003, Chris's body was found in the Mississippi River near the Third Avenue Bridge. The medical examiner's office suspected Chris had drowned, but evidence was inconclusive, so they ruled the cause of death unknown. The manner of death, whether it was a homicide, suicide, or accidental, also couldn't be determined.

But most law enforcement officers believed Chris had either taken his own life or accidentally fallen into the river. Chris's parents were devastated. They believed foul play was involved, so they contacted Kevin Gannon at GDI. And Kevin agreed. He believed Chris Jenkins was murdered. Kevin and his investigators pointed to a few different pieces of evidence.

According to the search dog handlers, the bloodhounds had followed Chris's scent from Lone Tree Bar to a parking garage, where a small amount of blood was found. From there, the scent led to the middle of the street, and then it was gone. This suggested Chris may have been driven away in a car.

The Bloodhounds didn't, however, detect Chris' scent on the bridge from which police theorized Chris either jumped or fell. He was also not spotted on video footage from the bridge, or anywhere nearby for that matter. Second, Chris had a high level of GHB in his blood, higher than what occurs naturally during decomposition, according to Kevin Gannon.

The evidence led Kevin to believe that Chris Jenkins had been drugged, abducted and driven away in a van, held for a period of time, then suffocated and placed in the river.

To date, I can't find any records of a smiley face. But in 2006, Minneapolis police announced something shocking. Chris's death had been reclassified as a homicide. Authorities said the change was due to information gathered from inmate testimony in an interview with an eyewitness. But they didn't offer more details.

They did, however, apologize to his parents for mistakes made during the investigation. Later, Milwaukee Magazine reported an informant told police a man named Jeremy Alford had boasted about killing Chris Jenkins. And he didn't have an alibi for Halloween 2002. He was supposed to meet with his sister for trick-or-treating, but didn't show.

He and his brother Luis had been convicted of the murder of a man named Douglas Miller. Jeremy and Luis killed Douglas and left his body in a burning mobile home. Later, Douglas' van was found in an Iowa river. Police in Iowa and Minnesota discovered Jeremy had ties to a gang known as the Dealers of Death, which may have had over 300 members.

When the FBI questioned Jeremy, he didn't mention Chris Jenkins, but said the gang was responsible for at least 40 murders of young men in Minnesota and Iowa. Strangely, one of the informants in the case with ties to Jeremy and the dealers of death had the last name of Smiley.

The FBI also didn't find Jeremy Alford to be credible. No charges were ever filed against Jeremy or anyone else for Chris's death. And as of 2024, the Chris Jenkins case is the only one in GDI's database that has been ruled a homicide. Kevin and Anya came into this story as skeptics, two people who wanted facts to back up the theory.

After dissecting the theory with them, I wanted to know, where do they stand now?

I came into this story wanting some answers to my classmate's death. But with that desire, I can see how easy it is to be seduced by theories. It means wanting to believe something, even if the facts butt up against that belief.

I may never know what happened to my classmate, but I do have a better understanding of investigatory approaches and why, no matter the suspected cause of death, it's important to avoid tunnel vision. With that, I wanted some final wisdom from Kevin and Anya. Why did the smiley face killer theory generate so much interest with people? And what does it say about us?