Chelsea Wood
speaker
42 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Chelsea Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén · The Smiley Face Murder Theory (with Murder Sheet) · 18 Nov 2024
podcast
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?
Showing 21–40 of 42 · page 2 of 3
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