Did you catch the series on Oxygen devoted to the search for answers in the “Smiley Face Killings”? If your answer to that question was “huh?” then it’s possible you have never heard of the Smiley Face Killings. A quick recap, then: Since the 90s, dozens of young men have gone missing under eerily similar circumstances, only for their bodies to turn up later in bodies of water. The majority of these cases were ruled “undetermined” in terms of the cause of death, while some were dismissed as accidental drownings. At or near the sites where the victims were located, a smiley face was usually found spray-painted onto a wall or some other surface. There is evidence, considerable evidence, that the crimes were in fact murders and the smiley face was the killer’s calling card. If they are murders, though, who could be responsible?
The crimes are so spread out it seems unlikely that any one serial killer could be responsible. A more troubling possibility, and a far more likely one, would be that there’s a cadre of serial killers working together for reasons of their own. Are they a cult of some kind? Is it some bizarre gang initiation? What’s really going on here?