Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host Ashley Flowers and I'm Brett and I want to tell you all to brace yourself because today

I'm going to tell you a story that stretches across time, distance, and even the boundaries of belief.

The more I read about this story, the more I feel like that meme of Charlie Day with like the crazy eyes next to the string wall because

depending on what you believe hundreds of mysterious drownings across the United States could very well be connected.

For over 20 years, young college aged men have been going missing only to turn up dead in local waterways.

Now police think these cases are just tragic accidents, but a small group of investigators have long believed there's something else at work.

Something much more sinister that leads back to one huge question.

Is the smiley face killer or killers real?

In early 1997, a New York City police detective named Kevin Ganon is working in the missing person squad when he gets assigned to work the case of a 20 year old man named Patrick McNeill who's been missing since after midnight on February 17th.

Kevin's a veteran in the department and so he and the other officers on the case go about the usual steps in any missing person's case to put together a timeline of Patrick's last known movements.

Kevin and his team learn that on the night he vanished Patrick, who's a junior at Fordham University in the Bronx, was out drinking with his buddies at the Dapper Dog Bar in Manhattan.

That was known for having a pretty like hand wavy policy about checking IDs and serving underage drinkers.

So as Patrick's friends tell police around midnight that night Patrick went to the bathroom to throw up and then came back and told his friends that he was going to go catch the subway back to the Bronx so he could just get back to campus and sleep it off.

Now one of his female friends volunteered to go with him, but she said listen, hold up just a second, I'd use the bathroom first.

Then his friends think that at this time when the girl goes to the bathroom that Patrick headed outside to get some air to like start to sober up except none of his friends actually saw him leave the bar.

They just make this assumption because one second he's there and then the next he's not.

And when his friend went outside looking for him a few minutes later Patrick was nowhere to be found and no one had seen or heard from him since.

Kevin finds some witnesses who put Patrick outside the Dapper Dog right within this time frame which seems to confirm his friend's idea about him going outside to wait.

But he wasn't just standing there. The witnesses say that he started walking away from the bar and get this.

They also say that Patrick was being followed by Hill.

Nobody knows. According to Nicole Egan's piece in the Daily Beast, these witnesses tell Kevin about a man and a woman sitting in a double parked car outside the bar kind of like they're waiting for somebody.

And then when Patrick comes out and starts walking south on second avenue, they start following him in their car.

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