Five Victims
The first, and the oldest, was Chuck Blatz, a 28-year-old veteran of the military who had come to La Crosse for the annual October Fest. His friends last saw the 5-foot-10, 130-pound Blatz alive around midnight on Saturday, September 29, 1997, at Sneakers, a popular downtown bar. Five days later, on October 3, his body was pulled from the river after a duck hunter found him. Blatz, who had a reputation as a strong swimmer and had had scuba lessons, was missing a sock and one of his black sneakers.
Two days later, Tony Skifton disappeared. As Conte wrote in Stuff, "Tony had a reputation for getting drunk and passing out early. He was the guy everyone would pounce on with magic markers so he'd wake up with writing all over his face."
Skifton was last seen alive at 2:30 a.m. on October 5, 1997, when he left a party carrying a case of beer. He was found five days later, floating in Swift Creek not far from a known gay cruising area. His pants were unzipped and his bladder was empty, leading authorities to speculate that he may have stopped to relieve himself and tumbled into the frigid waters. But most puzzling was the fact that the case of beer was missing and has never been recovered.
Nathan Kampfer, victim
The next to die was Nathan Kampfer, a baseball player who was attending nearby Viterbo College on an academic scholarship. At 5-foot-10 and about 150 pounds, he bore a striking resemblance to the other two missing boys. Though he was known to take a drink, Kampfer was not regarded by his friends as wild, nor was he particularly belligerent when he was drunk. But on the night of February 22, 1998, friends have said, Kampfer turned up drunk at a downtown pub called Brother's Bar after having DJ'd a local party. When the bartender refused to serve him, he became agitated, authorities said, and even, as Conte reported, "cursed at the bouncer after being escorted out of the bar." In the Kampfer case, it seems, there was a possibility for police to intervene. Police were summoned and they picked Kampfer up, authorities have confirmed, but rather than lock him up for disorderly conduct, they released him at 2 a.m. Not long afterwards, his hat, wallet and four citations the police officer had written charging him with disorderly conduct were all found neatly arranged on the deck of a riverboat gift shop. His body was found 42 days later Authorities believed the evidence strongly suggested that Kampfer had committed suicide. But the public remained skeptical.
Then Geesey died. Authorities also suspected that he might have been suicidal when he disappeared on April 11, 1999. He had, after all, been hospitalized overnight in the past for observation and had four shallow, self-inflicted scars on his arms. But when a pair of fishermen discovered Geesey's body 41 days later, his friends and his family all insisted that the young man was not suicidal and that there had to be more to his death than authorities were willing to admit.
Then came Dion, and at long last, all the public doubt, the fear and the mistrust, overflowed.
