Those rumors had receded in the months and years following Geesey's death. But they all came flooding back when Dion's body was found. In fact, a week after Dion's body was recovered, the rumors became so pervasive that Kondracki and the police department took the unusual step of calling a town meeting. The meeting was televised, and residents grilled police, university and health officials. Among those they peppered with provocative questions was Dan Marcou, a La Crosse police lieutenant who, tragically, was also the uncle of one of the five boys who died in the river.

As Conte reported the scene, Marcou "fought back tears as he chastised the crowd."

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"The La Crosse Police Department investigated all of these (deaths) thoroughly," she quoted Marcou as saying. "I have to listen to people applaud at the thought that my nephew was killed by a serial killer. This community is like an alcoholic. It would rather think that a killer is on the loose than admit that it's got a drinking problem."

Perhaps Marcou was right. Perhaps the serial killer that stalked the young men of La Crosse was nothing more than their own penchant for excess. There is little question that the manner of death drowning would be unusual for a serial killer, to say the least. Serial killers as a whole, strive to control every aspect of their victims' demise. It would be a rare serial killer indeed, several experts told the magazine, who would be willing to trust the vagaries of the river to finish off his prey.

But as Stuff magazine reported, there was an equally compelling argument to be made that "police might have too readily dismissed that a killer or killers were responsible for some or all of the deaths simply because it seemed unlikely." What's more, the magazine found, there were strong indications that police "failed to thoroughly investigate any of the deaths as possible homicides."

Even more compelling, the magazine found, there was at least one person, a member of an odd subculture that gets sexual excitement from the act of drowning, who in many respects might have fit a profile for the type of person who could have committed a series of murders like those the residents of La Crosse feared had taken place there. In fact, that man had already been identified as a "person of interest" in at least one similar drowning up-river in Minnesota. And yet, even now, six months after Stuff first alerted police in La Crosse to his existence, nine months after Dion's body was found, and nearly a decade after the first of the town's young men turned up dead, authorities acknowledge that they still have not interviewed the man, nor have they yet completed a timeline of his activities to determine whether he was in the La Crosse area at the time of any of the deaths there.

As a result, there is as of yet no hard evidence to suggest that a serial killer is at work in La Crosse, Wisconsin. But it is also equally true that police there have not yet done the work to determine conclusively that the people of La Crosse and the students at the University are wrong in believing that there is.