Only the River Knows

Men Under Water

He is not alone in that opinion.

Pat Brown

"There are more serial killers out there than we know and more people are killed by serial killers than we realize," says Pat Brown, an investigator and founder of the Sexual Homicide Exchange.

Brown, a criminal profiler and star in the series I, Detective, is perfectly willing to concede that there are a great many reasons to be skeptical that a serial killer would turn to drowning as a method to slake his thirst for murder. "It isn't terribly convenient," she says. "That's why serial killers have such difficulties with it. It's a great idea but it's damned hard to find those bodies of water when you need them so you have to bring somebody back and try to get them into your bathtub which is not the easiest thing in the world. Unless you're Jeffrey Dahmer."

Jeffrey Dahmer

But that does not mean, she says, that there are not candidates out there, serial killers in training, perhaps, who eroticize the act of drowning, and fantasize about becoming the next Dahmer.

In fact, over the past few years, Brown has carefully monitored one man in particular.

Christopher Jenkins

Though she is quick to point out that the man - both Stuff and Crime Library have decided to withhold his name because he has not been charged in connection with the case - is not formally a suspect in the case, he does in many respects, she says, fit the profile of the kind of man who might be capable of the kind of crimes believed by many to have taken place in La Crosse. In fact, she says, she first stumbled across the man while investigating a similar case, the death of Chris Jenkins, a 21-year-old college student, one of several students, who drowned in Minnesota. Brown -- along with Chuck Loesch, a private investigator hired by Jenkins' family - contend that they have determined that the John Doe, a sometime-male prostitute, lived in Minneapolis, just a few blocks from where Jenkins disappeared, around the time of his death. Brown contends that there is also evidence that the man has spent time in Wisconsin.