Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt for Justice (2019–…): Season 1, Episode 6 - Todd Geib - full transcript
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- Since 1997, hundreds
of college-aged men
have gone missing, vanished.
Almost all of the victims
are top students and athletes
who disappeared after
a night out with friends.
They are later found drowned
in a body of water.
Near where most of the bodies
are recovered,
smiley faces.
♪ ♪
We believe these deaths may
all be connected;
the work of an organized group
of serial killers.
We believe the victims may
have been drugged,
abducted, killed on land,
and eventually dumped
in the water.
With the help of preeminent
crime and forensic experts
from all over the nation,
our goal is to uncover
new evidence
to reopen these closed cases
and compel the authorities to
investigate them as homicides,
like the case of Todd Geib,
who was found dead in 2005.
He's part of a cluster
of young men
who have been found dead
in suspicious drownings
across the Midwest.
Smiley face graffiti was found
later on Todd's tombstone.
We believe that Todd
was not only murdered,
but that he may be a victim
of the Smiley Face Killers.
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
- On June 11, 2005,
22-year-old Todd Geib went
to an orchard party
in rural Michigan.
21 days later, Todd's body
was found floating upright
in a private, secluded lake.
The medical examiner ruled
his death a drowning.
The autopsy report states
only moderate decomposition,
but Todd's body
was supposedly floating
in a warm summer lake
for a period of 21 days.
In warm lake water,
Todd's body should have had
severe decomposition.
Was the death of Todd Geib
an accident or a homicide?
We believe this case
may be linked to
the Smiley Face Killers.
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
Todd Geib, 22-year old male,
white.
He was going to a party
in an orchard with friends.
Few drinks, not even
highly intoxicated.
He was seen leaving
the party at midnight.
He was supposed to be
on his way home.
And 21 days later he's found
in Lake Ovidhall,
which was on the property,
in the opposite direction
from his house.
Medical examiner says
it's undetermined;
the police think it looks like
a drowning.
The police believe Todd left
the orchard party
and wandered into
Lake Ovidhall and drowned.
- What is it that specifically
bothers you about this case?
- There's three red flags
that are really compelling.
The level of decomposition
from the body.
The medical examiner's report
states
he was only moderately
decomposed.
After 21 days in the water,
Todd should have
advanced decomposition.
I mean, he should be
completely black.
- What about insects?
Certainly an environment
like that in the summertime,
insects would get in, you know,
any openings in his body.
- The rural environment
for this lake,
there should be water insects.
So we'll have to find somebody
that can tell us more about
what the ecology
of a lake like this
can do to a body.
When you read
the autopsy report,
there is no mention of insects.
So a forensic entomologist
can bring to the table
some physical evidence
that we can show to
the police investigator
there weren't any insects
on the body
and how that is remarkable.
It's an anomaly.
What's really strange,
according to
the medical examiner,
he had Desipramine
and Amitriptyline
in his system.
These are prescribed
medications for
a whole host of
psychological disorders,
but we really need to find
someone with a PhD
in Pharmacology
and find out what's going on
with this.
- And how did these drugs
get into his system?
The prevailing theory that Todd
fell into the lake and drowned
doesn't make sense.
So we need to find some
concrete forensic evidence
to try to figure out
what actually happened to him
and could he have been in
the lake for 21 days.
- In the police reports,
canines tracked him
from the orchard party site,
down the trail,
back to White Road,
the gravel road,
on the south side.
And at that point,
they lose the scent.
So what happened to him?
- The fact that the scent
just stops, you know,
and then he's gone.
So I mean, that fits
the pattern 100%.
Obviously, his mom, Kathy,
has always been tormented by
the whole thing.
She's adamant about the fact
that there's a lot of material
from the case that
was never really
investigated by the police.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
Can you believe it's
almost 13 years?
- Yeah, it's been a long time.
- How you doing?
- You know, I miss my son.
Obviously, we want--still
want answers
after all these years.
And for us,
because we have no answers,
it's kind of like we never
get to leave the gravestone.
You know?
It's always questions.
Always questions.
- Unfortunately,
I never got to meet Todd.
- He was like a lot
of 22-year-olds.
I mean, I've seen it
with a lot of young people;
you have your ups and downs.
He was a great kid,
and actually,
in lieu of all of this
that has happened,
sometimes I'm afraid people
lose track of who Todd was.
He was fun-loving.
He was athletic.
He loved his family a lot.
He was a real family guy.
I miss so many things
about him.
I miss him walking in
the door and going, "Hey, Ma!"
Sometimes I'm in a store,
and I hear a young man
say that to his mom,
and it hurts.
How could this happen?
How could my big, strong,
handsome,
wonderful son
be gone?
And God gives you a numbness
that gets you through
what you gotta get through,
but, um,
the pain, there's no words.
It's like, if you sawed off
all my limbs,
I don't think it would have
any more pain
than your heart does
when you lose a child.
- Kathy, like the majority
of the mothers that
we've worked with
in the cases,
are the real linchpin of
the whole investigation.
Because when you have
the parents,
but specifically the moms,
it's a crucial piece that
helps to push the case
into another level.
- I'm asking you to help me
insist this case is opened
and investigated.
I will never stop fighting
for Todd.
I believe some day this will be
broken open.
And what has been done
in the darkness
will come to light.
I want closure.
The gravestone says
June 12th...
I don't know
if he died on June 12th.
I believe there was no way
Todd was in that water
for three weeks.
I, myself, got to see
a recovery picture,
which was very hard to see,
but he was not in
the condition
to be in there three weeks.
I did my research
and found out what condition
people would be like
if they were
in the water three weeks.
So where was he
for three weeks?
There's a lot of mystery
behind that,
and I want answers.
- We wanna try to provide
that for you.
That's why we're here.
- Okay.
I read in a magazine
about Kevin Gannon
and the cases he was
looking at,
and it was identical to Todd's.
So I called Kevin, and then
I believe it was after that
we found a smiley face
on Todd's grave.
When I saw the smiley face
on his grave,
my first initial thing was,
"Somebody's playing with me."
Um, but then we found
a smiley face on a tree
close to where Todd was found.
It was an evil smiley face.
And there are people who saw it
that fall after Todd died.
- And where'd you find that?
- Well, it was right by
Witch's Corner, by the lake.
- Did it make you feel
uneasy, uncomfortable?
- Just sick.
- Yeah.
- You know?
- It's been a long time.
I mean, you waited 13 years
there's still no activity.
And we wanna try to move this
forward for you,
and we wanna figure out what's
the best way to do that.
- We're gonna go start
things up again.
- That sounds--that
sounds great.
I don't want vengeance;
that belongs to God.
I want justice for Todd.
- Our canoe that we keep
right over there,
we come down there
and it was gone,
and when I got it,
it was full of beer cans.
- If Todd's body was
in this lake for 21 days,
the carcass gets consumed
pretty quickly
and dramatically.
- How 'bout yourself, sir,
what is your gut feeling on it?
- It was foul play
and most people guess
that it was a murder.
[dramatic music]
[dramatic percussive music]
♪ ♪
- Watch your steps, guys.
This is pretty muddy and marshy
along the edge of
the lake here.
- Yeah, I see that.
The prevailing theory is
Todd was at the orchard party,
wandered off and wound up
in the lake and drowned.
We're gonna start at the lake,
'cause that's where Todd
was recovered.
Jim Wilde found Todd's body.
- You said you found Todd,
correct?
- My wife and I did, yes.
- Okay.
Can you tell us
the circumstances
surrounding that?
- We come out in the afternoon,
one afternoon,
decided to get a little
peace and quiet
on the lake together,
and we come in
off the back side.
When we got to the top
of the hill,
my wife looked out and said,
"Hey, look, there's a beaver."
And I stopped and I looked
and I said,
"The beaver's not moving."
And at that point,
it kind of went through my head
that Todd had not been found.
♪ ♪
- Did you feel there was
anything unusual
about the way he was in
the water?
- His head was up.
He was kinda leaning forward
like this, coming across here,
so I could see his shoulder.
And I could see the top
of his head
and a little bit of his face.
- So the water's deep enough
where his whole body
would be...
- Oh, yeah, he was--he was
straight up and down.
- A normal body, after
a certain period of time,
the gases in the body rise
and the body floats
horizontally,
face down, in the water.
Todd's body didn't do that.
He was floating vertically,
straight up and down
in the water.
Todd's body position is
totally contrary to any other
drowning victim that
I've ever seen.
He's like, standing almost
in the water.
- Were you on the lake
prior to that day
or the day before or within
the last--the three weeks?
- My brother actually was
on it the night before
with his son, fishing.
And when you fish this lake,
you fish all the way around
the edges.
They had seen nothing.
- Did you notice any other
boats in the lake
that--when you were out there?
- Our canoe that we keep
right over there,
we come down there
and it was gone.
So we had to take
and go get another boat
and come over here to get it.
And when I got it,
it was full of beer cans.
So somebody had gotten
over there
and brought it over here.
- Was that unusual?
- Yeah, nobody takes your boat.
I've never had that
happen before.
- Never?
Did the police ever come down
and talk to you?
Like, and give you, like,
a formal interview?
Anything like that,
where they sat down?
- No.
[tense music]
- Jim's brother was fishing
till 9:00 the night before
he was recovered.
They saw nothing--no bodies,
no fish, no nothing.
So where was the body
the night before?
And why wasn't there more
attention paid to the canoe
that was supposedly tied up
the night before,
but was found on
the other side of the lake
with the empty beer cans
in them?
- There's no way he was in
the water 21 days.
Think about it, they were
fishing the night before.
The body was not there.
- Also, the way he was
floating is very unusual.
Bodies float face down.
- Right.
- Whereas Todd was
actually standing up almost.
- Doesn't even seem possible
for him to go in the lake
right where we were
talking to Jim by the dock.
- And his boat that he tied up
floated to the other side
of the lake.
- So it floated by itself,
that's the prevailing theory?
- And it drank its own beer.
♪ ♪
The fact of the matter is,
the people we've spoken to
said they were at that
lake the night before,
didn't see him.
If there's no body in a lake
for 20 days
and one shows up on
the 21st day,
and there's a boat that was
tied up by the owner,
and then the next day when
the body was recovered,
it's on the other side of
the lake with beer cans in it,
and he didn't do it,
someone else was there.
- He was put in
the water afterward.
- The canoe tells me someone
was there;
someone used the boat.
Maybe they used the canoe
to place Todd into the water.
- And like you said,
if the body wasn't there
the night before,
how did it get there?
These are pieces to the puzzle
that we're trying to solve.
The next step for us is to
find some scientific evidence
that we can bring to
authorities to force them
to treat Todd's case as
a homicide,
instead of an accident.
- A step in the right
direction, my brother.
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
- In warm lake water,
Todd's body should have
had severe decomposition.
Decomposition is not
an exact science.
It's related to temperature
and time.
We believe that a body
in water for 21 days
in the summertime
would have much more extensive
decomposition.
Thanks, Doctor.
Thank you for meeting,
I appreciate this.
- Yeah, good to meet you guys.
- Dr. Eric Benbow is
a forensic biologist
from Michigan State University
who has agreed
to take a look at Todd's case.
- Now, what you have there is
some pictures from
the body recovery,
as well as the autopsy.
In his autopsy report,
there's no mention of insects,
debris or sand
or anything on the body.
You don't see any
in the photographs.
- In my experiences
in aquatic cases, as well,
and terrestrial cases,
any kind of insect evidence
is always reported
in the autopsy report.
- And there's very little
levels of decomposition on him
from what we've observed.
- It's interesting;
I'm looking at the algae
on the clothing.
And it's
long filamentous algae,
and what I can tell is,
if there's an algal biofilm
on parts of the clothing
that looks fairly clean.
- And what does that mean?
That means there's some kind of
algae film?
Is that what you mean?
- Yeah, algae,
like a slime film.
- Right.
- If Todd's body was in
this lake for 21 days or so,
I would imagine you should have
more biofilm,
more slime build-up.
The other thing, it looks like
part of his head was exposed.
- Right.
- Yes.
Half his head
and his shoulder.
- There should be insects
in the clothing,
even in, like, the mouth,
in and on the ears,
in the folds of the skin.
That's where these flies will
typically lay their eggs.
And they've evolved to be
attracted to dead things,
within minutes, to hours,
to a day.
Our work, aquatic decomposition
studies, have shown that
the carcass gets consumed
pretty quickly
and dramatically.
- Entomology, bug science,
is so important to determining
how long that body's
been there,
'cause it takes X number
of hours
for the flies to find it,
then lay the eggs
and then hatch and so forth.
I'm hoping that Dr. Benbow
can bring some
physical evidence
to the table
to show how it is
absolutely impossible
for a body to be lying in water
during the summer for 21 days
and not have any insects on it.
I think a visit to the lake
would make sense.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- What do you think, Doc?
- It's bigger than I expected,
actually.
So damselflies,
so this is indication
that they're here.
There we go.
- Where is it?
- It's right there.
What I'm seeing here is
pretty good diversity
of aquatic insects.
So if they're in here,
they're predators;
it indicates that
there's a lot of prey.
I would imagine if
a body was in here,
it would be colonized with
some kind of aquatic insects.
- How would you go
about testing
things that does impact
the rate at which
a body decomposes--
the hypothesis of
whether or not he was here
for three weeks?
- Ideally, you wanted to do it
with human bodies.
Alternatively,
what's been used most commonly
for human bodies is
swine carcasses.
Swine carcasses are
really similar in terms of
the way that they decompose.
The skin is very similar,
you can put clothing on
the pigs,
clothing that resembled
what the victim was wearing.
You could test whether or not
there's biofilm developing
over the course of three weeks.
And then you'd evaluate
all of the insects that
presumably would be colonizing
inside--in the water.
But also, when the body
becomes exposed,
are they colonizing quickly,
within a day?
Is it two days?
Is it three days?
Or do they never colonize?
- If we can prove that
it's absolutely impossible
for a body to be lying
in a pond in the summer
for 21 days
and then be discovered
with no insects on it,
then that should convince
local law enforcement
to reexamine this death.
- So if we were able to do
this experiment...
- Right.
- Um, and I could determine
the timing
of insect colonization
and the algae biofilm,
I'd be able to have
a better assessment of
what happened to Todd's body.
♪ ♪
- Can you overdose on this type
of drug?
- You sure can.
- I think any mother of
a child would understand
you can't walk away.
You have to find out
what happened to your baby.
[somber music]
♪ ♪
- Hi, Kathy.
Mike and I wanna give you
an update on
some of the stuff that we've
been working on.
Doc and I went down
and had a meeting with
a forensic entomologist.
He has a test that
he wants to do
where we would be able to tell
the length of time
that Todd was in the water.
Dr. Benbow brought
new information
to the investigation.
We never thought of the fact
that there was a possibility
that there was a time element
to algae growth
that would help us to determine
how long a body was in water.
Do you still have any of
Todd's clothing?
- Yes, we do.
These are the clothes
and Toddy's shoe that
we got back from the police.
- That's all they gave you
back, everything?
- Yes.
- This is what he's looking for
right now.
He's going to check the level
of the algae
and the insect activity.
And then he'll be able to know
how many days
that algae took to grow.
- I can just say one thing,
when we did get the clothes,
there was no algae on them.
- Visible to the eye, right?
- Visible to the eye.
- Obviously, that's something,
you know,
we obviously wanna
follow up on.
- I'm thrilled, should have
been done 13 years ago.
I'm thrilled that someone's
looking into it.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
There are just no words
that a mother can give
when you lose a child.
He was still my boy.
He was my boy
and he was in trouble.
I miss his laughter.
I miss his love of life.
Just hearing his footsteps
coming in at night
when he was with us
and bringing his problems
to me.
I think any mother of a child
would understand
that you just can't walk away
from it.
As difficult as it is,
it's something you will never
give up on.
You can't walk away.
You have to find out
what happened to your baby.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- So the goal for this
experiment is going to be
to replicate Todd's case
using multiple swine carcasses.
So we know swine carcasses
are the best representation
of human decomposition.
- In order to bring this case
forward,
we have to have some
scientific evidence
to substantiate what
we believe transpired.
We need to prove that Todd
was not in the water
for 21 days.
- So what we wanna
determine is,
do terrestrial insects colonize
on the first day or second day
or third day?
And evaluate any kind of
aquatic insects
that are part of the clothing
or that are on the body.
- Well, you're saying
you're basically
gonna dress the pig, then?
- Yeah.
And then lastly, we're gonna
evaluate the algal communities,
the biofilms, the slime layers.
So at the end of
the experiment,
we should have
a really good understanding
of what a body should look like
that's been in a lake
for 21 days.
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
- The way we're gonna develop
information
like every other
investigation is,
talk to everybody and anybody.
What I wanna learn more about
is the party at the orchard
that Todd was at
the night he went missing.
- If you can take us back
13 years ago
to the night where Todd Geib
went missing...
- One of my boys had a party--
a lot of kids here
and a lot of people--
but I didn't know anything
about anybody drowning
till later.
You know, they couldn't
find him,
and we were all worried
about him and stuff,
and the whole neighborhood
was looking for him.
- So where was the lake
from here?
- Back to the north, here.
That goes to the lake.
But this--the hill was all
prickers and stuff,
and that you--it
wasn't passable.
- So even if someone
made an attempt
to try to go through,
they wouldn't have made it
through,
or they would have been all
cut up and torn up?
- They'd had been all cut up
getting through it.
They might have made it
through,
but it'd been quite a project.
- That bad?
- That's that bad.
Those rose--whatever they call
that pricker and it's bad.
They're good two inches,
inch and a half.
- Oh, wow.
- I mean they'll stab ya.
- From where
the orchard party was,
it's really tough to get down
to the lake
the way the authorities
think he went.
At that time of the year,
there's gonna be
real long thorns,
razor sharp stuff,
that if anybody
went through them,
they would definitely get cut.
And Todd's autopsy
and the autopsy photo shows
no such injuries.
To me, that means that Todd
did not
go through
the sticker bushes
and was entered into that
or placed into that lake
somewhere else.
♪ ♪
- This didn't make sense.
If he lived over at Half Moon,
which is a mile away,
he certainly would have headed
for his house,
he wouldn't have headed
for here.
- Now, correct me if
I'm wrong,
Half Moon, where he lives,
is the opposite direction
of where the lake is--
- Yes, it is.
- Where he was found.
- The police were here
with their dog,
they searched everything and...
- Did you notice that
any of the dogs
actually got a scent
and followed
in a particular direction?
- I remember 'em saying
they thought
something that way,
towards a house, south.
- Okay.
- Opposite of the lake.
- Okay.
- How 'bout yourself, sir,
what is your gut feeling on it?
- My gut feeling is it wasn't
an accident.
It was foul play,
and most people guess
that it was a murder.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Well, you know the party was
down there and so...
- And this is the way
the dogs tracked.
- This is where the dogs
followed the scent.
- Right.
- Followed it all the way
up here
from where the par--from where
the actual orchard is.
- Right.
- Where the party was.
Right to here, kept going.
Followed it, followed it,
followed it.
When he got to this point,
heading to our left,
on this dirt road to where
it meets the paved road.
- That's 37, right?
- That's 37,
that's which way he lives.
♪ ♪
This is where the dogs lost
the scent.
Right here, at the pavement,
right at 37.
- We don't know...
- We don't know--no.
- It just ended?
- No, it ended, right here.
It tells me that he either
got in the car,
or he was taken into
another vehicle,
'cause you just don't vanish.
- I think, at this point,
foul play has been suspected.
- Why do you say that?
- Because someone like that
doesn't just disappear.
- If the body floats, this is
likely what you would see.
- Oh, my God.
- Oh, man.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- From what I understand,
the prevailing theory is that
Todd Geib was at this party,
got drunk,
and fell into the lake.
But it doesn't add up,
especially since dogs followed
his scent
to the edge of the highway.
So we need to find out more
about what happened to Todd
the night he disappeared.
♪ ♪
- According to
the police reports,
one of the last locations
Todd was
before he went to
the apple orchard party
was the Kazz Bar in
downtown Casnovia.
We're gonna go to
the Kazz Bar,
and we wanna talk to
the people who work there.
You got a couple minutes
for us
you can spend with us,
down here?
- Yeah.
- Good, good.
We're looking at
the investigation of a death
of a young man, Todd Geib.
- Mm-hmm.
- You ever hear about him?
- I did.
- You did?
Did you know him?
- We were the same age,
so we had a lot--I had common
friends with him.
Same group of friends.
- Yeah.
What'd you think of him?
- Nice guy, nice guy,
very nice guy.
- Ever known to have
any problems with anybody?
Anything like that?
- Nope.
- Nothing?
- Nothing at all.
Nothing at all.
Do you remember being actually
at parties with him?
- Yeah, yeah, that's how I had
met him before, yeah.
- All right.
- It was a two-track party.
- What is a two-track?
- It's a road that has
two tracks,
that you go in the woods
and that's where--like,
the apple orchard is
a two-track party.
We'd go party out in the woods.
Um, you know, at the end of
a dead road, or...
- At these parties that
you said they happen at
various orchards and whatnot,
do you know of any recreational
drug use?
"Hey, let's--we got some pills,
let's crush 'em up."
- Um, I don't know,
everyone just drank a lot.
- Do you ever hear of
anyone break into
their grandmother's
medicine cabinet?
Now the big thing is,
what, opioids.
- You know, I don't feel like
that was an issue back then
for our generation.
In 2005, we really just drank.
There wasn't a lot of
the, you know, opioid problem,
the crushing up the pills,
or, you know,
abusing the drugs.
That was--the group
in that era just drank.
We didn't do all
the crazy stuff
to get messed up.
It was just more drinking
and keg-stands.
- In your experience here
at the bar,
no one has come in
and made reference to
anything that happened at
that party, you know...?
- I think, at this point,
foul play has been suspected.
And...
- Why do you say that?
- Because someone like that
just doesn't disappear.
Someone from a small town
that's close with family
and friends
typically doesn't just
disappear.
[tense music]
- The thing I really took
note of was
when we asked her about Todd,
she had stated that
Todd was a good guy.
She confirmed it with
her friends
who've known him for
a long time.
- I believe in her;
she said she saw him at
these orchard parties too.
But she told us that pills
weren't really prevalent.
You know, they weren't.
- It was all about the drink,
all about the beer.
- That makes it
more suspicious, even,
why Todd had all that in him.
♪ ♪
- We know from
the toxicology report
that Todd was found with
two drugs in his system
that are used to treat
depression.
I wanna talk to a licensed
pharmacist
so that I can get
a better understanding
of how these two drugs
would have physiologically
and cognitively affected him,
and whether they are
substances that
could have been used
to drug Todd.
- Hey, how can I help you
guys?
- We have a case that we've
been working on in the area,
the name is Todd Geib.
When he was recovered,
during the autopsy
and toxicology test,
he was found with a couple
of drugs in his system.
- What kind of medications
are we talking about?
- Well, he had two primary
ones, Desipramine...
- Desipramine, okay.
- And Amitriptyline.
- Both of those drugs are used
for depression.
That's their labeled use.
You can only get them written
through either psychiatrists
or primary care physicians,
so they have to have
a written prescription
in order to obtain 'em.
- Are they typically
prescribed at the same time
to the same individual?
- No, I don't normally see
those medications
or two drugs in the same class.
Usually you will have
one or the other.
It's mainly because of
additive effect.
So you would have
two Tricyclic amines
doing the same thing.
And what's that gonna cause?
That's gonna cause increased
risk for side effects,
increased risk
for hallucinations,
confusion, agitation.
- Would that be a type of drug
that somebody would use
recreationally, though?
At a party?
- No, it's not an abused drug.
It's not something that
somebody's gonna take
on a recreational basis.
They're not gonna take it
to have a euphoric feeling
or to get high;
that's not how that drug works.
- Is this the type of drug
that somebody could crush up
and, you know,
put it in a beer
unknown to the recipient?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So you'd be able to crush
this medication up
relatively easily, um,
turn it into a powder
and, you know,
put it into an open container:
beer, mixed drink, whatever
he happens to be drinking.
- So, David, what if
our individual, Todd Geib,
had almost 500 nanograms,
what kind of effect would that
have on somebody?
- You can start seeing symptoms
within an hour;
confusion, hallucinations,
cardiac arrest,
coma, seizures.
These are life-threatening
issues.
- Can you overdose
on this type of drug?
- You sure can.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- We know Todd did not have
a history of drug use,
much less, abuse,
to experiment with
these drugs in particular
at such a high dosage.
It just doesn't make any sense.
- In Todd's case,
we found out that he had
an exorbitant amount of
an anti-depressive drug in him,
which is not consistent with
the type of drug
that somebody uses to get high
at a party.
- That's not explained at all
in the autopsy or toxicology?
- It's completely--nobody's
ever looked into it.
- It's gotta be suspicious.
- It's definitely suspicious.
- So how did he get this level
of this type of drug
in his system?
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- I think you're gonna be
impressed with
the amount of activity that
we observed.
- What we need to get
the authorities
to reopen Todd's case
as a homicide
is to prove beyond
a reasonable doubt
that Todd Geib was not in
the water for 21 days.
And hopefully, Dr. Benbow's
study with the pigs
will give us the information
we need
to help bring
this case forward.
- We set up this experiment
and what we did,
we placed five pig carcasses
into a pond,
an experimental pond.
Three of them,
we sampled every other day
and then two, we left
for essentially 21 days.
What you'll see is on day one,
after we had placed the pigs
into the pond,
the decomposition process
of one of the pigs.
- Okay.
- So let me play it for you.
Starts to bloat on day one.
Okay, so that's
microbial activity,
bacterial activity in the gut
that's producing gases that
bloat it.
- Right.
- But you can also notice
on these days,
when we were collecting,
we did collect aquatic insects
on the first day
that the carcasses
had been in there.
Day three...
In three days,
if there's a floating carcass
or body, in this case, right?
Likely, there should be
terrestrial insect
colonization,
and we did get eggs on
the third day of decomposition.
- Boy, look at all
the insects.
- Those are all the maggots.
- Oh, my God.
If the body floats, this is
likely what you would see.
♪ ♪
So day 21...
- Your body's collapsing.
- Oh, man.
- That's insect activity
for you.
- Wow.
- Holy cow.
- You can see the green.
- Mm-hmm.
- So this is surface,
so there's a lot of sunlight,
so you would expect
real thick,
green biofilm algal layers,
and that's what we found here.
We saw none of this in
Todd's shirt.
Given our experiment,
I find it very surprising
that Todd's body had no
reported insect activity,
and the clothing had no
algal development.
There was no mention of
any kind of
terrestrial insect eggs
or terrestrial insect larvae
or maggots.
- From what you have
right here,
What is this telling you?
Was he in the water
for 21 days?
- Based on our study,
unlikely that his clothing
and his body had been in
for 21 days.
- After seeing this test,
the scientific evidence
is irrefutable.
If Todd had been in
the water for 21 days,
that body would have been
decimated...
engulfed by insect activity,
and by the end of
the 21 days,
he would have been a shell,
which he wasn't.
Which only substantiates
our claim that
Todd was never there
for the 21 days,
was only in the water
shortly before his recovery.
- Would you be willing
to write a formal report
stipulating about
your experiments,
you know,
from an expert position.
- I'd be happy
to provide a report.
- Well, listen, this was more
than just enlightening,
I mean,
this was excellent for us.
So I think you helped us
tremendously.
I don't know how to thank you
for that.
- Hopefully it's useful.
[somber music]
- This evidence could be
the linchpin
to forcing the authorities
to take a second look at this,
and I believe it will be
classified a case.
♪ ♪
- Did Benbow give us
what we need?
- Oh, yeah.
- That time-lapse photography
he had from
his swine experiment,
it clearly demonstrated that
had Todd been in
a body of water like that,
he would have been absolutely
destroyed.
- So there's no way he was in
for 21 days?
- No, no way.
The only thing that held
that pig together
was the clothing on the body;
that was it.
And then you talked about
the drugs
from the toxicologist
that we spoke with,
he said Todd has enough
drugs in him
to have made him completely
incapacitated.
So that shows that the police's
prevailing theory--
Todd was, you know,
this stupid, drunk kid that
just wandered into the lake--
is preposterous.
- This is phenomenal.
We have two solid pieces
to bring to the police.
- And then there's
the smiley face disk.
Somebody placed that
smiley faced disk
on Todd's grave marker.
- And we know dogs tracked him
from the party to the highway
right across from his house.
- Right.
- And then his scent
just disappeared.
- In my opinion,
we have enough evidence here
to make it compelling enough
that they have to take
this case and reinvestigate it.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
- Kathy.
- Hi, Kevin.
- How are you?
- I'm good.
- Long time, now see.
How you doing?
- Good.
- Good to see you.
- Well...
- We got a lot of
new developments,
so I think we did a lot
of good work,
and we got some stuff I
think you'd be really
interested in...
- Okay.
- In hearing, so.
- Okay, sound good to me.
- Despite the work that was
done on Todd's case
by the Michigan State Police,
Todd's case was never looked at
as a homicide.
Kathy Geib has been waiting
for answers
for the last 13 years.
I wanna tell you some of
the people we did meet with
and tell you what we have,
this new evidence,
which we think is
pretty outstanding.
We spoke with a pharmacist
from Michigan.
Pharmacist even said that
Todd would be probably
unconscious,
that he could have never even
walked from that party
to the lake.
- Okay.
- They're not the kind of drugs
to get high,
being an antidepressant,
which Todd wasn't on.
- Exactly, right.
- So we believe that
Todd was drugged.
- Okay.
- We also met with this doctor,
Eric Benbow,
and he's a forensic biologist
and he put these five pigs
in the water,
which he actually dressed up
with clothes.
They took Todd's clothing
and the clothing from the pig
and compared it.
The clothing that was on
the pig had all this bacteria,
had algae and biofilm.
But neither the shoe
or his shirt had
biofilm or algae,
but most importantly,
the pig was decimated.
What it did is it showed
there was no possible way
that Todd could have been
in the water
for that period of time,
for 21 days.
[melancholy music]
- Okay.
Well, that's good they have
scientific on it,
but didn't make sense he was in
there that long anyway.
- The fact that his body
is pristine in the water
makes us believe that
Todd was drugged,
abducted,
held for a period of time,
and then murdered
and placed into the lake.
I understand everything
you've been through.
I really believe that if they
look at all this new evidence
that we have for you
to bring forward,
there's no way that
they can't take this case
and change it to a homicide.
I really honestly
believe that.
- Mm-hmm.
Well, I hope so.
I--I truly do.
I will be thrilled if
they do take it seriously.
I miss Todd every single day.
Sometimes more than
once a day.
I sure hope this new evidence
does bring closure or justice.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
- You ready for this?
- I think so.
I think so.
♪ ♪
Women understand
that a mother will never stop.
For all these years,
I have felt I've carried a lot
on my shoulders doing all
the calling
and the this and the that,
and I think he would have
hated it,
that it's consumed my life.
He always said--the last card
I got from him,
a month before he died,
was a Mother's Day card,
and he said, "Thanks, Mom.
You've always had my back."
♪ ♪
- Telling you right now,
I am not just giving this up.
We have uncovered so much
credible forensic
and physical evidence
in Todd's case,
we have a real chance
to flip this case to
a homicide.
I think that when the
authorities see that,
they'll have no other option
but to say,
"You know what?
"We made a mistake,
and we'll have to
take a second look at it."
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
My goal in this whole
investigation
has always been to prove
whether these mysterious
drownings
from all these different cities
are linked.
There's too many things
going on
to be a coincidence.
So we have a distinct
pattern of injuries
with certain victims.
James has a ligature
strangulation around his neck
with severe hemorrhaging.
And then Homan's injuries,
which our expert was able
to tell
he had a boot that was standing
on top of his forehead.
- Another victim of an assault.
- When you look at Hurley,
you're saying he has
a periorbital injury that
would take brute force
to damage that eye socket.
He matches James and Homan
with their injuries.
This is a distinctive pattern
of assault.
For us, this has been
one long uphill battle
of trying to put together
all these cases,
proving that they are
homicides,
and then connecting 'em to
the Smiley Face Killer theory.
- And we've also got
the pattern with drugs.
- We got Geib,
who had that anti-depressive
medicine,
and he had what seems like
more than enough drugs
in him to kill him,
so there's no way he walked
into that lake.
And then you got William Hurley
and Dakota James
both with GHB,
so that's another
distinct pattern, right here.
- And in all six of the cases,
the condition of the body
is inconsistent with
the time period that they were
supposed to be deceased.
- Right.
Booth's missing for 14 days
and he's got what looks like
one day of decomposition.
So where was he for
the other 13 days?
You got Todd Geib missing
for 21 days,
and he's got about three days
of decomposition,
according to Dr. Benbow's test.
Dakota James is missing
for 40 days...
- The water recovery guys said
that they recognized him
from the TV.
- Right.
His decomposition level
does not match
somebody who is dead
for 40 days.
I believe that people are
being murdered,
and somebody needs to step up
and do something.
Our theory is that our victims
are drugged,
abducted,
held for a period of time,
murdered, and then placed
into the water
at a later period of time.
So far, three of the six cases
are in the process of
being reopened.
But there are hundreds more
that we believe are
connected to
the Smiley Face Killers
that also need to be
reinvestigated.
I'm not gonna stop until
I get these cases
reclassified as homicides,
and then determine
whether or not
they're connected to
the Smiley Face Killers.
- What are your thoughts on
the Smiley Face Killer theory?
Join the conversation on
Oxygen's Facebook page
♪ ♪
- Since 1997, hundreds
of college-aged men
have gone missing, vanished.
Almost all of the victims
are top students and athletes
who disappeared after
a night out with friends.
They are later found drowned
in a body of water.
Near where most of the bodies
are recovered,
smiley faces.
♪ ♪
We believe these deaths may
all be connected;
the work of an organized group
of serial killers.
We believe the victims may
have been drugged,
abducted, killed on land,
and eventually dumped
in the water.
With the help of preeminent
crime and forensic experts
from all over the nation,
our goal is to uncover
new evidence
to reopen these closed cases
and compel the authorities to
investigate them as homicides,
like the case of Todd Geib,
who was found dead in 2005.
He's part of a cluster
of young men
who have been found dead
in suspicious drownings
across the Midwest.
Smiley face graffiti was found
later on Todd's tombstone.
We believe that Todd
was not only murdered,
but that he may be a victim
of the Smiley Face Killers.
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
- On June 11, 2005,
22-year-old Todd Geib went
to an orchard party
in rural Michigan.
21 days later, Todd's body
was found floating upright
in a private, secluded lake.
The medical examiner ruled
his death a drowning.
The autopsy report states
only moderate decomposition,
but Todd's body
was supposedly floating
in a warm summer lake
for a period of 21 days.
In warm lake water,
Todd's body should have had
severe decomposition.
Was the death of Todd Geib
an accident or a homicide?
We believe this case
may be linked to
the Smiley Face Killers.
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
Todd Geib, 22-year old male,
white.
He was going to a party
in an orchard with friends.
Few drinks, not even
highly intoxicated.
He was seen leaving
the party at midnight.
He was supposed to be
on his way home.
And 21 days later he's found
in Lake Ovidhall,
which was on the property,
in the opposite direction
from his house.
Medical examiner says
it's undetermined;
the police think it looks like
a drowning.
The police believe Todd left
the orchard party
and wandered into
Lake Ovidhall and drowned.
- What is it that specifically
bothers you about this case?
- There's three red flags
that are really compelling.
The level of decomposition
from the body.
The medical examiner's report
states
he was only moderately
decomposed.
After 21 days in the water,
Todd should have
advanced decomposition.
I mean, he should be
completely black.
- What about insects?
Certainly an environment
like that in the summertime,
insects would get in, you know,
any openings in his body.
- The rural environment
for this lake,
there should be water insects.
So we'll have to find somebody
that can tell us more about
what the ecology
of a lake like this
can do to a body.
When you read
the autopsy report,
there is no mention of insects.
So a forensic entomologist
can bring to the table
some physical evidence
that we can show to
the police investigator
there weren't any insects
on the body
and how that is remarkable.
It's an anomaly.
What's really strange,
according to
the medical examiner,
he had Desipramine
and Amitriptyline
in his system.
These are prescribed
medications for
a whole host of
psychological disorders,
but we really need to find
someone with a PhD
in Pharmacology
and find out what's going on
with this.
- And how did these drugs
get into his system?
The prevailing theory that Todd
fell into the lake and drowned
doesn't make sense.
So we need to find some
concrete forensic evidence
to try to figure out
what actually happened to him
and could he have been in
the lake for 21 days.
- In the police reports,
canines tracked him
from the orchard party site,
down the trail,
back to White Road,
the gravel road,
on the south side.
And at that point,
they lose the scent.
So what happened to him?
- The fact that the scent
just stops, you know,
and then he's gone.
So I mean, that fits
the pattern 100%.
Obviously, his mom, Kathy,
has always been tormented by
the whole thing.
She's adamant about the fact
that there's a lot of material
from the case that
was never really
investigated by the police.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
Can you believe it's
almost 13 years?
- Yeah, it's been a long time.
- How you doing?
- You know, I miss my son.
Obviously, we want--still
want answers
after all these years.
And for us,
because we have no answers,
it's kind of like we never
get to leave the gravestone.
You know?
It's always questions.
Always questions.
- Unfortunately,
I never got to meet Todd.
- He was like a lot
of 22-year-olds.
I mean, I've seen it
with a lot of young people;
you have your ups and downs.
He was a great kid,
and actually,
in lieu of all of this
that has happened,
sometimes I'm afraid people
lose track of who Todd was.
He was fun-loving.
He was athletic.
He loved his family a lot.
He was a real family guy.
I miss so many things
about him.
I miss him walking in
the door and going, "Hey, Ma!"
Sometimes I'm in a store,
and I hear a young man
say that to his mom,
and it hurts.
How could this happen?
How could my big, strong,
handsome,
wonderful son
be gone?
And God gives you a numbness
that gets you through
what you gotta get through,
but, um,
the pain, there's no words.
It's like, if you sawed off
all my limbs,
I don't think it would have
any more pain
than your heart does
when you lose a child.
- Kathy, like the majority
of the mothers that
we've worked with
in the cases,
are the real linchpin of
the whole investigation.
Because when you have
the parents,
but specifically the moms,
it's a crucial piece that
helps to push the case
into another level.
- I'm asking you to help me
insist this case is opened
and investigated.
I will never stop fighting
for Todd.
I believe some day this will be
broken open.
And what has been done
in the darkness
will come to light.
I want closure.
The gravestone says
June 12th...
I don't know
if he died on June 12th.
I believe there was no way
Todd was in that water
for three weeks.
I, myself, got to see
a recovery picture,
which was very hard to see,
but he was not in
the condition
to be in there three weeks.
I did my research
and found out what condition
people would be like
if they were
in the water three weeks.
So where was he
for three weeks?
There's a lot of mystery
behind that,
and I want answers.
- We wanna try to provide
that for you.
That's why we're here.
- Okay.
I read in a magazine
about Kevin Gannon
and the cases he was
looking at,
and it was identical to Todd's.
So I called Kevin, and then
I believe it was after that
we found a smiley face
on Todd's grave.
When I saw the smiley face
on his grave,
my first initial thing was,
"Somebody's playing with me."
Um, but then we found
a smiley face on a tree
close to where Todd was found.
It was an evil smiley face.
And there are people who saw it
that fall after Todd died.
- And where'd you find that?
- Well, it was right by
Witch's Corner, by the lake.
- Did it make you feel
uneasy, uncomfortable?
- Just sick.
- Yeah.
- You know?
- It's been a long time.
I mean, you waited 13 years
there's still no activity.
And we wanna try to move this
forward for you,
and we wanna figure out what's
the best way to do that.
- We're gonna go start
things up again.
- That sounds--that
sounds great.
I don't want vengeance;
that belongs to God.
I want justice for Todd.
- Our canoe that we keep
right over there,
we come down there
and it was gone,
and when I got it,
it was full of beer cans.
- If Todd's body was
in this lake for 21 days,
the carcass gets consumed
pretty quickly
and dramatically.
- How 'bout yourself, sir,
what is your gut feeling on it?
- It was foul play
and most people guess
that it was a murder.
[dramatic music]
[dramatic percussive music]
♪ ♪
- Watch your steps, guys.
This is pretty muddy and marshy
along the edge of
the lake here.
- Yeah, I see that.
The prevailing theory is
Todd was at the orchard party,
wandered off and wound up
in the lake and drowned.
We're gonna start at the lake,
'cause that's where Todd
was recovered.
Jim Wilde found Todd's body.
- You said you found Todd,
correct?
- My wife and I did, yes.
- Okay.
Can you tell us
the circumstances
surrounding that?
- We come out in the afternoon,
one afternoon,
decided to get a little
peace and quiet
on the lake together,
and we come in
off the back side.
When we got to the top
of the hill,
my wife looked out and said,
"Hey, look, there's a beaver."
And I stopped and I looked
and I said,
"The beaver's not moving."
And at that point,
it kind of went through my head
that Todd had not been found.
♪ ♪
- Did you feel there was
anything unusual
about the way he was in
the water?
- His head was up.
He was kinda leaning forward
like this, coming across here,
so I could see his shoulder.
And I could see the top
of his head
and a little bit of his face.
- So the water's deep enough
where his whole body
would be...
- Oh, yeah, he was--he was
straight up and down.
- A normal body, after
a certain period of time,
the gases in the body rise
and the body floats
horizontally,
face down, in the water.
Todd's body didn't do that.
He was floating vertically,
straight up and down
in the water.
Todd's body position is
totally contrary to any other
drowning victim that
I've ever seen.
He's like, standing almost
in the water.
- Were you on the lake
prior to that day
or the day before or within
the last--the three weeks?
- My brother actually was
on it the night before
with his son, fishing.
And when you fish this lake,
you fish all the way around
the edges.
They had seen nothing.
- Did you notice any other
boats in the lake
that--when you were out there?
- Our canoe that we keep
right over there,
we come down there
and it was gone.
So we had to take
and go get another boat
and come over here to get it.
And when I got it,
it was full of beer cans.
So somebody had gotten
over there
and brought it over here.
- Was that unusual?
- Yeah, nobody takes your boat.
I've never had that
happen before.
- Never?
Did the police ever come down
and talk to you?
Like, and give you, like,
a formal interview?
Anything like that,
where they sat down?
- No.
[tense music]
- Jim's brother was fishing
till 9:00 the night before
he was recovered.
They saw nothing--no bodies,
no fish, no nothing.
So where was the body
the night before?
And why wasn't there more
attention paid to the canoe
that was supposedly tied up
the night before,
but was found on
the other side of the lake
with the empty beer cans
in them?
- There's no way he was in
the water 21 days.
Think about it, they were
fishing the night before.
The body was not there.
- Also, the way he was
floating is very unusual.
Bodies float face down.
- Right.
- Whereas Todd was
actually standing up almost.
- Doesn't even seem possible
for him to go in the lake
right where we were
talking to Jim by the dock.
- And his boat that he tied up
floated to the other side
of the lake.
- So it floated by itself,
that's the prevailing theory?
- And it drank its own beer.
♪ ♪
The fact of the matter is,
the people we've spoken to
said they were at that
lake the night before,
didn't see him.
If there's no body in a lake
for 20 days
and one shows up on
the 21st day,
and there's a boat that was
tied up by the owner,
and then the next day when
the body was recovered,
it's on the other side of
the lake with beer cans in it,
and he didn't do it,
someone else was there.
- He was put in
the water afterward.
- The canoe tells me someone
was there;
someone used the boat.
Maybe they used the canoe
to place Todd into the water.
- And like you said,
if the body wasn't there
the night before,
how did it get there?
These are pieces to the puzzle
that we're trying to solve.
The next step for us is to
find some scientific evidence
that we can bring to
authorities to force them
to treat Todd's case as
a homicide,
instead of an accident.
- A step in the right
direction, my brother.
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
- In warm lake water,
Todd's body should have
had severe decomposition.
Decomposition is not
an exact science.
It's related to temperature
and time.
We believe that a body
in water for 21 days
in the summertime
would have much more extensive
decomposition.
Thanks, Doctor.
Thank you for meeting,
I appreciate this.
- Yeah, good to meet you guys.
- Dr. Eric Benbow is
a forensic biologist
from Michigan State University
who has agreed
to take a look at Todd's case.
- Now, what you have there is
some pictures from
the body recovery,
as well as the autopsy.
In his autopsy report,
there's no mention of insects,
debris or sand
or anything on the body.
You don't see any
in the photographs.
- In my experiences
in aquatic cases, as well,
and terrestrial cases,
any kind of insect evidence
is always reported
in the autopsy report.
- And there's very little
levels of decomposition on him
from what we've observed.
- It's interesting;
I'm looking at the algae
on the clothing.
And it's
long filamentous algae,
and what I can tell is,
if there's an algal biofilm
on parts of the clothing
that looks fairly clean.
- And what does that mean?
That means there's some kind of
algae film?
Is that what you mean?
- Yeah, algae,
like a slime film.
- Right.
- If Todd's body was in
this lake for 21 days or so,
I would imagine you should have
more biofilm,
more slime build-up.
The other thing, it looks like
part of his head was exposed.
- Right.
- Yes.
Half his head
and his shoulder.
- There should be insects
in the clothing,
even in, like, the mouth,
in and on the ears,
in the folds of the skin.
That's where these flies will
typically lay their eggs.
And they've evolved to be
attracted to dead things,
within minutes, to hours,
to a day.
Our work, aquatic decomposition
studies, have shown that
the carcass gets consumed
pretty quickly
and dramatically.
- Entomology, bug science,
is so important to determining
how long that body's
been there,
'cause it takes X number
of hours
for the flies to find it,
then lay the eggs
and then hatch and so forth.
I'm hoping that Dr. Benbow
can bring some
physical evidence
to the table
to show how it is
absolutely impossible
for a body to be lying in water
during the summer for 21 days
and not have any insects on it.
I think a visit to the lake
would make sense.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- What do you think, Doc?
- It's bigger than I expected,
actually.
So damselflies,
so this is indication
that they're here.
There we go.
- Where is it?
- It's right there.
What I'm seeing here is
pretty good diversity
of aquatic insects.
So if they're in here,
they're predators;
it indicates that
there's a lot of prey.
I would imagine if
a body was in here,
it would be colonized with
some kind of aquatic insects.
- How would you go
about testing
things that does impact
the rate at which
a body decomposes--
the hypothesis of
whether or not he was here
for three weeks?
- Ideally, you wanted to do it
with human bodies.
Alternatively,
what's been used most commonly
for human bodies is
swine carcasses.
Swine carcasses are
really similar in terms of
the way that they decompose.
The skin is very similar,
you can put clothing on
the pigs,
clothing that resembled
what the victim was wearing.
You could test whether or not
there's biofilm developing
over the course of three weeks.
And then you'd evaluate
all of the insects that
presumably would be colonizing
inside--in the water.
But also, when the body
becomes exposed,
are they colonizing quickly,
within a day?
Is it two days?
Is it three days?
Or do they never colonize?
- If we can prove that
it's absolutely impossible
for a body to be lying
in a pond in the summer
for 21 days
and then be discovered
with no insects on it,
then that should convince
local law enforcement
to reexamine this death.
- So if we were able to do
this experiment...
- Right.
- Um, and I could determine
the timing
of insect colonization
and the algae biofilm,
I'd be able to have
a better assessment of
what happened to Todd's body.
♪ ♪
- Can you overdose on this type
of drug?
- You sure can.
- I think any mother of
a child would understand
you can't walk away.
You have to find out
what happened to your baby.
[somber music]
♪ ♪
- Hi, Kathy.
Mike and I wanna give you
an update on
some of the stuff that we've
been working on.
Doc and I went down
and had a meeting with
a forensic entomologist.
He has a test that
he wants to do
where we would be able to tell
the length of time
that Todd was in the water.
Dr. Benbow brought
new information
to the investigation.
We never thought of the fact
that there was a possibility
that there was a time element
to algae growth
that would help us to determine
how long a body was in water.
Do you still have any of
Todd's clothing?
- Yes, we do.
These are the clothes
and Toddy's shoe that
we got back from the police.
- That's all they gave you
back, everything?
- Yes.
- This is what he's looking for
right now.
He's going to check the level
of the algae
and the insect activity.
And then he'll be able to know
how many days
that algae took to grow.
- I can just say one thing,
when we did get the clothes,
there was no algae on them.
- Visible to the eye, right?
- Visible to the eye.
- Obviously, that's something,
you know,
we obviously wanna
follow up on.
- I'm thrilled, should have
been done 13 years ago.
I'm thrilled that someone's
looking into it.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
There are just no words
that a mother can give
when you lose a child.
He was still my boy.
He was my boy
and he was in trouble.
I miss his laughter.
I miss his love of life.
Just hearing his footsteps
coming in at night
when he was with us
and bringing his problems
to me.
I think any mother of a child
would understand
that you just can't walk away
from it.
As difficult as it is,
it's something you will never
give up on.
You can't walk away.
You have to find out
what happened to your baby.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- So the goal for this
experiment is going to be
to replicate Todd's case
using multiple swine carcasses.
So we know swine carcasses
are the best representation
of human decomposition.
- In order to bring this case
forward,
we have to have some
scientific evidence
to substantiate what
we believe transpired.
We need to prove that Todd
was not in the water
for 21 days.
- So what we wanna
determine is,
do terrestrial insects colonize
on the first day or second day
or third day?
And evaluate any kind of
aquatic insects
that are part of the clothing
or that are on the body.
- Well, you're saying
you're basically
gonna dress the pig, then?
- Yeah.
And then lastly, we're gonna
evaluate the algal communities,
the biofilms, the slime layers.
So at the end of
the experiment,
we should have
a really good understanding
of what a body should look like
that's been in a lake
for 21 days.
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
- The way we're gonna develop
information
like every other
investigation is,
talk to everybody and anybody.
What I wanna learn more about
is the party at the orchard
that Todd was at
the night he went missing.
- If you can take us back
13 years ago
to the night where Todd Geib
went missing...
- One of my boys had a party--
a lot of kids here
and a lot of people--
but I didn't know anything
about anybody drowning
till later.
You know, they couldn't
find him,
and we were all worried
about him and stuff,
and the whole neighborhood
was looking for him.
- So where was the lake
from here?
- Back to the north, here.
That goes to the lake.
But this--the hill was all
prickers and stuff,
and that you--it
wasn't passable.
- So even if someone
made an attempt
to try to go through,
they wouldn't have made it
through,
or they would have been all
cut up and torn up?
- They'd had been all cut up
getting through it.
They might have made it
through,
but it'd been quite a project.
- That bad?
- That's that bad.
Those rose--whatever they call
that pricker and it's bad.
They're good two inches,
inch and a half.
- Oh, wow.
- I mean they'll stab ya.
- From where
the orchard party was,
it's really tough to get down
to the lake
the way the authorities
think he went.
At that time of the year,
there's gonna be
real long thorns,
razor sharp stuff,
that if anybody
went through them,
they would definitely get cut.
And Todd's autopsy
and the autopsy photo shows
no such injuries.
To me, that means that Todd
did not
go through
the sticker bushes
and was entered into that
or placed into that lake
somewhere else.
♪ ♪
- This didn't make sense.
If he lived over at Half Moon,
which is a mile away,
he certainly would have headed
for his house,
he wouldn't have headed
for here.
- Now, correct me if
I'm wrong,
Half Moon, where he lives,
is the opposite direction
of where the lake is--
- Yes, it is.
- Where he was found.
- The police were here
with their dog,
they searched everything and...
- Did you notice that
any of the dogs
actually got a scent
and followed
in a particular direction?
- I remember 'em saying
they thought
something that way,
towards a house, south.
- Okay.
- Opposite of the lake.
- Okay.
- How 'bout yourself, sir,
what is your gut feeling on it?
- My gut feeling is it wasn't
an accident.
It was foul play,
and most people guess
that it was a murder.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Well, you know the party was
down there and so...
- And this is the way
the dogs tracked.
- This is where the dogs
followed the scent.
- Right.
- Followed it all the way
up here
from where the par--from where
the actual orchard is.
- Right.
- Where the party was.
Right to here, kept going.
Followed it, followed it,
followed it.
When he got to this point,
heading to our left,
on this dirt road to where
it meets the paved road.
- That's 37, right?
- That's 37,
that's which way he lives.
♪ ♪
This is where the dogs lost
the scent.
Right here, at the pavement,
right at 37.
- We don't know...
- We don't know--no.
- It just ended?
- No, it ended, right here.
It tells me that he either
got in the car,
or he was taken into
another vehicle,
'cause you just don't vanish.
- I think, at this point,
foul play has been suspected.
- Why do you say that?
- Because someone like that
doesn't just disappear.
- If the body floats, this is
likely what you would see.
- Oh, my God.
- Oh, man.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- From what I understand,
the prevailing theory is that
Todd Geib was at this party,
got drunk,
and fell into the lake.
But it doesn't add up,
especially since dogs followed
his scent
to the edge of the highway.
So we need to find out more
about what happened to Todd
the night he disappeared.
♪ ♪
- According to
the police reports,
one of the last locations
Todd was
before he went to
the apple orchard party
was the Kazz Bar in
downtown Casnovia.
We're gonna go to
the Kazz Bar,
and we wanna talk to
the people who work there.
You got a couple minutes
for us
you can spend with us,
down here?
- Yeah.
- Good, good.
We're looking at
the investigation of a death
of a young man, Todd Geib.
- Mm-hmm.
- You ever hear about him?
- I did.
- You did?
Did you know him?
- We were the same age,
so we had a lot--I had common
friends with him.
Same group of friends.
- Yeah.
What'd you think of him?
- Nice guy, nice guy,
very nice guy.
- Ever known to have
any problems with anybody?
Anything like that?
- Nope.
- Nothing?
- Nothing at all.
Nothing at all.
Do you remember being actually
at parties with him?
- Yeah, yeah, that's how I had
met him before, yeah.
- All right.
- It was a two-track party.
- What is a two-track?
- It's a road that has
two tracks,
that you go in the woods
and that's where--like,
the apple orchard is
a two-track party.
We'd go party out in the woods.
Um, you know, at the end of
a dead road, or...
- At these parties that
you said they happen at
various orchards and whatnot,
do you know of any recreational
drug use?
"Hey, let's--we got some pills,
let's crush 'em up."
- Um, I don't know,
everyone just drank a lot.
- Do you ever hear of
anyone break into
their grandmother's
medicine cabinet?
Now the big thing is,
what, opioids.
- You know, I don't feel like
that was an issue back then
for our generation.
In 2005, we really just drank.
There wasn't a lot of
the, you know, opioid problem,
the crushing up the pills,
or, you know,
abusing the drugs.
That was--the group
in that era just drank.
We didn't do all
the crazy stuff
to get messed up.
It was just more drinking
and keg-stands.
- In your experience here
at the bar,
no one has come in
and made reference to
anything that happened at
that party, you know...?
- I think, at this point,
foul play has been suspected.
And...
- Why do you say that?
- Because someone like that
just doesn't disappear.
Someone from a small town
that's close with family
and friends
typically doesn't just
disappear.
[tense music]
- The thing I really took
note of was
when we asked her about Todd,
she had stated that
Todd was a good guy.
She confirmed it with
her friends
who've known him for
a long time.
- I believe in her;
she said she saw him at
these orchard parties too.
But she told us that pills
weren't really prevalent.
You know, they weren't.
- It was all about the drink,
all about the beer.
- That makes it
more suspicious, even,
why Todd had all that in him.
♪ ♪
- We know from
the toxicology report
that Todd was found with
two drugs in his system
that are used to treat
depression.
I wanna talk to a licensed
pharmacist
so that I can get
a better understanding
of how these two drugs
would have physiologically
and cognitively affected him,
and whether they are
substances that
could have been used
to drug Todd.
- Hey, how can I help you
guys?
- We have a case that we've
been working on in the area,
the name is Todd Geib.
When he was recovered,
during the autopsy
and toxicology test,
he was found with a couple
of drugs in his system.
- What kind of medications
are we talking about?
- Well, he had two primary
ones, Desipramine...
- Desipramine, okay.
- And Amitriptyline.
- Both of those drugs are used
for depression.
That's their labeled use.
You can only get them written
through either psychiatrists
or primary care physicians,
so they have to have
a written prescription
in order to obtain 'em.
- Are they typically
prescribed at the same time
to the same individual?
- No, I don't normally see
those medications
or two drugs in the same class.
Usually you will have
one or the other.
It's mainly because of
additive effect.
So you would have
two Tricyclic amines
doing the same thing.
And what's that gonna cause?
That's gonna cause increased
risk for side effects,
increased risk
for hallucinations,
confusion, agitation.
- Would that be a type of drug
that somebody would use
recreationally, though?
At a party?
- No, it's not an abused drug.
It's not something that
somebody's gonna take
on a recreational basis.
They're not gonna take it
to have a euphoric feeling
or to get high;
that's not how that drug works.
- Is this the type of drug
that somebody could crush up
and, you know,
put it in a beer
unknown to the recipient?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So you'd be able to crush
this medication up
relatively easily, um,
turn it into a powder
and, you know,
put it into an open container:
beer, mixed drink, whatever
he happens to be drinking.
- So, David, what if
our individual, Todd Geib,
had almost 500 nanograms,
what kind of effect would that
have on somebody?
- You can start seeing symptoms
within an hour;
confusion, hallucinations,
cardiac arrest,
coma, seizures.
These are life-threatening
issues.
- Can you overdose
on this type of drug?
- You sure can.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- We know Todd did not have
a history of drug use,
much less, abuse,
to experiment with
these drugs in particular
at such a high dosage.
It just doesn't make any sense.
- In Todd's case,
we found out that he had
an exorbitant amount of
an anti-depressive drug in him,
which is not consistent with
the type of drug
that somebody uses to get high
at a party.
- That's not explained at all
in the autopsy or toxicology?
- It's completely--nobody's
ever looked into it.
- It's gotta be suspicious.
- It's definitely suspicious.
- So how did he get this level
of this type of drug
in his system?
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- I think you're gonna be
impressed with
the amount of activity that
we observed.
- What we need to get
the authorities
to reopen Todd's case
as a homicide
is to prove beyond
a reasonable doubt
that Todd Geib was not in
the water for 21 days.
And hopefully, Dr. Benbow's
study with the pigs
will give us the information
we need
to help bring
this case forward.
- We set up this experiment
and what we did,
we placed five pig carcasses
into a pond,
an experimental pond.
Three of them,
we sampled every other day
and then two, we left
for essentially 21 days.
What you'll see is on day one,
after we had placed the pigs
into the pond,
the decomposition process
of one of the pigs.
- Okay.
- So let me play it for you.
Starts to bloat on day one.
Okay, so that's
microbial activity,
bacterial activity in the gut
that's producing gases that
bloat it.
- Right.
- But you can also notice
on these days,
when we were collecting,
we did collect aquatic insects
on the first day
that the carcasses
had been in there.
Day three...
In three days,
if there's a floating carcass
or body, in this case, right?
Likely, there should be
terrestrial insect
colonization,
and we did get eggs on
the third day of decomposition.
- Boy, look at all
the insects.
- Those are all the maggots.
- Oh, my God.
If the body floats, this is
likely what you would see.
♪ ♪
So day 21...
- Your body's collapsing.
- Oh, man.
- That's insect activity
for you.
- Wow.
- Holy cow.
- You can see the green.
- Mm-hmm.
- So this is surface,
so there's a lot of sunlight,
so you would expect
real thick,
green biofilm algal layers,
and that's what we found here.
We saw none of this in
Todd's shirt.
Given our experiment,
I find it very surprising
that Todd's body had no
reported insect activity,
and the clothing had no
algal development.
There was no mention of
any kind of
terrestrial insect eggs
or terrestrial insect larvae
or maggots.
- From what you have
right here,
What is this telling you?
Was he in the water
for 21 days?
- Based on our study,
unlikely that his clothing
and his body had been in
for 21 days.
- After seeing this test,
the scientific evidence
is irrefutable.
If Todd had been in
the water for 21 days,
that body would have been
decimated...
engulfed by insect activity,
and by the end of
the 21 days,
he would have been a shell,
which he wasn't.
Which only substantiates
our claim that
Todd was never there
for the 21 days,
was only in the water
shortly before his recovery.
- Would you be willing
to write a formal report
stipulating about
your experiments,
you know,
from an expert position.
- I'd be happy
to provide a report.
- Well, listen, this was more
than just enlightening,
I mean,
this was excellent for us.
So I think you helped us
tremendously.
I don't know how to thank you
for that.
- Hopefully it's useful.
[somber music]
- This evidence could be
the linchpin
to forcing the authorities
to take a second look at this,
and I believe it will be
classified a case.
♪ ♪
- Did Benbow give us
what we need?
- Oh, yeah.
- That time-lapse photography
he had from
his swine experiment,
it clearly demonstrated that
had Todd been in
a body of water like that,
he would have been absolutely
destroyed.
- So there's no way he was in
for 21 days?
- No, no way.
The only thing that held
that pig together
was the clothing on the body;
that was it.
And then you talked about
the drugs
from the toxicologist
that we spoke with,
he said Todd has enough
drugs in him
to have made him completely
incapacitated.
So that shows that the police's
prevailing theory--
Todd was, you know,
this stupid, drunk kid that
just wandered into the lake--
is preposterous.
- This is phenomenal.
We have two solid pieces
to bring to the police.
- And then there's
the smiley face disk.
Somebody placed that
smiley faced disk
on Todd's grave marker.
- And we know dogs tracked him
from the party to the highway
right across from his house.
- Right.
- And then his scent
just disappeared.
- In my opinion,
we have enough evidence here
to make it compelling enough
that they have to take
this case and reinvestigate it.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
- Kathy.
- Hi, Kevin.
- How are you?
- I'm good.
- Long time, now see.
How you doing?
- Good.
- Good to see you.
- Well...
- We got a lot of
new developments,
so I think we did a lot
of good work,
and we got some stuff I
think you'd be really
interested in...
- Okay.
- In hearing, so.
- Okay, sound good to me.
- Despite the work that was
done on Todd's case
by the Michigan State Police,
Todd's case was never looked at
as a homicide.
Kathy Geib has been waiting
for answers
for the last 13 years.
I wanna tell you some of
the people we did meet with
and tell you what we have,
this new evidence,
which we think is
pretty outstanding.
We spoke with a pharmacist
from Michigan.
Pharmacist even said that
Todd would be probably
unconscious,
that he could have never even
walked from that party
to the lake.
- Okay.
- They're not the kind of drugs
to get high,
being an antidepressant,
which Todd wasn't on.
- Exactly, right.
- So we believe that
Todd was drugged.
- Okay.
- We also met with this doctor,
Eric Benbow,
and he's a forensic biologist
and he put these five pigs
in the water,
which he actually dressed up
with clothes.
They took Todd's clothing
and the clothing from the pig
and compared it.
The clothing that was on
the pig had all this bacteria,
had algae and biofilm.
But neither the shoe
or his shirt had
biofilm or algae,
but most importantly,
the pig was decimated.
What it did is it showed
there was no possible way
that Todd could have been
in the water
for that period of time,
for 21 days.
[melancholy music]
- Okay.
Well, that's good they have
scientific on it,
but didn't make sense he was in
there that long anyway.
- The fact that his body
is pristine in the water
makes us believe that
Todd was drugged,
abducted,
held for a period of time,
and then murdered
and placed into the lake.
I understand everything
you've been through.
I really believe that if they
look at all this new evidence
that we have for you
to bring forward,
there's no way that
they can't take this case
and change it to a homicide.
I really honestly
believe that.
- Mm-hmm.
Well, I hope so.
I--I truly do.
I will be thrilled if
they do take it seriously.
I miss Todd every single day.
Sometimes more than
once a day.
I sure hope this new evidence
does bring closure or justice.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
- You ready for this?
- I think so.
I think so.
♪ ♪
Women understand
that a mother will never stop.
For all these years,
I have felt I've carried a lot
on my shoulders doing all
the calling
and the this and the that,
and I think he would have
hated it,
that it's consumed my life.
He always said--the last card
I got from him,
a month before he died,
was a Mother's Day card,
and he said, "Thanks, Mom.
You've always had my back."
♪ ♪
- Telling you right now,
I am not just giving this up.
We have uncovered so much
credible forensic
and physical evidence
in Todd's case,
we have a real chance
to flip this case to
a homicide.
I think that when the
authorities see that,
they'll have no other option
but to say,
"You know what?
"We made a mistake,
and we'll have to
take a second look at it."
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
My goal in this whole
investigation
has always been to prove
whether these mysterious
drownings
from all these different cities
are linked.
There's too many things
going on
to be a coincidence.
So we have a distinct
pattern of injuries
with certain victims.
James has a ligature
strangulation around his neck
with severe hemorrhaging.
And then Homan's injuries,
which our expert was able
to tell
he had a boot that was standing
on top of his forehead.
- Another victim of an assault.
- When you look at Hurley,
you're saying he has
a periorbital injury that
would take brute force
to damage that eye socket.
He matches James and Homan
with their injuries.
This is a distinctive pattern
of assault.
For us, this has been
one long uphill battle
of trying to put together
all these cases,
proving that they are
homicides,
and then connecting 'em to
the Smiley Face Killer theory.
- And we've also got
the pattern with drugs.
- We got Geib,
who had that anti-depressive
medicine,
and he had what seems like
more than enough drugs
in him to kill him,
so there's no way he walked
into that lake.
And then you got William Hurley
and Dakota James
both with GHB,
so that's another
distinct pattern, right here.
- And in all six of the cases,
the condition of the body
is inconsistent with
the time period that they were
supposed to be deceased.
- Right.
Booth's missing for 14 days
and he's got what looks like
one day of decomposition.
So where was he for
the other 13 days?
You got Todd Geib missing
for 21 days,
and he's got about three days
of decomposition,
according to Dr. Benbow's test.
Dakota James is missing
for 40 days...
- The water recovery guys said
that they recognized him
from the TV.
- Right.
His decomposition level
does not match
somebody who is dead
for 40 days.
I believe that people are
being murdered,
and somebody needs to step up
and do something.
Our theory is that our victims
are drugged,
abducted,
held for a period of time,
murdered, and then placed
into the water
at a later period of time.
So far, three of the six cases
are in the process of
being reopened.
But there are hundreds more
that we believe are
connected to
the Smiley Face Killers
that also need to be
reinvestigated.
I'm not gonna stop until
I get these cases
reclassified as homicides,
and then determine
whether or not
they're connected to
the Smiley Face Killers.
- What are your thoughts on
the Smiley Face Killer theory?
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