SERIAL KILLERS > UNSOLVED CASES

Only the River Knows

By Seamus McGraw

To Mark the Anniversary

It was cloudy that night and cool, the temperatures hovered in the low forties, and a chill breeze swept across the college town of La Crosse, Wisconsin, from the deceptively still Mississippi. All the same, after a long hard winter in the frigid upper reaches of the mid-west, the night of April 9, 2004 held enough of the promise of spring to bring students from the University of Wisconsin and other nearby schools to the streets of La Crosse in droves.

Besides, it was Friday night, the hottest night in the hard-partying town of La Crosse.

Jared Dion had been out with his friends and his brother Adam that night. A strapping, 21-year-old sophomore -- he was a member of the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse wrestling team and had been an outstanding athlete in his high school days -- Dion had clearly been drinking. But by all accounts, he was not so drunk that fellow revelers took much notice when he staggered out of one of those downtown bars clad in his baseball cap and a maroon UW-LaX sweatshirt. It was a pity that they hadnt taken more notice. It was the last time any of them would see the gregarious young wrestler alive.

Five days later, Jared Dions bloated body was pulled from the frigid waters of the Mississippi. Authorities would later declare his death an accident. He had drowned, an autopsy found, after consuming enough alcohol to send his blood alcohol content to a formidable .28, nearly three times the level at which the law deems a person to be intoxicated.

Certainly, it was a tragedy, police said, that another young college-age man had consumed too much liquor and wandered too close to the river. But thats all it was, they said. Sure there were elements of Dions death that seem at first blush to be odd, like, for example the fact that his baseball cap had been found casually tossed across the top of a post not far from the spot on the river where they assumed Dion had plunged in. That was easily explained, authorities said. A group of joggers passing by had noticed it on the ground and one of them placed it there, Police Chief Ed Kondracki had later claimed. It didnt much trouble the chief when one of those same runners later told Anne Marie Conte of Stuff magazine that the chiefs version of that event was in error. In fact, the runner told Conte, the cap had been hanging on the post when he first happened by. It was already on the post, the fifth-year senior told Stuff.  We didnt stop at all. We didnt touch anything. Thats what it said in the police report.

Still, the police remained convinced, they said, that Dions death was an accident.

It was just a coincidence, they said, macabre perhaps, but a coincidence nonetheless that Jareds disappearance came almost precisely five years to the day that another young college-age man, a man bearing a striking resemblance to Dion, had drowned along that same stretch of river under circumstances that were chillingly similar.

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1. To Mark the Anniversary
2. Chillingly Similar
3. Rumors
4. They Might Be Zebras
5. A Culture of Skepticism
6. Spawning Ground for Boogey Men
7. Men Under Water
8. The Profiler's Suspect
9. A Truly Bizarre Fetish
10. Something Troubling
11. An Alibi is Not an Answer
12. Five Victims
13. Unanswered Questions
14. Bibliography