By Justin McKinney, Staff Writer
In one of the most alarming stories of 2017 so far. 23-year-old Michael Kelleher of Southborough, Mass., was found dead in the Charles River several weeks after he’d gone missing following a Celtics game. While this case may seem like an isolated incident, the fact is that Kelleher is just the latest in a strange string of disappearances in the Boston area that have led to the victim being found dead in a body of water weeks later.
The disappearances date back to 2009 and they all seem to involve a man in his mid to early 20’s, leaving a Boston bar, either with an unknown person or alone, and then ending up a Boston body of water shortly thereafter. Some have been weighed down, while others’ bodies seemed to have been dumped in the water days or weeks after their initial deaths. However, the Boston Police Department refuses to acknowledge that there is or even could be a killer on the prowl.
I did not want to believe it at first, as the whole idea of a serial killer being on the loose in Boston targeting men my own age is utterly terrifying. A blog post on Cryptid Antiquarian called “Boston’s Mysterious Missing Men” has recently gone viral and I hate to say it, but I doubt I’ll be spending my 21st birthday in Boston because it convinced me that something sinister is happening in The Cradle of Liberty.
The post focuses on 11 cases from 2007-2016, six of which happened between 2012 and 2016, all involving men within their early to mid-twenties. It’s also worth noting that if you add in Kelleher, the number of lost men between the past five years found dead in a body of water rises to seven.
According to the article out of the 11 men three were from North Carolina, two were in the Navy, three were engineers, one was a chemist, and five were artists. It just seems extremely strange that 11 men who met the same deadly fate in the same city less than a decade apart had so much in common.
Not to mention that the tangled web gets much creepier. Both men in the Navy disappeared right after speaking with their girlfriends on the phone. Even stranger, one of the Navy-vets who disappeared was in town on the day of the other man’s disappearance two years prior to his own.
Another set of men who disappeared both left the bars they were at on their birthdays without coats, despite the cold temperatures, and both were caught on security cameras just before their disappearances.
While there isn’t any one thing other than age, sex, and that all these men were found in the water that really ties all of these together, it seems that there are some very peculiar coincidences in these string of disappearances. The Boston Police simply aren’t admitting that there’s an issue here because they don’t want to give the serial killer fame. But, the fact is young men need to know this is happening.
In the most recent case with Kelleher, the police had been searching the river for about two weeks before his body was eventually found, and the police released almost no details on Kelleher except that they found his body.
This was a high profile disappearance that was all over social media, and no details were released on his case at all. It just seems very strange and like they have something to hide.
Other cases that were listed on the blog got similar treatments as well.
One man’s body was weighed down with a chain and a cinder block and police claimed it was a suicide. My question is, why weigh your own body down to commit suicide?
In most cases, murderers use this tactic as a way for bodies to not float, and thus, not be found. Another body was found several weeks after his disappearance, however his body had limited water exposure. Police listed it as an accidental drowning. If this was an accidental drowning, why was his body’s decomposition not consistent with what it would had had he been in the water for several weeks?
If you are a young man headed to Boston, travel in packs and don’t get wasted and wander off. Something is happening in the city and its nothing that any sane person wants a part of.
Hopefully, the men and women at Boston Police Department are working on something despite their denial of a serial killer.
It should be noted that after this article was written, this week, another 20 year-old man was found dead in Boston. His body was found near the Charles River.