June smoked a joint as he told me of his first murder. “Jonas Sharpless was three sheets to the wind by the time I walked in,” he said. “Tobias was his handler and he waved me over while telling Jonas, ‘This is my friend Kevin. He’s going to take you home.’ I put an arm under him and Tobias wrapped his arms around his shoulders and then he mumbled, ‘Alright.’ I led him out of the bar and into the back of the van. Once we got him in, I jumped inside and pushed him forward. Morrie grabbed him and threw him down, and then Tobias put him in a chokehold until he passed out. I grabbed his legs so he couldn’t kick at us, and then I sat on his chest to make sure he was completely out. Rocko started driving the second we got inside, and he was playing Childish Gambino over the Bluetooth in case someone outside heard Jonas yell.” He paused to take a drag. He breathed in and exhaled out, hurling smoke up toward his ceiling. “Unconscious bodies are like a ton of cement,” he said. “When we got to the LaCroix River–I asked Rocko to park with the back facing out so we could push Jonas out easier–it took all of us to push him out. And he fell onto the river bank and as soon as he hit the ground, he jolted like he was lying in bed and the alarm went off.” June flailed his arms and shot his feet out, mimicking the gesture. “He was unconscious, but the collision woke him up. So we got out of the van and put our feet on his neck until he was completely still, and then we rolled him over to the water. Once we saw him sink down, we drove off.”
Jonas Sharpless was 21 years old. He was a biology major at Reservoir Baptist College, a varsity member of the soccer team, and a volunteer at the student health center. He was honest with his family and friends about his troubles with alcohol, but he was committed to improving himself, limiting himself to two drinks at family gatherings and pursuing counseling. He planned on working in harm reduction, helping people with drug and alcohol addictions live healthy lives.
On January 10, 2019, Jonas Sharpless walked into Jack O’Reilly’s Bar in Lamson. Security cameras captured him entering at 10:31 p.m., making his way toward the back of the bar. This was typical for him. He was a frequent visitor to O’Reilly’s, always coming in late at night and heading to the back where he could have some privacy while he drank his three or four beers. He wasn’t caught on surveillance cameras again until 1:06 a.m., which was also typical. He left the bar on most nights by himself, and every now and again with a girl, but on January 10, he was walking out with two men under his arms. Neither of their faces could be seen, nor could anyone else in the bar identify them.
“Camera footage is easy to circumvent,” June said. “Nightclubs and bars have relatively dim lights, and their cameras are low quality, something like six frames per second with 480 pixels per frame. So right off the bat, you can slip in without much worry. Put your head down as you walk in and out, wear a hat, slouch your shoulders and puff out your chest, you can take six inches off your height and add twenty pounds to your weight. And the lighting is so bad and the bar is so busy that few workers have enough time to remember your face, and they’ll forget about you once they hear the guy died in an accident.”
June is a manager at a mattress store sandwiched in between a take-out Chinese restaurant and a massage parlor “known for giving happy endings.” He is in his thirties–he declined to give his exact age. He describes himself as a nobody, “Mr. Low Profile, just another douchebag with a job and three pairs of Dockers,” a line he stole from Breaking Bad. When we met for the first time, he was wearing a black hoodie, blue jeans, and gray socks, and he opened the door with a Heineken in his hand. He is slightly hunched, and he likes to steeple his fingers when he is deep in thought. His favorite food is pepperoni pizza with red pepper flakes on top, and he likes to watch football in his free time–he is a Panthers fan. He wants to open up his own business; he got a business degree from a college he says is “undistinguished,” and he thinks there is an opening in the market for an eco-friendly bedding company. All things considered, he is content with his lot in life, though, as he puts it, “I wouldn’t mind being a rockstar.” His only distinguishing trait is his involvement in four murders, none of which he has any regrets about.
On February 10, 2019, the partly decomposed body of Jonas Sharpless was found by an off-duty state trooper. According to his initial description, “his skin was pallid and clammy, his eyes and cheeks were swollen, and his torso was bloated with gas.” The coroner determined that he died from drowning on January 11, “after falling and sustaining abrasions to the neck, head, and back.”
After I read the coroner’s report back to June, he puffed on his joint and smirked, like he was trying to hold back laughter. “Did you know that coroners are elected to their positions? That they don’t need any special training or advanced degrees or anything? They’re just rank-and-file doctors. People don’t care about dead bodies enough to get experts on them, they don’t care about what causes people to die once they’re dead, the mystery is over. They care about the people who go missing because there’s no end to the story. After Jonas died, I saw something like ten stories about him, you could speculate all you want, maybe he got amnesia, maybe he was abducted by space aliens. But then he was found dead, and there was a story about it, and that was it. Once you see someone dead and the oxygen has gone out of the room, what’s the difference between an abrasion on their back that looks like someone’s knee and an abrasion that looks like they hit a rock?”
I asked Jones if that means he’s never nervous about killing.
“Honestly, no,” he said. “We keep things down to earth. I don’t actually really feel anything while it’s happening. It’s only after the fact that it comes over me, which is nice. I can focus in the moment.”
June’s second murder came at the start of the 2019-2020 school year. “That first Friday, kids are drinking, trying to make the summer last longer,” he said. “Zachary Euclid was the kid’s name, I was in the van this time around with an extension cord. Zachary bought a daiquiri and drank it in about thirty minutes, and he was a burly guy, so it would take him a few drinks in order to get drunk. I remember sitting in that van looking at my phone for the time, and Rocko had to start driving around because we were idling outside Taylor’s Bar for so long. I mean, it figured. These kids are in a bar for a reason, they want to savor the moment and they can hold their liquor, to a point, at least.”
June was one of these kids. “I hated high school, it was all just standardized tests and preparation for college. They hyped it up, they said every little multiple-choice question mattered to the fate of your soul, because if you don’t go to college, you may as well live in a gutter. But then I go to college, and it’s just sitting in a classroom. The only preparation you’re doing there–it’s funny–is preparation for graduate school. Business classes, that’s all that really was, just listening to lectures and hoping you can take something from it into the real world. That’s partly why I want to start a business, just to make use of all that time sitting in that room doing nothing. Otherwise, it’s a huge waste of time.”
June’s favorite spot on his campus was an Irish bar that was five minutes from his dorm. His favorite drink was the mint julep, a drink he enjoyed so much he would have three each night, “usually with a few peanuts.” He would then drive back to his dorm, trying to beat the traffic before the alcohol completely disoriented him. “Then I would go and take a shower and try not to piss my bed,” he said, “wake up with a headache, go to a biology class or something, go out for a walk and scream my lungs out, go to the bar and then come home and do the same thing all over again.”
After he graduated, he moved into an apartment not far from his campus and worked at a retail store. He continued to drink, buying his own alcohol to save money, and he fell into a depression. “All that work I put in learning number tables, and here I am. And all my friends at school were like that, too, no one I knew who tried hard was moving on with their lives. The slackers and the try-harders were all in the same ship. I had all this angst inside me, and nowhere to turn to. It goes with working in a service industry, you can’t say anything if a customer yells at you, so you just bottle it up and go get some drinks to calm you down. For a while, I was just hoping to find some sort of outlet to get myself together.”
Two years after he graduated, June found his outlet. “One night, I ran out of booze, so I decided to go out. I walked into some bar I had walked by on my way to work, and I’m going over to the back when this guy beats me inside. He sits down in the seat next to me just before I can sit down, and he asks me what I want and he shows me his wallet. Who am I to refuse a free drink? So he orders himself and myself a mint julep and we start talking. At first, it’s just the basic stuff, small talk. But then we start going on about work. I work retail, he works retail. I deal with all these customers all day, he deals with all these customers all day. And then we’re off to school–I was in a public school that insisted your grades mean your life, look, he was in a public school that insisted your grades mean your life. He was hmm-mmming me the entire time, affirming me, letting me talk and then he’d pepper me with little things, all buttery and nice.” June laughed. “He was trying to dunk me. Beat for beat, what you’re supposed to do before you dunk someone. You establish your connection with the same drink order, and you buy them a drink to keep it friendly. Then you let the guy talk about his life story. Then you confirm him while you keep ordering drinks, then you put in the cube. He was working me until he realized I was so fucked up that I’d be better at killing people than being killed.”
“It did seem that you didn’t meet the profile. These guys who got killed had some sort of success, in school, in life,” I told June. “No offense.”
“None taken,” June said. “You’re right. That might have been one reason. I mean, it’s weird that we go after the successful people, until you stop to think about it. To the wider world, it’s the losers who murder each other. They’re poor and stupid and lacking in morality, so it makes sense that they would shove each other into rivers. It’s the successful people with the varsity memberships and elite alma maters who get drunk and are trying to go pee when they slip into the river. But I like to think it was more for what I am and less for what I’m not.”
At the end of the night, June’s new friend gave him a business card with a name and one number on it. June went home and called it, and the man who picked up the phone asked him, “So you’re the fresh meat?” His name was Lincoln, and the two talked until sunrise, following up on what June had spoken about earlier in the night. “I think the guy had a wire on because Lincoln knew everything. It was mainly just talking about life and so on, but he told me that he had an opportunity for me if I was willing to head out to Des Moines.”
So June drove out to a mattress store in the city–he refused to say whether or not it was the same store he now works at. Lincoln offered him his current job and gave him three thousand dollars to move out to Des Moines and a new cell phone with contacts “to call if I ever got in trouble and when I was ready to give back to Lincoln what he had given me.” One week after he moved into his apartment, he called the number.
June quickly got into the swing of things. “We did a couple of practices with the guys just so I knew what we were doing.” He studied the terms they were to use: “placer” for the guy who spoke to the target and controlled his drinks; “cube” for the drug that goes into the target’s drink; “handler” for the one who did most of the talking to the target and kept him drunk and isolated; “dunking” for the process of bringing the dead target out to the water and drowning him. “We don’t have a term for the guy who does the killing because we’re not stupid enough to say that part out loud,” June said.
June appreciated how meticulous the murders had to be. The murders are spaced out from each other. No two targets are taken from the same bar, and no two targets are dunked in the same body of water. No two murders occur within a month. Two consecutive murders cannot occur on the same weekday. The targets are white men who go to college and like to drink, but they do not have to share any other major qualities. Any member of the killing team can pull rank and stop the murder–June stopped one after he spotted an EMT walking into the bar. “We were toward the back, but it was too close for comfort.”
Yet there is wiggle room. The team can choose any target they want and kill them however they need to. They can be out as late as they want, and they can keep hanging out once they’re done. “The rules sound strict, but they’re ones we’ve adopted so we don’t get caught,” June said, shrugging his shoulders. “All Lincoln really insists on is that we drown him in a river after drugging him, and we draw a smiley face near where he dropped. There’s a lot of gaps for us to fill in, and we fill them in.”
Case in point, Zachary Euclid. “So Ralph gets him full of drinks, and Marco places in the cube. Now they call us to come back because Zachary needed to get carried out. So we go in and get him up and into the van. As I mentioned, Zachary is a huge guy, and when I wrapped the cord around his neck, it’s too narrow to strangle him. So I held him down, bundled the cord up, and I pressed on his trachea until he opened his mouth, and when he did, I shoved the bundled-up cord down his mouth and pinched his nose so he couldn’t breathe. After he had asphyxiated, I stuck my fingers down my throat and vomited in his mouth to make it seem like he had choked on his own vomit. And then we pitched him off the Lamar Aqueduct and threw the cord into a trash bin.”
Zachary was found beside the Aqueduct on September 28, 2019. His coroner’s report lists the causes of death as being: “1.) Drowning; 2.) Asphyxiation on ingested food; 3.) Collapsed lung from collision with water.”
Similar tweaks were involved with Kyle Simmons’s murder. “Rocko beat him to death. He was a karate guy, so he was trying to fight back, and Rocko is an amateur MMAer. He got him against the back of the van because he was so groggy and then he kept slamming his head into the wall. We dunked him in Vincent Square Park by the pond where it’s all rocky to make it look like he fell against the rocks going in.” Kyle was found dead at the bottom of the pond in Vincent Square on January 29, 2020. His cause of death was “drowning and blunt force trauma to the head.”
His final murder of Jordi Karlsen also required improvisation: “I was in the back because we were around the corner from a police station and I needed to be on the lookout. Marco knocked out Jordi by putting him in a chokehold, and Jordi was a little guy, barely five feet tall. So Marco could just pick him up and hang him until he died. It was like he’d put him in a noose, his feet were dangling off the ground and everything.” Jordi was found dead in the Scofield River on October 3, 2020, with his cause of death being “cardiac arrest due to cold water immersion.”
But the most leeway that June and his crew have is with the smiley faces. “You have to change them up,” June said, nodding his head. “These stations have handwriting experts who have actual training in this sort of stuff. So you have to do it in different ways, even though smiley faces are so commonplace.”
As an initiation, June was allowed to draw the smiley face at Jonas Sharpless’s dunk site. With yellow chalk, he drew one with Xs for eyes and an egg-shaped head on a railing next to the river. “I wanted it to be distinct,” he said with a laugh.
“Ralph–” the handler for Zachary Euclid and the new member of the Des Moines crew–“drew with a Sharpie a smiley face with big Kylie Jenner lips on a telephone post. He really didn’t want to be indiscreet. Rocko drew a face in the letter O for the word ‘of’ to make it seem more inconspicuous, that was for Kyle. And for Jordi, Loren made a dotted circle and then drew an arrow for the mouth and one capital T for each eye. Pretty fucking creative. Next time, I’d like to draw one with a big grin and with each tooth visible, like a Cheshire cat. My first one was lame. I thought about drawing my next one in blood, maybe putting it up against the rocks so it would wash off, but that would be too crazy. We would get caught for sure.”
June hasn’t received a call from Lincoln in a year. As far as June knows, none of the other crew members have been contacted by him, either. When I asked him whether he was bothered by that, June shrugs. “You can’t have the money he has to give a bunch of guys jobs and have them kill people from running a couple of mattress stores in flyover country. He probably has his fingers in a lot of things.”
“But why go through all of this?” I asked. “You don’t even send him photographs or anything of what happened.”
“I think the smiley faces are areas for him to go back and relish in what happened. But I don’t know. It’s not like you can tell the differences between all the different smiley faces around here.”
“Exactly. Why go through all of it?”
June leaned forward, steepling his fingers. “I can’t speak for anyone but myself. But for me, I could just sit on my ass and smoke weed and watch the NFL until I’m dead from diabetes or something. Every now and then, I get to do something different without disrupting my entire life. And I’m good at it, naturally, I guess–or maybe from all of those years I spent in school looking at the backs of kids’ heads and figuring I could choke them out. I won’t be doing this forever. I’m sure I’ll get bored–I might give Lincoln a call, thank him for everything, and go on my way. But I’m really content with how things are going right now, and they could go on for a while. As long as I don’t go to the police, nothing is going to change. We’ve got all our bases covered, as long as we keep our mouths shut. And for that matter, I hope to God you change my name for this.”
Samuel Fishman (he/him/his) is a proprietor of post-modernist hogwash. A graduate of Oberlin College, Sam is currently employed as an SEO marketing writer in the Boston area. He aspires to be a professional creative writer, penning books about celebrity stalkers and witches who talk to ghosts to stop serial killers. You can hear him talk about ESPN poker documentaries on the Two Fish at the Table Podcast on YouTube.