Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt For Justice — What happened to William Hurley?

Will was found dead in the Charles River in Boston in 2009. Pic credit: Oxygen

What happened to Will Hurley?

Navy man Will was murdered in 2009 and was found in the Charles River. But why?

His distraught girl friend Claire Lebeau recalls him in our exclusive clip where she goes over the night he went missing.

“He made me a happy, spontaneous person, he was a fun person and I loved him for that,” she says.

Claire and Will had been living in Boston for a few years. She remembers meeting him and loved him very much.

Will was heading to a Bruins game in Boston and that is when the trouble started. Six days later, his body was pulled from the Charles River and a smiley face graffiti image was nearby.

Detective Kevin Gannon interviews Claire who says her last commincations were a text message saying he was going to a hockey game. But he did not stay long. Claire says he didn’t know hockey that well and was tired.

So goes the work of retired NY police detectives Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte.

Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt for Justice follows retired NYPD Detective Kevin Gannon, Anthony Duarte, Mike ‘Mikey’ Donovan and D. Lee ‘Doc’ Gilbertson all of whom spent the last 12 years of their retirement to finding justice for these cases.

As the men investigated, they began connecting numerous drowning deaths of men across the USA. The pair studied cases dating back to the last century and believe the deaths of at least 45 college males who were found drowned or killed were connected.

They came up with a theory. The Smiley Face Murder theory was formulated after the discovery of the smiley-face symbol painted at many of the body recovery locations.

The graffiti convinced the pair that a killer or killers are stalking men as they leave bars and then murdering them and then staging their deaths as accidental drownings.

Oxygen Media is now telling the recreated stories of these horrific true crimes. The Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt for Justice talks to victims’ families and top forensic experts to investigate these mysterious, accidental drownings.

The logline, from Oxygen:

Since 1997, hundreds of college-aged men have mysteriously drowned after a night out drinking with friends. Their bodies have been found in clusters around the country, and the victims are eerily similar – they’re all athletic, academic achievers. In addition, near where many of the bodies are recovered is one distinct mark: graffiti of a smiley face.

All of the drownings have been individually classified as accidental or undetermined and have not been investigated as possibly related crimes.

There are grieving families of these young men who are convinced that there is something more sinister at play, and desperately search for answers with Gannon and the team. Their goal is to gather enough evidence to convince local authorities to reclassify and investigate these deaths as homicides.

Only then can the team attempt to establish a possible connection between these deaths to further their theory that the young men are victims of a calculated group known as The Smiley Face Killers.

Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt For Justice airs Saturday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on Oxygen.

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