The case of Houston’s bayou bodies

HOUSTON — When Houston officials pulled the remains of a 67-year-old Black man from the brown waters of Buffalo Bayou on Sept. 20, it marked the fifth body found in a Houston bayou in as many days. The discovery, made beneath the low-hanging morning sun less than a mile downstream from downtown, might have gone unnoticed earlier in the year. Or even the year before. 

But not now. Not as rumors of a serial killer swirled around the nation’s fourth-largest city, warping a complex series of events into viral speculation, fueled by social media’s insatiable thirst for true crime. Not as city officials tried in vain to reclaim the narrative, and dispel the rumors. 

How many bodies have been found in Houston’s bayous?

Mayor John Whitmire looked frustrated. Exasperated. It was Tuesday, Sept. 23, three days after the most recent discovery. He stood behind a press-conference microphone, facing rolling cameras and notebook-wielding reporters. 

“Enough is enough,” he said, “of misinformation, wild speculation by either social media, elected officials, candidates, the media. We do not have any evidence that there is a serial killer loose in Houston, Texas.

“Let me say that again,” he reiterated. “There is no evidence that there is a serial killer loose on the streets of Houston.”

Whitmire was firm, if agitated. 

“It’s very frustrating to me to be at home, watch the news or social media and see people spread what I know to be false,” he said. 

Three days later, a dive team recovered yet another body — this time, a 23-year-old Black woman — also in Buffalo Bayou, right in downtown’s center. 

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To date, 25 bodies have been pulled from Houston’s bayous this year, according to medical examiner records obtained by Straight Arrow News. That easily eclipses last year, when an SAN analysis shows the medical examiner’s office recorded 20 such cases all year. 

If the pace recorded through September holds steady, Houston is on track to log 32 bayou deaths in 2025 — a 60% increase from 2024. 

That’s enough to give a whole city something to talk about. 

Why are most of the bodies found in Houston’s bayous men?

And the city has been talking. City Council Member Letitia Plummer has fielded concerns from constituents across Houston — especially in the weeks after the body of Jade McKissick, a 20-year-old University of Houston student, was found in Brays Bayou. The discovery, Plummer told SAN, “created a ton of fear from the college students.”

Plummer took it upon herself to assuage the community’s fears. She spoke at community meetings, set up a press conference on the banks of one of Houston’s many bayous and passed out flyers at the University of Houston and nearby Texas Southern University to reinforce tips for pedestrian safety. 

“When I spoke with the (Medical Examiner), what he said was the angst that we’re feeling in the community is that we’re finding so many of them consecutively,” Plummer told SAN. “Normally, within the year, you’d find one a month or you know, maybe two a month. But we’ve just had so many being found as days go by, which has created a lot more stress.”

It’s also created a lot of noise. 

“There’s no shortage of so-called experts — and I’m putting experts in quotation marks — who pipe in on this,” said Kim Rossmo, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation in the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Texas State University.

“There was a forensic psychiatrist that Fox News quoted who said, if this was just accidental, we wouldn’t have a preponderance of males over females,” Rossmo told SAN. “Well, she gets an F for not doing her homework.”

About 78% of drowning victims in Texas are men, said Rossmo, who is a former police detective. An SAN analysis of medical examiner records found that 88% of the bodies found in Houston’s bayous this year were men. 

Speculators have focused on the outsized number of men as evidence of a pattern at play. But Rossmo chalks it up to “social media apophenia” — when social media users point out “patterns that don’t exist.” 

This illusion of crime linkage is something he said he has “seen more and more in the past few years.”

Do serial killers usually drown their victims?

What’s happening in Houston, Rossmo told SAN, doesn’t fit the standard operating procedure for serial killers, who “almost never drown their victims.” 

In an analysis published earlier this year on the “Rainey Street Ripper” — an urban legend conflating found bodies with a serial killer in Austin, Texas — Rossmo noted that “homicidal drownings account for only 0.2% of all murders in the United States.” 

And that’s with good reason.

“Drowning is really difficult,” Rossmo told SAN. “If you walk yourself through the stages of how you would drown somebody, it just doesn’t make much sense at all to do it that way. And even if someone was trying to do this, you’d have a lot of failed attempts, and you would have reports of those failed attempts with descriptions of the offender.”

Rossmo’s research shows that only 0.1% of serial killers’ victims died by drowning. 

“It’s just really, really rare,” he told SAN. “And it doesn’t even fit the motivation of serial killers: These are often crimes of sex and power. So that doesn’t make sense either.”

What does make sense: The drowning rate in Texas — a state rife with rivers, bayous and gulf coastline — is 8% higher than the national average. In a city of 2.4 million people, with 2,500 miles of bayou, some drowning deaths are to be expected. And because they’re normalized, they don’t always hit the news. 

This part of the equation, Rossmo said, is largely being ignored by social media sleuths who have donned their armchair investigator hats. 

Do social media sleuths help or hurt the police?

America’s obsession with true crime is sharpening. In 2019, 6.7 million American adults listened to true crime podcasts weekly. In the next five years, that number nearly tripled, to 19.1 million, according to Edison Research. 

And these listeners are likely to be heavy social media users: 41% of podcast listeners between the ages of 18 and 29 say they regularly listen to true crime, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s the same age bracket in which 43% of Americans told Pew that they regularly receive news from TikTok.

Those true crime listeners are about 4.4 times more likely to call in a tip or provide other information to law enforcement in the quest to solve a case, according to Edison. 

That’s good news when the tips are good, said Rossmo. But he cautioned that amplifying theories that officials have already ruled out can lead to real harm. 

“There’s four harms,” he told SAN. 

The first is that “resources that could be used to solve a drowning problem are spent on chasing a phantom serial killer. Two, those police resources that just could be used to solve other real murders. Third is you’re re-victimizing the family members,” Rossmo said. “And then finally, you’re unnecessarily increasing fear levels. Our fear levels should be consistent with real risk, not with social media hype.”

Why does everyone have different information about Houston’s bayou deaths?

Some of the speculation swirling in Houston has been tied to confusion around the number of bodies recovered. Local TV station KHOU reported in early October that at least 13 bodies had been pulled from Houston waterways so far this year, compared with 24 in 2024. A few days later, the Houston Chronicle reported this year’s number was 24. Fox News reported 16. 

The inconsistencies stem from a dearth of data, including a lack of comprehensive cause-of-death information. 

At his Sept. 23 press conference, the mayor told reporters that “if there was (a serial killer), you would hear it from me first.”

Whitmire added that he held the press conference “to make certain that everybody knows we operate in my administration and HPD (Houston Police Department) in total transparency. What we know and can release to you, you will know as soon as anyone.”

Yet the information released by officials reflects the transparency of the bayou waters themselves — about as clear as mud. 

After several unanswered requests for comment, the mayor’s spokesperson, Mary Benton, pointed SAN to the September press conference — 24 days earlier — as the most current source for comments from the mayor. She also directed questions to the Houston Police Department; an HPD spokesperson declined to comment.

“I don’t think we have enough information,” said Lise Olsen, a Houston-based investigative reporter and author of the true crime book, “The Scientist and the Serial Killer”, about Houston’s notorious “Candyman” killings.

“There are different ways that serial killers are identified,” Olsen told SAN. “Sometimes they actually want to be identified as a serial killer. They have signatures, they write notes to the press. Some serial killers in our history have done that. Some serial killers in Texas dumped all of the bodies in the same place, like the so-called ‘Texas killing fields’ killer who put three bodies in the same spot on Calder Road — the same exact place, not just any bayou anywhere.”

An SAN analysis of medical examiner records found that the 25 bodies pulled from Houston’s bayous this year were discovered across 16 ZIP codes. The 77003 ZIP code, just east of downtown — where the city and private philanthropists recently pledged $310 million to revitalize the eastern portion of Buffalo Bayou — was the most common entry, accounting for three deaths in May and two in September. But largely, mapping the location information creates a scattershot scatterplot. 

“Even if you look at where all the victims were found, there’s no commonalities in the dumpsites,” said Olsen.

If Houston doesn’t have a serial killer, what’s behind the bayou deaths?

In his press conference, Whitmire posited that the city’s growing unhoused population could explain the increase in bayou deaths. 

“We have homeless living underneath the bridge,” Whitmire said. “When a homeless person dies of an illness — diabetes or cancer — what do you think his friends or associates do? They do not take him to a funeral home. Unfortunately, the homeless, when they pass, often end up in the bayou.”

Many of the city’s largest encampments — including one the mayor ordered cleared a week after his press conference — are located near Buffalo Bayou in downtown Houston’s 77002 ZIP Code. This area, directly upstream from 77003, was the second-most common ZIP code for a body to be recovered, SAN found. 

Rather than accept this theory as an answer to the bayou mystery, some see it as a launching pad for more questions. More concerns. 

Plummer, the city council member, told SAN she continues to ask the medical examiner for information that could determine whether the bodies found were likely to have been unhoused. 

“Once we get more information, I think we can have those deeper conversations on what we need to do,” Plummer said. 

“If many of them were unhoused and were homeless, then obviously we have an opportunity to support our unhoused community,” she told SAN. “We have to figure out ways to support.”

The mayor’s theory has left Olsen similarly unsatisfied. 

“I don’t know if we have enough information. But what we do know is a lot of bodies get put in the bayou, one way or another,” Olsen told SAN. “For some reason, a lot of people end up in the bayou. Why is that?”