AUSTIN (KXAN) – Hundreds of books filled floor-to-ceiling, wooden shelves stacked along the walls of Dr. Kim Rossmo’s home office in Central Austin. Their spines displayed titles like “The Biology of Violence,” “Career Criminals” and “Delinquent Behavior.” Without knowing Rossmo’s background, one might assume a darker obsession.
Kim Rossmo’s collection of crime-related books line the walls of his office (KXAN Photo/Josh Hinkle)But a closer look would reveal a handful written by Rossmo himself, a criminologist. They included “Geographic Profiling.” That particular volume described an investigative methodology he pioneered and has now used to scientifically determine the likelihood of a serial killer drowning victims in Lady Bird Lake a few miles away.
“Serial murder is a very rare event, but it's also one with very serious consequences,” Rossmo said, pointing to a computer monitor on his desk that showed a map of the waterway – part of the Lower Colorado River – stretching through the city’s downtown. He traced his finger from the eastern boundary of focus – U.S. Highway 183 – across the screen to Red Bud Isle at the west end.
Applying his technique, he then analyzed what some believe to be a series of seemingly connected crimes over the past 22 years.
Criminologist Kim Rossmo reviews Lady Bird Lake drowning research in his Austin home office (KXAN Photo/Josh Hinkle)“We started with 189 cases,” Rossmo explained of the data he and his team gathered from police, medical examiner reports and other sources. It included locations and dates of when bodies were recovered in or near the water, along with other key characteristics – helping them narrow down the list to 58.
“We removed some that were obviously not of our interest,” he said. “So, for example, a flooding death. We removed boating accidents or things where it clearly was suicide.”
That final tally allowed Rossmo to take an evidence-based, “completely independent“ approach to a story that continues to haunt the city’s lakeside bar district.
“These are the cases that match the M.O. and the victimology of the Rainey Street Ripper,” he said, pausing momentarily before adding, “if he or she exists.”
The resulting report answers that thought, finding "neither direct evidence nor indirect warning signs of a serial murderer" and that the "frequency of drowning incidents in Austin is consistent with historical patterns, average drowning risk in Texas, and population growth."
Read Rossmo's study, “The 'Rainey Street Ripper': An Independent Analysis of the Evidence”‘Preconceived bias’
For years, police have denied the existence of a serial killer in the heart of Austin, insisting “no foul play” in most cases and concluding they lacked connections beyond a few similar details: often young men, many intoxicated, found floating in Lady Bird Lake.
After one such death in 2023, then-APD Assistant Chief Jeff Greenwalt reiterated the message some victims’ loved ones and several social media sleuths refuse to believe: “There are a lot of allegations that there’s a serial killer, but there’s no proof or evidence in any of our investigations to sustain that.”
MAP: Tracking deaths in Lady Bird Lake in downtown AustinSgt. Nathan Sexton, who helps oversee the department’s homicide unit — which responds initially to several types of deaths, including drownings — told KXAN the serial killer theory has led to an increase in tips, but that can sometimes create frustration during an investigation.
“I think it just takes from resources that could be spent in other areas (like) our victim services counselors,” Sexton said. “The families can often be misled to think… that there might be foul play. And that could potentially, I think, be very damaging to families.”
APD Homicide Sgt. Nathan Sexton speaks with KXAN Investigator Josh Hinkle about drownings in Lady Bird Lake (KXAN Photo/Dalton Huey)Sexton said he generally sees more “conspiracy theories” surrounding the drownings compared to other investigations in his unit, as the rise of social media influencers has likely fueled that trend in recent years.
“That is definitely an obstacle to overcome when we're trying to work with (families) and help them through this very difficult time,” he said. “Years ago, there weren't quite so many places you could go click and watch a YouTube video or TikTok or whatever it is to see somebody explaining and walking through exactly what their theories are.”
So this year, Rossmo, a professor at Texas State University’s School of Criminal Justice and Criminology and director of its Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation, approached APD to propose a partnership, a study “not meant to be supporting that or be critical.”
“What can we figure out from this evidence without sort of having a predetermined goal in mind?” he said. “Let's take a look at patterns over time, and let's see what they tell us without any sort of preconceived bias. And when I did this, when I talked to APD about it, they committed to releasing the results publicly.”
Austin’s Lady Bird Lake (KXAN Photo/Josh Hinkle)Austin police and other city leaders have not yet said how the results of the 40-page study might inform their future decisions.
“The Austin Police Department looks forward to collaborating… to fully understand the circumstances surrounding these deaths,” APD Chief Lisa Davis said in a university release. “If any patterns or correlations are found, we want to know what changes can be made to reduce the likelihood of such preventable tragedies.”
In recent years, lights and fencing have been added along some areas near the water, and police and EMS patrols have temporarily picked up around the lake following new cases. Rossmo's study notes drownings decreased after the Austin City Council dedicated nearly $1 million in 2023 to lakeside trail safety improvements.
“Let's be effective and efficient, and let's use knowledge, research and data to determine where our problems are and what they are and then what we can do about them,” he said.
Rossmo's study notes, "The Travis County Medical Examiner's Office concluded the deaths were accidental drownings, most involving intoxicated individuals who fell into the water." As an area of potential focus, he further emphasized to KXAN cases often involved alcohol — especially when speaking of lake-adjacent Rainey Street, the name of which inspired the moniker for the supposed serial killer.
Rainey Street has transformed over the past decade from mostly historic houses to a bustling bar scene today, though Rossmo's report said it is "not Austin's drowning epicenter" with "only eight target victims... recovered from" that area since 2004. Bodies were more often found upstream near Auditorium Shores and Barton Creek, according to the study.
“In our data, we found more men than women,” he said, highlighting other studies on the prevalence of men drowning in Texas and also how male victims generally engage in more perilous behavior than females.
Rossmo's report references 7,737 unintentional drownings across the state over more than two decades. 78% of those were males "predominantly between the ages of 22 and 44 years." It also mentions Austin's population boom and alcohol sales in the "Downtown/Rainey Street district" increasing increasing by 320% between 2020 and 2022.
Historic Rainey Street home gets new life in Dripping Springs“It's been suggested that the serial killer's preference is that he's going after young men,” Rossmo continued. “One of our points is going to be: well, how does this differ, if at all, from what we find from drownings across the entire state of Texas going back many years? You know, it's just the victimology is different because men engage in probably more drinking and riskier behavior.”
Autopsy and toxicology reports, police records, witness accounts and other evidence showed several of the victims were indeed intoxicated. The cause of death for most in the list was accidental drowning or undetermined.
“Some people — whether attempting to use the bathroom or just going down by the river just to see it — that close access can be dangerous,” Sexton said. “Mixing — whether it's drugs or alcohol — with a body of water nearby, there's potential, obviously, for drownings.”
Sexton added police and city officials should continue educating and reminding the public about such risky situations, and Rossmo’s study could be another tool in that campaign.
“I think trying to promote factual evidence like this research project and showing that, that it's not a killer,” Sexton added. “That it's, you know, I think, unfortunately, most of these are a series of accidents — and just public awareness.”
‘Looking for clusters’
By "invoking drama and fear," the study indicated social and mainstream media coverage “has criticized the failure of authorities to recognize the threat of a violent offender,“ while adding that “police must properly respond to the risk of a predator“ but “not waste limited resources pursuing a criminal who does not exist.“
"Murder is uncommon," the study also acknowledged. "And homicidal drownings account for only 0.2% of all murders in the United States... serial murderers almost never drown their victims (fewer than 0.1%)."
Rossmo said seeing this research should help dispel the myth of a single person or group repeatedly preying along the lake’s shores.
“I think they'll convince some people,” he said. “Others? Yeah, the research is very clear that once people make up their minds, some of them can be very, very difficult to budge from that.”
Rossmo as a Vancouver detective-inspector (Courtesy Kim Rossmo)Though definitions vary among researchers and law enforcement professionals, the Federal Bureau of Investigation labels “serial murder” as “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s) in separate events.”
Rossmo has studied serial murder for more than three decades, spending the early part of his career as a detective-inspector in Vancouver, Canada.
“I was in charge of (the police department’s) geographic profiling section,” he said, “which did a lot of work on serial crime,” including his experience on the Robert Pickton case.
“The Pig Farm Serial Killer in the suburbs of Vancouver,” Rossmo recounted. “Women were disappearing… No bodies were being found. And this wasn't happening elsewhere, like in other Western Canadian cities.”
Robert Pickton, convicted Canadian serial killer (AP Photo)Rossmo played a key role in analyzing the pattern of those missing women, using some of the same methods he applied to the Lady Bird Lake drownings.
“We borrowed techniques from epidemiology, something called spatial temporal clustering, which simply means: do we have too much happening in too small an area in too short a time period for it just to be random?”
Rossmo said, at that point, such research turns to his main approach: cluster analysis.
“We're looking for clusters or spikes of things in time and space that might suggest we have a serial offender,” he explained.
An investigation eventually led police to Pickton, who murdered at least 26 women – many of them prostitutes from Vancouver – between 1995 and 2001. Their remains were buried and scattered across his family’s pig farm. He confessed to 49 murders and was later killed by a fellow prisoner while serving a life sentence.
Investigators digging at family farm where Pickton buried victims (AP Photo)“That analysis ended up, unfortunately, being correct,” Rossmo said. In 2012, he told a panel during an official inquiry he believed Pickton would have been stopped up to two years sooner if senior police officials would not have rejected his serial killer theory and avoided a public warning.
“I would like to say we are sorry again to the family and friends of the murdered and missing women,” Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu said in a statement later that year. “We could have and should have caught Pickton sooner.”
The inquiry’s final report blamed “blatant failures” by police for allowing Pickton to remain undetected for so long. Rossmo suggested police back then suffered from linkage blindness.
“Police departments don't see or sometimes refuse to see linkages between cases,” he said. “There are scientific techniques, statistical techniques we can use to try to determine if something like that is happening.”
But even without a serial killer at play in Austin, Rossmo said embracing academic research at this stage in the Lady Bird Lake timeline could help police here not only further target potential solutions, but also rebuild lost trust in the community.
“Hopefully, this will allow for a more moderate and rational discussion,” he said. “That's going to get us as close to the truth as possible.”
KXAN Investigative Photojournalist Richie Bowes and Digital Director Kate Winkle contributed to this report.
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