David Harrington’s body was discovered first, sitting upright in a deck chair on the back patio. Clayton McGeeney and Ricky Johnson were lying nearby in the garden, frozen in the dirt.
Pals since their days at Park Hill high school two decades ago, the trio had gathered on Sunday, January 7th at a mutual friend’s house to drink beers and watch their beloved Kansas City Chiefs play their final game of the regular season against the Los Angeles Chargers.
After the match ended in victory, they enjoyed an episode of the game show Jeopardy. And then, well, everything after that remains a gruesome mystery that has gripped America for the past month.
What is known for certain is that, for much of the next two days, three corpses lay undetected, slowly being coated in snow and ice, in the backyard of a nondescript home on a quiet, suburban Missouri street.
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On Tuesday evening, April Mahoney arrived at the house in the neighbourhood known as “The Coves”, anxious because she hadn’t heard from McGeeney, her fiancé, since he went there to cheer on the Chiefs 48 hours earlier. When nobody answered her repeated pounding on the front door, she broke in through a basement window and began scouring the place for clues to his whereabouts. She found none.
Eventually, from an upstairs window, she spotted Harrington’s obviously dead body out the back, phoned the police, and was so overcome by the macabre tableau she didn’t even notice the other two bodies, one of them the love of her life, lying close by.
After the cops arrived, Jordan Willis, who was renting the house and hosted the NFL watch party, finally woke from a deep slumber and greeted the officers, in his boxers, an empty wine glass in hand, claiming ignorance about the grisly fate of his friends.
Willis’s story is that at a certain juncture that Sunday evening, following the departure of Alex Weamer-Lee, another buddy, from the house, he crashed out, turned on a fan and donned noise-cancelling headphones, two accoutrements that he says helped him remain asleep through most of the next day and night.
Presuming the other three had simply gone home, he got up a couple of times, going on to do some work on his computer. He never saw or heard the desperate loved ones of Harrington (37), McGeeney (36) and Johnson (38) trying to rouse him, via Facebook messages or in person. Nor did he notice his pals (two of whose cars were still parked in front of the house) dead in his backyard.
“There were four of you in that house, now three of them are dead and you’re not,” said Jon Harrington, father of David. “That doesn’t add up. I’m thinking that the three of them learned something or saw something that they shouldn’t have seen, and he decided, ‘Well, I need to get rid of you now’. Friends or not’.”
Denying any knowledge of how they died in such a way that their remains couldn’t even be formally identified until they thawed out, Willis, whose only criminal record is a DUI, initially spoke to the police without a lawyer present, and has not been charged with any crime.
Although the case is not being treated as a homicide investigation, social and traditional media are aflame with conspiracy theories and lurid allegations, especially since it emerged that he is a prominent research scientist, most recently at the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center in Kansas City.
Boasting a national reputation for stellar work on HIV vaccine-related projects and a high school nickname of “The Chemist”, Willis’s laboratory-rich resume led the New York Post to ask, “Did suburban Walter White poison his friends?”
The reference to the chemistry teacher turned drug manufacturer from Breaking Bad was perhaps inevitable once preliminary toxicology reports revealed all three men had traces of cocaine and THC in their systems, as well as three times the lethal dose of fentanyl. Whether they knowingly ingested the latter or were unaware of it being mixed in with another substance in a cocktail (a common occurrence, unfortunately), this is the drug blamed for 112,000 Americans dying from overdoses last year.
A leading forensic pathologist has speculated all four men could have taken the same narcotic, with the three who died most likely falling asleep from it outside where they then suffered cardiac arrest due to the onset of hypothermia. One of the men was not even wearing a jacket, suggesting he hadn’t intended to stay in the cold.
In this scenario, Willis survived simply because he got drowsy and lay down inside the house, safely sleeping off the effects of whatever they took. In another twist to the tale, he has moved out of the house and checked into rehab because his friends’ deaths were a wake-up call regarding his own drug addiction.
As the Chiefs try to win their third Super Bowl in five seasons against the San Francisco 49ers in Las Vegas next Sunday night, people with varying levels of interest in the sport will gather at houses across America to eat, drink, and indulge too much. Over-imbibing in a communal setting is as much a part of the gridiron sporting ritual as complaining about officiating. Meanwhile, back in Kansas City, the search for answers about how three of the team’s fans came to die doing just that is ongoing.
