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Mysterious deaths of Kansas City Chiefs fans found frozen in back garden baffles America

As the Chiefs prepare to bid for their third Super Bowl in five years, back in Kansas City the search for answers to disturbing recent incident is ongoing

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Thousands of Kansas City Chiefs gather to celebrate their Super Bowl LVII success during the victory parade last year in Kansas City, Missouri. Photograph: David Eulitt/Getty Images

Dave Hannigan's face

Dave Hannigan

Thu Feb 8 2024 - 06:00

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.

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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.

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1748

Dave is a very good writer

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Sally Rooney: Killing in Gaza has been supported by Ireland’s ‘good friend’ in the White House

Brilliant piece.

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Self-obsession is the root of modern loneliness

Our culture’s idea that happiness can be found only within ourselves runs counter to history

James Marriott

Wednesday March 20 2024, 5.00pm GMT, The Times

‘Until the end of the 17th century,” the French historian Philippe Ariès once observed, “nobody was ever left alone.” It is a mark of the strangeness of modern lifestyles that the statement sounds like an exaggeration. It isn’t really.

For most of human history loneliness was not only undesirable but “virtually impossible”. People lived, worked, ate and slept together. The whole meaning of a person’s life was bound up with others to a degree that is now difficult to comprehend.

To shut oneself up in a room alone was regarded as an act of remarkable eccentricity and it was only in the 18th century that houses began to be regularly built with such modern guarantees of comfortable solitude as locks, private fireplaces and corridors (which meant other members of the household weren’t continually passing through your room to get to the next one).

We are so accustomed to news reports about loneliness — such as this week’s story that middle-aged English adults are the “loneliest in Europe” — that we forget to be properly alarmed by them. To our ancestors they would have been among the most shocking items in the newspaper. What might have struck them as even stranger is the paradox that the more isolated we become, the more insistently our culture bombards us with the idea that happiness is not to be found in other people but within ourselves.

“Be yourself,” we tell our children. “Don’t worry what other people think.” If we are depressed we need to “work on ourselves”, achieve “personal growth”, practise “self-love” or improve our “self-esteem”.

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All solutions to life’s problems are found not in community but in the individual — in its YouTube adverts the software company Wix persists in inanely reminding me that “there’s nothing more powerful than you”.

The American writer Tyler Austin Harper has described modern ideas about human flourishing as “therapeutic libertarianism”: “the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints … should impede each of us from achieving personal growth”.

It is a mistake to interpret the ubiquity of these ideas as a sign that they are universal truths. Ancient philosophers placed an overwhelming emphasis on community and relationships in their theories of the good life. Aristotle thought friendship essential for happiness; Cicero believed that life without a friend was not worth living.

The Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich has shown how unusual western hyperindividualism looks in a global context. In one fascinating study cited in his book The Weirdest People in the World, participants from around the globe were asked to define themselves, completing the sentence “I am…”.

Westerners tended to focus on their personal attributes and achievements (“I am a doctor”, “I am intelligent” and so on). Non-western participants tended to emphasise their relationships (“I am a son”). More collectivist societies, such as those in east Asia, tend to have much lower rates of depression and anxiety than western countries.

Unfortunately we are caught in a cultural Catch-22: the more isolated we are, the more accustomed we become to the idea that human beings are solitary animals who find meaning and purpose as individuals, not in groups. Companies like BetterHelp ask us to believe that unhappiness can be cured in isolation, pouring out our troubles to a virtual therapist or a chatbot on a smartphone.

Contrast that with the psychiatrist Anthony Storr’s tale about a friend who worked with a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa and was perplexed to find his clients turned up for therapy with their extended families in tow — to them the idea of understanding, let alone curing a human mind in isolation made no intuitive sense.

Much fashionable therapy speak and “wellness” jargon is underpinned by the assumption that if we want to be mentally healthy we must maintain an attitude of vigilant paranoia towards other people who might intrude on our lives. We are instructed to fear interactions that might contain “microaggressions” or unpleasant “triggers”.

Difficult people are not to be tolerated but condemned as “toxic”. In pop-psychology, “people-pleasing” is not a laudable instinct but a pathology. We must maintain “boundaries” and beware the effort of “emotional labour”.

Universities provide “safe spaces” for students to preserve their mental health through isolation. These seem precisely the wrong solutions for a society suffering from a dearth of human connection. I wonder how many people realise how unusual these ideas are from a historical perspective.

Few now seriously dissent from the assumptions of individualism. Economic individualism has long been an important force on the political right. Many on the left, which once offered a more communitarian view of society, have now succumbed to “identity politics”, which teaches that happiness and fulfilment can be found by looking inwards: discovering and expressing ever more exotic and recherché personal identities. But most of us, I think, would be better off not thinking about ourselves nearly so much.

I sometimes wonder if our lonely age might not be more content if we simply reversed all our conventional ideas about happiness: don’t be yourself if it makes it harder to get on with other people; don’t express yourself if it alienates the people around you; do worry about what other people think of you if you want to make friends.

We don’t need to go so far as to demolish our corridors and remove our locks but if we want a happier, less isolated society it might help to remember quite how odd modern western ideas about human flourishing are.

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The main reason for much, probably most, of the loneliness, depression and general fucked upness in first world countries can be reduced to two words: The INTERNET.

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1753

I think this is a great bit of work.

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1754

Mayflies was a tremendous book.

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I’ve not read it. I probably will now.

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Ah it’s a classic.

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Johnny Liew is a grand auld writer at times.

Loved this part (especially the dig at Guardian nerds like himself):
And for the avoidance of doubt, none of this is necessarily a bad thing. For all its inequities and inefficiencies, the landscape of football media is broader and richer place than it has ever been. You have Fabrizio Romano for transfers, Grace Robertson for tactics, Versus for football culture, Stadio podcast for the global game, Mark Goldbridge for performative rants about Erik ten Hag, the Guardian for chin-strokey think-pieces written by the guys picked last at PE. In a way, there has never been a better time to consume football. The garden is blooming. But for spring to begin – and yes, you know it’s coming – first winter has to end.

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He murdered it with the intro tbh.

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the Guardian for chin-strokey think-pieces written by the guys picked last at PE

Nice line in self deprecating self awareness :smiley:

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Thank goodness for Jonny Arse

https://gript.ie/revealed-the-documents-the-state-didnt-want-you-to-see-before-the-referendums/

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Might have been an idea to publish this beforehand

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Whatever side you take on it, and this would as we know have blown the referendum out of the water, a government governs on behalf of the citizens. To deny them access to all potential major concerns when voting in a referendum is just plain wrong. I hadn’t considered this aspect of it, and the vast majority wouldn’t either, but it could and I suspect would have had huge ramifications.

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https://twitter.com/SeanMcGoldrick1/status/1829495896947486757

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Can you copy?

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Apologies @Batigol, i had to work

This week I watched footage of great beasts roaming the plains of Zimbabwe as swelling orchestral music played. The world has changed rather dramatically since these majestic creatures first emerged, and they have come to these great plains for one final adventure. Look at them silhouetted against an African sunset, emitting their trademark barrage of semi-ironic hoots and chortles. There’s the big one who bellows, the little yoke who sits on his head, grooming him, and, of course – who can forget? – the other one.

I’m writing about Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, the trio at the core of The Grand Tour, aka Continuity Top Gear, aka Cars! Cars! Cars! and Maybe Racism! aka David Attenborough’s Magnificent Blokes.

They represent all three kinds of ageing Englishman. May is the type of ageing man who slowly fades until he is a ghost whispering to you about engines on Dave. Old Richard Hammond is a scale model of young Richard Hammond, identical to his younger self in every way except being somehow smaller and looking slightly lacquered. Look at him there, sucking a big spiral lollipop and wearing bootees. He might continue to shrink until he can perch on Clarkson’s shoulder like a cockatoo – and please God he shall. Frowny Jeremy Clarkson himself has been slowly adding furrows to his body, so now he looks like a full-body frown in a flowery shirt.

He has reason to frown. As with all contemporary nature programmes, the horrible impact of climate change is a recurring theme in this episode. While many have found their habitats and ways of life destroyed, the way climate change is affecting Clarkson, Hammond and May is that electric cars now exist and they don’t want to drive electric cars.

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Yes, I am weeping as I write this. It comes up a few times in this episode, the horror they feel at the prospect of having to drive electric cars. It is, literally, one of the reasons Clarkson gives for ending the show. I shed bitter tears, but that could be all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Top Gear was some phenomenon. Clarkson, May and Hammond relaunched the BBC’s motoring show in 2002. The pitch was, basically, “yuk-yuks in vroom-vrooms”. They pioneered expensive stunts and ironic chauvinism, and in the process they frequently tiptoed up to the edge of what was permissible at Britain’s national broadcaster.

Then, in 2015, Clarkson went too far, because he hit an Irishman for refusing to bring him hot meats. Older Britons may not know this, but by 2015 it was no longer permissible to hit an Irishman, even if he had brought you the wrong dinner. So Clarkson was fired from the BBC, and May and Hammond then left too. (Clarkson is basically their ecosystem. Think of him as a coral reef and them as gentle clownfish.)

Luckily, billionaire Amazon proprietor Jeff Bezos was passing, and the sight of these networkless millionaires dancing for pennies (programmes on commercial television) touched his gold-plated heart. He couldn’t even imagine such destitution, so he set up a millionaire sanctuary (Prime Video) and said, “Come play in my garden, Clarkson, which is paradise!”

And so Bezos scooped them up for Amazon’s The Grand Tour, which was, essentially, Top Gear, except it was now not on a public-service broadcaster but available in a huge digital supermarket, somewhere between the toilet paper and the canned spam.

Things had changed significantly. While Clarkson’s iteration of Top Gear was at the centre of a very centralised television culture, The Grand Tour began at a time when the centre could no longer hold. Everything was splintering into a dizzying array of streamers and chaotic social-media platforms filled with young people grunting and eating competitively.

While Clarkson and company seemed like delightfully naughty boys when under the aegis of Lord Reith, their centrist safari-suited buffoonery seemed almost genteel in the new media free market, where a week didn’t pass without some YouTuber touching a dead body or going full fascist.

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This is a long way of saying that I did not expect The Grand Tour: One for the Road (Prime Video) to be a bittersweet elegy all about ageing, fading relevance and death. It is, on the surface, one of those Grand Tour specials in which the hosts reassert British cultural exceptionalism (Hammond’s body is literally clad in a safari suit presumably once owned by a Ken doll) and tour exotic locales at great expense (I mean, it’s called The Grand Tour).

It contains all the usual expensive high jinks: crossing Zimbabwe in malfunctioning classic cars, putting those cars on rickety boats to cross a crocodile-filled lake or on rails to ride a railway, “accidentally” sending a Volkswagen Beetle off a cliff, and smuggling silver into Botswana (because crossing borders is inherently hilarious to the type of wealthy Englishman who is accustomed to creating them).

But there is also a constant awareness, in the jokes about electric cars and censorious producers, that their time in the spotlight is over. The little mammalian creatures running around at their big dinosaur feet have evolved into MrBeast, and they can see the vibe-changing meteor crashing to Earth out of the corner of their eye. And so the customary lulz are accompanied by melancholy stares, dewy-eyed reminiscences and sombre ruminations.

“Everyone does anything in their life for the last time – but you don’t know when you’re doing it that you’re doing it for the last time,” Clarkson says glumly, intent on ruining our buzz.

“Not our first, not our last,” Hammond says of their adventure before looking to the camera, sadness in his eyes, to say: “Maybe it is.”

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The show is also more than two hours long, a fact that frequently makes me think of my own mortality. Half of it is sighing. When, in the final scenes, they visit an area of Botswana they had been to many years before, the new shots are movingly intercut with footage of their younger selves, and I start to sing a few bars of Johnny Cash’s Hurt. It’s genuinely touching, in fairness.

And then Clarkson unplugs his microphone and the trio walk into the desert to die (I presume; while it probably wouldn’t have been permitted at the BBC, I can certainly imagine Bezos dealing with former employees in this manner). Anyway, there isn’t a dry eye in the house. Though, again, that might be the petrol fumes.

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