Jeff Jones flew into Austin last year for what he assumed would be a wild bachelor party.
The Boston native went to dinner with his friends before moving onto bars on the notoriously rowdy West 6th Street.
At 1am, the 38-year-old somehow got separated from his friends.
Two weeks later he woke up in hospital with metal rods supporting his back and he didn’t remember a thing.
Doctors found the date-rape drug Rohypnol in his system and told him he had been found in water after falling 25ft off a bridge.
A terrified Jones thought he had been drugged and pushed by a potential serial killer that many believed was roaming the streets of the Texas city.
Police have insisted a mass murderer is not on the loose, but grim discoveries in a waterway that runs through the center of Austin means these rumors haven’t gone away.
More than three dozens bodies have been pulled from the Lady Bird Lake in the last three years, it was revealed on Wednesday.
While police say only one case was a homicide – and have shut down suggestions of a hunt for a suspect called the ‘Rainy Street Ripper’ – half a dozen causes of death remain unknown.
Even though many of the fatalities are shrouded in mystery, cops do have a theory.
They believe the party scene in downtown Austin – a favorite destination for bachelorette and bachelor parties – as exacerbated the problem.
Many of those who have ended up in Lady Bird Lake had been partying hard at Rainey Street, a popular bar scene, just feet away from the river.
Officials have increased safety measures, including lighting and fencing around the lake.
Ambulances are also parked at the end of Rainey Street, to treat those who have either had too much fun, or turn those walking towards the water away.
The latest remains were found on Tuesday. Law enforcement believe they belong to a teen who went missing on Sunday.
A 17-year-old black male who was paddle boarding with his family went missing around 7pm.
Tuesday, a body with clothes matching the description of the unidentified youngster was pulled from the water, however, local cops are still awaiting a positive identification from the medical examiner’s office.
There are no signs of foul play in this case, which has been classified as a drowning, investigators shared.
‘The teenager got off his kayak to stand in shallow water. He was not wearing a life jacket at the time. Investigators have determined that he was unknowingly standing near an underwater shelf, which is a sudden drop-off in the lake, when he stepped or slipped off and did not resurface’, the Austin Police Department explained.
The teen’s backpack and life jacket have also been recovered alongside the kayak.
Since 2022, 38 bodies have been recovered from Lady Bird Lake, according to Fox 7.
Drowning has been the top cause of death, followed by suicide, drug overdoses and natural causes.
But the case still unresolved have lead to the wild serial killer speculation, which the Austin Police Department has shot down multiple times.
One debunked theory was that gay men were being targeted.
Like Jeff Jones, most of people who have been found dead in the water are men- 30 out of 38.
The majority, 60 percent, were between the ages of 30 and 49.
Two were teenagers, including the person found Tuesday.
‘The things that lead to it being a serial killer is that it’s a very specific type of victim, which I fit, they don’t have anything stolen from them, they drown in the water, and they disappear in the middle of the night,’ Jones told Daily Mail last year.
‘I match all of this, I just luckily didn’t end up dead.’
However, police have chalked up the growing number of fatalities to a growing party scene near the water.
Former Austin Police Department forensic director Mark Gillespie previously stressed in an interview with KVUE that the public should believe the police when they say that there is no foul play.
‘They’re looking for foul play, and so when APD comes out with the statement that at the current time, they don’t suspect foul play, I promise you they were looking for it, and they were looking very hard for it, so I respect that,’ he said.