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It’s too soon to rule out a potential serial killer behind a string of mysterious deaths in Houston’s murky bayous, according to a local private investigator.
“They’re saying they don’t have a serial killer, but I’m not sure,” Colman Ryan, who is working with the family of 22-year-old Kenneth Cutting Jr., told Fox News Digital in a phone interview. “Maybe their objective isn’t sexual assault. It’s not robbery. But they’re just throwing people in the bayou.”
Authorities have not yet accessed Cutting’s phone or location records, Ryan said.
With Cutting’s cause and manner of death ruled undetermined in his autopsy, and negative toxicology results, Ryan believes geolocation data and other digital clues could shed more light on his final hours.
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Houston leaders have downplayed the possibility of a serial killer following a rash of recent deaths involving the city’s 2,500 miles of bayous, with Mayor John Whitmire blaming homelessness and substance abuse.
Sixteen bodies have been recovered from the bayous so far this year, including a University of Houston student named Jade McKissic, who was last seen leaving a downtown bar on Sept. 11.
The 20-year-old McKissic was found dead in Brays Bayou days later.
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Neither McKissic nor Cutting was homeless, Ryan said, and neither of them had signs of trauma.
“I think they’re too quickly dismissing it,” Ryan said.
Cutting was seen leaving Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar on June 28, 2024, after an apparent argument with one of his roommates. They reunited that evening, and at around 2 a.m., his roommates texted his father to say he had gone “crazy” and got out of their car on a highway outside town.
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Days later, police recovered his remains from the Buffalo Bayou, about a mile from where the roommates said he got out. A toxicology report found no drugs in his system.
But alleged discrepancies in his autopsy have raised additional questions from relatives.
Lauren Freeman, his cousin, told Fox News Digital earlier this month that a reference to orthopedic hardware in his neck had perplexed the family. No one was aware of him ever undergoing a surgery that would have placed it there, she said.
Now, she claims that someone from the medical examiner’s office told her the line was the result of a clerical error and that no such hardware had been found in Cutting’s neck.
A spokesperson for the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, which conducted the autopsy, did not immediately respond to questions about the allegations.
“After looking over everything in detail there are other things odd,” Freeman said.
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For example, her cousin stood at 5 feet, 3 inches tall, but was listed as 4 feet, 8 inches tall in the autopsy report, she said. Although he was small, she also took issue with the official weight of his remains as 89 pounds, she said.
According to his father, Kenneth Cutting Sr., the victim weighed around 115 pounds when he went missing, three days before being found in the bayou.
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“To me, his credibility is shot,” Freeman said.
Neither Whitmire’s office nor the Houston Police Department has responded to multiple requests for comment from Fox News Digital regarding the Cutting case over the past two weeks.
“Each case has to be dissected on its own merits — timeliness, reinterviews and autopsy reports,” said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and criminal justice professor at Penn State Lehigh Valley. “Those reports and autopsies now come with a whole host of new problems.”
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