Five homeless men were fatally injured on the Lansing River Trail between October 2025 and late August 2026. Police say the deaths may be related. On October 12, CNN, The Blaze and The Daily Wire headlined a serial killer. CNN’s headline asks a question no official in the story has answered yes to, and that is the tell to carry into the next headline. The words ‘serial killer’ entered the coverage on October 2 as a question Chief Robert Backus said the public was asking him. He said the deaths ‘may be related cases’ and stopped short of the label. The question mark lets the claim travel while no one in the sentence makes it. The medical examiner’s record moves slower than the headline. Three of the five deaths are ruled homicides; two still await a finding, and one of those is listed as undetermined. One death, the stabbing of Daniel Lusk, 22, has a charge: Edward Joseph Smith, 23, faces open murder, and he is not charged in the others. No weapon is identified in the four blunt-force cases. The headline’s ‘five deaths’ is one count; the examiner has not made it one. The headline also leaves out who died. All five were homeless white men hurt in the early morning hours. The Detroit News says ‘unhoused men’; CNN says ‘a Michigan trail’, and a reader pictures their own walk. One vivid figure stands in for how often it happens: lower in its own story, the Daily Wire says investigators have not linked the deaths, and cites known active US serial killers falling from nearly 300 in the 1970s to fewer than 50 in the 2010s.
