The Bayou Strangler Read online

  The Bayou Strangler

  Louisiana’s Most Gruesome Serial Killer

  Fred Rosen

  For my daughter, Sara, whose love and support during the writing of this book made it possible

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This story is based on primary, on-the-scene reporting in the bayous of Louisiana; the investigative transcript of the case; and extended interviews with the primary detectives. Some names have been changed in the interest of privacy. But every single victim is as he was.

  FOREWORD

  2017

  Some stories take longer to come together than others. This is one of them. That it’s about the serial killer who killed more victims than any other serial killer in the United States during the past two decades, well, you’d think that would have been enough to generate books, movies-of-the-week, films, TV-magazine broadcasts, and podcasts.

  But that didn’t happen. The sexuality of the killer and his choice of victims got in the way.

  I’ve written four books about serial killers. This is the fifth. What I have discovered is that when the victims are prostitutes, society, including law enforcement, really doesn’t care that much about them. But supposing the serial killer is gay and he targets gay men, most of whom are sex workers? That is rare.

  Media outlets stayed away from the specifics of this story, of which there are many. One would hope that the sexuality of the bad guy and the victims wouldn’t make any difference. But it does when it comes to press coverage, which always reflects public perceptions. If the serial killings also happen in Louisiana, the state with the highest per capita murder rate, who would care? What’s one more victim in Louisiana to the media, let alone twenty-three?

  I don’t look at Louisiana as the murder capital of the United States. It’s the place where, as a teenager, I had turtle soup and Shrimp Creole Agnew (named after the corrupt vice president who served President Richard Nixon) at Brennan’s, one of New Orleans’ best restaurants, and where I once made the mistake of ordering a drink called a hurricane in the French Quarter. It put me on the floor!

  During that and subsequent trips, I discovered that no other state has Louisiana’s unique DNA in its gumbo and étouffée. Louisiana has very heavy French, African, Spanish, Native American, and French Canadian influences, helping to account for its Cajun character. The state has a one-of-a-kind parish system, with really exotic names, instead of counties. Yet despite all of these unique cultural influences, there is a supposition in the northern and western parts of the United States that Southern cops are prejudiced.

  In the late 1960s, this stereotype was best exemplified by Rod Steiger’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Sheriff Bill Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night. During the 1970s, Clifton James, as the stocky, loud, and blustering Sheriff J. W. Pepper, faced off opposite Sir Roger Moore’s first and second turns as 007 in Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun. James Best, one of television’s finest character actors, took over the stereotype’s mantle as Sheriff Roscoe Coltrane in The Dukes of Hazzard, which ran from 1979 to 1985.

  On the contrary, nothing could be further from the truth.

  The detectives on the case of the century’s worst serial killer were anything but ignorant, racist idiots. Central casting would have a problem with this one. The Southern detectives on this case have advanced college degrees, allied with street smarts and a healthy lack of prejudice toward gay men.

  There were in particular two detectives, a man and woman, who were willing to spend years of their lives hunting the bad guy—literally hunting the serial killer through two millennia—in order to bring justice and humanity to each and every one of his twenty-three victims. That is a story that had gotten lost—until now.

  Never before have I seen such dedication to justice. Dennis Thornton and Dawn Bergeron truly speak for the dead.

  “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

  —Ernest Hemingway

  PROLOGUE

  Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida, 2006

  Why do serial killers always seem to have a middle name or initial? Detective Dawn Bergeron knew the answer to that one.

  It’s because the arrest warrant, a legal document that a judge signs off on, always contains the killer’s full legal name, including a middle name and/or middle initial, if there is one. But before you can get a warrant, you need a suspect. Or suspects.

  His big black feet clomping, Mickey Mouse strode by on his way to a character breakfast, which cost a little bit more than regular admission. Bergeron was more than happy to give her daughter, Justine, a special breakfast on their vacation at Disney World.

  Bergeron was wearing what she usually wore away from the job—jeans, a T-shirt, and black and brown Doc Martens. At work, she dressed more formally, in a pantsuit and blouse. Despite the Doc Martens, business had found her. Bergeron’s business was homicide.

  She had borrowed the Disney computer to check in on what was happening with her most pressing case. She opened an email from her task-force partner, Lieutenant Dennis Thornton of Jefferson Parish, fifty-eight miles from Terrebonne Parish, where Bergeron worked. Mickey Mouse would have blushed if he could have seen the arrest warrants for murder she was downloading from the email attachments that Thornton had sent to her.

  Thornton has been on this case longer than anybody, she thought.

  She began signing the forms that would, at last, bring the two-millennia-spanning manhunt to a close. Bergeron regularly worked out of the major crimes and juvenile division of the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office, in the southern part of Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico. Tall, curvy, and Southern Louisiana beautiful with tawny skin and high cheekbones, her horn-rimmed glasses could not disguise the slightly dark and exotic look of Bergeron’s French relatives; you could see it in her eyes.

  Her T-shirt swelled over large, voluminous breasts with a tattoo on the left breast that was only visible if she wore something extremely low-cut, which she seldom did. She had learned that it was the confidence built up in a suspect that made them talk. Big breasts were too distracting; at work, the jacket helped.

  Bergeron was angry. She had wanted to cancel the vacation. She hadn’t seen much point in going if they were close to finally arresting the serial killer, but she felt she owed it to her daughter. It had been a long haul; she and Thornton had been working twenty-two-hour days. Louisiana is a poor state; the task force didn’t even have enough money for their overtime.

  Instead, they’d surveilled the killer on their own time. They even let him know they were on his trail. With that much attention on him, he no longer had carte blanche to kill.

  A real Disney World vacation would be good, she’d thought, no matter the results of the pending Sutterfield DNA tests. So she had gone, with assurance that nothing would happen until she returned. Wrong! But it was a “good” wrong. They had just gotten two mitochondrial-DNA hits from victim Oliver LeBanks. The semen in his rectum had been genetically linked to their prime suspect. Yet still they hesitated to pick up their killer.

  Usually taken from a suspect’s hair, mitochondrial DNA can only narrow the suspect down genetically to a given family. The results are therefore impeachable in court by a good defense attorney. What was needed for an airtight conviction at trial was a match of nuclear DNA. Nuclear DNA includes much more of the individual’s genome or genetic makeup. A direct match. Nonetheless, the results convinced the department to begin round-the-clock surveillance on the suspect. The hope for a Sutterfield match was a nuclear-DNA hit.

  “It
’s mitochondrial,” Thornton told Bergeron over the phone, not hiding the disappointment in his voice.

  “Well, what are we gonna do?” Bergeron asked the senior detective.

  Thornton had spent eight years hunting the suspected killer when they finally found him in Bayou Blue. They discussed it for a while. If they arrested the guy now, they had a strong case to bring to trial, but not by any means a guaranteed conviction. But not to bring him into custody risked further homicides.

  “We gotta pick him up,” Thornton finally said. “Let’s roll the dice.”

  Bergeron’s daughter, Justine, had been looking forward to the vacation and was having a wonderful time. Like so many other times though, work interfered. They had bought seven-day passes. To add insult to injury, Disney doesn’t give refunds. But maybe in this case …

  Walt Disney had produced the first-ever television mini­series about serial killers!

  In Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (1956), a sequel to the Davy Crockett miniseries, Davy Crockett (Fess Parker) and his pal Georgie Russell (Buddy Ebsen) raced riverboat-king Mike Fink (Jeff York) down the Ohio River to New Orleans. Then, in a twist based upon legend, Davy Crockett and Georgie Russell went up against Big Harpe and Little Harpe, America’s first-known serial killers.

  It would be nice to know if Walt Disney would have made an exception and given a refund to the detective about to arrest the new millennium’s most prolific serial killer.

  It was a little easier for Bergeron and her daughter to get back home to Louisiana than it had been for Davy and Georgie to get back to Tennessee, sailing up the Mississippi. Instead, Bergeron and her child left Frontier Land and flew back to New Orleans, and from there drove up to Houma. Bergeron dropped off Justine with a friend and then drove her white Dodge Charger over to the big stone slab of a building in the middle of town that served as headquarters for the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office.

  Walking up the steps, she thought about the victims. She’d thought about them a lot over the years the serial killer had been active. Twenty-three bodies strewn like so much detritus across Southern Louisiana. A lot of things needed to be explained. Until they got the killer into the interview room, it was hard to say what they would get from him.

  Boy, she and Thornton really wanted to get this guy.

  PART ONE

  THE CLOAK OF NIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Quarters

  Orleans Parish, October 3, 1998

  It all started eight years earlier, on the kind of day when you needed to take a shower to get dry. That’s how hot and humid it was.

  The unusually high temperature in the low eighties and the 80 percent humidity made it very uncomfortable. Ronald J. Dominique’s damp T-shirt clung to his back. He did not rate a second glance from any of the hustlers, tourists, pickpockets, addicts, and strippers crowded into the streets of the French Quarter.

  Short and stocky, five feet five inches tall and 160 pounds, he had a straggly black mustache and an unkempt black goatee on the lower part of his thin lips. Puffy cheeks and deep-set green eyes rounded out the picture of just another anonymous, slightly overweight, balding thirty-six-year-old American strolling through the French Quarter at twilight.

  Dominique thought of the neighborhood as “the quarters.”

  To get out of the house, he had started going to the quarters. It was a good place. The trumpet notes of New Orleans jazz drifted out of the clubs onto Bourbon Street. He liked the music, though it did nothing to relax him. He went into a few of the raunchier clubs and tried a few draft beers. They didn’t take the edge off either.

  Sex. He needed sex.

  There was something else that he couldn’t easily define, something he felt that was more basic and that, even had he tried, he couldn’t give words to. It just was time to troll. That’s why he had parked his car, outside the quarters in a dark spot and gotten it ready. Inside his car, he had placed what he needed to satisfy his insatiable craving.

  I know what I want. I need a guy to play around with, Dominique thought.

  He knew that he wasn’t an attractive man. Even when he did his Patti LaBelle impersonation all dressed up as the singer, nobody liked him. Making friends had never been easy. He’d also never had a long-term relationship with another man. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but just as when he had been growing up, Dominique was laughed at, called a slob, a fag, a loser.

  This wasn’t San Francisco. Louisiana is a lot more conservative and, like many places in the United States, had not been so accepting of a gay man trying to come to grips with his sexuality. Dominique may have looked roly-poly, but that belied his strong upper body.

  Trolling or fishing requires bait that attracts the fish to the hook. It’s a simple, businesslike proposition. He had learned early on that it was easy in Southern Louisiana to buy sex. Lots of people did. Oliver LeBanks knew it too. And LeBanks also needed something—money.

  The twenty-seven-year-old would sometimes pickpocket a tourist, maybe sell some drugs, or just hustle. No strong-arm stuff. Just a little bit here and there to make ends meet. Like Dominique, he had been strolling through the French Quarter enjoying himself, his brother and a couple gay friends by his side.

  “I don’t get it,” said his brother. “What you with these guys for?”

  “There are these old guys that like young guys like us. This is a way to make extra money,” LeBanks explained reasonably. He was a businessman, about to make a proposition.

  LeBanks, his brother, and his friends later went to 740 Burgundy, the location of Rawhide, a local gay bar popular with hustlers. With its constant flow of tourists, Rawhide was a great place to hustle sex, the kind of gay bar most gay bars fantasize about being. It was known as a leather-and-Levi’s place where older guys cruised younger guys.

  Time to get to work.

  Throwing the door open, the music and boisterous laughter hit LeBanks like a hurricane. A jukebox in the back was blaring out some Patti LaBelle song. LeBanks’s close-set dark eyes adjusted to the dim, smoky interior. He saw a pool table with guys using their cues to bang the balls into the holes.

  On the right was the long teak and mahogany bar that curved around the room. The walls were decorated with multicolored license plates from all over the United States. Three sets of two supporting wooden pillars, six in all, were staggered down the bar, seeming to hold the whole place up. In practice, they divided the bar into cozy warrens of six-man sections, where intimate conversation and other mature things were possible.

  It was already crowded-to-overflowing, with shirtless men sitting before cold bottles of beer. Many were middle-aged with paunches hanging down over their belts to their Bermuda shorts. There were a few men dressed in leather, brandishing whips with the idea of using them in ways Indiana Jones hadn’t even thought of. However, for LeBanks, the place was the Temple of Doom.

  The older leather boys mingled with younger guys in Levi’s, boots, and Stetsons. LeBanks hung back a little, eying the customers at the bar, sizing them up. The upside down U-shaped aluminum handrails reflected the occasional flash of a tourist snapping a picture. LeBanks’s friends took their shirts off to join in. He noticed a guy at the bar who wanted to blend in but could not.

  Dominique wasn’t about to expose himself in public, not with his portly frame. Too embarrassing; he’d had enough of that. He was sick and tired of his family ridiculing him for being gay. Their taunts made him ashamed at first, and then angry.

  He kept his shapeless T-shirt on, figuring the money in his pocket would do the talking when the time was right. He kept busy drinking a cold bottle of Purple Haze, an American-style wheat beer with a slight raspberry taste that was lost on Dominque that night.

  Dominique was too busy thinking about other things, like the slim black guy who sat down in the empty stool next to his, ordered a beer, and started to talk to him. After a
few minutes of chitchat, the hustler got down to business.

  “You like to have a good time?” LeBanks asked, drinking his beer casually.

  “I like to fool around,” Dominique replied.

  His Southern Louisiana accent betrayed him to LeBanks as a native. Probably from up in the Houma area. That part of Terrebonne Parish was crisscrossed with bayous, a rural place centered around a small town. Locals referred to the town as “up,” though in fact it was fifty-five miles southwest of New Orleans.

  But that made no difference. Local was all right with LeBanks. Money was money.

  “Sure,” LeBanks said.

  “I ain’t got no money for no motel or nothing,” Dominique explained.

  “I don’t have none either,” answered LeBanks.

  Dominique had a ready solution: instant intimacy that had worked for many couples since Henry Ford had invented the Model T automobile in 1908.

  “Come on, we’ll go to my vehicle. It’s parked nearby. You need money?” Dominique asked.

  LeBanks knew what the guy wanted. He’d done it before. There was only one more thing that needed to be said.

  “How much you got?”

  “About twenty or thirty dollars,” Dominique responded.

  The price was fine with LeBanks. That was the rate for a blow job. Sounded good. It was a business transaction, plain and simple: step out to do it, and then come back to make some more money with some other guys. Names weren’t needed; just cash.

  “Why don’t we go to my car? It’s parked right near here,” said Dominique, slipping off the bar stool.

  LeBanks eyed him again. He saw nothing out of the ordinary—green eyes and round, placid face. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Dominique looked like any other guy wanting to get his rocks off on a handsome young hustler like LeBanks. Dominique led the way out. Outside, they turned down St. Ann Street and continued walking.