The Bayou Strangler

by Fred Rosen

  The coroner found hemorrhaging at the key points where the killer put his hands around Oliver LeBanks’s neck. LeBanks, who had a record of low-level crimes, was easily identified by his fingerprints. With the help of the victim’s family and friends, Thornton backtracked his movements on the day of his death. LeBanks’s girlfriend, Judy Jason, who was really shaken up, and his brother, Michael LeBanks, were interviewed and given the details of his last night.

  According to Judy and Michael, there was nothing out of the ordinary about LeBanks’s movements that day prior to entering the Quarter, when he separated from his brother and went with his two gay friends into the “raw hole,” as the cops called Rawhide.

  Thornton drove his unmarked Chrysler into the Quarter and parked on Burgundy Street. Walking past a few storefronts, he came to Rawhide. Back in the day, Rawhide was a 1960s American-Western television series that made Clint Eastwood a star. Now, it was the gay bar from which Oliver LeBanks disappeared—until he turned up dead.

  Unlike many police officers and prosecutors, who tended to dehumanize anyone engaging in prostitution, Thornton was a real pro; he refrained from judging the victim on the basis of his sexual orientation. Who cares whether the victim was gay? “Oliver” was how Thornton thought of him. He didn’t care whether Oliver was hustling gay sex or not. He was a human being who got in way over his head and was murdered.

  The detective saw that it was business as usual at Rawhide: leather, Bermuda shorts, beer, stroking, guys coming and going. Thornton stood out in his neat suit and tie. He moved into the bar, between bare-chested bikers, and questioned the bartenders, showing them a mug shot of LeBanks.

  No one remembered him.

  Working Burgundy Street outside, Thornton tried a few merchants, addicts, and prostitutes. No one had seen Le­Banks on the street. Getting back into his car, Thornton found it remarkable that no one saw his body being dumped either, as though his killer had blended into thin air.

  Thin air my ass!

  Dennis Thornton knew that whoever this guy was, he hadn’t bothered to cover his trail. He could have secreted the body, at least for a few more days until someone discovered it by chance. Yet he didn’t do that. He had dumped LeBanks in a less populated area, but one that did see car traffic. The killer had seen the freeway and it looked convenient.

  He may even, for some reason of his own, have wanted the body discovered.

  Thornton knew the homicide statistics for the state, which consistently ranked in the top five in the nation for females murdered in single incidents, usually by men they knew. The killer he was tracking didn’t fit into the latter category. The only thing he could conclude, so far, was that LeBanks’s killer had acted alone. There was no evidence to show otherwise.

  It looked like an ordinary hookup, probably a business deal—sex for money. Which might make the suspect gay.

  Fifteen days after Oliver LeBanks was murdered, Joseph Brown turned up dead, his partially clothed body found on the western end of Veteran’s Memorial Boulevard in Kenner. That gave venue to the detectives of St. Charles Parish, who soon discovered that Brown, an African American, was all of sixteen years old.

  As for the method of death, the coroner concluded “death by asphyxiation, due to strangulation.” The police had no other clues or leads to the killer. One month later, Bruce Williams became the next victim discovered. This time, the body was fully clothed, dumped in an industrial area of Jefferson Parish.

  Again, Dennis Thornton got the call.

  The details were the same as with LeBanks—he had been strangled and raped. Male-on-male rape was not a crime that police officers encountered often. Thornton saw the immediate similarities and his mind made the necessary linkage. Once again, he backtracked the victim’s movements and, this time, he discovered that Williams, an eighteen-year-old African American, had been a hustler much like LeBanks, only he lived in New Orleans.

  He had walked over to the French Quarter the night of November 27 and disappeared.

  The parish reached out to the FBI for help. It wasn’t Thornton’s decision alone, of course. There were higher-ups who were captains, commanders, majors, whatever, who carried a lot more pull. But when a decision is finally reached internally that a serial killer is their quarry, calling in the FBI is firm policy across the country.

  The FBI had conducted a serial-killer project in the 1970s. Their idea was to try to identify and analyze the most common characteristics of serial murderers, which could then be used to capture them. In our book Tracker: Hunting Down Serial Killers, my coauthor, Dr. Maurice Godwin, the renowned geographic profiler, writes: “With good intentions, the FBI proceeded, but unfortunately without scientific evaluation. FBI agents conducted interviews with thirty-six incarcerated men, only twenty-five of whom were serial killers.”

  The lack of a real scientific basis for the study didn’t stop the bureau from developing what it termed the profiles of the “organized” and “disorganized” serial killer. It became the most widely used profiling “model” in the world. But because it was based on a specious study, the results came into question among criminologists during the 1980s.

  Most local police departments that used the FBI’s profiling services soon found they all got the same “white male, mid-thirties, high school dropout, difficulty with social skills” cookie-cutter profile. It was no different for Jefferson Parish. But the FBI narrowed the hunt down further for them. Based upon the string of dump sites, they had a possible location for the suspect.

  “This guy lives near the airport,” FBI profiler Tom Colby told Thornton.

  Well, that narrowed it down to another million guys, thought Thornton.

  But it did seem accurate. The guy had dumped bodies on both sides of the airport. Why in these places? Besides being sloppy—or maybe because of it—could he have wanted the bodies to be seen? As for where he lived, it did seem logical to Thornton that it would be nearby—but where?

  Cookie-cutter or not, this time the FBI got it right. They didn’t know it, but their profile fit Ronald J. Dominique exactly. Dominique lived in Boutte, just thirteen and a half miles from New Orleans International Airport. Of course it also fit millions of other guys in Louisiana and probably more than a few in the airport vicinity. But only one of them was a serial killer who decided, once again, to go trolling in the quarters at night.

  Ronald J. Dominique was on the prowl for another male hustler who needed money. And he soon found him. His name was Manuel Reed. A native of the Big Easy, Reed was African American, twenty-one years old, with a slim muscular build that was evident when his partially clothed body was discovered inside a business dumpster in Kenner on May 30, 1999.

  “Death by asphyxia due to strangulation,” ruled the coroner.

  And like all the rest, Reed had been raped before he died.

  While some serial killers do their killing across state lines, many, like Dominique, murder close to home. That proximity gives them a comfort zone, knowing that once the job is done, they can get away safely and easily and be home quickly. It was Angel Mejia, then, who changed the serial killer’s paradigm.

  Angel Mejia was a homeless, twenty-one-year-old African American. With no permanent address, he worked the streets for his existence. Last seen alive on the afternoon of June 30, 1999, he was found that night in front of a business dumpster in an industrial area of Kenner.

  In front of the dumpster.

  As Thornton viewed the body, he remembered what he had thought about the killer—he was sloppy and he was proving it again and again. Mejia was partially clothed and had been raped. “Death by asphyxia due to strangulation,” the coroner wrote in his report. It was getting to be a rather repetitive—not to mention frustrating—line.

  No matter what testing they did, they still could not come up with anything on the killer’s prints, DNA, or even his car’s tire impressions. They had those hairs, b
ut no database to check them with, and, more importantly, no suspect to check them against. And even if you identified a suspect, you needed a search warrant to get his DNA, unless he consented.

  Then, to make matters worse, the media got involved. The Advocate broke the story on June 23, 1999, with the sensationalistic headline:

  SHOELESS BODY COULD BE WORK

  OF SERIAL KILLER

  “A serial killer may be responsible for the deaths of three young men, whose shoeless bodies were dumped in isolated areas around New Orleans International Airport over the past eight months,” the article said. It was also mentioned that Angel Mejia and Joseph Brown “knew each other and had a history of dealing drugs.”

  Making a public statement that a serial killer is working in a specific locality is a double-edged sword that requires careful handling. On one hand, it allows people to be aware of what’s happening and take measures to protect themselves. On the other hand, it lets the bad guy know the cops are on to him, thus giving him a chance to cover his tracks and run.

  And so that’s how the urban myth of the Shoeless Serial Killer was born. It has alliteration going for it. Local television stations went with it, claiming that all the serial killer’s bodies had been missing their shoes. On the Internet, amateur sleuths who had never even heard of Mycroft Holmes claimed without substantiation that removing the shoes was part of this serial killer’s modus operandi (MO), his signature behavior, the thing he did that made him unique. Mycroft Holmes’s little brother, Sherlock, might have disagreed.

  Thornton, too, knew that wasn’t accurate. It just made good copy. In the cases where the shoes were missing, they were found nearby. In others, the victims were wearing shoes when the police found them. More revealing was who the victims were.

  Street people, they led transient lives, here today gone tomorrow. They were people that would never be missed. Like Mitchell Johnson.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Sure Tip-Off

  Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes,

  November 1–December 31, 1999

  Mitchell Johnson was the kind of guy that Dominique liked to fuck and kill—a well-built thirty-four-year-old black man. Of course, Dominique didn’t know his name; that didn’t matter.

  Johnson’s body was dumped under the same overpass where LeBanks’s had been discarded. Police found Johnson literally a few feet away from the exact spot where LeBanks had been discovered. Thornton was puzzled and enraged—it was as if the killer were playing a game. Perhaps he had seen or heard the reports of the investigation and was screwing with the heads of the posse that was after him?

  Was the killer so supremely overconfident to the point of insanity, or was he purposely sloppy, hoping to get caught? Thornton didn’t know yet. The autopsy report came back that Johnson, like the rest, had been raped and strangled. Same MO. Witnesses said they last saw Johnson in Kenner; there was a suspicious guy cruising around about the same time Johnson disappeared.

  Witnesses gave Thornton a rough description of a white male, mid-thirties, receding hairline, puffy cheeks. A police sketch artist produced a picture of the suspect. Was this the killer? The guy didn’t look very dangerous, except maybe in the eyes. They seemed to just stare out at you, without registering any emotion.

  Sketch in hand, the detective decided to reach out to both the mainstream and gay media in the New Orleans area. Given the fact that every victim was male and had been raped—a decidedly unusual MO—the police thought that the killer was targeting gays. In November 1999, the New Orleans Times-­Picayune, the city’s only big newspaper, published the sketch of the suspect, reporting that police were describing him as a serial killer targeting men in the area.

  Later, officials wouldn’t know whether Dominique had seen that article, or if it played any role in his decision to pick up and leave Boutte. But in November 1999, shortly after it was published, he quit his job with the county and drove his trailer home to Houma. Houma is only fifty-eight miles southwest of New Orleans, off of Interstate 90, next to the Gulf of Mexico. Boutte was a New Orleans suburb. Houma was way south.

  Dawn Bergeron had already been in Houma for a decade. Her oilman father moved his family there when Bergeron was a teenager in the 1980s. Southern Louisiana’s economy is dependent upon the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, which pump up black gold and jobs. Lit up like a Christmas tree at night, the Deepwater Horizon was the biggest.

  After high school, Bergeron went south to attend Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she got her bachelor of arts in criminal justice in 1994. Moving back up to Houma, she joined the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office. She could have joined the Houma Police Department, which had venue inside the actual city, but the sheriff’s office roamed the entire parish and there was something appealing to Bergeron about that.

  A deputy is a street cop working for the county, not the town or city. As a sheriff’s deputy riding in a squad car, Bergeron quietly observed the type of crimes detectives are asked to investigate. Among them was sexual abuse, which she investigated as a member of the Sheriff’s Homicide and Juvenile Division. The parish had a huge sex abuse rate, with a significant number of cases of parents sexually abusing their children.

  Her education and demeanor placed her way above the average deputy sheriff in her county. Promoted to detective, Bergeron spent a lot of time in the interview room taking statements from parents who would claim they had sex with their child in the same way their parents had had sex with them. Parish detectives spoke privately about how some juvenile abuse came about as a result of Cajun culture. They said that some Cajuns accepted parents having sex with their children as the natural order of things.

  Squad detectives were also called on to investigate homicides. Homicides usually fell into one run-of-the mill category or another, with the common motives of money, sex, and revenge. Learning her trade, Bergeron balanced her professional life with her private one. She married a cop and had a child. She had a funny, knowing laugh—which you need when you have to juggle warrants and child.

  And then life in Houma changed when Ronald J. Dominique came back home from Boutte.

  He drove down Broadway, past the town square, where more than a century earlier, the bodies of Union soldiers mutilated by Southern guerrillas were left to rot in the sun. He took a left to go across one of the town’s bridges, over the alligator infested bayous that cut right through the town.

  Dominique went over to Bayou Blue Road, a long street, mostly rural, with cane fields and the occasional house bordering the highway. He turned in at one of them, his sister Lainie’s place, and parked in the yard. There she and her husband welcomed him, allowing her brother to hook up his mobile home to the electricity and water in the yard.

  People in the parish identified themselves by the road they lived on. That’s how Dominique became a “Bayou Blue man,” by settling at his sister’s home on that road. Directly across the street was a church, its pale white paint peeling from the sun, the high humidity, and occasional hurricane. Dominique was a man on the run but no one, including his sister, knew that.

  He was eager to assume an appearance of normalcy as soon as possible, lest anyone see the police sketch. However, it had not been distributed as widely as Dominique might have assumed. In fact, the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office and Houma police had not been sent the sketch. Unless he made a mistake, Dominique was safe.

  Little did anyone in Houma realize, a serial killer was now in their midst.

  With the successful hookup to electricity and water, Dominique had all the comforts of home. Yet he needed a second trailer, which he would later put to good use. He bought a smaller, beat-up trailer that he parked next to the larger one. And, having to support himself, Dominique went to work as a laborer for Caro Produce on Brien Street.

  This wasn’t New York City, where men could walk around arm in arm and not rate a second look. This was H
ouma, Louisiana, where small, long lakes called bayous leak out into the Gulf of Mexico. Dominique sought attention from a world that ridiculed him, at worst, for being gay, and at best, for being homely.

  He did and said nothing to stand out. In conversations with people, he was nice and polite, his speech peppered with “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am” like some Southern gentleman. People looked through him, like he didn’t exist. In a sense, he didn’t. Terrebonne Parish has a high rate of illiteracy. Many do not read the newspapers or watch television. They knew nothing about the Shoeless Serial Killer and his eight murders in the northern parishes.

  Beneath Houma’s sleepy Southern appearance was an undercurrent of abysmal poverty where people lived in shacks, couldn’t afford cars or car insurance, and rode bicycles to get around. The town had exactly two gay bars and a slew of others where whatever beer was cheap or on special was the beverage of choice.

  The poor residents lived on the fringes, in the shacks and apartments off the main streets of the town, bordering the bayou. Some lived farther out in the country. Wherever you were, one type of coyote or another roamed at night.

  Michael Rydell Vincent was a young African American man who lived in a rundown apartment on Peters Street. He, like his killer, sported a mustache and a goatee. He’d been a criminal long enough to have an a.k.a. (also known as), which in his case was “Chris Vincent.” Regardless of the name he used, Vincent was a small guy—five-foot-seven and 121 pounds soaking wet.

  Despite his lack of size, or perhaps because of it, he’d been arrested for aggravated battery. His record indicated that he hustled sex with men, a record that came to an end when he vanished on New Year’s Eve, 1999. The next day, a motorist on Highway 7 in neighboring Lafourche Parish saw a body that had been dumped on a barbed wire fence right off the road.

  The motorist made a police report, and detectives arrived to process the crime scene. Because of the holiday, the autopsy had to wait until everyone returned to work on the morning of January 3, 2000. The autopsy began at 8:20 a.m. in the coroner’s office in Jefferson Parish. Dr. Susan M. Garcia was the forensic pathologist in charge. She also had two assistants from the coroner’s office, Detectives Chad Shelby and Jason Fanguy of the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office.