The Bayou Strangler

by Fred Rosen

  Once again, Somers told police her story, adding nothing new. She knew none of the people involved in the Randolph case. Others were reinterviewed too; no links. For Dennis Thornton, it wasn’t so much disappointing as it was disheartening. Thornton had a street cop’s common sense. The detective from Jefferson Parish knew it was no accident the victims didn’t rate a line of print or one soundbite. They weren’t considered valuable enough, by anyone, to be a priority one way or the other. There was therefore no internal pressure to bring the killer to justice. To Dennis Thornton, that made no difference. He couldn’t, wouldn’t let it go, which was just as well.

  Back in Terrebonne Parish, Dominique hooked his trailer up to his Sonoma and prepared to tow it out of the shipyard. The Bayou Blue man was on the move.

  Time to troll.

  PART TWO

  THE INVESTIGATION

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Grandpa Socks

  Terrebonne Parish, Saturday, May 24, 2003

  Datrell Woods was a real piece of work.

  Released from jail a few months earlier, the teenager was hanging out on a sunny spring afternoon at his house, which he shared with his mother and sister, on Buron Street in Houma

  About three o’clock, Datrell changed clothes in his bedroom, then relaxed for the next three hours. At six, Datrell was talking to his cousin Frank Wilson, who was visiting.

  “I’m going stay at my girlfriend’s house in Mott Trailer Park,” Datrell informed his cousin.

  Wilson had something a little bit more important on his mind.

  “Look—my mom got a call from a man who said he was going to kill everyone in the house if he did not get his rings back,” said Wilson.

  It seemed that Datrell was engaged in a little habit of breaking and entering. Or, put another way, he was a burglar who preferred the same victim. Datrell had been continually breaking into this dude’s house at the corner of Elder Street and stealing stuff. He claimed the guy had given him permission to take some of his things as payment for a debt. Datrell also tried to sell the Brooklyn Bridge for five dollars to anyone who was interested.

  Datrell went back over to the dude’s house. When he emerged a short while later, his friend Gary Birdwright was waiting for him. They had served time in prison together. A car pulled up to the curb, a Toyota Celica, with a few other people in it. Gary opened the door. Datrell was ready to dive in when the words made him freeze.

  “Datrell, would you get me a glass of water,” his mother, Margaret Woods, called from the ramshackle house.

  Like a good son, Datrell reversed direction and went back in the house. After getting his mother the water, Datrell came out of the house a second time. He was wearing a white polo shirt that hung longer in the rear than the front, with light-green stripes near the buttons. He had on the brown socks he’d gotten as a present from an aunt, which Datrell called his “grandpa socks.” Over them, he sported black three-quarter-top Nikes with the silver swoosh.

  Datrell got into the Celica and it drove off. Interviewed later, Datrell’s mother, Margaret, remembered things a little differently.

  Datrell had been walking on Buron Street with “a white guy named Gary when another white guy who was sitting on the driver’s side and the white girl who was sitting on the passenger side passed my house in a white car. It had black stripes.”

  They turned off Leona Street, back onto Buron. That’s when she called her son back to get her the water. Maybe it was a premonition or perhaps that elusive bond between mother and son. Whatever it was, Margaret Woods felt something was wrong. The “water story” was just that—a pretext to get her baby boy back in the house, where he was safe and sound.

  “Datrell, don’t leave,” she pleaded with her son, once he was safely inside.

  Datrell thought a moment.

  “I’m going to stay by my friend’s house,” he reassured his mother reasonably.

  She knew that Datrell hung with Gary. But she reminded him that he had an appointment down at Social Security on May 27. Datrell ignored the remark. He could take care of social security any time. Besides, Datrell had left his bike at Gary’s house. It was his major means of transportation and he needed it. Datrell got his mother the water and left her house.

  His mother watched him get into the Toyota Celica with Gary, and the car drove off into a dark abyss.

  It was a nice, cool morning, and Corey Hood, twenty-one years old, felt like riding his three-wheeler. So he got together with his cousin Joshua Robicheaux, a twenty-three-year-old dirt-bike enthusiast, to go out dirt biking together.

  “I was riding my dirt bike in the field off of Highway 56 near Woodlawn Ranch Road. My cousin Corey Hood was riding his three-wheeler. While we was riding, Corey’s chain came off. We was headed toward Woodlawn Ranch Road. I took a left on the dirt road and saw something lying in the road. When I saw it, it looked like a body,” said Robicheaux.

  Robicheaux rode closer, to see if he was right. He stopped and saw that it was, indeed, a body. It looked like it had been there for a while, because the corpse was “puffy.” There was also a bicycle lying a couple of feet away from his head.

  Robicheaux turned the wheels of his dirt bike around and rode back to where Corey was still stuck

  “It looks like someone’s laying in the dirt road!” Robicheaux shouted.

  Corey finished fixing his chain and hopped on the seat. They rode back purposefully, to view the corpse together. It was now covered with flies. To a pathologist, that would indicate the body had been there for some time and decomposition was well along. Corey figured, correctly, “that there was nothing they could do for him but call the police.”

  Getting back on the bikes, they rode quickly to a nearby casino, where they hailed an employee who was dumping trash outside.

  “Call the police because we saw a body!” Robicheaux announced to the surprised worker.

  “We found a body in the cane field,” Corey added.

  The worker ran for a phone and dialed 911. A few minutes later, two police officers arrived. Pulling up in their marked units, they asked the cousins to show them where the body was. The boys told the police the location and they headed that way. The cousins got back on their bikes and rode after them, to view what would now be considered a crime scene, and later, a dump site.

  The second time viewing the body, Corey took in more detail. He noted that the black man wore blue jean shorts and brown socks. Curiously, he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  Detective Simon Fryman of the Houma City Police Department was at home when he got the call from dispatch. When Fryman arrived at the location, he was met by uniformed officers and briefed on the situation. They took the detective over to speak with Robicheaux and Hood, who told him of their grisly discovery.

  They had found a black man who was dead and puffy. Fryman thought about that for a moment, taking note of the weather. It was partly cloudy and about eighty-five degrees. It had been several days since it had rained. The ground in the area was very dry and arid. On closer inspection, Fryman noticed that there was no dirt on the bottom of the victim’s socks. That implied that he was dumped, rather than dragged, to the location.

  The detective saw that lying just south of the body was a bicycle, a red beach cruiser. Fryman noticed the clean treads; there was no dirt on the tires. Nor were there tire tracks to indicate that the bike had been ridden into the area, but there were impressions made in the dirt by the handlebar and the pedal.

  It appeared someone had physically thrown the bike down.

  The detective noted that the victim’s face was quite swollen and that large blisters were forming on the body. Fryman looked at the eyes, but because of the decomposition, he was unable to detect any petechial hemorrhaging. He also spotted a tattoo on the right arm: the letters “VW.”

  As if things weren’t strange enough, there was more: a fluid-like s
ubstance around the body. Yet the detective couldn’t identify any injuries from which the fluid might have seeped. Nor was there any identification on the body. The guy had really been stripped.

  Once criminalists arrived on the scene, Fryman rolled the victim onto his side and checked for any possible injuries. None were visible. Preservation was all-important. The body was bagged and taken away. Due to the state of decomposition and the stink of the body as it decayed, it was immediately shoved into the freezer at the morgue. The cold would stop both.

  They’d keep him on ice for a while and then the detectives could come in and fingerprint the victim to get his identification. A few hours later, the body was removed from the cooler to be fingerprinted by investigator Donald McCord. Fryman and his investigative team then went to the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office Crime Lab, where he requested a fingerprint comparison be done using the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) database. The results were phoned to him that evening.

  “We’ve got a confirmation on the fingerprints,” said the excited voice of Detective Frank Foran over the phone.

  Foran explained that a sergeant with the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office Crime Scene Unit had called him earlier with a match to a subject named Datrell Woods. It may have been a big parish but it was a small town. On a case in the past, Fryman had encountered the Woods family.

  Fryman knew Datrell Woods’s mother, Margaret, and that the Woods family resided on Elder Street. He remembered that the last time he spoke to her, the family was in the process of moving. Fryman didn’t know if they had indeed moved out or not, but Elder Street seemed like a good place to start the field investigation.

  When Fryman and the detectives arrived at the Elder Street address, the first thing they noticed was there were no curtains hanging at the windows. Looking inside, they didn’t see any furniture. The place was clearly unoccupied. Fryman knew of a Woods relative, Ellen Finch, on Main Street. They drove over to question her but she wasn’t home.

  Fryman recalled that Finch was employed at the McDonald’s located near the intersection of Grand Caillou Road and Industrial Boulevard. They found Ellen’s husband, Cyrus, sitting there in the parking lot.

  “Do you know where I can find Margaret Woods?” Fryman asked.

  “Check with my wife inside,” Cyrus said, gesturing to the hamburger joint.

  Ellen Finch was working the takeout window. Fryman flashed his badge and asked where Margaret Woods lived. Finch gave him an address on Buron Street. When they got there, Fryman asked the man who opened the door if he could speak to Margaret Woods. A few minutes later, she appeared and Fryman walked her outside to his car.

  “When was the last time you saw your son, Datrell?” he asked softly.

  “Yesterday,” said Margaret.

  “No, it could not have been yesterday,” Fryman replied, bearing in mind the condition of the body.

  Margaret thought again.

  “It was during the weekend,” she answered. “I talked to him about an appointment he has with the Social Security Department.”

  They chatted a bit longer about a few of the details of the last time she saw her son. As Fryman listened, he knew it was leading to the inevitable.

  “Detectives recovered the remains of an individual in a cane field off Woodlawn Road near Highway 56 that was identified as Datrell.”

  Margaret listened, shocked at the details of the discovery. She started sobbing and ran inside to tell her family the dreadful news. Family members came outside and began shouting questions at the detective. But Fryman had a question of his own. He allowed family members to look at the bike that they had recovered near the body.

  “Was this Datrell’s?” he asked.

  Sure enough, it was identified as Datrell’s bicycle. Everywhere he went, Datrell rode that exact bicycle. He was never far from it.

  On May 28, Dr. Susan Garcia performed the autopsy on Datrell Woods at the state-of-the-art Jefferson Parish Forensics Center.

  The preliminary results showed no signs of trauma to the body. There were no signs of Woods having been shot or stabbed. Blunt force trauma was ruled out as well; there were no wounds, defensive or otherwise. There were also no signs that the feet or hands of their victim had been bound. But the body had been preserved long enough to note that cause of death was asphyxiation. He’d been strangled.

  Although toxicology results would take a few days, they had the cause of death and didn’t expect anything unusual to be revealed in the report. The family did tell the police about Datrell’s friend Gary. Was he a suspect? Fryman and some other detectives rode on horseback to the dump site for a more intensive search.

  Slowly, the horses were directed around the area. The detectives eyed everything for evidence or clues. Unfortunately, their search was fruitless.

  Once back at the station, a detective handed Fryman Datrell Woods’s record. Fryman wasn’t surprised to learn that Woods had been locked up in the juvenile jail system, starting in 1996. Put into custody at Bridge City, a group home, he left in 2000. But soon he was in trouble again. Woods was sent to Jetson Correctional Center and then Swanson Correctional Center in Tallulah.

  In reading the records, Fryman noticed that Woods had been cared for by social worker Jeannette Dupree. He called her office—she wasn’t in and he left a message with the receptionist for her to call back. Then he got a phone call from a “good Samaritan.” A man named Jonathan Burdick said that about 12:30 to 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, he was passing the area near where the body had been found, when he saw a white or cream-colored car parked on the dirt road in the cane field.

  That appeared suspicious to him. Burdick wasn’t sure exactly what kind of car it was or if anybody was in it. But as he looked back, it appeared that the car was moving. Once Burdick turned onto Louisiana Highway 56, he couldn’t see it anymore.

  No sooner had Fryman hung up the phone than it rang again. Jeannette Dupree was returning his call. Dupree told Fryman that Woods had been in correctional centers for two years. She said the only other person she knew from Houma who had been locked up with Woods was James Jefferson. Jefferson and Woods got along. She added some sad details.

  “Datrell’s family was not supportive of him at all. They were barely in touch with Datrell while he was in lockdown.”

  “How about visitors?”

  “The family had virtually no contact. They wouldn’t even supply him with basic necessities, like underclothes. He said his mom never called. Oh, and Datrell was slow in his learning capabilities.”

  By early afternoon, Fryman had found Woods’s brother, Willie Woods, at the family home on Buron Street. They brought him in for questioning. Willie recalled his last meeting with his brother vividly. He’d seen Datrell on Saturday evening, about 6:00 p.m.

  Then he added, “Before you picked me up, my mom got a call from a man who said he was going to kill everyone in the house if he did not get his rings back.”

  It seemed that Datrell had stolen the guy’s rings.

  Fryman returned to the Royal Flush Casino, where the cousins had found the worker who made the 911 call. He asked Sam Blaine, the head of security for the casino, to check his surveillance cameras for anything suspicious. He gave him CDs to burn in case he found information that he could copy and pass on to the detectives.

  Now it was time to get to Gary. The Woods family had identified him as Gary Stevens. They drove out to Robert Street where Stevens lived with his mother. He wasn’t home, but his mother was.

  “Gary’s somewhere in Bayou Blue and hasn’t been home recently,” she said.

  Fryman also spoke to Gary’s brother, Jonathan, who said that neither he nor Gary hung out with Woods.

  “People been saying that we hang together, but neither of us hung with Datrell,” he told Fryman.

  A few days later, Fryman received a phone call that Stevens
had been located. He was back home. Fryman immediately picked Stevens up and took him to the Houma Police Department headquarters for an interview. He was very cooperative.

  “Last time I saw Datrell was about a month ago,” said Stevens. “I was never locked up with Datrell. The only time I was locked up was approximately three years ago for a burglary.”

  The detectives were curious if he had a girlfriend.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend, haven’t had one for about a year. I really don’t think I’m the ‘Gary’ Datrell’s family talked about. The only friends I hang out with are P-Dot and John, and I don’t know their names. And I stay on Jerome Court, on the east side of Houma.”

  “Do you know Willie Woods?” Fryman asked.

  “I’m familiar with Willie. I hung out with him or knew him from school, but I never hung out with Datrell and I was never at Datrell’s house.”

  Based on the interview, Gary Stevens did not appear to be the subject the family was referring to who was hanging around with Datrell. But one thing was for sure—Datrell Woods wasn’t going to make his Social Security appointment anytime soon.

  Through his research, Fryman eventually became aware of the previous killings. He made the linkage to the serial killer working Southern Louisiana. Dennis Thornton was contacted. Looking at the Datrell Woods case file, Thornton knew immediately the suspect was the serial killer he’d been tracking through the end of the last millennium.

  A few articles about the murders had appeared in local papers and didn’t go national. Thornton knew a lack of resources was preventing the police from solving the case. He knew what was needed: a full-fledged task force, dedicated to tracking the murderer down. That way they could pool all their resources.