The Bayou Strangler

by Fred Rosen

  But to upper-level authorities, the murderer who had killed Datrell Woods and the others was just one guy. And the victims, well, no one really wanted to talk about what the killer had done to them. There were many other murderers, drug dealers, and thieves working the parishes who also needed to be caught. And maybe some of those victims were taxpayers, unlike the hustlers who were the serial killer’s victims.

  Thornton recalls of the case, “The attitude was don’t break your neck.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Meter Reader

  Terrebonne Parish, 2006

  Things changed for Dominique in January 2004. That’s when Caro Produce laid him off.

  Being the diligent worker he was, he soon got a job with Gulf Coast Maintenance in Houma, staying six months until he quit. Then Dominique got the perfect job for someone keeping a low profile. He became a meter reader.

  Let’s face it: that’s the perfect job for a serial killer.

  Dominique was employed by a meter-reading company through the end of 2004. During that entire time—in fact, since the first of the year—Dominique didn’t murder anyone. Dominique was smarter than most serial killers, having remained undetected for so long, and with so many victims. He had found that killing in Houma was very different from killing in New Orleans and its suburbs.

  While New Orleans had a series of highways and streets around each dump site, which always made for a swift getaway, Houma was a rural town. It can be risky to dump a body in a rural town; if he didn’t know the roads, he could easily get lost. But in Houma he was getting to know the roads—and learning which ones to take to find a little privacy.

  He wouldn’t, however, go the extra mile into the bayou. Supposing once he’d finished dumping somebody, he got lost on the way back? That would make him a target for the police. That’s the last thing he wanted. So far, no one he knew had been questioned about the murders. While he obviously never spoke about it, Dominique must have known he was being hunted. After all, he had deliberately dropped the bodies in ways that would attract the cops.

  Every day on the way to work, he passed by the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office. He knew what he was doing. He never once attracted the attention of them or the cops in any of the other parishes. If he didn’t know for sure that the police were on his tail, he sure acted like he did.

  Dominique used the time on the clock to plan future killings. If it were later proven in court that he was planning first-degree murder, he’d have a quick march to the death chamber regardless of who was on the Supreme Court.

  His meter-reading job took Dominique all through Terrebonne Parish, into the outlying areas. Dominique found himself on more than one occasion driving his truck up a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, just to read someone’s meter. He became familiar with the roads and he began to make mental notes for future body-dump sites.

  One place stood out. It was on a backwater road, a Shriners meeting hall. Behind it, near the local airport, was a dense patch of woods and a field.

  During the years that Dominique abstained from killing, police made no progress in tracking him down.

  They knew there were thirteen murders in five different parishes, all linked by MO. It was the same in every case—strangulation. Cops referred to them as “soft kills.” There were no motives that could be associated with any of the victims’ families, friends, or even enemies. That, of course, is consistent with serial killing. Nor did police have a viable suspect.

  Thornton, Fryman, and every other detective working the case had sat down in front of computer screens in their offices. Thornton himself had been through every database he had access to, of men charged and/or convicted of sex offenses, and still had no viable leads. It was more than frustrating; it was dispiriting. Sometimes he found his broad shoulders sagging under the weight.

  They might have sagged further had he known that Dominique was indeed in another parish’s database. Having been charged with male-on-male rape many years before, the serial killer’s identity was waiting to be discovered by a keen-eyed detective. Absent that, police could always hold out the hope that someplace down the line, they might match some left-behind DNA to their “not yet” suspect.

  Dennis Thornton knew it was necessary to establish a special task force. With a dedicated group of officers pooling their information, resources, and intelligence, they’d have a better shot at identifying and catching the killer.

  One night, Dominique found himself driving out in the parish with a tropical storm raging all around him. This was Tropical Storm Matthew, which ravaged Southern Louisiana in October 2004. Eighty-mile-an-hour winds lashed at roofs as rain pounded down in sheets for a full day. At times, the rain was horizontal because of the intense winds, and the temperature fell as the storm reached its peak. It finally ended during the night. The next morning dawned sunny and bright.

  Banker Jeff Murrow was the first to notice the body lying near a pond in the Des Allemands area. Murrow drove home. He knocked on the door of his neighbor Don Jerome. By pure coincidence, Jerome was a criminalist with the sheriff’s office of St. Charles Parish. He responded immediately to his neighbor’s summons.

  Racing to his car, Jerome drove toward the location that Murrow had described. He got there in twenty minutes. At 11:40 a.m., Jerome located the body of a “black male,” as he later detailed in his report. Jerome notified dispatch and went back to his observations. The victim lay on his right side, knees slightly bent; no visible signs of trauma; and rigor mortis not yet present.

  Jerome went through the pockets of the victim’s blue sweat pants and black polo-style short-sleeved shirt. The criminalist could find no identification. No socks, no shoes. And he was very wet. The killer had dumped the body while the tropical storm still raged.

  It was a desperate thing to do, going out in weather like that, when a flying tree could kill you instantly. But if you happen to have killed somebody and you have already transferred them to your car, dumping the body is of the highest priority, lest you be discovered. Dominique did not dally after a kill. He immediately disposed of his victims.

  Jerome searched the area for trace evidence and found nothing. A few minutes later, he took digital photographs of the deceased and the surrounding recovery area. Then detectives arrived on the scene. A rough sketch and measurements were taken of the dump site. Shortly after, the coroner’s investigator arrived to officially pronounce the victim dead and have the body removed to the morgue.

  The autopsy took place the following day, with Jerome in attendance at the “post mortem examination of an unidentified black male subject (John Doe).” Jerome took digital photographs of the victim prior to and during the autopsy, conducted by Dr. Frank Johnson. Johnson eventually concluded that whoever had killed the victim had used a lot of force.

  Johnson’s official autopsy report says that he found blunt force trauma to the right shoulder and soft tissue and intramuscular hemorrhages of the back and buttocks. For some reason, that was not found to be unusual. Instead, Johnson wrote: “Signs of violence are not apparent at the scene. Cause of death as determined at autopsy and toxicological analysis is considered to be drug overdose (cocaine). Manner of death is considered to be accidental.”

  It probably wasn’t the first time, or the last, that a victim of a serial killer was listed first as an “accidental” death, in this case from a cocaine overdose. That did, of course, contradict the autopsy finding where Johnson found “lineal abrasions of each buttock … vascular hemorrhage within the subcutaneous fatty tissues.”

  Could the victim have been raped? The coroner didn’t comment. As for method of death, a neck dissection “noted overlying the strap muscles of the anterior right neck … is red-currant jelly-clotted blood.” That would be consistent with strangulation. After the autopsy was completed, the victim’s prints were gathered and entered in the AFIS.

  A short time later, t
he prints came back identifying the victim as “Larry Matthews of Thibodaux.” They also got his last known address. Turned out detectives from the Thibodaux Police Department were already familiar with Larry Matthews. A known drug dealer and user, he was described in police reports as “somewhat homeless.”

  How exactly someone could be “somewhat homeless” was not quite explained.

  The Thibodaux cops had met Matthews’s brother, Martin, during a prior investigation of Matthews’s drug dealing. When they went to his residence to interview him, Martin said that he had last seen his brother three or four days ago and was worried about him. He remembered seeing him walking south on Charles Street and then disappearing in the distance.

  The cops told Martin that his brother had been found dead. They had positively identified Larry Matthews through his fingerprints.

  “Do you know anyone who would want your brother dead?” a detective asked.

  “I can’t think of anyone my brother hung around with or anyone wanting to do him harm.”

  Four days later—well past the seventy-two-hour window of opportunity in a murder investigation (most successful cases are solved in that time frame)—the phone rang at the Thibodaux Parish Sheriff’s Office.

  “This is Simon Fryman of the Houma Police Department,” said the voice on the line.

  Fryman told Thibodaux police that they had a “white male” at their office, Jim Jarmin, claiming that the police were looking for him. It was in reference to Larry Matthews’s murder.

  “Jarmin said that he was visiting a friend in Thibodaux when Larry Matthews showed up. He lent his wife’s vehicle to Matthews and he has not got it back yet,” Fryman continued.

  Jarmin admitted that he and Matthews started talking about drugs (crack cocaine) and women. Matthews told him that if he would let him use his wife’s car, he’d bring back some girls and some crack for a party. The agreeable Jarmin gave Matthews the keys. Matthews drove off and never came back.

  Jarmin was angry and decided to do something about it. He went over to where Matthews was living with his brother, Martin, who told him that Matthews had been found dead. That’s when Jarmin filed the report with the police about his wife’s missing car. As for Matthews, all Jarmin remembered was that the last time he saw Matthews, he was wearing blue jeans, a red shirt, a baseball cap, and white tennis shoes.

  He was alone.

  The details seemed mundane, but they weren’t. It was a way to backtrack Matthews’s movements leading up to his killing. After the phone call, police canvassed the street Jarmin had spoken of and wound up speaking to Calvin Early. Early said that on Friday, October 8, an unknown white male, two unknown white females, and Larry Matthews showed up at his residence in a silver car. Early’s description of the white male fit Jarmin.

  “They all entered my house,” Early said, “and they drank and played cards for a while. After a while, Larry left walking away, I don’t know where. Larry never returned.”

  A day later, police spotted the stolen car and pulled it over. As soon as they did, the car’s doors sprung open and four men ran from it, with the surprised police at the scene unable to catch up with them. The car was then processed for evidence, at which time a few latent fingerprints were recovered.

  When Jarmin went to the impound lot to claim his car, the St. Charles cops decided to go there and chat with him again. Jarmin made the same statement that he had previously given to the Houma Police. Again he was hesitant, this time admitting he was nervous because he was on parole for drug charges and didn’t want to get in trouble with his probation officer.

  Regardless, police now knew that sometime after Larry Matthews drove away from Jarmin’s place in his wife’s car, he fell into the clutches of … a cocaine overdose. He had officially succumbed to a white powder, not a guy with strong hands.

  “Due to this information, I will close this case, taking no further actions at this time, closing it as an accidental overdose,” Jerome wrote in his report.

  Wendy Guidry was just trying to make a living like everyone else. She and her husband, Dirk, owned Gator Storage, a hundred-unit storage-rental facility in town. The Gator had no visible security—no electronic gate or security codes like some storage facilities had. Perhaps the couple figured that, being in a rural area, there was very little chance of theft.

  All of the units were sealed with dull blue shuttered doors that stood out starkly against the cane field surrounding the facility. Guidry had received a report from one of her employees about a strange smell coming from one of the units. Once she arrived, she too smelled the stink immediately, noticing a dark fluid seeping out from under the door of an unlocked unit.

  Unlike all the other units, which were padlocked, this one was secured by a simple twist tie. Guidry removed the tie and lifted the door warily. The stench was overwhelming and the dark fluid was now readily visible in the light of day as blood. That’s when her gaze centered on the body. The man was laid on his back, naked, and looked middle-aged, maybe in his fifties.

  Guidry panicked and bolted from the unit. When she got back to her office, she dialed 911. Within minutes, Houma police arrived on the scene, followed by the Terrebonne Parish detectives, who had also been summoned. Detective Simon Fryman of the Houma Police Department and Detective Dawn Bergeron of the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office were led to the unit, where they found the body in an advanced state of decomposition.

  As the criminalists began their work, Bergeron and Fryman peppered Wendy Guidry with questions. How had she initially come to make the call? Why had she gone to that specific storage bin? Then they asked Guidry to give them a complete list of all the rental units, including tenants’ names, addresses, and phone numbers.

  The police then called every single name on that list—more than fifty people—to find out if anyone had noticed anything out of the ordinary. No such luck. No one had seen, heard, or smelled anything unusual. Once again, it was as if the killer had drifted into thin air.

  The next day, the Houma Daily Courier carried a front-page article about the body’s discovery. The police had decided there was no point in embargoing the story. The article went so far as to link this fresh kill with the others that had preceded it, speculating that a serial killer targeting men was on the loose.

  However, the Associated Press did not pick up the story, so word of the new murder failed to be disseminated beyond the Southern Louisiana area. Pending identification of the decomposed “John Doe,” the coroner found “no obvious signs of trauma to the body.” The decomp was too far along to tell much else. The victim was kept refrigerated in the morgue until he could be positively identified.

  The next morning, Bergeron returned to speak with Wendy Guidry. Bergeron had a hunch that further questioning might elicit new information. Many times, witnesses remember more when they repeat their statements. Guidry’s recollection was that one of her employees, Rod Billings, was someplace at the back of the property on Saturday, two days prior to the discovery of the body.

  Bergeron found Billings in the office. He explained that he had been in back sweeping out the cobwebs from the climate-controlled units. He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  The next day, a local merchant named Francis Barber came into the Houma Police Department to report that his childhood friend, Michael Barnett, was missing. Barber had last seen Barnett on Friday evening as he was leaving 317 Ruth Street. He was on his bicycle. Barnett told Barber that he was going to meet a girl at a fire station.

  Detectives showed Barber a picture a sketch artist had drawn the previous day. The decomposition of the body was far along, but not so far as to prevent at least partial identification. The artist had noticed a unique dragon tattoo on the decedent’s arm and drew it in detail. They showed the tattoo sketch to Barber.

  “Yup,” said Barber, nodding. “I am positively sure Michael had that tattoo. I remember seein
g it many times.”

  So now they had an identification. While Detective Fryman continued to take Barber’s statement, Bergeron went to the fire station. Barber had said that Barnett was on his way to a “fire station” to meet a girl. Unfortunately, the firemen had seen nothing out of the ordinary. It seemed Barnett had not made it to the firehouse.

  The killer was murdering mostly black men, but he had also started killing Caucasians. The detectives pooled information and someone said that Michael Barnett had a brother named David who was possibly living on Miranda Court. They got back in their cars and drove to Miranda Court, a run-down neighborhood of detached homes. No one was home at the brother’s address.

  They left a message on the door for the brother to call and went back to headquarters. One hour later, Barnett’s friend Jack Gilings called. Just about the same time, David Barnett got the message and called too. The detectives asked the men to come down to be interviewed. They both had the same story.

  They said they’d last seen Barnett approximately four weeks ago. They had gotten into an argument, in which they accused Barnett of stealing power tools from Gilings. Both men had on-again, off-again friendships with Barnett.

  “However, he’s still family,” David Barnett said.

  No longer angry with Michael Barnett, they were very concerned he had been reported missing. Both men claimed that Michael’s new roommate, Dorian Bates, may have been involved. Detectives made a note of Bates’s name and explained that Barnett had not been positively identified yet. They were trying to use fingerprints and dental records to aid in positive identification. The tattoo wasn’t enough.

  After he got home later in the day, David Barnett remembered a few things. He called and spoke with Bergeron, filling her in on his brother’s background. Michael was born in Mississippi, and his biological mother gave him to Chad and Patricia Barnett for adoption. David, thirty-five years old, was their biological son.