The Bayou Strangler

by Fred Rosen

  “Michael was raised as a brother to me,” David added.

  Bergeron told Barnett of the advanced state of decomposition, which made positive identification difficult. Anxious to help catch his brother’s killer, he volunteered to help police check Mississippi for possible dental records. Then Bergeron found a judge who agreed to sign a search warrant. Armed with the warrant, she drove over to the Ruth Street apartment where Barnett lived and went through the place. She was trying to locate items that might have belonged to Michael Barnett.

  The hope was that they could take prints off something he’d touched and match them to the ones they had gotten off the body. Several pieces of mail and a few CDs were collected and taken to the department for processing. The next day, Bergeron was looking through Barnett’s correspondence when she discovered that he had been housed as a child in the Baptist Children’s Village in Jackson, Mississippi.

  Maybe he’d seen a dentist while there. She faxed a request to see Barnett’s dental records. Soon, the fax machine rang and the pages started coming through. Barnett had seen a Dr. Don Murphy on February 8, 1999, when Barnett was a teenager. Calling Murphy’s office, Bergeron learned that Murphy had retired and a Dr. Mike Madison had taken over the business.

  Madison’s office still had the old records. Soon, she received hard copies of the dental records in the mail. They were turned over to the coroner’s office for comparison to the victim. The coroner confirmed that the deceased was definitely Michael Barnett. With a positive identification, Bergeron shared the news with David Barnett and Jack Gilings: Michael was dead.

  Gilings and Barnett urged Bergeron to question Michael’s roommate, whom they continued to suspect.

  Dawn Bergeron had been coming through the ranks. Major Vernon Bourgeois, who was the overall field commander of the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office, had been watching her for some time.

  “She’s a real firecracker!” he’d exclaim to anyone who asked.

  The ambivalent high school graduate who wasn’t sure what she was going to do with her life had grown into a no-­nonsense, dedicated, intelligent, and—most importantly—empathetic detective. Empathy was the one thing any good detective needed—the ability to put yourself in the suspect’s shoes and relate to what he’s feeling when being questioned.

  Bergeron just seemed to be a natural at getting confessions, or as police like to call them, statements. Her personal life had also gone through important changes. She’d married, given birth to a daughter, divorced the child’s father, then gotten remarried, this time to a detective like herself. In spite of the domestic obligations of being a wife and mother, Bergeron remained dedicated to her job.

  She was known to beg off social functions with her daughter because “Mommy had to serve a warrant.” It was this combination of being a sympathetic parent and a committed cop that made her especially good on the job.

  Going through all the names on the list Guidry had given them of people who had rented storage units, Bergeron came up with a blank. There was no connection with anyone on the list to Barnett. Bergeron, though, was well aware of the Southern Louisiana serial killer. She wondered if Barnett could have been one of his victims.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dirt Bikes at Dusk

  Terrebonne Parish, February 2005

  It was another sleepless night for Dennis Thornton. There had been many of these, as he struggled to see what he hadn’t yet: some piece of evidence, some clue, that would lead him to the killer.

  He had heard of the Matthews murder and the grisly discovery of Barnett’s body. In the latter case, the coroner could not establish cause of death because the decomposition was too well along. Despite that failure, and the failure to link conclusively the Matthews and Barnett cases to the serial killer, behind the scenes, the detectives strongly suspected they were related.

  He didn’t pause to consider the guy’s “kill total” and where he stood in US criminal history. That, however would have provided some perspective, not to mention a great story for any reporter smart enough to pay attention. Had they compared their killer’s total number of victims, the Louisiana cops would have discovered that their murderer was in distinguished company.

  Dominique had now killed as many as Jeffrey Dahmer, a.k.a. “the Milwaukee Cannibal,” with fifteen murders. Unless he was caught quickly, he would exceed that. But as far as the detectives were concerned, they had an unknown serial killer on their hands who moved freely from parish to parish, leaving a trail of bodies behind him.

  Now he appeared to be concentrating on Terrebonne Parish. It was therefore a logical assumption that he was living someplace in the parish, which appeared to be his “comfort zone.” Some serial killers would remain forever at large were it not for some subconscious action, usually a slight mistake, that lead the police to them.

  Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin, for example, was spotted by police because there was a body part hanging out the back door of his van. Some may even expose themselves deliberately. Ted Bundy was a lousy driver. His erratic driving led to his arrest twice, the second time after he had escaped … for the second time!

  In cases where the cops don’t know whodunit, suspects are brought in for questioning. But suspicions are not enough, so suspects are released if there isn’t evidence of their guilt. Then, after committing more murders and getting away with them, the serial killer will often confess to his crimes. Kendall Francois, a.k.a. “the Poughkeepsie Serial Killer,” was originally brought in for questioning and even passed a lie-detector test. After a victim escaped his clutches in 1998, he was brought in again for questioning. This time, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and confessed to killing eight women and using his house as a “body dump.”

  Admissions of this kind have nothing to do with getting it off your conscience; serial killers don’t have one. Otherwise they couldn’t do what they do. No—the confession is a boast of what he has done. Sometimes a confession can even be used to save a killer’s life. Attorney Clarence Darrow showed that in the Leopold and Loeb case.

  First he got the thrill-killers to plead guilty to murdering little Bobby Franks, and then he argued for their lives before the trial judge. Darrow opposed the death penalty. In the end, the judge sided with Darrow and spared the murderers’ lives instead of hanging them. But in that case, both suspects emerged quickly. Here, investigators did not know who the killer was, but they knew he was smart.

  Forensically aware, he didn’t leave anything behind. That made the job more difficult. What was it that made him kill at some times and not at others? Thornton was unable to answer that question. He also couldn’t figure out how the killer picked up his victims or talked them into trusting him. The questions continued to swirl around in his mind, unanswered.

  The Houma Shrine Center, or “club” as the locals referred to it, was located right in front of the air base. Everyone called it “the air base,” but it was actually a small airport, used primarily by oil companies with offices in the Houma area. The Shrine Center itself, which one passed before getting to the air base, was a wooden clapboard building, weathered enough to say, encouragingly, that it had seen better days. Their origins tracing back to 1870, the Shriners had by the twenty-first century become an international club devoted to “good works” through its Shriners Hospital.

  Behind the Shrine Center was an open grassy field leading up to a forest. The whole area was deserted at night. It was evening, February 19, 2005, and the Shrine Center looked ghostly. The field behind it was just a sheet of solid black darkness—until it was suddenly lit up by the headlights of Dominique’s Sonoma. He knew the place because he’d read the meter there; no one noticed him or his automobile.

  The next day, Steve Pym and his son, Vincent, decided to go to the air base to ride their dirt bikes. As they were loading the bikes, friend Donald Clendenon showed up to visit, then asked to go along. So Pym threw in a third
dirt bike, and off they went for a few hours of riding.

  The three had been dirt biking around the Shriners building and airfield a short while when Clendenon caught a flash of clothing in the grass. On closer inspection, he saw that the clothes were actually covering a body and set off instantly to tell Pym. Pym was startled by his urgency. Up ahead, Clendenon was riding toward him wildly, waving him down.

  Pym reached Clendenon first, who frantically explained the situation. Pym turned fast and shouted at his son, who attempted to follow.

  “Stay away!”

  Pym followed Clendenon back to the body. When Clendenon started to reach down, Pym said, “No. If the guy’s drunk, he might get up fighting.”

  Pym had seen a beer bottle in a tree. To him, it looked like the guy had just passed out. Then again, he didn’t have a shirt on. Also, he was wearing jeans and socks, but no shoes. Clendenon stooped down to see if the stranger was still breathing. He didn’t appear to be. His wrists and back looked blue; flies were swarming around him.

  Pym pulled out his cell phone. In the eight years Dominique had been operating, cell phones had become a common pocket item. Pym dialed 911.

  “I want to report the discovery of a body.”

  He gave their location, then waited for police. Next, Pym dialed his mother to come pick up his son. He needed his kid away from the scene. The last thing any child needs to see is a dead body.

  Once again Detective Simon Fryman of the Houma Police Depart­ment got the call at home.

  “Respond to the rear of the Shriner Building on Moffett Road, in reference to a body that has been discovered,” the dispatcher instructed.

  Fryman drove down to the site, wondering what it was this time. He was met by uniformed officers who led him to the crime scene. Fryman saw the white male laying on his side. He was wearing only blue jeans and socks. The Houma Police Department Crime Scene Division began to search the area for possible clues. The forensic photographer took his photographs of the body and all the other potential evidence of a crime.

  Examining the body from the rear, Fryman saw nothing that indicated a weapon had been used. As in other homicide investigations in his parish, Fryman himself bagged the left hand of the victim and began doing the same thing to the other hand, when he stopped cold. Not only did he recognize the victim; he knew him!

  It was when Fryman moved the victim’s right arm back from his face, to bag the hand, that he saw that it was Leon Lirette. Fryman had dealt with Lirette in the murder of Noka Jones, not to mention the fact that he had arrested him for previous low-level offenses.

  How had he wound up here?

  “I’ll see you later, T-Paul,” he said, and walked out the door.

  That, as Leon Lirette had told police three years earlier, was the last thing Noka Jones had ever said to him. Now, in a terrible act of fate, it appeared that Lirette had died in the same manner as his friend. Fryman continued to bag the right hand. That’s when he noticed several small wounds on Lirette’s chest.

  He also noted what appeared to be markings on Lirette’s neck, possibly left by some kind of ligature used to suffocate him. Maybe it was the same killer as before? There were small particles of blood, a dried-cranberry color, spattered across the body. Blood pooled from Lirette’s nostrils.

  The shoeless feet were bagged. Another detective ran a vacuum sweep on Lirette’s blue jeans for trace evidence. It was just a small cordless vacuum with a high-tech filtering system. It could sometimes yield valuable evidence, like fibers and skin scrapings.

  The body was taken to the Terrebonne Parish morgue for autopsy, but Fryman had more urgent matters to address. Rather than join detectives at the station, he drove straight to Lirette’s house on State Street, an address Fryman had become familiar with after a series of busts. Lirette lived with his mother, who answered the door and consented to a preliminary search of the premises.

  Pointing to blood at the rear of the living room behind the recliner, she was panicked that her son might be hurt or even dead. Fryman also saw a thumb-sized bloodstain on the recliner itself. He realized that proceeding any further without a search warrant was constitutionally unsound. Warrant in hand two hours later, Fryman went back to Lirette’s residence.

  The neighborhood Lirette had lived in was a drug-infested area. Along with a team of investigators, Fryman entered the living room, where the processing of evidence began. Fryman waited it out until the specialists did their job, at which time the scene was released and turned over to Lirette’s mother.

  Fryman thought it possible that the blood was Lirette’s; that could be confirmed later in the day with laboratory analysis. For now, Fryman continued his investigation into Lirette’s background, hoping he might find some clue to his death. He interviewed one of Lirette’s friends, Mark Donaldson, who referred to him by his nickname, “T-Paul.”

  The last time Donaldson had seen T-Paul was about six days ago, Tuesday of last week, at Laverne’s Bar, by the Bryson Mobil station. He was in the bar drinking when T-Paul tried to come in carrying a forty-ounce beer. He was denied entrance. T-Paul left it outside and was then allowed to come in. Donaldson bought Lirette a beer and they drank together. After that, T-Paul left.

  Nobody had talked to him since, and friends were worried. Donaldson gave Fryman a description of what T-Paul had been wearing when he last saw him: white muscle T-shirt, blue jeans, and a red beanie cap. Fryman immediately sought out Joey Gazzo, who was the last person to speak to Lirette before he was murdered.

  The fifty-three-year-old filled in some blanks. Gazzo had seen Lirette for the last time on the previous Thursday at Lirette’s house. He and Donaldson had stayed over for the night. Lirette’s mother, Dorothy, was at home. Gazzo and Donaldson got up that morning and went to work with Mark’s brother Darrell of D&M Roofing. They came home about 5:30 p.m.

  A short while later, he and Mark went out to go to the store to get a beer and ended up at Laverne’s Bar. He had a beer and then went to the Pit Stop to get something to eat. When he got home, T-Paul called.

  “I answered the telephone and he asked me to talk to his mother. He said he was drunk, stoned, and did not know where he was. Then, all of a sudden, the phone went dead.”

  Donaldson figured it was about 9 p.m. He also figured that T-Paul hung up the phone, or that someone did it for him.

  “The next time I saw Mark was the next morning when we went to work. We did not talk about T-Paul at all.”

  After not hearing from her son for a few days, Lirette’s mother had gotten worried and called the police. In chatting further with the detective, Gazzo came to recall something else.

  “A couple of nights ago, Mark and Dorothy had an argument. Mark was drunk and he made a comment to Dorothy that the police might find her son dead. But I think it was the alcohol talking.”

  It probably was. There was no indication that Mark Donaldson was involved in Leon Lirette’s disappearance and murder. Fryman found Lirette’s movements hard to trace because he moved around the street a lot. Yet the two interviews brought out important information. Lirette had made a phone call at a time that looked to be immediately before his death, or close to it.

  He was heavily under the influence. Fryman figured that, with his judgment impaired, Lirette was vulnerable. Easily enticed, a plum target for a serial killer out trolling for his next victim. The next day, Fryman received a call from a clerk at the Bryson Mobil store. The clerk, who had heard of the investigation, told him to contact Diedre Porter. She might have some information about Leon Lirette’s disappearance.

  Fryman called Porter, who also worked at the Bryson store. She told him that on either Monday or Tuesday, which would have been February 14 or 15, she had seen Leon Lirette during daylight hours speaking to a white male, about twenty years old, in a bright-purple eighties-model car with rims.

  “I don’t actually know Leon Lirette. He w
as just a guy who came to the store,” Porter explained to the detective.

  Porter was implying, however tangentially, that a white guy in a bright-purple muscle car from the 1980s was somehow involved in Lirette’s disappearance. While it seemed doubtful—serial killers don’t generally have vehicles that stand out; the idea is to blend in—every tip needed to be noted and checked out. But the first thing was the autopsy.

  Fryman went over to the coroner’s office to attend the autopsy, which Dr. Garcia was in the process of performing. A sexual-assault kit was prepared and the results were turned over to Fryman for forensic analysis. Noting that the victim had been dead for about twenty-four to thirty-six hours, Garcia looked at the eyes. There was hemorrhaging in both of them.

  In Dr. Garcia’s professional opinion, “the victim was extremely drunk at the time of death and it would not have taken much force to strangle him.”

  Fryman went back to the department feeling that the autopsy had only confirmed what they already knew: it was the work of their serial killer. Dr. Garcia was very straightforward—Lirette had been strangled to death in the same manner as the previous victims. The detective wondered if being drunk had in some way softened his death.

  Before he had a chance to sit down at his desk, another detective told Fryman that a black female and a white male had come in for an interview on an unrelated case. They had both once resided at the Sugar Bowl Motel. Fryman knew the Sugar Bowl was a notorious place for pickups. Male and female prostitutes lived there and worked the large street right in front of it.

  Fryman reasoned that Lirette might have been down there looking for some action when the wrong person picked him up. Soon, the woman identified herself as Marie Maples. Fryman pulled out a mug shot of Leon Lirette and handed it to Maples.

  “I don’t know his name, but I’m a hundred percent sure I seen him in the parking lot of the Sugar Bowl last week.”