The Bayou Strangler

by Fred Rosen

  Fryman was on to something—or so he thought.

  He began to theorize that maybe the killer was the man driving the white vehicle, that maybe, finally, this would lead them to the serial killer. Suddenly, the door opened and John Bolden, Jones’s new boyfriend, arrived home from work. Fryman quickly explained that he was there investigating Terrell Watkins’s death, and it turned out Bolden also knew him.

  “When was the last time you saw Terrell?” Fryman asked him.

  “Friday, April 8, standing on St. Joseph Street near an abandoned green house. Elizabeth had sent me to the Family Food Mart on St. Joseph Street. Everyone calls it the ‘Chinese’ store.”

  “What time was that?”

  Bolden figured it was about 9:30 p.m., when he saw Terrell and the woman standing there.

  “Did you see a white truck that day?”

  He said that he hadn’t.

  Fryman put out a BOLO on the white truck. Dispatch soon informed him that the vehicle he was searching for, that he hoped contained his serial killer at the wheel, was back at Jack’s Grocery. When he got to Jack’s, the detective saw a white truck with green trim leaving the lot. He could see a man at the wheel.

  Excited, Fryman swung the wheel around sharply, turned on his siren, and gave chase. The siren pierced through the din of a too-ordinary day. The blue, white, and red lights that flashed from his car were intimidating enough to make even Bonnie and Clyde pull over, which the driver of the truck did. Quickly, Fryman ran the truck’s Louisiana plate through the state’s motor-vehicle database.

  Up came the owner’s name: Maggie Brown.

  Fryman wore a sport jacket, which he flicked to the side, putting his hand on the butt of his 9mm. Sauntering slowly up to the driver’s side, he saw that the driver wasn’t Maggie Brown—of that he was positive. He was a man wearing eyeglasses and a hat. Sitting next to him in the passenger seat was a woman, possibly Maggie Brown.

  Fryman showed the driver his badge and asked him to step out of the vehicle. He thought he might have his serial killer. Fryman put him up firmly against the side of the truck, frisked him, and then snapped on the handcuffs.

  “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to the presence of an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed by the court. Do you understand these rights?”

  “Yes,” the driver said.

  “You’re not under arrest at this point,” Fryman informed him. “But I need to talk to you in reference to an investigation.”

  The driver relaxed a little, though he shouldn’t have. Once a cop puts on the cuffs, advises you of your rights, and won’t let you go, you are effectively under arrest. He identified himself as Michael Joselyn, date of birth June 2, 1958. But his driver’s license said his name was Jack Pennington. Taking this discrepancy into careful consideration, Fryman confiscated his license as evidence and placed him in the back seat of his car. As for the woman, she was a twenty-something, Selma Davies.

  “I don’t know why we were stopped,” she said as Fryman escorted her to his car.

  But she did, or thought she did.

  “I know my uncle Mike has a drug problem. I think he gets his drugs from a family called Jones,” she volunteered.

  Another police car arrived on the scene and Davies was taken in for further questioning. She told Fryman that her uncle Mike picked her up to accompany him to a notary to witness some documents he needed to sign. Then they went to Jack’s Grocery to get some gas.

  Showing her Mike’s driver’s license, Fryman asked her, “Why does your uncle’s ID say that he’s Jack Pennington from Missouri?”

  She looked at it.

  “I don’t know why,” she finally answered. “But the picture is actually him.”

  Detectives typed up Davies’s statement, had her sign it, and released her. Now they turned their attention to “Uncle Mike.” Placed in the drab green interview room nearby, with a few battered chairs and an institutional-style desk, Uncle Mike was again given his Miranda warning, and then signed a waiver that allowed him to speak to police, on the record, without an attorney being present representing his best interests.

  “I’m not nervous that you wanted to talk to me,” he told Fryman. “I’m in the process of getting my marriage back on the right track with my wife. I’ll help you guys in any way possible.”

  Fryman sagged a bit inside. The guy sounded like he had nothing to hide, but then again, so do most killers. So the detective told him that based on his statement, they would make a determination as to whether he could continue his journey to Missouri. If he was truthful—and helpful—he’d be on his way.

  “Do you know the Jones family?” Fryman asked.

  “I occasionally do mechanical work along with other odds-and-ends jobs for them. When I do odd jobs for them, they occasionally would pay me with crack.”

  He paused for a second and then added for clarity, “Cocaine.”

  Joselyn was casual in the way he described the deal, and with good reason. Drug charges were minor. Besides, he carried no drugs and therefore no physical evidence. Nor would any judge allow police to admit this in a court of law, for fear of violating his Fifth Amendment right not to self-incriminate.

  “Do you know someone by the name of Terrell who lives at Liz Jones’s house?”

  “No, I don’t know him,” Joselyn answered.

  Like the rest of the victims, Watkins too had a record of low-level drug dealings and other misdemeanors. To refresh Joselyn’s memory, Fryman showed him a mug shot of Watkins. Looking at the picture for a few moments seemed to jog his memory.

  “Yes, I do know him,” Joselyn said after a while. “Terrell would occasionally sell us dope. I remember someone yelling at Terrell about selling him dope and coming up short.”

  Jones didn’t get a good “count.”

  “Terrell was a little off mentally,” Joselyn added. “I don’t see how he could be selling dope.”

  Not that you had to be smart to be a drug dealer.

  “Did Terrell occasionally ride in your truck?” Fryman asked.

  “No,” Joselyn answered.

  “Well, the Joneses stated that you called their residence for Terrell on several occasions.”

  “They’re lying,” Joselyn shot back. “I think they implicated me because they want to get the attention off of them.”

  Maybe a family member had done it. Or maybe the Jones family didn’t want to be investigated for drug sales. Not a bad theory. No one likes to be questioned by police, let alone about the murder of a loved one. You didn’t have to be familiar with a homicide investigation to know cops will focus first on family and friends. NCIS could tell you that.

  Yet so far there was no evidence tying Joselyn to Watkins’s murder, except that Joselyn knew him, had bought drugs from him, and drove a white truck that Jones’s family saw and thought might be involved with Terrell’s disappearance and murder. Fryman still had to wonder if Michael Joselyn might be their serial killer. Or maybe he was what he seemed to be—an innocent man.

  “You know, I really didn’t know Terrell, but I would like to know what happened to him. You guys are asking me questions about him, but you’re not telling me why I’m at the police department. That makes me nervous.”

  Joselyn was technically not in custody. He had not been charged with a crime. He could have left at any time. Part of the detective’s art is getting the subject to stay put and allow questioning without being charged. Now the detectives finally told him the truth.

  “We’re investigating a homicide. Terrell is dead.”

  Joselyn thought about that for a moment.

  “I’d be willing to take a lie-detector test, because I know for a fact that I had nothing to do with the homicide,” he said firmly.

  “This investi
gation may take a couple of days,” Fryman advised.

  Actually, it had already been going on for eight years, but who was counting?

  “Well, I’ll make myself available to you guys when you need me.”

  He didn’t appear to have anything to hide. And he told the detective that Winter’s last name was Lewis. Satisfied he had gotten all he could out of Joselyn for now, Fryman released him. Now it was time to find Winter. She had allegedly been the one in the truck with Joselyn when they ran into Terrell. Fryman turned to his street contacts, who told him that Winter hung with a guy named Frank Jagger. Fryman got his address from a junkie.

  As it turned out, Fryman knew Jagger, a tall, slim man from a previous case. Fryman got into his car and took off through the streets of Houma, eventually spotting Jagger. It was easy to find him; he drove a custom-made GTO. Using the siren and lights, Fryman pulled Jagger over. Fryman told Jagger he was trying to locate Winter Lewis.

  According to Jagger, Winter lived at the third trailer on Matthews Drive. He had walked her there about thirty minutes before Fryman pulled him over. She was wearing a black skirt and red shirt. Fryman followed the lead and drove over to the trailer park. He knocked on the door of the third trailer, and the tenant who answered refused to give his name, which was his constitutional right.

  However, the man did say that Winter Lewis was in the trailer. He then gave police, who did not have a warrant, permission to enter. Inside, Fryman and another detective found Lewis wearing the exact same clothing Joselyn had described She was handcuffed and taken into the Houma Police Department headquarters for questioning.

  The cops read Lewis her rights and then presented her with a form that waived those rights, allowing police to question her without a lawyer being present. She signed it.

  “Are you familiar with August Watkins?” Fryman began.

  “I don’t know who he is,” she responded.

  Just as he had done with the room’s previous occupant, Fryman showed her August Watkins’s mug shot.

  “I know him by the nickname ‘Cornbread.’”

  That was a new one: “Cornbread.”

  “Okay, when was the last time you saw Cornbread?”

  “Possibly last week or during the end of March on Matthews Drive.”

  As they continued to speak, Fryman was able to narrow it down further.

  “The last time I saw Cornbread was April eighth.”

  That was the day he disappeared.

  “I remember talking to him and Jack Pennington in front of the Soul Castle on Matthews Drive. As I was talking to them, I saw a green van with tan lines pull up and Jack got close to it. He was talking to the guy in the van while Cornbread stood there waiting for him.”

  Then, according to Lewis’s statement, a friend of hers pulled up in a red car. She got in and they went to a friend’s house, where Lewis stayed a while. When she was dropped off at the Soul Castle later in the day, no one was around.

  “Another friend of mine was there, a little drunk dude. He wants to have a relationship with me. I asked the drunk dude [she didn’t know his name] where everyone else was and he just said they had left.”

  The detectives confirmed her allegations, that she was with a white male who had a white truck. She also appeared to be the last one to have seen Watkins alive.

  “Jack was actually the last person to be with Terrell. I don’t hang out with white guys, so no one should be saying that I was seen with a white guy!”

  She made it sound like to be with a white man was an insult. Perhaps to her it was.

  At this point, the phrase “wild goose chase” comes to mind.

  That’s what Fryman and the police were tangled up in. It was almost like they were in a parallel universe—in pursuit of the phantom white truck with the phantom white guy driving, who might have picked up August Watkins that night and transported him to his death. Yet there was no physical evidence this story was true.

  But the story of the phantom van was at least partially right. The person who had picked up, strangled, and dumped Terrell Watkins and other men was indeed a white guy at the wheel of a white vehicle. Though they didn’t know it yet, the police had already started to solve the case.

  It was time to go all the way.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Firecracker

  Lafourche, Terrebonne, and Assumption Parishes, 2005

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Dennis Thornton wanted a task force to take on the serial killer. He took the murders in his own parish personally. That’s what made him particularly suited for his vocation. For most detectives, personal feelings were forcibly repressed. Thornton was the direct opposite: not only did he have feelings about what had happened, he also had theories.

  Thornton had already surmised that the killer was mobile, picking up his victims on the street. That was the MO he had established since his early activities in New Orleans at Rawhide. The killer would transport his victims, kill them, and dump their bodies. What happened in between was anybody’s guess.

  Dawn Bergeron hadn’t ever been on a serial-killer case, except for her experience on the periphery of this one. Then again, neither had Thornton or anybody else. Despite its media coverage, serial killing is still a very rare crime in comparison to other types of homicide. Few cops ever work such a case. Yet in Southern Louisiana, detectives in half a dozen different parishes had been chasing a deadly serial killer for eight years, through a new millennium, without any success in capturing him, before he killed and killed again and again and again.

  The fact that the case had stayed out of the cable-channel news and therefore avoided the kind of media saturation that inevitably follows the story of a serial killer can be attributed to the profile of the victims. Dead black men, gay or not, doesn’t sell on the news. White girls being killed by a black serial killer, on the other hand—that sells and gets coverage.

  Up in Baton Rouge, the police had recently caught the Baton Rouge Serial Killer, a.k.a. Derrick Todd Lee. He was an African American man who killed white coeds, many from Louisiana State University. Because of his choice of victim, the state allocated the resources to capture him. If Dominique had only chosen different victims, whose lives were more valued by society, then the state might have acted earlier.

  But, eventually, act they did. The numbers finally added up.

  The recent spate of killings in Houma had pushed the “kill total” to fifteen, high enough to get the attention of the state’s criminal justice system, where it could not be denied that there was a serial killer operating in Southern Louisiana parishes. Whoever this guy was, he seemed to thrive on raping, then strangling or suffocating all of his male victims. It fueled him.

  Who it was who made the decision to form the task force isn’t clear. All evidence in official records indicates that the state was simply doing its job, finally marshaling all forces available to bring in a public enemy. Unsurprisingly, Dennis Thornton was the first one to answer the summons to help.

  “It was April 2005 when I got a call that Houma was having problems. They had a string of unsolved murders. The state was interested in forming a task force to track down the serial killer they thought responsible. They wanted me to join,” he later recalled.

  The state knew of Thornton’s long investigation of the serial killer, and that he would readily agree to help. That’s why he got the first call. His experience and dedication would be invaluable. There followed a big organizational meeting at state-police headquarters in Baton Rouge. Present were fourteen cops representing six parishes and the state and federal government, all invited by blue-ribbon invitation.

  Besides Thornton, there was Houma parole officer Tom Lambert; Jack Erskine, an FBI agent from New Orleans; and Simon Fryman of the Houma Police Department. And of course Dawn Bergeron from Terrebonne Parish. Dawn Bergeron’s boss, Major Vernon Bourgeo
is of the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office, realized how important this task force was.

  Bourgeois saw they needed the “Firecracker,” Dawn Bergeron. Showing the kind of leadership that helps move the country forward by obliterating gender discrimination, Bourgeois appointed a woman as the department’s lone representative on the task force. The parishes then brought in the work that they had done on the linked murder cases.

  Behind the scenes, Thornton and his parish had taken the lead in working the cases in their jurisdiction and linking them with the killings in the Houma area. FBI Agent Erskine pointed out that the task force would have instant access to proprietary federal law-enforcement databases. But it would all come down to how well they could cooperate: whether they could tap into that unique chemistry that develops when smart, unbiased cops get together.

  “I kind of liked not having any publicity on the case,” Thornton said. “This way, we could pursue our investigation without the media being on top of our every move.”

  He was right. Having a talking head like Wolf Blitzer reporting on the case as though it was one big carnival would not help to solve it. Thornton still couldn’t figure out how the killer seduced the victims. What about the inducements for those who weren’t gay? What set him off? The questions kept going around and around in his head.

  One thing Bergeron, Thornton, and the others on the task force could agree on at their first meeting was that all fifteen murders were committed by the same perpetrator. Because the serial killer was currently operating in Terrebonne Parish, the task force decided that their investigation would center on events there.

  Bergeron knew her parish, knew her people well. She had been on the job long enough to appreciate what life was like for street people like the ones who had been killed. She knew about their peripatetic, pathetic lives. Unless you were someone who had been homeless, or a police officer interacting with the homeless, you had no idea what it felt like to not have a home or even hope for one. She also knew the outlying areas of the parish, where you could take a road for miles without seeing a living soul.