The Bayou Strangler

by Fred Rosen

  There was little emotion in Dominique’s voice. But he had what seemed like an incredible memory for detail. That’s what would make the murder charges stick: the details of the murders that only the killer would know.

  “Now when you stopped, what did you do then?” continued Thornton, keeping the excitement he was feeling out of his voice.

  “I panicked. I was scared that if I went to the cops, they’d put me in jail because he was dead.”

  “You’re pretty sure he was dead, right?”

  “He wasn’t breathing,” Dominique answered.

  “So you got back in the front seat of your car and drove where?” Thornton continued.

  “I drove off and I just drove and drove. It looked like it was forever. All I remember is streets and lights.”

  Thornton remembered that the victim had been found in a dumpster.

  “Tell us about the dumpster where you put him. How’d you pick it?”

  Dominique couldn’t remember where the dumpster was, or its location. It was simply there and convenient.

  “I took him out of the car and put him in the dumpster. Then I left.”

  Dominique had told them enough to reveal that he had, indeed, killed LeBanks. Only someone with intimate knowledge of the crime—the killer—would have had the details that Dominique had. He had a terrific memory despite his protestations that he couldn’t remember things.

  “How did you take him out of the car?” Thornton continued.

  “I had to grab him by his pants and grab him by the throat and just kind of pick him up and put him in.”

  “Now after you put him in the dumpster, what happened next?” Thornton asked.

  “I drove home and turned the shower on and I just laid in the tub and cried until I fell asleep.”

  “Did you notice that anything that belonged to him was still in your car?” Bergeron asked.

  Serial killers usually like to keep souvenirs of their victims and kills. For example, Jeffrey Dahmer took this to the hilt by keeping his victims’ flesh and bones.

  “No,” Dominique answered.

  “Okay, let’s talk a little bit more about this other guy,” said Thornton.

  He showed him a picture of Manuel Reed.

  “What can you tell me about that one?”

  “I came out the bar and he wanted to fool around. We went to my car, got in the back seat like I did with the other guy. We fooled around and then when I lay down, he got me to lay on my stomach and he held me and he put it in me and started hurting me.”

  Hurting him?!

  Dominique was talking like he was the victim. Neither detective believed him, though they put on their most sympathetic expressions.

  “You’re talking about this guy placing his penis in your rectum?” Thornton asked.

  “Yes. I met him in a bar, I don’t remember which one, and he said, ‘You wanna have fun?’”

  “What did you tell him, Ronald?”

  “I told him yes, but I didn’t have much money. I told him about my operation and he said that was fine.”

  “Well let me ask you this, Ronald, when you talked about your operation to this guy, did he really understand you?”

  “He understood that I can’t take it in the rectum.”

  “He was good with that?”

  “Yes. He told me that he’s used to letting people put it in him. In other words, doing blow jobs and letting people screw him, put their thing in his rectum.”

  “What about the money, you talk about that?” Bergeron asked.

  “I told him I don’t carry that much money, maybe twenty or thirty dollars, and he said twenty bucks is fine ’cause he just needed a little money to do something. To get some food.”

  “What happens when you get to your car?” asked Thornton.

  “I unlock the doors, we both got in. We both pulled down our pants. First, he went down on me and then I went down on him. He gave me a blow job and then he laid on his stomach and then I put my thing in his rectum.”

  Thornton looked down at the tape recorder. He could see that they were almost at the end of the first side of the cassette.

  “Alright, Ronald, I hate to stop you, we’re gonna stop now and flip the tape over. It’s now 7:02 p.m. End of first statement.”

  The two cops excused themselves and went outside to get him a snack.

  “He offered no resistance in talking to us,” Thornton recalled later. “If he wanted food, he got food, if he wanted a bathroom break, he got one. We wanted to get his full story. He’s not going to be able to recount nine years in just one session in one room. But it was important to keep him talking until we got the facts on the first two murders he was initially being charged with.”

  After that first statement, there was only a one-minute pause to flip the tape over, and then Thornton continued.

  “Okay, we’re continuing now on an additional side of this statement, in our interview with Ronald J. Dominique. The time is now 7:03 p.m. Now, Ronald, you were continuing again with what happened in your car. Did he tell you his name?”

  “If he did, I don’t remember.”

  “How about the guy that ended up in the dumpster? Did he say anything about his name at all?” Bergeron asked.

  “No, I don’t remember. That’s the first time I seen him.”

  “Do you ask names or does it matter to you?” Thornton asked.

  “I don’t remember a lot of people’s names at work. I gotta ask them a bunch of times.”

  “But he might’ve told you his name?”

  “Might’ve.”

  “Would you have told him your real name?”

  “I always say to people, ‘Call me Ron.’”

  They’re going to call him a serial killer now.

  Bergeron listened as her partner once again got Dominique to describe fooling around with Reed before it got deadly.

  “After I came, he told me to lay on my stomach and he just wanted to rub his thing on my butt. That’s when he grabbed me by my shoulders and my back and he slipped it in and started screwing me. I panicked ’cause it was hurting and I grabbed the tire tool and I hit him.

  “When he fell, I tried to tie his hands so he wouldn’t hurt me no more. He pulled loose and I grabbed a rope I had in the back and started choking him. And I noticed he wasn’t breathing no more.”

  “Okay, now this rope you had, where’d you keep it, Ronald?” Thornton asked.

  “It was a rope I kept in the back seat of my station wagon, where it’s flat.”

  “You’re on your stomach on the back seat and you’ve agreed to let him get on top of you?”

  “Yeah, just to rub his thing on my butt.”

  “Okay, now, at this point, you have already ejaculated in his rectum, is that correct?” said Thornton.

  “Yes,” Dominique responded.

  “Where’d you hit him at?”

  “I don’t know, I just hit him and then when he fell, I just hurry up and grabbed the rope and had started tying his hands. And then he started coming to and started pulling and he got his hands free.”

  Even with his skull pounded in, Reed was fighting for his life.

  “At this point you had a rope out and were tying his wrists?” asked Thornton.

  “Yes, behind him.”

  “He’s face down with his hands behind his back and you’re tying his wrists?”

  “Yes.”

  “How thick was the rope?” Bergeron asked.

  “Maybe a little bit thicker than a pencil.”

  “How long was it?” Thornton asked.

  “Maybe ten or eleven foot, maybe,” the killer answered.

  Whether it was the rope or the jack handle, he was prepared to immobilize and then kill his victim. That would make it premeditated murder, which in Louisia
na was punishable by the death penalty.

  “How long did you have to hold that rope around his neck?” Thornton asked.

  “I don’t remember, I was scared. I don’t remember! I just kept holding it and holding it.”

  “What did you do after he stopped breathing?”

  “I got out in front and drove somewhere where it was dark so I can get rid of him and go home. I drove somewhere where they had an overpass and it was dark. I just turned my lights off, drove in, pulled him out, and drove off.”

  Thornton needed him to get more specific, so he went back and ask Dominique where he dumped LeBanks’s body.

  “Tell me, where was this?”

  “Toward Kenner.”

  “Remember any buildings or businesses nearby?” Thornton continued.

  “No, it was dark. It looked like they had a cement wall for a overpass, but everything else was dark.”

  Dominique dropped off LeBanks like so much detritus and drove away.

  “Ronald, see if you can remember this,” said Thornton. “When you took this person out of your car, did you back out or could you completely keep going? If it’s an overpass, you can go through it.”

  “I don’t remember, it’s been a long time. All I remember is I hurry up and grabbed him and pulled him out and then took off.”

  “How did you find this place, Ronald?”

  “I don’t know, I was just driving.”

  “Is it somewhere you had been before, somewhere you knew about?” Bergeron asked.

  “No, I just drove down that street.”

  While he planned out in advance how he would immobilize and kill his victim, he did not seem to have any plan in particular as to the dump sites. According to Dominique, it was all improvisation.

  “Now, Ronald, this particular person we’re talking about here in the second photograph,” said Thornton, showing him a shot of the Reed dump site, “what happened here?”

  “We were just supposed to give each other head,” Dominique said defensively, “and he told me I could put my thing in him, that I was gonna pay him. He was just gonna go. He just needed a little money to get him some food.”

  “But it didn’t happen like that, did it?” said Thornton.

  “No.”

  “Alright now, would you say when you were laying on your stomach and he put his penis in, did you want him to

  do that?”

  “No, I told him I couldn’t. He told me he was just gonna rub it on my butt.”

  Dominique was trying to establish a justification for killing. Thornton knew that. His job was to undermine any alibi the killer came up with.

  “Would you say that he had this type of sex with you against your will?” Thornton continued.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell him to stop?”

  “I started screaming and told him no! He kept on.”

  “He kept on and that’s when you used this tire tool?”

  “I twisted my body and grabbed it and hit him and he fell against the back seat and me. That’s when I got on top of him.”

  “Now let me ask you this, Ronald. We’re here today, Lieutenant Bergeron and myself, to tell you that this person that you’re talking about, where you had to incapacitate him and he ultimately died, you placed in a dumpster. And the first one you spoke about, you placed him under an overpass. Do you have any idea what the time difference was in those two?”

  “No, sir.”

  “After the second one, how did you feel about going out?”

  “I was just going out to get a drink. Just to get things off my mind.”

  Thornton looked down at the cassette. The tape was nearly to the end.

  “Everything you are telling us here is truthful to the best of your knowledge?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you give this statement of your own free will?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The statement is now ended. It’s the first of December, 2006, 7:19 p.m. December 1, 2006.”

  The tape recorder was turned off.

  Bergeron and Thornton left Dominique alone in the interview room with a drink and a sandwich, and they went outside to confer.

  The detectives were on spilkes, meaning “on edge.” Their insides churned. Finally, finally, they were going to solve this case. And their superiors knew it: they’d been watching through the two-way glass.

  Two of the twenty-three murders had now been cleared. They had Dominique where they wanted him, but with a long way to go. They had been tracking the serial killer across two millennia and they almost had him.

  “Let’s keep going,” said Thornton.

  Bergeron nodded. The iron was hot—time to strike.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Confession

  Before they went back into the interview room, Thornton and Bergeron received a preliminary report from the crime-scene technicians.

  They had towed in both of Dominique’s trailers for a detailed search. The preliminary results were that Dominique had kept no souvenirs of his “kills.” Or maybe he did and they just had not found them yet. The detectives went back into the interview room a few minutes later. The plan was to move from one murder to the next, and see what Dominique said about each.

  Whether Dominique would give the details necessary to solve the other twenty-one cases was hard to say. When they went back into the interview room, Thornton went with the sympathetic approach again to prime him.

  “I know you’re suffering,” said Thornton, “but we need to know, and I think you’ve picked this up, that there’s others, Ronald. And without bringing out any more photographs, without writing anything else, if you’re hearing me okay now …”

  Bergeron turned on the tape recorder as Thornton continued to talk.

  “And I know you are,” Thornton continued, “and we could certainly deal with this. I think you’ll agree there are others. Am I right in saying that?”

  “Most probably. I just don’t remember,” said Dominique, trying to stall.

  “Okay, ‘probably.’ That’s fair enough that there was one more time.”

  “I said most probably. I just don’t remember.”

  “Most probably,” Thornton repeated. “But you just don’t remember. Okay, well, that’s fair enough.”

  “All I ask is y’all just to tell my sister, I’m not the same after I got out of jail, especially after I got raped, and I didn’t mean to hurt my family.”

  “You’re gonna get to call her if you want,” Bergeron offered.

  “No!”

  “Okay,” she replied, a little surprised at the vehemence of his reply.

  She had picked up on Thornton’s softer approach and was going with it herself.

  “Do you wanna call?” asked Thornton sympathetically.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt my godchild and my sister and all! When I go in front of the judge, I’m gonna tell him just take my life.”

  They didn’t believe him, but they didn’t let on. Serial killers as a rule did not offer their own lives in place of their victims. It would have been impossible to believe that, given that Dominique had brutally raped and murdered twenty-three human beings. Proving it was another matter.

  “Do you wanna talk to her?” Thornton repeated sympathe­tically.

  “No!”

  “We’ll talk to her for you. What do you want us to tell her again?”

  Dominique hung his head and was silent, like a schoolkid who was just caught doing something wrong. Except it was much more serious than that.

  “You want to write her a note?” Bergeron suggested. “You just want us to tell her that?”

  “We’ll deliver whatever you want,” Thornton added.

  “She’s the only one in the family treated me nice. Everybody else treated me lik
e crap because I’m gay.”

  “I know—we know that, Ronald,” said Thornton reassuringly.

  It was important to keep him cooperative.

  “My mother should’ve seen I needed help when I got out of jail but …”

  Thornton thought about that one and how to respond. Sometimes you just wing it.

  “Right. Well, look, you’ve had a rough life,” Thornton said. “I mean you told us your family had picked on you, right? Isn’t that true? And listen, we know just like what you told us with the other people.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt nobody.”

  Thornton was playing right into Dominique’s paranoid self-pity act, or whatever it was. He didn’t know where it was going, but he knew he had to adjust and play along to get Dominique to continue talking. Thornton had more questions—a lot more questions—and he needed answers.

  “Well,” the detective continued, “like I said, before you told us everything that happened with the ones we already talked about. But just to touch a little bit on the other ones we didn’t talk about yet, let me ask you a question. You know where Highway Louisiana 347 is? You’ve been on that road before.”

  “In Lafourche,” said Dominique.

  “Like Kraemer Road?” Bergeron cut in.

  “You’ve been on there before, you know what we’re talking about, correct?” Thornton asked.

  “You know where we’re going?” Bergeron asked.

  “What happened on Kraemer, Ronald?” Thornton said, the words coming at Dominique faster. “I know that there’s a couple of things there.”

  “Just put my name on it, I don’t care.”

  Reacting swiftly to the serial killer’s self-pity, Bergeron declared, “No! We’re not gonna charge you like that, and if you don’t care, we care.”

  “I don’t wanna talk about nothing no more. I’m tired,” Dominique declared.

  They still had a long way to go and a narrow window within which to do it. But a confession obtained while keeping a suspect without sleep or breaks could quickly be overturned by an appeals court. Besides, both cops played fair. It wasn’t their style to abridge a suspect’s constitutional rights, serial killer or not.

  “You’re really tired, alright?” said Thornton, acknowledging for the record the suspect’s state of mind.