phill4paul
02-02-2014, 08:29 AM
Lengthy investigative article implicating police in the Jefferson 8 murders: https://medium.com/p/d1b813e13581
A serial killer has allegedly been preying on Louisiana prostitutes. But a new investigation reveals a far scarier theory
Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of seven more women would be discovered around the swamps and canals that ring Jennings, a staggering body count for a tiny sliver of a town of about 10,000. Along with Lewis, the victims were Ernestine Marie Daniels Patterson, 30; Kristen Gary Lopez, 21; Whitnei Dubois, 26; Laconia “Muggy” Brown, 23; Crystal Shay Benoit Zeno, 24; Brittney Gary, 17; and Necole Guillory, 26. Both Patterson and Brown had their throats slit; the other bodies were in too advanced a state of decomposition to determine the cause of death, though the coroner often suspected asphyxia. The victims were mired in poverty and mental illness; and all had hustled Jennings’ south side streets for drugs and sex.
In December 2008 a multi-agency investigative team (MAIT) of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies was formed to solve the killings. At the time there were seven dead women, and the reward for information leading to the guilty party’s arrest was increased from $35,000 to $85,000. From the outset, the task force was searching for a serial killer.
Guillory had wild, intense eyes, a dimpled smile, and long brown hair that she meticulously brushed while waiting for johns on the stoop of a South Jennings home frequented by all the murdered women. She was known for her street savviness, and in 2006, when she was 24, she savagely attacked a john with the handle of sledgehammer.
She racked up a towering rap sheet that was dominated by charges that ended up getting mysteriously dropped. I’ve reviewed the parish district attorney office’s case files on Guillory, and in at least six cases, the charges against her ended in a nolle prosequi (a legal term meaning “be unwilling to pursue” on the district attorney’s part). Though there is no record of Guillory’s cooperation—excluding a theft case in which she agreed to testify against her codefendant—snitches routinely have charges nolle prossed in exchange for their off-the-record cooperation.
Barbara believes that her daughter was murdered because she was witness to local law enforcement corruption or misconduct or worse. “She used to tell us all the time it was the police killing the girls,” Barbara said. “We’d say, ‘Necole, a name. Something. Write a letter and leave it somewhere. Let us know. We can help you.’ No, momma. It’s too far gone. It’s too big. I’d rather y’all not know nothing, that way nothing can happen to y’all… She knew, she knew, she knew, and that’s why they killed her.”
Several family members of the murdered women told me eerily similar stories. Gail Brown, a sister of the fifth victim, Laconia “Muggy” Brown, told me that just before Muggy was killed she worriedly informed her family that “she was investigating a murder with a cop; the cop wanted to give her $500 to tell what happened.” Gail put it as bluntly as Barbara Guillory: “She knew what was going on,” she told me, referring to her sister’s work as a cooperator. “I think it was a cop that killed my sister.”
The Brown family accounts are corroborated by task force witness interviews; one was noted as saying that “Laconia Brown told her that…three police officers were going to kill her.”
Against the backdrop of decades of misconduct and corruption, a veteran Jennings cop made a decision that would forever change the course of his career—and the Jeff Davis 8 investigation.
In December 2007, Sergeant Jesse Ewing received word that two female inmates at the city jail wanted to talk about the unsolved homicides (then totaling four). He was stunned by what he heard: Ewing said that both women told him that “higher-ranking officers” had been directly involved in covering up the murders.
Ewing had long been wary of his fellow cops, and he feared that the audiotapes would simply vanish, just as drugs and cash had a way of disappearing from evidence. So Ewing handed the interview tapes over to a local private investigator named Kirk Menard, who rushed copies to the FBI’s office in nearby Lake Charles.
Ewing’s gambit to grab the attention of the feds backfired. The tapes ended up right back with the sheriff’s office–dominated task force, and Ewing’s fears of retaliation turned out to be justified. The parish district attorney charged Ewing with not only malfeasance in office, but also sexual misconduct. (One of the female inmates claimed that Ewing touched her inappropriately during the interview. Ewing denies it, and that charge was dismissed.)
But the two inmates told another story, too, about a truck, and about a conspiracy between Richard and a top sheriff’s office investigator to destroy evidence in the Lopez case.
Richard, the second inmate said, put Lopez’s body “in a barrel,” and used a truck to transport it. The truck, she said, was later purchased by “an officer named Mr. Warren, I don’t know his exact name, he bought the truck to discard the evidence.”
By “Warren,” the inmate meant the sheriff’s office chief criminal investigator, Warren Gary. The first inmate had also spoken of Lopez’s body and a truck and an officer named Warren.
So you’re saying that this officer knew about the DNA?
Yes sir.
Did Hannah say that?
Yes sir.
Did he know about the killing?
Yes, sir, because him and Frankie Richard were good friends…
What did Hannah tell you about the officer?
That him and her Uncle Frankie are good friends and that he bought the truck so that the evidence wouldn’t come back to her Uncle Frankie. He discarded it. He cleaned the truck at the car wash.
Who cleaned it at the car wash?
Officer Warren.
What car wash did he clean it at?
Ray’s.
Ray’s Laundry and Fixtures, on South Lake Avenue in Jennings, has a car wash out back; it is directly across the street from offices of the multi-agency investigative team.
Danny Barry, a 12-year veteran of the sheriff’s office when he died in 2010 at the age of 63, was named as a suspect by at least three separate task force witnesses in a single day of interrogations in November 2008. “Deputy Danny Barry would ride around on the south side with his wife,” one witness said. “And they would try to pick up girls….[Barry’s vehicle was] a small blue sports car…Barry would drop off his wife, Natalie, and she would get the girls. The couple would ‘spike’ a drink and then take the girls back to the Barrys’ house….”
One witness even told investigators that “Danny Barry had a room in his trailer that had chains hanging from the ceiling and that a person could not see in or out of the room.”
There was only one task force interview with Barry, on February 25, 2009. He wasn’t questioned about the myriad allegations against him, and there hasn’t been any substantive follow-up investigation.
Most of the murdered women seemed to have some knowledge about the other prostitute killings. But at least one victim from the Jeff Davis 8 witnessed a killing at the hands of state and local law enforcement during a drug bust in Jennings that went awry.
On April 19, 2005, a snitch tipped off local law enforcement that “there was ongoing narcotics activity” at a particular Jennings house. According to investigators, the snitch also claimed that “two other probationers,” including Richard associate Tracee Chaisson, “were frequenting the residence.” The next day, just after 10:20 p.m., a team of Louisiana Probation and Parole agents, Jennings Police Department detectives, and an investigator with the parish district attorney’s office burst through the front door of the clapboard home. They shouted “Police” and encountered a dozen drug users crowded inside in the front living room. The home was shrouded in darkness: with the exception of the agents’ flashlights, the only light came from a lamp in the kitchen.
Moments later, Probation and Parole agent John Briggs Becton encountered Leonard Crochet, a ponytailed 43-year-old prescription-pill dealer, standing on the north side of the living room. Briggs Becton told Crochet to show his hands, and, according to a statement he gave later to investigators, Crochet “then made a sudden movement with his hands toward his belt line.” Believing that Crochet was reaching for a weapon, Briggs Becton fired his departmentally issued Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun, with a single shot striking Crochet in the chest.
According to a statement provided later by a fellow Probation and Parole agent at the raid, Briggs Becton approached Crochet’s body muttering, “Oh shit.” Briggs Becton called an ambulance to the scene, and the inhabitants at 610 Gallup were taken into custody and transported to the Jennings Police Department for questioning. Police investigators concluded that they were “unable to locate any items in the immediate vicinity of Crochet’s location in the residence which could have been construed as a weapon. Further, no persons inside the residence at the time of the shooting, whether law enforcement or civilian, could provide any evidence that Crochet had brandished a weapon.”
That July, a parish grand jury heard prosecutors make their case that Briggs Becton committed the crime of negligent homicide, but came back with a decision of “no true bill”—no probable cause or evidence to show that a crime had been committed.
“When I was walking out with my ride,” Crochet told me when we spoke several weeks later on the front porch of her home, which is just down the street from the Richard family home, “she was screaming out the car with some black people, ‘You’re gonna be number 9.’”
Crochet said she reported the incident to the task force. She cleared her throat nervously. “I could tell you more,” she said, “but I’m scared. I’m scared for my own life.” The Jeff Davis 8 killings, she said, “started right after” her brother Leonard was killed. “Right after. All them girls were in there at one point. They were all in there for two days in and out.”
As the sky over Jennings darkened and we said our goodbyes on Richard’s porch, the mask of the anxiety-ridden, cornered onetime kingpin dropped, and he bellowed: “If something ever happens to my kids behind this shit, they can believe one fucking thing: Frankie Richard’s coming, and hell is coming with him.”
A serial killer has allegedly been preying on Louisiana prostitutes. But a new investigation reveals a far scarier theory
Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of seven more women would be discovered around the swamps and canals that ring Jennings, a staggering body count for a tiny sliver of a town of about 10,000. Along with Lewis, the victims were Ernestine Marie Daniels Patterson, 30; Kristen Gary Lopez, 21; Whitnei Dubois, 26; Laconia “Muggy” Brown, 23; Crystal Shay Benoit Zeno, 24; Brittney Gary, 17; and Necole Guillory, 26. Both Patterson and Brown had their throats slit; the other bodies were in too advanced a state of decomposition to determine the cause of death, though the coroner often suspected asphyxia. The victims were mired in poverty and mental illness; and all had hustled Jennings’ south side streets for drugs and sex.
In December 2008 a multi-agency investigative team (MAIT) of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies was formed to solve the killings. At the time there were seven dead women, and the reward for information leading to the guilty party’s arrest was increased from $35,000 to $85,000. From the outset, the task force was searching for a serial killer.
Guillory had wild, intense eyes, a dimpled smile, and long brown hair that she meticulously brushed while waiting for johns on the stoop of a South Jennings home frequented by all the murdered women. She was known for her street savviness, and in 2006, when she was 24, she savagely attacked a john with the handle of sledgehammer.
She racked up a towering rap sheet that was dominated by charges that ended up getting mysteriously dropped. I’ve reviewed the parish district attorney office’s case files on Guillory, and in at least six cases, the charges against her ended in a nolle prosequi (a legal term meaning “be unwilling to pursue” on the district attorney’s part). Though there is no record of Guillory’s cooperation—excluding a theft case in which she agreed to testify against her codefendant—snitches routinely have charges nolle prossed in exchange for their off-the-record cooperation.
Barbara believes that her daughter was murdered because she was witness to local law enforcement corruption or misconduct or worse. “She used to tell us all the time it was the police killing the girls,” Barbara said. “We’d say, ‘Necole, a name. Something. Write a letter and leave it somewhere. Let us know. We can help you.’ No, momma. It’s too far gone. It’s too big. I’d rather y’all not know nothing, that way nothing can happen to y’all… She knew, she knew, she knew, and that’s why they killed her.”
Several family members of the murdered women told me eerily similar stories. Gail Brown, a sister of the fifth victim, Laconia “Muggy” Brown, told me that just before Muggy was killed she worriedly informed her family that “she was investigating a murder with a cop; the cop wanted to give her $500 to tell what happened.” Gail put it as bluntly as Barbara Guillory: “She knew what was going on,” she told me, referring to her sister’s work as a cooperator. “I think it was a cop that killed my sister.”
The Brown family accounts are corroborated by task force witness interviews; one was noted as saying that “Laconia Brown told her that…three police officers were going to kill her.”
Against the backdrop of decades of misconduct and corruption, a veteran Jennings cop made a decision that would forever change the course of his career—and the Jeff Davis 8 investigation.
In December 2007, Sergeant Jesse Ewing received word that two female inmates at the city jail wanted to talk about the unsolved homicides (then totaling four). He was stunned by what he heard: Ewing said that both women told him that “higher-ranking officers” had been directly involved in covering up the murders.
Ewing had long been wary of his fellow cops, and he feared that the audiotapes would simply vanish, just as drugs and cash had a way of disappearing from evidence. So Ewing handed the interview tapes over to a local private investigator named Kirk Menard, who rushed copies to the FBI’s office in nearby Lake Charles.
Ewing’s gambit to grab the attention of the feds backfired. The tapes ended up right back with the sheriff’s office–dominated task force, and Ewing’s fears of retaliation turned out to be justified. The parish district attorney charged Ewing with not only malfeasance in office, but also sexual misconduct. (One of the female inmates claimed that Ewing touched her inappropriately during the interview. Ewing denies it, and that charge was dismissed.)
But the two inmates told another story, too, about a truck, and about a conspiracy between Richard and a top sheriff’s office investigator to destroy evidence in the Lopez case.
Richard, the second inmate said, put Lopez’s body “in a barrel,” and used a truck to transport it. The truck, she said, was later purchased by “an officer named Mr. Warren, I don’t know his exact name, he bought the truck to discard the evidence.”
By “Warren,” the inmate meant the sheriff’s office chief criminal investigator, Warren Gary. The first inmate had also spoken of Lopez’s body and a truck and an officer named Warren.
So you’re saying that this officer knew about the DNA?
Yes sir.
Did Hannah say that?
Yes sir.
Did he know about the killing?
Yes, sir, because him and Frankie Richard were good friends…
What did Hannah tell you about the officer?
That him and her Uncle Frankie are good friends and that he bought the truck so that the evidence wouldn’t come back to her Uncle Frankie. He discarded it. He cleaned the truck at the car wash.
Who cleaned it at the car wash?
Officer Warren.
What car wash did he clean it at?
Ray’s.
Ray’s Laundry and Fixtures, on South Lake Avenue in Jennings, has a car wash out back; it is directly across the street from offices of the multi-agency investigative team.
Danny Barry, a 12-year veteran of the sheriff’s office when he died in 2010 at the age of 63, was named as a suspect by at least three separate task force witnesses in a single day of interrogations in November 2008. “Deputy Danny Barry would ride around on the south side with his wife,” one witness said. “And they would try to pick up girls….[Barry’s vehicle was] a small blue sports car…Barry would drop off his wife, Natalie, and she would get the girls. The couple would ‘spike’ a drink and then take the girls back to the Barrys’ house….”
One witness even told investigators that “Danny Barry had a room in his trailer that had chains hanging from the ceiling and that a person could not see in or out of the room.”
There was only one task force interview with Barry, on February 25, 2009. He wasn’t questioned about the myriad allegations against him, and there hasn’t been any substantive follow-up investigation.
Most of the murdered women seemed to have some knowledge about the other prostitute killings. But at least one victim from the Jeff Davis 8 witnessed a killing at the hands of state and local law enforcement during a drug bust in Jennings that went awry.
On April 19, 2005, a snitch tipped off local law enforcement that “there was ongoing narcotics activity” at a particular Jennings house. According to investigators, the snitch also claimed that “two other probationers,” including Richard associate Tracee Chaisson, “were frequenting the residence.” The next day, just after 10:20 p.m., a team of Louisiana Probation and Parole agents, Jennings Police Department detectives, and an investigator with the parish district attorney’s office burst through the front door of the clapboard home. They shouted “Police” and encountered a dozen drug users crowded inside in the front living room. The home was shrouded in darkness: with the exception of the agents’ flashlights, the only light came from a lamp in the kitchen.
Moments later, Probation and Parole agent John Briggs Becton encountered Leonard Crochet, a ponytailed 43-year-old prescription-pill dealer, standing on the north side of the living room. Briggs Becton told Crochet to show his hands, and, according to a statement he gave later to investigators, Crochet “then made a sudden movement with his hands toward his belt line.” Believing that Crochet was reaching for a weapon, Briggs Becton fired his departmentally issued Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun, with a single shot striking Crochet in the chest.
According to a statement provided later by a fellow Probation and Parole agent at the raid, Briggs Becton approached Crochet’s body muttering, “Oh shit.” Briggs Becton called an ambulance to the scene, and the inhabitants at 610 Gallup were taken into custody and transported to the Jennings Police Department for questioning. Police investigators concluded that they were “unable to locate any items in the immediate vicinity of Crochet’s location in the residence which could have been construed as a weapon. Further, no persons inside the residence at the time of the shooting, whether law enforcement or civilian, could provide any evidence that Crochet had brandished a weapon.”
That July, a parish grand jury heard prosecutors make their case that Briggs Becton committed the crime of negligent homicide, but came back with a decision of “no true bill”—no probable cause or evidence to show that a crime had been committed.
“When I was walking out with my ride,” Crochet told me when we spoke several weeks later on the front porch of her home, which is just down the street from the Richard family home, “she was screaming out the car with some black people, ‘You’re gonna be number 9.’”
Crochet said she reported the incident to the task force. She cleared her throat nervously. “I could tell you more,” she said, “but I’m scared. I’m scared for my own life.” The Jeff Davis 8 killings, she said, “started right after” her brother Leonard was killed. “Right after. All them girls were in there at one point. They were all in there for two days in and out.”
As the sky over Jennings darkened and we said our goodbyes on Richard’s porch, the mask of the anxiety-ridden, cornered onetime kingpin dropped, and he bellowed: “If something ever happens to my kids behind this shit, they can believe one fucking thing: Frankie Richard’s coming, and hell is coming with him.”