What happened to the Jeff Davis/Jennings 8?

www.themidnighttrainpodcast.com 

Hello, you crazy, beautiful bastards. And happy new year. We hope your Christmas or whatever holiday you chose to celebrate was a great one. As you probably know, we took the week off to be with our families, and this week we're back with another banger, as the cool kids say. We are hopping back into the dark, twisted world of UNSOLVED true crime—the best and only way to serve that horrible cold dish. We know you guys love that shit, and so do we. Of course, not in a weird "sitting alone in front of my computer masturbating to unsolved terrible crimes" sort of way, but in more of a "gee-whiz Mr. Wilson, that's interesting, I'd like to learn more" kind of way. And with that out of the way, let's get into today's episode on the Jennings 8!

 

The Jennings 8, sometimes also referred to as the Jeff Davis 8, is a series of unsolved murders in Jefferson Davis Parish in Louisiana between 2005- 2009. And for those of you wondering, no, Moody wasn't living there yet. So he's been cleared of this one. This one. 

Two of the victims had their throats slit; the other six were in such a bad state of decay that a cause of death could not be determined, but asphyxiation is thought to be the cause. Law enforcement would have you believe a serial killer was on the loose but is that really what happened? Or was something crazier going down? 

Let's take a look at the unfortunate victims first. 

 

The first body found was that of Loretta Lynn Chaisson Lewis. She was 28 and last seen on 05/17/05 in Jennings, Louisiana. Her body was found in the Grand Marais Canal 05/20/05 and floating in Grand Marais Canal's east fork, a few miles southwest of Jennings. She was partially clothed and shoeless. The advanced decomposition caused difficulty identifying and collecting evidence, and an autopsy found Loretta had no physical injuries. A toxicology report showed "high levels of drugs and alcohol" in her system, but no cause of death was determined. Investigators believe she may have been in the canal for three to four days. 

 

The second victim, Ernestine Patterson, was a mother of four and a lifelong Jennings resident. The 30-year-old was last seen on June 16, 2005. On June 18, her body was discovered in a drainage canal off LA Highway 102. She was partially clothed, and her throat had been slit. The death was ruled a homicide, and two people were arrested and charged with 2nd-degree murder but were later released due to "lack of evidence." She worked at Iota State University.

 

The third victim was Kristen Elizabeth Gary-Lopez. Kristen was last seen alive by friends and family on March 6, 2007. By all published accounts, Kristen was involved in a high-risk lifestyle of drugs and prostitution. Because it was not unusual to not hear from her for extended amounts of time, she was not reported missing until ten days later.

 

On March 18, a fisherman discovered Lopez's utterly nude body in the Petitjean Canal, a rural area near Cherokee Road right off LA 99, about 10 miles south of the town of Welsh. Investigators felt her body had been placed in that location but killed elsewhere. According to autopsy results, the cause of death for Kristen Gary Lopez is undetermined. However, toxicology results showed elevated levels of drugs and alcohol in Lopez's system. In May 2007, Frankie Richard and his niece, Hannah Conner, were arrested in connection with Lopez's death. Richard and Conner were also questioned about the other deaths before Lopez's body was found. Richard was reportedly seen with three of the victims in the last days of their lives. Charges were eventually dropped due to insufficient evidence and conflicting witness statements.

 

Also arrested in May 2007 was Tracee L. Chaisson. The police booked her on Accessory After the Fact charges. Chaisson was the person who reported Kristen missing. Investigators believed she knew where the body was when she made the report. Like Richard and Conner, charges were dropped against Tracee Chaisson due to lack of evidence and conflicting statements.

 

    Whitnei Charlene Dubois, 26, was last seen on 05/10/07. Her remains were found 05/12/07 at the intersection of Bobby and Earl Duhon Roads, approximately five miles outside of Jennings, Louisiana.

 

According to the family, "Whitnei enjoyed listening to music, absolutely adored her daughter, was tough on the outside despite her vulnerabilities within, and left a lasting impression on all those who knew and loved her."

 

The nude body of Whitnei Dubois was found 05/12/07 near the intersection of Bobby and Earl Duhon Roads, approximately five miles outside of Jennings. Investigators believe she had been dead "a couple of days." Officials never determined the cause of death, but high levels of alcohol and drugs were found in her body. 

 

Her family has doubts about the investigation into her death. Whitnei's sister Brittney Jones wonders, "why haven't we been questioned? Why haven't we been asked when was the last time we saw our sister? Where her whereabouts was? Why haven't we been asked about the evidence? Why haven't we been contacted?"

 

Lolita Doucet, her aunt, believes Whitnei and the other victims were dismissed as women who lived high-risk lifestyles involving drugs and prostitution.

 

23-year-old LaConia Shontel "Muggy" Brown was last seen on May 27, 2008. Around 2 am on May 29, a Jennings police officer discovered her body lying on Racca Road, leading to the police firing range. Although in a rural area, Brown's body was the first found within the city limits of Jennings. She would become the 5th victim of the Jennings 8. LaConia was clothed but had no shoes on. Her throat had been slit, and someone had doused her body with bleach. Brown was wearing a white, tank-top style shirt stained from white to pink. Police believed the stain to be blood and that some type of liquid had diluted it from red to pink. They discovered more evidence and potential leads in this case than in any of the previous deaths since Brown's body was found about six hours after it was left on the road.

 

LaConia's family stated that she may have known something horrible was about to happen to her and that she was living in fear just days before her death. She was a lifelong resident of Jennings and attended Jennings High School.

 

Crystal 'Shay' Benoit Zeno, 23, was last seen 08/29/08. Her remains were found on 09/11/08 near a dry irrigation canal a few miles from Jennings, Louisiana.

 

Crystal was employed with Sonic in Lake Arthur until May 2008, when she moved to Jennings. She enjoyed spending time with her daughter, fishing, singing, and listening to music. She was a people-person, who also enjoyed spending time with friends.

 

According to her parents, Shay was diagnosed with bipolar at 12 and started using drugs early to cope with the illness.

 

On 09/11/08, hunters reported a foul smell in a wooded area to authorities. The remains of Crystal Shay were found around 3:00 pm on the LaCour Road levee, off LA Highway 1126, a few miles southeast of Jennings. Due to the advanced state of decomposition, she was not identified with DNA until nearly two months later, on 11/07/08. Her death was ruled a homicide, although the cause of death and toxicology reports have not been released to the public.

 

Crystal, who went by "Shay," was married and had a young daughter. She also knew many of the other victims, including Brittney Gary.

 

17-year-old Brittney Gary became the 7th and youngest victim. Brittney walked out of the Family Dollar Store in Jennings, never to be seen alive again; sometime after 5:30 pm that day, she was abducted. Thirteen days passed as her family, and a concerned public held out hope that Brittney was safe and would be located soon. Sadly, on November 15, 2008, her deceased body was found in a grassy area outside Jennings. According to her family, Brittney loved to swim, hang out with her friends, and listen to music. She enjoyed spending time with her friends and family and was a friendly and loving person. She was also trusted by the third victim Kristine Gary Lopez. She also knew several of the other victims.

Necole Jean Guillory, 26, was last seen on 08/16/09. Her remains were discovered on 08/19/09 near the westbound I-10 exit in Egan, Louisiana.

 

She was a resident of Lake Arthur, and according to her family, enjoyed listening to music and loved being outdoors.

 

Necole's remains were discovered on 08/19/09 by a highway worker mowing grass. She was left between mile markers 72 & 73, near the westbound I-10 Egan exit (between Crowley and Jennings) in Acadia Parish. Mark Dawson, Acadia Parish Coroner, ruled the death of Necole murder by probable asphyxia. 

 

According to Necole's mother, shortly before her daughter's disappearance, she'd asked her what kind of icing she wanted for her birthday cake. Necole replied it didn't matter because she wouldn't see her birthday. Unfortunately, her premonition was correct: her body was found just days before her birthday. She also confided in her Mom that police killed the other young women, and it would only be a matter of time before she ended up dead too. Holy shit! What the hell is going on down there?

 

Ok, so those are the unfortunate victims in the case. Did a serial killer kill them? In December 2008, Officials formed a multi-agency investigative team (MAIT) of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies 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.

"It is the collective opinion of all agencies involved in this investigation," said then Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff Ricky Edwards, who was flanked by FBI agents, Louisiana State Police, and sheriffs from neighboring parishes at a press conference announcing the task force's inception, "that these murders may have been committed by a common offender." 

 

In 2012 the new Jefferson Davis sheriff claimed they still had no evidence that these deaths were all related or even homicides. Now, he may be technically correct, but most find this incredibly hard to believe, given the evidence and connections. At the time, most people chalked this up to the work of a serial killer preying on sex workers. If you're interested in serial killers, you'll know that this is not unusual. Many serial killers get started by killing sex workers as they are viewed as less important and less likely to be missed. Killers believe they can easily get away with murders of women who partake in this work line because nobody cares about them. As far as suspects go, some were arrested and released, as we've mentioned earlier.  

 

However, one man believes that this was not the work of a serial killer. Writer Ethan Brown spent several years investigating this case and had discovered some interesting things in the process. 

 

Buckle up bitches. This is about to be a crazy ride!

 

In one article he wrote for medium.com, Brown says, "Over the past two years, I have obtained and reviewed hundreds of pages of task force witness interviews, the homicide case files on several of the victims, the Jeff Davis Parish sheriff's office's and Jeff Davis Parish district attorney's files on all of the victims, federal and state court records, and the complete personnel files of the cops and sheriff's deputies at the center of the case. I have interviewed friends and family of all eight victims, as well as some of the possible suspects.

 

The details of the Jeff Davis 8 case can be murky; the connections between victims, suspects, and police tangled. My investigation, however, casts serious doubt on the theory that the Jeff Davis 8 is the work of a serial killer."

 

Brown goes on to say, "One fact is clear: local law enforcement is far too steeped in misconduct and corruption—and this extends to the task force, which is dominated by detectives and deputies from the sheriff's office—to run an investigation with the integrity that the murdered women and their families deserve after nearly a decade in which no one has been brought to justice."

 

One reason Brown doesn't believe this was the work of a serial killer is the connections between all of the victims. Generally, serial killers kill victims who have no relation to other victims. However, the women themselves all knew one another intimately. Some were related by blood (such as cousins Kristen Gary Lopez and Brittney Gary) or lived together (Gary bunked down with Crystal Benoit in South Jennings just before being killed in 2008). They solicited prostitution at the Boudreaux Inn, a now-shuttered motel in Jennings that, with its sloping blue metal roof and nondescript white façade, could be mistaken for a storage facility. The inn was ideally situated in Jennings's heady drugs and sex trade—just off a 400-mile stretch of Interstate 10 connecting Houston to New Orleans, favored by marijuana and cocaine traffickers and prescription-pill "doctor shoppers"—and cops were there on a near-nightly basis for busts. Loretta Lewis, the first victim, was the subject of several complaints to the police based on her activity at the inn.

 

Brown also says, "It wasn't simply that they traded their bodies at the same address. According to my reporting, all but one of the victims—Ernestine Patterson—were associated with the same fixture of the Jennings underworld: a 58-year-old oil-rig worker turned strip-club owner named Frankie Richard. "We shared something," he said of the murdered women, his voice so raspy it sounded as though he had been gargling rocks. "When we were at the lowest point of our life, and no one wanted to have anything to do with us, we had something to do with each other. And that means something to me. Them girls were my friends no matter how fucking low my life was. And I was their friend no matter how fuckin' low their life was."

 

Richard described the city of Jennings when the killings began: "It was wide open… The drugs, the prostitution, the bars, the crooked cops." Since the early 1990s, there have been nearly 20 unsolved homicides, including the slain eight women, in Jefferson Davis Parish, a statistic any competent sheriff's department would regard as both a shallow clearance rate and an astonishingly high murder rate for a small area.

 

As for suspects, Brown had found several while going through the reports from the task force and interviewing witnesses. In 2007, Frankie Richard himself was briefly charged in the Lopez killing, but those charges were dropped after witnesses provided conflicting statements and an essential piece of physical evidence was mishandled. Richard died in 2020. 

 

Byron Chad Jones and Lawrence Nixon (a cousin of the fifth victim, Laconia Brown) were briefly charged with second-degree murder in the Ernestine Patterson case. But despite several witnesses implicating them, the sheriff's office did not test the alleged crime scene until 15 months after Patterson's murder and found it "failed to demonstrate the presence of blood." That messed-up crime scene work contributed, in part, to the collapse of the case against the two men. According to case files, Jennings street hustlers with connections to Richard were suspected in the deaths of some of the other women. 

 

Brown claims no credible suspects outside the Jennings drug circle have been found, yet the official narrative is still that of a serial killer. 

 

Another strange connection is that the murdered women of the Jeff Davis 8 (aka, the Jennings 8) provided information to law enforcement about other Jeff Davis 8 victims—and then turned up dead themselves. For example, Laconia Brown (the fifth victim) was interrogated about the 2005 killing of Ernestine Patterson (the second victim). Brown, the article author, obtained by a task force report in which one witness claims that Brown, the murder victim, spotted the body of Loretta Lewis (the first victim) floating in the Grand Marais Canal before Jerry Jackson discovered her there in May 2005. In 2006, detectives investigating Lewis's murder interrogated Kristen Gary Lopez (the third victim).

 

"She knew what was going on," Melissa Daigle, Lopez's mother, told Brown. She trailed off, tearing up at the memory. "They were scared, them girls. I think she knew about it and was too scared to say."

 

Brown also claims that he discovered that all of the women at one point had been informants for local law enforcement regarding the Jennings drug trade. 

 

When Brown confronted Sheriff Edwards with the allegation that the Jeff Davis 8 were informants, the sheriff stammered a non-denial. "I wouldn't respond," he told me. "If they were informants, I would still continue to protect their anonymity. I don't know that's the truth. I won't comment on it."

 

Brown writes that at the end of 2008, a Jennings prostitute warned task force investigators that Necole Guillory "might be the next victim."

 

Guillory was known for her street savviness, and in 2006, when she was 24, she savagely attacked a sex customer with the handle of a sledgehammer. 

 

Brown says of Guillory," 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."

 

"Necole knew a whole lot," said Frankie Richard, "about a whole lot."

 

Necoles mother Barbara would tell Brown, "She was always paranoid," "It got to the point where she did not want to go anywhere by herself," she said. "I think she could feel that they were closing in on her." With her 27th birthday approaching, Guillory refused even to entertain the idea of celebrating. "I bought some icing and cake for her birthday," Barbara recalled. "She said, 'Momma, it doesn't matter—I'm not gonna be here.'"

Guillory also had her four kids placed with relatives. A task force witness supports the claim that in her final days, she "was scared of someone," but she would not say who and that she "knew who killed the girls."

 

Barbara believes that her daughter was murdered because she witnessed 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."

 

Brown writes that several other families of victims have similar stories. 

 

He says, "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."

 

Taskforce witness interviews corroborate the Brown family accounts; one was noted as saying that "Laconia Brown told her that…three police officers were going to kill her."

 

According to Brown, the Jennings police force and Jeff Davis sheriff's offices have been plagued by misconduct for years. 

 

Veterans of Jennings' streets trace the unwinding of local law enforcement back to the '70s when they say cops began getting involved in drug trafficking. But this is not merely street gossip. In March 1990, two local men burglarized the sheriff's office, making off with a staggering 300 pounds of marijuana. According to court documents, investigators interviewed one of the burglars. He named a surprising pair of accomplices—Frankie Richard and a man named Ted Gary, who was then chief deputy sheriff. (Officials brought no charges against Richard and Gary.)

 

From sheriff's using parish funds to purchase personal items illegally, to unlawfully and purposefully stopping cars with out-of-state plates, to improper dealings with inmates, and even the murder of one officer and his wife by another officer, things were getting pretty nuts. 

 

In October 2003, eight female Jennings cops filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court against Jennings police chief Donald "Lucky" DeLouche, a gaggle of male cops, and the City of Jennings, alleging widespread acts of sexual violence and harassment. Among the allegations in the complaint: a captain who shook his penis at female officers, saying, "You know I like to lick pussy, I can numb it all night," and forced oral sex on a female officer, as well as a lieutenant who waved a knife at a female officer, warning, "Girl, I'll cut you."

In January 2013, former Jennings police chief Johnny Lassiter was hit with a battery of charges after a Louisiana State Police audit found $4,500 in cash, 1,800 pills, more than 380 grams of cocaine, and several pounds of marijuana missing from the department's evidence room.

 

In December 2007, Sergeant Jesse Ewing received word that two female inmates at the city jail wanted to talk about the unsolved homicides (at the time totaling four). He was stunned by what he heard: Ewing said both women told him that "higher-ranking officers" had been directly involved in covering up the murders.

 

Brown claims 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.

 

Brown goes on to write, "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. As a result, the parish district attorney charged Ewing with malfeasance in office and sexual misconduct. (One of the female inmates claimed that Ewing touched her inappropriately during the interview. Ewing denies it, and that charge was dismissed.)

 

Brown says, "Ewing and I sat in his trailer in the Paradise Park development in Jennings in July 2011. He is a short, wide-shouldered man with a cleanly shaved head, a graying goatee, and the bulky frame of a rugby player. Ewing decorated the trailer with little more than a TV set and a couch—a no-frills lifestyle that he blamed on employment troubles since his termination after 20 years on the job. "I felt screwed for doing the right thing," he said."

 

Although the tapes were never made public, Brown says he had listened to them in their entirety. He claims they provide highly specific information about the murders of two of the prostitutes—Whitnei Dubois and Kristen Gary Lopez—as well as local law enforcement's alleged role in covering up Frankie Richard's role in at least one of the killings.

 

The first inmate says that a prostitute named Tracee Chaisson had told her that she was there when Richard and his niece Hannah Conner killed Dubois. They'd all been getting high, and when Dubois refused Richard's sexual advances, he "got aggressive, he started fighting with her, and when she started fighting back he got on top of her and started punching her." According to the inmate, Chaisson then said that Hannah held her head back and drowned her. 

 

The two inmates told another story about a truck and a conspiracy between Richard and a top sheriff's office investigator to destroy evidence in the Lopez case.

 

The second inmate said Richard 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, a truck, and an officer named Warren.

 

Public records would seem to corroborate the second witness' account. On March 29, 2007, Warren Gary purchased a 2006 Chevy Silverado truck for $8,748.90 from Connie Siler, a Richard associate who had just been hauled into the sheriff's office for questioning in the case of a bad check.

On April 20, Gary resold Siler's Silverado for $15,500, a nearly 50 percent profit in less than one month. (Siler, in turn, used profits from the sale, $3,207.13, to pay the parish district attorney's office for the bad checks she had issued.)

Gary's truck purchase was possibly illegal and definitely unethical—the Louisiana Board of Ethics fined him $10,000 in the incident. "What [Gary] did with that was wrong," former sheriff Ricky Edwards told Brown. "Buying from an inmate, that's what was ethically wrong." He insisted, however, that his office "had no clue that [the truck] was even part of evidence [in the Lopez case]. That didn't come out until way after the fact."

 

Brown says there is some reason to doubt this claim. According to their reports, investigators knew that Siler was one of the last to see Lopez alive. In addition, Paula Guillory, a former detective in the sheriff's office who was later investigated for her ties to the Jennings drug scene, recently spoke to Brown and told him, "We knew that Connie Siler's vehicle was probably involved."

 

In a town where everyone was related and where the atmosphere had the feeling of a vicious family feud, it was Paula's then-husband Terrie Guillory, the warden at the jail, who brokered the Siler truck deal, according to the ethics board report on Gary. (Note: That he shares a last name with one of the victims is not a coincidence: Necole Guillory was his cousin.)

 

Because of Warren Gary and Terrie Guillory, two members of law enforcement, the Lopez case lost an essential piece of physical evidence. Because of Terrie Guillory, one suspect found herself with an alibi. And because Conner refused to flip on Richard, and Chaisson had changed her story repeatedly, the charges against all of them were dropped.

 

Brown writes, "Put simply: The statements from the two female inmates portrayed Richard and his associates working with the sheriff's office to dispose of evidence in the Lopez case. Yet the sergeant who took the statements was forced out of his job, and the allegations were ignored by law enforcement." 

 

A review of hundreds of pages of task force investigative reports by Brown reveals a series of witness interviews where local law enforcement was implicated in the murders. However, these allegations have never been made public.

 

Danny Barry, a 12-year veteran of the sheriff's office when he died in 2010 at the age of 63, was named 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." What the fuck?

 

There was only one task force interview with Barry on February 25, 2009. He wasn't questioned about the abundance of allegations against him, and there hasn't been any substantive follow-up investigation.

 

Brown goes on to write, "As the murders in the parish crescendoed in 2009, Guillory participated in a raid on Frankie Richard's family home. This was part of a sprawling investigation by the sheriff's office into a drugs and theft ring that Richard, his mother, and Teresa Gary (the mother of the seventh victim, Brittney Gary) were later charged with running, in which guns, jewelry, and rare coins had been pilfered from residences across Jennings. Yet when Guillory turned over evidence, nearly $4,000 was missing. So the theft case collapsed under the weight of serious law enforcement misconduct."

 

"Guillory denies that she stole or disposed of evidence in the case. She told me that she realized the money was missing when she was cataloguing the evidence from the raid and immediately contacted her superiors. (Warren Gary, the former chief investigator who had purchased the truck allegedly used to dispose of Lopez's body, helped catalogue the evidence, which is another troubling coincidence.) She was sent home from work and, even though she offered to take a polygraph test regarding the missing money, she was promptly fired by Sheriff Edwards. "I never even gave my own side of the story," she told Brown.

 

Yet again, the charges against Richard were dropped. It was a break that he relishes to this day. "I'm not mad at that," Richard told Brown when he asked him about the missing evidence in his case. "In fact I thank her for doing that. If she had handled her business right, my momma would still be in jail."

 

Most of the murdered women seemed to know 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.

 

During a drug bust brought on by a tip from a snitch, Leonard Crochet, a pill dealer, was shot and killed by Probation and Parole agent John Briggs Becton. 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 later statement 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 near 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. However, they came back with a decision of "no true bill"—no probable cause or evidence to show that Briggs Becton had committed a crime.

 

Could this be the reason the Jennings 8 we're killed? It is one theory suggested by some in the parish. "The victims were being killed because they were present when Leonard Crochet was killed by the police," one witness told task force investigators. "The girls were being killed because they had seen something they were not supposed to see." Even Richard connected the Crochet killing to the murdered women: "Most of them girls was at a raid…when that Crochet boy got killed. Most of the girls that are dead today were there that night."

 

Brown obtained a witness list from the Louisiana State Police on the incident. He says, "it reads like a who's who of players in the Jeff Davis 8 case, including the third victim Kristen Gary Lopez, Alvin "Bootsy" Lewis (the boyfriend of the fourth victim, Whitnei Duboisi, and the brother-in-law of the first victim, Loretta Lewis), and Harvey "Bird Dog" Burleigh, who later told Dubois' older brother Mike that "I'm close to finding out who killed your sister" and was then found stabbed to death in his Jennings apartment. His murder, too, remains unsolved."

 

The slaying of witnesses appears to be a pattern in Jefferson Davis Parish. Soon after Crystal Shay Benoit Zeno (the sixth victim) was found in a wooded area in South Jennings in September 2008, a tip was called into the parish district attorney's office from a 43-year-old Lafayette man named Russell Carrier. Carrier said that he had seen three African-American men exiting the woods. Richard associate Eugene "Dog" Ivory, Ervin "Tyson" Mouton (who is named as another possible suspect in the Lopez homicide in the task force documents), and Ricardo "Tiger" Williams.

On October 10, 2010, Carrier was struck and killed by a Burlington Northern Santa Fe Train in Jennings early in the morning. Police Chief Todd D'Albor said that "for whatever reason," Carrier laid on the tracks and was run over.

 

God damn, this shit is nuts! 

 

Brown concludes his article with information about one of the leading players in the case, Frankie Richard, whom we've talked about a lot. 

 

Brown writes of Frankie, "Though Richard was well aware that I was deeply investigating the Jeff Davis 8, he never turned me down for an interview and didn't flinch when I confronted him with my reporting—he has a knack for explaining away bad facts and constructing theories on alternative suspects." Deceased deputy Danny Barry is also a favorite. "All these girls or most of these girls was found within a three-mile radius of Danny Barry's house," Richard told Brown. "Since he been dead, nobody died. All these motherfuckers on the sheriff's department are some crooked sons of bitches."

 

Brown describes one interview with Frankie as follows "On an unusually warm and muggy late spring night in 2012, Richard sat shirtless, exposing his meaty upper body, on a pair of rockers on the front porch of his family home in Jennings. He has expressionless brown eyes, a thick head of black hair streaked with gray, and a salt-and-pepper goatee. He was trying very hard to project the image of a wrongly accused, down-on-his-luck, sobered-up former hustler. "I was a dope addict, a coke head, meth head, alcoholic, no-good sonofabitch," Richard told me. "But I'm determined to get my head on right. I'm one year clean from meth and 100 days clean from alcohol and cocaine after 42 years. That's a long fuckin' time for a motherfucker like me." 

 

Brown continues, "Standing nearby, on the ground below, was an associate of Richard's, a towering African-American man in his 30s wearing baggy jeans and a white T-shirt. At one point, he interrupted the conversation to warn me that the story I'm working on will likely put me in the crosshairs of local law enforcement. "You a bold-ass little man, dog," he said. "Don't get caught in Jeff Davis Parish at night."

 

Brown continues about Frankie Richard:

 

"That Richard continues to sit atop what police files and my own reporting suggest is an empire of drugs and prostitution is no spectacular stroke of luck. He is a prized informant who, according to task force documents, has provided a steady stream of intel to investigators. (Richard was debriefed in 2008, which Brown says challenges another official narrative: that no one is talking to the multi-agency investigative team, and that all investigators have is a series of unhelpful dead ends.) He goes on to say, "Criminal activity sanctioned by high-level law enforcement is hardly uncommon; a 2011 FBI report concluded the agency gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times that year.

Richard would push back against the snitch label vigorously. But, in May 2012, Kirk Menard, the private investigator, sent a pair of female witnesses who said they had tips in the killings related to Richard to the task force offices to be interrogated. "Do not worry about Frankie," one high-ranking task force investigator told the stunned women, "because he works for me." According to the witness account, the investigator added that Richard has a task force–issued cellphone. Menard forwarded me an e-mail he sent to the task force outlining his concerns about the interview. Nearly two years later, he has yet to receive a response."

 

Brown says that the possibility that Richard is just circumstantially connected to all of the eight murdered women has also been undermined again and again. Soon after charges against Richard in the 2007 Lopez slaying were dismissed, he and associate Eugene "Dog" Ivory—who is, according to task force witnesses, a suspect in the murder of Crystal Benoit—beat a rape case in which, according to case files, Richard allegedly told the victim, "If you tell anyone, bitch, you will end up like the others."

 

Brown also recounts another story relayed to him: 

 

"One night, not long before Richard and I met, Beverly Crochet, the sister of slain drug dealer Leonard Crochet, was leaving Tina's Bar, a South Jennings haunt frequented by the Jeff Davis 8. Tracee Chaisson, the former prostitute who was once charged with being an accessory after the fact of second-degree murder in the slaying of Kristen Lopez, approached her in the parking lot.

"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."

 

Brown concludes his article by saying The Jeff Davis 8 case is begging for a takeover by the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. They had intervened in a now-notorious New Orleans Police Department case from 2005, where cops shot and killed innocent bystanders on the Danziger Bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Brown claims his investigation raises several genuine questions about the prevailing serial-killer theory of these murders. It also indicates that local law enforcement is a hindrance, not a help, to a resolution being reached. Whatever the truth, these eight women, and their surviving families, deserve a fresh inquiry by an outside investigative body.

 

Holy shit! What seemed like a pretty clear-cut case on the outside; Serial killer preying on sex workers turned into THAT fucking crazy story. Wow. What do you all think? Fucking nuts, huh! The case remains unsolved, and if the things Brown uncovered are accurate, we will most likely never get to the bottom of this! 

 

Movies: 

 

Top ten drug horror movies, keeping with the drug theme 

 

http://www.theblood-shed.com/top-10-drug-horror-movies/