Bayou Justice: Southeast Louisiana Cold Case Files compiles year one of the award-wining newspaper columns with updates to each true-crime installment.Bayou Justice is a twice-weekly true-crime newspaper column featuring exciting or notable crime-related stories often focusing on cold case files in South Louisiana; stories based on interviews with key players, among them: police investigators, lawyers, victims, and their families.
Call them anything but closed cases. Who killed attorneys Margaret Coon and Donna Bahm? Why would someone butcher a 26-year-old bank teller? Did the mafia assassinate Senator Huey Long? What happened to the Grinch who stole shotguns? Louisiana's foremost expert on true-crime, and a thirty-year veteran investigative journalist, HL Arledge revisits those tantalizing questions, meeting the state's most colorful characters along the way. From voodoo practitioners, mobsters, and train robbers to cult leaders, psychopaths, and crooked politicians, Bayou Justice, Arledge's twice-weekly newspaper column has covered them all. The book Bayou Justice: Southeast Louisiana Cold Case Files revisits and updates the most infamous of those newspaper reports, offering convincing and controversial conclusions, and deconstructing evidence and widely held beliefs, revisiting each case with fascinating, surprising, and often haunting results.
More Bayou Justice: South Louisiana Cold Case Files More cold case murder mysteries and true crime histories with mafia hits, prostitution, klan kidnappings, cult rituals, jealous pimps, and missing girls gone wild in the land of gators, gumbo, strippers, hurricanes, mardi gras, and voodoo. More Bayou Justice from investigative journalist and broadcaster HL Arledge Louisiana's foremost expert on true-crime, and a thirty-year veteran investigative journalist, HL Arledge revisits those tantalizing questions, meeting the state's most colorful characters along the way. This book revisits and updates the most infamous of those Louisiana true crime newspaper reports, offering convincing and controversial conclusions, and deconstructing evidence and widely held beliefs, revisiting each case with fascinating, surprising, and often haunting results.
More Bayou Justice: South Louisiana Cold Case Files More cold case murder mysteries and true crime histories with mafia hits, prostitution, klan kidnappings, cult rituals, jealous pimps, and missing girls gone wild in the land of gators, gumbo, strippers, hurricanes, mardi gras, and voodoo. More Bayou Justice from investigative journalist and broadcaster HL Arledge Louisiana's foremost expert on true-crime, and a thirty-year veteran investigative journalist, HL Arledge revisits those tantalizing questions, meeting the state's most colorful characters along the way. This book revisits and updates the most infamous of those Louisiana true crime newspaper reports, offering convincing and controversial conclusions, and deconstructing evidence and widely held beliefs, revisiting each case with fascinating, surprising, and often haunting results.
Bayou Justice Book 3: More Louisiana True Crime Stories More cold case murder mysteries and true crime histories with mafia hits, prostitution, klan kidnappings, cult rituals, jealous pimps, and missing girls gone wild in the land of gators, gumbo, strippers, hurricanes, mardi gras, and voodoo. More Bayou Justice from investigative journalist and broadcaster HL Arledge Louisiana's foremost expert on true-crime, and a thirty-year veteran investigative journalist, HL Arledge revisits those tantalizing questions, meeting the state's most colorful characters along the way. This book revisits and updates the most infamous of those Louisiana true crime newspaper reports, offering convincing and controversial conclusions, and deconstructing evidence and widely held beliefs, revisiting each case with fascinating, surprising, and often haunting results.
This collection chronicles the most mysterious, bizarre and often overlooked homicides in Louisiana history. Drawing on contemporary records and, where available, the recollections of those who provide a coherent version of the facts, these mesmerizing tales detail some of the more gruesome episodes: the rise of the first Mafia godfather in the United States; the murder of two New Orleans police chiefs; the brutal murder of a famous New Orleans madam; the story of a respectable young woman who "accidentally" poisoned her younger sister and is a suspect in other family deaths; the ritual killing of blacks in southwestern Louisiana and eastern Texas; the mysterious death of a young housewife which still generates debate; and the demise of a local celebrity who believed in his own invincibility.
A New York Times Bestseller & the Basis for the Hit Showtime Docuseries Murder in the Bayou is a New York Times bestselling chronicle of a high-stakes investigation into the murders of eight women in a troubled Southern parish that is “part murder case, part corruption exposé, and part Louisiana noir” (New York magazine). Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of eight women were discovered in Jennings, Louisiana, a bayou town of 10,000 in the Jefferson Davis parish. The women came to be known as the Jeff Davis 8, and local law enforcement officials were quick to pursue a serial killer theory, stirring a wave of panic across Jennings’ class-divided neighborhoods. The Jeff Davis 8 had been among society’s most vulnerable—impoverished, abused, and mired with mental illness. They engaged in sex work as a means of survival. And their underworld activity frequently occurred at a decrepit motel called the Boudreaux Inn. As the cases went unsolved, the community began to look inward. Rumors of police corruption and evidence tampering, of collusion between street and shield, cast the serial killer theory into doubt. But what was really going on in the humid rooms of the Boudreaux Inn? Why were crimes going unsolved and police officers being indicted? What had the eight women known? And could anything be done do stop the bloodshed? Mixing muckraking research and immersive journalism over the course of a five-year investigation, Ethan Brown reviewed thousands of pages of previously unseen homicide files to posit what happened during each woman’s final hours delivering a true crime tale that is “mesmerizing” (Rolling Stone) and “explosive” (Huffington Post). “Brown is a man on a mission...he gives the victims more respectful attention than they probably got in real life” (The New York Times). “A must-read for true-crime fans” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), with a new afterword, Murder in the Bayou is the story of an American town buckling under the dark forces of poverty, race, and class division—and a lightning rod for justice for the daughters it lost.
Small town Envie, Louisiana, is shaken when the unthinkable happens and murder victims begin to multiply in the wake of a killer who leaves calling cards to name the next target. Desperate for a break in the case, the local police chief recruits an old friend, Special Detective Legend Cruz, to lead the investigation. As Legend makes his way back to his hometown, another victim is discovered-the chief's daughter-and Legend vows to catch the murderer before the tight-knit community loses another member. But it doesn't take long for the past to catch up to him, and as he works to hunt down a dangerous criminal, Legend must contend with bittersweet memories of a life and love he left behind. Envie Police Detective Sienna Rose Jordan arrives at the latest crime scene astonished to find Legend Cruz, the one that got away, heading the investigation. Former coworkers and sweethearts, Sienna Rose and Legend had planned a future together in Envie. But when the opportunity arose to join a special task force in New Orleans, Sienna Rose stayed behind to care for her family after a devastating loss, and Legend chose to leave, taking their shared dreams with him. Tasked with working alongside each other, Legend and Sienna Rose quickly realize their old feelings haven't faded. And when a vulnerable family member is abducted to lure Sienna Rose into the line of fire, she and Legend must join forces to stop a terrible killer before another life is claimed.
Historian Alan G. Gauthreaux chronicles 12 homicide cases from late 1800s and early 1900s Louisiana--where "unwritten law" justified jilted women who killed their paramours, and police took measures to protect defendants from lynch mobs. Stories include the 1907 kidnapping of seven-year-old Walter Lamana by the New Orleans "Black Hand," the 1912 acquittal of Zea McRee (a woman of "good reputation") in Opelousas, and the 1934 trial and execution of Shreveport's infamous "Butterfly Man."
The true story of Louisiana serial killer Ronald Dominique's ten-year murder spree, the men he slayed, and the detectives who hunted him down. In 1997, the bodies of young African American men began turning up in the cane fields of the quiet suburbs of New Orleans. The victims--many of them transient street hustlers--had been brutally raped and strangled, but police had no leads on the killer's identity. The murders continued, leaving southeast Louisiana's gay community rattled and authorities desperate for a break in the case. Then, Detectives Dennis Thornton and Dawn Bergeron came together as task force partners, indefatigable in their decade-long effort to track down the killer. In 2006, DNA evidence finally linked the murders to a suspect: the unassuming Ronald Joseph Dominique, who had lived under the radar for years, working as a pizza deliveryman and meter reader. But who was Ronald Dominique and what led him to commit such heinous crimes? With direct access to the investigation, Dominique's confession, and all of the killer's body dump sites in throughout the state, author Fred Rosen enters the warped mind of a murderer and captures a troubled, disturbing, and broken life. As with the many other serial killers he has covered, including Jeffrey Dahmer (the Milwaukee Cannibal) and Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer), Rosen provides a horrifying and fascinating account of the lengths to which a bloodthirsty monster will go to lure and brutalize his victims.
