March 6, 2020 • 57 mins
Located in Jefferson Davis Parish, the town of Jennings, Louisiana wasn't a particularly well-known place -- in fact, many people in the US would probably have lived their entire lives without ever hearing of the town until a few years ago. You see, Jennings had a secret, a dark criminal underbelly that seethed just below the surface. Over the course of several years, multiple women were murdered under mysterious circumstances, inspiring journalists and federal investigators alike to dive into the increasingly strange connections between each homicide. And today the question remains: What happened to the Jennings 8?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome back to
(00:25):
the show. My name is Nomal. Our good friend writer
die colleague Matt Frederick is on adventures but will be
returning soon. They call me Ben. We are joined as
always with our super producer. Today it is Seth Nicholas Johnson,
So give him an audible hello when you get the
chance in the meantime, and most importantly, you are you.
(00:46):
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Uh No, I figured we'd start
off today's episode with an email from one of our listeners.
This comes to us from Claude G. Claude says, hey, guys,
I just listened to our latest episode about the possible
inspiration for True Detective. We did that one a while back.
(01:10):
Uh and this and Claude says, I enjoyed the episode,
but was wondering if you had heard of another theory
about the inspiration for the show. I was raised in Jennings, Louisiana.
I live a few minutes away now but still go
there multiple times a week. Jennings claimed to fame, unfortunately
as a multiple murder case titled by the media the
(01:31):
Jennings Eight. Showtime has recently done a five part series
on it and mentioned True Detective in one of the episodes.
My family and I are personally connected to the story.
Is one of the victims was a cousin of ours. Anyway,
I was curious to see if you guys have heard
of the connection to the TV series and our case.
Thanks for your time, Claude this this is fascinating. Now,
(01:52):
we did know a little bit about this, but we
wanted to explore the case today. It's something that many
people have heard of but or maybe not intimately familiar with. UH,
And for this sort of episode, we do need to
have a disclaimer at the top of the show. It's
true on today's episode dives into some pretty disturbing stuff
(02:13):
stories of true crime, murder, drugs, and corruption and UH.
The episode contains at times quite graphic descriptions of violence
and assault, and it might not be suitable for all listeners.
So to start, what are the Jennings Eight. In order
to answer this question, please travel with us to Jefferson
(02:34):
Davis Parish, Louisiana. Here are the facts Jefferson Davis Parish.
It's located in southwest Louisiana and it's a small place.
You know, a parish is Louisiana's version of a county.
It has a little more than thirty thousand residents. The
parish seat is a town called Jennings. It's the largest
(02:56):
town in the area, but the population is still us
a little over ten thousand according to the census. It's
home to some notable individuals. I found one mysterious story
here a guy named Father Eugene John Herbert. It was
a Jesuit missionary and he disappeared in Sri Lanka during
the country's Civil war. He has nothing to do with
(03:19):
this show today, as far as we know. Before the
events disclosed in today's episode. Jefferson Davis, which was named
after the former President of the Confederacy. It was one
of those places you probably wouldn't be too familiar with
unless you lived in the area. It made the news
a couple of times for things like corrupt ticketing by
(03:43):
local law enforcement. You know, we've all heard that thing
where if you're a stranger to town you're driving by
and you've got plates from outside of the area, big
old red flag target, and that's happened. You've you've driven
through some of those areas in your travels, Baby to
Athens or Agusta. Sure, I mean, you know, I mean
I would I would imagine there'd be an argument to
(04:04):
to make that it's some form of profiling, but it's just,
you know, it's the rules kind of it's it's like
something you should expect probably, and it's kind of difficult
to prove too. Like many rural areas, you wouldn't see
Jennings often in the national news. In fact, you could
live your entire life here in the United States never
(04:24):
know this place existed. Jefferson Davis isn't particularly large. In
fact um it's not particularly wealthy either, and like so
many other places in the United States these days, it
had a pretty CD underbelly. Um in the absence of prosperity, um,
(04:45):
economic opportunity jobs. You it is a vacuum that is
typically filled with drugs and crime and other types of
black market trading, which grew into kind of an open
secret and Jefferson Davis everyone knew what went down on
South Main street um, but it wasn't necessarily something that
(05:06):
was going to get shut down by the cops, you know,
on the regular right. Absolutely, yeah, it was an open secret.
Especially in South Jennings. Life in this small parish seems
set to continue as it always had, and even to
continue along a bit of a slow economic decline until
(05:28):
that is, residents began finding the bodies. We're going to
explore the initial murders, or the discoveries of the bodies
even before they were termed murders. On May two thousand
and five, there's a fisherman retired men named Jerry Jackson
who discovers the first body. It's floating in a canal
(05:50):
off Highway eleven on the outskirts of Jennings. His body
is identified as one Loretta Lynn uh Kind song Chasa
On Louis. Louis had been seen alive three days earlier.
Because of the amount that her body had decomposed, um
authorities weren't able to conclusively determine her cause of death,
(06:14):
but they suspected asphyxiation, and as you'll recall from our
previous episode on the Smiley Face Murder Theory, drowning as
homicide can can be a pretty tough nut to crack.
It's very difficult to prove, just like it's hard to
prove that it cop pulls you over because you had
out of state place. Yet the court of public opinion
was already in full swing, and there's some pretty nasty
(06:37):
victim blaming that happens, especially in the media. Because, according
to the residents in the no Louis was living what
was often euphemistically described as a quote high risk lifestyle.
She was addicted to crack cocaine. She was another casualty
of the drug trade running along that quarter of I ten,
(07:00):
and she had turned to the sex trade to feed
her addiction. And at first this was seen as a tragedy,
and it is, but less than a few months later,
residents and law enforcement started to recognize that this discovery
wasn't just a singular tragedy. It was something else, the
beginning of a pattern. That's right. A group of friends
(07:23):
hunting bull frogs, which is the thing that you do
in Jefferson Davis for fun. Uh, they found the corpse
of a thirty year old Messtine Patterson m A. Stein Patterson.
A few weeks later, flitting in a different canal um
this particular victim's cause of death was a bit easier
to figure out. Her throat had been cut, her body brutalized.
(07:47):
Two men u a Byron Chad Jones and Lawrence Nixon
Um are held for a brief amount of time on
charges of second degree murder. But these charges were of
course dropped and they were released. And so we have two.
We have two discoveries in two thousand and five years pass.
(08:09):
On March eighteen, two thousand seven, another body is discovered,
that of twenty one year old Kristen Gary Lopez. She
is discovered in a canal, and like the Lewis case,
medical examiners cannot conclusively nail down a cause of death,
and like in the Patterson case, two people are briefly detained.
(08:31):
This time it's a guy named Frankie Richard who has
described alternately as a retired oil rig worker, UH strip
club owner and a PEMP along with his niece Hannah Connor.
These two are later released, just like in the Paterson
case due to lack of evidence. Yeah it's right. And
(08:52):
over the next year and a half, four more bodies
turned up in and around Jennings, all UH fitting the
same profile. The same unfortunate kind of forgotten demographic, poor young,
with a history of drug addiction. Rap sheets a mile long,
um typically um charges involving the sex trade or other
(09:17):
criminal activities. We have Whitney du Bois, it was twenty six,
Laconia Muggie Brown twenty three, who like Patterson, had her
throat slit, as well Crystal Sha Benoir Zeno Brittany Gary seventeen,
(09:37):
who was the cousin of Kristen Gary Lopez. Most of
these bodies showed almost no signs of trauma, and the
medical examiner's ruled asphyxiation is the cause of death. It's
interesting other than the like case with the slit throat,
so the law has to respond again. Jefferson Davis Parrish
has a small population. This death rate, this murder rate,
(10:01):
is insane. So in December of two thousand and eight,
the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff's Department, under the leadership of
one Sheriff Rickey Edwards, announces that they're forming a task
force to investigate what they're now openly calling murders. His
task force is referred to as Multi Agency Investigative Team
(10:21):
or m a i T. They include local officials, state officials,
and some FEDS. Their results leave much to be desired.
In August of two thousand and nine, and eighth victim
is found, Nicole Guillory, twenty six years old. The body
has discovered off I ten in the adjacent Acadia Parish
(10:43):
later that fall, Sheriff Edwards notes that these deaths may
be the work of what they describe as a common offender,
a single person committing the homicides. In other words, although
they would hate to use the phrase, I'm sure a
serial killer, so that's where we're at at that point.
Between two thousand and five and two thousand and nine,
(11:04):
eight women have disappeared, only to be found dead Shortly thereafter.
The task force more than doubles their reward for information
from thirty five thousand dollars to eighty five thousand dollars,
and the victims become collectively known in the zeitgeist as
the Jeff Davis eight or later the Jennings eight. But
this is only the beginning of the story. In January
(11:27):
of the New York Times reported on the deaths, and
this article caught the attention of a New Orleans based
journalist named Ethan Brown. In eleven, Brown went to Jennings
to do his own digging, his own interviews, his own investigations.
Brown becomes obsessed with the story and convinced that there's
(11:52):
more to it than what has already been reported, and
will explore Brown's investigation after a word from our sponsors.
Here's where it gets crazy. So as this journalist Ethan
(12:12):
Brown pours over public records, as he interviews numerous people
affiliated with the victims, As he interviews members of the
task force and even suspects in the crimes, he begins
to think this was not, in fact the work of
a serial killer, but of someone else. And it starts
when he It starts when he begins connecting dots between
(12:35):
the victims. Because remember, this is a small town, and
there's a reason we have stereotypes about small towns. One
of the most common stereotypes about small town is that
there are no real secrets, that everyone knows everyone somehow,
and a lot of our fellow listeners tuning in today
probably have lived in a small town and can attest
(12:56):
to that you know. And then also there's the argument
that every town you live and becomes smaller the longer
you live there. So he Brown starts to note that
all these victims are connected. No, you mentioned that they
had that demographic in common, and they had similar issues
with addiction and money. But he also finds that in
(13:18):
addition to that first point, secondly, they had all served
to some degree or another as police informants. What are
they called see eyes, Yeah, confidential informants. That's right. And
that's the thing. I mean a lot of times folks
that are doing this kind of informing they may know
each other, and they're aware of each other and maybe
have each other's backs in that respect, because it is
(13:38):
such a dangerous situation to be in two we're actually related,
and another two lived together for a time in eight Uh. Fourth,
we've got multiple relatives who told Brown the victims had
appeared unusually anxious or frightened before disappearing. Yeah, And that
(14:01):
fourth point, to be fair, is a little maybe a
little more subjective, because these people were living hard, difficult lives,
you know, when there was there were probably plenty of
normal reasons to be anxious or frightened. But still it
fits the pattern. Let's pause here now, I know what
you're saying. Folks. Didn't you all just have a commercial break?
(14:23):
Well we do, but we also have an important announcement.
You see, our our good pal and colleague, Matt Frederick
has actually returned from his adventure. Matt, I'm materialized. I'm here.
I didn't know we could all do you that thought
that was just a ben power. Well, I heard you
guys talking about Ethan Brown, and I was like, oh man,
I gotta get in there. That's I mean, it is
(14:44):
crazy that you showed up, but we're glad you're here.
It's also a very niche fascination that to have triggered
your spidy sense. I mean, I have been reading about
this case, um ever since. I believe it was a
listener male claud Yeah, send us down this rabbit hole
and it uh yeah, it's been disturbing me ever since.
So thanks so much for sending it to us. And
(15:07):
also no, thank you, but thank you. Yes we uh
we opened the show with Claude's email, and now we're
I don't think we need to catch you up on
any of this, Matt, because you know it pretty well.
Uh So, now we're at this point where Brown is
making connections, right, He's already he's connected some stuff about
(15:27):
He's co operated some statements from relatives. He's noticed that
there is a web of connection between the victims. He
also finds another key connection the Boudreau in just off
of Interstate ten. It connects Houston to New Orleans. Could
you tell us a little bit about that one. Yeah,
so this is like one of the hubs or possibly
(15:48):
the hub of a whole drug and sex like sex
traded drugs of what do you call it? Not empires,
but just where where drugs are distributed pretty heavily. Uh.
Police are always there busting people for various things. Generally
is for the sex rader for drugs, surprise, surprise. And
several of the victims that have been identified in this
(16:10):
case or you know that are that are out there
that he is kind of bringing together here. Um, they've
received complaints based on their behavior at this location. When
you say, when we say complaints based on their behavior, um,
we're talking, you know, generally about sex work. Well, yeah,
I'm also uh loud hotel parties. Yes, that's occurring here.
(16:33):
Depending on where you've spent time in the US or broade,
you've probably seen motels like this before, typically right off
the inner state. Um, a little beaten down right and Uh.
They you know, they don't have the best reputation, and
they've earned that not the best reputation. Well here and
(16:55):
here's the deal to um, it's a lot of times
the community of its own uh motel like that. So
a lot of the the victims here are sharing this
this um web of of people that they all are
acquaintances with. And again it's like you know, it's it's
also a small town, right, it's a this whole this
(17:17):
whole place we're talking about is small town. So all
those rules apply, and in this case, within the drug
trade itself, within the six trade. I mean, it's true
a lot of those very let's call them affordable hotels,
I guess for lack of a better term, people stay
there for long periods of time. They rent rooms weekly,
and often there is a like you said, Matt, kind
(17:37):
of a hub where it's people kind of go in
and out, like you know, John's will show up to
this particular motel to particular room to get um, you know,
sex work services, and same with with drugs, and like
you said, it becomes almost this community where everyone knows
each other, everyone is aware of each other's kind of
comings and goings, right, exactly. These are good points because
(17:58):
the victims also share a head of mutual acquaintances. The
thing about these small town rules, the stereotype I mentioned
earlier about everyone knowing everyone, is that this kind of
rule applies to the criminal side of a small town
as well, and it applies in the drug trade. That's
what leads Ethan Brown to interview a friend of the victims,
(18:22):
self professed uh the man we mentioned earlier, a strip
club owner named Frankie Richards, and in his interview with
Brown and with others, Richard paints Jennings in a grizzly light.
The drugs, the sex work, and the crooked cops, he argues,
are operating more or less openly and Jennings and have
(18:45):
been for some time before the killings begin. So Brown
also finds that the rot in Jennings Louisiana does not
stop at the dirty banks of the canals. In may
see piece he wrote on medium dot com he we
have a quote that that that helps walk us through
(19:08):
his opinion on the law enforcement. Since the early nineteen nineties,
there have been nearly twenty unsolved homicides, including the slain
eight women in Jefferson Davis parish, a statistic and a
competent sheriff's department that would be regarded as both a
ridiculously low clearance rate and an astonishingly high murder rate
(19:31):
for a small area. Yeah, but Brown does not attribute
these disturbing statistics to incompetence alone. As a matter of fact,
he explicitly calls out law enforcement in this article. Yes,
he says, quote, one fact is clear. Local law enforcement
is far too steeped in misconduct and corruption. And this
(19:51):
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 in their
families deserve after nearly a decade in which no one
has been brought to justice. And we'll love love more
on law enforcement plenty more actually in in a moment.
(20:12):
But let's let's follow Brown a bit further. Let's let's
learn more about these suspects. So Brown finds that the
suspects have something similar going on with their web of relationships.
While there are different suspects for different cases or different
you know, specific murders, the suspects seem increasingly inter related,
(20:36):
even Frankie Richard was briefly charged in two thousand and
seven for the murder of Lopez, but the charges were
dropped when the witness statements were conflicting and then when
a key piece of physical evidence was mishandled and definitely fishing. Yeah,
and that you have you have some insight on Frankie Richards, correct. Well,
(21:00):
it comes from a a series titled Murder in the Bayou,
and there are just quotes there from Frankie Richard that
just I wonder how much of it makes me feel
as though he's like doing something morally wrong. And I
just feel like there's some some semblance of of um
(21:26):
distrust in him just in general because of that, or
it's just because of the way he words things. And
and I don't know how much of that can actually
be attributed back to you know, the Jennings eight murders, right,
And I don't think any of it can, because it's
just a feeling that I'm getting in reading these things.
And I'm gonna read this quote, Um, You'll understand what
(21:46):
I'm saying, but it's going to be a little bit. Uh,
I'm gonna use different words for what he's saying. My
most memorable way of making a living was selling p
We sold p any and every effing way we could.
I did not pimp them girls. I introduced them to
older men that wanted to spend some money on a
(22:07):
young gal. I'm making sure they are getting their money,
making sure they're not getting hurt. Broker in sex is pimping, right,
that's not the quote, that's just a fact. Yeah, I know. Well,
and also just the way again, like maybe it's reading it,
maybe he's just I'm imagining him saying that, and just that, um,
(22:29):
the way he's so nonchalantly is talking about it and
then reflects back on it as in like, oh man,
this was a great time in my life. Well, he's
also he's he's a free man, but he's he's lived
a hard life. If you hear any audio with him. Yeah,
and you know, and I'm not discounting that he's led
a hard life. It's just I'm just talking specifically about
(22:50):
personal feeling from and then here's one more quote. Just
when we're talking about Frankie Richards, um he a family
member of his and niece and daughter named Hannah talked
about her uncle in this way. And this is a
quote again from that same series, Uncle Frankie was like
the guy you didn't mess with, you know, he took
(23:11):
care of business, which again like it's more of like
a character witness kind of thing. It has nothing to
do with whether or not he actually did any of
these crimes. It's just perhaps is one of the major
reasons why he was a suspect, along with all the
other evidence that was involved. But you can just maybe
there's just this air about him that would make him
(23:31):
look good for it. Yeah, and he was. He did
have knowledge, carnal and otherwise of people who would later
go on to be murdered in in this course of events.
There were other people charged in these cases, as we said,
the men charged in the Patterson case Byron Chad Jones
and Lawrence Nixon. Uh, he got off because of what
(23:56):
it may have been police incompetence, you could call it that.
But it's sort of a glass half empty, glass half
full situation because our journalists Brown learned that the sheriff's
office did not test the alleged crime scene until fifteen
months after Patterson's murder, and they were unable to demonstrate
(24:18):
the presence of blood. Surprise surprise, if you wait more
than a year, that kind of organic evidence can get
increasingly more difficult to detect. He also found evidence that
other street level criminals in Jennings, especially people who were
associated with Frankie Richard, were suspected in some of the
(24:39):
other murders, but nothing came of it. And this task
force was conducting exhaustive interviews, nothing came of it. The
law found no credible suspects. Yeah. And here's the thing, though,
corruption or incompetence, because what Brown starts calling the jeff
Davis a didn't just give info the drug trade to
(25:01):
the police when they were cis. They apparently gave authorities
information about other women in the trade and the community
who would later turn up dead and be part of
the Jefferson Davis eight murders. Uh. Laconia Brown, the fifth victim,
was interrogated about the two thousand five killing of Ernestine Patterson.
(25:23):
Was you know as you will call the second victim,
Brown said that he had. Brown is not Ethan Brown,
our journalist, is not related to Laconia Muggy Brown. But
he found a task force report where one of the
witnesses claims that Brown spotted the body of Loretta Lewis
the first victim floating in that canal before the fisherman
(25:47):
found her body there in in May two thousand five.
And then in two thousand six, detectives who were looking
into that first murder also interrogated Kristen Gary Lopez, who
later becomes the third victim, and and Brown correctly false
the task force for not immediately noticing this troubling cavalcade
(26:10):
of red flags. Here's what literally was happening. Women were
being questioned in murder cases and then shortly thereafter they
were turning up dead. It's really tough because you never
want to believe that law enforcement, you know, could possibly
even just be turning an eye of a blind eye, right,
(26:31):
You never want to believe that that could be happening.
And we're certainly not saying that is what's happening. But um,
just from the reporting of Ethan Brown, it definitely is
making me personally question a lot of this stuff. And
then you move on to the last victim, Nicole Guillory. Um,
she's a you know, another person who had a rap
(26:51):
sheet that was pretty extensive with charges that were repeatedly dropped,
which is something that should pique your interest in what's
called as a nol pros sequi. It's a ruling from
the District Attorney's office the d A, and it just
means uh, to be unwilling to pursue. Yeah. So we're
we're prosecutors and we're we're not saying that there's no
(27:14):
sand to the charges. But for one reason or another,
usually internal, we have decided not to prosecute. Yeah. And
it could be we don't want to put resources into
this for one reason or another. It could be that
maybe there's something happening behind the scenes with this person
that's being charged as let's say, a see I or something. Right.
(27:35):
This is often used as a way to uh, It's
often used his way to trade favors. You tell us
about this other unrelated case off the books, and then
will make this, you know, this possession charge something small
time go away. Gilory's mother, Barbara, noted that her daughter
(27:57):
was increasingly paranoid in the days leading up to her disappearance,
and one Task Force witness told Ethan Brown that Guillory
Nicole Guillory, had said she knew who killed the other girls,
the other seven women. To this day, Barbara Guillory believes
her daughter was murdered not by a serial killer, but
(28:18):
by someone inside law enforcement because her daughter knew too
much about the ongoing corruption. We even have a quote
from Barbara here, which is which is pretty You can
tell that she has certitude about us. This is not
something she suspects. She used to tell us all the time.
It was the police killing the girls. Um, this was
(28:40):
Barbara said. And we would reply, and Nicole a name something,
writes a letter and leaves it somewhere, let us know
we can help you. Uh No, Mama, 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,
(29:02):
and that's why they killed her. Brown found other similar
reports and still at this point, this is all you know.
Witness testimony, and witness testimony can can be unreliable, right,
It can trend toward anecdote to memory as a tricky
treacherous thing. But when you find multiple reports corroborating similar accounts,
(29:27):
it becomes something you cannot ignore. Gayle Brown, for instance,
a sister of Muggy Brown, said shortly before her sister
was killed, she told her family she was investigating a
murder with a cop and this cop was I believe,
supposed to give her five dollars for information. But Gail
also believes law enforcement murdered her sister. Is what's going
(29:51):
on here? Why is a task force composed of local
and state level and federal authorities, uh, pushing a narrative
about a serial or when multiple relatives and surviving witnesses
are saying the same people are some of the same
people investigating these murders are the same people who committed them?
Will explore this after a word from our sponsor and
(30:22):
we're back sort of, yes, we I mean, we've been
talking about how they are, all these witnesses, and within
this room one of ours has left. We have gained
a witness that's me, and we've lost a witness, which
is Noel Brown. Yeah, I'm starting to wonder what you
guys are getting up to. Well, you know, it's interesting
when uh, when you were not here recently and the
(30:44):
two of us were in the room and we were
we were talking with everyone who's also gathered here right
now just about you know, your mysterious ways. Uh, you know,
I don't want to surprise you, Ben, but I think
we are starting to develop some mysterious ways of our own.
Perhaps it's a sketchiness by osmosis, right, yes, proximity. And
(31:05):
you know I noticed this didn't happen until Seth you started, uh,
you started producing this show. He's a guy on the
inside and he's he's got this weird kind of malevolent
smirk on while he's he's knitting. What this is true? Yeah, Seth,
Seth is knitting. Do you think that's knitting? Dude? I
(31:27):
don't know, he is. He is stringing together a thought
tulpas right now, he's making a weapon. I like it.
I don't know, No, I like it. I like it. Uh,
you know it reminds me of the Three Fates story. Right, well,
we'll spin a golden thread in there for us man,
(31:49):
you know, the fate of heroes something. Uh, so we'll
pick up. We do not know whether our good compatriot
Knol is related to our journalist here Ethan Brown, but
hopefully no will be returning soon. And here we arrive
at the point Brown has to ask himself, is this
a matter of incompetence or is it a matter of insidiousness?
(32:11):
You know? Is it just a bunch of people who
are terrible at their jobs, or is it something more malevolent? Well,
you know what we're calling in the beginning there it
definitely or you at least have to give a bit
of the benefit of the doubt and say, okay, this
is if something is happening, is probably incompetence. And now
as he's gone further and further and further into this,
(32:32):
he's thinking it's more corruption, right, and along the way
he is starting to get warning signs, little threats, cryptic hints.
We should, also, of course, to be completely fair, say
that it's it's easy for someone on the outside without
knowledge of law enforcement investigative processes, to say something is
(32:56):
incompetent because law enforcement has the labor under a distinct
set of rules. And there's one primary disadvantage that law
enforcement always has, which is, in theory, law enforcement has
to play by the rules and the bad guys do not.
So if if there's something that seems off kilter, if
(33:18):
there's something that seems like it doesn't add up, just
like any anytime you investigate something like this, you have
to realize that what can be what can appear to
be conspiracy, can often be explained by incompetence or mistake
or user error essentially, or just a regulation didn't allow
(33:39):
for one thing or another to happen right right, or
because of a technical problem with the chain of command
for evidence. For instance, Uh, someone that everyone knows as
a murderer walks free. That happens. That happens because the
law is not perfect. So Brown does his due diligence,
and he says, you know what, this could have been incompetence,
(34:03):
But incompetence does not explain the enormity of what's happening
here in Louisiana. He says, what appears to be incompetence
might be out and out corruption. And this is when
he begins to learn what we should call the oral
history of the dark side of Jennings, Louisiana. The old
(34:26):
street heads people have been in and out of the
system for decades. They tell him that corruption in this
in this little part of Louisiana dates all the way
back to the nineties seventies, when cops got involved on
the other side of the drug trade where they were
you know, they were selling the drugs or getting a
big yeah, at least allowing it to to occur with
(34:49):
with some beneficial thing, right. Um, but then he keeps
going down the rabbit hole about the local law enforcement. Right,
And we've got a quote, Yeah, we've got a quote.
As he's going down the rabbit hole, he learns more
and more. We we pulled just a few examples that
were powerful to to show you that if there is
corruption related to the murder of the Jefferson Davis eight,
(35:15):
then it this corruption itself is part of a larger pattern.
It didn't happen out of the blue. That's again, if
law enforcement is responsible for the murders. Here's the quote.
Brown rights. In March of two local men burglarized the
sheriff's office, making off with a staggering three hundred pounds
(35:35):
of marijuana. When investigators interviewed one of the burglars, according
to court documents, he named a surprising pair of accomplices,
Frankie Richard and a man named Ted Gary. Ted Gary
is interesting because he was the chief deputy sheriff at
the time. Brown notes that there were no charges ever
(35:56):
brought against Richard and Gary. And uh, let's just keep
going here because there's another quote. Quote. Three years later,
Sheriff Dallas Cormier pleaded guilty and federal court to one
count of obstruction of justice after he was charged with
crimes ranging from improper dealings with inmates to using public
(36:19):
funds to buy trucks, tires, and guns for himself. And
then in October of two thousand and three, eight female
cops on the Jennings force filed a civil rights lawsuit
against the Jennings Police Chief, Donald Lucky Deluche Uh and
then a bunch of other male cops and the city
(36:39):
of Jennings itself, and they said there were widespread acts
of sexual violence and harassment. Amongst the allegations and the complaint,
there were things like a captain who would shake his
genitals at female officers and say things like, you know,
I like to lick as you said, Matt Pte, I
can numb it all night. Uh, people forced oral sex
(37:03):
on female officers, a lieutenant who waved a knife at
a female officer saying that, you know, he was going
to cut her up. And then in January, just think
about this. This goes back from these specific examples to
a former police chief, Johnny Lasseter, gets hit with a
(37:26):
ton of charges after Louisiana State Police find forty dollars
in cash, eighteen hundred pills, more than three eighty grahams
of cocaine, and pounds of marijuana missing from the department's
evidence room. Wow, the evidence room, by the way, is
a sieve. Yeah, it's exactly well. And and who knows
(37:50):
how many officers were actually involved in the you know,
movement of all those materials that were found missing, right,
I mean the sheriff is blamed there that case because
this is your evidence room. And I think it's so
intellectually lazy and tempting. Will we hear these stories to say, well,
all cops are bad? Are all all these people everybody
(38:13):
who works at this department from bottom up, they're all
they're all rotten. It's jerks all the way up and
jerks all the way down. That's not true in this case.
There's a there's a former sergeant named Jesse Ewing. In
two thousand and seven, he hears that two female inmates
at the city jail want to talk because they say
(38:35):
they have knowledge about the murders and that higher ranking
officers were directly involved at least in the cover up
of the murders. At this time, again in two thousand seven,
if we remember our timeline. There are four victims, and
this has really got you Ing. You know, he's got it.
It's got his mind really stirred up because he's already
(38:55):
had a lot of suspicions about stuff that's been going on.
Are things that he's felt were possible going on. Um,
he was concerned that the recording of you know, the interviews,
the tapes of these two particular inmates, might you know,
disappear in the same way that all this stuff like
the drugs, the cash, all those things in the evidence
locker and evidence room, all that stuff have been disappearing.
(39:17):
He was thinking, somebody's just going to erase this from
the from the records. So he ends up giving the
tapes to a private investigator named Kirkmannard and then he
in turn sent them onto the Federal Bureau of Investigation
office in Lake Charles. This plan backfires. It turns out
that Ewing is right not to trust his fellow officers
(39:39):
and his colleagues because the tapes end back up with
the Task Force m a I T. And Sergeant Dooing
has is concerned that there will be reprisals if he
if he goes through the regular channels. That's why I
went through a p I to the FBI. It turns
(40:01):
out he was right, because as soon as those tapes
end up at m a I T the Jefferson Davis
District Attorney Office charges this sergeant with malfeasance in office
as well as a trumped up charge of sexual misconduct.
The one of the female inmates who's on the audio
(40:21):
tapes says that he touches her inappropriately while they are recording.
These charges are later dismissed. The tapes contained specific information
about the murders of du Bois and Lopez, including allegations
that law enforcement helped cover up the role of one
(40:44):
Frankie Richard in at least one of the murders. So
we get to a bit of secondhand information here. But
but it's interesting walk with us on this. So one
of the people on the tapes, who remains publicly unidentified today,
says that she heard from a different person working in
the sex trade uh that Richard and his niece Hannah
(41:08):
Connor are the ones who killed Whitney Dubois. And Furthermore,
this sex worker, Tracy, says that she was there the
night it happened. She saw it occurring. She says they'd
all been getting high and when Dubois refused richards sexual advances,
he got aggressive. He started fighting with her, and when
she started fighting back, he got on top of her
(41:30):
and began punching her. According to this inmate, uh that
that's when the niece held held Dubois head back and
drowned her. Ordinarily, you could see why this should be
treated with skepticism, right, Like, I'm an inmate in a jail.
(41:52):
I'm telling you that something. I'm telling you something someone
else said to me and I wasn't there. There's just
another person that I know from the streets. It's probably
gonna be in jail later. Well, yeah, and if you
think about the uh cost benefit thing there, right, are
you gonna get? What are you getting in return for
(42:13):
giving information like that? Right? And if it comes back
that oh wait, this person says that they didn't say that,
well then I mean all you have to say is, well,
they must be mistaken because that's what they said to me, right,
And what's the Yeah, it's here saying what's the motive?
You know? Maybe they just have some kind of vindetta
against the other person in the community and they want
(42:35):
to get him jammed up. The problem is this tracks
with a confession that that same person who said she
was in the room made earlier that same year. The
two inmates claimed there was a conspiracy afoot that Frankie
Richard and a high ranking member of the Sheriff's office
named Warren Gary worked together to destroy the evidence of
(42:58):
Lopez's murders. If that was true, they were probably working
together in some other capacity, or at least there was
a payoff, There was some benefit to to Warren Gary,
if that is true, and Gary himself was never actually charged.
In fact, he ended up getting promoted to run the
evidence room. Yes, yeah, it's true, Like like think about that.
(43:23):
It's again, it's it's not confirmed, all of this stuff,
but like just the perfect placement, if it were true,
to be to be placed there in charge of the
evidence room. He ended up leaving the Sheriff's office some
sometimes around two thousand twelve. Yes, and he's just there
are multiple other suspects. Brown found a multitude of allegations
(43:46):
regarding the case. In These allegations were in various parts
of the task force reports, but they were not made
public until his research brought them to life. And Mr Brown,
if you were listening, thank you for your courage and
your diligent efforts. Here enter a fellow named Danny Barry.
(44:09):
Before dying in at the age of sixty three. Danny
Barry worked for the Sheriff's office for twelve years. Three
separate witnesses named him as a suspect in murders during
interviews in two thousand and eight. They claimed first that
Barry and his wife would drive around, pick up women
(44:29):
off the street and then drug them, specifically spiked their drinks.
Some of these women also said that Barry had a
room in his trailer cordoned off from the rest of
the domicile, that there were chains hanging from the ceiling.
This was a room people could quote not see in
or out of. Barry was interviewed by the task Force
on February two thousand and nine. He was not asked
(44:53):
about any of these allegations. Yeah, of course not. But
then is oh gosh, it's so tough. It's so tough
with these kinds of things because it just it's a
cumulative effect, right, I mean, but that's the same thing
that happened to Ethan Brown here too. With that's happening
to me, I think maybe to you listening to this,
(45:15):
to to to Ben and all of us just it's
a cumulative effect of feeling like something is fully rotten
in in. I was gonna say, Denmark put in Jennings
and you know, for this guy to be what what
do we what was that quote there? We said he
was not a suspect in three murders. He was brought up,
(45:37):
was it? Um? They named him? He was named by
somebody as a suspect in three of the Jennings eight murders. Uh,
that's pretty weird. But then there's a whole other twist
that you Ben, you found here, um something about one
of the victims was present during a police shooting. So yes,
(45:57):
So it turns out that there's another connection. So we
have the hotel, the location through which they're often connected.
We have their acquaintances male female colleagues, fellow drug users
and so on. And then we have an incident. In
two thousand and five, police fatally shot a local drug
(46:20):
dealer named Leonard Crochet. A grand jury investigated this shooting
and determined that there was no probable cause for a
charge of negligent homicide on the officers part or against
the police at all in the case, even though the
dealer was provably unarmed when he was murdered. Witnesses told
investigators multiple times that they believed police were killing victims
(46:45):
who knew about how this shooting went down. At least
one of the Jennings eight was in the room when
when this when this fatal shooting occurred. And you can
read some read some pretty harrowing in depth that counts
of that. But if that is true, then it seems
that these victims were being murdered to cover up a
(47:09):
dirty shooting, right, Uh? And then how dirty is the shooting? Well,
that depends on how dirty the law enforcement personnel were
we're working there. Well, yeah, well, here's we've kind of
you know, if you were to believe some of the
picture that's been painted here through this reporting, then you
may think, wow, I guess if you know they were
(47:32):
gonna they if the police officers who were involved with
some of this stuff did end up needing to take
somebody out with whom they were involved, um, then yeah,
you can just imagine how dirty the dealings actually were.
And there's this other thing here. A warden named Terry
Guillory was trafficking some of the inmates, the female inmates,
(47:55):
for sex or you know, maybe it's like Richard said,
maybe he was just introducing them to men who wanted
to exchange money. Old man who wanted money. Yeah, unclean.
And here's this other thing, um, Warren Gary who we
were talking about up top there, he purchased a truck
(48:16):
on the cheap from a friend of Richard, the Richard
Frankie Richard that we were talking about there, And this
truck may have been used in a murder and then
later sold. Just this is a thing. This is like
a let's just put that out there. I'm just saying
kind of thing. Right. Also, Guillory is a cousin of
(48:42):
that last victim, Nicole Guillory. Um. Yeah. And again a
lot of this goes into things that we would have
to be we would have to call hearsay. Yeah, oh,
a ton of us is. There are very sketchy timelines,
strange relationships. But right now, despite these troubling things, there
(49:06):
are no convicted murderers in these in any of these cases,
and given the increasingly shady activities of law enforcement in
the investigation, it's no surprise that the then Sheriff Edwards
required all Task Force members to get swapped for DNA,
if for nothing more than to put the public at ease.
Tut tut, though, because it turns out that the results
(49:29):
of those DNA tests were never disclosed to the public
and have not been at the time of this recording.
This is where you come in. Public knowledge of the
story may help with the case. You know, It's been
covered pretty well in several different venues, most recently in
the two thousand five part documentary Murder in the Bio,
which you had mentioned earlier, Matt. But these these murders
(49:53):
remain unsolved. Their numerous people pointing their fingers at folks
in the sex trade, folks in the drug trade, some
people still pushing the serial killer narrative, and of course
people pointing their fingers at former members of law enforcement.
This is where we want to hear from you now, Claude,
to answer the question you would asked us earlier, is
(50:15):
the Jennings h or the Jefferson Davis eight an inspiration
for True Detective Season one? There are some uh notable differences,
of course, because True Detective Season one is clearly a
work of fiction, but the creator of the show, Nick Pizolatto,
(50:36):
says that he was not aware of the Jennings case
until after True Detective was coming out, and uh he
in fact tweeted about this approvingly inten when Ethan Brown
and his medium article UH noted that this felt like
a True Detective story, So we don't. We have not
(50:59):
found any statement, at least from the creator of the
show that he was inspired by this. However, we will
point out that during the run of True Detective season one, UH,
the creator came under some fairly serious criticism, including plagiarism
right for some of I think it was specifically some
(51:21):
of the dialogue Rust Cole speaks, right, And I can't
remember the writer from whom it was believed he was borrowing,
but it was that it's the weird fiction. H Thomas Ligotti.
That's it. That's it. Yeah. Um, you know there are
similarities here, for sure, but this whole the corruption within
(51:43):
the police department thing feels a little different to me.
I'm having a hard time fully recalling True Detective season one.
I think I need to rewatch it. It's fantastic. It's
fantastic work, uh, and I'm glad that it's fiction. The
problem here, and I don't know not the not the problem.
The complication here is that fiction has has a complicated
(52:06):
relationship with the truth. We have cases where real life
events become embellished and works of fiction, But then we
also have cases where works of fiction create real life
tragedies and crimes, such as the infamous slender Man stabbings.
Slender Man was, you know, is acknowledged to be an
(52:27):
urban legend created on the Internet. The people who made
slender Man say that they made it and didn't quote
unquote discover it. Yes, um, but you know, in this case,
it's all it is that too. It's a lot of
people saying a lot of things without a ton of
evidence to back any of it up. And that's why
we're very much interested in what you think. To my money,
(52:50):
it feels like a combination of things that we've discussed here,
of people that may or you know, maybe implicated you know,
in very all very minor ways, and then others in
pretty major ways. And I still feel like that Frankie
Richards guy, yeah, he gives me just a bad feeling.
Frankie Richard, yeah, yeah, he Uh. Here's the thing. At
(53:15):
least eight people are dead, and the one of the
big questions is did they all know each other because
they just happened to run in the same circles, happened
to live in the same relatively small town or relatively
sparsely populated area. Uh, Were they all targeted? Right? We
(53:37):
know that this murder rate is incredibly high for the
population and it's abnormal. There's no way around it, no
matter who you think is responsible, there's no way around that.
I am going to voice my opinion. I believe that
police corruption is heavily involved if you look at the
(53:58):
track record and again, and this is no ding on
the people UH currently working in law enforcement, but if
you look at the track record of things that had
happened over the course of the decades leading to these murders,
and if you look at how the murders were handled,
then it seems to me fairly obvious that there was
(54:19):
at least some corruption and cover up at play. And
you know, it's tempting to say, well was this um
Were they killed by members of the drug trade? Where
they killed by members of law enforcement? When you can
get past a certain threshold of corruption, the drug trade
and law enforcement are very close to being the same
(54:42):
thing their fingers on a hand. Now, I'm not saying
there's a case like that, because you know, I've never
sold weight on the Interstate ten corridor. I've never had
to pay off a Louisiana member of law enforcement like specific,
giving it such specifics there, those are the specifics. Your
(55:05):
statement is just so specific. Oh do you think I've
got to say I seventy five that's a different story. No, No,
I just know, I'm just I'm just choking. I was
just hoping you would say I've never sold weight. I've
never I've never sold weight on the ITUN corridor, and
(55:28):
I've never made a deal with the good folks in
Jetting's Well. You know, sorry, I'm making light of it,
just because it is uncomfortable talking about the deaths of
individuals like this, where corruption, like you said, has a
track record, and it seems it seems that it at
least had some handed and Brown was onto something. Brown
(55:49):
is onto something. He was threatened. He did have to
stay out of the area for several months. It can
be it can be enormously dispiriting to admit that this
is a situation where the law has failed. Has the
law failed because it is imperfect or has the law
purposefully been made to fail? Here the fact that that
(56:11):
I I would argue that the fact that this these
crimes remain unsolved, presents us and presents you listening, an
opportunity to be part of the solution. Yes, so, uh,
contact us in whatever way you choose, or whatever way
you prefer the most. You can find us on Facebook
and Twitter and Instagram. We're conspiracy stuff on some of
(56:35):
those conspiracy stuff show on Instagram. If you don't want
to contact us that way, you can you can join
our Facebook group. That's a really great way to have discussions.
It's called Here's where it gets crazy. A lot of
fine people in that group. Um, even finer people running
it right there we go. Um. And if you don't
want to do that stuff, you can give us a call.
(56:56):
Our number is one eight three three T D W
Y T K and I leave us a message, tell
us your story. If you want to protect your identity,
call from a burner phone or a Google Voice number
or something like that, because I do see your numbers
when you call in. Just a word of warning. UM.
(57:17):
And if you don't want to do that, you can
send us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy
at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you
(57:44):
to know. Is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome back to
(00:25):
the show. My name is Nomal. Our good friend writer
die colleague Matt Frederick is on adventures but will be
returning soon. They call me Ben. We are joined as
always with our super producer. Today it is Seth Nicholas Johnson,
So give him an audible hello when you get the
chance in the meantime, and most importantly, you are you.
(00:46):
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Uh No, I figured we'd start
off today's episode with an email from one of our listeners.
This comes to us from Claude G. Claude says, hey, guys,
I just listened to our latest episode about the possible
inspiration for True Detective. We did that one a while back.
(01:10):
Uh and this and Claude says, I enjoyed the episode,
but was wondering if you had heard of another theory
about the inspiration for the show. I was raised in Jennings, Louisiana.
I live a few minutes away now but still go
there multiple times a week. Jennings claimed to fame, unfortunately
as a multiple murder case titled by the media the
(01:31):
Jennings Eight. Showtime has recently done a five part series
on it and mentioned True Detective in one of the episodes.
My family and I are personally connected to the story.
Is one of the victims was a cousin of ours. Anyway,
I was curious to see if you guys have heard
of the connection to the TV series and our case.
Thanks for your time, Claude this this is fascinating. Now,
(01:52):
we did know a little bit about this, but we
wanted to explore the case today. It's something that many
people have heard of but or maybe not intimately familiar with. UH,
And for this sort of episode, we do need to
have a disclaimer at the top of the show. It's
true on today's episode dives into some pretty disturbing stuff
(02:13):
stories of true crime, murder, drugs, and corruption and UH.
The episode contains at times quite graphic descriptions of violence
and assault, and it might not be suitable for all listeners.
So to start, what are the Jennings Eight. In order
to answer this question, please travel with us to Jefferson
(02:34):
Davis Parish, Louisiana. Here are the facts Jefferson Davis Parish.
It's located in southwest Louisiana and it's a small place.
You know, a parish is Louisiana's version of a county.
It has a little more than thirty thousand residents. The
parish seat is a town called Jennings. It's the largest
(02:56):
town in the area, but the population is still us
a little over ten thousand according to the census. It's
home to some notable individuals. I found one mysterious story
here a guy named Father Eugene John Herbert. It was
a Jesuit missionary and he disappeared in Sri Lanka during
the country's Civil war. He has nothing to do with
(03:19):
this show today, as far as we know. Before the
events disclosed in today's episode. Jefferson Davis, which was named
after the former President of the Confederacy. It was one
of those places you probably wouldn't be too familiar with
unless you lived in the area. It made the news
a couple of times for things like corrupt ticketing by
(03:43):
local law enforcement. You know, we've all heard that thing
where if you're a stranger to town you're driving by
and you've got plates from outside of the area, big
old red flag target, and that's happened. You've you've driven
through some of those areas in your travels, Baby to
Athens or Agusta. Sure, I mean, you know, I mean
I would I would imagine there'd be an argument to
(04:04):
to make that it's some form of profiling, but it's just,
you know, it's the rules kind of it's it's like
something you should expect probably, and it's kind of difficult
to prove too. Like many rural areas, you wouldn't see
Jennings often in the national news. In fact, you could
live your entire life here in the United States never
(04:24):
know this place existed. Jefferson Davis isn't particularly large. In
fact um it's not particularly wealthy either, and like so
many other places in the United States these days, it
had a pretty CD underbelly. Um in the absence of prosperity, um,
(04:45):
economic opportunity jobs. You it is a vacuum that is
typically filled with drugs and crime and other types of
black market trading, which grew into kind of an open
secret and Jefferson Davis everyone knew what went down on
South Main street um, but it wasn't necessarily something that
(05:06):
was going to get shut down by the cops, you know,
on the regular right. Absolutely, yeah, it was an open secret.
Especially in South Jennings. Life in this small parish seems
set to continue as it always had, and even to
continue along a bit of a slow economic decline until
(05:28):
that is, residents began finding the bodies. We're going to
explore the initial murders, or the discoveries of the bodies
even before they were termed murders. On May two thousand
and five, there's a fisherman retired men named Jerry Jackson
who discovers the first body. It's floating in a canal
(05:50):
off Highway eleven on the outskirts of Jennings. His body
is identified as one Loretta Lynn uh Kind song Chasa
On Louis. Louis had been seen alive three days earlier.
Because of the amount that her body had decomposed, um
authorities weren't able to conclusively determine her cause of death,
(06:14):
but they suspected asphyxiation, and as you'll recall from our
previous episode on the Smiley Face Murder Theory, drowning as
homicide can can be a pretty tough nut to crack.
It's very difficult to prove, just like it's hard to
prove that it cop pulls you over because you had
out of state place. Yet the court of public opinion
was already in full swing, and there's some pretty nasty
(06:37):
victim blaming that happens, especially in the media. Because, according
to the residents in the no Louis was living what
was often euphemistically described as a quote high risk lifestyle.
She was addicted to crack cocaine. She was another casualty
of the drug trade running along that quarter of I ten,
(07:00):
and she had turned to the sex trade to feed
her addiction. And at first this was seen as a tragedy,
and it is, but less than a few months later,
residents and law enforcement started to recognize that this discovery
wasn't just a singular tragedy. It was something else, the
beginning of a pattern. That's right. A group of friends
(07:23):
hunting bull frogs, which is the thing that you do
in Jefferson Davis for fun. Uh, they found the corpse
of a thirty year old Messtine Patterson m A. Stein Patterson.
A few weeks later, flitting in a different canal um
this particular victim's cause of death was a bit easier
to figure out. Her throat had been cut, her body brutalized.
(07:47):
Two men u a Byron Chad Jones and Lawrence Nixon
Um are held for a brief amount of time on
charges of second degree murder. But these charges were of
course dropped and they were released. And so we have two.
We have two discoveries in two thousand and five years pass.
(08:09):
On March eighteen, two thousand seven, another body is discovered,
that of twenty one year old Kristen Gary Lopez. She
is discovered in a canal, and like the Lewis case,
medical examiners cannot conclusively nail down a cause of death,
and like in the Patterson case, two people are briefly detained.
(08:31):
This time it's a guy named Frankie Richard who has
described alternately as a retired oil rig worker, UH strip
club owner and a PEMP along with his niece Hannah Connor.
These two are later released, just like in the Paterson
case due to lack of evidence. Yeah it's right. And
(08:52):
over the next year and a half, four more bodies
turned up in and around Jennings, all UH fitting the
same profile. The same unfortunate kind of forgotten demographic, poor young,
with a history of drug addiction. Rap sheets a mile long,
um typically um charges involving the sex trade or other
(09:17):
criminal activities. We have Whitney du Bois, it was twenty six,
Laconia Muggie Brown twenty three, who like Patterson, had her
throat slit, as well Crystal Sha Benoir Zeno Brittany Gary seventeen,
(09:37):
who was the cousin of Kristen Gary Lopez. Most of
these bodies showed almost no signs of trauma, and the
medical examiner's ruled asphyxiation is the cause of death. It's
interesting other than the like case with the slit throat,
so the law has to respond again. Jefferson Davis Parrish
has a small population. This death rate, this murder rate,
(10:01):
is insane. So in December of two thousand and eight,
the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff's Department, under the leadership of
one Sheriff Rickey Edwards, announces that they're forming a task
force to investigate what they're now openly calling murders. His
task force is referred to as Multi Agency Investigative Team
(10:21):
or m a i T. They include local officials, state officials,
and some FEDS. Their results leave much to be desired.
In August of two thousand and nine, and eighth victim
is found, Nicole Guillory, twenty six years old. The body
has discovered off I ten in the adjacent Acadia Parish
(10:43):
later that fall, Sheriff Edwards notes that these deaths may
be the work of what they describe as a common offender,
a single person committing the homicides. In other words, although
they would hate to use the phrase, I'm sure a
serial killer, so that's where we're at at that point.
Between two thousand and five and two thousand and nine,
(11:04):
eight women have disappeared, only to be found dead Shortly thereafter.
The task force more than doubles their reward for information
from thirty five thousand dollars to eighty five thousand dollars,
and the victims become collectively known in the zeitgeist as
the Jeff Davis eight or later the Jennings eight. But
this is only the beginning of the story. In January
(11:27):
of the New York Times reported on the deaths, and
this article caught the attention of a New Orleans based
journalist named Ethan Brown. In eleven, Brown went to Jennings
to do his own digging, his own interviews, his own investigations.
Brown becomes obsessed with the story and convinced that there's
(11:52):
more to it than what has already been reported, and
will explore Brown's investigation after a word from our sponsors.
Here's where it gets crazy. So as this journalist Ethan
(12:12):
Brown pours over public records, as he interviews numerous people
affiliated with the victims, As he interviews members of the
task force and even suspects in the crimes, he begins
to think this was not, in fact the work of
a serial killer, but of someone else. And it starts
when he It starts when he begins connecting dots between
(12:35):
the victims. Because remember, this is a small town, and
there's a reason we have stereotypes about small towns. One
of the most common stereotypes about small town is that
there are no real secrets, that everyone knows everyone somehow,
and a lot of our fellow listeners tuning in today
probably have lived in a small town and can attest
(12:56):
to that you know. And then also there's the argument
that every town you live and becomes smaller the longer
you live there. So he Brown starts to note that
all these victims are connected. No, you mentioned that they
had that demographic in common, and they had similar issues
with addiction and money. But he also finds that in
(13:18):
addition to that first point, secondly, they had all served
to some degree or another as police informants. What are
they called see eyes, Yeah, confidential informants. That's right. And
that's the thing. I mean a lot of times folks
that are doing this kind of informing they may know
each other, and they're aware of each other and maybe
have each other's backs in that respect, because it is
(13:38):
such a dangerous situation to be in two we're actually related,
and another two lived together for a time in eight Uh. Fourth,
we've got multiple relatives who told Brown the victims had
appeared unusually anxious or frightened before disappearing. Yeah, And that
(14:01):
fourth point, to be fair, is a little maybe a
little more subjective, because these people were living hard, difficult lives,
you know, when there was there were probably plenty of
normal reasons to be anxious or frightened. But still it
fits the pattern. Let's pause here now, I know what
you're saying. Folks. Didn't you all just have a commercial break?
(14:23):
Well we do, but we also have an important announcement.
You see, our our good pal and colleague, Matt Frederick
has actually returned from his adventure. Matt, I'm materialized. I'm here.
I didn't know we could all do you that thought
that was just a ben power. Well, I heard you
guys talking about Ethan Brown, and I was like, oh man,
I gotta get in there. That's I mean, it is
(14:44):
crazy that you showed up, but we're glad you're here.
It's also a very niche fascination that to have triggered
your spidy sense. I mean, I have been reading about
this case, um ever since. I believe it was a
listener male claud Yeah, send us down this rabbit hole
and it uh yeah, it's been disturbing me ever since.
So thanks so much for sending it to us. And
(15:07):
also no, thank you, but thank you. Yes we uh
we opened the show with Claude's email, and now we're
I don't think we need to catch you up on
any of this, Matt, because you know it pretty well.
Uh So, now we're at this point where Brown is
making connections, right, He's already he's connected some stuff about
(15:27):
He's co operated some statements from relatives. He's noticed that
there is a web of connection between the victims. He
also finds another key connection the Boudreau in just off
of Interstate ten. It connects Houston to New Orleans. Could
you tell us a little bit about that one. Yeah,
so this is like one of the hubs or possibly
(15:48):
the hub of a whole drug and sex like sex
traded drugs of what do you call it? Not empires,
but just where where drugs are distributed pretty heavily. Uh.
Police are always there busting people for various things. Generally
is for the sex rader for drugs, surprise, surprise. And
several of the victims that have been identified in this
(16:10):
case or you know that are that are out there
that he is kind of bringing together here. Um, they've
received complaints based on their behavior at this location. When
you say, when we say complaints based on their behavior, um,
we're talking, you know, generally about sex work. Well, yeah,
I'm also uh loud hotel parties. Yes, that's occurring here.
(16:33):
Depending on where you've spent time in the US or broade,
you've probably seen motels like this before, typically right off
the inner state. Um, a little beaten down right and Uh.
They you know, they don't have the best reputation, and
they've earned that not the best reputation. Well here and
(16:55):
here's the deal to um, it's a lot of times
the community of its own uh motel like that. So
a lot of the the victims here are sharing this
this um web of of people that they all are
acquaintances with. And again it's like you know, it's it's
also a small town, right, it's a this whole this
(17:17):
whole place we're talking about is small town. So all
those rules apply, and in this case, within the drug
trade itself, within the six trade. I mean, it's true
a lot of those very let's call them affordable hotels,
I guess for lack of a better term, people stay
there for long periods of time. They rent rooms weekly,
and often there is a like you said, Matt, kind
(17:37):
of a hub where it's people kind of go in
and out, like you know, John's will show up to
this particular motel to particular room to get um, you know,
sex work services, and same with with drugs, and like
you said, it becomes almost this community where everyone knows
each other, everyone is aware of each other's kind of
comings and goings, right, exactly. These are good points because
(17:58):
the victims also share a head of mutual acquaintances. The
thing about these small town rules, the stereotype I mentioned
earlier about everyone knowing everyone, is that this kind of
rule applies to the criminal side of a small town
as well, and it applies in the drug trade. That's
what leads Ethan Brown to interview a friend of the victims,
(18:22):
self professed uh the man we mentioned earlier, a strip
club owner named Frankie Richards, and in his interview with
Brown and with others, Richard paints Jennings in a grizzly light.
The drugs, the sex work, and the crooked cops, he argues,
are operating more or less openly and Jennings and have
(18:45):
been for some time before the killings begin. So Brown
also finds that the rot in Jennings Louisiana does not
stop at the dirty banks of the canals. In may
see piece he wrote on medium dot com he we
have a quote that that that helps walk us through
(19:08):
his opinion on the law enforcement. Since the early nineteen nineties,
there have been nearly twenty unsolved homicides, including the slain
eight women in Jefferson Davis parish, a statistic and a
competent sheriff's department that would be regarded as both a
ridiculously low clearance rate and an astonishingly high murder rate
(19:31):
for a small area. Yeah, but Brown does not attribute
these disturbing statistics to incompetence alone. As a matter of fact,
he explicitly calls out law enforcement in this article. Yes,
he says, quote, one fact is clear. Local law enforcement
is far too steeped in misconduct and corruption. And this
(19:51):
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 in their
families deserve after nearly a decade in which no one
has been brought to justice. And we'll love love more
on law enforcement plenty more actually in in a moment.
(20:12):
But let's let's follow Brown a bit further. Let's let's
learn more about these suspects. So Brown finds that the
suspects have something similar going on with their web of relationships.
While there are different suspects for different cases or different
you know, specific murders, the suspects seem increasingly inter related,
(20:36):
even Frankie Richard was briefly charged in two thousand and
seven for the murder of Lopez, but the charges were
dropped when the witness statements were conflicting and then when
a key piece of physical evidence was mishandled and definitely fishing. Yeah,
and that you have you have some insight on Frankie Richards, correct. Well,
(21:00):
it comes from a a series titled Murder in the Bayou,
and there are just quotes there from Frankie Richard that
just I wonder how much of it makes me feel
as though he's like doing something morally wrong. And I
just feel like there's some some semblance of of um
(21:26):
distrust in him just in general because of that, or
it's just because of the way he words things. And
and I don't know how much of that can actually
be attributed back to you know, the Jennings eight murders, right,
And I don't think any of it can, because it's
just a feeling that I'm getting in reading these things.
And I'm gonna read this quote, Um, You'll understand what
(21:46):
I'm saying, but it's going to be a little bit. Uh,
I'm gonna use different words for what he's saying. My
most memorable way of making a living was selling p
We sold p any and every effing way we could.
I did not pimp them girls. I introduced them to
older men that wanted to spend some money on a
(22:07):
young gal. I'm making sure they are getting their money,
making sure they're not getting hurt. Broker in sex is pimping, right,
that's not the quote, that's just a fact. Yeah, I know. Well,
and also just the way again, like maybe it's reading it,
maybe he's just I'm imagining him saying that, and just that, um,
(22:29):
the way he's so nonchalantly is talking about it and
then reflects back on it as in like, oh man,
this was a great time in my life. Well, he's
also he's he's a free man, but he's he's lived
a hard life. If you hear any audio with him. Yeah,
and you know, and I'm not discounting that he's led
a hard life. It's just I'm just talking specifically about
(22:50):
personal feeling from and then here's one more quote. Just
when we're talking about Frankie Richards, um he a family
member of his and niece and daughter named Hannah talked
about her uncle in this way. And this is a
quote again from that same series, Uncle Frankie was like
the guy you didn't mess with, you know, he took
(23:11):
care of business, which again like it's more of like
a character witness kind of thing. It has nothing to
do with whether or not he actually did any of
these crimes. It's just perhaps is one of the major
reasons why he was a suspect, along with all the
other evidence that was involved. But you can just maybe
there's just this air about him that would make him
(23:31):
look good for it. Yeah, and he was. He did
have knowledge, carnal and otherwise of people who would later
go on to be murdered in in this course of events.
There were other people charged in these cases, as we said,
the men charged in the Patterson case Byron Chad Jones
and Lawrence Nixon. Uh, he got off because of what
(23:56):
it may have been police incompetence, you could call it that.
But it's sort of a glass half empty, glass half
full situation because our journalists Brown learned that the sheriff's
office did not test the alleged crime scene until fifteen
months after Patterson's murder, and they were unable to demonstrate
(24:18):
the presence of blood. Surprise surprise, if you wait more
than a year, that kind of organic evidence can get
increasingly more difficult to detect. He also found evidence that
other street level criminals in Jennings, especially people who were
associated with Frankie Richard, were suspected in some of the
(24:39):
other murders, but nothing came of it. And this task
force was conducting exhaustive interviews, nothing came of it. The
law found no credible suspects. Yeah. And here's the thing, though,
corruption or incompetence, because what Brown starts calling the jeff
Davis a didn't just give info the drug trade to
(25:01):
the police when they were cis. They apparently gave authorities
information about other women in the trade and the community
who would later turn up dead and be part of
the Jefferson Davis eight murders. Uh. Laconia Brown, the fifth victim,
was interrogated about the two thousand five killing of Ernestine Patterson.
(25:23):
Was you know as you will call the second victim,
Brown said that he had. Brown is not Ethan Brown,
our journalist, is not related to Laconia Muggy Brown. But
he found a task force report where one of the
witnesses claims that Brown spotted the body of Loretta Lewis
the first victim floating in that canal before the fisherman
(25:47):
found her body there in in May two thousand five.
And then in two thousand six, detectives who were looking
into that first murder also interrogated Kristen Gary Lopez, who
later becomes the third victim, and and Brown correctly false
the task force for not immediately noticing this troubling cavalcade
(26:10):
of red flags. Here's what literally was happening. Women were
being questioned in murder cases and then shortly thereafter they
were turning up dead. It's really tough because you never
want to believe that law enforcement, you know, could possibly
even just be turning an eye of a blind eye, right,
(26:31):
You never want to believe that that could be happening.
And we're certainly not saying that is what's happening. But um,
just from the reporting of Ethan Brown, it definitely is
making me personally question a lot of this stuff. And
then you move on to the last victim, Nicole Guillory. Um,
she's a you know, another person who had a rap
(26:51):
sheet that was pretty extensive with charges that were repeatedly dropped,
which is something that should pique your interest in what's
called as a nol pros sequi. It's a ruling from
the District Attorney's office the d A, and it just
means uh, to be unwilling to pursue. Yeah. So we're
we're prosecutors and we're we're not saying that there's no
(27:14):
sand to the charges. But for one reason or another,
usually internal, we have decided not to prosecute. Yeah. And
it could be we don't want to put resources into
this for one reason or another. It could be that
maybe there's something happening behind the scenes with this person
that's being charged as let's say, a see I or something. Right.
(27:35):
This is often used as a way to uh, It's
often used his way to trade favors. You tell us
about this other unrelated case off the books, and then
will make this, you know, this possession charge something small
time go away. Gilory's mother, Barbara, noted that her daughter
(27:57):
was increasingly paranoid in the days leading up to her disappearance,
and one Task Force witness told Ethan Brown that Guillory
Nicole Guillory, had said she knew who killed the other girls,
the other seven women. To this day, Barbara Guillory believes
her daughter was murdered not by a serial killer, but
(28:18):
by someone inside law enforcement because her daughter knew too
much about the ongoing corruption. We even have a quote
from Barbara here, which is which is pretty You can
tell that she has certitude about us. This is not
something she suspects. She used to tell us all the time.
It was the police killing the girls. Um, this was
(28:40):
Barbara said. And we would reply, and Nicole a name something,
writes a letter and leaves it somewhere, let us know
we can help you. Uh No, Mama, 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,
(29:02):
and that's why they killed her. Brown found other similar
reports and still at this point, this is all you know.
Witness testimony, and witness testimony can can be unreliable, right,
It can trend toward anecdote to memory as a tricky
treacherous thing. But when you find multiple reports corroborating similar accounts,
(29:27):
it becomes something you cannot ignore. Gayle Brown, for instance,
a sister of Muggy Brown, said shortly before her sister
was killed, she told her family she was investigating a
murder with a cop and this cop was I believe,
supposed to give her five dollars for information. But Gail
also believes law enforcement murdered her sister. Is what's going
(29:51):
on here? Why is a task force composed of local
and state level and federal authorities, uh, pushing a narrative
about a serial or when multiple relatives and surviving witnesses
are saying the same people are some of the same
people investigating these murders are the same people who committed them?
Will explore this after a word from our sponsor and
(30:22):
we're back sort of, yes, we I mean, we've been
talking about how they are, all these witnesses, and within
this room one of ours has left. We have gained
a witness that's me, and we've lost a witness, which
is Noel Brown. Yeah, I'm starting to wonder what you
guys are getting up to. Well, you know, it's interesting
when uh, when you were not here recently and the
(30:44):
two of us were in the room and we were
we were talking with everyone who's also gathered here right
now just about you know, your mysterious ways. Uh, you know,
I don't want to surprise you, Ben, but I think
we are starting to develop some mysterious ways of our own.
Perhaps it's a sketchiness by osmosis, right, yes, proximity. And
(31:05):
you know I noticed this didn't happen until Seth you started, uh,
you started producing this show. He's a guy on the
inside and he's he's got this weird kind of malevolent
smirk on while he's he's knitting. What this is true? Yeah, Seth,
Seth is knitting. Do you think that's knitting? Dude? I
(31:27):
don't know, he is. He is stringing together a thought
tulpas right now, he's making a weapon. I like it.
I don't know, No, I like it. I like it. Uh,
you know it reminds me of the Three Fates story. Right, well,
we'll spin a golden thread in there for us man,
(31:49):
you know, the fate of heroes something. Uh, so we'll
pick up. We do not know whether our good compatriot
Knol is related to our journalist here Ethan Brown, but
hopefully no will be returning soon. And here we arrive
at the point Brown has to ask himself, is this
a matter of incompetence or is it a matter of insidiousness?
(32:11):
You know? Is it just a bunch of people who
are terrible at their jobs, or is it something more malevolent? Well,
you know what we're calling in the beginning there it
definitely or you at least have to give a bit
of the benefit of the doubt and say, okay, this
is if something is happening, is probably incompetence. And now
as he's gone further and further and further into this,
(32:32):
he's thinking it's more corruption, right, and along the way
he is starting to get warning signs, little threats, cryptic hints.
We should, also, of course, to be completely fair, say
that it's it's easy for someone on the outside without
knowledge of law enforcement investigative processes, to say something is
(32:56):
incompetent because law enforcement has the labor under a distinct
set of rules. And there's one primary disadvantage that law
enforcement always has, which is, in theory, law enforcement has
to play by the rules and the bad guys do not.
So if if there's something that seems off kilter, if
(33:18):
there's something that seems like it doesn't add up, just
like any anytime you investigate something like this, you have
to realize that what can be what can appear to
be conspiracy, can often be explained by incompetence or mistake
or user error essentially, or just a regulation didn't allow
(33:39):
for one thing or another to happen right right, or
because of a technical problem with the chain of command
for evidence. For instance, Uh, someone that everyone knows as
a murderer walks free. That happens. That happens because the
law is not perfect. So Brown does his due diligence,
and he says, you know what, this could have been incompetence,
(34:03):
But incompetence does not explain the enormity of what's happening
here in Louisiana. He says, what appears to be incompetence
might be out and out corruption. And this is when
he begins to learn what we should call the oral
history of the dark side of Jennings, Louisiana. The old
(34:26):
street heads people have been in and out of the
system for decades. They tell him that corruption in this
in this little part of Louisiana dates all the way
back to the nineties seventies, when cops got involved on
the other side of the drug trade where they were
you know, they were selling the drugs or getting a
big yeah, at least allowing it to to occur with
(34:49):
with some beneficial thing, right. Um, but then he keeps
going down the rabbit hole about the local law enforcement. Right,
And we've got a quote, Yeah, we've got a quote.
As he's going down the rabbit hole, he learns more
and more. We we pulled just a few examples that
were powerful to to show you that if there is
corruption related to the murder of the Jefferson Davis eight,
(35:15):
then it this corruption itself is part of a larger pattern.
It didn't happen out of the blue. That's again, if
law enforcement is responsible for the murders. Here's the quote.
Brown rights. In March of two local men burglarized the
sheriff's office, making off with a staggering three hundred pounds
(35:35):
of marijuana. When investigators interviewed one of the burglars, according
to court documents, he named a surprising pair of accomplices,
Frankie Richard and a man named Ted Gary. Ted Gary
is interesting because he was the chief deputy sheriff at
the time. Brown notes that there were no charges ever
(35:56):
brought against Richard and Gary. And uh, let's just keep
going here because there's another quote. Quote. Three years later,
Sheriff Dallas Cormier pleaded guilty and federal court to one
count of obstruction of justice after he was charged with
crimes ranging from improper dealings with inmates to using public
(36:19):
funds to buy trucks, tires, and guns for himself. And
then in October of two thousand and three, eight female
cops on the Jennings force filed a civil rights lawsuit
against the Jennings Police Chief, Donald Lucky Deluche Uh and
then a bunch of other male cops and the city
(36:39):
of Jennings itself, and they said there were widespread acts
of sexual violence and harassment. Amongst the allegations and the complaint,
there were things like a captain who would shake his
genitals at female officers and say things like, you know,
I like to lick as you said, Matt Pte, I
can numb it all night. Uh, people forced oral sex
(37:03):
on female officers, a lieutenant who waved a knife at
a female officer saying that, you know, he was going
to cut her up. And then in January, just think
about this. This goes back from these specific examples to
a former police chief, Johnny Lasseter, gets hit with a
(37:26):
ton of charges after Louisiana State Police find forty dollars
in cash, eighteen hundred pills, more than three eighty grahams
of cocaine, and pounds of marijuana missing from the department's
evidence room. Wow, the evidence room, by the way, is
a sieve. Yeah, it's exactly well. And and who knows
(37:50):
how many officers were actually involved in the you know,
movement of all those materials that were found missing, right,
I mean the sheriff is blamed there that case because
this is your evidence room. And I think it's so
intellectually lazy and tempting. Will we hear these stories to say, well,
all cops are bad? Are all all these people everybody
(38:13):
who works at this department from bottom up, they're all
they're all rotten. It's jerks all the way up and
jerks all the way down. That's not true in this case.
There's a there's a former sergeant named Jesse Ewing. In
two thousand and seven, he hears that two female inmates
at the city jail want to talk because they say
(38:35):
they have knowledge about the murders and that higher ranking
officers were directly involved at least in the cover up
of the murders. At this time, again in two thousand seven,
if we remember our timeline. There are four victims, and
this has really got you Ing. You know, he's got it.
It's got his mind really stirred up because he's already
(38:55):
had a lot of suspicions about stuff that's been going on.
Are things that he's felt were possible going on. Um,
he was concerned that the recording of you know, the interviews,
the tapes of these two particular inmates, might you know,
disappear in the same way that all this stuff like
the drugs, the cash, all those things in the evidence
locker and evidence room, all that stuff have been disappearing.
(39:17):
He was thinking, somebody's just going to erase this from
the from the records. So he ends up giving the
tapes to a private investigator named Kirkmannard and then he
in turn sent them onto the Federal Bureau of Investigation
office in Lake Charles. This plan backfires. It turns out
that Ewing is right not to trust his fellow officers
(39:39):
and his colleagues because the tapes end back up with
the Task Force m a I T. And Sergeant Dooing
has is concerned that there will be reprisals if he
if he goes through the regular channels. That's why I
went through a p I to the FBI. It turns
(40:01):
out he was right, because as soon as those tapes
end up at m a I T the Jefferson Davis
District Attorney Office charges this sergeant with malfeasance in office
as well as a trumped up charge of sexual misconduct.
The one of the female inmates who's on the audio
(40:21):
tapes says that he touches her inappropriately while they are recording.
These charges are later dismissed. The tapes contained specific information
about the murders of du Bois and Lopez, including allegations
that law enforcement helped cover up the role of one
(40:44):
Frankie Richard in at least one of the murders. So
we get to a bit of secondhand information here. But
but it's interesting walk with us on this. So one
of the people on the tapes, who remains publicly unidentified today,
says that she heard from a different person working in
the sex trade uh that Richard and his niece Hannah
(41:08):
Connor are the ones who killed Whitney Dubois. And Furthermore,
this sex worker, Tracy, says that she was there the
night it happened. She saw it occurring. She says they'd
all been getting high and when Dubois refused richards sexual advances,
he got aggressive. He started fighting with her, and when
she started fighting back, he got on top of her
(41:30):
and began punching her. According to this inmate, uh that
that's when the niece held held Dubois head back and
drowned her. Ordinarily, you could see why this should be
treated with skepticism, right, Like, I'm an inmate in a jail.
(41:52):
I'm telling you that something. I'm telling you something someone
else said to me and I wasn't there. There's just
another person that I know from the streets. It's probably
gonna be in jail later. Well, yeah, and if you
think about the uh cost benefit thing there, right, are
you gonna get? What are you getting in return for
(42:13):
giving information like that? Right? And if it comes back
that oh wait, this person says that they didn't say that,
well then I mean all you have to say is, well,
they must be mistaken because that's what they said to me, right,
And what's the Yeah, it's here saying what's the motive?
You know? Maybe they just have some kind of vindetta
against the other person in the community and they want
(42:35):
to get him jammed up. The problem is this tracks
with a confession that that same person who said she
was in the room made earlier that same year. The
two inmates claimed there was a conspiracy afoot that Frankie
Richard and a high ranking member of the Sheriff's office
named Warren Gary worked together to destroy the evidence of
(42:58):
Lopez's murders. If that was true, they were probably working
together in some other capacity, or at least there was
a payoff, There was some benefit to to Warren Gary,
if that is true, and Gary himself was never actually charged.
In fact, he ended up getting promoted to run the
evidence room. Yes, yeah, it's true, Like like think about that.
(43:23):
It's again, it's it's not confirmed, all of this stuff,
but like just the perfect placement, if it were true,
to be to be placed there in charge of the
evidence room. He ended up leaving the Sheriff's office some
sometimes around two thousand twelve. Yes, and he's just there
are multiple other suspects. Brown found a multitude of allegations
(43:46):
regarding the case. In These allegations were in various parts
of the task force reports, but they were not made
public until his research brought them to life. And Mr Brown,
if you were listening, thank you for your courage and
your diligent efforts. Here enter a fellow named Danny Barry.
(44:09):
Before dying in at the age of sixty three. Danny
Barry worked for the Sheriff's office for twelve years. Three
separate witnesses named him as a suspect in murders during
interviews in two thousand and eight. They claimed first that
Barry and his wife would drive around, pick up women
(44:29):
off the street and then drug them, specifically spiked their drinks.
Some of these women also said that Barry had a
room in his trailer cordoned off from the rest of
the domicile, that there were chains hanging from the ceiling.
This was a room people could quote not see in
or out of. Barry was interviewed by the task Force
on February two thousand and nine. He was not asked
(44:53):
about any of these allegations. Yeah, of course not. But
then is oh gosh, it's so tough. It's so tough
with these kinds of things because it just it's a
cumulative effect, right, I mean, but that's the same thing
that happened to Ethan Brown here too. With that's happening
to me, I think maybe to you listening to this,
(45:15):
to to to Ben and all of us just it's
a cumulative effect of feeling like something is fully rotten
in in. I was gonna say, Denmark put in Jennings
and you know, for this guy to be what what
do we what was that quote there? We said he
was not a suspect in three murders. He was brought up,
(45:37):
was it? Um? They named him? He was named by
somebody as a suspect in three of the Jennings eight murders. Uh,
that's pretty weird. But then there's a whole other twist
that you Ben, you found here, um something about one
of the victims was present during a police shooting. So yes,
(45:57):
So it turns out that there's another connection. So we
have the hotel, the location through which they're often connected.
We have their acquaintances male female colleagues, fellow drug users
and so on. And then we have an incident. In
two thousand and five, police fatally shot a local drug
(46:20):
dealer named Leonard Crochet. A grand jury investigated this shooting
and determined that there was no probable cause for a
charge of negligent homicide on the officers part or against
the police at all in the case, even though the
dealer was provably unarmed when he was murdered. Witnesses told
investigators multiple times that they believed police were killing victims
(46:45):
who knew about how this shooting went down. At least
one of the Jennings eight was in the room when
when this when this fatal shooting occurred. And you can
read some read some pretty harrowing in depth that counts
of that. But if that is true, then it seems
that these victims were being murdered to cover up a
(47:09):
dirty shooting, right, Uh? And then how dirty is the shooting? Well,
that depends on how dirty the law enforcement personnel were
we're working there. Well, yeah, well, here's we've kind of
you know, if you were to believe some of the
picture that's been painted here through this reporting, then you
may think, wow, I guess if you know they were
(47:32):
gonna they if the police officers who were involved with
some of this stuff did end up needing to take
somebody out with whom they were involved, um, then yeah,
you can just imagine how dirty the dealings actually were.
And there's this other thing here. A warden named Terry
Guillory was trafficking some of the inmates, the female inmates,
(47:55):
for sex or you know, maybe it's like Richard said,
maybe he was just introducing them to men who wanted
to exchange money. Old man who wanted money. Yeah, unclean.
And here's this other thing, um, Warren Gary who we
were talking about up top there, he purchased a truck
(48:16):
on the cheap from a friend of Richard, the Richard
Frankie Richard that we were talking about there, And this
truck may have been used in a murder and then
later sold. Just this is a thing. This is like
a let's just put that out there. I'm just saying
kind of thing. Right. Also, Guillory is a cousin of
(48:42):
that last victim, Nicole Guillory. Um. Yeah. And again a
lot of this goes into things that we would have
to be we would have to call hearsay. Yeah, oh,
a ton of us is. There are very sketchy timelines,
strange relationships. But right now, despite these troubling things, there
(49:06):
are no convicted murderers in these in any of these cases,
and given the increasingly shady activities of law enforcement in
the investigation, it's no surprise that the then Sheriff Edwards
required all Task Force members to get swapped for DNA,
if for nothing more than to put the public at ease.
Tut tut, though, because it turns out that the results
(49:29):
of those DNA tests were never disclosed to the public
and have not been at the time of this recording.
This is where you come in. Public knowledge of the
story may help with the case. You know, It's been
covered pretty well in several different venues, most recently in
the two thousand five part documentary Murder in the Bio,
which you had mentioned earlier, Matt. But these these murders
(49:53):
remain unsolved. Their numerous people pointing their fingers at folks
in the sex trade, folks in the drug trade, some
people still pushing the serial killer narrative, and of course
people pointing their fingers at former members of law enforcement.
This is where we want to hear from you now, Claude,
to answer the question you would asked us earlier, is
(50:15):
the Jennings h or the Jefferson Davis eight an inspiration
for True Detective Season one? There are some uh notable differences,
of course, because True Detective Season one is clearly a
work of fiction, but the creator of the show, Nick Pizolatto,
(50:36):
says that he was not aware of the Jennings case
until after True Detective was coming out, and uh he
in fact tweeted about this approvingly inten when Ethan Brown
and his medium article UH noted that this felt like
a True Detective story, So we don't. We have not
(50:59):
found any statement, at least from the creator of the
show that he was inspired by this. However, we will
point out that during the run of True Detective season one, UH,
the creator came under some fairly serious criticism, including plagiarism
right for some of I think it was specifically some
(51:21):
of the dialogue Rust Cole speaks, right, And I can't
remember the writer from whom it was believed he was borrowing,
but it was that it's the weird fiction. H Thomas Ligotti.
That's it. That's it. Yeah. Um, you know there are
similarities here, for sure, but this whole the corruption within
(51:43):
the police department thing feels a little different to me.
I'm having a hard time fully recalling True Detective season one.
I think I need to rewatch it. It's fantastic. It's
fantastic work, uh, and I'm glad that it's fiction. The
problem here, and I don't know not the not the problem.
The complication here is that fiction has has a complicated
(52:06):
relationship with the truth. We have cases where real life
events become embellished and works of fiction, But then we
also have cases where works of fiction create real life
tragedies and crimes, such as the infamous slender Man stabbings.
Slender Man was, you know, is acknowledged to be an
(52:27):
urban legend created on the Internet. The people who made
slender Man say that they made it and didn't quote
unquote discover it. Yes, um, but you know, in this case,
it's all it is that too. It's a lot of
people saying a lot of things without a ton of
evidence to back any of it up. And that's why
we're very much interested in what you think. To my money,
(52:50):
it feels like a combination of things that we've discussed here,
of people that may or you know, maybe implicated you know,
in very all very minor ways, and then others in
pretty major ways. And I still feel like that Frankie
Richards guy, yeah, he gives me just a bad feeling.
Frankie Richard, yeah, yeah, he Uh. Here's the thing. At
(53:15):
least eight people are dead, and the one of the
big questions is did they all know each other because
they just happened to run in the same circles, happened
to live in the same relatively small town or relatively
sparsely populated area. Uh, Were they all targeted? Right? We
(53:37):
know that this murder rate is incredibly high for the
population and it's abnormal. There's no way around it, no
matter who you think is responsible, there's no way around that.
I am going to voice my opinion. I believe that
police corruption is heavily involved if you look at the
(53:58):
track record and again, and this is no ding on
the people UH currently working in law enforcement, but if
you look at the track record of things that had
happened over the course of the decades leading to these murders,
and if you look at how the murders were handled,
then it seems to me fairly obvious that there was
(54:19):
at least some corruption and cover up at play. And
you know, it's tempting to say, well was this um
Were they killed by members of the drug trade? Where
they killed by members of law enforcement? When you can
get past a certain threshold of corruption, the drug trade
and law enforcement are very close to being the same
(54:42):
thing their fingers on a hand. Now, I'm not saying
there's a case like that, because you know, I've never
sold weight on the Interstate ten corridor. I've never had
to pay off a Louisiana member of law enforcement like specific,
giving it such specifics there, those are the specifics. Your
(55:05):
statement is just so specific. Oh do you think I've
got to say I seventy five that's a different story. No, No,
I just know, I'm just I'm just choking. I was
just hoping you would say I've never sold weight. I've
never I've never sold weight on the ITUN corridor, and
(55:28):
I've never made a deal with the good folks in
Jetting's Well. You know, sorry, I'm making light of it,
just because it is uncomfortable talking about the deaths of
individuals like this, where corruption, like you said, has a
track record, and it seems it seems that it at
least had some handed and Brown was onto something. Brown
(55:49):
is onto something. He was threatened. He did have to
stay out of the area for several months. It can
be it can be enormously dispiriting to admit that this
is a situation where the law has failed. Has the
law failed because it is imperfect or has the law
purposefully been made to fail? Here the fact that that
(56:11):
I I would argue that the fact that this these
crimes remain unsolved, presents us and presents you listening, an
opportunity to be part of the solution. Yes, so, uh,
contact us in whatever way you choose, or whatever way
you prefer the most. You can find us on Facebook
and Twitter and Instagram. We're conspiracy stuff on some of
(56:35):
those conspiracy stuff show on Instagram. If you don't want
to contact us that way, you can you can join
our Facebook group. That's a really great way to have discussions.
It's called Here's where it gets crazy. A lot of
fine people in that group. Um, even finer people running
it right there we go. Um. And if you don't
want to do that stuff, you can give us a call.
(56:56):
Our number is one eight three three T D W
Y T K and I leave us a message, tell
us your story. If you want to protect your identity,
call from a burner phone or a Google Voice number
or something like that, because I do see your numbers
when you call in. Just a word of warning. UM.
(57:17):
And if you don't want to do that, you can
send us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy
at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you
(57:44):
to know. Is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com