Louisiana’s Most Prolific Serial Killer - Serial Killer Documentary

Louisiana’s Most Prolific Serial Killer - Serial Killer Documentary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
In October two thousand and four, the partially decomposed body
of a twenty one year old man was discovered in
a disused storage locker.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Ronald Dominique strangled Michael Barnet and his body was found
several days later, which started to decompose within those many storages.
Dominique was the wolf in sheep's clothing.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
The unassuming Ronald Dominique, known as the Bayou Strangler, raped
and killed men across South Louisiana.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
Let's say hands and fee were bound. Ronald Dominique then
raped these individuals, and once he was done with them,
he'd kill him and then remove the body from his
residence in throw on the side of the road.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
Dominiqueould often discard and leave his victims on the size
of highways or in a canal, or in a ditch,
like somebody throwing garbage out of a car window.

Speaker 5 (01:00):
This is one of the most relentless serial killers in
US history.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
For nine years, Ronald Dominique was a ghost, undetected, homicidal,
and one of the world's most evil killers. In December

(01:39):
of two thousand and six, forty two year old Ronald
Dominique was arrested in Homer, Louisiana, in connection with the
murder of two men. He soon confessed to more than
twenty other killings.

Speaker 6 (01:52):
In essence, all of them.

Speaker 5 (01:55):
God, what would take from sex to do it?

Speaker 7 (02:01):
It was against their will, yes, when they get.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
He cured multiple men across multiple parishes within the area.

Speaker 5 (02:13):
There was no national manhunt, there was no headlines. He
just was there, slipping in and out of lives, taking
them as he did so.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Ronald Dominique appeared as a sharp, white male, a little overset,
walking with a cane, perfectly harmless.

Speaker 4 (02:35):
And yet he was an extremely prolific murderer of young,
healthy men.

Speaker 8 (02:42):
People who do monstrous things do not look like monsters.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
Many of Ronald Dominique's victims were homeless with drug dependency problems.

Speaker 4 (02:55):
These were the most vulnerable people in society, the absolute
people that police were least willing to investigate. It was
just so much easier to kill them and get away
with it.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Due to where some of his victims' bodies were found,
Dominique became known as the Bayou Strangler. He would claim
the lives of twenty three men.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
At that time. Ronald Dominique was the most prolific serial
killer that we knew of operating in the United States.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
This killer's story begins in the small bayou community of Timberdeaux, Louisiana.

Speaker 4 (03:40):
Ronald Dominique was born in nineteen sixty four, just outside
of Baton Rouge.

Speaker 9 (03:45):
He came from very meager backgrounds.

Speaker 4 (03:48):
He was poor kid growing up, and his family really
clung to the tight knit community.

Speaker 8 (03:54):
He was one of seven children, so his household would
have been very busy and quite demanding one. The area
that Dominique grew up in southern Louisiana is one that
is quite traditional, one weather of very clear boundaries between
masculine and feminine and between men and women. And as
he was growing up, he wasn't one of those alpha males.

(04:17):
He had some quite feminine tendencies.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
He was an outsider. He tried to fit in. He
wasn't having any luck.

Speaker 4 (04:26):
He was bullied, taunted by friends, and even put down
by his family members. While growing up, he was living
by himself in a camper on the property because the
family essentially said he was just too odd and they
knew that there was something amiss with him.

Speaker 5 (04:44):
It would gradually emerge that one of the reasons that
he was uncomfortable with his peers was that he was gay.
He was struggling throughout adolescence and into his early twenties
with his sexuality.

Speaker 6 (04:54):
I think he didn't quite know what he was.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Dominique graduated high school in nineteen eighty three at the
age of nineteen. When he left home, he moved frequently
between trailer parks.

Speaker 8 (05:11):
Dominique came to spend quite a lot of time in
New Orleans because that was somewhere where he felt being
gay was more acceptable. He could be himself in that
kind of environment.

Speaker 5 (05:22):
There was quite a big contrast between this neighbor in
the trailer park and a boy who then turns.

Speaker 6 (05:27):
Up at the local gay bar.

Speaker 5 (05:29):
And he used to dress up as his favorite character
for singer Patti LaBelle. But even in the gay community
didn't seem to fit in all that well.

Speaker 8 (05:39):
There was still a feeling of marginalization, of people not
really wanting to include him. So wherever he turns, he
seems to be rejected, and I think that instills in
him this underlying current of shame.

Speaker 5 (05:57):
But he never really got a proper job. He did
all sorts of menial things as a young man.

Speaker 7 (06:02):
He was a pizza delivery driver.

Speaker 8 (06:04):
He was a meter reader, and I think there's a
sense in which there's a frustration in him that he's
having to settle for these jobs that are perhaps less
than he feels that he's entitled to. But at the
same time, these jobs ensure that he goes unnoticed. They
ensure that he remains in the background.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
In nineteen eighty five, at the age of twenty one,
Dominique was caught making a number of dirty phone calls
to local residents. He was convicted of telephone harassment and
find seventy four dollars.

Speaker 8 (06:40):
He wants a connection with other people to some degree,
but he wants that connection to make him feel in control,
to make other people essentially fear him. So this is
how he's going about doing that. He's making a connection,
but it's a connection that's based on a very negative foundation.
But then in the nineteen nineties, Dominique's crimes take on

(07:02):
an even more sinister edge to them.

Speaker 5 (07:07):
In August nineteen ninety six, Dominique was charged with attacking
a young man. The young man escaped, but he insisted
that Dominique had actually been on the brink of killing him.
He attempted to strangle him. It's the first real sign
of what was to come.

Speaker 8 (07:27):
This isn't remote, distant telephone harassment. This is him luring
somebody into his property and essentially assaulting them. So here
we've got somebody who is escalating, who is getting more
severe in terms of the kind of offenses that they're committing.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
Dominique was in prison for two weeks while awaiting trial.

Speaker 5 (07:53):
He's held in jail and insists that he was brutally
and persistently raped by fellow prisoners.

Speaker 8 (08:02):
When he tells it, it puts him in the role
as the victim to try and gain sympathy.

Speaker 7 (08:10):
It seemed to.

Speaker 4 (08:11):
Really impact him because he said, I never want to
go back to jail again.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
When Dominique faced the charges at court, his alleged victim
didn't appear, so the case was dismissed.

Speaker 8 (08:24):
Dominique comes out of the other side of this realizing said,
I've gotten away with it. But also it's given him
a bit of a fright. He's not going to stop
doing it, but he knows that he can't leave any
more witnesses.

Speaker 4 (08:39):
While most people who are in jail decide to stop
all legal behavior at that point, While Dominique actually escalated
his behavior.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
On the twelfth of July nineteen ninety seven, a nineteen
year old man named David Mitchell had just attended a
family gathering in New Orleans and then is believed to
have hitched a ride to go home. But nearly forty
eight hours later, David's lifeless body was found.

Speaker 6 (09:15):
The body was just dumped.

Speaker 8 (09:16):
And dumping the body out in the open, that's basically
saying that you are worthless. You know you have no value.
So this first murder is quite a significant one.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
David's body had been abandoned along a stretch of highway
in Saint Charles Parish of Louisiana, six miles away from
where he was last seen alive. He'd been raped and drowned.

Speaker 8 (09:41):
Dominique would have been able to watch the life drain
out of his victim.

Speaker 7 (09:45):
So this tells me that he's a killer who.

Speaker 8 (09:47):
Enjoys the process of murder as well as the outcome
of ending somebody's life.

Speaker 4 (09:54):
He felt a lot of anger and frustration inside, and
so I'm sure the motivation was twofold to silence somebody
who was able to witness and say what he had done.
But also he was acting on on his violent tendencies,
which were developing after years of nine decades of feeling
repressed and ostracized by his family and society.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
Police found no meaningful evidence of the identity of the killer.
Ronald Dominique had escalated from would be rapist to savage murderer,
then escaped without a trace.

Speaker 5 (10:32):
Barely six months later, in December nineteen ninety seven, Dominique
kills for the second time, Gary Pierre, and he was twenty.

Speaker 6 (10:42):
He was a high school student.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
When his body was discovered on the fourteenth of December
nineteen ninety seven. There were signs that Gary Pierre had
been sexually assaulted. He was strangled to death.

Speaker 5 (10:57):
Significantly, Pierre had been tied up. For Dominique, it's about
control as much as it is about the death. It's
the ultimate godlike complex.

Speaker 8 (11:11):
He enjoys seeing people helpless and humiliated, and this is
something that throws back to his experiences of adolescence. He
felt ashamed, he felt humiliated, and he's repeating those feelings,
but this time he's the one carrying them out.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
In July the following summer, a third young man was
found murdered in the same six mile radius of Saint
Charles Parish.

Speaker 5 (11:39):
It's extraordinary that the bodies were found so close together.
But no one adds two and two and gets four.
They're just separate bodies. But now you have three killings
in the space of a year. Bill strangled, but no
DNA is found.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
Dominique had managed to cover his tracks. He continued to
hide in plain sight and frequent gay bars in New Orleans.
On the fourth of October nineteen ninety eight, he met
twenty seven year old Oliver Lebanks at a bar in
the French Quarter. Years later, he would detail the encounter

(12:17):
in a police interview. To what he was said, Victoria,
what would you say.

Speaker 10 (12:38):
For sure? Ali was a good friend. He was delightful,
never a problem, never an angry word, very just jovial, smiling,
sweet kind. I saw him walk away down the alleyway

(13:01):
from the restaurant, and he turned the corner, and that
was the last time I saw him.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
After chatting in the bar, Oliver and Dominique left together.

Speaker 5 (13:14):
According to Dominique, the two men had agreed to have
sex in the back of his car.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
Oliver Lebanks had become the fourth man to lose his
life at Dominique's hands.

Speaker 10 (13:57):
He just didn't deserve to die like that. People were
talking about him as being transient and drug addict, and
you know, Oliver was a wonderful human being with a family.
He was as much a part of that French Court
community as I was, or anybody else was.

Speaker 8 (14:33):
He begins to cry at several points during these interviews,
and this is just an act. So what this does
is it distracts our attention away from the fact that
he's the aggressor.

Speaker 7 (14:44):
He's the one who enacted this violence.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
The following day, in the Jefferson Parish of Louisiana, a
passer by discovered Oliver's body under a freeway ramp.

Speaker 10 (15:00):
Detectives came in and sat down, and they showed me
a picture of Olie and told me that he had
been found dad, and they wanted me to tell them
something about him. They really just didn't want to hear
anything that was good. I think that they were expecting

(15:23):
me to say he was all kinds of problems then
he was on drugs, and the only thing that I
could tell them was that he was a good young man.
So they wrapped it up and left and I didn't
hear from them after that.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
Investigators had, however, found a Caucasian hair and seamen on
Oliver's body and recovered mitochondrial DNA. Dominique had made a mistake.

Speaker 11 (15:57):
Michochondrial DNA, it's very different to what we refer to
as autosolmoth DNA. It's maternally inherited, so it would have
been shared with brothers and sisters and so forth, because
they were all inherited from the same month. So it's
not the type of DNA that we have on the database.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
Investigators now had a partial DNA profile of Olive Labanks's killer,
but no means to match it to anyone.

Speaker 5 (16:25):
In the weeks following, other victims began to turn up.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
There were some that were killed in rather close proximity
in close in time. Then he used to go for
months without killing anybody. Then he had to go back
to having a spree of three or four deaths, So
this is part of the challenge.

Speaker 10 (16:44):
At that time.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
Some were written off as deaths by accidents. Others were murdered,
but the string of mark together into one guy was
a little bit far reaching.

Speaker 8 (16:57):
There wasn't very much in the way of forensic evidence.
This suggests that Dominique may have used condoms when and
assaulting his victims, So this does tell us that there
might be a degree of forensic awareness here. There is
a sense in which he wants to limit the amount
of evidence that he leaves on their bodies.

Speaker 7 (17:15):
He's quite an intelligent serial killer.

Speaker 4 (17:19):
Dominique would pick victims and leave their bodies at multiple
different parishes across Louisiana.

Speaker 9 (17:28):
We assume that.

Speaker 4 (17:29):
Police departments share information and have access to each other's
case files and databases, then it certainly wasn't that way
in the nineteen nineties. They would have to literally share
information by calling each other to discuss and therefore linking
these crimes. Pulling the evidence and trying to actually put
together a case against a serial killer versus individual murders

(17:51):
was just not on police radar.

Speaker 5 (17:55):
They were not banner headlines saying serial killer is loose
in the bay.

Speaker 6 (18:00):
There are no headlines at all.

Speaker 5 (18:03):
If they warranted a small mention, it was quite rare,
and we can't be sure, but it's significant. I think
that at this point all its victims have been black.

Speaker 10 (18:13):
To this day, when I talk to people and I
talk about having someone that worked with me killed by
a serial killer, they're like, why didn't we hear about this?

Speaker 6 (18:23):
What happened?

Speaker 10 (18:25):
I think that in essence, the biggest problem was that
you were dealing with young black men and it just
got completely passed over.

Speaker 4 (18:39):
Victims that are white, female, young in college, they get
the vast majority of media attention. Victims that are male, older,
in age, minorities, and especially if they were gay or
had any type of other stigmatizing features, especially in the

(19:00):
nineteen nineties and even early two thousands, they just did
not generate a lot of public attention, sympathy and were
not deemed as media worthy.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
Most of the victims lived on a street and it
was homeless. You're subject to anyone that passes by, or
anyone that's offering you something. Sometimes what some individuals believe
is an act of kindness is really something for them
to take advantage of an individual person and then take
them somewheres. That's the reason why they hate to say,

(19:31):
could end up in human trafficking or even death.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
In January of two thousands, more than two and a
half years since he'd killed, for the first time, police
were no closer to identifying thirty five year old Ronald Dominique.

Speaker 4 (19:48):
We thought that he could engage in this type of
pattern of systematic serial killing and sexual assault and yet
never get caught.

Speaker 5 (19:58):
In this period, between the summer of nineteen ninety seven
and two thousand, Dominique had killed ten young men with
no trace or suggestion that a serial killer could be
at work. And now something even more extraordinary happens in
the story of Ronald Dominique.

Speaker 6 (20:19):
He stops killing.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
By January two thousand and thirty five year old Ronald
Dominique had seemingly ended his murderous spring. The previous year,
he'd moved home from New Orleans to the nearby town
of Homer.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Almost more of a nice, quiet little town. We're probably
about maybe about forty five minutes to sixty minutes southeast
of New Orleans. As a small community, you pretty much
know everybody.

Speaker 6 (20:53):
Now.

Speaker 5 (20:53):
I don't think the move in itself accounts for why
he stopped killing. I think it's in the sense coincidence.
Something convinced him to stop killing. Had he been frightened
that people would think there was a serial killer in action.
There's no evidence that he wasn't going to escalate further,
But for some reason.

Speaker 6 (21:12):
He doesn't kill again.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
For almost three years, On the sixth of October two
thousand and two, the body of twenty year old Kenneth
Randolph was found dumped in an isolated area of La
Fourche Parish, eighteen miles outside of Homer. Kenneth had been
raped and strangled. His body was completely naked except for

(21:39):
a pair of white socks, with his limbs sprawled out.

Speaker 8 (21:44):
Sominikis continuing that theme of shame. He wants his victims
to appear in these quite shameful positions. This is how
he wants them to be remembered.

Speaker 4 (21:56):
So he's somewhat blaming the victims for his own urges,
whether it was the sexual attraction he had to them
or the fact that he killed them. Either way, he
put on the victims and didn't take any responsibility himself.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
Thirty eight year old Dominique had now left victims' bodies
in four different parishes of South Louisiana, with minimal evidence
at any of the scenes. Police were still struggling to
put together a coherent investigation.

Speaker 8 (22:27):
Many of Dominique's victims were people who led quite transient lifestyles,
quite high risk lifestyles, people who live off the radar
of society, people who are essentially forgotten.

Speaker 1 (22:44):
Lieutenants. Bobby O'Brien with the Homer Police Department co founded
an initiative to help vulnerable local men called the Bunk House.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
We opened up the Bunk House in nineteen ninety eight
as a shelter for homeless in the Viduin was within
our community.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
One of the residents was Michael Barnett.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Michael Barnett was on the streets as a homeless teenager.
He stayed with us probably about two years in the
early two thousands. Through our process of our program, Michael
Barnett was able to work hisself to become self sufficient
and eventually move on to his own little place and
stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
In October of two thousand and four, twenty one year
old Michael wouldn't counter Ronald Dominique.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
And it was October two thousand and four that Michael
Barnett was found deceased in the east side of Homer.

Speaker 5 (24:19):
For the first time in this long litany of killing,
he kills a white victim. Nobody had come looking for him.
He was simply more fodder for Ronald Dominique.

Speaker 1 (24:36):
Michael Barnett's body was found on the twenty fourth of
October two thousand and four, three weeks after he was
last seen alive. Ronald Dominique wasn't an obvious threat to
his victims. He was overweight, often walked with a cane,
and appeared unassuming, but he had now killed fifteen men.

Speaker 4 (25:11):
In two thousand and five, after almost a decade of murders.
There was information being shared across jurisdictions, and at that
point they started noticing similarities and patterns in the cases,
and they were able to communicate and share the information
that made them think this is a serial killer, not
just a number of unexplained deaths.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
That number was still climbing. By spring, Dominique had taken
eighteen lives.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
April in two thousand and five, I was signed to
head up the FBI Field Office in New Orleans, Louisiana,
which covers the whole state of Louisiana. This killing spree
began in nineteen ninety seven, so that's eight years right there,
and Ronald Dominique was not ten pointed as a suspect.
We had put together a task force made up of

(26:03):
sheriff's officers, Louisiana State Police, Attorney General's officer in the FBI,
and we worked this case together, the.

Speaker 4 (26:11):
Task force showed law enforcement was finally all coming together
to form a more cohesive, collaborative team and put that
evidence towards finding one offender rather than working separately with
only ten bits of the case.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
On the sixteenth of August two thousand and five, the
task force had another victim on their hands. The body
of a black teenager named Wayne Smith was found in
a small bayou south of Homer. The elusive killer had
now taken twenty lives and discarded the bodies.

Speaker 12 (26:46):
Like trash.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
When it was found. Wayne's body was so badly decomposed
that his ethnicity wasn't initially identifiable and his cause of
death could not be determined.

Speaker 4 (27:13):
And in this case it was a seventeen year old
boy who had a girlfriend, who very supportive and loving family.
And at this point it seemed that this mo of
killing men that were on the fringes of society now
all of a sudden had changed, and the attention that
maybe had not been paid to this case seemed to

(27:35):
be changing and going in the opposite direction with the
task force forming and the nature of the victim that
was now killed. But all of this got derailed in
early September of two thousand and.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
Five, Category five Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana with devastating effect.
Wide scale flooding ravaged the city of New Orleansans and
its surrounding parishes, and over one million residents were evacuated.
There were more than one thousand, eight hundred fatalities.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
The police force was very stretched out then during that time,
and really you couldn't focus on, say, big investigations only
because you're dealing with the devastation for which we have
in the area.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
That shut down the case for about six months, because
all of us were in our own particular environments trying
to bring structure back to the city and actually too
the entire state.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
Hurricane Katrina may have stole the investigation, but did little
to hinder the advance of forty one year old Dominique,
who now killed.

Speaker 4 (28:49):
Twenty Dominique had gotten away with murder for almost a
decade at this point, killing almost two dozen men and
never getting hot, arrested, questioned, or seemingly even on police radar.

Speaker 9 (29:04):
So by this time he's thinking he can do anything
and get away with it.

Speaker 1 (29:09):
But Dominique's luck was about to change.

Speaker 5 (29:15):
In November two thousand and five, a young man called
Ricky Wallace tells his parole officer about being tied up
by a man who is intent on killing him.

Speaker 4 (29:26):
Ricky Wallace said that he was approached by a white
man who showed him a photo of a woman and
said that he would pay him to sleep with her.

Speaker 9 (29:35):
And he took him into his.

Speaker 4 (29:37):
Van, and at the point that he was trying to
get to tie him up, he refused, and at that
point Wallace said, please take me back home. I don't
want to do this, and incredibly, the man actually agreed
and took him back home, and that's the only reason
why he survived.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
Ricky Wallace would later reveal that he he personally knew
one of the previous victims of the Bayou Strangler and
was convinced that he'd encountered the same man.

Speaker 6 (30:09):
That man was, of.

Speaker 5 (30:10):
Course, Ronald Dominique, and.

Speaker 9 (30:15):
The brawl officer told the task force what happened.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
Ricky Wallace brought to the Sheriff's deputies to Bernald Dovenique's trailer.

Speaker 4 (30:25):
When they got there, they questioned him. They searched the camper,
but they did not find any evidence that linked him
to the crimes. At this point, they asked him for
a DNA sample, and even though he denied any involvement,
he was willing to give police a saliva sample.

Speaker 8 (30:42):
There isn't very much resistance to this at all, because
he knows that by refusing a sample that's going to
look even more suspicious. And there's also an arrogance to
him as well. So on many of his victims, there
was no DNA evidence found whatsoever, So I think he
believed that he'd been so careful that they just wouldn't
be able to link him.

Speaker 4 (31:04):
At this time, there were actually multiple serial killers operating
in Louisiana, and on top of the deaths from Hurricane Katrina,
forensic labs were actually so backlogged that there are delays
in forensic evidence testing.

Speaker 5 (31:21):
But because the microscope is being focused more and more
on Ronald Dominique, the police launch a surveillance operation.

Speaker 3 (31:29):
While we were putting together the case playing closed. Sheriff's
deputies assumed positions to watching Dominique.

Speaker 8 (31:36):
When the police were surveiling him, Dominique appeared to stop
his killing behavior.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Eventually, is the backlog at the forensic lab east Dominique's
saliva sample was processed In November two thousand and six,
a mitochondrial DNA match was made with evidence found on
olive labanks in nineteen ninety eight, and another victim of
the Bayou Strangler. Authorities believed that they finally had the killer.

Speaker 8 (32:09):
Dominique was staying with his sister in her trailer.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
He moved out and she left the area and he
went to the Buck House.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
On the twenty ninth of November two thousand and six,
Ronald Dominique, still under surveillance, checked into the bunk House
homeless shelter run by Bobby O'Brien.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
Originally, I did not know Ronald Dominique was a suspect
in reference to any of these potential murders, and we
took him in just like any other homeless male person.
He was very soft spoken, almost to a point to
where I had to lean into him a little bit
to listen to what he was saying. We actually put
him in a it's called a bunk room, which is

(32:52):
a room where several beds in it, which other male
subjects would be in that room.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
The following morning, Sittis Depotment contacted Bobby and informed him
of the growing case against Dominique.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
The process of our program that we have over here
is that the next morning from the emergency bed, you
have to leave at eight o'clock while the Chief acts
to sy if there was a way possible that I
could put Ronald Dominique back into the bunk house. That
way they would have a location that they know that
he would be at without having to go find him
each and every day. Originally I told the Chief no,

(33:28):
because why would I put him inside a closed facility
building where he has access to other individuals that fit
the profile of male subjects that he actually would attack
and kill. The Chief convinced me after a few minutes.
Then I went back and I spoke to Dominique, he
was sitting right on the fire escape scairs, and told

(33:49):
him that somebody wants to sponsor him, and reference to
getting into a private room, which was Room six. It
was not known to me at that particular time that
Ronald Dominique actually stayed in the same exact room that
Michael Barnett lived here during the time that he stayed
with us for more than two years.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
Two days later, on the first of December two thousand
and six, investigators moved.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
In actually walked the two detectives into the bunk house
towards his room, and I knocked on room six. Ronald
Dominique opened up the door and then all he did
was put his head down, looking at the ground like
he knew or like he was waiting for something.

Speaker 1 (34:42):
Ronald Dominique was arrested and charged in connection with two
of the murders, including the killing of Oliver Lebank's.

Speaker 4 (34:50):
Police were interrogating him for his involvement in all of
the other crimes, and he almost instantaneously confesses, but turns
it around and starts making excuses and in some ways
blaming the victims for his behavior.

Speaker 5 (35:09):
Dominique confesses to twenty three killings. One policeman commented, he
seemed to like killing. There can be no doubt of that.
Dominique was obsessed with killing, obsessed with power and control.

Speaker 6 (35:26):
He was just forty two years old at the time.

Speaker 1 (35:30):
As police confirmed the identities of the twenty three victims
in Dominique's confession, they realized that his final victim was
killed just weeks before his arrest.

Speaker 4 (35:43):
It took ten months for the DNA testing from Dominique
to actually be linked to a victim. The ten month
delay allowed him an enormous amount of time to go
on and commit more offenses.

Speaker 9 (35:59):
And that's exactly what he did.

Speaker 6 (36:02):
While he's under the police surveillance operation.

Speaker 5 (36:04):
They cannot make it absolutely.

Speaker 6 (36:07):
Twenty four to seven.

Speaker 5 (36:10):
In October two thousand and six, Ronald Dominique picks up
a man called Christopher Sutterfield, who is twenty seven years old.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
Dominique took Christopher to a storage facility off Highway sixty
nine in Iberville Parish of South Louisiana. It was the
same location where he'd previously left the body of Michael Barnett.

Speaker 5 (36:35):
Dominique hits him on the head strangles him. He was
his twenty third and last victim.

Speaker 7 (36:44):
It really does tell you about the arrogance.

Speaker 8 (36:46):
There may have been a sense in which he thought,
it's only really a matter of time before I get apprehended,
and he wants to kill and nothing, not even a
police investigation, gets in the way of that.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
The ra and killer attempted to hide behind emotion as
he confessed to police.

Speaker 8 (37:46):
He's trying to make people feel sorry for him, So
he's basically saying that these guys had robbed me, they'd
attacked me first. I was simply defending myself. To think
that each one of these men had been killed essentially
self defense, it's absolutely unacy.

Speaker 1 (38:06):
On the twenty third of September two thousand and eight,
Ronald Dominique appeared in court charged with the murders in
Terrebone Parish.

Speaker 4 (38:19):
The public had the first images of what Dominique looked like.

Speaker 9 (38:24):
The fact that he was labeled to buy you.

Speaker 4 (38:26):
Strangler and seemingly so evil and heinous, and yet looked
like this very trustworthy man that could potentially live next door.
I think threw a lot of people off and really
showed them that a serial killer can look like anything.
There's not one profile, and evil can come in any
different form.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
Dominique could seemingly overpowered and killed many young men. The
question was how.

Speaker 10 (38:55):
Oliver was not a small person. He carried him, sew
very well, he was tall, and it just didn't make
any sense to me how he could be so easily
taken down by someone like the person that murdered him.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Because of the way his demeanor, the way he acted,
the way he spoke. Walking with a cane, he could
barely move, and to say, to wrestle with someone that
would have probably been the last thought, if you would
have saw him just walking down the streets.

Speaker 3 (39:30):
What actually did happen to some of these guys?

Speaker 12 (39:33):
How did you.

Speaker 9 (39:33):
Actually pick them up?

Speaker 6 (39:35):
Some of them are picked up saying that.

Speaker 10 (39:40):
Very nice.

Speaker 11 (39:44):
And the girl had hurt.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
Right, They had to be taught before over, They had
to be taught, Yes, that it wasn't true.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
Dominique could reveal the final piece of the puzzle. Investigators
knew how this seemingly weak and unassuming man had overpowered
so many. Under Louisiana's state law, the Bayou Strangler could
face a death sentence for his vicious crimes if found guilty.

Speaker 4 (40:15):
Many families of the victims joined together and cohesively stated
they did not want the death penalty applied in this
case against Dominique.

Speaker 6 (40:26):
He's made a deal with the district attorney.

Speaker 5 (40:29):
If he pleads guilty, he's going to avoid the death
penalty and he's going to accept eight life sentences without parole.

Speaker 6 (40:38):
An extraordinary deal.

Speaker 5 (40:40):
You might think for a man who insisted he never
wanted to go back to jail.

Speaker 1 (40:44):
In accepting the deal, Dominique pled guilty to eight charges
of murder and received eight consecutive life sentences in Angola
the Louisiana State Penitentiary. To date, he has not been
tried for his crimes three other parishes where victims were found.

Speaker 10 (41:04):
I think Ronald Dominique should have gotten the death penalty.
He killed twenty three people.

Speaker 7 (41:13):
He is just.

Speaker 10 (41:14):
A complete sick monster crying that he was a victim.
He doesn't need to walk on the planet.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
These victims were not seemingly taken seriously for such a
long period of time, and he killed them and made
it seem like they deserved what they had happened to them.

Speaker 10 (41:44):
I got upset when these young men are portrayed as
the dregs of society and the transience, the drug addicts,
the sex workers.

Speaker 7 (41:58):
They were just people.

Speaker 10 (42:00):
They went to work, they did the best that they could,
and just did not deserve to die at the hands
of this just gross human being.

Speaker 5 (42:16):
He demonstrates a level of callousness and disregard for human
life without expressing a word of remorse, without considering any.

Speaker 6 (42:25):
Of his victims or their families.

Speaker 5 (42:27):
The sheer number of deaths and the fact that Dominique
went unidentified for so long is genuinely terrifying.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
For nearly a decade, the Bayou Strangler deceived, bound, assaulted,
and murdered men as he drifted across South Louisiana. He
chose victims on the fringes of society, earned their trust,
then savagely snatched their lives away, confirming Ronald Dominique as

(42:59):
one of the world's most evil killers.