At approximately 2:00 p.m. on February 12, 1991, a seventy-six-year-old Calcasieu Parish woman, Nella Haygood, rushed next door to check on her granddaughter Pam Littleton Ellender.1 It was Mardi Gras and no one had heard from Pam or her husband, Eric, since Lundi Gras, the Monday before Mardi Gras. Lundi Gras is usually reserved for friends and family to prepare meals and make last-minute alterations to costumes for Fat Tuesday. Pam’s absence was conspicuous.
Nella peered into the carport and saw only Eric’s car. Concerned, she walked to the front of the house and looked in the window. A gun lay on the floor surrounded by shotgun shells.
Eric was the proud owner of a Remington 7 mm rifle and a 12 gauge shotgun, so the sight of the weapon didn’t alarm her, but the chaotic scene in the room did. “Pam never went to bed with the house messed up,” Nella later told investigators. Panicked, she went to the side door, which was often left open. To Nella’s relief, the door was ajar and she went inside and up to the bedroom.
Eric and Pam were in bed, under the covers, but not moving. When Nella pulled back the sheets, she found Eric lying faceup in nothing but white underwear, his left eye wide-open and his right eye closed. Pam lay next to him, naked from the waist down. Just then, Nella heard her year-and-a-half-old great-granddaughter, Erica, crying from her crib in an adjoining room. Nella rushed to Erica, scooped her out of the crib, and ran to a neighbor’s house. “I told Huey,” Nella later said to investigators, referring to her son, “to call the law and bring them out there.”
The law arrived quickly; just moments after the 911 call was made, Deputy Michael Williams of the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office greeted Nella in the driveway of her granddaughter’s home, where she was clutching Erica. Williams inspected the bedroom. “I approached the bed and pulled the covers back,” he wrote in his investigative report, “to see massive gunshot wounds to the victims’ heads.”2 The murders in this sleepy section of Calcasieu Parish resembled an execution.
Pam and Eric were atypical murder victims. Eric, twenty-seven, worked as an adjuster for his father-in-law’s insurance company, while Pam, twenty-five, raised Erica at home and worked at the insurance company as needed. “Whoever did this,” thought Huey Littleton, Pam’s father, “killed two of the finest people in Calcasieu Parish.”3
The mystery of the Ellender homicides lasted barely a few hours. In the early evening of Mardi Gras, the Baton Rouge Police Department, acting on a tip, apprehended four white men, all in their late teens or early twenties—Christopher Prudhomme, Robert Adkins, Robert Gentry, and Robert Messick—in a Toyota 4Runner owned by the Ellenders. The police searched the suspects’ apartments and found Eric’s 12 gauge shotgun, which had been freshly sawed off. Adkins confessed that he and Prudhomme had disposed of an infant seat and a baby stroller from the Ellender home in a Sulphur drainage canal. Those items were later recovered exactly where Adkins had said they were discarded.
Law enforcement also took a series of incriminating statements from friends and associates of the suspects. One friend told investigators that he was watching Helter Skelter with Christopher Prudhomme just before the murders and that later, in the early-morning hours of February 13, both Robert Adkins and Prudhomme visited his home, visibly shaken. “Chris looked very scared,” the friend admitted to detectives. “He told us that he had done something bad. I asked him about what he did, and he told me not to worry about it, he didn’t want me in on it.” The friend then walked Prudhomme and Adkins to the door and watched them get in a truck he had never before seen.
Sensing that he was facing insurmountable evidence against him, Prudhomme confessed to the slayings and insisted that he acted alone. “I went and shot ’em,” he said in a videotaped statement to investigators. “I shot the guy. . . . He had a hole in his head. . . . The lady, when she jumped, I shot her, too . . . in the face.” In the wake of Prudhomme’s statement, Prudhomme was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder—punishable by life in prison without the possibility of parole, or death. Adkins was charged with being an accessory after the fact.
It was a remarkably ugly murder case for Sulphur, Louisiana, a quiet, small town of about twenty thousand. But given the quick resolution, it seemed the criminal justice system had worked a real miracle.
Two weeks later, Prudhomme was found hanging from a shower stall at the Calcasieu Parish jail. The noose was fashioned from torn bedsheets. Prudhomme left a long suicide note in which he proclaimed the innocence of codefendants Robert Adkins and Robert Messick. In the note, Prudhomme asserted—again—that he was solely responsible for the Ellender slaughter: “Neither of them knew positively of my actions and had no reason to believe in my acts of violence, which I would also like to say that I enjoyed very much in the taking of those two individuals lives.” Prudhomme signed off by quoting lyrics from a song by Houston thrash rockers D.R.I.: “FUCK THE SYSTEM IT CAN’T HAVE ME I DON’T NEED SOCIETY.”4
With the demise of the alleged perpetrator, the parish considered the Ellender case closed. But Huey Littleton, Pam Ellender’s father, wasn’t convinced that justice had been served. He hired private investigators, who interviewed witnesses. According to those interviewed, more than a dozen people were in the Ellenders’ bedroom when they were killed.
Littleton also found Prudhomme’s repeated assertions of responsibility—sole responsibility—to be suspicious. “I will not be able to testify in court,” Prudhomme wrote in his suicide note, a statement of defiance, given that the question of guilt was not settled, but also a bizarre one, too, since he had already confessed. Was Prudhomme saying that he would not be used to convict others who were perhaps more culpable? Whom was he protecting and why?
Huey Littleton was a skeptic by nature. He investigated insurance claims for a living. He spent his days determining whether the people around him were being untruthful. In the case of his daughter’s murder, the facts didn’t match up. Something was off. He sensed a cover-up. Later the following month, after he hired the raft of private investigators, new witnesses emerged whom law enforcement had never contacted. In the fall of 1991, Littleton prodded the new district attorney, Rick Bryant, to reopen the case. Bryant and Sheriff Wayne McElveen were both resistant, but Littleton’s unyielding pressure and prominent stature in the community led them to forge a highly unusual deal. The Ellender case would be reopened and Littleton himself could present information directly to the grand jury.
Littleton and his team of hired private investigators collected dozens of witness statements. Perhaps the most stunning statement they obtained came from a former deputy sheriff who worked at the intake section of the Calcasieu Parish jail. He told one of Littleton’s investigators that the shower where Prudhomme was found could only be accessed by deputies, who possessed special “rover’s keys.” Prudhomme was let into the shower by the jail’s intake officer, Dave Carson, who he claimed later gave another inmate a fabricated witness statement that he was forced to sign. The statement characterized Prudhomme’s death as a suicide.5
Carson was connected to another, earlier death similar to Prudhomme’s. On May 7, 1988, twenty-one-year-old patrolman Stephen Sandlin, who worked under Carson in Mountainair, New Mexico, was found dead in the department’s offices, felled by a gunshot. Carson discovered Sandlin’s body and service weapon just hours after the two had been arguing over traffic tickets.6 Sandlin’s autopsy results were inconclusive, but only insignificant traces of gunpowder were found on his hand, essentially ruling out the possibility that Sandlin shot himself. Sandlin’s family has long maintained that Sandlin was murdered. “Steve’s death was a homicide,” Sandlin’s father, Tom, told Unsolved Mysteries. “I think they killed him to keep him quiet.”
Littleton’s witness who implicated Carson in the death of Prudhomme offered a similar theory: he was killed to prevent other, more powerful people, including the Calcasieu Parish sheriff’s son, from being implicated in the Ellender case.
Carson is currently a licensed private investigator in Louisiana. He runs an investigative shop called “A Carson Agency.” According to state guidelines, investigative agencies must register their contact information with the state board so it can be searchable online. However, the phone number on the state website for A Carson Agency was out of service, and therefore I was unable to reach Carson for comment.
Littleton’s investigators uncovered other bizarre links between the Ellender slayings and law enforcement. Several witnesses claimed to have seen Sheriff McElveen’s son, Richard McElveen, at the crime scene. Both Sheriff McElveen and his son strenuously denied the allegations, and the sheriff even took out a newspaper ad to proclaim his son’s innocence, claiming that “this office is aware of no credible evidence placing Sheriff McElveen’s son at the Ellender home before, during or after these homicides.”7 To one reporter, Sheriff McElveen blasted Littleton as a “sick man” obsessed with the investigation into his daughter’s murder. He claimed that Littleton paid witnesses in exchange for their statements, allegations Littleton categorically denies.
The increasingly public and pitched battle between Littleton and McElveen led the Ellender case to be transferred to the Louisiana attorney general. In February 1995, Robert Adkins was charged with two counts of second-degree murder and Christopher Prudhomme’s associates Philip LeDoux and Kurt “Dragon” Reese were indicted as accessories after the fact. Reese pleaded guilty and received a two-year sentence. LeDoux went to trial and was convicted, but only received four years. The relatively lenient sentences were a major disappointment to Littleton, who had pushed so hard to see LeDoux and Reese brought to justice. But for Sheriff McElveen, the paltry sentences were further validation of Prudhomme’s guilt. “What did they get?” he asked a reporter from the Times-Picayune in 1998 (referring to Littleton and his investigators). “A couple of dopers who tried to cover up for Prudhomme.” But Assistant Attorney General Fred Duhy praised Littleton’s work, telling the Times-Picayune, “Huey Littleton is the reason this case is alive. He refused to accept what Chris Prudhomme said. He refused to say no.”
Littleton’s persistence in the investigation, however, never yielded a clear theory of the Ellender case: law enforcement suspected it was a botched robbery, while defendants such as LeDoux, who said that Prudhomme watched Helter Skelter before the slayings, darkly hinted at some sort of ritual killing. Yet one Littleton witness supported Littleton’s suspicions that Prudhomme was a fall guy. Chip Richard, a confidant of several of the Ellender suspects, said that Prudhomme wasn’t even present at the Ellender house the night of the murders. He had taken the fall for LeDoux and Adkins (though Richard wasn’t clear why). Chip also told Littleton’s investigators about a cop who was supplying the Prudhomme crowd with drugs seized from I-10: Calcasieu Parish detective Donald “Lucky” DeLouche. The drugs, Chip said, were seized from vehicles traveling on I-10, then put back on the streets for sale by local law enforcement, a common practice in both Calcasieu and Jeff Davis. Local hustlers call this phenomenon “dope on the table, dope on the streets”—meaning drugs are seized from I-10, proudly displayed for the press, then resold by the cops.
Throughout the 1990s, Detective Lucky DeLouche was the director of Calcasieu’s Violent Crimes Task Force (VCTF), an elite homicide investigation unit comprising officers from the Sheriff’s Office, the Louisiana State Police, and area police departments. VCTF investigators were tasked with solving the parish’s most high-profile homicides.
Their most significant case came on July 6, 1997.
Early that morning Stacie Reeves, Nicole Guidry, and Marty Leboeuf were killed in an apparent armed robbery at KK’s Corner, a convenience store and gas station near the corner of Highway 14 and Tom Hebert Road in Calcasieu Parish.8 The victims were shot multiple times and their bodies were tossed in the store’s cooler. Because the perpetrators left no physical evidence and had even removed the store’s surveillance tape, the crime went unsolved for more than a year. The parish called in the FBI, and Sheriff McElveen offered a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the killers.
By all appearances the KK’s Corner case appeared to be cold. No suspects were named, no official leads were announced. But behind closed doors the Sheriff’s Office was sitting on essential intelligence. And this secret information linked the KK’s Corner murders to the Ellender homicides.
After the KK’s Corner slayings, the department received “thirty to forty tips or more” implicating Sheriff McElveen’s son, according to a former Calcasieu Parish sheriff’s deputy.9 A decade before, young Richard McElveen had allegedly been spotted at the Ellenders’ on the night of their murder. Now he was being implicated in another murder case.
“Some of the people who talked about the murders said [Richard McElveen] was drunk and high and he was bragging about it,” said a former sheriff’s deputy, who asked that she remain anonymous, “and they said he was there. I still say to this day that boy killed those people at KK’s Corner. No doubt in my mind.” The former sheriff’s deputy points to McElveen’s rap sheet of assault charges: “Wayne always got him out of trouble.”
More damningly, with his thick shock of brown hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and wide nose, Richard McElveen closely resembled a composite sketch of the KK’s killer.10 The features of the sketch came from a witness who had purchased $10 worth of gasoline at KK’s just moments before the murders. The witness observed two people enter the front of the store and saw some activity that frightened her (she never specified what), so she left before filling her gas tank.
Sheriff McElveen held an internal meeting to quell the allegations. “We got called into a meeting at the Sheriff’s Department right after KK’s Corner on Tom Hebert Road,” the former deputy told me, “and it was to tell us his son was not involved in it and we were not to speak to anyone about the case. Everybody that knew that boy, he was the one who murdered the people at KK’s Corner.” In early May of 2016, I called Richard McElveen on his home phone for comment; a woman who answered the phone hung up on me when I introduced myself.
In addition to the flood of tips regarding the sheriff’s son, an eyewitness told investigators that just after the killings occurred, he observed an unmarked police unit pull into the Fairview Mobile Estates, a trailer park just yards from KK’s Corner. The car parked beside a trailer, and moments later a white man—whom the witness was unable to identify—approached the unmarked car and passed two paper bags to the driver. The white man then climbed into his own vehicle, described as a Mitsubishi Eclipse–type sports car with a hatchback, and sped away heading north, toward Highway 171, on the outskirts of Lake Charles.
The witness then spoke to an employee of KK’s Corner who identified the occupant of the unmarked police car as Johnny Lassiter, a detective from the Jennings Police Department who would later become police chief. At the time, Lassiter resided in the Fairview Mobile Estates. Intriguingly, so did Richard McElveen.
Was the man with the paper bags Richard McElveen? Did the paper bags contain evidence that could incriminate him? Was Lassiter involved in a cover-up? It’s a frustratingly incomplete tip and raises more questions than it settles. But this kind of suspicious activity is a hallmark of law enforcement in the region. And it would not be the last time that Johnny Lassiter appeared to wear the black hat.
Lucky DeLouche, who was both the director of the VCTF and the lead investigator on the KK’s Corner case, focused the investigation solely on one suspect, Thomas Frank Cisco, an acquaintance of one of the victims who had also been identified by a witness in a physical lineup conducted by DeLouche.I Cisco claimed that he was in Metairie, Louisiana, the weekend of the KK’s Corner murders, but investigators couldn’t confirm his alibi.
The police arrested Cisco and placed him in an isolation cell. Cisco received a court-appointed lawyer, Evelyn M. Oubre, who, according to court records, was also representing DeLouche in “family court matters” at the time, a clear and undeniable conflict of interest. Oubre rightly raised the conflict with the courts but, incredibly, remained on the Cisco case anyway.
DeLouche and VCTF investigators continued their interrogations throughout 1998 and 1999. Cisco, too, implicated Sheriff McElveen’s son. According to Cisco, Richard McElveen paid him $10,000 out of a promised $20,000 to kill KK’s victim Stacie Reeves “because she knew too much about how her former boyfriend, Kevin Abel, had been killed in a drug-related matter in which McElveen was involved.” The Sheriff’s Office claimed that Abel’s death was a suicide, which Reeves told a friend was false. Her insight may have put her in danger and possibly led to her death.
The case against Cisco was plagued by serious ethical problems, from the conflicts inherent in Cisco’s legal representation to the credible leads about the sheriff’s son that should have led to a recusal of the Sheriff’s Office from the case. Nonetheless, in the fall of 2000 Cisco was tried and convicted on first-degree murder charges and sentenced to death by lethal injection. In 2003, the Louisiana State Supreme Court reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial because Cisco did not knowingly and intelligently waive his right to conflict-free representation by appointed counsel. But Cisco’s attorneys ultimately brokered a deal to avoid the death penalty, convincing Cisco to plead guilty to three counts of manslaughter and serving a sentence of ninety years in prison.11
Both the Ellender case and KK’s Corner were marred by accusations involving the sheriff’s son, but allegations of misconduct were also directed at DeLouche of the VCTF. Pursuing Cisco in 1997, DeLouche faced serious criminal charges of his own. His ex-wife accused him of sexually molesting their daughter. According to allegations made in an incident report, DeLouche and his girlfriend allegedly penetrated the four-year-old’s vagina with their fingers and performed oral sex on her.12 DeLouche was hit with aggravated rape and aggravated oral sexual battery charges on October 22, 1997. Later, a pair of videotaped statements from the four-year-old were given to the state Attorney General’s Office.
This was not the first time that DeLouche was accused of sexual misconduct. According to multiple sources close to the KK’s case, the lawman made dozens of sex tapes that portrayed him and a girlfriend in a number of sexual acts, including copulation with a dog. In at least one of the tapes DeLouche was wearing a VCTF T-shirt. One investigator close to the KK’s case told me that he and his coworkers personally reviewed the videos and identified DeLouche.
It is unclear what, if any, actions were taken by the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office, and there is no record of the molestation case ever being prosecuted by Calcasieu Parish.13 Over the course of several weeks in the spring of 2016, I left multiple messages for DeLouche on his home phone seeking comment; he did not return any of my calls.
Still, in the late 1990s, the case against Cisco had yet to collapse. The abuse allegations against DeLouche remained a secret because of the age of the alleged victim, and the DeLouche videotapes were viewed only by a handful of people in law enforcement and never publicly discussed. Local citizens remained oblivious. All the community knew was that DeLouche was a swaggering lawman nicknamed Lucky who handled Calcasieu Parish’s most high-profile homicides.
In the fall of 2000, DeLouche was lured from the VCTF to the Jennings Police Department. Much later, Johnny Lassiter, who was allegedly seen near KK’s Corner the night of the murders, became chief of police in Jennings. One Taskforce witness would later maintain, Sheriff McElveen “was involved in trafficking and distributing drugs and many, if not all, of his law enforcement associates moved from Calcasieu Parish to Jeff Davis Parish, where they conveniently slipped into positions of power.”14
Jefferson Davis Parish would prove to be an ideal locale for a lawman such as DeLouche. In 1999, just months before DeLouche took over as the Jennings police chief, Sheriff Ricky Edwards was reelected in a landslide victory over his opponent, Arnold Benoit (Edwards received 6,416 votes to Benoit’s 3,802).15
On election night, unbeknownst to his constituents, Benoit received threats from a group of men who claimed to be Edwards supporters. Benoit was attending an election party at the American Legion hut in Jennings when three African-American men strode in and confronted him.
“You know you’re not gonna beat Ricky until you play the game,” the men warned him, all within earshot of his supporters, two of whom were so frightened that they vomited after the encounter. Benoit told me that he was surprised by the juvenile-sounding taunt but absolutely shocked by what the trio of men said next: “We can kill anybody we want in this town and nobody is gonna question it.” Benoit says that the group of men then swiftly exited the American Legion hut—and he was never able to determine who they were. “But they were right,” Benoit told me. “You can kill in this town and no one will question it. Just look at the Jeff Davis Eight.”
After Sheriff Edwards’s re-election, then Jennings mayor Greg Marcantel appointed Lucky DeLouche police chief. Local media celebrated the mayor’s decision, praising DeLouche’s decades-long career in law enforcement.16 DeLouche himself touted his connections, both personal and professional, to the Sheriff’s Office: “I’m looking forward to our two departments working together.”
DeLouche had gotten lucky in Calcasieu, but his tenure in Jennings was quickly consumed by further sexual scandal. One female officer claimed that DeLouche forced her to videotape her nipples getting pierced and then displayed the video to visitors in his office. A police captain working directly under DeLouche allegedly told a female cop, “You know I like to lick pussy, I can numb it all night,” and then demonstrated the sexual act with his mouth. The same captain was alleged to have driven a young female officer to a dead-end road in his patrol unit where he threatened to rape her. “You know what I want,” he said, “it’s time to prove yourself.” A female prisoner said that she performed oral sex on this captain to get the position of cook in the jail. And a male lieutenant in DeLouche’s employ waved a knife at a female officer, threatening, “Girl, I’ll cut you.” These sexual assault allegations and threats of violence—along with countless others—formed the basis of a sprawling civil rights lawsuit filed in federal court against DeLouche, a gaggle of male cops, and the City of Jennings, by eight female cops in 2003.17
The routine victimization of female officers at the Jennings Police Department pushed the organization to near collapse, just as it was beginning to recover from a murder by one of its own. On February 5, 2000, Jennings police officer Phil Karam shot and killed retired officer Kenneth Guidry and his wife, Christine, who was suffering from cancer, at their Jennings home. Johnny Lassiter of the Jennings Police Department was also shot in the encounter, though he survived.18 When help arrived, Karam answered the door and said, “Yeah, I did them both.” He then shot at several officers, killing one. When Karam was transported to the police station, he allegedly told a Jennings officer, “Well, who else did I kill today besides Kenneth and Christine, of course?”
Unsurprisingly, Karam entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. “Phil was pushed over the edge by what he was seeing at the Jennings Police Department,” a former law enforcement source in Jennings told me. “He couldn’t take it anymore. He broke.” Karam was tried on three counts of first-degree murder and was ultimately sentenced to three life terms. The ugly saga didn’t truly conclude until Karam died of an apparent heart attack in a North Louisiana prison in 2011.
The Jennings Police Department and the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Office shared a long and deep history of corruption, evidenced by the illegal I-10 traffic-stop and asset-forfeiture scandals of the 1990s. But the misconduct of the new millennium in Jennings was much darker than the get-mine-while-nobody’s-looking days of the 1990s. Murder and rampant sexual violence now reigned in the ranks of local law enforcement.
“This is a place of sin,” one patrolman said of the Jennings Police Department just before resigning. “There is nothing but sex going on here.”
Facing mounting pressure from the Jennings business and city government elites over the growing disarray of his department, Chief DeLouche hurriedly submitted his resignation letter on August 19, 2003.19 Reporters covering DeLouche’s resignation noted the pending harassment complaints from female police officers as well as accusations made by his ex-wife of “many immoral explicit sexual acts.” DeLouche’s attorney Ric Oustalet denied all of the sexual misconduct allegations and insisted that his client’s resignation from the Jennings Police Department was voluntary. DeLouche left the Jennings Police Department consumed in scandal. Later he was named assistant chief of police in Welsh.20 The Sheriff’s Office, meanwhile, was still reeling from the torrent of lawsuits leveled by I-10 motorists. This near-anarchic time in Jennings and Jefferson Davis Parish was the perfect moment for a savvy homegrown hustler to seize power.