With the shooting death of Leonard Crochet at the hands of law enforcement in April and the unsolved slaying of Loretta Chaisson in May, the spring of 2005 was Jennings’s bloodiest in contemporary memory. Just after midnight on June 18, 2005, the body count grew once again. Three friends—Byron Roy, Jason Smith, and Aaron Dupuis, all of Jennings—were frogging (catching bullfrogs by hand) in the Louisiana swamps to later eat, by a bridge over the Aguillard Canal just south of Jennings along Highway 102. In the impenetrable darkness of an early-summer night, the trio saw what appeared to be a corpse floating near the west bank of the canal. Smith hurriedly called 911, which brought a phalanx of Sheriff’s Office detectives, including Sheriff Ricky Edwards himself. The officers took brief, incomplete statements from the trio, an investigative failure made all the more egregious given that Loretta’s body had been fished out of a Jennings canal just weeks before. “I was frogging and we found a body,” Byron Roy wrote in a statement written after midnight on June 18.1 “I was out frogging and found what I thought was a body,” said Smith, also in a statement provided around midnight, “then called 911.”
Detectives fished the body of a partially clothed African-American woman out of the canal and then transported it to the coroner. The only identifiable piece of clothing on the decomposing corpse was a pair of jean shorts with the number 34 stitched on one leg.
The cause of death was clear even before the body reached the coroner. Detectives noted a large incision on the neck. Indeed, at 10:15 that morning the Calcasieu Parish coroner determined that the woman had died from three incisions on the front of her neck, and the death was declared a homicide.2 It took just a few hours for local law enforcement to determine that the victim was Ernestine Marie Daniels Patterson, a thirty-year-old sex worker who frequented South Jennings and had been missing since at least June 16, 2005.
Excluding her race, Ernestine was much like Loretta. Both were slight physically—Ernestine weighed just eighty-two pounds and stood at five foot four—and their deaths followed a cascade of personal problems, including failed marriages, drug abuse, mental illness, and, for Ernestine, home foreclosure. Before she became immersed in drugs and sex work, Ernestine—whom friends called by her middle name, Marie—was a devoted churchgoer. She attended Greater First Apostolic Church on West Division Street with her four children and husband, Calvin. According to her sister, Jessica Daniels, Ernestine’s downward spiral began when her marriage to Calvin dissolved. She left church, lost her home, moved in with a violent, drug-addicted boyfriend, and began hustling the streets of South Jennings.
Slim, petite, and sweet-faced with a wide, dimpled smile, Ernestine was extremely attractive to potential johns in Jennings. In an interview with investigators, two men who would later be charged in her murder described her as a “good-looking skinny girl who would do anything for crack.”3 Ernestine’s naïveté also made her easy prey for the police. Her sister Jessica told me that late one night during the winter of 2004 the pair were walking along Cutting Avenue in South Jennings when they were stopped by an unmarked police car. “It was eleven or twelve o’clock at night,” Jessica remembers. “He said, ‘What y’all doin’ late at night like that?’ And I said, ‘We ain’t doin’ nothing but goin’ home.’ ”4 The encounter was all too typical for African-American residents on the south side of Jennings. There wasn’t probable cause for the stop. They were simply being pestered. The officer snarled at Jessica, “Yeah, I know your sister. Your sister ain’t nothing but a crackhead. She’s a sex worker. I’m gonna arrest y’all ’cause you ain’t got no business walking late at night.” Jessica protested—“I was like, ‘No, you’re not, you’re not gonna arrest nobody’ ”—even though Ernestine tried to persuade her to stop arguing. “My sister was like, ‘Jessica, shut up, c’mon,’ ” she remembers. The officer continued his tirade. “He was saying our family is crazy, nobody like us out here, we some crazy motherfuckers out here,” says Jessica. “Then he said, ‘Next time I see y’all, I’m gonna kill y’all.’ Then he popped the trunk. I called the police and told them about it, and they were laughing like I was crazy.”
The last night Ernestine was seen alive—June 16, 2005—she faced similar abuse, but this time from powerful street players. She was searching for potential clients near Renshaw, a tiny street off South Main, the long, ragged strip featuring Jay’s Lounge, a run-down nightspot with the warning STRICKLEY ADULTS, NO ONE UNDER 21 painted on its pink clapboard siding. After sex with one client, Ernestine walked along the strip, searching for a South Jennings man named Larry West. During the spring of 2005, Ernestine crashed at West’s home and did sex work in the abandoned house next door. That night she would make use of the house for the last time.
Ernestine had sex with Byron Chad Jones, a man from nearby Lake Arthur with a long criminal record, including charges of robbery and rape. While they were occupied, Jones’s friend Lawrence Nixon waited for his turn. When they returned to the main house, Nixon was ready. He carried three black-colored condoms: two for Jones, one for himself. Nixon fantasized about a threesome with Jones and Ernestine, but it’s not clear that Ernestine had sex with anyone other than Jones that night; indeed, what transpired among the trio after Nixon obtained the black condoms is disputed by everyone involved.
Nixon’s wife Lucenda Kagy’s account is that she was cooking fried chicken and french fries that night when her husband barged through the front door. He and Jones were carrying a massive, bulging, blood-soaked garbage bag. Nixon confessed that he had held Ernestine down while Jones sliced her throat. They dropped the bag on the back porch until a white vehicle appeared outside. The men loaded the bag—which Kagy described as large enough to hold a human body—and drove off. Kagy then hosed down the porch.
Kagy’s story was partly corroborated. Her teenage daughter Ashley told investigators that Nixon came home covered in blood. And a neighbor (Ernestine’s uncle) had given Nixon an industrial-size garbage bag just hours before.
Nixon and Jones both disputed the accounts. Nixon claimed that Jones came to his home covered in blood and said “he did something wrong and then left.” Yet Jones had an alibi for at least part of the night. At 3:04 a.m. on June 17, 2005, he had checked himself into the American Legion Hospital in Jennings for psychological evaluation. He told doctors that he was living in an abandoned house and had smoked both formaldehyde and crack.
With so many competing narratives, the investigation stretched on for months without an arrest. But Nixon’s troubles persisted into that fall. Just before 8:00 a.m. on November 28, 2005, Rosalyn Faith Breaux was riding through South Jennings with her friend Muggy Brown.5 Earlier that night, Breaux had downed multiple beers and Somas (a muscle relaxant) in Lafayette. During the approximately forty-mile drive back to Jennings, Breaux passed out in the backseat. She awoke to find Muggy at the wheel, navigating the streets of South Jennings in search of a buyer for an Alpine CD player that she had just stolen. When Muggy couldn’t find any takers, she pulled over at her cousin’s home.
Her cousin was Lawrence Nixon.
“Why don’t you come in this house real quick,” Muggy told Breaux as they parked outside Nixon’s home. Thinking that she and Muggy might ease their comedown with a joint of marijuana, Breaux went inside, passing Lucenda Kagy on the way to the bedroom. Inside the bedroom, Muggy closed the curtains and then promptly turned around and left. Just then, a hulking local drug dealer named Jarriel “Mooney” Palfrey walked in and removed his shirt.
“I done gave them some dope,” Mooney allegedly said, referring to Nixon and Muggy. “Let’s get this over with.” Before Breaux could phone for help, Mooney pinned her down on the bed.
“I screamed out for Muggy,” Breaux remembered later.
“Quit hollering,” Mooney replied.
“If you’re going to do this,” a desperate Breaux said, “please put on a condom.”
Mooney refused.
Breaux had no choice but to submit. “All I could do,” she later told investigators, “was cry.” When it was all over, Mooney ejaculated on the bedsheets and then Kagy returned to the bedroom, under Nixon’s instructions, to clean up the mess.
A terrified Breaux ran outside and straight into a cluster of detectives, who were questioning Nixon about the stolen CD player that Muggy had just been hawking. Breaux raced over and told them about the assault.
Investigators discovered that Mooney had given Muggy Brown nine rocks of crack to deliver Breaux, and $10 to Kagy for use of the room. Mooney, Muggy, and Nixon were all indicted by the Jefferson Davis DA on charges of conspiracy to commit forcible rape. All three denied the charges, though Muggy corroborated many of Breaux’s allegations. She admitted that Mooney had taken Breaux’s cell phone, that Breaux didn’t want to have sex with Mooney, and that she had seen semen on the bed after Breaux ran out of the bedroom. The cruelty of the alleged setup—Mooney told her, “You been traded for some crack cocaine and I’m going to get it”—was matched by Muggy’s confrontational interrogation. She dared the Sheriff’s Office to prove the rape case against her and even proudly bragged about getting high off Mooney’s supply. “I smoked mine right there,” Brown boasted. “I walked clean outside and smoked it.”
Between Brown’s bold defiance and Nixon’s suspected involvement in Ernestine’s murder, Breaux grew fearful; on March 27, 2006, she walked into the DA’s office and dropped all charges.6 The case was then “nolle prossed”—a legal term meaning a refusal to prosecute. But the collapse of the Breaux case did not signal an end to Nixon’s legal troubles.
On June 23, 2006, Nixon and Byron Chad Jones were indicted on second-degree murder charges in Ernestine’s murder.7 With Nixon now officially charged, the circumstances of the Breaux case suddenly took on more relevance. After all, if women in Jennings could be sold off for drugs or small amounts of cash, then they could certainly be slaughtered and disposed of in canals around the parish. That the Breaux and Patterson cases had the same central players—Nixon, Kagy, and Brown—also pointed to the cliquishness behind the killings. Even then, with the body count at just two, it was likely that this was a case of serial murder, not the work of a single serial killer.
Muggy Brown was a particularly important figure in both cases. During the summer of 2005, Brown was interrogated about Ernestine’s homicide. She said she’d heard that Ernestine had “robbed some Mexicans” in Jennings.8 But Muggy knew much more than she let on.
According to multiple sources, Muggy witnessed Nixon and Jones kill Ernestine in the abandoned house on Garage Alley. Though she never reported this information to the police, her story is frighteningly plausible. Muggy was a frequent visitor to Garage Alley and a close associate of Nixon’s and Jones’s. In all likelihood she was there that night, either engaging in sex work, procuring drugs, or both. Muggy’s confessions, however, also provided a crucial clue. According to her, Ernestine was murdered with a hunting knife.
Where did the knife come from? Whom did it belong to? Where was it hidden?
This potential piece of evidence could have cracked the case open, and police officers were well aware of the suspicious weapon. In an interview with investigators, Lucenda Kagy said that “a jagged hunting knife” lay in an abandoned home on Garage Alley that she and Nixon once shared. Incredibly, nothing in the homicide file indicates that investigators ever followed up on this lead.9 A woman had died of laceration wounds to the neck on Garage Alley and someone had seen an out-of-place knife on Garage Alley. How could law enforcement have overlooked such an elemental piece of the case?
The Breaux rape brought the increasingly violent milieu of drugs and sex work in South Jennings to the attention of a Jennings-based private investigator named Kirk Menard. Menard was also Breaux’s father. He had long known of his daughter’s struggles with addiction and her dangerous circle of friends. And he knew firsthand about the corrupting powers of Jeff Davis law enforcement. His first wife, Kalanie Bourque, was a former Jennings police officer and one of the many plaintiffs in the sprawling civil rights lawsuit against Lucky DeLouche in 2003.
But Menard only truly grasped the dangers posed by South Jennings hustlers in the spring of 2006 when his daughter disappeared. Fearing she might become victim three, he initiated a frenzied search through the Jennings canals as well as the abandoned homes and drug houses that dot South Jennings. Menard received a tip that Breaux was hiding in a camper belonging to Frankie Richard’s brother Billy Conner. The camper sat on the Richard family property on McKinley Street. Menard and his wife, Jessica, piled into their Chevy Suburban and gunned it toward McKinley Street. Jessica was armed with a tiny .38 special.
Menard and his wife knocked on the camper door. Billy Conner answered.
“Is Rosalyn there?”10
Getting no response, Jessica flashed her .38 special and Billy nervously stammered, “Rosalyn, somebody’s here for ya.” A flustered Breaux hurried past Billy Conner and joined her parents in the car.
When the newly reunited family arrived home, Menard pondered his own convoluted connections to the Jennings underworld. He was related by blood to the pimp Frankie Richard—Menard’s brother Eldridge was married to Richard’s aunt Caroline—and Menard’s daughter had been raped by a suspect in one of the Jeff Davis 8 homicides, and one of its underworld’s central players.
Menard, who is now in his late forties, is short, sweaty browed, and often clad in jeans and a company-issued red polo shirt bearing the name of his firm, Advanced Investigative Technologies. He works mostly on civil, not criminal, cases. Like most private investigators, he specializes in divorce and child-custody cases. Back then it was difficult for Menard to imagine investigating homicides, though in some ways he seemed destined to work the Jeff Davis 8 case. Born at the Jennings American Legion Hospital off I-10 to Rosita, a housewife, and Robert, an oil-rig worker, Menard, like the outcast women of the Jeff Davis 8, had a host of family problems that alienated him from his home life. His parents divorced when Menard was just five years old. Rosita got custody of Menard and his four siblings, then took up with a local Cajun musician named Eli Stutes, whom Menard says was abusive toward his mom.
By his early teens, Menard began to feel like a burden to his mother, who supported the entire family with a job in the meat department at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket. At fifteen, Menard ran away from home, thinking he would strike out on his own somewhere in southwest Louisiana. “I was gone for about a week and I was staying about two blocks away,” Menard remembers. “A sheriff’s deputy came and found me. He talked to me in my mom’s kitchen—we were living in the projects in Jennings at the time—and said, ‘Look, we got a program we’re starting up called Sheriff’s Explorers.’ ” Local police and sheriff’s departments across the country maintain after-school “explorer” programs for teens who display an interest in law enforcement. Menard enrolled. He instantly loved carrying a law-enforcement-styled ID and kept busy with activities ranging from softball to shooting at a local firing range.
Sheriff’s Explorers was not the only way the teen’s life would intersect with the criminal justice system. When Menard was fifteen, his mom met a new man—Walter Dave Hickock—at a bar in Mermentau, a town of about seven hundred located near Jennings. Walter Dave had left his Kansas City home to escape the notorious reputation of his brother Dick. Dick and an acquaintance had brutally murdered four members of the Herbert Clutter family on November 15, 1959—the case that became the subject of Truman Capote’s totemic work, In Cold Blood. Despite Walter Dave’s notoriety, Menard’s mother married him anyway, and when Menard was just a teen, the specter of the In Cold Blood murders hung heavily over his new family, an unspoken burden. “He wouldn’t hardly ever talk about it,” Menard remembers. Much later, however, Walter Dave told his story to Jefferson Davis Parish Library director Linda LeBert-Corbello, with whom he collaborated on an “as told to” book about his life called In the Shadow of My Brother’s Cold Blood.
When Menard was just eighteen, his high school girlfriend, Shirley Marie Breaux, gave birth to Rosalyn. They had a second daughter, Chassity, two years later. Menard and Breaux never married, however, and when Menard was twenty-five he got engaged to seventeen-year-old Kalanie Bourque. The marriage to Bourque, who went on to become a Jennings police officer, lasted only two and a half years. In 1998, Bourque filed a protective order against Menard (Bourque claimed that Menard was stalking her, a charge Menard denies).
While Menard experienced a turbulent personal life, he found fast success in his career. In 1994, he took a job with oil giant Phillips 66 as an entry-level operator on an offshore rig. Six months later, he was promoted to an investigator position, a heady job in the accident-prone world of offshore rigs. The work was not unlike that of a crime scene investigator. “I seen guys get their fingers cut off, broken legs, broken backs, cracked skulls,” Menard says.
In 2000, he found employment as a repo man for a major Jennings bank—called simply The Bank—and then in 2004 he took the forty-hour class required by the Louisiana State Board of Private Investigators and started his own PI agency, Menard Investigations Services LLC.
By early 2006, just one year after the first of the Jeff Davis victims was discovered, Menard found himself drawn to the case. The homicides quite literally hit home: his daughter Rosalyn’s alleged attackers were charged in the murder of Ernestine. And Menard says his daughter’s case collapsed because of witness intimidation and bribery, not lack of evidence. “One of the guys involved said he would pay [Rosalyn] ten thousand dollars to drop the charges,” Menard says, “then he said he would kill her. Then he paid her five hundred dollars. My daughter was scared to pursue the case and she dropped it.” Menard also pointed to the involvement of Muggy Brown in the incident as proof that sex workers in Jefferson Davis Parish could be both victims of—and accomplices to—crimes. “Muggy knew what was going to happen,” Menard says. “This is a common practice—the luring of girls to certain guys.”
Menard sensed that the unsolved homicides could be Jennings’s undoing. Even though there were just two slain sex workers at that time, it seemed to Menard that the murders were the poisoned fruit of a tree that had been growing roots for decades. “Jennings is like an undisciplined child,” Menard says. “If you never hold that child accountable, you’re gonna have huge problems.”
The chaos, incompetence, and corruption of law enforcement in Jefferson Davis Parish that so concerned Menard culminated in the sad and surprising outcome of the Ernestine Patterson slaying. By all accounts the investigation was doomed by shoddy police work and incomprehensibly bad decision-making. Not only had investigators failed to follow up on the substantial leads about the abandoned home on Garage Alley, the very place where Lucenda Kagy admitted that a “jagged edge hunting knife” would be found under a bed, but they also mishandled part of the crime scene itself. The lab didn’t test the floorboards of Nixon and Kagy’s home until October of 2006, nearly eighteen months after Patterson’s homicide, even though witnesses had reported seeing pools of blood on their floor the night of the murder. Unsurprisingly, all of the floorboard tests “failed to demonstrate the presence of blood.”