By 2006, frequent busts at the Boudreaux Inn drove parish sex workers to the home of Roxanne Alexander. At sixty-five, Roxanne was a maternal figure to the marginalized. She empathized deeply with the women who would be called the Jeff Davis 8, and they needed all the support they could get. They were poor, addicted to drugs, and often ostracized for dating African-American men. “One of the reasons they were so disliked in town is that they paid more attention to black men than white men,” Roxanne told me, noting that many of the Jeff Davis 8, including Loretta Chaisson and Whitnei Dubois, had children with African-American men.1
In Roxanne, the Jeff Davis 8 found a loving and protective guardian whose north-side Jennings home at 403 North Craig Street sat far from the predatory pimps and hustlers across the tracks. “They all lived with me,” Roxanne told me. “Loretta used to come around here and leave the children with me. Muggy stayed with me. I would give Kristen my ID. Just so that there would be something to identify her if she got into trouble. All of ’em stayed here. They would come to my house for refuge, when they were tired and didn’t have no place to go.” Roxanne admits that she, too, was a drug addict at the time and that her own struggles helped her forge bonds with the Jeff Davis 8. Still, she says, her domestic, tranquil life—a home on the quiet north side of Jennings—was far from the nomadic existence the Jeff Davis 8 otherwise clung to. “I was in the same lifestyle they were in,” Roxanne says, “but I was more secure, so I helped them out. They called me Mama.”
As Mama to the Jeff Davis 8, Roxanne was privy to their most closely held secrets. “Just before Loretta was killed, she lay with me in bed,” Roxanne remembers. “She said, ‘I’m scared. I’m tired of sucking dick for crack. I want to take my kids and go away.’ She was tired and crying. The police came to my house a few days later, asking if I’d seen her. I told them she was just here yesterday. Then later I found out that they found her.”
Loretta often confided in Roxanne; she once told her that several men in law enforcement were among her best clients. Roxanne remained highly skeptical of the claim until years later when she encountered a middle-aged man at a crack house on South Cutting Avenue. The man, Danny Barry, was a deputy with the Sheriff’s Office. He and his wife, Alexander soon learned, were patronizing the Jeff Davis 8 so often that she asked the pair, “You sure you’re not killing them girls out there?” (Barry would later become a suspect in the murders and was even interrogated by the Taskforce; he died of cancer in 2010.)
But while Roxanne possessed a fierce, motherly protectiveness, she could not spare her friends from the dangers of their world. Just before noon on March 18, 2007, James Aucoin, a Lake Arthur fisherman, reported a “body floating” in the Petitjean Canal on the outskirts of Jennings.2 Aucoin’s 911 call came in at 11:54 a.m. that day—“James said he was going fishing when he found the body,” wrote detective Angie Theunissen. “Everyone responded.” Investigators from the Sheriff’s Office, the DA’s office, and the Calcasieu Parish forensics unit converged at 12:02 p.m. The victim was naked, save for a gold ring and white sock with red hearts. She was identified as Roxanne’s beloved friend Kristen Gary Lopez. A missing person report had been filed for her on March 15. Investigators confirmed her identity by the tattoo on her lower right leg: interlocking hearts.
Yet the passage of time from Kristen’s last-known sighting—sometime around March 5, 2007—to the date her body was discovered, March 18, made the task of determining a cause of death difficult. The Coroner’s Office ruled her cause of death “undetermined” and noted that the body was significantly decomposed.3 The notes describe “no obvious injuries: no scalp injuries, no facial or rib fractures,” but instead “horseshoe-shaped puncture wounds consistent with the frontal jaws of alligators. I feel all of the injuries . . . were due to marine predators, after her death, chewing on her.”
Kristen’s fate was particularly cruel because she was so vulnerable. At twenty-one, she was physically gawky—wide forehead, thin nose, outsize ears, and a choppy, severe haircut that rested just above her shoulders. She was intellectually disabled and received Supplemental Security Income checks every month; when she was growing up in Jennings, she participated in Special Olympics events in Baton Rouge. Tougher still, a thirty-five-year-old man had sexually assaulted her when she was just thirteen. She had hardly any family support.4 Her parents, Andrew Newman and Melissa Daigle, struggled with substance abuse problems and Newman was a regular at the Boudreaux Inn. Between the ages of eight and ten, Kristen was forced to live with her grandmother Nancy. In her preteen years she returned home but was placed in what her mother dubbed the “slow-learning class.” Angry and frustrated as an outsider, Kristen dropped out of school in the eighth grade, only to get lost in the South Jennings underworld. Like the victims who preceded her, Kristen had become so alienated from friends and family that she was little more than a spectral presence. “She was out in the streets, she’d go from one place to another, she’d sleep on porches and in barns,” Kristen’s grandmother told me. “She’d say, ‘Mama?’ And I’d say, ‘What, baby?’ And she’d say, ‘Do you have something to eat?’ I’d fix her two or three ham sandwiches and two Cokes, put it in a bag, and off she’d go.”5
In Frankie Richard, Kristen found both a father figure and a protector and took to calling him Uncle Frankie. In true Jennings fashion, their lives had intersected for many years: Frankie’s sister Tabatha babysat Kristen when she was a toddler. Frankie told me that his family assisted in the raising of Kristen because her mother, Melissa, was addicted to drugs and unable to care for her. Melissa does not deny past drug problems nor that Frankie’s kin babysat for her slain daughter. In fact she believe Frankie holds the answers. “I still say Frankie and Tracee [Chaisson] know what happened to my child,” Melissa told me.
In Frankie’s room at the Budget Inn—down the road from the Boudreaux Inn—Kristen found both sex work and shelter. Just before Mardi Gras in 2007, Kristen and fellow sex worker Tracee Chaisson (cousin of the first Jeff Davis 8 victim, Loretta) were viciously beaten by a Jennings drug dealer over a dispute about money. They were traumatized and deeply concerned for their safety. That spring they stuck closely to Frankie and strayed only from the Budget Inn to pick up fresh clothes. Sometimes, Kristen and Tracee avoided putting on new clothes altogether. Kristen could often be seen wandering near Frankie’s house wearing Tweety Bird pajama pants and flip-flops.
When Frankie booked Room 114 at the Budget Inn for a two-week stretch—February 23, 2007, through March 8, 2007—Tracee and Kristen could breathe easily knowing they were temporarily safe from drug dealers.6 At the time Frankie was one of the most respected and feared street hustlers in Jefferson Davis Parish. If you stuck with Frankie, you were safe.
But soon after the trio checked into Room 114, tensions emerged. Frankie suspected Tracee and Kristen were ransacking his room for everything from cash to motel shampoo bottles. “If they caught you slipping, you was got,” Frankie told me, “and you don’t leave a hundred-dollar bill laying around or no dope or nothing of any value hanging around because they had a habit to support.”7 Fed up, Frankie banned both Tracee and Kristen from Room 114. The women were devastated. They had nowhere else to go.
Late in the evening of March 5, 2007, Tracee and Kristen approached Frankie outside his home on McKinley Street and begged to be taken back to the safety of his room at the Budget Inn. “Kristen come give me a hug and said, ‘Uncle Frankie, you don’t want me back to your room?’ And I said, ‘No, because you don’t have no respect, you want to steal everything.’ ” According to Frankie, the women then left and “went over to Frank Street,” just blocks away, to have sex with clients. This was the last time Frankie saw Kristen.
Taskforce investigators conjecture that Kristen stopped at Frank Street just hours before she was murdered. Several of Kristen’s personal items were seized from the Frank Street home, including a gray bra with pink trim, a pair of orange shorts, and a white undershirt.
At first, Tracee Chaisson corroborated Frankie’s version of events. She told investigators that she last saw Kristen on the night of March 5th at 214 Frank Street, the home of a mutual acquaintance, which also served as a base for drugs and sex in South Jennings. Tracee had begged Kristen to go home because the pair had been partying for days, and the Frank Street location was unsafe. Tracee eventually left, but Kristen stayed. When a week passed with no word from Kristen, Tracee grew worried. On March 15, she called Kristen’s mother, Melissa Daigle.
“Tracee was the one that led me to my daughter’s murder,” Daigle told me. “She called me—I was living in Evangeline Parish at the time—and she said that something really bad happened to Kristen. I said, ‘What are you talking about? Get your fuckin’ ass ready because I’m coming to get ya.’ I got into my car with a picture of Kristen and picked up Tracee and went to the police station.”8 There, they filed a missing person report, and just three days later Kristen’s body was discovered in the Petitjean Canal.