At about 2:00 a.m. on May 11, 2007, Whitnei Dubois—the younger sister of Mike Dubois, who hustled prescription pain medication with Harvey “Bird Dog” Burleigh—was furiously searching for drugs in South Jennings. She stopped at her older brother’s house and, just afterward, Frankie Richard’s. Whitnei, twenty-six, stood at a petite five foot three and possessed a wide, engaging smile. She had thick brown bangs that hung just above her eyes. Like her fellow Jeff Davis 8 victims, Whitnei struggled with drug addiction and came from a troubled background. When she was six months old, she was abandoned by her birth mother and taken in by Elery and Dorothy Dubois, who had a large family of their own.1 The Dubois clan cared for Whitnei until she was two, when the courts ordered that she be placed back into her biological mother’s care. Years later, after enduring physical and sexual abuse at the hands of several of their mother’s boyfriends and husbands, Whitnei and her sister were officially adopted by the Dubois family. Mike Dubois was more than twenty years Whitnei’s senior. His daughter Brittany was Whitnei’s aunt, but the pair were raised as sisters. “We tried to shelter Whitnei as much as we could,” Mike Dubois said.
The love and protectiveness of her new Jennings family, however, could not erase Whitnei’s long history of trauma. One of the men who dated her mother attacked Whitnei’s brother Cody with a butcher knife. “Me and Whitnei would huddle in the closet and cry,” Whitnei’s sister Taylor told the Jennings Daily News.2 “We could hear our brother screaming, but we couldn’t do anything to stop it.” Whitnei remained angry and rebellious into her late teens and developed a fierce crack-cocaine habit with her boyfriend, Jennings drug dealer Alvin “Bootsy” Lewis. (Bootsy had myriad connections to the Jeff Davis 8 milieu: he was a witness to the 2005 murder of Leonard Crochet and his brother was married to the first Jeff Davis 8 victim, Loretta Chaisson.) “It was a battle between her and Bootsy,” Mike Dubois remembers. “She loved Bootsy and Bootsy loved her. But they fought. Whitnei had a temper. She was a fighter, man. She was sweet as gold, but don’t make her mad. Even though she and Bootsy would fight, they were pretty much irreplaceable to each other. But the big trouble was, Bootsy couldn’t stay out of jail. Bootsy would get busted for dealing crack, Bootsy would get busted for stealing, Bootsy would get busted for this, that, and the other, you know. And it left Whitnei hanging out there.”
The loneliness that Whitnei felt when her relationship with Bootsy faltered eased when she became pregnant in 1996. She gave birth to a daughter, Beyoncé Dubois in November of that year. But Whitnei’s problems with drugs and with the law persisted. In 2001, she was charged with cocaine possession (the case was dismissed),3 and on April 8, 2006, she and Bootsy got into a brawl in Room 204 at the Boudreaux Inn. When investigators arrived at the scene, they found a large pool of blood in the bathroom. Whitnei had been stabbed in the back of the head with a screwdriver.4 The deep wound measured two inches long and a quarter of an inch deep.
By 2006, Whitnei had hit rock bottom. “Our daddy passed,” explained her brother Mike. “That was traumatic again for Whitnei because she was Daddy’s girl. She had all of the other problems from her past and then Daddy died. When Daddy died, she lost her sanctuary, ’cause Daddy’s house was there and she could go. When Daddy died, that was gone. Daddy was her protector. Whitnei could do no wrong in Daddy’s eyes. So when Daddy died, Whitnei probably got worser at everything. She was already bad, but she got worser at everything.” Mike Dubois added, “The rest of our family judged her, looked down on her.”
Mike was one of the few remaining family members Whitnei felt she could trust. In the early-morning hours of May 11, 2007, on a quest for drugs and shelter, she stopped at his home. “Whitnei walked to my dad’s house,” Mike Dubois’s daughter Brittany Jones told me. “She got something to eat and said she wanted to stay there. She was stealing and nobody could trust her and my dad didn’t want her to stay. They started arguing. Whitnei told my grandma, ‘You always favor him.’ Then she took off out the front door. When my grandma went through her purse, she noticed that Whitnei had stolen all of her medicine. [Whitnei] took her pain medicine, her nerve medicine, anything she could get high off of. Then she turned the corner and went to Frankie’s. She didn’t stay long. Her and Frankie were arguing about something in the front yard. She took off. Some people say that Frankie took off after her.”5
Frankie confirmed to me that Whitnei stopped by his house sometime late in the evening of May 10 or early on May 11, but refuses to say what she was doing there. And he insists he had nothing to do with her murder a few hours later. “I’m on the side of the road when Whitnei died,” Richard says. “I’m on the side of the road getting searched by the police. I was getting searched by Jennings City Police. And they still tried to put that on me. I think that Mike Dubois had something to do with that. I really and truly do.”6
No one connected to the Dubois case disputes what happened next. At approximately 7:30 a.m. on May 12, Jamie Trahan, a Jennings man with close ties to Frankie, discovered a body at the intersection of Bobby and Earl Duhon Roads, on the outskirts of Jennings. The desolate area is surrounded by vast soybean and rice fields and shallow, murky crawfish ponds. Trahan told investigators that he spotted Whitnei’s lifeless body from Highway 102, about a half mile away.
Was it really possible that Trahan had spotted the body at such a distance? Even though the sun had risen and the sky was clear, it would have taken laser-sharp vision to discern a human figure from his vantage point. It makes one wonder whether Trahan had been actively searching for Whitnei, whether he had really been driving on Highway 102, and whether he knew ahead of time where the body had been dumped. I don’t have any evidence that suggests investigators followed this line of thinking. Reporter Scott Lewis, who covered the Dubois homicide for the Jennings Daily News, also questioned how her body could have been seen from Highway 102. “Whitnei was further south on Earl Duhon,” Lewis told me, “completely out of sight of La. 102. Unless police moved her body out of the intersection, it would have been absolutely impossible to see her body from the highway.”7
Word of the body spread rapidly. “I heard it was a woman,” said a nearby resident to the local news. “I don’t know the age, or anything like that, just that the body was found in the middle of the road. Some of the guys were talking this morning about how this was the fourth female body found within a year and a half in this general area. It’s scary. I have two kids and I’m scared. I hope they do something about it.”8
While the other Jeff Davis 8 victims were sparsely dressed when they were found, Whitnei was completely naked save for two elastic bands—one brown, the other white—hanging from her right wrist. An earring also lay near her body. Like the previous three victims, Whitnei had a high level of alcohol and drugs—cocaine and Xanax—in her system. The coroner deemed the cause of death “undetermined” and noted “non-specific” bruises on her lower extremities. He also found “no evidence of significant injuries or natural disease.”
Whitnei’s final hours are shrouded in mystery, and as with all of the Jeff Davis 8 victims, no one has been brought to justice in her murder. But I’ve obtained an interview conducted by the Taskforce of a witness whom I believe provides the most credible account of what happened to Whitnei Dubois on that May night. Out of concern for this witness’s safety, I will identify him only as Witness A.
Witness A told investigators that on the night of May 11, 2007, he, Jamie Trahan, and an unidentified woman partied at the Budget Inn, just down the road from the Boudreaux Inn. Late that evening, Trahan left the Budget Inn and did not tell friends where he was going. Hours later, Trahan returned and at approximately 5:15 a.m., Witness A and Trahan drove from the Budget Inn to the outskirts of Jennings: “We turn a corner and Whitnei was in the middle of the road,” said Witness A. Trahan attempted to convince A that what they’d just seen was not a corpse but a dead deer. “That wasn’t no deer,” A told Trahan, “that was a body.” Despite A’s pleas to pull over, Trahan returned to the Budget Inn, where he and his girlfriend took a shower. According to A, Trahan then drove back alone to where Whitnei had been dumped and called the police.
Trahan then rendezvoused with Frankie Richard and his street associate Brandon “Disco” Wise. “We was past Lafa-yette,” Wise told me, “and partner and I”—Wise gestures at Frankie—“were out there getting fucked up.”9
Just then, the pair were approached by Trahan. “Man, I found a body,” Trahan told Disco.
“What the fuck is you telling me for?” Disco shot back. “What you mean you found a body, dude?”
Disco remembers Trahan muttering, “I wish there was something I could do.”
Disco replied. “Why?”
Bringing, finally, a fuller explanation: “I found Whitnei’s body on the gravel road.”
Frankie took immediate action: “Disco and I put him [Trahan] in the car because I know Mike Dubois. I was raised with him. And I brought [Trahan] there, introduced him, and went outside and sat with Disco. I thought maybe he could give him some answers and some closure.”
But instead of answers, the visit—in which Trahan shocked the grieving Dubois family by offering to put up $2,500 for Whitnei’s funeral—posed only questions. What was Trahan doing at the desolate intersection of Earl Duhon and Bobby Roads that night to begin with? And what role, if any, did Frankie Richard play?
Witness A’s Taskforce interview doesn’t answer all of these questions, but it provides what I believe is the most complete account of Frankie’s involvement in the Dubois slaying. In early 2009, two years after Whitnei’s murder, Witness A and Frankie were enrolled together in a drug rehabilitation program in Logansport, Louisiana. During that time Frankie spoke openly about the Dubois murder. It was there, Witness A told the Taskforce, that Richard confessed. “He and James Trahan had killed Whitnei and . . . two other girls and he didn’t mention their names.” Witness A was unable to elicit many specifics from Richard about the killings, but Richard admitting to utilizing a “fifty-five-gallon drum behind his mama’s house.” There were, A told Taskforce investigators, “chemicals in the drum.” The drum could have been used to store the Jeff Davis 8 victims and preserve them in formaldehyde before the bodies were dumped. Indeed, Frankie himself has admitted to Taskforce investigators that he and his associates had purchased formaldehyde from Jennings-area funeral homes, most likely to sell and smoke as “wets,” a marijuana cigarette dipped in formaldehyde. But the mystery of the alleged fifty-five-gallon drum and what chemicals were inside it remains just that. Multiple witnesses have alleged that Frankie used a barrel to store his victims, but police chose not to follow the lead. Nor did they pay heed to Witness A’s specific and highly credible account of the behavior and activities of Jamie Trahan. This deeply unsettling investigative oversight would have fatal consequences down the road.
Soon after Witness A gave his statement, police discovered yet another victim with close ties to Frankie Richard. In the early-morning hours of May 14, 2007—just two days after Whitnei’s decomposing body was found—thirty-five-year-old crack addict and sex worker Elizabeth Dawn Clemens clambered into a rusted truck with Frankie and his associate Eugene “Dog” Ivory.10 The previous night Clemens had slept in Roxanne Alexander’s garage. Roxanne, the Jeff Davis 8’s maternal protector, didn’t know Clemens; she had simply allowed her to stay at her home because she was an associate of Dog’s. Just moments after pulling onto West Division Street, Frankie and Dog turned onto a gravel road. There, according to Clemens, Dog held her down in the backseat while Frankie raped her. Then the pair switched. “If you tell anyone, bitch,” warned Frankie, “you will end up like the others.” Clemens took Frankie’s threat as a clear, unmistakable reference to the four murdered sex workers—Loretta, Ernestine, Kristen, and most recently, Whitnei.
After the alleged assault, Clemens fled to a home on Sheridan Street in South Jennings, where she called the cops. When the police arrived, Clemens was sobbing uncontrollably in the living room. She refused to answer any questions. “They’ll kill me,” she wailed. “They’ll kill me like they did the others.” After Clemens calmed down, she provided a statement and was transported to the American Legion Hospital. A swab found a “sperm fraction” inside Clemens’s vagina that contained Dog’s DNA. In the wake of the test results, Dog and Frankie were both charged with rape; Frankie has long denied that he assaulted Clemens. He told me that he was the victim of a “fuckin’ bogus-ass rape charge” in the case.
Behind bars during the spring of 2007, Frankie lamented his bad luck. A judge set his bond at $750,000. At the time, he had expanded his seedy underworld empire to include both the Boudreaux Inn and the Budget Inn. Now, with two more murder victims—Kristen and Whitnei—who had strong personal connections to him, Frankie’s business stalled out. Worse, as a habitual offender in Louisiana, Frankie faced the possibility of a “natural life” sentence without parole.
Frankie’s legal woes would only deepen. On May 16, 2007, a warrant for his arrest was issued in Jefferson Davis Parish on second-degree murder charges in the slaying of Kristen Gary Lopez, the third victim.11 It was the first significant break in a Jeff Davis 8 murder case since the arrest of Byron Chad Jones and Lawrence Nixon in the 2005 killing of Ernestine. Sheriff Edwards eagerly announced the huge catch to local media.
“I’m sitting there watching the five o’clock news on Channel 7,” Frankie remembers, “Here comes Ricky Edwards on the TV and he says, ‘We have the killers in custody.’ And I say to myself, ‘All right, they got that motherfucker, ya know?’ Then, here comes my picture on the TV. Mine and my godchild. They charged my godchild with second-degree murder and told her, ‘Just say your uncle done it and you helped him clean it up and we’ll give you a manslaughter charge and let you walk.’ She said, ‘No, I ain’t doing it because he didn’t do it.’ ” Richard’s niece, Hannah Conner, was a crack addict at the time. She frequently partied with Frankie, Kristen, and Tracee Chaisson. A warrant was issued for Conner’s arrest on May 16, 2007, on second-degree murder charges.
Frankie and Conner were justifiably shocked; Frankie had not been interrogated in the investigation, and Conner had asserted that she had nothing to do with Kristen at the time she went missing. Tracee Chaisson had also offered little of use. She was simply one of the last people to see Kristen alive. She hadn’t implicated anyone.
But during a second interrogation (that was, until now, part of the DA’s file on the Lopez case that has never been made public), Tracee broke down weeping. She told investigators that on the night of March 9, she, Frankie, Kristen, Hannah Conner, and a Jennings sex worker named Connie Siler had been driving around in Siler’s Chevy Silverado. They stopped in South Jennings to purchase drugs, did rails of cocaine in a trailer Frankie owned on Martin Roy Road, then traveled to the outskirts of town along dirt roads. Richard was furious with Kristen for stealing from him, and at one point he stopped the truck, dragged her outside, and beat her severely. As she lay wounded, he pulled her into a nearby canal. Tracee claimed that Hannah Conner held Kristen under the water, and as Kristen went lifeless, Frankie threatened to kill Tracee and all of her children if she said a word. Frankie then dropped Tracee back at Frank Street, where she and Kristen had been engaging in sex work.
After offering the surprise confession, Tracee led a group of investigators on the route she said that she had taken with Frankie, Kristen, Siler, and Conner in the Silverado on the night of the murder. Tracee claimed the truck traveled through a rural area south of Jennings, to the intersection of Highways 380 and 99. From there, they took a right on Cherokee Road and parked by a levee near the Petitjean Canal. Here, Tracee told investigators, Frankie and Conner killed Kristen. When they drove off, Siler “kept whispering to be quiet and to say nothing because I was going to be next.”
Based almost entirely on her new statements, Tracee Chaisson was charged with accessory after the fact to second-degree murder, and Frankie and his niece Hannah Conner were hit with second-degree murder charges.
Both Conner and Tracee have refused multiple requests for interviews, but Frankie has talked to me about Kristen’s murder on several occasions. He not only denies any involvement, but claims to know who is responsible. “They left here,” Richard says of Tracee and Kristen, “here” being his home on McKinley Street. “They went over to Frank Street. Tracee and Connie [Siler] set Kristen up. The dudes they had ripped off were there. They made Tracee hold Kristen under the water.”12
Frankie’s story about Kristen’s fate lacks specifics: he couldn’t answer when I pressed him for details about where Tracee killed Kristen or why the drug dealers would kill her over a drug debt. Indeed, as we discussed his theory about Kristen’s murder, he seemed to realize the gravity of his implications and began to backpedal. “That’s what I was told,” he stressed, adding that he can only corroborate details about Kristen’s last days, which were mostly spent with him at the Budget Inn. “When Kristen asked me if she could go back to my room, I said no. I feel bad about that because she really had no place to go,” Richard laments. “If I had let her come back to my room, she might still be alive today.”
Tracee’s inconsistent statements on Kristen’s murder put the case on shaky factual ground from the get-go. Indeed, after Tracee stopped cooperating with investigators in late May of 2007, the second-degree murder case completely collapsed. “Obviously the judge was convinced they [Frankie and Hannah Conner] should be arrested because he issued a warrant,” one Taskforce investigator told me. “But the DA decided not to prosecute.” Frankie was sent back to the streets of South Jennings, and Jeff Davis law enforcement now had four unsolved sex-worker homicides. Worse, charges had been brought only to be dropped.
The summer of 2007 brought even better legal news for the once-beleaguered Frankie Richard. Like Rosalyn Breaux before her, Elizabeth Clemens walked into the DA’s office and asked to drop rape charges against her assailants, Frankie and Dog.13 The collapsing cases against Richard transformed him into a Teflon Don of the South Jennings underworld. For the moment, it seemed, no charge against him—be it rape or murder—could stick.
With four victims in two years, the milieu of the Jeff Davis 8 was quickly shrinking. The streets of South Jennings took another significant hit on July 25, 2007, when Harvey “Bird Dog” Burleigh, a witness to the Leonard Crochet killing, was stabbed to death inside a home on West Jefferson Street. A family member had discovered his body just after midnight after shopping at a local grocery store. “When she tried to get in the door, she noticed blood,” Jennings police chief Johnny Lassiter told the media. “The victim was found on the floor, just on the other side of the door. He had been stabbed multiple times.”14
Chief Lassiter assured reporters that the police were pursuing “several leads,” but like the Jeff Davis 8 case, Bird Dog’s murder remains unsolved. The lack of closure in the slaying was particularly disheartening because Bird Dog told friends that he’d gathered crucial intel in the Jeff Davis 8 slayings. “Just before he was killed,” Mike Dubois remembers, “Bird Dog told me, ‘I’m close to finding out who killed your sister. I almost got everything I need.’ And then—boom—somebody murdered him.”
A growing fear was rising across Jennings, transcending racial and economic divides. “It was just one murder after another, and suddenly there were different strands connecting all of them,” remembers Scott Lewis, the former reporter with the Jennings Daily News. “These people all knew each other. And now we were hearing all of the people killed knew Bird Dog. Every single one of these victims had been through Bird Dog’s living room. He knew all of them. This was far beyond one crazy person committing these murders.”15 Mounting public pressure for justice led Sheriff Edwards to lash out at the Jennings Daily News, which had preempted traditionally extensive coverage of the Jennings Bulldogs high school football team to focus more on the sex-worker slayings. During a visit with the sheriff by a member of the newspaper’s sales department, Sheriff Edwards tossed a copy of the paper in the direction of a garbage can. “You know where I keep my newspaper,” he said icily.