It takes a near-supernatural force to move Frankie Richard off his front porch, but by 2010, the increasingly high profile of the Jeff Davis 8 case goaded him not just off his porch, but out of the parish. On a steamy July day in 2011, I pulled up to Frankie’s house to meet him. When the front door swung open, I was greeted not by Frankie but by his nephew Billy Conner Jr., who told me that Frankie was no longer living there. Billy invited me in anyway and led me to a low-ceilinged kitchen, where Frankie’s sister, Tabatha, his brother, Billy Conner Sr., and his mother, Jeanette LeBlanc, were all seated. Though she is barely over five feet tall and in her midseventies, LeBlanc (called Maw Maw, Southern slang for “grandma”) was the room’s center of gravity. As LeBlanc scooped gloppy heaps of peanut butter with a pair of oversize spoons, she soothingly promised me that she would find Frankie’s cell phone number. In the meantime, she instructed Billy Conner Jr. to find out where Frankie might be. While Billy made several calls from an old rotary phone affixed to the kitchen wall, LeBlanc proudly boasted that the Richard family had hosted reporters from New York to Switzerland. As she lidded one of the peanut butter jars, she lamented law enforcement corruption, ranting about Paula Guillory’s alleged mishandling of the theft-ring raid on their home back in 2009. “She took thirty-five hundred dollars that I’d saved up for braces for one of my children,” LeBlanc told me, “about a thousand dollars in rare coins, and two of my pistols!” She let out a hearty laugh and then became serious. “This is a corrupt parish,” she said sternly, “but it’s the people who run the parish, not the people themselves.” Before LeBlanc was able to say much more about the raid, Billy Conner Jr. returned to the kitchen with Frankie’s cell phone number scrawled on a piece of notebook paper. I thanked LeBlanc for her help and made my way back outside. On Frankie’s front porch, I dialed his cell phone number and he immediately picked up. He nervously explained that he’d fled to Breaux Bridge—nearly fifty miles east of Jennings—and that he was hunkered down in a friend’s camper.
At around 5:00 p.m. the next day, I pulled up to a long tan mobile home in a rural section of Breaux Bridge just off I-10. Before I could even put my car in park, Frankie, who was dressed in a gray short-sleeve shirt and jean shorts, ambled to my car to meet me. He appeared frailer than a man in his midfifties, but he struck an imposing presence nonetheless; when we shook hands, his thick fingers seemed to envelope my own. After our greeting, Frankie led me into the camper and shut the door behind us; we sat just inches from each other at a tiny kitchen table squeezed in by the front door. In the almost deathly quiet, the only sound came from a small, boxy air conditioner that rumbled to life every few minutes. “I didn’t hurt none of them,” Frankie told me of the Jeff Davis 8 as he leaned back in his chair. “All them girls was my friends.”1 He paused for a breath and then admitted that he’s been known as one of the roughest street players in Jennings for decades, “a dope addict, a coke head, meth head, alcoholic, no-good son of a bitch” always up for a fight and willing to commit acts of violence for others.
But Frankie insisted that he swore off violence for good in the early 1990s when his daughter Lauren, now twenty-four, was born. She was not breathing and essentially lifeless after she was delivered at a hospital in Jennings. After forty-five minutes she was medevaced to Ochsner Hospital in New Orleans. Her full recovery—doctors had told Frankie that his daughter would suffer significant brain damage as a result of being deprived of oxygen—convinced Frankie to make a “deal with the Lord.” He would never resort to violence except to defend himself or his family. “That right there oughta tell somebody that I wouldn’t hurt nobody,” Frankie says angrily. “I would not put my hands on somebody, because that’s the deal I made with the Lord. I cannot break that deal for no other reason that I can’t do it because of my daughter’s life.”
Frankie spoke to me passionately and with a surprising eloquence about his daughter and his relationship with the Jeff Davis 8 victims. He had grown up with Whitnei’s relatives, and Brittney’s family had helped his brother Billy Conner Sr. recover from colon cancer. He laments how the murders set Jennings families at odds with one another.
Despite his vows to swear off violence, Frankie has been charged with simple assault, simple battery, aggravated battery, and second-degree battery in the years following the birth of his daughter. And the almost never-ending series of dropped charges against him—Clemens and Kristen in 2007, and the theft case in 2009—can likely be attributed not to Frankie’s innocence but law enforcement’s incompetence.
There is no doubt, too, that Frankie was one of the last to see both Whitnei and Kristen alive. In our interview, he provided a string of incriminating statements, including an admission that Michael Prudhomme cleaned Connie Siler’s truck “before Warren Gary ever got ahold of it.” However, he has denied involvement in any of the murders and dismissed allegations—such as transporting dead women in barrels—as ludicrous in both interviews with me and with Taskforce investigators. In a January 2009 interview with the Taskforce, Frankie said the notion that “in the back of the house I had one of them girls in a fifty-five-gallon drum of chemicals . . . [is] a lie.”
Perhaps because he sensed that he’d talked too much about the Jeff Davis 8 slayings, Frankie turned defiant. “I’ll never go back to Jennings,” he told me. “And I was raised right there at my mother’s house on McKinley Street.” I asked him why he’d never return home. “I been hospitalized for depression, for cocaine, alcohol, just trying to forget that shit,” he explained, referring to the accusations against him in the Jeff Davis 8 case. “What I’m trying to do is get away from Jennings and get my head right and put this behind me and my family.” Frankie tapped a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table. “I’m determined to get my head on right. I’m one year clean from meth and a hundred days clean from alcohol and cocaine after forty-two years. That’s a long fuckin’ time for a motherfucker like me.” For a moment, Frankie seemed vulnerable and wounded, but just before I left his camper, he tapped my notepad and tape recorder with a stubby index finger and asked me to take down the following, a paraphrase of a Wyatt Earp quote from the 1993 movie Tombstone: “If something ever happens to my kids behind this shit, they can believe one fucking thing: Frankie Richard’s coming and hell is coming with him.”
In the early-morning hours of July 8, 2011, I was awakened by a phone call from private investigator Kirk Menard, who told me that yet another murder had occurred on the streets of South Jennings. “Bowlegs is dead,” Menard said mournfully. David “Bowlegs” Deshotel was a white, heavily tattooed twenty-nine-year-old hustler and onetime boyfriend of two Jeff Davis 8 victims, Necole Guillory and Brittney Gary. Bowlegs was so close with Brittney that when she was reported missing in the fall of 2008, her family thought she might have fled town with him. Necole’s mother, Barbara, told me with a smile, “Little Dave and my daughter used to get into a lot of trouble together.”
David Deshotel earned the Bowlegs nickname just months before his death. In March 2011, he was shot in the leg by a Houston-based rival named Carvell O’Brien.2 O’Brien turned himself in to the cops and was charged with attempted second-degree murder. It was a rare case of a violent crime being solved in Jennings. But the shooting left Deshotel on crutches. “Bowlegs! Bowlegs! Bowlegs!” South Jennings residents hollered as he hobbled by. When Bowlegs became too exhausted to walk, he’d hoist himself into a clunky wheelchair and roll around the neighborhood. Bowlegs and his wheelchair became such a fixture in South Jennings that I spotted him myself. On the night of July 7, 2011, as I rode down Hobart Street in Menard’s battered Ford Escape, Deshotel waved at us from his wheelchair. It was a fleeting encounter, but I instantly remembered him because his red baseball cap and matching sweatpants reminded me of Wayne D., South Park’s send-up of Caucasian gangsta.
On the morning of July 8, 2011, just hours after I’d seen him, Bowlegs was shot to death in his tiny single-family home on Hobart Street, which sits in a particularly rough section of South Jennings. The coroner pronounced him dead at the scene. Yet law enforcement left his home unsecured. When I met Menard there that morning, we were both stunned not to find any yellow crime scene tape. Worse, we watched, slack jawed, as burly, shirtless tattooed men—one with a gigantic 337 (the area code for southwestern Louisiana) across his bare back—casually strode in and out of the crime scene. I even saw a few men remove items from the home. The chaotic atmosphere vividly demonstrated the ineptitude of local law enforcement. Unsurprisingly, no one has ever been arrested or charged in the case.
In the wake of Bowlegs’s murder, I traveled with Menard to the outskirts of Jennings to follow up on a tip. A female witness had told Menard that during the peak of the Jeff Davis 8 murders in 2008 and 2009, she had done drugs with several of Frankie Richard’s associates, including Necole Guillory, at an abandoned home on Martin Roy Road. Inside, she saw drawings of the Jeff Davis 8 scrawled across the walls. It was a seemingly outlandish claim, but because Tracee Chaisson had told investigators that she had done drugs with Frankie in a house on Martin Roy Road just prior to Kristen Gary Lopez’s murder, it nonetheless seemed worth checking out. So, Menard, Mike Dubois, and I piled into Menard’s car. As we drove down Martin Roy, the atmosphere grew quiet and tense. All of us knew that the Jeff Davis 8 had followed a similar route to the outskirts of Jennings in their final moments.
We reached an abandoned house set back on a large plot of land. A white camper was sunk into the tall, unkempt grass beside it. Menard spotted a gold Dodge Ram parked on the front of the property, and Dubois said he’d seen Tracee Chaisson riding around town in a truck that resembled it. Just as we clambered out of Menard’s truck, an older white man strode across the back of the property. Dubois jogged over to him. He seemed unbothered by Dubois, and the pair engaged in what seemed to be a friendly conversation. A few moments later, the man was joined by a burly, bearded man who, I later learned, was his nephew.
The trio was out of earshot, though I caught what sounded like snippets of French. Menard told me that Dubois was speaking in Cajun French. Dubois, who was smoking the end of a cigarette, started gesturing wildly with his hands. Then he gave the others a handshake and climbed back in the truck. Dubois said no one had been using the abandoned house recently and that it was near collapse, with nothing—certainly not drawings of murdered women—on its walls. “But I seen Frankie and his brother Billy here,” the older man told Dubois, “years ago. And I know Frankie been in some homes down the road. A yellow house and one old wooden place that’s falling apart.”
Menard took pictures of all three properties and then called his witness to tell her the tip had partially panned out. During the phone call, the tipster reiterated that she was certain that drawings of the Jeff Davis 8 were on the walls and that she’d recognized a portrait of Necole because she’d seen her face on the news. Menard was unable to verify the witness’s claim because she had allegedly seen the drawing more than a year before our trip—even if the drawing had existed, it was long gone before we checked out the homes.
On the ride back to Jennings, Menard realized that he was nearly out of gas, so we stopped at an E-Z Mart to fuel up. The low-riding Cadillac parked next to us had an RIP BOWLEGS banner in its back window, another sign of the endless mourning that had plagued the region for so long. The new murders in the parish—most of which are still unsolved—led to unprecedented pressure on Sheriff Edwards and, finally, a pervasive sentiment in Jennings that he was no longer the right man for the job. “I was approached by a businessman who said, ‘Maybe Ricky’s not the guy,’ ” former Jennings Daily News reporter Scott Lewis told me. “Other businessmen grumbled that he was giving a black eye to the town: ‘Maybe it’s time for Ricky to step down.’ ”3 Suddenly Sheriff Edwards’s vocal business-elite supporters had dwindled, which meant that he was unlikely to last long. It was a profound fall for Edwards, who had been sheriff for nearly two decades. Few in the parish were surprised when, in May of 2011, he announced he would not seek reelection.
In the dynastic tradition of southwest Louisiana, Edwards handpicked his successor: Chief Deputy Larry Dupuis. But as the race for sheriff began in the fall of 2011, Dupuis faced off against a surprisingly large number of candidates, among them former detective Jesse Ewing, the whistle-blower who took the notorious witness statements implicating Warren Gary in evidence destruction, and Ivy Woods, a twenty-one-year veteran of the Louisiana State Police. In 2006, Woods had seized $3.3 million in cash off I-10, which at the time was the largest illegal drug currency seizure in Louisiana history.4 The candidates held a debate on September 27, 2011, in the Strand Theater, a soaring art deco building on North Main Street. The discourse was often contentious, though nearly all of the candidates promised to make the Jeff Davis 8 case a priority. “As your sheriff,” Woods told the crowd of Jennings residents, “I will be able to access the files to see what has been done and what needs to be done. Right now, I am unable to look at any files.”5 The next day in the Lake Charles American Press the headline read “Unsolved Deaths Priority for Candidates.”
As the election approached, Dupuis, Sheriff Edwards’s anointed successor, was slipping in the polls, while Woods was gaining momentum. The election reflected voters’ indignation with the status quo. Woods gave Dupuis a profound thumping, receiving 70 percent of the votes (6,624) to Dupuis’s 22.38 percent (2,114).6 “We want to look over all the investigations,” a jubilant Woods told KPLC that night. “The number one thing we would like to do is regain the trust of the public. There’s a gap there and we want to close it and make it more personal.”
Even though I watched the election results from afar, in New Orleans, I, too, was thrilled to see change come to the parish. The Edwards era was finally over, bringing with it new hope for resolution in the Jeff Davis 8 case. That December, I called Sheriff-elect Woods to discuss his approach to the Jeff Davis 8 investigation. His wife, Brigit, answered the phone and was friendly when I introduced myself. She gave me Woods’s cell phone number, but when I called him there, the number wasn’t working. I called Brigit back and she again sounded happy to hear from me, but she claimed she hadn’t been able to reach Woods either.
Later that day, as I interviewed Sheriff Edwards at his office, my cell phone rang with an unfamiliar number. I silenced the call. Afterward I checked my voice mail and found a message from Joy Huvall, who identified herself as a member of Woods’s transition team.7 She told me that Woods wouldn’t be making any comment on the case until he took office, in July. When I called Huvall back, she told me that Woods didn’t want to say anything about the Jeff Davis 8 murders until he could “review all of the evidence.” I thanked Huvall for getting in touch; it made a lot of sense that Woods wouldn’t want to comment until he took over as sheriff.
Woods’s electoral triumph should have instilled a profound sense of fear among the Jeff Davis 8 suspects, particularly Frankie Richard, who had a good thing going with the Edwards administration. But when I arrived at Frankie’s house during the spring of 2012, just months after he vowed to never return to Jennings, I found him at ease in his front-porch rocker, shirtless and paunchy as ever. Next to him sat Brandon “Disco” Wise, the street associate who accompanied Frankie and Trahan to the Dubois family home the morning Whitnei’s body was found. Though decades of drugging, pimping, and street brawling have severely impaired Frankie’s cognitive skills, he was nonetheless acutely aware of just how odd it looked that he was happily back on his porch. He had insisted that the publicity surrounding the Jeff Davis 8 case had forced him into permanent exile, and now he knew he would have to explain the turnabout. He quickly reverted to a tried-and-true strategy, one that he’d deployed when we first met in Breaux Bridge: framing himself as the victim in the Jeff Davis 8 case.
“I can remember a time when Dallas Cormier lived right over here,” he said of the former sheriff, who is also a South Jennings native.8 “They would call me and tell me they have a warrant for me, and I would get a bondsman and post the bond. Now the whole force is coming for me.” Frankie flashed a conspiratorial smile and asked me if I wanted to hear a story; I said that I’d love to. “One day I was walking down the street and”—he paused for dramatic effect, then clapped his hands loudly to make a gunshot sound—“pow! Where it was coming from, I don’t know.” I asked him if he was serious—was he really targeted in an assassination attempt? “Oh, yeah. If you gonna shoot me, look me in the face when you shoot me, motherfucker.” He rubbed his goatee. “Three different times that happened since this shit started with them murders.”
Frankie spun incredible tales about his life in Jennings in the Jeff Davis 8 era—the entire Sheriff’s Office was after him, he was nearly killed in three assassination attempts—but as the sun began to set that day, the Richard home took on a familial, everyday feel. His family ambled up the front steps for dinner, and Frankie’s sister Tabatha offered me their mother Jeanette’s specialty, crawfish pie. When I politely declined, the frowning, disappointed look on Tabatha’s face told me I’d violated a core principle of Southern life, graciously accepting a host’s meal. But I was far too aware that at least two of the victims in the Jeff Davis 8 case had spent their final hours here. I imagined sitting down to dinner and then waking up (or perhaps not waking up at all) in a nearby bayou. So instead of eating, I pushed Frankie to wrap up his assassination tale. Who did he think tried to take his life? I asked. “I don’t know,” Frankie replied, adding with a sly smile, “If I knew, he wouldn’t shoot me again.”
Even though one criminal case after another against him collapsed, Frankie insisted that the assassination attempts demonstrate he is a wanted man, by everyone from Sheriff Woods to pimps and pill pushers of South Jennings. “They haven’t stopped me,” Frankie told me, “but of course I don’t go nowhere.” He pointed to the wooden porch below him. “I stay right here.”
Just as Frankie proclaimed himself a victim of police harassment, a procession of beat-up, low-riding Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs rolled by in ominous slow motion. “FRAN-KAY!” a couple of young African-American men yelled out car windows, trying to grab his attention. One man in saggy pants actually clambered out of a Cadillac and bowed to him. “Hey, FRAN-KAY.” Frankie halfheartedly acknowledged the hustlers with a slight, awkward wave. He was visibly aware that the tributes from South Jennings street hustlers profoundly contradicted the down-and-out image that he was so desperately trying to project to me.
The impromptu salutations also attracted the attention of Frankie’s mother, Jeanette, who had been watching the evening news in the living room. “C’mon, Richard,” Jeanette said derisively, striding onto the front porch, “cut it short!”
Frankie shifted uncomfortably in his rocker. “They doin’ a life history on me,” he said meekly, sounding like a chastened child.
Jeanette rolled her eyes. “Oh, Lord.” She let out a long sigh.
For the first time that night, Frankie looked nervous. “I’m not telling him everything,” he protested.
“Keep some secrets,” Jeanette said icily before turning back to the living room.
Jeanette’s warning resonated with Frankie’s associate Disco, who had until then been quietly monitoring the interview. “You got big nuts,” Disco warned me. “You writing on Jennings. And you’re riding in Jennings. You got big nuts, man.” At first Disco’s comments seemed little more than a reflection on how crazy I’ve been to tackle this sprawling case. But then his warnings turned sinister. “You in the crookedest town in Louisiana,” he drawled. “New Orleans ain’t got shit on us.” The gibe against New Orleans was purposeful—Disco clearly wanted me to know the violence in my hometown couldn’t even compare to the bloodshed in Jennings. He finally dropped the potshots and made the danger I’d be facing plain. “If you destroy they business,” he said, referring to the crooked cops and deputies in Jefferson Davis Parish, “you be a dead-ass lil’ white boy.” Disco wiped his nose with his right hand and surveyed the neighborhood. “You a bold-ass little man, dog. Don’t get caught in Jeff Davis Parish at night. Make sure you’re staying somewhere with security cameras. Watch your fuckin’ back, bro.”
But such warnings didn’t dissuade me from my investigation. Even then, back in 2012, I’d already spent months investigating the Jeff Davis 8 case and had become accustomed to dire predictions about my fate. “Do you like to live?” Necole’s mother, Barbara, asked me when I visited her in her trailer in the summer of 2011. “I’d hate to read a newspaper and see your name in it.” But Disco had sensed that I wasn’t about to be scared off, and his tone transitioned from intimidating to darkly humorous: “It’s Jennings, man.” He gave me a friendly, almost collegial clap on the shoulder. “Welcome to the Dirty South.”
Despite Sheriff Woods’s promises, nothing new developed in the Jeff Davis 8 investigation. And he was also breaking his promises of transparency. As instructed, I waited until July 2012 to contact his office. I spoke to Joy Huvall again, who told me dismissively, “Do you have a bald head? The sheriff googled you. He’ll call you back.”9 More than four years later, I have not heard back from Sheriff Woods, though I do in fact have a bald head.
The Taskforce, too, continued to operate as an inneffective and conflicted entity. In the spring of 2012, private investigator Kirk Menard referred a pair of female witnesses to the Taskforce. They claimed they were being stalked by Frankie Richard. One even claimed that Frankie had used her father’s phone after killing Whitnei. Menard strongly believed that both witnesses were credible. One had highly specific information about the Whitnei Dubois slaying.
The women reported back to Menard that Taskforce investigator Ramby Cormier dismissed them outright, claiming, “Frankie works for me.” Furious, Menard wrote the following e-mail to Cormier on May 10, 2012:
To: Ramby Cormier [e-mail address redacted]:
Ramby,
I will give you some information I’ve received but I will ask that you keep it between us as I keep confidential information between us as well. I’ve received a phone call from WITNESS A regarding the questioning of FEMALE WITNESS 1 and FEMALE WITNESS 2. FEMALE WITNESS 1 explained to me that you told FEMALE WITNESS 2 not to worry about Frankie because Frankie works for you (her exact words were [“]do not worry about Frankie because he works for me[”]) and supposedly for Acadia Parish detective Keith Latiolais. She also mentioned that you stated that she was to be the next victim, which scared her tremendously. She also stated that you stated to FEMALE WITNESS 2 that Mike Dubois was the killer. . . . She also stated that you said “watch who you trust” which is understandable. I found the phone call very strange because you are usually reserved and questioning a witness usually receives information and does not give information. She stated that you told her that she did not need a gun or mace but stated she was confused because of your comment about “she may be the next victim.” She did call the FBI and repeat to them about her questioning with you because she was scared when you told her that she will be the next victim or may be the next victim. From what I understand, she reiterated to the FBI about your questioning of her and FEMALE WITNESS 2. In any case, both girls are terrified. She also informed me about Frankie and that he has three cell phones and one is issued to him by the task force. In any case, I felt you should know this information in maintaining my reporting procedures. The only reason I would not want FEMALE WITNESS 1 or FEMALE WITNESS 2 to know that I’ve informed you of what I was told is because they are already terrified and if they do have any more information, it may scare them into coming forward in the future. Just FYI. Thanks.10
Menard had expected to receive a reply from Cormier immediately because this e-mail contained so many explosive allegations, top among them that Frankie Richard had a Taskforce-issued cell phone. But Menard says that years later Cormier has still not responded to this e-mail even after acknowledging a flurry of other tips. Menard insists that both witnesses truthfully recounted their interrogation.
“No, it’s not correct,” Cormier told me when I asked him about the allegations in the e-mail. “Just because that’s what people say, that doesn’t mean that’s what happened.”11
The Taskforce and the Sheriff’s Office may have been corrupt and ineffective, but on the streets and in the courtrooms of southwest Louisiana an alternative form of justice was being served. On August 25, 2012, Kenneth Patrick Drake, the forty-four-year-old man from Welsh who attacked Jeff Davis 8 victim Crystal Benoit Zeno with a metal pipe, passed away (the circumstances of his death are not clear).12 A little more than one year later, on November 26, 2013, Ervin “Big Mack” Edwards, one of the men who dumped Muggy’s body, died at the West Baton Rouge Parish jail, where he was being held for resisting arrest and disturbing the peace.13 The thirty-eight-year-old Big Mack had been arrested for fighting with his girlfriend in a gas station parking lot and was placed in an isolation cell. There, Big Mack’s family claims, a police officer shocked him with a stun gun, causing his death. (In the spring of 2015, in the midst of a period of high-profile police misconduct such as in the case of Freddie Gray, a Baltimore man who died from severe spinal injuries after being held in police custody, Edwards’s case was discussed nationally. #ErvinEdwards even became a hashtag tweeted by celebrities such as Mia Farrow.14)
That same month, former Jennings police chief Johnny Lassiter, who served as a lieutenant under Chief Todd D’Albor, pleaded guilty to two counts of malfeasance in office.15 He had pilfered $4,500 in cash, 380 grams of cocaine, several pounds of marijuana, codeine, and 1,800 pills from the evidence room. In June of 2014, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and ordered to pay back $4,500 to the city of Jennings.16 Lassiter is a key figure in both the Jeff Davis 8 case and the KK’s Corner killings in Calcasieu Parish. A witness claimed to have observed Lassiter in an unmarked police unit outside KK’s in the hours after the triple homicide there in July of 1997. According to an official complaint by Jeff Davis 8 whistle-blower Jesse Ewing, in January 2008, Lassiter pulled a gun on him. Specifically, Ewing reports, Chief Lassiter removed a handgun from a holster, placed the gun on his desk, and pointed its barrel directly at Ewing.17 “The way I have been firing people,” Lassiter allegedly told Ewing, “you never know who is going to want to take my head off.” It’s unclear if any charges were ever brought against Lassiter in the incident with Ewing.
Still, the fates of these Jeff Davis 8 players did not bring about a resolution in any of the slayings. By the outset of 2014, the eight women were fading even further into history. That spring would mark nine years since Loretta’s body was discovered in the Grand Marais Canal.