On January 31, 2014, I published a long-form feature headlined “Who Killed the Jeff Davis 8?” that ran on Medium.com.1 The piece reignited interest in the case, garnering coverage ranging from the Jennings Daily News to Business Insider to the feminist blog Jezebel to True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto, who called the piece an “important study of police corruption and supposed serial killer in Louisiana.”2
I’d worked on the piece quietly for years and was stunned by the reception it received, particularly because the case had already been covered by the likes of CNN and the New York Times. I was floored, however, by developments on the ground in Jefferson Davis Parish the day my piece was published. The body of twenty-seven-year-old Lacie Fontenot was found in a shallow ditch in Lake Arthur. “Story on Jeff Davis murders comes out this AM,” tweeted Campbell Robertson of the New York Times. “Another body is found this PM.”3 Like the Jeff Davis 8, Fontenot had been missing for days before she was discovered. “We have been talking to a few people,” Lake Arthur police chief Cheryl Vincent had told the media, “and nobody has seen her in four or five days.”4
Fontenot, who had long red hair and a pale freckled face, was found in a location much like the shallow water where the murdered sex workers were discarded: a foot of water in a ditch in a wooded area on Lake Arthur’s west side. Like the Jeff Davis 8, Fontenot struggled with substance abuse and shared a comparable criminal history. In 2006, she allegedly stabbed a sixty-three-year-old Lake Arthur man during an argument and faced second-degree murder charges, which a grand jury ultimately dismissed.5 Despite the many striking and undeniable similarities between the Jeff Davis 8 and Fontenot, the Lake Arthur police chief instantly dismissed any connection to the cases. Later, the coroner determined that Fontenot’s cause of death was drowning as a result of hypothermia. Yet the coroner’s ruling does not take into account the circumstances surrounding Fontenot’s death—namely her role in the brutal Jefferson Davis Parish sex-and-drug trade.
Fontenot, incredibly, was the second possible ninth victim. In 2012, a relative of slain drug addict Leonard Crochet, who asked that she remain anonymous out of concerns for her safety, was leaving Tina’s Bar, the South Jennings haunt frequented by the Jeff Davis 8, when she claimed that Tracee Chaisson approached her in the parking lot. “When I was walking out with my ride,” the Crochet family member told me when we spoke several weeks later on the front porch of her home, which is just down the street from the Richards’, “she was screaming out the car with some black people, ‘You’re gonna be number nine.’ ”
Crochet told me she reported the incident to Taskforce investigator Ramby Cormier. She cleared her throat nervously and said, “I could tell you more, but I’m scared. I’m scared for my own life.” The Jeff Davis 8 killings, she said, “started right after” her relative Leonard was killed. “Right after. All them girls were in there at one point. They were all in there for two days in and out.”6
And while Fontenot, like Crochet before her, was not the ninth victim, I unearthed myriad personal connections between her and the Jeff Davis 8. In the months before her death, Fontenot dated Bootsy Lewis, the father of Whitnei’s daughter and Loretta Chaisson’s brother-in-law. I also discovered that one of the last people to see Fontenot alive was Eugene “Dog” Ivory, a strong suspect in the slaying of Crystal Benoit Zeno. “Just before she turned up missing, she tried to get ahold of Dog,” a source close to Fontenot told me. “She’d asked for Dog’s phone number and met up with him. One of Lacie’s friends said that the last time she heard from Lacie was when she was connecting with Dog.”
I wasn’t the only one skeptical of local law enforcement’s handling of Fontenot’s death, specifically their dismissal of any links to the Jeff Davis 8. “We’re distrustful,” a member of Fontenot’s family, who asked to remain anonymous, told me in February of 2014. “We don’t think the timing of your article is a coincidence. I was sent a link to your article that morning, and Lacie was found that afternoon.” The Fontenot family member rightly noted that the coroner’s determination “doesn’t explain how she was dumped in the woods.”
On February 9, 2014, the Jennings Daily News ran three separate articles, quoting sources from the Sheriff’s Office, from the DA, and from the Jennings PD, all denouncing my work. I was cast as the out-of-town reporter who was “causing further pain to the victims’ loved ones and potentially harming investigative efforts.”7 The editors of the Jennings Daily News parroted the police brass with a subhead that read, absurdly, “Brown . . . created more problems.” The newspaper also ran an unsigned editorial on the same day, claiming that my article “leads the reader to point fingers, question authorities, and worst of all, force the families of the victims to relive the nightmare once again.”
The Jennings Daily News is a small paper for a small town; its attack on me took up most of the day’s real estate. While investigators talking to the paper claimed that my piece contained “misinformation” and “numerous inaccuracies,” they also consistently “declined to be specific on details” regarding what those supposed inaccuracies might have been.
The most ludicrous charge leveled against me by Jennings law enforcement was the implication that they never shared public records with me. “I’m not sure how some of the information was obtained,” parish DA Michael Cassidy told the Jennings Daily News. Cassidy should know how I obtained records in my investigation: I made requests directly to his office under Louisiana’s Public Records Act and received written responses from one of Cassidy’s own prosecutors, Assistant DA Kevin Millican, who also serves as the city attorney for Jennings. Indeed, I received thousands of pages of records from Millican alone. In a September 28, 2011, e-mail message, for example, Millican wrote to me, “At this point I have made 539 copies for the City of Jennings Police Department (JPD) files. I have all the District Attorney’s files and expect the total copies to exceed 1000 pages.”8 The dump of public records directly from Millican was so enormous that in the same e-mail he warned me that his office’s copying charge of fifty cents per page was going to result in “cost[s] that jump quickly.”
So when I published a short follow-up story for Medium called “My Investigation into the Jeff Davis 8 Murders” in which I detailed the thousands of pages of records that I’d obtained from the Louisiana State Police, the DA’s office, the Sheriff’s Office, and the Jennings PD, they were forced to acknowledge that they had indeed turned over records to me to comply with Louisiana’s Public Records Act. “We don’t necessarily like giving out these records,” Michael Cassidy then told the Jennings Daily News in a piece titled “Murder Investigation Documents Released under Public Records Law,” “at the same time, though, we have to comply with the law.”
I was never given an opportunity to comment for any of the pieces the Jennings Daily News ran about me, even though its reporters and editors had my e-mail address and phone number as well as the contact information for my agent and my editor at Medium.
While the DA was forced to walk back his claims about how I procured my documents, Sheriff Woods posted an extraordinary message about me on the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Office website:
Recently our office has come under fire by an investigative reporter from New Orleans and an author of fiction stories. They have written some very negative articles involving the Jeff Davis Sheriff’s Office, including the Multi-agency Investigative Team (MAIT) formed under former Sheriff Ricky Edwards on the eight deaths that occurred in our area from 2005 to 2009. They have drudged up investigations and incidents, some going back thirty years, insinuating corruption in our Sheriff’s Office. Well, I don’t dispute the Sheriff’s Office has had problems, but the past is the past.
When you elected me as your sheriff in 2011, I promised to bring professionalism to the department, which included having integrity that is beyond reproach, and gaining the respect and trust of our citizens. We have worked hard at this and will continue to do so. Having said that, I would like to say I resent out-of-town journalists trying to paint our parish with a broad brush that insinuates we are corrupt.
As your sheriff, I want to insure the victim’s families and the public that we are continuing to work on these eight investigations. I have the utmost confidence in the people I have assigned and the members of the MAIT from other agencies. They will continue the investigations into these deaths until all leads are exhausted. I also would like to make it clear that the MAIT and the law enforcement personnel working these investigations are not hiding anything. We are doing everything possible to solve these cases. It is unfortunate out-of-town journalists are taking information and twisting it to support a fictional conspiracy theory to gain followers and sell a story.9
Just as he had done in the past, Sheriff Woods failed to cite even a single error in my piece, preferring instead to attack me personally (he referred to my being from out of town three times in the short message, I live in New Orleans). He also described me, falsely, as an “author of fiction stories,” unless that reference was mistakenly meant to be about Nic Pizzolatto, the novelist and creator of True Detective. Bizarrely, the notion that I was either involved in the creation of the HBO hit series or connected to its showrunner gained traction during the race for Jefferson Davis Parish district attorney in the spring of 2014. A rumor surfaced that DA hopeful Ric Oustalet, a criminal defense attorney whose family once ran the Zigler hotel, covertly worked with me on my article in an attempt to discredit the incumbent Michael Cassidy, and that I pursued my investigation to piggyback off the success of True Detective. “As this article states,” Oustalet wrote on his Facebook page on March 28, 2014, referring to a New York Observer piece that compared my Medium piece to True Detective, “the story was researched several years ago and the publishing of the article was part of a marketing push to sell the story based on an increased interest generated by the HBO Series ‘True Detective.’ I can assure you that I have no involvement with the author of this article. However, the recent statements by the DA beg the question: If he has to fabricate lies about the person behind the article . . . what is he afraid of???”10 I posted a public response to Oustalet on his Facebook page, noting, “Ric did not pay me for my article” and that I began work on the Jeff Davis 8 case years before True Detective premiered on HBO.
It was no surprise that the sheriff, DA, and police chief were unhappy with my Medium piece. It garnered so much attention that then Louisiana attorney general Buddy Caldwell was forced to respond to it even though he rehashed the discredited serial killer theory of the Jeff Davis 8 case. “Every one of us is really interested in getting the case solved,” Caldwell told KPLC on February 6, 2014. “And as you may well know, serial killers are all around the country, and if they were easy to solve, it should’ve been done. In my view it’s very likely that the person who was doing this has either moved out of the area or is now in prison.”11
Even the attorney general was sticking to the serial killer theory to the bitter end.
What shocked me most about this media backlash was the role played by the Jennings Daily News. I never expected the newspaper would publish allegations about me and my work, because its editors not only praised the Medium piece but asked me, my agent, and my editor for permission to republish it. “You certainly have Jeff Davis Parish talking today,” Sheila Smith of the Jennings Daily News wrote to me on January 31, 2014, “which is a good thing. My editor and I are hoping to have your permission to reprint the Jeff Davis 8 article in our newspaper, with all credit given to you, as well as Medium.com if necessary.”12 I responded to Smith in an e-mail that I was “pleased and humbled” that they were interested in my story, and in subsequent communications with Smith among me, my agent, and Medium we agreed to allow the newspaper to republish the piece.
Later that day, however, Smith e-mailed me to tell me the newspaper’s vice president didn’t want the story to run in the paper: “His opinion is that our newspaper cannot verify all of Ethan’s sources, mainly case files, and victims’ families have already contacted us claiming some of the information is wrong. The staff here, however, believes Ethan did an incredible job of obtaining information and files and we hope residents continue to share the story for the public to see. We also believe that Ethan has brought this case to the forefront again and now local officials will have tough questions to answer.”
I would have happily shared the case files, and the only specific complaint I received from victims’ families was from the family of Leonard Crochet, who said that I had wrongly implicated Crochet in the drug business run by Harvey “Bird Dog” Burleigh in Jennings. I seriously considered that criticism and believe that my account of Crochet in this book more accurately reflects Crochet as a drug addict and not a drug business player. The Jennings Daily News may, of course, have chosen not to republish my Medium piece regardless. But what was so disturbing about my experience with the paper was the way they supported my casework one day and castigated it the next, all without any effort—by phone or e-mail—to contact me for comment. It’s a basic tenant of journalistic fairness that I afforded them. On March 31, 2015, I called Sheila Smith in hopes of having her explain to me how the newspaper’s position changed so quickly, and why law enforcement was given a platform to attack me. Smith never called me back.
The blowback in Jefferson Davis Parish about my work was unpleasant and sometimes scary. One of my contacts in southwest Louisiana who is deeply connected to the case told me, “I’ve already heard more than once that you’ll never get that book out. You can take that however you want to. But is that book worth your life?” I stayed away from the parish for months after the Medium piece, and a former Jennings law enforcement official warned me, “As soon as you hit town, they know you’re there.” But whatever challenges I faced in reporting on the Jeff Davis 8 case paled in comparison to the attacks on the parish’s citizens and whistle-blowers alike. I learned that after my Medium piece was published, a Jennings drug dealer and sometime rapper named Christopher Trent, who made a mixtape calling out Jennings police officers by name, threatened a former Jennings sex worker who he believed had talked to me (Trent was mistaken; I didn’t interview her for the Medium piece). “Loose lips,” Trent told the Jennings woman, “sink ships.” I planned on confronting Trent about his harassment, but in March 2015 he was shot to death at a travel plaza in Rayne, Louisiana, about twenty-five miles from Jennings.13 (On April 29, 2015, police in Rayne arrested two Lafayette men in the Trent homicide.14) And Jennings police detective Jesse Ewing and jail nurse Nina Ravey had their careers shattered and faced criminal charges after they passed on reports of law enforcement misconduct. Ewing and Ravey will continue to live with the consequences of seeking the truth about the Jeff Davis 8 long after the attacks on me have faded into the parish’s memory.