On the floor beside a burned-out bed, they find a fifty-one-year-old orthopedic surgeon, stabbed eight times. Her right side is burned beyond recognition, her organs included. The victim’s dark hair is still braided and coiled at the back of her neck.
They found a dress, clean and pressed, laid across a chair.
By the time anybody at the New Orleans Police Department understood the bedroom was a crime scene, it was filled with rubber boot tracks and fire hoses.
On August 20, 1964, a month after the murder, Major Lawrence J. Cassanova admitted to this failure in protocol. When reporters pressed him to elaborate, he declined.
But the States-Item pushed further, wanting more from the New Orleans Police Department’s good-natured chief of detectives. They asked him what the odds were of solving the case.
Not good, Cassanova said without hesitation.
Then he explained why. “It is a difficult case, and it was treated as a fire before it was known to be a homicide.”
Larry’s statement sums up the problems with this investigation.
Consider what the department had to work with once they knew it was a murder. Blood on the walls and the floor with her chest showing she was stabbed in the room. In other words, the case file negates all claims that someone carried her body in from elsewhere.
Away from the bed, the fire barely touched anything else. The curtains looked fine. So did most of the furniture. Her white purse still looked white.
It held her jewelry and prescription drugs, but no money. If she had a wallet, it was missing, but nothing else.
Well, nothing else except her car.
The afternoon of the murder, detectives found her 1960 Plymouth Valiant in the 2600 block of Chestnut Street, nine blocks away. They found a lipstick inside, with an empty Diet Rite can and a black perfume dispenser, all lying in the street next to the car.
Also by the car, they found a spent tear-gas cartridge.
Someone found her keys the next day, under a hedge on Conery Street.
Detective Frank Hayward also lifted one palm print from the car.
Newsmen asked Larry Cassanova whether the palm print produced a lead. His answer: “We won’t know the full value of the print until we have a [suspect’s] print to compare it with.”
Homicide ruled out robbery inside of two days, according to a July 23 news wire. By then police were checking her former patients. Maybe one of them was a psychopathic killer. The Associated Press found she had medical contacts worldwide. That complicated matters.
That first morning the coroner’s investigator told reporters Dr. Sherman’s front door had been forced. Two days later Lieutenant James Kruebbe told the Times-Picayune there had been no forcible entry. The paper printed, in the next line, that it had been told otherwise the Tuesday before.
The doctor’s maid, Mrs. Elmner Peterson, said she found a set of kitchen knives missing. Captain Edward Stevens said it may or may not be the weapon. The pathologist suggested investigators look for a surgical instrument.
No weapon was ever found.
Asked about suspects, Captain Stevens tried to make a joke.
“Everybody and Nobody.”
What the department believed, and said that first week, was that Mary Sherman knew her killer. But they could not thoroughly account for the last twelve hours of her life.
The maid left about half past four on Monday afternoon. Sherman was washing her hair. She was in good spirits, Mrs. Peterson said, and mentioned a woman friend might visit.
Nobody ever revealed who that friend was.
The next fixed point in the timeline was 4:10 the following morning. That’s when the neighbor smelled smoke.
Talking to reporters about the timeline, Lieutenant Kruebbe wasn’t hopeful, saying, “I wish I had something to tell you, but I don’t. All I can say is we’re working on it.”
He did say she was supposed to drive the Valiant to Tangipahola Parish that morning.
Once a month the doctor drove up to the crippled children’s clinic there. The Tangipahoa Parish Health Unit hosted the monthly event. Mary Sherman, one of the founders of the clinic, volunteered her time every month. She was due in Amite the morning she died. Lieutenant Kruebbe and Detective Frank Hayward made the drive north on August 5 and talked to the clinic staff, but learned nothing new.
By then, the department said, it had interviewed more than 106 of her professional associates and social acquaintances.
Two weeks later Major Cassanova estimated roughly 125 interviews. The police report reviewed by reporters in 2014, covered five years, and counted 104 people questioned with 49 locations searched.
The apartment was unsealed by August 20. Investigators pulled down the crime scene tape, just after the executor of her estate walked through it.
On August 29 there were still no new clues and no arrests.
The States-Item on September 8, 1964, quoted the department’s information officer, Lieutenant Marvin Leonard, saying the investigation continued with nothing new to report.
The reporter noted they had been told the same for weeks, and even weeks later, investigators stopped providing updates altogether.
The case had gone cold.
And today, it remains that way.
Everybody who worked the case in 1964 is beyond asking now. But the people who lived at the Patios that summer were mostly young. Someone living could still come forward.
What we know: It was a fire before it was a murder, and somebody in New Orleans spent sixty-two years keeping a secret they never shared.
If you have information about the 1964 murder of Dr. Mary Sherman, call Crime Stoppers of Greater New Orleans at 504-822-1111. Tips are anonymous and may earn a cash reward.
]]>Sherman is fifty that winter, her dark hair braided and coiled at the back of her neck the way she wears it in every photograph. She is the first woman elected to the American Orthopaedic Association.
She tells him she’ll think it over.
Six months later her sister repeated that story to a New Orleans homicide detective, because Mary Sherman had been stabbed eight times and set afire on the floor of her apartment at 3101 St. Charles. The coroner identified her by her dental plates.
The colonel’s name was in her address book.
In the photograph the States-Item ran that afternoon, a detective stands at the left of the bed frame, overlooking what the fire left of the mattress.
His name was Frank Hayward.
I talked with Frank Hayward more than once over the years. He shook his head at the story that got around later, that a woman close to Mary Sherman killed her in a jealous rage. The department never put much stock in it, he told me.
What it did put stock in was her address book and answering service.
On July 27, 1964, Lt. James Kruebbe of Homicide called the FBI’s New Orleans office for help finding four men.
The first was Colonel Ernest A. Brav, an orthopedic surgeon out of Walter Reed who may by then have moved to Madigan General in Tacoma. He was the one who proposed. Kruebbe wanted to know where he was between July 19 and 22.
Sherman had been in Tacoma herself that June, using a Dr. David Hillyer’s house as her mailing address. Hillyer was the second man Kruebbe wanted found.
The third man telephoned her twice from a New Orleans hotel the last Sunday of her life. He called at 10:15 that morning and again at 1:36. The second message said he’d call back if he didn’t leave town.
He gave the answering service the name Dr. John Keggi and said he was from New Haven. The service didn’t deliver his messages until 6:39 that evening.
By then he was gone. He had checked out of the New Orleans Hotel at 1:56, twenty minutes after that call, registered with a Texas ID, saying John Keggi, William Beaumont General Hospital, El Paso.
Ochsner staff never heard of Keggi. Neither had Dr. Sherman’s family.
The fourth man on the FBI’s list was her husband, since NOPD wasn’t certain he ever existed.
Dr. Lillian Donaldson told police she divorced a Dr. Thomas Sherman while he served in the Pacific, and that he came home, remarried, and jumped off a building. The Chicago FBI office traced him to a university register and to four newspaper morgues that had nothing on him.
Several of Mary Sherman’s acquaintances had no idea she had ever been married.
The answer came back from Chicago July 31, four days after Kruebbe’s call, but Director Hoover authorized record checks and nothing more.
“As no violation within the Bureau’s jurisdiction is present, no active investigation is to be conducted,” it read. The four men, “if located, are not to be interviewed.”
Two reasons follow, and neither one has anything to do with Mary Sherman. An interview with any potential suspect or witness would put agents from scattered locations “in the position of being potential witnesses in a local murder trial.”
And the men sought “may be prominent in their communities,” so knocking on their doors would place the Bureau “in an embarrassing position in view of the lack of investigative jurisdiction.”
Offices in seven cities went to work, but limited the work to research only.
New Haven identified the El Paso-bound Keggi as Kristaps Juris Keggi, an orthopedic resident whose Yale appointment ended the last day of June. An agent knocked on a door at Killam’s Point in Branford and talked to a neighbor, Dexter Goodwin.
The family moved out July 1, Goodwin said, and came back mid-month for a visit. The doctor bought a cream-colored 1964 Pontiac to drive south while his wife and children flew.
Goodwin volunteered one more thing. Everybody at Killam’s Point called him Kris. Nobody had ever called him John.
On August 11 headquarters told New Haven it had gone “beyond the scope of the investigation authorized by the Bureau,” because “apparently a neighborhood investigation was conducted.”
New Haven answered the next day. Nobody drew discipline for the canvass. Because the office failed to send New Orleans a copy of what it found.
Nobody established which Keggi called her answering service, or why. Kristaps Keggi went on to a long Yale career and died in 2023.
Edward Haslam spent years trying to lift a black bar off the second page of that July 31 memorandum. He suspected the name underneath said Lee Harvey Oswald. The Bureau wouldn’t tell him, and Justice told him to sue if he wanted it.
Then a New Orleans researcher, Greg Walters, pulled the unredacted copy from the National Archives, where the Bureau filed it in 2016. Haslam revealed the name in writing.
“It is, instead, Col. Ernst A. Brav, MD, an orthopedic surgeon who worked at the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Hospital.”
The name under the bar belonged only to a widower who had asked her to marry him.
The last page in the file is dated August 17, 1964.
Baltimore never answered on Brav. Neither did Seattle, St. Louis, or Washington Field.
Nothing in the released file says where Colonel Ernest Brav was the night of July 20, 1964. The Bureau never asked.
But Dr. Sherman’s sister told police Mary was still considering his proposal.
If you have information about the 1964 murder of Dr. Mary Sherman, call Crime Stoppers of Greater New Orleans at 504-822-1111. Tips are anonymous and may earn a cash reward.
]]>Firefighters reach apartment J at the Patios, on St. Charles Avenue, and cut through thick smoke with gas masks. What they find under the char is a woman stabbed in the heart, the abdomen, both arms, one leg.
A fire has been set to cover the murder.
In the kitchen a single place is set for breakfast, a tea bag already in the cup.
Dr. Mary Sherman did not have breakfast that morning.
On the living room wall hung a painting of a woman gripped by fear, both hands at her own throat. Smaller sketches beside it showed a Roman soldier driving his sword into a woman’s body. Sherman had hung these herself. No one is sure why.
She wore her dark hair coiled in braids at the back of her neck, the style she’d wore since her thirties. The building’s janitor, Alvin Alcorn, said she always had a book in her hand, working her flowers in the patio, and never let him help. “They’re my flowers,” she told him, “and I want to do everything for them myself.”
By 1964 she was America’s most accomplished female surgeon, the first woman elected to the American Orthopaedic Association. In 1954, she became the first female oral examiner ever appointed.
She ran the bone pathology lab at Ochsner, sat as a partner in the clinic, and published nineteen papers in the journals on bone tumors, fractures and joint disease. In 1963 the Kappa Delta sorority gave her a thousand dollars to continue this work.
Nothing related to virology.
Nothing related to monkeys.
I mention this because for most people who’ve heard of Mary Sherman at all, the murder isn’t the story. A 2007 book, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, claimed she died in a secret lab accident testing a virus meant for Fidel Castro, and that colleagues moved her body afterward to cover it up.
The Ochsner Journal considered the theory in a review of the book. The Journal reported that her published works related only to bone and joint pathology, adding “not a virologist at all, nor a basic scientist in cancer research.” The only cancer she studied was cancer of the bone.
Dr. Monroe Samuels, the pathologist who opened her body, confirmed the murder with no mention of lasers. He found no soot in her lungs. Dead before the fire started. Ordinary homicide, ordinary fire.
An undated Times-Picayune graphic, drawn by artist Dan Swenson, still says her alarm wasn’t set that night, as though she’d let her own killer in. The New Orleans Police Department explained and reported on this in writing, back in 1965. An outside alarm, armed by key, used only when nobody was home.
If it had been on, she would have tripped it with every move.
Now, let’s talk about some forgotten facts.
The killer left evidence. Sherman’s car turned up seven blocks away on Chestnut Street. Near it lay a tear-gas pen, and the Chicago Daily News identified this before the New Orleans press, as one of the two chief clues to the killer’s identity.
However, no one openly discussed this finding for five years.
In 1969, a pharmacist named Doris Haindel walked into a New Orleans police station. She’d dated a young doctor at Ochsner, a resident of Sherman’s. She’d taken out a restraining order against him, she said, because he frightened her.
She told detectives he was an addict, who kept a chainsaw, a gas can, a saw sharpener and an axe in the trunk of his car. She said he’d threatened her after she cut off his access to her pharmacy.
She also told them the guy carried a tear-gas canister that matched the one found by Sherman’s abandoned car.
That guy was a former Tulane basketball standout named Stanley Edward Stumpf, Jr.
Coincidentally, Sherman’s colleagues at Ochsner gave police his name within days of the murder. The weapon investigators sought was never a kitchen knife. The file describes it as scalpel-like, an “autopsy knife,” something surgical, something an Ochsner resident would own and know how to use.
Someone like Dr. Stanley Stumpf.
After the death of Dr. Mary Sherman, Stumpf left New Orleans for an internship with the Army Medical Corp. at the Letterman Friendship Hospital in San Francisco. Discharged in 1965, he moved to Lebanon, Missouri, where he lived for two years before returning to Louisiana. In August of 1967, he opened a private practice in Gretna.
Nobody at the New Orleans Police Department ever interviewed Stumpf about Mary Sherman’s murder. Police found a finger-print inside Dr. Sherman’s car. No one ever compared it to those of Stanley Stumpf.
In 2014, Times-Picayune reporters, Adriane Quinlan and Naomi Martin discovered these facts from NOPD’s 117-page police report. Fifty years after the crime. No interrogation, no finger-prints, and no charges for Stanley Stumpf.
I’m not saying the doctor did it.
What the file suggests may be worse. A suspect named by the victim’s employer, and a suspect carrying physical evidence, a tear-gas canister, matching one found at the scene, walked away unquestioned and uncharged.
And to be fair, there is another suspect.
Juan Valdez, the man who called in the fire, drew scrutiny himself. A former landlady said he’d propositioned several of her employees. One young couple obtained a restraining order against him.
Frank Hayward, the lead detective, told his own department he believed Valdez could have done it. But nobody charged him either.
Dr. Stumpf died in December 1977 at age 40, two weeks after his father.
Three months earlier, the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners suspended Stumpf’s medical license for perscribing both stimulant and depressant drugs to the same patients.
Whatever Stumpf told his friends and colleagues about Mary Sherman’s murder never made a police report. But sixty-two years after Mary Sherman’s murder, the case remains open, and police can still find her killer.
Ochsner trained Stanley Stumpf and kept a personnel file on him. Someone working with him in 1964 may still be alive. And somebody he talked to knows something.
]]>They drive around it. The cab looks empty, though they can’t be sure. They have a service call waiting, so they drive passed.
Forty-five minutes later they come back the same way and find the truck on fire.
They called the sheriff’s office, which sent Fire Protection District 4 out of Walker. The firemen knocked the flames down and found a body in the cab, burned past recognition, Chief Deputy Willie Graves told The Advocate on December 30, 1989.
Deputies knew the dead man. Charles Lee Reppond, 41, owned the wrecker, and he’d left his house on Burgess Road Extension after a three o’clock call. His wife, Mary Reppond, told deputies he never returned home.
A state Fire Marshal’s investigator went over the truck in a Walker yard and found no trace of gasoline or other flammable liquid. LSU forensic anthropologists took what was left of the driver’s body.
On January 4 the LSU scientists told Livingston Parish detectives they’d identified Reppond.
And they found bullet fragments in his skull.
Somebody shot Charles Reppond in the head before burning the truck around him. The Advocate reported it on January 5, 1990. Detective Dillard Stewart said the next day deputies ruled out suicide and accident.
The Denham Springs News ran Reppond’s photograph on September 11, 1975, third man on a hose line at a house fire off Cook Road. He sold Chevrolets at Lamar-Lane in Gonzales after that, well enough that a customer thanked him in a newspaper ad for driving her van out on a Sunday.
Between October 1987 and May 1988, Sheriff Odom Graves advertised three seizures against Charles and Mary Reppond in The Livingston Parish News, two for private plaintiffs and the last a mortgage foreclosure.
Early in 1988 he opened Ace Wrecker and Towing on U.S. 190.
Here’s how he got work: Police officers work a wreck, and whoever they call gets the tow and the storage fees. Denham Springs PD had a contract with Trading Post 24-Hour Wrecker Service, and Trading Post belonged to Charles Roman Dugas, who everybody called Sonny.
Sheriff Odom Graves pinned captain’s bars on Sonny at the courthouse in the summer of 1981, and the Denham Springs and the newspaper ran his picture: a short-sleeved uniform shirt with his name stitched over the pocket, hair combed straight back, a heavy forearm out to take the sheriff’s hand. He ran the parish auxiliary deputies.
On May 30, 1988, Reppond stood in front of the Denham Springs Board of Aldermen and asked for a rotating call list.
They turned him down, so he hired a lawyer.
Larry G. Starns filed a $50,000 suit against the city and Dugas, calling the arrangement a conspiracy in restraint of trade. Police Chief Scott Jones had told Reppond he’d never be called to a city wreck at all, the petition said.
“All I’m asking for is a chance to work the same as this man does,” Reppond told the aldermen that September, according to the Livingston Parish News on September 15, 1988. “There’s no ordinance for him.”
Jones had also told him to buy a second wrecker to qualify, he told The Advocate on October 19, 1988. He said he bought it and hired two men. He stayed off the list anyway, so he let the men go and sold the truck back.
A man who worked for one of the other wrecker services told me court was never what scared anybody off. The owners were getting phone calls threatening their children, he said. He wouldn’t let me print his name.
On October 26, 1988, Denham Springs police arrested Reppond twice in one day. Chief Scott Jones explained the first one to the Livingston Parish News for its November 3 edition. Reppond had a validation sticker saying his license plate was good through 1989, when it had expired in 1988. The second arrest was for an East Baton Rouge warrant that Baton Rouge police told them, after they booked him, no longer existed.
The board adopted its wrecker ordinance on November 29, 1988.
Two weeks later Reppond stood in front of the aldermen again and told them police still called Trading Post and nobody else. The board opened a temporary list on December 15. His claim for damages remained alive years later.
Sonny Dugas died of a heart attack on December 21, 1989, with that suit unresolved.
Eight days later Charles Reppond’s tow truck burned on Black Mud Road.
Somebody telephoned Larry Starns at five that morning to say Reppond’s truck was on fire, and Starns reached Reppond’s house before the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s deputies, and he broke the news to Mary himself.
Asked before the grand jury who called him, he refused. Judge Kenneth Fogg gave him until January 12 to answer or begin six months in the parish prison.
On January 8 he named the caller.
Lieutenant Rod Vulgamore of the Denham Springs Police Department.
Vulgamore was already under internal investigation for violating department policy, Captain Joe Shumate told the Livingston Parish News on January 11, 1990. He never explained how he knew at five in the morning what deputies hadn’t told the widow.
The grand jury heard four witnesses that week and returned nothing. Deputies pinpointed no specific suspect, Wayne Sanders of the sheriff’s office told the Advocate on January 9, 1990.
Reppond’s family believed friends or family of Sonny Dugas killed him, but I’ve never been able to stop there.
Two days short of five years before Reppond’s body burned, a man walking his dog found his son’s body at an oil-well site off Hatchell Lane, south of The Willows.
Charles Warren Reppond was 17. Deputies said he’d been hunting alone on New Year’s Eve and caught the trigger of his 12-gauge in a barbed-wire fence.
Deputies said they found a barb still hooked in it when they arrived, but the safety was on.
Chief Criminal Deputy Willie Graves told the Denham Springs News on January 3, 1985 that the crime lab failed to fire the magazine’s two live shells with the safety engaged.
The lab also found the buckshot spread across the boy’s shirt in a pattern too wide for a close shot. Still, Graves said his office still called the death an accident.
Charles Lee Reppond kept his son’s shirt. He kept the lab report with it, and for five years he told anybody who’d listen that somebody had been in those woods with his son and that the sheriff’s office helped hide what really happened.
They buried the father at Hebron Baptist on a Saturday morning, in the churchyard where his boy lay. Dr. Joel B. Lucas read the service, the same man who had read the son’s eulogy five years before.
I’ve never been able to forget this case.
A man spends five years hunting a killer’s name. His enemy dies in bed of a bad heart, and eight days later somebody puts a bullet in that man’s head, then sets him on fire.
Maybe he found the name he was looking for.
]]>She fixes her daughter’s at the Southern Funeral Home in Winnfield.
Then she drives to the nursing home to sit a while with her husband, who has Parkinson’s.
Her daughter was thirty. Somebody shot her four times after hitting her in the back of the head.
A man visiting Bankston Cemetery found the body of Bonnie Sue Henderson Pannier around three o’clock, Monday afternoon, January 23, 1989, in the woods behind Hammond High School. He had come to see a relative’s grave. Chief of Detectives Norman Davidson gave the Daily Star that much for its January 24 edition.
The autopsy counted five wounds, two from behind and three from the front. A heavy blow to the back of her head and a shot to the base of her neck. Two shots to the chest and one to the abdomen.
Coroner Vincent Cefalu put her death on Sunday afternoon, January 22, working from the body’s rigidity and from the insects he found.
In the photograph the Daily Star ran on January 26, her dark hair is parted in the middle and falls straight past her shoulders.
She was born Bonnie Rena Bradshaw in December 1958. The Hendersons adopted her six days short of her first birthday, after her natural mother’s health gave out. Irene kept her because she had no daughter of her own.
They paid for lessons. Bonnie sang in churches from the age of five. She held first chair in the band at her school in Winnfield and majored in piano at Northwestern.
“Her teacher would play something once for her, and then she could play it herself,” her mother told the paper.
She married a man from Jonesboro and had two children, and when that ended she gave the children to a family in Lake Charles.
“She said she was looking at it logically,” Irene Henderson said. “She said, ‘I cannot afford them. I cannot take care of them alone.’”
Then a carnival came through Natchitoches in 1984, and Bonnie left town with a carnival worker named Ricky Pannier.
They reached Tangipahoa Parish in 1985 and lived under a bridge near Interstate 55 and U.S. 190, until somebody stole their property and the authorities moved them on.
She worked fast food around Ponchatoula, and at the end she was at Brenda A’s Donuts. A businessman gave her work sweeping out his restaurant when she came looking for money.
Acquaintances told the Daily Star on January 26 that she seemed “not all there,” that she exaggerated, that she wasn’t keen on appearances or hygiene, gruff outside, but sweet once you knew her.
“She never cared nothing for her looks,” her mother said.
Mostly she walked.
“It didn’t matter day or night, they’d just as soon walk,” said a doughnut shop worker the paper called only Pierce. “Her and him would walk to Hammond, Springfield. I’ve seen ‘em as far as Independence.”
Pierce told the paper one more thing.
“Somebody say, ‘Let’s go to Bankston Cemetery,’ and she’d probably say, ‘OK, let’s go to Bankston Cemetery’ and think nothing about it.”
David Mitchell had worked with her at a local eatery. “I can see how she could become a victim,” he said in the same story. “She wasn’t scared of anything or anybody. People take advantage of people like that.”
Bonnie filed for separation from Ricky Pannier on October 17, 1988. It ran in the Daily Star’s parish legal notices that November, three months and five days before she died.
Her mother and her estranged husband each accounted for that last week, and the two don’t agree.
Irene Henderson said Bonnie and a Ponchatoula man named Richard McCarter had driven up to Joyce two weeks earlier. Bonnie told her she had gotten divorced and that she and McCarter were marrying on January 25. She brought her mother a pair of earrings for her birthday on the 24th.
Ricky Pannier told the Daily Star on January 30 that he and Bonnie had reconciled at a concert at First Assembly of God Church in Ponchatoula on Sunday night, January 22.
She came to his door at half past three Monday morning, he said, upset about nightmares and wanting to come back. She stayed until he left for work at half past four. She was getting a ride at ten for her belongings.
When he got home her purse was there and she wasn’t. Some change in it, and her driver’s license.
On February 2 the Daily Star printed it’s findings.
The church said the concert was Friday night, January 20. A church employee confirmed Bonnie had been in the audience.
But Cefalu’s report shows her death happened Sunday afternoon, before the door and the nightmares.
No agency has ever named Ricky Pannier a suspect in this case. Nobody has ever been arrested for her murder.
On Tuesday the 24th, her mother’s birthday, the telephone rang in Joyce.
“He asked if we had insurance on Bonnie,” Irene Henderson said. “I said, ‘Well, we have some.’ He said, ‘You want to bury her there or down here?’ Well, it shocked me. He said she was shot and they’d found her in the woods.”
Deputies sent the evidence to the State Police Crime Lab in Baton Rouge that January. On February 2 the paper noted that a week had passed with nothing back. I have found no published word about it since.
Detective Mike Sticker told the Advocate in October 1989 that he had some good suspects and that he thought she was killed in anger, on the spur of the moment. In January 1991 he said the case remained open.
That is all we know.
On January 22, 1999, a memorial notice ran in the Daily Star classifieds with her portrait above it.
“Gone before your prime. All done from a dirty crime. Unsolved!”
Ricky Pannier signed it.
A recording of Bonnie singing gospel played at her funeral, and he told the paper it broke him down.
Everything else here ran in the Hammond paper between January 24 and February 2, 1989, where anybody in the parish could read it over coffee.
I did, and I still want to know who killed Bonnie.
]]>Two men come in past her. One of them is tall, six foot two or better, and she will spend the next twenty-six years being asked what else she remembers.
A black two-door sits in the lot. So does a red pickup with the passenger door standing open.
On Sunday, July 6, 1997, an employee let herself into KK’s Corner, a Texaco food mart on Louisiana 14 at Tom Hebert Road, and found the place in disarray. She called the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office at 4:53.
Deputies found three bodies in the walk-in cooler.
Stacie Reeves, 26, wore blonde curls piled high and always smiled big for photos. Marty LeBouef, 21, had dark hair swept back off his forehead and didn’t smile as much. They were closing the store together.
Nicole Guidry had long dark hair and bangs cut straight across her eyebrows. The first wire stories listed her as 15 and every account after mid-July said 14. She was Stacie’s baby sitter, just visiting.
All three were shot the same way. No weapon was ever recovered.
Several dozen people watched investigators from the next parking lot, behind the police tape.
“This was kind of a safe haven,” Rocke Fournet, who owned a business next door, told the Associated Press that afternoon. “Nothing’s ever really happened here.”
More than $10,000 in cash, checks and money orders could not be found. KPLC reported on Oct. 20, 2000 that three phone wires had been cut, that the office door came off its hinges, and that the July 5 surveillance tape was missing.
Deputies had checked the store around 11 the night before and found nothing wrong, Detective Donald “Lucky” DeLouche said.
On July 18 the Violent Crimes Task Force released a sketch. A white man, six feet to six-two, stocky, short light-brown hair worn longer in the back, late twenties or early thirties, in dirty blue jeans, a white T-shirt and tennis shoes. Wanted for questioning. Not a suspect.
The sketch worked.
Virginia Johnson also remembered a Marlboro keychain. After a hypnosis session that ran eleven or twelve hundred dollars, she remembered a rabbit head. When America’s Most Wanted staged its reenactment in January 1998, the man on television carried a rabbit’s foot.
The tip that produced a suspect came from Lonnie Kemp, who said he knew a fellow who carried a rabbit’s foot.
Thomas Frank Cisco Jr. had heavy dark brows and a thin mustache that never quite filled in. Deep creases already crossed his forehead at twenty-nine. Deputies booked him, a former Lake Charles man living in New Orleans, with three counts of first-degree murder on Aug. 28, 1998.
And then he talked.
He couldn’t remember, saying he’d been on drugs. He wasn’t there at all. Then he did it with Robert Thigpen. Thigpen did the shooting.
Next, he did it alone. Then he did it with Malcolm and Bobby. There was a fourth man, and the fourth man was Chris Cabral.
According to police, nothing he said was true.
He even said the eyewitness was white. Virginia Johnson is Black.
In all he gave thirty-five statements, by reporter Catherine Townsend’s count. Most were told to the detective, Lucky DeLouche, with several taken in Cisco’s cell, and one session running past two in the morning.
Nineteen conflicting statements made it to the jury.
That jury in Baton Rouge on October 18, 2000 recommended the death penalty and Judge Patricia Minaldi imposed it.
Three years later the Louisiana Supreme Court found that Cisco’s court-appointed lawyer, Evelyn Oubre, was representing Lucky DeLouche in family-law matters while she defended Cisco against DeLouche’s investigation.
The court threw out the conviction and the death sentence on December 3, 2003. It also recorded the fact that nothing physical linked Cisco or anyone else to that store.
In February 2004 a second prosecutor, Rick Oustalet, turned out to have also represented Detective DeLouche, causing District Attorney Rick Bryant’s office to step off the case.
The charges came down to second-degree murder in 2008. In March 2010 Cisco pleaded guilty to three counts of manslaughter and got ninety years in Angola State Penitentiary.
Now, let’s recount those mentioned but never charged.
Robert Thigpen didn’t match Johnson’s description and had an alibi DeLouche called firm, though the court record notes that Thigpen’s wife and her sister did drop Nicole Guidry at the store that evening.
Investigators eliminated Malcolm and Bobby.
Miles Addison quit the store the day before the killings. He failed three polygraphs and admitted dealing and stealing, but nobody tested his hair or DNA in any form.
Narcotics officer Jerome LaStraps puts himself near KK’s Corner at 12:22 that morning but denies being in the store parking lot.
Richard McElveen, the sheriff’s son, got the most attention. The parish rumor mill had him confessing, and they had him arrested in California. His father called a press conference in February 1998 to put those rumors to rest: “First I want to tell you that Richard is not a suspect.”
The task force and the FBI interviewed Richard. He gave biological samples, sat for a polygraph, produced an alibi at Big Lake, and witness Virginia Johnson could not pick him out of a photo lineup.
DA Bryant, who tried the case, put it plainer than anybody. “I think Richard McElveen was 5’8”.”
Johnson’s man was six foot two.
Which leaves Chris Cabral. Bryant told KPLC in October 2000 that Cabral resembled the composite and remained under investigation, and that his girlfriend’s brother, Alfred Foster, contradicted his fireworks alibi.
Nobody has ever charged Cabral with anything.
In 2023, Bryant told KPLC he believes the second man was Cisco’s best friend out of New Orleans, alibied by a girlfriend, who “looks identical to the composite in my mind.”
He did not identify the best friend by name.
The parole board granted Cisco release on February 8, 2023, and rescinded it two days later over a contraband write-up nobody disclosed.
A cigarette butt was found in that cooler near Nicole Guidry’s body. It has never been tested for DNA. Somebody in Calcasieu Parish knows if it’s worth sending to the lab.
]]>“I got out of Jennings after my mother died,” Frankie Richard told me that day. “I lived in Morse, but the press found me there after a while. I moved in with family here and told everybody I was in Baton Rouge. Life got peaceful when people couldn’t find me no more.”
He said his health was bad and he didn’t know how long he had.
His story and the lack of justice surrounding the deaths of the eight women have been the focus of many news articles, a book and documentary series that often implicated him.
The investigating task force said they confirmed early in the investigation that the victims, all allegedly prostitutes, knew each other and at least seven of them worked for Frankie Richard at some point.
Over the years, Frankie Richard maintained his innocence.
The Jennings Police Department initially …
]]>Loretta Lynn Chaisson Lewis was twenty-eight years old.
Not long before, she told her family the Jennings police arranged for her to be a spy, reporting back to them on a drug deal.
The medical examiner found cocaine and alcohol in her body. Cause of death, undetermined. Twenty-one years later, it’s still undetermined.
Ernestine Marie Daniels Patterson came out of a canal off Louisiana Highway 102 on June 18, 2005, five miles south of where the fisherman found Loretta. Somebody had cut Ernestine’s throat. The wounds on her wrists proved she fought somebody. Hers is the one death of the eight that Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Office classifies outright as a homicide.
Kristen Gary Lopez, twenty-one, nude in water in March 2007, wore a single sock on her left foot.
Whitnei Dubois…
]]>The driver weighs close to 280 pounds. The Medellin men who hired him called him El Gordo, the Fat Man. He’s forty-six. There’s no pistol in the car, because a federal judge has forbidden him to carry one.
A man crouched behind the donation bin stands up with a MAC-10, a suppressor screwed to the barrel.
He fires a dozen rounds. Six hit Adler Berriman Seal, whom everyone called Barry, in the head and chest, and he dies in the driver’s seat.
He was staying there because a court ordered him to.
Seal had already made his deal. The Justice Department, working from a Florida case, agreed to probation for what he could give the government, and U.S. District Judge Frank Po…
]]>No wound on him. No door forced, no window broken, no way in and no way out. The only thing out of place is his pocket watch, turned back one hour to cover the time of the lie.
His name is John Watson. Yes, that Watson.
He has come to Geneva in the summer of 1925 to help the nations of the world outlaw poison gas. He dies breathing the very thing those nations gathered to ban.
The meeting really happened. The murder did not.
I made it up. The bolted room, the turned-back watch, the gas, the dead man on the floor. I sat at my desk and invented a murder, which is the one thing I have spent nearly forty years refusing to do.
That is what I wanted to explain today.
All those years writing true crime were bulit on one a promise. When I attach my name to a story about a murder, it happened.
The blood is too real. The families are real, and a good many of them read what I write. I have sat at their kitchen tables. I have drunk their co…
]]>Vincent Sherry opens it.
Margaret Sherry comes out of the bedroom in her underwear, drawn perhaps by the sound of her husband falling. The visitor fires his quieted pistol again and exits the house.
He leaves nothing behind but casings and a scatter of foam.
Nobody calls the police. The house sits for two days without anyone finding the Sherrys inside. Two days.
Wednesday morning, September 16, Judge Sherry missed court. In forty years around courthouses, I’ve never known a sitting judge to miss his own docket without somebody calling his home. This case was no diffe…
]]>His name is Len Davis. He is heavyset and round-faced, with a thin mustache, and on the day police arrest him he’s wearing an ear-ring and one of the loud vertical-striped shirts he favors, the wardrobe of a man who wants to be seen. On the street they call him Robocop to his face, a gangster with a badge, behind his back.
Davis lifts his cell phone. He wants a woman dealt with. He calls it a thirty.
The agents write the word down. In the New Orleans police code, a signal thirty means a homicide, but the agents don’t know that yet, and by the time somebody explains it to them, Kim Groves is already dead.
In the photograph of her most shown by the media, Kim Groves is smiling wide, her hair a dark natural halo around h…
]]>Thomas Griffin, who had taken over the Lagniappe column at the New Orleans Item after John Lester left for New Jersey, was calling long distance with news. Stanley Lyle had booked a new dancer at the Casino Royale, one who did the Stormy Weather routine and argued with handsy customers exactly the way Stacey Lawrence used to do.
“Tourists think she’s the real Stormy,” Griffin said. “They can’t tell the difference.”
Weeks earlier, the same paper had run a notice calling the new Stormy “the greatest name in Bourbon Street show business,” language it had once used, without irony, about Stacey herself.
Stacey returned to New Orleans three months later to settle the matter. In the ph…
]]>Three women ran from the steaming coupe to the shelter of the Morning Call coffee stand: Josephine Spellman, her daughter Mildred, and Helen, not yet twenty and already using her married name less than she used her mother’s advice.
Joe Gleason followed them in. He was heavy-set, his hairline already retreating, and he owned a bar down the street that needed women who could bring customers through the door.
They listened. After a time, Josephine said they could help, but only on one condition of her own: Gleason had to forget he had ever seen a 1942 baby-blue DeSoto President.
He agreed. Nobody mentioned the DeSoto again.
By February 1945, Helen was dancing and hosting at the Old Opera House. When the club ran short on chorus girls, the other women dared her to strip if she thought she could do it better.
“I said I thought I could,” she told a reporter two years later. “And th…
]]>It is a Thursday, May 22, 1941.
His bride comes from 619 South Railroad Street, the gambling side of town. She is raven-haired and blue-eyed. She is also fourteen years old.
Judge Claude Bertram Gullatt has signed licenses like this one before. He barely looks up before he signs this one too.
The paper in front of him lists her birthday as December 7, 1922. She was actually born December 7, 1926, in a carnival tent pitched for the season in Metairie, Louisiana. Her father, Henry Spellman, is a compact man with carnival grease worked permanently into his knuckles, a circus mechanic by trade. Her mother, Josephine, has a soft Georgia drawl and a shape she has already spent years fielding comments about from strange men.
Dr. Ashby Floyd, who has certified more Floyd …
]]>The shop sold T-shirts and hot sauce up front. In the back room, it ran one of the oldest cons in the business, dressed up fresh for a new century of tourists.
Bourbon Street runs twelve blocks, jazz trumpets and hurricane cups spilling out of every doorway, and it has swallowed grifters like this one for two hundred years.
Carnival men used to call the game Razzle Dazzle: a rigged betting contest with an unwinnable jackpot, worked by a barker who never lets the mark walk away ahead. Bet a little, the barker says, and you’re one roll from the big prize. The version running out of Happy Days, at 335 Bourbon Street, pulled in m…
]]>The waiter sets down champagne nobody ordered, at a figure nobody quotes. The stranger pays, because that is what a man does when the lights are low and a pretty woman is thirsty.
Keeping him buying is her whole line of work.
She is a “party girl” or bar girl, shortened to “b-girl”.
The waiters knew their part, too. They quit bringing change. They let a man drink past his money, and when the money was gone they walked him out to the banquette and left him there like a parcel set out for the morning.
Some nights, to hurry the math, a hand tipped a sedative into the man’s glass. On Bourbon Street they called it slipping a mickey.
Robert Dunn Jr. came down from Nashville and walked into the Latin Quarter Club,…
]]>It is July 16, 1958. Grosch is chief investigator for the district attorney, and for two weeks he has worked Bourbon Street, hauling dancers off in pairs. He tells the reporters that her number, “Tom Cat Fever,” is the filthiest thing he has ever seen, and he is a man who has been around.
Lilly Christine tells them something different. She is an exotic dancer, not a stripteaser. She wears nothing on that stage more daring than the costumes in Peep Show on Broadway, and she never takes it all off.
One of them is about to be proven right by the Supreme Court of Louisiana. It will not be Grosch.
They called her the Cat Girl, for the slow, stalking way she m…
]]>The road is a short stretch of blacktop northwest of Greensburg, between Louisiana Highways 10 and 43.
It is also the road where Keith Madison Sr. vanished, more than five years before.
Deputies recovered the remains and sent them to the LSU FACES Lab. With help from the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab, technicians gave the bones a name.
The name was Madison’s.
On Monday, the St. Helena Parish Sheriff’s Office said the cause of death is undetermined. The same office has asked the Louisiana State Police to assist.
After five years, the rural road that swallowed Keith Madison has given him back, and no one can yet say how he died.
I first heard his name in 2022.
His daughter called me and asked Bayou Justice to shine some light on a father who had walked out of his own neighborhood a year earlier and never come back.
He was 46 then, a white man of 5-foot-7…
]]>I thought in these times of artificial intelligence and too-perfect editing, you might appreciate a blast from our crime fiction past.
Note: The British English spellings (italicized) are intentional.