Who Killed the Women Known as the Jeff Davis 8?
Investigating the serial murders of women in a troubled Louisiana parish
On May 20, 2005, Jerry Jackson, a soft-spoken slim African-American retiree with a short salt-and-pepper Afro, prepared to cast a fishing line from a hulking bridge over the Grand Marais Canal on the outskirts of Jennings in southwest Louisiana. Jackson peered down at the muddy rush below, the corroded, cylindrical rain pipes along the canal belching water, the collapsed pedestrian bridge far out in the distance. As he prepped his fishing line, Jackson imagined the catch that day, white perch, a small bass with a strong spine that’s so abundant in Louisiana it’s the state’s official freshwater fish. In low-lying southwest Louisiana, where rain is constantly siphoned to prevent flooding, drainage canals are as common as the perch. These canals provide sustenance for poor Louisianans for whom fishing is both a generations-old tradition and a day-to-day necessity. For hobbyists such as Jackson, who made the approximately ten-mile trip to Jennings from his cramped trailer on a dead-end street in nearby Welsh, drainage canals democratize fishing. Expensive shrimp boats and fishing equipment aren’t necessary — all one needs to do is drop a line into the water.
As Jackson peered deeper into the Grand Marais Canal, he spied the outline of a human body. “It had come up on the news that someone had stole some mannequins,” Jackson told me, “so I thought that one of the mannequins ended up in the water somehow.”2 Jackson focused his eyes on the figure. “I saw flies, and mannequins don’t attract flies.” Panicked, Jackson dialed 911 from his cell phone. His call was transferred to a dispatcher at the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Office. The parish is home to about thirty thousand residents (a “parish” is known as a county outside Louisiana). The dispatcher at the Sheriff’s Office took Jackson’s call at 11:46 a.m. and noted: “Caller adv fishing from bridge and seen body floating in the water.”
About five minutes later, over a dozen deputies and detectives arrived at the foot of the bridge. An emotionally overcome Jackson piled into his truck and sped back home — “I was afraid somebody might bump me off,” he remembers. On the short drive he thought about whether he’d have the courage to ever go fishing again. “It’s a bad feeling,” Jackson told me. “Them things,” he adds softly, “run across your mind all the time. I love to fish. But that broke me up.”
That afternoon, a dead woman was hoisted over the bridge and laid on the banks of the Grand Marais. She was clad in blue jeans, blue panties, and a short-sleeve white blouse; her body was decayed but showed no evidence of injury aside from a small patch of blood under her scalp. Fingerprints identified her as twenty-eight-year-old Loretta Lynn Lewis Chaisson, a Jennings sex worker.
Farther down Highway 1126, Barb Ann Deshotel, a longtime friend of the victim’s, watched nervously as investigators set up a perimeter around the crime scene. Early that morning Terrie Guillory, a deputy from the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Office who had a thick, stocky build, a shaved head, and a scruffy goatee, had arrived at her home on West Division Street in South Jennings to question her about Loretta’s whereabouts.
“Where was Loretta?” Deshotel remembers Guillory asking. “When was the last time I seen her? I said, ‘After my son’s birthday. What’s the matter?’”
Guillory’s tone grew serious: “We think she’s missing.” Then he turned his back on Deshotel and left.
A confused and panicked Deshotel phoned Loretta’s brother Nick, asking him to come over. But before he even arrived, the news had spread through the neighborhood: a body, found in the canal. She feared it was Loretta. When Nick finally made it to Deshotel’s home, the pair took off down Highway 1126 in the direction of the Grand Marais.
“We saw a CSI van on the road,” Deshotel remembers, “and followed it to where the cops blocked the road off. Me and Nick watched the body come out of the water and onto the bridge. We were watching from afar but I knew it was her. She was wearing one of my shirts when they found her. It was pink, but the color had gotten so light that they said it was white in the police report.”
For Deshotel, the sight of a friend being fished out of the murky Grand Marais was terrifying and traumatic. Afterward, she found herself thinking not about Loretta’s passing but Terrie Guillory’s early-morning visit. She and Loretta’s brother Nick had been unaware of anyone — not her family nor her friends — reporting her missing (I was also unable to find any record of Loretta being reported missing to the Sheriff’s Office or the Jennings Police Department; I obtained such records on other victims).
“None of us called her in as a missing person,” Deshotel insists. “So why were they looking for her? Unless they know something that other people didn’t know?”
Deshotel would have known if Loretta was missing. The pair, after all, shared everything. Clothing, food, makeup, even Deshotel’s West Division Street home. Loretta stood five foot three and weighed just 104 pounds. She had sandy-brownish-blond hair and a sly smile. At the time of her death she was deep in thrall to a crack addiction. After years of slow and painful dissolution, Loretta’s marriage to a burly African-American shipyard worker, Murphy Lewis, had finally come undone. She’d sought refuge with friends and extended family, including, at the time, Deshotel.
“I knew she did drugs recreationally,” says Lewis, who married Loretta in March of 2000 in the backyard of a relative’s home in Jennings, “but two weekends out of a month developed into an everyday habit.”
Though Lewis and Loretta had two boys together — Keylan in 1999 and Kendrick in 2002 — she would disappear into South Jennings’s heady drug scene for days, sometimes weeks at a time, reemerging only to beg her husband for a few dollars to purchase meals at Popeyes or Sonic. By 2004, Lewis had persuaded Loretta to enter a local outpatient drug-rehabilitation facility. When the stint failed to help her, the pair separated but did not legally divorce.
Loretta’s decline quickened after her separation from Lewis. On March 6, 2005, she snatched a checkbook out of a truck and wrote three checks, for $54, $265, and $226. The petty crime crystallized Loretta’s desperation: one of the checks was made out to local grocery store Hanson’s Super Foods, and a receipt shows that the bulk of her purchases were cigarettes. Hanson’s turned over surveillance footage to law enforcement and Loretta was quickly apprehended.
In a videotaped interview with the Sheriff’s Office, Loretta admitted to taking the checks, but insisted it was all part of a routine cash-for-sex arrangement. According to the interview notes, Loretta insisted that the owner of the checkbook “give [sic] her money for sex all the time.” Nonetheless, Loretta was charged with theft and forgery and, thanks to an outstanding cocaine-possession charge, faced the prospect of three years in prison.
In an April 11, 2005, letter to the District Attorney’s Office, Loretta’s attorney, David Marcantel, pleaded for leniency, citing her myriad mental and physical health problems: “You have her pleading to simple possession of cocaine, suspended all but three years is very harsh,” Marcantel wrote. “Loretta, who is in jail on a bench warrant for missing court, has tuberculosis and takes 12 kinds of medicine for her TB, anxiety, bi-polar disorder, cough, breathing difficulties, depression. I am asking that she be allowed to plead to simple possession of cocaine, get a suspended sentence, parish jail time of four months, with credit for inpatient substance abuse treatment. She has no prior felonies. She has done three weeks in jail on these charges. I would like to get her out of jail and into substance abuse treatment as soon as possible, if you will agree.” Marcantel’s push for mercy worked: she was given a six-month prison sentence, just about all of which — excluding sixty days — was suspended.
That spring, Loretta was released from lockup. Nothing in the court records indicates that she received the substance abuse treatment Marcantel requested. Even after jail Loretta’s drug habit remained as ferocious as ever.
Loretta’s husband isn’t sure when he last saw his wife alive; he thinks it may have been the late afternoon of Sunday, May 15, 2005, when Loretta emerged from a multiday bender, hungry, exhausted, and broke. Lewis gave her a few bucks to buy herself some chicken from Popeyes; she took the cash, thanked him for being a good daddy to their sons, then walked over to Tina’s Bar, a popular South Jennings haunt with a rough-and-tumble reputation, bearing a sign encouraging patrons to pass a good time.
After Loretta was pulled from the waters of the Grand Marais Canal, Lewis, like Loretta’s confidante Barb Ann Deshotel, took issue with the investigation. “After Loretta died, I was never questioned,” Lewis says furiously. “The spouse is supposed to be questioned. What was in evidence that ruled me out as a suspect?”
Barb Ann Deshotel kept circling back to Terrie Guillory’s visit. It felt like a linchpin, a crucial piece of the puzzle. Guillory had somehow known Loretta was missing before anyone else.
And, according to a law enforcement witness, Guillory was acquainted with Loretta long before her murder. Loretta’s cellmate from the Jefferson Davis Parish jail, an outdated, sixty-two-bed facility built in 1964 and plagued with inadequate lighting and sewer backups, spoke to investigators and alleged that the pair maintained a sexual relationship. One night, according to the cellmate, while the two were lying in their decrepit steel bunks, someone entered the cell unannounced. The cells were often hot. No air-conditioning even in South Louisiana’s humid, subtropical climate. Scared, the cellmate feigned sleep. A short time later, she heard the sound of “heavy breathing coming from the bunk, which was directly beneath her.” When the cellmate peered over the side of her bunk, she saw Deputy Guillory; Loretta’s legs were spread and in the air. He and Loretta were having sex.
According to the cellmate, the encounter was followed by a period of quiet, then the sound of the cell door opening and closing again. With Deputy Guillory gone, the cellmate looked “over at Chaisson and Chaisson put her finger to her lips, meaning for her to be quiet.” But Loretta Chaisson wasn’t secretive about her illicit relationship. She admitted to having “sex with the deputy all the time,” even when she was not incarcerated.
At the time Loretta was also engaging in sex work and partying with the parish’s roughest street players. On the morning of May 17, 2005 — the day she was murdered — Loretta was seen clambering into a vehicle at the Phillips 66 gas station with a much-feared South Jennings pimp and drug dealer named Frankie Richard. Later that day, she snorted cocaine at the Boudreaux Inn, a now-shuttered motel and bar on Highway LA 26 in Jennings, just off exit 64 on I-10, with street heavy Jermaine “Stymie” Washington and two fellow sex workers and, later, Jeff Davis 8 victims Muggy Brown and Necole Guillory. Certain investigators, I have learned, believe that Stymie suffocated Loretta at the inn as Muggy and Necole watched helplessly, a theory that fits with the coroner’s report. Murder by suffocation often leaves no discernible wounds or marks, and indeed, the coroner later noted “no evidence of significant injuries.” The manner of Loretta’s death was left “undetermined.” The toxicology screen was more definitive: Loretta had the antidepressants Zoloft and Celexa as well as cocaine in her system. Her blood alcohol level was measured at 0.16, defined as a “sloppy drunk.”
Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of seven more female sex workers would be discovered in and around the outskirts of Jennings and nearby Acadia Parish, in dirt roads, swamps, and canals, as well as along a highway; like Loretta’s, the other victims’ bodies were often too decomposed to determine the cause of death.
It’s a staggering body count for a town of approximately ten thousand residents, a place that lies in the heart of Cajun country, a town once named “the boudin capital of the Universe.” For the uninitiated, boudin — pronounced boo-dan — is a Cajun sausage packed with herbs, spices, and rice, served in a broth as murky as the area’s swamps. Indeed, the landscape in and around Jennings is quintessentially Cajun. To the east sits the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest wetland and swamp in the entire United States. To the west lies Calcasieu Parish, where oil and gas refineries, vinyl chloride production facilities, coalfired power plants, and several major petrochemical manufacturers dominate. These towering facilities release high levels of cancer-causing chemicals into the environment, contaminating fish and leaking toxins into groundwater. According to an environmental activist group based in Louisiana, one Citgo Petroleum refinery in Lake Charles — the parish seat of Calcasieu Parish — averages about fifty-five accidents per year, one of the highest accident rates in the state. At times the parish seems shrouded in a thick chemical fog. “Got a bad taste out there,” fictional Louisiana State Police detective Rust Cohle famously remarks as he rides through Calcasieu Parish in season one of the HBO series True Detective. “Aluminum, ash, like you can smell the psychosphere.”
Yet along with Loretta, victims Ernestine Marie Daniels Patterson, thirty, Kristen Gary Lopez, twenty-one, Whitnei Dubois, twenty-six, Laconia “Muggy” Brown, twenty-three, Crystal Shay Benoit Zeno, twenty-four, Brittney Ann Gary, seventeen, and Necole Guillory, twenty-six — who are collectively known as the Jeff Davis 8 — all resided in Jefferson Davis Parish. Each of the victims was deeply mired in poverty, mental illness, and drug addiction — afflictions so prevalent that drugs “account for eighty to eighty-five percent of our cases,” according to the long-serving parish DA, Michael Cassidy. Given the pervasiveness of addiction, one would think that treatment would be readily available. Not so, according to Cassidy: “We certainly don’t have any inpatient treatment here,” he admitted.
Drugs are plentiful in Jennings because of its critical location along the route of the Gulf Coast drug trade. Jennings sits along the nearly four-hundred-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that connects Houston to New Orleans, a route favored by marijuana and cocaine traffickers as well as prescription-pill “doctor shoppers.” Turn on the local news in Jeff Davis Parish and you’ll likely see deputies announce the latest I-10 drug bust. The amounts are usually staggering. In December 2011 during a routine traffic stop, police confiscated 116 pounds of marijuana from a Jeep Liberty. In May of 2014, a drug bust in the Lake Charles area resulted in the indictment of fifty-one people, one of whom was accused of being the largest cocaine distributor in the entire southwest Louisiana region.
The many threads that linked the Jeff Davis women in life (sex work) and in death (elevated levels of cocaine and antidepressants, possible death by asphyxia) led local law enforcement to investigate the Jeff Davis 8 as a serial killer case.
“The average time it takes to catch a serial killer is 7.8 years,” District Attorney Michael Cassidy said in November of 2008. “That’s alarming. We’re not used to something like that happening in our little rural community.”
In December of the same year, a Multi-Agency Investigative Team (MAIT), composed of federal, state, and local law enforcement, was formed to investigate the unsolved sex worker slayings, which then totaled seven. About one year later, the Taskforce more than doubled the reward — from $35,000 to $85,000 — for information leading to the guilty party’s arrest. They also launched a website, www.jeffdaviscrimes.net, in which identifying information about the murdered women was posted (names, height and weight, and date of birth) along with the most basic facts about their deaths, such as the dates that they were last seen alive. The Taskforce’s website, which solicited tips directly from the public, is no longer functioning. It’s unclear why this is so. The FBI also posted a flyer on its own website seeking information about the cases. The flyer offered little else but the number to the Taskforce hotline.
“You have all asked whether or not this is a serial killer,” Sheriff Edwards said in the first Taskforce press conference, which was held in December of 2008. “The facts that we currently have do not allow me at this time to say with certainty that these cases are all linked.” But then Sheriff Edwards spent the remainder of the press conference ticking off the behavioral characteristics of serial killers.
About one year later, in another Taskforce press conference, Sheriff Edwards seemed more certain that a serial killer was at work in Jennings. “It is the collective opinion of all agencies involved in this investigation,” he said, “that these murders may have been committed by a common offender.”
Law enforcement stuck by this theory, at least publicly; Sheriff Edwards even suggested that a “serial dumper” was behind the unsolved murders, a nonsensical phrase that he admitted to a reporter is “terminology I guess we’re making up.” Behind closed doors, however, various members of the Taskforce were dubious. In the spring of 2015, a Taskforce investigator admitted to me, “We investigate under a dual-type situation.”
This is law enforcement speak for a case that they believe could just as likely have multiple suspects or a single serial killer.
The Taskforce had many reasons to cling to a serial killer theory. For one, it kept the public vigilant. Neighbors started keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior, suspicious people. A killer could be lurking among the canals, creeping through backyards, seeking shelter in abandoned houses. If you weren’t careful, you could be next. The threat was tangible, concrete. And more important, the threat was external. A single killer, though horror inducing, was a more containable, less nefarious prospect than a network of killers, working in concert, hiding in plain sight.
“A big mystery is stalking a small town deep in Louisiana,” said CNN anchor Don Lemon on CNN Newsroom in September 2009. “At least eight women in the town of Jennings, that’s in Jefferson Davis Parish in Louisiana, have been found dead in the past few years.” In January of 2010, the New York Times ran a feature on the front page of its National section, “8 Deaths in a Small Town, and Much Unease.” It has been more than a decade since the first body of a Jennings sex worker — Loretta — was fished out of the Jennings canal, yet all eight of the murders remain unsolved.
But the Jeff Davis 8 cases are far from the only unsolved homicides in Jefferson Davis Parish. With nine other unsolved murders in the area since Loretta’s body was discovered in 2005, Jefferson Davis Parish has one of the lowest homicide-clearance rates in the country — less than 7 percent, compared to a national clearance rate of 64 percent. The result of so many unsolved murders in communities such as Jennings causes, as Los Angeles Times crime reporter and author Jill Leovy wrote in a 2015 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “a doubling down on distrust . . . many conclude that the state seeks control, not justice.”
Complex murder cases such as the Jeff Davis 8 can remain open for years, sometimes even decades. The infamous killings of twenty-nine children in Atlanta during the late 1970s and early 1980s yielded the arrest of one suspect, Wayne Williams, who was charged in and then convicted of just two of the murders. When the remains of four women — some sex workers — were discovered near the Long Island towns of Gilgo Beach and Oak Beach in December 2010, the media again circled around a serial killer theory, but the attention generated few leads, even though there may be as many as seventeen victims. And like the Jeff Davis 8 case, the Gilgo Beach case has been characterized by law enforcement corruption and incompetence. In December of 2015, former Suffolk County police chief James Burke was indicted in federal court on civil rights charges for allegedly beating a robber after he stole items, including sex toys, from Burke’s car. In February 2016, an outside medical examiner reexamined one of the victims’ autopsies and concluded that, contrary to an earlier finding, “there is no evidence whatsoever that [the victim] died from drowning.”
“They can go unsolved forever,” laments John Jay College of Criminal Justice forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger of serial killer cases. “It’s usually just luck that breaks a case.”
But it should have been obvious all along that the Jeff Davis 8 killings were not the handiwork of a serial killer. For one, the victims of serial killers (according to the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit’s own research) are almost always strangers, both to their assailant and to each other. Yet the Jeff Davis 8 all knew one another intimately. Some were related by blood, others lived together. The prime suspects, too, were directly connected to the victims.
All of the victims engaged in their sex work locally, several at the Boudreaux Inn, the motel where some investigators believe Loretta was murdered. Local law enforcement were dispatched to the Boudreaux Inn regularly to break up fights or bust patrons with drugs; on at least one occasion, the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Office was called to the Boudreaux Inn regarding a dead body on the premises. Loretta was the subject of numerous complaints to the Sheriff’s Office based on her activities at the motel.
All but one of the victims — Ernestine — were associated with the same fixture of the Jennings underworld: sixty-one-year- old pimp and drug dealer Frankie Richard.
“Most serial killing is solo,” cautions Schlesinger. “Serial murder is very unusual.” But the multiple suspects in the Jeff Davis 8 case do suggest serial murder. In 2006, two men — Byron Chad Jones and Lawrence Nixon (a cousin of the fifth victim, Muggy) — were charged with second-degree murder in the 2005 slaying of Ernestine Patterson. (The case eventually collapsed.) In 2007, Frankie Richard himself was briefly charged in the killing of one of the victims, Kristen Gary Lopez. But those charges were dropped after witnesses provided conflicting statements and a key piece of physical evidence was mishandled. He remains free and is often perched on the porch of his family home in South Jennings. According to case files, Jennings street hustlers with connections to Frankie were suspected in the deaths of some of the other women. In aggregate, we see a pattern more in keeping with serial murder than a lone serial killer.
More compelling than any serial killer theory is that most if not all of the Jeff Davis 8 were murdered for knowing too much: most compelling that they witnessed other murders. Indeed, women who provided information about the first few cases wound up victims themselves. Muggy Brown — the fifth victim — was interrogated about the killing of Ernestine, the second victim. Muggy also claimed to have spotted the body of Loretta, the first victim, floating in the Grand Marais Canal before Jerry Jackson found her there. According to a Taskforce report that I have obtained, a witness told investigators, “Laconia Brown were [sic] walking across a bridge and they found Loretta Chaisson’s body.” Detectives also interrogated Kristen Gary Lopez, the third victim, about Loretta. “She knew what was going on,” Melissa Daigle, Kristen’s mother, told me. She trailed off, tearing up at the memory. “They were scared, them girls. I think she knew about it [who was responsible for the murders] and was too scared to say.”
That women who were questioned in high-profile homicides were turning up dead all over Jeff Davis Parish should immediately have raised red flags. But it didn’t. At least not with law enforcement, who were accustomed to maintaining inappropriately intimate connections with those on the wrong side of the law.
But one thing is for certain. All eight of the victims snitched for local law enforcement about the Jennings drug trade.
When I confronted Sheriff Edwards with the allegation, he stammered a nondenial: “I wouldn’t respond. If they were informants, I would still continue to protect their anonymity. I don’t know that’s the truth. I won’t comment on it.”
Chapter 1 of Ethan Brown’s Murder in the Bayou is reprinted here with permission from Simon & Schuster. Buy the book here.
