Charlotte Murray Pace has brought her fight to you." These crimes are vividly depicted in this first comprehensive book about Derrick Todd Lee. That fight is not over, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. She preserved her honor by the way she lived and the way she died. And in the fight, he took her life, her body. As her young, strong heart pumped its last blood out of the holes he cut out of her, she fought. Just open my hand, and you'll know who did it to me.'" Two months later: "Charlotte Murray Pace fought from one room of that apartment to the other," Prosecutor John Sinquefield told jurors as they blinked tears away. "Geralyn was trying to tell us something. Geralyn's clenched fist, frozen in death away from her body, held her secret.
Like so many of its true-crime brethren, Galkin and Levine’s series is spellbound by not only the unknown, but by the possibility that, because of the particular circumstances of these homicides, the truth may be fundamentally unknowable."Rigor mortis had set in by the time police arrived," Special Prosecutor Tony Clayton told the jury, watching their eyes as they viewed the photograph of the bloodied arm of Geralyn Barr DeSoto. The effect is simultaneously intriguing and frustrating, since it makes one think that something deeply fishy was going on in Jennings, and yet leaves one wondering if all these ideas are just fanciful conspiracy theories designed to fill a vacuum created by a dearth of concrete answers.
And parish warden Terrie Guillory had long-standing relationships with many of the victims, sometimes of a carnal nature, and may have known about first victim Loretta Chaisson’s death before her body was found.įacts are few but hearsay is plentiful in Murder in the Bayou, which casts intense doubt on the official version of events, and suspicion on Richard and his cop pals, through voluminous eyewitness accounts and speculation. Jailor Danny Barry, who knew many of the oft-incarcerated women thanks to his position, was known to pick up working girls, get them high, and then enjoy time with them in his home’s plastic-encased sex dungeon (alongside his wife, no less). Chief investigator Warren Gary, for example, purchased a truck from an incarcerated Richard associate that may have been used in Lopez’s slaying, and then sold it for profit. More damning still, Brown’s look into the murders exposed a thicket of crisscrossing paths and allegiances between the victims, Richard, and law enforcement. Friends, family members and reporters Scott Lewis and Brown, however, contend that biases against Jennings’ poorer residents both clouded public perception and undercut urgency to find the culprit(s). The Jeff Davis 8’s drugging-and-prostituting proclivities certainly put them in the crosshairs of lethal forces.
They all apparently sold their bodies for money or drugs.Īnd, crucially, they all knew Frankie Richard.
13) is a peek into the tangled bonds and socioeconomic divides of Jennings, located in Jefferson Davis Parish, where train tracks separate the north side “haves” from the south side “have-nots.” It’s from that latter region that the victims, who came to be known as the Jeff Davis 8, hailed, although that wasn’t the only thing that bound them to one another. Directed by Matthew Galkin, produced by Joshua Levine, and based on Ethan Brown’s 2016 book Murder in the Bayou: Who Killed the Women Known as the Jeff Davis 8?, Showtime’s new five-part true-crime series (premiering Sept. Murder in the Bayou, however, isn’t nearly as confident about that supposition. Certainly the police felt that way, since after considerable investigative work, Sheriff Ricky Edwards declared that the atrocities were the work of a single serial killer. So when, over the course of four-and-a-half years (2005-2009), eight women were killed, their bodies dumped in canals or on the sides of roads, and it turned out that they all ran with the same crowd, it was hard to imagine that the crimes were unrelated. In small towns like Jennings, Louisiana, everybody knows everybody.