Who Really Murdered The Jeff Davis 8?

Kristen Lopez was perhaps the most vulnerable of the Jeff Davis 8. At 21, she was physically gawkyâ€"she had a wide forehead, a thin nose, outsized ears, and a choppy, severe haircut that rested just above her shoulders. Lopez was intellectually disabled, and received Supplemental Security Income checks every month; when she was growing up in Jennings she participated in Special Olympics events in Baton Rouge. Lopez considered Richard a father figure and used to call him “Uncle Frankie.” She could often be seen wandering near his home, wearing Tweety Bird pajama pants and flip-flops.

Frankie Richard admitted to me that he had spent a portion of the last two weeks of Kristen Lopez’s life with her and Tracee Chaisson, partying in a rented motel room. But he claimed that he had suspected them of stealing, and thrown them out. “Kristen come give me a hug and said, ‘Uncle Frankie, you don’t want me back your room,’” Richard remembered. “And I said, ‘No, because you don’t have no respect, you want to steal everything.’” He never saw her again, he said.

Chaisson had told a similar story to investigators at first. But, according to the homicide file, in her second interrogation, she broke down in tears describing what she now said she had seen: that Richard and Conner had, on another drug-addled night, killed Lopez in a fit of anger, beating her severely by a levee near the Petitjean Canal on the outskirts of Jennings and then drowning her.

That confessionâ€"corroborated by the fact that Lopez’s body was recovered floating in the canalâ€"led to both Richard and Conner being charged with second-degree murder. The second inmate corroborated Chaisson’s story, claiming that Hannah Conner had confessed her guilt while high on crack.

But the two inmates told another story, too, about a truck, and about a conspiracy between Richard and a top sheriff’s office investigator to destroy evidence in the Lopez case.

Richard, the second inmate said, put Lopez’s body “in a barrel,” and used a truck to transport it. The truck, she said, was later purchased by “an officer named Mr. Warren, I don’t know his exact name, he bought the truck to discard the evidence.”

By “Warren,” the inmate meant the sheriff’s office chief criminal investigator, Warren Gary. The first inmate had also spoken of Lopez’s body and a truck and an officer named Warren.

So you’re saying that this officer knew about the DNA?

Yes sir.

Did Hannah say that?

Yes sir.

Did he know about the killing?

Yes, sir, because him and Frankie Richard were good friends…

What did Hannah tell you about the officer?

That him and her Uncle Frankie are good friends and that he bought the truck so that the evidence wouldn’t come back to her Uncle Frankie. He discarded it. He cleaned the truck at the car wash.

Who cleaned it at the car wash?

Officer Warren.

What car wash did he clean it at?

Ray’s.

Ray’s Laundry and Fixtures, on South Lake Avenue in Jennings, has a car wash out back; it is directly across the street from offices of the multi-agency investigative team.

Public records would seem to corroborate the second witness’ account. On March 29, 2007, Gary purchased a 2006 Chevy Silverado truck for $8,748.90 from Connie Siler, a Richard associate who had just been hauled into the sheriff’s office for questioning in a bad checks case.

On April 20, Gary resold Siler’s Silverado for $15,500, a nearly 50 percent profit in less than one month. (Siler in turn used profits from the sale, $3,207.13, to pay the parish district attorney’s office for the bad checks she had issued.)

Gary’s purchase of the truck was possibly illegal and definitely unethicalâ€"he was fined $10,000 by the Louisiana Board of Ethics in the incident. “What [Gary] did with that was wrong,” former sheriff Ricky Edwards told me. “Buying from an inmate, that’s what was ethically wrong.” He insisted, however, that his office “had no clue that [the truck] was even part of evidence [in the Lopez case]. That didn’t come out until way after the fact.”

There is some reason to doubt this claim. According to their own reports, investigators knew that Siler was one of the last people to see Lopez alive, and Paula Guillory, a former detective in the sheriff’s office who was later investigated for her own ties to the Jennings drug scene, recently told me, “We knew that Connie Siler’s vehicle was probably involved.”

In a town where everyone was related, and where the atmosphere had the feeling of a vicious family feud, it was Paula’s then husband Terrie Guillory, the warden at the jail, who brokered the Siler truck deal, according to the ethics board report on Gary. (That he shares a last name with one of the victims is not a coincidence: Necole Guillory was his cousin.)

Terrie also provided Richard’s niece Hannah Conner a thin but serviceable alibi in the murder of Lopezâ€"he said her comings and goings were because of her day job at a cable company, but did not account for her whereabouts that nightâ€"according to police reports.

Because of Warren Gary and Terrie Guillory, two members of law enforcement, the Lopez case lost a key piece of physical evidence. Because of Terrie Guillory, one suspect found herself with an alibi. And because Conner refused to flip on Richard, and Chaisson had changed her story repeatedly, the charges against all of them were dropped.

(Later on, a man named Michael Prudhommeâ€"who was Necole Guillory’s boyfriend and the father of one of her childrenâ€"would admit to task force investigators that he was approached about helping clean out the Silverado.

Richard himself would claim to investigators that Prudhomme had said that “there was a little blood inside the truck in the front and rear seat of the truck.”)

Put simply: The statements from the two female inmates portrayed Richard and his associates working with the sheriff’s office to dispose of evidence in the Lopez case. Yet the sergeant who took the statements was forced out of his job, and the allegations were ignored by law enforcement.

Warren Gary, on the other hand, was soon promotedâ€"to run the evidence room. “I don’t think it was a bad decision,” Edwards told me. “I understand how some people would question that, but no, I don’t think it was a bad decision.”

Edwards had initially not responded to my repeated calls for comment; however, after I submitted a public records request for the personnel file of one of his deputies, Edwards unexpectedly met me at the courthouse in Jennings to copy the file, and I interviewed him there.

And while Edwards said that he had received the Ewing tapes, he claimed ignorance of these witness interviews: “I’m not aware of that. You’d have to provide those witnesses to me. If you have that information, I’d love it. I don’t have that information.”

Warren Gary left the sheriff’s office around 2012. He could not be located for comment.

Ewing’s witnesses weren’t the only ones to provide information linking the Jeff Davis Parish sheriff’s office to the slain prostitutes. A review of hundreds of pages of task force investigative reports reveals a series of witness interviews in which local law enforcement were implicated in the murders. These allegations have never been made public.

Danny Barry, a 12-year veteran of the sheriff’s office when he died in 2010 at the age of 63, was named as a suspect by at least three separate task force witnesses in a single day of interrogations in November 2008. “Deputy Danny Barry would ride around on the south side with his wife,” one witness said. “And they would try to pick up girls….[Barry’s vehicle was] a small blue sports car…Barry would drop off his wife, Natalie, and she would get the girls. The couple would ‘spike’ a drink and then take the girls back to the Barrys’ house….”

One witness even told investigators that “Danny Barry had a room in his trailer that had chains hanging from the ceiling and that a person could not see in or out of the room.”

There was only one task force interview with Barry, on February 25, 2009. He wasn’t questioned about the myriad allegations against him, and there hasn’t been any substantive follow-up investigation.

Then there’s Paula Guillory, the 44-year-old former sheriff’s deputy. According to private investigator Kirk Menard, she was the person who recruited all of the Jeff Davis 8 as informants. Guillory, however, denies that any of the women were her snitches; “I’ve never had a female informant,” she told me in a recent interview.

As the murders in the parish crescendoed in 2009, Guillory participated in a raid on Frankie Richard’s family home. This was part of a sprawling investigation by the sheriff’s office into a drugs and theft ring that Richard, his mother, and Teresa Gary (the mother of the seventh victim, Brittney Gary) were later charged with running, in which guns, jewelry, and rare coins had been pilfered from residences across Jennings. Yet when Guillory turned over evidence, nearly $4,000 was missing. So the theft case collapsed under the weight of serious law enforcement misconduct.

Guillory denies that she stole or disposed of evidence in the case. She told me that she realized the money was missing when she was cataloguing the evidence from the raid and immediately contacted her superiors. (Warren Gary, the former chief investigator who had purchased the truck allegedly used to dispose of Lopez’s body, helped catalogue the evidence, another troubling coincidence.) She was sent home from work and, even though she offered to take a polygraph test regarding the missing money, was promptly fired by Sheriff Edwards. “I never even gave my own side of the story,” she told me.

Yet again the charges against Richard were dropped. It was a break that he relishes to this day. “I’m not mad at that,” Richard told me when I asked him about the missing evidence in his case. “In fact I thank her for doing that. If she had handled her business right, my momma would still be in jail.”

Guillory told me this sentiment infuriates her. “I believe he should be in jail,” she said.

I’ve obtained a copy of Guillory’s personnel file, and it details an internal investigation that was overseen by the nearby Vermilion Parish sheriff’s office. In the course of the inquiry, Guillory’s fellow deputies accused her of an array of misdeeds, from pilfering from the property room to involvement in the drug trade. Derrick Miller, a detective with the Jefferson Davis Parish sheriff’s office, spoke with investigators; according to their summary notes, he said that “prior to her being hired, they never had anything come up missing from the office,” and that he “does not trust her because there is information that leaked and knows that it came from her.”

Miller did not specify the nature of the leaks from Guilloryâ€"or who she leaked to. But any allegation that Guillory was improperly disclosing information is troubling because back then, in 2009, she was a core member of the task force.

No task force witness interview that I reviewed indicated that Paula Guillory was involved in the murders. But numerous interviews suggest that she was deeply connected to the drugs and sex scene in Jennings, and that Terrie, during his tenure as warden, tricked out female inmates, including his cousin Necole. I’ve also spoken to witnesses who saw them at both Frankie Richard’s house and a drug den at 610 South Andrew Street in Jennings that nearly all of the women frequented. “They don’t hang out at this house,” Richard told me, before clarifying: “They never hung out at this house unless they came for police business or unless they was coming to buy crack in the middle of the night from somebody else. I didn’t sell it. I smoked it.”

“That’s news to me,” Guillory said when I asked her about the task force interviews. “I’ve heard many rumors. That me and [Terrie] were serial killers.” (Guillory no longer works in law enforcement. Her ex-husband declined to speak with me.)

As 2009 ended, public outcry mounted at the cascade of local law enforcement misconduct. Sheriff Edwards ordered that every investigator working the Jeff Davis 8 case be swabbed for DNA; he told the media that the testing was meant to silence “gossip and rumors” that anyone wearing a badge was involved in the killings. Yet this is a dishonest characterization of the allegations. Task force witnesses have consistently fingered local law enforcement, and with great specificity.

After leaving the sheriff’s office in 2012, Edwards joined the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association. The office still refuses to comment on the results of the DNA testing.

Most of the murdered women seemed to have some knowledge about the other prostitute killings. But at least one victim from the Jeff Davis 8 witnessed a killing at the hands of state and local law enforcement during a drug bust in Jennings that went awry.

On April 19, 2005, a snitch tipped off local law enforcement that “there was ongoing narcotics activity” at a particular Jennings house. According to investigators, the snitch also claimed that “two other probationers,” including Richard associate Tracee Chaisson, “were frequenting the residence.” The next day, just after 10:20 p.m., a team of Louisiana Probation and Parole agents, Jennings Police Department detectives, and an investigator with the parish district attorney’s office burst through the front door of the clapboard home. They shouted “Police” and encountered a dozen drug users crowded inside in the front living room. The home was shrouded in darkness: with the exception of the agents’ flashlights, the only light came from a lamp in the kitchen.

Moments later, Probation and Parole agent John Briggs Becton encountered Leonard Crochet, a ponytailed 43-year-old prescription-pill dealer, standing on the north side of the living room. Briggs Becton told Crochet to show his hands, and, according to a statement he gave later to investigators, Crochet “then made a sudden movement with his hands toward his belt line.” Believing that Crochet was reaching for a weapon, Briggs Becton fired his departmentally issued Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun, with a single shot striking Crochet in the chest.

According to a statement provided later by a fellow Probation and Parole agent at the raid, Briggs Becton approached Crochet’s body muttering, “Oh shit.” Briggs Becton called an ambulance to the scene, and the inhabitants at 610 Gallup were taken into custody and transported to the Jennings Police Department for questioning. Police investigators concluded that they were “unable to locate any items in the immediate vicinity of Crochet’s location in the residence which could have been construed as a weapon. Further, no persons inside the residence at the time of the shooting, whether law enforcement or civilian, could provide any evidence that Crochet had brandished a weapon.”

That July, a parish grand jury heard prosecutors make their case that Briggs Becton committed the crime of negligent homicide, but came back with a decision of “no true bill”â€"no probable cause or evidence to show that a crime had been committed.

Was the Crochet killing the spark that led to the deaths of the Jeff Davis 8? It is one theory suggested by some in the parish. “The victims were being killed because they were present when Leonard Crochet was killed by the police,” one witness told task force investigators. “The girls were being killed because they had seen something they were not supposed to see.” Even Richard connected the Crochet killing to the murdered women: “Most of them girls was at a raid…when that Crochet boy got killed. Most of the girls that are dead today were there that night.”

I’ve obtained a witness list from the Louisiana State Police on the incident. It reads like a who’s who of players in the Jeff Davis 8 case, including the third victim Kristen Gary Lopez, Alvin “Bootsy” Lewis (the boyfriend of the fourth victim, Whitnei Duboisi, and the brother-in-law of the first victim, Loretta Lewis), and Harvey “Bird Dog” Burleigh, who later told Dubois’ older brother Mike that “I’m close to finding out who killed your sister” and was then found stabbed to death in his Jennings apartment. His murder, too, remains unsolved.

The slaying of witnesses appears to be a pattern in Jefferson Davis Parish. Soon after Crystal Shay Benoit Zeno (the sixth victim) was found in a wooded area in South Jennings in September 2008, a tip was called into the parish district attorney’s office from a 43-year-old Lafayette man named Russell Carrier. Carrier said that he had seen three African-American menâ€"Richard associate Eugene “Dog” Ivory, Ervin “Tyson” Mouton (who is named as another possible suspect in the Lopez homicide in the task force documents), and Ricardo “Tiger” Williamsâ€"exiting the woods.

In the early morning hours of October 10, 2010, Carrier was struck and killed by a Burlington Northern Santa Fe Train in Jennings. Police Chief Todd D’Albor said that “for whatever reason” Carrier simply laid on the tracks and was run over.

At the center of the Jeff Davis 8 case is Frankie Richard.
For the past two years, I have been an unlikely friend and confidant to him. Every few months, my cellphone rings and Richard is on the line, either to complain about harassment from cops or to ask for a favor (a copy of the 2010 Times article about the killings, or, more strangely, everything from the Times’ archive on boxer Rocky Marciano).

Though Richard was well aware that I was deeply investigating the Jeff Davis 8, he never turned me down for an interview and didn’t flinch when I confronted him with my reportingâ€"he has a knack for explaining away bad facts and constructing theories on alternative suspects. Deceased deputy Danny Barry is a favorite. “All these girls or most of these girls was found within a three-mile radius of Danny Barry’s house,” Richard told me. “Since he been dead, nobody died. All these motherfuckers on the sheriff’s department are some crooked sons of bitches.”

On an unusually warm and muggy late spring night in 2012, Richard sat shirtless, exposing his meaty upper body, on a pair of rockers on the front porch of his family home in Jennings. He has expressionless brown eyes, a thick head of black hair streaked with gray, and a salt-and-pepper goatee. He was trying very hard to project the image of a wrongly accused, down-on-his-luck, sobered-up former hustler. “I was a dope addict, a coke head, meth head, alcoholic, no-good sonofabitch,” Richard told me. “But I’m determined to get my head on right. I’m one year clean from meth and 100 days clean from alcohol and cocaine after 42 years. That’s a long fuckin’ time for a motherfucker like me.”

Standing nearby, on the ground below, was an associate of Richard’s, a towering African-American man in his 30s wearing baggy jeans and a white T-shirt. At one point, he interrupted the conversation to warn me that the story I’m working on will likely put me in the crosshairs of local law enforcement.

“You a bold-ass little man, dog,” he said.
“Don’t get caught in Jeff Davis Parish at night.”

Richard’s mother, Jeanette LeBlanc, who, with her short, silvery hair and T-shirt and jeans seemed more like a Southern retiree than the alleged grand dame of a prescription-pill ring, arrived on the porch to add another set of eyes on the interview.

“They doin’ a life history on me,” Richard said.

“Oh, lord,” LeBlanc replied.

“I’m not telling him everything,” Richard asserted.

“Keep some secrets,” she said icily.

Richard waved his hand, dismissively. He wanted his momma back inside, in part, he claimed, for her own safety. He said that he’d been the target of several recent assassination attempts. “One day I was walking down the street and”â€"Richard clapped his hands to make a gunshot soundâ€"“where it was coming from I don’t know. If you gonna shoot me, look me in the face when you shoot me, motherfucker. Three different times that happened since this shit started with them murders.” Though Richard’s been the subject of several failed prosecutions, he insisted that he is a wanted man by just about everybody in town, from the sheriff’s office to the pimps and pill-pushers on the south side streets.

A series of beat-up, lowriding Oldsmoblies and Cadillacs then rolled by. “FRAN-KAY!” a couple of young African-American men yelled out the window, trying to grab his attention. “Hey, FRAN-KAY!” One saggy-pantsed man actually got out of a Cadillac, prostrated himself on the street, and began bowing. Richard half-heartedly acknowledged the menâ€"he was visibly aware that the tributes contradicted the image he was trying to project to me.

That Richard continues to sit atop what police files and my own reporting suggest is an empire of drugs and prostitution is no spectacular stroke of luck. He is a prized informant who, according to task force documents, has provided a steady stream of intel to investigators. (He was debriefed in 2008, which challenges another official narrative: that no one is talking to the multi-agency investigative team, and that all investigators have is a series of unhelpful dead ends.) Criminal activity sanctioned by high-level law enforcement is hardly uncommon; a 2011 FBI report concluded the agency gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times that year.

Richard would push back against the snitch label vigorously. But, in May 2012, Kirk Menard, the private investigator, sent a pair of female witnesses who said they had tips in the killings related to Richard to the task force offices to be interrogated. “Do not worry about Frankie,” one high-ranking task force investigator told the stunned women, “because he works for me.” The investigator added, according to the witness account, that Richard has a task forceâ€"issued cellphone. Menard forwarded me an e-mail he sent to the task force outlining his concerns about the interview. Nearly two years later, he has yet to receive a response.

Richard’s cooperation is especially troubling given that two members of local law enforcement may have disposed of evidence in critical murder and theft cases against him.

The possibility that Richard is just circumstantially connected to all of the eight murdered women has also been undermined again and again. Soon after charges against Richard in the 2007 Lopez slaying were dismissed, he and associate Eugene “Dog” Ivoryâ€"who is, according to task force witnesses, a suspect in the murder of Crystal Benoitâ€"beat a rape case in which, according to case files, Richard allegedly told the victim, “If you tell anyone, bitch, you will end up like the others.”

One night, not long before Richard and I met, Beverly Crochet, the sister of slain drug dealer Leonard Crochet, was leaving Tina’s Bar, a South Jennings haunt frequented by the Jeff Davis 8. Tracee Chaisson, the former prostitute who was once charged with being an accessory after the fact of second-degree murder in the slaying of Kristen Lopez, approached her in the parking lot.

“When I was walking out with my ride,” Crochet told me when we spoke several weeks later on the front porch of her home, which is just down the street from the Richard family home, “she was screaming out the car with some black people, ‘You’re gonna be number 9.’”

Crochet said she reported the incident to the task force. She cleared her throat nervously. “I could tell you more,” she said, “but I’m scared. I’m scared for my own life.” The Jeff Davis 8 killings, she said, “started right after” her brother 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.”

The parish’s current sheriff, Ivy Woods, won a heated campaign in 2011 on a promise to solve this case, but he has made no discernible headway. Woods never returned any of my calls for comment, but he recently gave an interview about the case to WWL-TV, the CBS affiliate in New Orleans. “The rumor’s gotten out several times within this investigation that it has to be a law enforcement official that committed these murders because they can’t be caught,” he said in a story broadcast on January 31. “I’ve tried to bring the trust back to law enforcement.”

The multi-agency investigative team, meanwhile, remains a case study in conflict of interest, dominated by investigators from a sheriff’s office with a deep history of corruption and misconduct. The Jeff Davis 8 case is begging for a takeover by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which intervened in a now notorious New Orleans Police Department case from 2005, where cops shot and killed innocent bystanders on the Danziger Bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. My investigation raises a number of very real questions about the prevailing serial-killer theory of these murders, and it also indicates that local law enforcement is a hindrance, not a help, to a resolution being reached. Whatever the truth, these eight women, and their surviving families, deserve a fresh inquiry by an outside investigative body.

As the sky over Jennings darkened and we said our goodbyes on Richard’s porch, the mask of the anxiety-ridden, cornered onetime kingpin dropped, and he bellowed: “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.”