One fact is clear: local law enforcement is far too steeped in misconduct and corruption-and this extends to the task force, which is dominated by detectives and deputies from the sheriff’s office-to run an investigation with the integrity that the murdered women and their families deserve after nearly a decade in which no one has been brought to justice. My investigation, however, casts serious doubt on the theory that the Jeff Davis 8 is the work of a serial killer. The details of the Jeff Davis 8 case can be murky the connections between victims, suspects, and police tangled. I have interviewed friends and family of all of eight victims, as well as some of the possible suspects. Over the past two years, I have obtained and reviewed hundreds of pages of task force witness interviews, the homicide case files on several of the victims, the Jeff Davis Parish sheriff’s office’s and Jeff Davis Parish district attorney’s files on all of the victims, federal and state court records, and the complete personnel files of the cops and sheriff’s deputies at the center of the case. The Derrick Todd Lee case broke by a stool pigeon.” It’s usually just luck that breaks a case. “They can go unsolved forever,” said John Jay College of Criminal Justice forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger of serial killer cases. HBO’s new drama True Detective is very much true to life in at least one respect: the extraordinary expanse of time-17 years-that a pair of Louisiana State Police homicide detectives, played by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, spent investigating a serial killer in West Louisiana. Intricate murder cases like the Jeff Davis 8 can remain open for years, even decades. In early 2010, The New York Times ran a long feature on the murdered women, “8 Deaths in a Small Town, and Much Unease,” that described “fury at the possibility that a serial killer might be loose.” It has been nearly nine years since the first body of a Jennings prostitute was fished out of a murky canal, yet all of the murders remain unsolved. This pronouncement brought a swarm of national media to Jennings. “It is the collective opinion of all agencies involved in this investigation,” said then Jefferson Davis Parish sheriff Ricky Edwards, who was flanked by FBI agents, Louisiana State Police, and sheriffs from neighboring parishes at a press conference announcing the task force’s inception, “that these murders may have been committed by a common offender.” From the outset, the task force was searching for a serial killer. At the time there were seven dead women, and the reward for information leading to the guilty party’s arrest was increased from $35,000 to $85,000. In December 2008 a multi-agency investigative team (MAIT) of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies was formed to solve the killings. The victims were mired in poverty and mental illness and all had hustled Jennings’ south side streets for drugs and sex. Both Patterson and Brown had their throats slit the other bodies were in too advanced a state of decomposition to determine the cause of death, though the coroner often suspected asphyxia. Along with Lewis, the victims were Ernestine Marie Daniels Patterson, 30 Kristen Gary Lopez, 21 Whitnei Dubois, 26 Laconia “Muggy” Brown, 23 Crystal Shay Benoit Zeno, 24 Brittney Gary, 17 and Necole Guillory, 26. Fingerprints later identified her as 28-year-old Loretta Lynn Chaisson Lewis, a local prostitute.īetween 20, the bodies of seven more women would be discovered around the swamps and canals that ring Jennings, a staggering body count for a tiny sliver of a town of about 10,000.
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Hours later, a dead woman was on the banks, clad in blue jeans, blue panties, and a white short-sleeved blouse her body was decayed but showed no evidence of injury aside from a small patch of blood under the scalp. More than a dozen deputies and detectives from the Jefferson Davis Parish sheriff’s office quickly arrived at the foot of the bridge. “I saw flies,” he said, “and mannequins don’t attract flies.” “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.” Jackson focused his eyes on the figure. But as he peered down into the muddy rush of water, he spied the outline of a human body. On May 20, 2005, Jerry Jackson, a slim, gentle-voiced African-American retiree, prepared to cast a fishing line from a hulking bridge over the Grand Marais Canal on the outskirts of Jennings in southwest Louisiana.
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