Murder in the Bayou by Ethan Brown

Author:Ethan Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER 10

* * *

The Undoing

On an unusually chilly day in mid-December 2008, Frankie Richard called Jarett Dobson, an investigator with the Louisiana State Police. Dobson had joined the Taskforce after serving on the team that investigated the 2005 police killing of Leonard Crochet. He’d also interrogated jail nurse and whistleblower Nina Ravey. Frankie wanted to talk about the unsolved murders; he made the call from the Freedom Baptist Church in Logansport, where he was hunkered down in an inpatient drug rehabilitation program. It was a moment of drying out, far from the temptations back home.

The church sits on a narrow, desolate stretch of Highway 5, surrounded by tall pine trees, nearly two hundred miles northwest of Jefferson Davis Parish. When Dobson arrived, Frankie immediately began talking about the slayings. He said that fellow rehab patient Michael Prudhomme—boyfriend of Jennings sex worker Necole Guillory, who months later would become the eighth and final victim—had cleaned the Chevy Silverado that investigators believed was used to dispose of Kristen’s body. Frankie also confessed that his sister Tabatha was with Loretta Chaisson just before she died, though he insisted that Loretta had suffered a seizure and then “people got scared and dumped [her] into the canal” (there’s no evidence to corroborate this). Then he ticked off an extensive list of corrupt members of local law enforcement (including Deputy Danny Barry) who he claimed paid for sex with the murdered women and were also involved in their violent demise.

Though Frankie was—and still is—a strong suspect in at least two of the Jeff Davis 8 murders (Whitnei and Kristen), he had a long history of cooperating with law enforcement. Indeed, Frankie was debriefed by the Taskforce on at least four separate occasions in 2008 and 2009. While Frankie often made incriminating statements, he always eluded law enforcement’s grasp, it appears, because he is savvy at making alliances born of mutual interest. His criminal history is a series of dropped charges in cases ranging from theft to rape and murder. It invites the conclusion that in exchange for information—and, likely, fearing what Frankie knows about their misconduct—local law enforcement provides him cover. His relationships extend to the highest ranks of the Taskforce. I’ve learned that Frankie was issued a key to the Taskforce office on South Lake Arthur Avenue. Multiple witnesses watched him let himself in, both day and night. The relationship far precedes the Jeff Davis 8 era; a law enforcement witness named Frankie as a coconspirator in the March 2, 1990, theft of nearly three hundred pounds of marijuana from the Sheriff’s Office. The other conspirator was a deputy.1

Frankie has been dubbed the Cajun Country Charles Manson. His grizzled look—flowing brown hair and wild, unkempt beard—and his circle of women make the comparison visually apt. But Frankie’s close confederacy with law enforcement is less reminiscent of Manson than of Whitey Bulger, the Boston Mob boss who for two decades provided information on murders, drug deals, armed robberies, and fugitives to corrupt FBI agent John Connolly.

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