Wicked Shreveport by Bernadette J. Palombo

Author:Bernadette J. Palombo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

The Butterfly Man: The Last Murderer Hanged in Shreveport, Louisiana

Bernadette J. Palombo, PhD

In my mind there is no doubt that this man, Fred Lockhart, is guilty and I feel as strongly as any man can feel that he should die.

—“Message to the People from Sheriff Hughes,” Shreveport Times, April 18, 1934

Much like other American cities at the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Shreveport executed convicted prisoners when local criminal courts imposed the death penalty rather than transporting them elsewhere in the state for execution as is done today. Caddo Parish prisoners today are sent to Angola State Penitentiary to await their final fates via lengthy isolation in a cell and then death administered by lethal injection. However, during the early period of the twentieth century, most death penalty convictions were carried out rather swiftly by either electrocution or hanging.

On May 18, 1934, in downtown Shreveport, at the location of the Caddo Parish Courthouse on Texas Avenue, the final official execution by hanging in the parish took place. Over the previous century, an overwhelming number of violent crimes had been committed in Shreveport.218 Yet the death penalty case involving the rape and murder of a young female victim by the “Butterfly Man” is considered one of the most bizarre and infamous crimes—“a torture killing unparalleled for brutality in all the crime annals.”219 It was a case that gained national attention.

The Butterfly Man murder case, known more formally in legal circles as the case of the State of Louisiana v. D.B. Napier alias Fred Lockhart (1934), involved the torture, rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old future-bride-to-be, Miss Mae Giffin, in April 1934. An accounting of this case, covered on the front pages of daily local and regional newspapers for nearly a month, aroused the anger of the citizens of Shreveport to such magnitude that vigilante mobs, led by two women, did their best to overtake the Caddo Parish Courthouse to exact retribution and vigilante justice.220 However, justice prevailed, and the expeditious trial and conviction of the Butterfly Man resulted in the last legal execution by hanging in the present Caddo Parish Courthouse in Shreveport, just one month after the heinous crimes had been committed.

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