When her great-grandmother Coralee asked why, Allison said only that her mom “looked funny.”

Coralee walked to the bedroom. The bed was empty.

She found Amelie Jane “Diddie” Cooper in the children’s room, half on and half off one of the twin beds. Naked from the waist down. Lingerie and quilted housecoat rolled up over her breasts.

Purple finger marks circled her throat. Blood soaked her hands and clothing, and a bloody foam had seeped from her nose.

Someone, Coralee later told police, had apparently dressed her with her clothes turned inside out.

Diddie Cooper was thirty years old.

Fourteen hours earlier, she had been at the Tulane-LSU game, sitting in the rain.

New Orleans knew Diddie Cooper. She hosted “A Date with Diddie,” a weekly variety show on WDSU-TV spotlighting local talent. The New Orleans States, January 13, 1954, called her an attractive young socialite from a prominent Louisiana family.

Accurate, to some degree.

Her father, Robert Woolfolk, was an investment banker; her mother, Ruth Samson Woolfolk, was an accomplished musician. Diddie, a singer like her mother, made her society debut after high school and attended H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College at Tulane.

She had been married before. On September 5, 1942, Diddie married Macrino Trelles, heir to a New Orleans cigar fortune, in a ceremony the papers put on the front page.

It didn’t last. She divorced Trelles in 1947 and four years later married James Leland Cooper.

Jimmy Cooper was clean-shaven and expensively dressed, his red hair dyed to a shade slightly too vivid for his age, his hairline retreating above a look the papers called smug.

He was born in Clara, Mississippi, studied medicine briefly in Chicago, and in 1932 was arrested there in a stolen-car scheme.

After six months in the Cook County House of Corrections, he moved to New Orleans, managed theaters in the French Quarter, and eventually bought the Court of Two Sisters restaurant on Royal Street.

During the war, he served as a Quartermaster Corps captain. When he came home, the restaurant was thriving: his first wife, Mildred Schmidt Cooper, had kept it going while he was overseas.

Jimmy and Mildred divorced on June 21, 1951. Nine days later, he married Diddie.

He adored her children from her first marriage, Mackie and Allison. He paid for private school and summer camp. When Diddie gave birth to their son, Donald, in 1952, the newspapers described the Coopers as an ideal couple.

The staff at the Court of Two Sisters had a different read.

Jimmy drank. When he drank, he hit Diddie and described their private life to whoever was standing nearby. The couple separated before Donald’s birth but reconciled for the baby’s sake. After the birth, restaurant employees said Diddie seemed afraid to leave no matter how belligerent Jimmy became.

On May 6, 1952, she called the police. Officers found Jimmy drunk and took him to jail wearing only his undershorts and what New Orleans had already started calling a “wife-beater” shirt. The next morning, Diddie filed for formal separation.

By June, Jimmy had moved out of their apartment at 3211 Louisiana Avenue Parkway. He paid alimony and covered the rent. He also refused to consider divorce.

He showed up uninvited at Diddie’s parties and threatened to evict her if she wouldn’t take him back. Then begged her in front of her friends.

In October, after a Tulane-Georgia football game, Jimmy crashed a cocktail party Diddie hosted. She left her own apartment.

Later that night at Perez’s nightclub, he begged her guests to intercede on her behalf.

November 29, 1952 was cold and stormy. Diddie joined two other couples to attend another game, Tulane-LSU, in Tulane Stadium

Nobody invited Jimmy, but he came anyway.

At first, he seemed fine, sharing umbrellas and raincoats to the group.

Then Diddie refused to sit with him. She moved to the row in front with the other women and told him she had plans after the game. She warned she’d call the police if he followed.

Jimmy apologized. Said he hadn’t been drinking. Then asked whether her son could spend the night at his house.

Mackie loved him, called him Daddy, had stayed at Jimmy’s before. But this was a Saturday, the busiest night of the week at the Court of Two Sisters, especially after a Tulane-LSU game. There was no clear reason to bring the boy to Jimmy Cooper’s house that night.

But Diddie said yes anyway.

After the game, she went home to change shoes, ditching the pair soaked from the rain before joining friends at Charlie’s Steak House on Dryades Street. Later the group moved to the Key Club on Louisiana Avenue for dancing.

By 2:00 a.m., Diddie sat across the street from her home having coffee with neighbors.

Crossing back home, she realizes she has left her hat and yells back. She will pick it up in the morning. Her neighbors watch her climb the stairs to her apartment.

At 2:10 a.m., the babysitter, Cecile Plantagenet, locked the front door and caught a cab home.

At approximately 3:15 a.m. that Sunday morning, Grandma Coralee heard a scream.

She went to the back window facing Toledano Street. Under a streetlight at the corner of South Roman and Toledano, she saw a man in a gray suit climb into a light-colored car and drive away. Seeing nothing else, she went back to bed.

She awoke again at 9:00 to Diddie’s baby screaming and the phone ringing.

“Can I speak to Diddie?” A muffled voice said.

“Who is this?” Coralee asked.

“It’s me, Jimmy.”

Coralee told him Diddie was still asleep and to call back later.

Not long after, she sent Allison to wake her mother.

New Orleans police charged Jimmy Cooper.

The state tried him, but no conviction.

Orleans Parish Coroner Dr. Nicholas J. Chetta testified at trial about Diddie’s skull fracture, her broken hyoid bone, and bruising consistent with a sustained assault. But, he said, the cause of death was strangulation.

Star witness Yvonne Evers Holmes, a policeman’s wife, testified she heard Cooper confess, but the state’s case collapsed when the Defense exposed Yvonne’s past life as a “strip-teaser” at the Bourbon Street Torch Club.

Under cross-examination, questioned by Assistant District Attorney Ed Haggerty, Yvonne admitted to being a fugitive from Tacoma, Washington, charged with embezzling funds from a club where she worked as a bar-tender.

Yvonne also told the court that Jimmy Cooper’s confession came while he was drunk and she was naked.

Diddie Cooper was buried in her blue negligee, turned inside out, just as Coralee found it. The weapon used to fracture her skull was never recovered.

The man in the gray suit was never identified.

Nobody asked Coralee who she thought it was.

Government Street, Baton Rouge.

It is 2:19 in the morning, September 16, 2022.

Behind the wheel sits Allison “Allie” Rice. She is 21 years old, sharp-featured and quick to laugh, the kind of young woman her coworkers at The Shed BBQ say lit up a room. She has worked a late shift. She is driving home.

Two men step out from between the stopped train cars.

What they want, in the next ten minutes, will be disputed for years.

Before I tell you what happened next, I want to tell you about Angela Engler.

A decade ago, I hired Angela as a quality assurance engineer at a Baton Rouge technology company. Her last name was Rice then.

She was intelligent, warm, and quick to laugh.

Angela’s daughter, Allie, took after her.

Someone shot Allie at a train crossing on Government Street in 2022. Three years later, police claim to have no leads and no suspects.

An eastbound driver had stopped across the tracks that morning. He later described the scene to journalist Kiran Chawla.

“I was bringing a friend home. When we got to the tracks on Government, the train was at a complete stop. Then two guys walked past my car. One was wearing dark clothes with long sleeves. The other wore a red hoodie pulled over his head. They were both Black males, maybe mid-20s, and both around 5’10 or 5’11.”

“At this time, her vehicle pulled up. I was going East on Government. She was coming West toward downtown. The train was still at a complete stop. They were walking through the train’s cars to get across the tracks.”

“Not ten minutes later, I heard the gunshots. At least five to six. After that, I could still see her car parked. As soon as the shots started, she tried to turn around but stopped. I began backing out to leave.”

“The next morning, I saw on the news that someone had been found dead by the tracks. That’s when I recognized her car as the one I saw.”

Later, police found Allie and her SUV riddled with bullets. Her attackers had fired at least a dozen times. The coroner found bullets in her chest and defensive wounds on her arms.

Witnesses reported the driver’s side window and front windshield blown out. Both doors had bullet holes.

Allie’s attackers had no interest in her car.

Baton Rouge Police ruled the attack a random, failed carjacking.

Lt. Kevin Heinz, commander of BRPD’s violent crime unit, spoke one week after the murder. The department, he said, had zero indication of gang involvement.

“There’s a lot of things we’re looking at that I’m not going to go over right now,” he said.

Evidence collected at the scene included ballistics and nearby surveillance footage. Neither produced a definitive breakthrough.

A carjacker who fires a dozen rounds into both sides of a car seems poorly motivated.

Highwaymen rarely shoot drivers in the chest. They do not shatter every window in a vehicle they plan to steal.

Years later, both investigators and Paul Rice have continued to work from a different premise. Allie, they believe, was the victim of a random, isolated act of violence.

The bullet patterns do not change. What motivated the men who fired them remains, officially, unknown.

After my first newspaper column on this case, a retired Baton Rouge officer contacted me. He was unhurried and precise, the manner of a man accustomed to being disbelieved.

The men, he said, did not want the car. They wanted Allie.

He believed the attackers planned an abduction. They killed her when she refused and tried to escape.

He described what he called guerilla pimps, gang-affiliated privateers who kidnap women for sale to criminal networks abroad. He said officials had suppressed the problem for years to avoid public alarm and protect downtown commerce.

I am a reporter of forty years. My first instinct was skepticism. Then I checked his facts.

The United Nations International Labor Organization designates sex trafficking as the world’s second-largest criminal enterprise.

The Department of Justice National Gang Center names street gangs as North America’s primary engine of human trafficking. In 2022 alone, according to DOJ data, American street gangs earned more than $150 billion trafficking human beings.

Covenant Rescue, an international nonprofit tracking trafficking activity, places Baton Rouge among the ten worst American cities for sex trafficking.

A 2021 Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services report counted 759 trafficking victims in the state in a single year. Of those, 530 were children.

In September 2022, Mayor Sharon Weston Broome addressed reporters following Allie’s murder.

“We cannot turn a blind eye to continuous offenses by the same groups of individuals,” she said.

Chief Murphy Paul told the same gathering that identified gangs in the city were looming. He estimated the active total had exceeded eight.

BRPD maintained the attack on Allie Rice was a random carjacking. No gangs were involved.

In 2013, the Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination project counted thirty street gangs in the city, with 500 members. LSU criminologist Ed Shihadeh placed the number higher, at more than 42.

18th Judicial District Attorney Tony Clayton addressed the Baton Rouge Rotary Club on the subject in 2023. He called street gangs the single largest catalyst for crime across four parishes.

“We have kids on the street who are 12, 15, 16 years old, and they have more guns than our cops,” Clayton said.

Allie Rice’s murder was the 74th in East Baton Rouge Parish in 2022. It followed an August 19 robbery-shooting of another LSU student. Police had also investigated two separate campus kidnapping cases in the days surrounding her death.

Baton Rouge’s streets were not simply dangerous that fall.

They were predatory.

SIDEBAR

Three months later, two to four men raped 19-year-old Madison Brooks and dumped her on a Baton Rouge highway, where an oncoming car struck and killed her.

Another LSU student’s life cut short.

The legal proceedings involving the four suspects arrested in connection with Madison’s January 2023 sexual assault continue today.

Because the suspects are being tried separately, their cases slog through the court system at different paces, thanks to system delays and complex legal maneuvers.

Beyond the criminal cases, Casen Carver and Everett Lee filed a federal defamation lawsuit against television host Nancy Grace and Madison Brooks’ mother, Ashley Baustert.

Their lawsuit alleges that public broadcasts unfairly branded Carver and Lee as “rapists and murderers” while arrest records say neither Carver nor Lee had physical contact with Madison that night.

The federal court rejected early attempts to dismiss the action, as the civil dispute continues alongside the criminal track.

On January 17, 2023, the Krewe of Spanish Town announced a tribute to Allie. Its Mardi Gras parade, one of Baton Rouge’s largest, would carry her photograph on the floats. The goal was to call witnesses forward.

Allie’s father, Paul Rice, spoke to WBRZ that afternoon.

“We are hoping that the continued exposure of Allie’s photo and the $55,000 reward serves as a reminder of how important it is that we as a community speak up and not protect those out there doing harm.”

The horror had begun for Paul at 4:45 the morning of Allie’s attack.

Uniformed officers had knocked on his door.

“They kept mentioning Allie’s name,” he told People magazine. “Finally, I asked, ‘Well, is Allie okay?’ And that’s when the policeman said, ‘No sir, she’s with the coroner right now. She didn’t make it.’”

LSU awarded Allie her degree posthumously.

Paul Rice and BRPD investigators have both publicly acknowledged a difficult possibility. The perpetrators may already be dead, killed in subsequent street violence. However, police cannot connect any deceased individual to the crime scene.

Allie’s family has not waited for answers.

They established the Live Like Allie Foundation to fund scholarships for local students. A room at Baton Rouge’s newly renovated Howell Park facility is being dedicated to her story, tied to youth mentorship and violence prevention.

What I cannot tell you is what those men wanted from Allie Rice. Paul Rice, after years of living with that question, believes it was random. The physical evidence does not contradict him.

It does not confirm those beliefs either.

What I can say is this. A dozen bullets entered both sides of a car. A young woman was shot in the chest and arms as she tried to escape. Two men disappeared back through a stopped train into the dark.

This does not describe a carjacking.

It describes something that wanted her.

The $55,000 reward has stood for nearly three years. It has not been claimed.

The sketch showed a hold-up man wanted for the murder of Thomas Gagliano, shot dead in his own New Orleans bar in 1958. None of the men were right.

Then a Tickfaw police officer named Louis Pigno walked over to his car. Pigno said he recognized the face in the sketch. A man called “Nofi” played poker every Wednesday night in the back room of Angelo Nicotre’s bar, right there in Independence. Holmes put down his keys and stayed another week.

The following Wednesday night, Holmes and Pigno sit in an unmarked car outside a bar called The Greek. It is cold. The door swings open and men move through the light. Holmes watches each one.

When the man they have been waiting for finally steps into the doorway, Pigno leans forward.

“Angelo says this guy’s got relatives all over Independence. You want to question some of them?”

Holmes studies the face. Five feet ten, olive-complexioned, straight dark hair, good teeth. The face is familiar. A booking photograph, years earlier, outside a warehouse.

Holmes shakes his head.

“That won’t be necessary. I recognize him. His name was Onofio Pecoraro. He changed it when we busted him for robbing a warehouse. Today, he’s called Nofio Pecora. He works as a collector for the mob.”

Neither man in that car could have known, on that January night, how far the name Nofio Pecora would eventually travel.

The original Gagliano homicide report described the killer as “a white man with an olive complexion, 5 feet 10 inches tall, 160 to 175 pounds, straight dark hair, who could speak Italian and had good teeth.”

Pecora matched on every count. He favored Panama hats in summer. He was no truck driver.

An anonymous telephone tip had directed Holmes toward highway men from the start, sending him across three states. Pecora could have placed that call himself.

There was one complication. Nofio Pecora was 48 years old in 1958. The witnesses who described the shooter had placed him considerably younger. If Pecora pulled the trigger on Thomas Gagliano, three people had lied to the New Orleans Police Department.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had assembled more than 200 documents on the man born Onofio Pecoraro. By 1935, he was running narcotics from Honduras up the Mississippi River. His first arrest came on December 21, 1937.

Federal agents had rounded up 88 people in what they described as a “gigantic interstate narcotics ring.” Five held New Orleans addresses: James Campo, Thomas Siracusa, Philip and Nicholas Bonura, and Onofio Pecoraro. All five faced charges of “conspiracy to violate narcotics laws.”

In 1942, Louisiana State Police found him with $20,000 in furs stolen from a state conservation warehouse. A night watchman had discovered two co-workers inside, bound and gagged with adhesive tape. Pecoraro was traveling with Philip Bonura and a man the record calls “Dutch August” Terilleaux.

All three said they were poultry dealers. They had found a stranded truck driver on the highway, they said. The grateful man gave them the furs.

The story made national news. Onofio Pecoraro became Nofio Pecora and opened a used car lot.

In time, the lot gave way to bars on Bourbon Street, a restaurant, and a mobile home park. The financing came through loans from his wife’s employer.

Frances Pecora worked for a man named Carlos Marcello. Marcello had built his fortune in the produce business. He was New Orleans’ celebrated tomato salesman. He was also the acknowledged head of organized crime in Louisiana.

Thomas Gagliano had run a bar with a gambling operation in the back room. Barmaid Linda Pertuit, 38, told Holmes that Pecora “collected dividends” every week from Gagliano and from other bar owners who hosted card games. She believed most bars in the city had opened with mob loans. She never asked questions.

Holmes must have thought of the poker game in the back of Nicotre’s bar. He must have thought of the unmarked car on a cold January night, and how long Pecora had been hiding in plain sight.

He went looking for the witnesses. Margie Simmons, 28, Gagliano’s common-law wife, had left New Orleans with no forwarding address. Holmes had planned to show her Pecora’s photograph and ask directly why she had described the shooter as a younger man. She was already gone.

Witness Louis Gallo, 41, refused to answer questions without a lawyer. Pertuit had not seen the shooter’s face. She recognized Pecora’s photograph and described what she knew, and she could offer nothing more.

We have only what Linda Pertuit was willing to say, and what Margie Simmons did not stay to answer.

Pecora’s name surfaced again eleven years later, in a different city. Among Jack Ruby’s last telephone calls, placed before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald, was a call to Pecora’s office at the mobile home court.

His wife, Frances, eventually found work in Louisiana state government. She later went to prison for attempting to bribe Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff Eddie Layrisson. This came after deputies found her son in a Loranger warehouse stocked with narcotics.

Nofio Pecora died in 1986.

The murder of Thomas Gagliano officially remains unsolved.

The man Holmes was looking for had shot Thomas Gagliano dead on May 14, 1958. Gagliano was 36 years old. He had run a bar called the T&M at 210 North Dorgenois Street in Mid-City New Orleans for seven months.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune described the shooting as a botched holdup. An anonymous telephone tip told police the assailant was a transfer truck driver. That tip sent Holmes in the wrong direction for six weeks. The record does not show who made the call.

The night of the murder, a man in a Panama hat walks into the T&M shortly after midnight and orders a drink. He leaves. He comes back at closing time, orders another glass, and levels a .25 caliber revolver at Gagliano.

He announces the holdup and backs away from the bar, raising the gun above his head.

Gagliano laughs.

The holdup man fires a slug into the ceiling.

“Okay, okay. Don’t get excited.”

Gagliano walks behind the register, opens the money drawer, and reaches for his pistol. Outside the holdup man’s line of sight, he tries to cock it. A penny from the drawer jams the mechanism.

Margie Simmons is 28 years old, Gagliano’s barmaid and his common-law wife. She screams from across the bar.

“Please don’t use that gun, Tom.”

The holdup man shot Gagliano. Gagliano fell forward, knocking the locked register to the floor. The gunman ran.

Three people witnessed the shooting: Simmons, barmaid Linda Pertuit, 38, and a customer named Louis Gallo, 41. All three would later prove difficult to reach. One would vanish from New Orleans before Holmes could find her.

The police file on Gagliano includes one prior arrest. On Valentine’s Day in 1955, officers raided his home at 827 St. Charles Street and charged him with pandering. Six women who listed the same address as their own were taken in alongside him.

The record notes it without comment. So will we.

Two days after the murder, a police sketch artist sat down with the three witnesses. The composite police distributed across the city carried the following description:

“He is a white man 25 to 30 years old, 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighing 160 to 175 pounds. He has straight dark hair, an olive complexion, and was wearing a light plaid sports shirt and blue jeans with spots. He was wearing a Panama hat, was possibly a truck driver, could speak Italian, and he had good teeth.”

Two more holdups followed in the weeks after. A witness to one described a Panama hat. Bars across the city began locking their doors before midnight. At the third holdup, however, the surviving bartender described the bandit in a wool cap and a stocking mask.

Whether the third robbery was the same man, the record does not resolve.

Then came the Slidell Five and Dime.

On the afternoon of June 23, 1958, stenographer Paula Rivet, 44, approached the store’s entrance. A man came out the door with a handkerchief over his face and a gun in his hand. He told her the store was closed and walked quickly away.

Rivet screamed. C.A. Strickland, who ran a nearby electrical repair shop, jumped into his truck and gave chase. After three blocks, the man ran between two houses.

“I shouted for him to stop, and he came back. That’s when I saw the blood on the gun. He pointed it at me and said: ‘Please don’t shoot,’ and tossed the gun under one of the houses.”

In the yard next door, the man confronted Mrs. Freda Magee as she hung laundry on the line. He ran past her to a heavy rice truck at the curb. He climbed into the cab and drove away.

Inside the store, Paula Rivet found the body of Myrtle Jones Pichon in the corner. Pichon was 47 years old and worked as the part-time cashier. The killer had dragged her body 45 feet across the floor.

Slidell Police Chief Clarence Howze spotted the rice truck speeding west on Highway 190 and gave chase. Four St. Tammany Parish deputies joined him. The pursuit covered ten miles and lasted more than an hour.

“It was the darndest thing. He was trying to change clothes as he drove. The way the truck was weaving, it made it dangerous for us to try and head him off.”

Tangipahoa Parish deputies stopped the truck at the parish line. Delbert William Eyer climbed from the cab. “I don’t know what you want me for,” he said. Then he tried to run.

Chief Howze bear-hugged him until deputies could apply the handcuffs.

Police locked Eyer in the St. Tammany Parish jail. That night, an armed mob entered the lockup carrying pistols, shotguns, and a hangman’s noose. Before sunrise, a judge transferred him to the Tangipahoa Parish prison. Deputies there phoned Detective Holmes.

Holmes arrived at noon and studied Delbert William Eyer. Eyer had no olive complexion. He did not speak Italian. His teeth were rotten.

Holmes compared the slugs. Eyer’s weapon had fired .22 caliber rounds. The Gagliano killing required a .25. The fingerprints lifted from an ashtray at the T&M bar did not match Eyer’s.

Holmes ordered a polygraph test. Questioned about the Slidell robbery and the death of Myrtle Jones Pichon, Eyer failed. Questioned about the killing of Thomas Gagliano, he passed.

The polygraph confirmed what the slugs and fingerprints already showed. What no test could answer was who had placed the anonymous telephone call pointing police toward truck drivers in the first place.

He packed his case files and walked out of the Amite jail. He was halfway to his car when a man in a Tickfaw police uniform stopped him.

The officer unfolded a crumpled newspaper clipping. It showed the police composite of the Panama Bandit. “I play cards with this man every week,” the officer said. “He’s got family in Independence.”

Porch lights on. Cars in the driveway.

Then the shots came.

Residents at the corner Labruzza Lane and Fontana Road called 911.

Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s deputies arrived to find 42-year-old Daytra Miller and her 13-year-old son, Robert West II, dead inside their home. The house was still quiet when deputies pushed through the door.

Daytra had lived at that address for at least fifteen years. That was where she built her home, raised her children, and spent her days. Her aunt, Gloria McGee, described her her as “hard-working, very respectful, full of life, and very loving.”

McGee said Robert was an honors student. “Just an angel, a joy to be around. So loving, respectful. A life cut short.”

Robert was the youngest of six children, the only boy among four sisters. One of those sisters, the youngest, was home during the shooting. She hid in a bathroom closet when she heard the shots. She remained there, shaking, when police arrived.

Robert played football and basketball at Tangi Academy. His teacher, Kristian Polk-Usey, said he spent time mentoring younger children. “He was everything you’d want your son to be,” she said. She also said he gave the best hugs.

Tangi Academy Principal Jackie Wilson remembers one ELA assignment Mrs. Garner gave the class.

Robert wrote about wanting to become a professional fisherman. His grandfather had taught him. He used to stop by Wilson’s office to check on her fish tank, and when her fish kept dying at the start of the school year, Robert West II offered advice on proper care. Two fish had been holding on since early September because of what that boy told her.

“He was a kind, gentle, helpful, and caring young man who always put others before himself.”

That was Principal Wilson. She meant every word.

Robert West, Sr. — the boy’s father — heard the news on the morning of Christmas Eve. He stood in the yard on Labruzza Lane and watched workers from the coroner’s office carry his son out of the house in a body bag.

He told reporters that Daytra had been his best friend. She had been packing Robert’s things that Sunday afternoon, getting him ready to spend a few days with his father for the holiday.

“My son was being raised by all of us,” West said. “He’s the youngest of six, including four girls.” The girls had been looking forward to having their brother home for Christmas.

West said that no matter what had passed between him and Daytra, he had wanted his children to hold together.

“We were just trying to preach to them how important it is for them to stay together. Even if Daytra and I weren’t getting along, or something happened to one of us. As long as they stayed together, they’d be okay.”

He was sobbing when he said it.

In the weeks that followed the murders, family members nailed plywood over the windows and doors of the wood-frame house, not ready to go back inside.

TPSO Chief Information Officer Dawn Panepinto confirmed that investigators worked the case around the clock for weeks after the December 23rd tragedy. Multiple tips came in from the public. She said verifying each one took time.

Then she shared that matters most. There was no sign of forced entry that night. Whoever killed Daytra Miller and her son did not break in. They walked through the door.

Panepinto said investigators believe the victims knew the person who came into that house that Sunday evening two days before Christmas. “For investigative purposes, we’re accepting any information anyone has about shots being fired in the area,” she told reporters that week.

West said detectives had told him they were waiting on the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab to finish analyzing the final pieces of evidence before they could go public with information on a possible person of interest. That analysis ultimately revealed nothing new.

McGee made clear one point. “These crimes were not a product of domestic violence,” she said. “We don’t know who did this, but on behalf of the Miller and West family, we need your prayers and support, and we need the community’s help to solve this crime.”

She asked anyone with information to call the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office or the Independence Police Department directly.

Daniel Edwards, the sheriff in 2018, said, “We are hopeful that someone with relevant information will step up and help put those responsible for this horrific crime behind bars. One thing we do know is that there are people out there who have information about these murders. We want that information, or anything that will lead us in the direction of the shooters.”

His office and the Tangipahoa Parish Crime Stoppers still offer rewards for information in the case.

Daytra Miller was 42 years old. She had spent fifteen years on Labruzza Lane raising her family two miles west of Independence. Robert West II was 13. He wanted to fish for a living. He kept his principal’s fish alive with advice she still follows. His sisters were waiting for him to come home for Christmas.

Somebody opened the door for a person they recognized that Sunday evening, and neither victim lived to see Christmas morning.

The elder Robert West made one ask. “If anyone has any information about my son or about anything that has happened to him — even if you even remotely know someone involved or know something about this situation, please contact any authorities.”

His family is still waiting for that information.

That said, the visit reminded me of this incident…

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1932, two bandits with shotguns forced W. E. Mount, president of the Merchants & Farmers Bank of Ponchatoula, into his car along with his two daughters. Ruby and Clarabelle were eleven and twelve years old.

What followed was a running gunfight past Springfield, a roadblock of three hundred armed citizens and deputies, and four days of searching through Livingston Parish swamp. The kidnappers were never caught.

Mount told the sheriff his captors were two young men. Several people near the roadblock said otherwise. They insisted the driver of the green sedan was a woman.

One witness, Springfield…

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In his room, he rolled a marijuana cigarette. Then he picked up the phone and called the ranch of Country Music legend Loretta Lynn.

The man’s name was Eric Maurer. He was 31 years old. And less than twelve hours earlier, he had shoved Rube Rogers down a stairwell and drawn a kitchen knife across his throat.

If you’ve spent any time at all in southeast Louisiana and you haven’t heard the name Rube Rogers, you haven’t been listening.

Cash Box Magazine caught wind of him first. September 24, 1960:

“We just got wind of an interesting incident that happened out Louisiana way. It seems…

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My grandmother, “Maw Telliua,” would shake her head and say he was making half of it up. I didn’t care either way. It was the best story I’d ever heard.

Turns out Paw Bill was underselling it.

Years later, digging through newspaper archives from 1930, I pulled headline after headline off the front pages of papers in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

One read “Hammond dentist tarred and feathered.” Another, “Starns admits tarring, labels dentist homewrecker.” There was “Crowds fill tar and feather courtroom” and even “U.S. court refuses to hear tar and feather appeal.”

The story had …

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I was eight years old watching nine Livingston Parish sheriff’s deputies pulling the body of John George Trathen from a briar patch at the base of the Courtney Bridge in Holden.

Bright sun, but chilly cold.

My mom stood beside me on the sandbar, along with a few other nosy neighbors, all of us squinting in the August light.

The deputies lost their footing pushing through the brush. Trathen’s wool cap fell off the stretcher. Nobody picked it up.

I never forgot that cap. And I never forgot Trathen.

A swimmer found John George Trathen, 41, on Sunday, August 8, 1973, behind a clump of bushes next to LA 1036, near a bridge over the Tickfaw River in Livingston Parish. The Associated Press reported he was a party barge captain and professional sports angler out of Miami Beach, Flo…

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That fact alone should bother us all.

Kassie Lynn Federer was nineteen years old, a psychology major at Louisiana State University. A Ponchatoula girl who hauled her blue book sack to class every day at LSU and came home to a deadbolted apartment on Park Boulevard in Baton Rouge.

On September 13, 1999, she walked in from class, set down her things, and sometime before three that afternoon, somebody kicked her deadbolt off the frame.

Investigators believe Kassie then ran for the kitchen as her killer fired shots behind her. One bullet pierced both lungs. Another caught her heart.

Kassie died before she hit the floor.

Her neighbor came home hours later, noticed the door ajar, and called the apartment manager. They fou…

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