Two men come in past her. One of them is tall, six foot two or better, and she will spend the next twenty-six years being asked what else she remembers.

A black two-door sits in the lot. So does a red pickup with the passenger door standing open.

On Sunday, July 6, 1997, an employee let herself into KK’s Corner, a Texaco food mart on Louisiana 14 at Tom Hebert Road, and found the place in disarray. She called the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office at 4:53.

Deputies found three bodies in the walk-in cooler.

Stacie Reeves, 26, wore blonde curls piled high and always smiled big for photos. Marty LeBouef, 21, had dark hair swept back off his forehead and didn’t smile as much. They were closing the store together.

Nicole Guidry had long dark hair and bangs cut straight across her eyebrows. The first wire stories listed her as 15 and every account after mid-July said 14. She was Stacie’s baby sitter, just visiting.

All three were shot the same way. No weapon was ever recovered.

Several dozen people watched investigators from the next parking lot, behind the police tape.

“This was kind of a safe haven,” Rocke Fournet, who owned a business next door, told the Associated Press that afternoon. “Nothing’s ever really happened here.”

More than $10,000 in cash, checks and money orders could not be found. KPLC reported on Oct. 20, 2000 that three phone wires had been cut, that the office door came off its hinges, and that the July 5 surveillance tape was missing.

Deputies had checked the store around 11 the night before and found nothing wrong, Detective Donald “Lucky” DeLouche said.

On July 18 the Violent Crimes Task Force released a sketch. A white man, six feet to six-two, stocky, short light-brown hair worn longer in the back, late twenties or early thirties, in dirty blue jeans, a white T-shirt and tennis shoes. Wanted for questioning. Not a suspect.

The sketch worked.

Virginia Johnson also remembered a Marlboro keychain. After a hypnosis session that ran eleven or twelve hundred dollars, she remembered a rabbit head. When America’s Most Wanted staged its reenactment in January 1998, the man on television carried a rabbit’s foot.

The tip that produced a suspect came from Lonnie Kemp, who said he knew a fellow who carried a rabbit’s foot.

Thomas Frank Cisco Jr. had heavy dark brows and a thin mustache that never quite filled in. Deep creases already crossed his forehead at twenty-nine. Deputies booked him, a former Lake Charles man living in New Orleans, with three counts of first-degree murder on Aug. 28, 1998.

And then he talked.

He couldn’t remember, saying he’d been on drugs. He wasn’t there at all. Then he did it with Robert Thigpen. Thigpen did the shooting.

Next, he did it alone. Then he did it with Malcolm and Bobby. There was a fourth man, and the fourth man was Chris Cabral.

According to police, nothing he said was true.

He even said the eyewitness was white. Virginia Johnson is Black.

In all he gave thirty-five statements, by reporter Catherine Townsend’s count. Most were told to the detective, Lucky DeLouche, with several taken in Cisco’s cell, and one session running past two in the morning.

Nineteen conflicting statements made it to the jury.

That jury in Baton Rouge on October 18, 2000 recommended the death penalty and Judge Patricia Minaldi imposed it.

Three years later the Louisiana Supreme Court found that Cisco’s court-appointed lawyer, Evelyn Oubre, was representing Lucky DeLouche in family-law matters while she defended Cisco against DeLouche’s investigation.

The court threw out the conviction and the death sentence on December 3, 2003. It also recorded the fact that nothing physical linked Cisco or anyone else to that store.

In February 2004 a second prosecutor, Rick Oustalet, turned out to have also represented Detective DeLouche, causing District Attorney Rick Bryant’s office to step off the case.

The charges came down to second-degree murder in 2008. In March 2010 Cisco pleaded guilty to three counts of manslaughter and got ninety years in Angola State Penitentiary.

Now, let’s recount those mentioned but never charged.

Robert Thigpen didn’t match Johnson’s description and had an alibi DeLouche called firm, though the court record notes that Thigpen’s wife and her sister did drop Nicole Guidry at the store that evening.

Investigators eliminated Malcolm and Bobby.

Miles Addison quit the store the day before the killings. He failed three polygraphs and admitted dealing and stealing, but nobody tested his hair or DNA in any form.

Narcotics officer Jerome LaStraps puts himself near KK’s Corner at 12:22 that morning but denies being in the store parking lot.

Richard McElveen, the sheriff’s son, got the most attention. The parish rumor mill had him confessing, and they had him arrested in California. His father called a press conference in February 1998 to put those rumors to rest: “First I want to tell you that Richard is not a suspect.”

The task force and the FBI interviewed Richard. He gave biological samples, sat for a polygraph, produced an alibi at Big Lake, and witness Virginia Johnson could not pick him out of a photo lineup.

DA Bryant, who tried the case, put it plainer than anybody. “I think Richard McElveen was 5’8”.”

Johnson’s man was six foot two.

Which leaves Chris Cabral. Bryant told KPLC in October 2000 that Cabral resembled the composite and remained under investigation, and that his girlfriend’s brother, Alfred Foster, contradicted his fireworks alibi.

Nobody has ever charged Cabral with anything.

In 2023, Bryant told KPLC he believes the second man was Cisco’s best friend out of New Orleans, alibied by a girlfriend, who “looks identical to the composite in my mind.”

He did not identify the best friend by name.

The parole board granted Cisco release on February 8, 2023, and rescinded it two days later over a contraband write-up nobody disclosed.

A cigarette butt was found in that cooler near Nicole Guidry’s body. It has never been tested for DNA. Somebody in Calcasieu Parish knows if it’s worth sending to the lab.

“I got out of Jennings after my mother died,” Frankie Richard told me that day. “I lived in Morse, but the press found me there after a while. I moved in with family here and told everybody I was in Baton Rouge. Life got peaceful when people couldn’t find me no more.”

He said his health was bad and he didn’t know how long he had.

His story and the lack of justice surrounding the deaths of the eight women have been the focus of many news articles, a book and documentary series that often implicated him.

The investigating task force said they confirmed early in the investigation that the victims, all allegedly prostitutes, knew each other and at least seven of them worked for Frankie Richard at some point.

Over the years, Frankie Richard maintained his innocence.

The Jennings Police Department initially named him a person of interest in 2007. At that time, Richard was in jail on an unrelated rape charge. He was questioned in the disappearance of two of the women and the Jennings P.D. later filed second-degree murder charges against him in connection with one of the cases.

After witnesses recanted statements, both the rape and murder charges were dropped. And a former Jeff Davis Sheriff said in a recorded interview that Frankie Richard was in a rehabilitation center in Shreveport when one of the women went missing.

In 2019, the suspected pimp and drug dealer told me he wanted to document what he knew about Jefferson Davis Parish. It’s dirty cops, prostitution, the Jennings drug trade, and a cartel route that ran through Louisiana across Texas and into the Midwest. Before I left the property there, I agreed to help him edit his story.

Two weeks after our meeting, Richard texted that he’d moved back to Morse. He still wanted to work on the book, he said, but he had business first.

But in Morse he bragged about his plans. Big mistake.

On the evening of September 11, Morse Police answered a 911 call from a woman saying Frankie Richard went into convulsions. The police affidavit after said they found a meth pipe and torch, crack cocaine, oxycodone, methamphetamine, and Xanax on scene. The woman told investigators that Richard paid her in Roxicodone pills to have sex with other men.

A relative of the 64-year-old told me that week, “Frankie started running his head [about writing a book]. That’s why they gave him the bad dope. He thinks they won’t take him out because of what he knows. He’s just been lucky so far.”

The hospital released him and the police booked him into the Acadia Parish jail on an $86,000 bond, a thousand dollars more than the posted Crime Stoppers reward for the eight murders.

He went into jail on the same day Showtime aired part one of “Murder in the Bayou.”

On February 1, 2020, he texted me from his daughter’s house in Jennings, saying he was out. “They tell me I died three times. I’m in a wheelchair, but not for long.”

On March 17 he wrote that he finished rehab. The night of March 21 he wrote, “Say, Big Man, I made it to Baton Rouge. Give me a call.”

On the phone he was anxious to get back to the book, but I couldn’t meet right away.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ve got time.”

He died in his sleep that night on his niece’s couch in Denham Springs. The Livingston Parish Coroner’s Office attributed it to lung disease without an autopsy.

Frankie Richard never wrote a word of that book, but others love to write about him. Guessing what he really knew.

And his name is surely in the case file Sheriff Kyle Miers told the Jennings Daily News on August 7 his detectives are rebuilding from scratch.

Back in December 2008, fourteen local, state, and federal agencies formed a task force to work the Jennings deaths.

The team was about a month old when the Louisiana State Police began investigating two of its own members.

A state ethics board fined veteran Jefferson Davis Parish detective Warren Gary $10,000 after he bought a truck investigators tied to one of the deaths. Jennings PD fired Detective Paula Guillory over $3,000 confiscated in a raid but never accounted for.

Lorritta Elizabeth LaCoste later named the task force’s chief investigator, Parish Jail Warden Terrie Guillory, in a wrongful death suit. Then officers shot and killed her boyfriend, police informant Steven Thomas Gunter, in his Lake Arthur home in June 2007.

Necole Guillory was the only one of the eight killed after that task force started.

Two potential suspects never made the documentaries.

Brian K. Lasage covered his face with a piece of clothing and called each of his victims by her first name, Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre said in 2010. A Jefferson Davis Parish court convicted Lasage of forcible rape in Jennings in 1991 and sentenced him to fifteen years.

In 2010 he pleaded to aggravated burglary in two Lafourche Parish knife assaults and got thirty years without parole. At Elayn Hunt he allegedly told a fellow inmate, “I’m looking forward to Angola. It will give me time to write a book on my girls in Jennings.”

Brandon Joseph Hebert stood 5 foot 7 and weighed 160 pounds in 2005 when Jennings police raided his Holiday Inn room in connection with the death of Loretta Lynn Chaisson Lewis.

They took his saliva, a Walmart receipt, tissue paper, a black shirt and blue jean shorts. Out of the room they carried a Louisiana ID card, a video poker receipt, two note pads, a green cigarette lighter, two beer bottle caps, a half dozen rolls of 35-millimeter film, and a Fujifilm Hi-8 videotape.

Investigators charged Hebert with possession of child pornography two years before that. He is a registered sex offender and lives today in Sunset.

No one has ever charged either man in connection with any of the Jennings murders.

Toby Leger called me. From November 1999 to January 2009 his company leased the Boudreaux Inn on Highway 26, and he drove there weekly for payroll. He died in 2021, at fifty-seven.

Ethan Brown’s book named the motel and cited three unnamed sources who said Representative Charles Boustany paid two of the murdered women for sex at Leger’s place. Scribner released Brown’s book two months before the 2016 election Boustany lost.

“The October Surprise has been sinking political campaigns as long as I can remember,” Leger told me, “but this is different because the lie muddies the water, preventing families from getting justice for eight murdered girls.”

Leger also told me about Ernestine Patterson, who cleaned his rooms. He said Ernestine talked only about church and her children, and she always dressed to keep from showing skin.

“I always wondered how she made the list,” Leger said.

Toby Leger died in 2021.

Like Leger, Frankie Richard spoke highly of the victims, five of them at least, who he described as his friends.

“No serial killer got them young girls in Jennings. Them people responsible kill snitches up and down I-10.”

He thought he had time to say more.

So does everybody else in that parish afraid to share the truth.

If you have information about the deaths of these women, contact Bayou Justice, Crime Stoppers, or the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Office.

Loretta Lynn Chaisson Lewis was twenty-eight years old.

Not long before, she told her family the Jennings police arranged for her to be a spy, reporting back to them on a drug deal.

The medical examiner found cocaine and alcohol in her body. Cause of death, undetermined. Twenty-one years later, it’s still undetermined.

Ernestine Marie Daniels Patterson came out of a canal off Louisiana Highway 102 on June 18, 2005, five miles south of where the fisherman found Loretta. Somebody had cut Ernestine’s throat. The wounds on her wrists proved she fought somebody. Hers is the one death of the eight that Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Office classifies outright as a homicide.

Kristen Gary Lopez, twenty-one, nude in water in March 2007, wore a single sock on her left foot.

Whitnei Dubois, twenty-six, police found naked beside a public road south of Welsh that May.

Laconia Shontel “Muggy” Brown, twenty-three, lay, doused in bleach on a roadside in May 2008, with seven slashes across her neck and three more cuts behind her right ear.

Hunters caught an odor in the woods on September 11, 2008. What they found there took the examiner until November 7 to identify as Crystal Shay Benoit Zeno, twenty-four.

A dollar store camera recorded seventeen-year-old Brittney Gary on November 2, 2008. Two weeks later she lay in the weeds by a Jennings highway. An officer said he reconized her tattoo, the most anyone could tell by what remained of her.

Necole Jean Guillory, twenty-six, lay at the bottom of a hill near Egan Ballpark in Acadia Parish. Highway workers found her on August 19, 2009, seven hours after her family reported her missing.

The Jennings Daily News, in its August 7 account of the case, told readers the eight bodies turned up between May 2005 and April 2009. Necole was found in August. Two decades on, the paper that covers the sheriff’s office is four months off on the last of the eight.

And even that may not give us an accurate count.

Before any of the others there was Sheila Comeaux. Somebody beat her to near death outside Jennings in 1998. She spent a year in a hospital bed before succumbing to her injuries, March 19, 1999.

Shiela’s daughter, Lakesha Myers, told Showtime cameras in 2019 that her mother ran with the same crowd and snitched for the same police. Lakesha believes somebody in Jennings can tie her mother’s death to the eight who followed. No task force officially counts Sheila among the others, but she cannot be forgotten.

Sheriff Kyle Miers keeps his head shaved and his face clean. He’s fifty-one, medium build, a high school football player who took up jujitsu as a grown man. His administration inherited all eight cases in July 2024.

On August 7, 2026, he provided the Jennings Daily News with the progress report he promised when he campaigned for the office.

“As of July 1, we have dedicated approximately 3,800 hours toward those cases,” Miers said, “and we’ve produced over 1,300 pages of documentation.”

He said his detectives did not take up the investigation where the last investigators stopped.

“When we began this process, detectives made a decision to start from the beginning rather than pick up where others left off,” Miers said.

Think about that.

A sheriff’s office seldom rebuilds a twenty-year murder file from scratch unless they doubt the work that came before.

Now, Miers didn’t say that. The paper didn’t ask him. That’s all me.

Miers can’t discuss evidence from open cases, and he won’t discuss how his detectives are working the case. He won’t name a person of interest. He won’t say which outside agencies are helping him, because naming them, he says, may compromise the investigation.

He did repeat his campaign promise: “We want to reaffirm our unwavering commitment to pursuing justice.”

In the same interview, Miers reported that his detectives handled 626 other cases over the last six months, better than a hundred a month, closing seventy percent of them and making forty-four arrests.

Seven out of ten on everything else. Zero out of eight on these.

Sheriff Ricky Edwards held the office while the bodies were still turning up, and he described the women as living “a high-risk lifestyle” that included drugs and prostitution. That phrase did years of damage in Jefferson Davis Parish, and the voters resented his excuses.

Miers opened a door his predecessors kept shut.

“I have made contact with some family members,” he told the paper, “and if any immediate family member of any young lady would like to talk, my door is open for you.”

Having an open door is important. It is not a name, and not a cause of death for six of these eight (or nine) women.

I have been writing about Jennings since 2019, and I still can’t tell you how most of them died. Neither, on the record, can the coroner.

The Crime Stoppers reward for information on the eight murders stood at $85,000 in 2019. Nobody ever collected it.

The sheriff’s 3,800 hours divide out to about 475 hours per victim.

Twenty-one years after a fisherman found Loretta in the Grand Marais, that number is the most anybody in Jefferson Davis Parish has ever reported. So, it’s a start.

Let’s see what happens next.

Thursday, I plan to recount what I suspect the sheriff’s office spent these months reviewing, including reconsidering some who wore uniforms. I also want to mention the two suspects the television documentaries never got around to, and the motel stories that muddied the case.

And yes, I’ll discuss the last thing Frankie Richard told me before he died.

Until then, if you have information about the deaths of these women, contact Crime Stoppers or the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Office.

The driver weighs close to 280 pounds. The Medellin men who hired him called him El Gordo, the Fat Man. He’s forty-six. There’s no pistol in the car, because a federal judge has forbidden him to carry one.

A man crouched behind the donation bin stands up with a MAC-10, a suppressor screwed to the barrel.

He fires a dozen rounds. Six hit Adler Berriman Seal, whom everyone called Barry, in the head and chest, and he dies in the driver’s seat.

He was staying there because a court ordered him to.

Seal had already made his deal. The Justice Department, working from a Florida case, agreed to probation for what he could give the government, and U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola was bound by it.

He said what he thought of that from the bench. “Drug dealers like Mr. Seal are the lowest, most despicable people I can think of,” Polozola said. “In my opinion, people like you ought to be in prison.”

He couldn’t send him there. So on December 20, 1985, he attached a condition to the probation: six months of nights, six in the evening until six in the morning, at the Salvation Army halfway house on Airline Highway. No armed bodyguards, and no gun of his own.

Lewis Unglesby, Seal’s attorney, told Polozola in open court that the order amounted to a capital sentence.

Seal put it plainer. The judge, he said, “made me a clay pigeon.”

He started reporting to the Salvation Army on January 24, 1986. United Press International reported on February 20, 1986, that the week he died marked the first time he’d driven himself in and out alone.

Twenty-six days.

Seal was born in Baton Rouge in July 1939, the son of a candy wholesaler, and he held a student pilot’s certificate at sixteen. TWA hired him in 1964, and within a few years he was flying 707s to Western Europe as one of the youngest command pilots in the fleet. Federal agents arrested him in July 1972 for a scheme to fly plastic explosives to Mexico. The case collapsed in 1974, and TWA fired him anyway for taking medical leave to do it.

Unemployed, he went back to flying, the only job he knew. But this time, his cargo changed.

Through the early 1980s he ran marijuana and cocaine out of South America for the Medellin cartel, first from an airstrip at Port Vincent, Louisiana, later from Mena, Arkansas.

March 1984 is when it stopped. Facing federal charges he could not fly out from under, Seal went to work for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

On June 25, 1984, CIA technicians fitted hidden cameras into the C-123K cargo plane Seal flew, and took photographs showing cocaine being loaded in Nicaragua with Pablo Escobar standing a few feet away. The Reagan administration used those pictures to tie the Sandinista government to the cocaine trade.

That’s the operation that got Barry Seal killed. Who arranged his hit is still up for debate decades later.

The FBI took everything from the trunk of Seal’s Cadillac that night.

What was in there depends on who tells it. Seal’s wife said afterward that she found George Bush’s private telephone number among her husband’s things. Daniel Hopsicker, who covered the case in his book “Barry and ‘the Boys,’” put the number in the trunk among the items confiscated by the Bureau.

Dandra Seale, no relation, was Seal’s secretary, and she never bought the official account. She told author Roger Stone the CIA allowed it to happen. “He had a chart, dirt on anybody and everybody,” she said. “They were afraid of him.”

Richard Sharpstein, who defended one of the gunmen, said all three Colombians told the same story. An “anonymous gringo,” a U.S. military officer, had directed them where to go and what to do once they were in the country. The gringo matched the fest of Colonel Oliver North.

However, no document has ever put North in Baton Rouge, and no prosecutor has charged him.

Unglesby’s own explanation had nothing to do with Washington. The cartel killed Seal, he said, to stop the extradition of Jorge Ochoa from Spain. “It worked,” Unglesby said. “Ochoa wasn’t extradited.”

Publicity forced the court to move the trial to Lake Charles, where it opened in April 1987.

Luis Carlos Uribe-Munera testified that Ochoa ordered him to kill Seal in January 1986, and that he took the job but backed out when he learned he’d be killed himself.

Cartel gunmen still shot him five times.

But he lived.

The case against the three who did hit Seal was solid. A witness identified Miguel Velez as the driver, and a second saw Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz outside the car handing off the MAC-10. Investigators lifted all three men’s fingerprints from the interior, and the salesman who sold the car identified Bernardo Antonio Vasquez as the buyer.

The jury convicted all three. Life without parole.

Velez died in Angola on August 25, 2015, after some time in hospice.

The Louisiana Board of Pardons and Parole voted unanimously to recommend cutting Vasquez’s sentence and setting him free.

Governor John Bel Edwards refused on January 27, 2023. His office said Vasquez had come to Baton Rouge for the single purpose of a murder for hire against a federal witness.

Quintero-Cruz went before the board on September 18, 2023. “I take full responsibility, and I honestly regret that I took Mr. Barry Seal’s life,” he said. The board split two to two, which in Louisiana is a denial.

His parole was also denied.

I’ve covered Louisiana crime for forty years, and I’ve never felt right about what happened in that parking lot.

JThree men flew up from Colombia to kill a federal witness, and they never had to follow him or wait for a mistake.

They only had to be there at six because a judge insisted their target must be there.

The order that put Barry Seal in that lot, unarmed, twelve hours a night for six months, is no conspiracy theory. It is a legit federal record in Baton Rouge, signed and dated December 20, 1985, and read aloud in open court.

Somebody was listening.

No wound on him. No door forced, no window broken, no way in and no way out. The only thing out of place is his pocket watch, turned back one hour to cover the time of the lie.

His name is John Watson. Yes, that Watson.

He has come to Geneva in the summer of 1925 to help the nations of the world outlaw poison gas. He dies breathing the very thing those nations gathered to ban.

The meeting really happened. The murder did not.

I made it up. The bolted room, the turned-back watch, the gas, the dead man on the floor. I sat at my desk and invented a murder, which is the one thing I have spent nearly forty years refusing to do.

That is what I wanted to explain today.

All those years writing true crime were bulit on one a promise. When I attach my name to a story about a murder, it happened.

The blood is too real. The families are real, and a good many of them read what I write. I have sat at their kitchen tables. I have drunk their coffee and run out of things to say.

I refuse to borrow their grief for something I dreamed up on a Tuesday afternoon. So, to avoid confusion, I’m releasing any novel I write under another name, a pseudonym.

Thomas Glock.

See that name on a cover, and you are reading fiction. You can enjoy every turn of the page without once asking which part is true, because none of it is. See HL Arledge on the cover, then it happened, and I can show you the file.

Think of Thomas Glock as a label on a pill bottle, keeping you from taking the wrong drug by mistake.

A man who spends his life asking frightened witnesses to tell the truth must to be careful before deciding to write lies for a living.

Here is why the separation matters to me.

I have had readers swear to my face that a real case I covered had to be invented, that it was simply too strange to have happened. I have watched good people repeat the plot of a novel as if it came off the front page. The line between the made-up crime and the real one is thinner than it ought to be. In true crime, a blurred line hurts people.

When an invented murder gets told with all the confidence of a real one, the real one loses a little of its weight. I will not do that to the dead I have sworn to avenge.

My novel is called The Palais Protocol, and this week, I’m giving away Kindle copies of the book FREE.

My novel is a historical thriller with a mystery spin. I recently shared a Sherlock Holmes pastiche I’d written in the 80s. This is not that. It is not written in the style of Conan Doyle, but in a modern thriller style.

The historic thriller takes place in Geneva, June 1925.

The League of Nations has gathered at a disarmament conference to promise, one more time, that they will never gas one another again. An evil baron intends to make liars of them all.

The conference is real, by the way. That June the delegates signed the Geneva Protocol, and the ban on poison gas they put their names to still stands today a century later. I staged my invented murder at a real event.

The heart-breaking murder of John Watson, it turns out, was only a rehearsal for a much larger crime.

Baron Anton von Reuth plans to gas the closing gala and pin the slaughter on a rival nation. Out of that panic he intends to start World War II.

He carries diplomatic papers and is backed by cartel money. He has the one thing no honest man in that room can claim. Immunity. No court on earth may touch him.

Four aging strangers take up what no one else will dare. Sherlock Holmes, who came to Geneva to bury a friend and stayed to hunt the man who killed him. Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief, who has already robbed half the delegations in the building.

Father Brown, who reads a guilty soul the way others read a train timetable. And Charlie Chan, a Honolulu police sergeant three thousand miles outside his jurisdiction and never once out of his depth.

Four detectives, each the invention of a different author in a different country, shut in their separate books for a hundred years. I’ve always wanted to sit them at one table.

Every one of them belongs to a century that has already ended. The man they’re up against has a future, and papers that lift him above the law. The detectives have one night to strip his immunity before the world goes back to the gas. The seventeenth of June.

I owe you a confession about this writing.

I set out to make a pure entertainment, a fair-play locked room where every clue sits in plain view and a sharp reader can beat the detectives to the answer.

Somewhere in the drafting I looked up and saw what I had actually written. A powerful man the law cannot reach, and the people who refuse to let that stand. I guess there is truly a thin line between fact and fiction.

The Palais Protocol is out now on Amazon in ebook and paperback as well as at Barnes and Noble and in hardback within a month.

For you, my loyal readers and supporters, I’ve made the Kindle version FREE to readers through August 1st, hoping some of you might enjoy the book and submit an Amazon review for me.

Look for Thomas Glock on the spine, first of the Savant Society Thrillers, so there will be more coming. If you read Dan Brown, Robert Harris, Alan Furst, or Philip Kerr, I believe you will feel at home in that glass room in Geneva.

Next week, Bayou Justice comes home to Louisiana, and to a case where the dead were real and somebody out there still knows something.

The name on that article will be mine.

Vincent Sherry opens it.

Margaret Sherry comes out of the bedroom in her underwear, drawn perhaps by the sound of her husband falling. The visitor fires his quieted pistol again and exits the house.

He leaves nothing behind but casings and a scatter of foam.

Nobody calls the police. The house sits for two days without anyone finding the Sherrys inside. Two days.

Wednesday morning, September 16, Judge Sherry missed court. In forty years around courthouses, I’ve never known a sitting judge to miss his own docket without somebody calling his home. This case was no different.

The someone who called was Pete Halat, Vince’s former law partner, a lean, tanned lawyer with a deep-creased face and graying hair combed down close. Getting no answer, he drove to the house with Chuck Leger, an associate from the firm. Leger found a door unlocked. Halat went in, then shouted back to Leger. Both Sherrys were dead.

“I walked a little into the house, and I saw your dad’s feet,” he told the Sherry children later. Think about that. Margaret’s body lay in the back of the house, well past where Halat said he stopped, yet he announced to Leger that two were dead.

Vince Sherry had a full face under heavy dark brows, hair gone gray at the temples, the easy look of a man happy with his career and home life. He practiced law with Halat, at the firm of Halat and Sherry, five years before winning the circuit bench.

Margaret usually wore her hair swept back and a strand of pearls, and aimed a level gaze at whatever crossed her. She served on the city council and lost the 1985 mayor’s race, but she planned to run again. Her platform focused on one thing: cleanup. She wanted the rackets out of Biloxi.

They died over money they likely knew nothing about, on the word of a man they never met, a man siting in a cell at Angola State Penitentiary, a prison farm bigger than Manhattan.

Kirksey McCord Nix Jr. was a big, fleshy convict, balding, dark hair slicked back over small hard eyes. In prison photographs, he wears a gold chain and a gold wristwatch alongside his handcuffs. In 1987, he was doing life without parole for the 1971 murder of New Orleans grocer Frank Corso.

In Oklahoma, his father was a sitting Court of Criminal Appeals judge. The son took a different view of the law and joined what the FBI called “a loose confederation of thugs and crooks” working the roadhouses from Texas to Georgia.

The Dixie Mafia was more of a lifestyle than an actual organization. It grew from the lowlifes left homeless after the United States government shutdown Phenix City, Alabama’s Sin City, in July 1954. Virtually none of its members traced their roots to the moonshiners of Appalachia, making media’s “cornbread mafia” tag no more than misdirection.

Despite the nickname law enforcement gave them, the Dixie Mafia had no dons and swore no oaths. They did “wet work” for the New Orleans mob from time to time, but not exclusively. According to the FBI, the services of these “Hoodlums for Hire” were available to the highest bidder. If the job was too immoral for one of them, they could recommend another with fewer morals.

From Angola, Nix ran a con investigators call a Lonely Hearts scam. His crew placed personal ads in gay magazines, posing as handsome young men in trouble, and lonely respondents wired money to rescue them. The FBI estimated their take hit hundreds of thousands of dollars. One Kansas man, they found, mortgaged his house and sent $30,000.

Nix believed enough money could buy him a pardon from a crooked politician and get him out of Angola. The collected cash went into a trust account at Halat and Sherry, where his attorney, Pete Halat, could safeguard it. Federal prosecutors said Halat helped himself to the scam money instead.

When Nix noticed the shortage, Halat told him Vince Sherry took it. But Sherry, the FBI believes, never touched a dime.

Nix wanted the Sherrys dead, so he asked an associate of Carlos Marcello’s to make the arrangements. That sat well with Mike Gillich, the gray and knot-faced, strip-club owner Biloxi everyone called Mr. Mike. Margaret Sherry had spent her public life promising to shut Mike Gillich and his fellow club owners down. Killing her too could be good business.

The man who knocked at the Sherry’s door that morning, prosecutors said, was Thomas Leslie Holcomb, a Dixie Mafia killer for hire.

For two years the case went nowhere, and Biloxi residents weren’t surprised. Their own sheriff, Leroy Hobbs, had gone to prison on racketeering and drug charges only a few years before. Plenty of people in Biloxi knew something, and every one of them understood what knowing could cost.

Lynne Sposito, the Sherrys’ daughter, wouldn’t leave it alone. She pressed the officials and hired her own investigator, and when Biloxi officials wearied of her, she looked elsewhere. Two FBI agents, Royce Hignight and Keith Bell, stepped up. They spent eight years tracing Lonely Hearts money from mailboxes to a cellblock at Angola, and from there into a Biloxi trust account.

In 1989, while the agents worked, Biloxi held an election. It chose as mayor the man who’d found Vincent and Margaret’s bodies.

In 1991, a federal jury convicted Nix and Gillich of conspiracy to commit murder. Then Gillich did the one thing a mafia man of any sort was never supposed to do. He talked.

In 1996, a grand jury indicted Mayor Halat. In 1997, a jury convicted him of conspiracy and obstruction, and the events of that Wednesday morning finally added up. He drew eighteen years and served till 2013.

Triggerman Holcomb drew life and died in prison in 2005. Gillich traded testimony for daylight and died at home in 2012. And Nix, he’s in his eighties now, back home in Oklahoma, but in a federal cell at El Reno, still doing the life sentence he tried to buy his way out of.

Thirty-nine years this September, and it’s the two quiet days I keep coming back to. A judge and his wife lay dead behind an unlocked door, and the town went about its business until a courtroom sat waiting on its judge.

Margaret Sherry told Biloxi that the rackets owned too much of the town. Proving her right took a daughter who wouldn’t quit and a pair of federal men with eight years’ patience, but not before the city handed her enemies’ lawyer its highest office.

Vince Sherry answered his own door that Monday evening, the way grocer Frank Corso did in New Orleans in 1971.

Today, we have doorbell cameras.

His name is Len Davis. He is heavyset and round-faced, with a thin mustache, and on the day police arrest him he’s wearing an ear-ring and one of the loud vertical-striped shirts he favors, the wardrobe of a man who wants to be seen. On the street they call him Robocop to his face, a gangster with a badge, behind his back.

Davis lifts his cell phone. He wants a woman dealt with. He calls it a thirty.

The agents write the word down. In the New Orleans police code, a signal thirty means a homicide, but the agents don’t know that yet, and by the time somebody explains it to them, Kim Groves is already dead.

In the photograph of her most shown by the media, Kim Groves is smiling wide, her hair a dark natural halo around her face, the thin white strap of a summer top at her shoulder. She looks like a woman with nothing to fear.

She was thirty-two, a mother of three. She lived in the Ninth Ward.

In October 1994 she watched two officers beat a young man in her neighborhood, and she did the thing every citizen is told to do. She walked into a police building and filed a formal complaint against Officer Len Davis and his partner, Sammy Williams.

Davis knew about the complaint within a day. That was the trouble with gangsters with badges: he controlled the very system that was supposed to hold him to account.

The FBI got to Davis by way of a smaller crime, and a smaller man.

In 1993, cocaine ran through New Orleans like river water, and in some corners of the city the badge and the dope did business together. One of the men caught in the middle was Terry Adams, a lean young man with a taste for sharp suits and patterned ties, who sold a little dope and answered to Scaboo.

On Christmas Eve, Officer Sammy Williams demanded ten thousand dollars from him and promised him a beating and a life sentence if he came up short. Scaboo didn’t have the money and had thirty minutes to find it.

Desperate, he phoned the FBI.

Special Agent Stan Hatton couldn’t put ten thousand dollars together on a holiday evening, so he wired Scaboo and sent him back to Williams to beg for a payment plan. Williams took the deal. His handshake started Operation Shattered Shield.

To reel in more officers, the Bureau invented a customer. Special Agent Juan Jackson became JJ, a cocaine wholesaler from the East Coast with a warehouse needing protection, offering five thousand dollars a day for the men who could guard it. Jackson and Scaboo rehearsed a false history for hours, until their story sounded plausible.

Williams brought in his partner Davis. At the first meeting JJ made everyone strip to the skin to prove no one wore a wire. The officers searched the room and found nothing, because the room itself was the wire.

The agents needed the officers on tape saying exactly what they guarded. So a courier unloaded cocaine in the open, in front of them. The men were furious at the sloppiness, and the cameras recorded their fury, which was as good as a signed confession. They even coached JJ on how to make his drug trucks look like honest delivery vehicles.

When the patrol cars overheated in the Louisiana sun, the FBI thoughtfully provided a van rigged with microphones. Inside it the officers spoke without a filter. They bragged about the prostitutes they brought to the warehouse, and they weighed killing JJ and his couriers and keeping the cocaine for themselves.

Then came the complaint, and the signal thirty.

Davis contracted a man named Paul Hardy, and on the night of October 13, Hardy shot Kim Groves in the head a few steps from her own door. When word of the killing went out over the police radio, the wire caught Len Davis screaming with delight.

The agents recorded the order as it went out. But they hadn’t cracked the code in time to send anyone to her door.

JJ had to keep smiling at the murderer. The operation wasn’t finished, and the same tapes that tracked a murder also recorded plots to kill JJ himself.

The Bureau ended the sting on November 18, 1994, at a truck stop, with eighty-five agents in position, filming six additional corrupt officers guarding a shipment of cocaine setup just to catch them.

They arrested Davis at his house. Sammy Williams, confronted with JJ’s real name and a federal badge, decided he’d rather testify than hang. To arrest the rest without a gunfight, the FBI invited them downtown to give handwriting samples for a grand jury, then arrested them at the door.

At trial the courtroom heard the officers in their own voices, prompting dead silence in the room. The jury convicted Len Davis of murder and sent him to death row; a later court resentenced him to life.

Fifteen more NOPD officers went to prison.

New Orleans called it a wakeup call and handed a new chief, Richard Pennington, the job of scrubbing the department.

But ending the story there leaves something out.

Kim Groves did everything a citizen is supposed to do. She reported a dangerous man to the authorities, in writing and by name. The authorities listened to that man around the clock, and they had his kill order on tape.

She was murdered anyway.

That tape still exists. So does the photograph, the one where Kim is smiling in the sun, with no idea that the safest thing she ever did would be the thing that got her killed.

Thomas Griffin, who had taken over the Lagniappe column at the New Orleans Item after John Lester left for New Jersey, was calling long distance with news. Stanley Lyle had booked a new dancer at the Casino Royale, one who did the Stormy Weather routine and argued with handsy customers exactly the way Stacey Lawrence used to do.

“Tourists think she’s the real Stormy,” Griffin said. “They can’t tell the difference.”

Weeks earlier, the same paper had run a notice calling the new Stormy “the greatest name in Bourbon Street show business,” language it had once used, without irony, about Stacey herself.

Stacey returned to New Orleans three months later to settle the matter. In the ph…

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Three women ran from the steaming coupe to the shelter of the Morning Call coffee stand: Josephine Spellman, her daughter Mildred, and Helen, not yet twenty and already using her married name less than she used her mother’s advice.

Joe Gleason followed them in. He was heavy-set, his hairline already retreating, and he owned a bar down the street that needed women who could bring customers through the door.

They listened. After a time, Josephine said they could help, but only on one condition of her own: Gleason had to forget he had ever seen a 1942 baby-blue DeSoto President.

He agreed. Nobody mentioned the DeSoto again.

By February 1945, Helen was dancing and hosting at the Old Opera House. When the club ran short on chorus girls, the other women dared her to strip if she thought she could do it better.

“I said I thought I could,” she told a reporter two years later. “And th…

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His bride comes from 619 South Railroad Street, the gambling side of town. She is raven-haired and blue-eyed. She is also fourteen years old.

Judge Claude Bertram Gullatt has signed licenses like this one before. He barely looks up before he signs this one too.

The paper in front of him lists her birthday as December 7, 1922. She was actually born December 7, 1926, in a carnival tent pitched for the season in Metairie, Louisiana. Her father, Henry Spellman, is a compact man with carnival grease worked permanently into his knuckles, a circus mechanic by trade. Her mother, Josephine, has a soft Georgia drawl and a shape she has already spent years fielding comments about from strange men.

Dr. Ashby Floyd, who has certified more Floyd …

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The shop sold T-shirts and hot sauce up front. In the back room, it ran one of the oldest cons in the business, dressed up fresh for a new century of tourists.

Bourbon Street runs twelve blocks, jazz trumpets and hurricane cups spilling out of every doorway, and it has swallowed grifters like this one for two hundred years.

Carnival men used to call the game Razzle Dazzle: a rigged betting contest with an unwinnable jackpot, worked by a barker who never lets the mark walk away ahead. Bet a little, the barker says, and you’re one roll from the big prize. The version running out of Happy Days, at 335 Bourbon Street, pulled in m…

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The waiter sets down champagne nobody ordered, at a figure nobody quotes. The stranger pays, because that is what a man does when the lights are low and a pretty woman is thirsty.

Keeping him buying is her whole line of work.

She is a “party girl” or bar girl, shortened to “b-girl”.

The waiters knew their part, too. They quit bringing change. They let a man drink past his money, and when the money was gone they walked him out to the banquette and left him there like a parcel set out for the morning.

Some nights, to hurry the math, a hand tipped a sedative into the man’s glass. On Bourbon Street they called it slipping a mickey.

Robert Dunn Jr. came down from Nashville and walked into the Latin Quarter Club,…

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It is July 16, 1958. Grosch is chief investigator for the district attorney, and for two weeks he has worked Bourbon Street, hauling dancers off in pairs. He tells the reporters that her number, “Tom Cat Fever,” is the filthiest thing he has ever seen, and he is a man who has been around.

Lilly Christine tells them something different. She is an exotic dancer, not a stripteaser. She wears nothing on that stage more daring than the costumes in Peep Show on Broadway, and she never takes it all off.

One of them is about to be proven right by the Supreme Court of Louisiana. It will not be Grosch.

They called her the Cat Girl, for the slow, stalking way she m…

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The road is a short stretch of blacktop northwest of Greensburg, between Louisiana Highways 10 and 43.

It is also the road where Keith Madison Sr. vanished, more than five years before.

Deputies recovered the remains and sent them to the LSU FACES Lab. With help from the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab, technicians gave the bones a name.

The name was Madison’s.

On Monday, the St. Helena Parish Sheriff’s Office said the cause of death is undetermined. The same office has asked the Louisiana State Police to assist.

After five years, the rural road that swallowed Keith Madison has given him back, and no one can yet say how he died.

I first heard his name in 2022.

His daughter called me and asked Bayou Justice to shine some light on a father who had walked out of his own neighborhood a year earlier and never come back.

He was 46 then, a white man of 5-foot-7…

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I thought in these times of artificial intelligence and too-perfect editing, you might appreciate a blast from our crime fiction past.

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I thought in these times of artificial intelligence and too-perfect editing, you might appreciate a blast from our crime fiction past.

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He is seventy-nine years old.

The strokes that began the previous January have hollowed something behind his eyes. He stands wide-shouldered and five feet three, the silver mane gone to white.

He is going home to Louisiana.

He returned to an empire that had not waited for him.

It had started on April 15, 1983, the day a federal judge dismissed the appeal and ordered him to begin serving immediately.

Two juries had convicted him in the BRILAB insurance fraud: Louisiana on August 4, 1981, then Los Angeles four months later. At seventy-three, Carlos Marcello faced seventeen years.

The Bureau of Prisons placed him at the US Medical Center f…

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September 1966.

Thirteen men descended on La Stella, an expensive Italian restaurant in the Forest Hills section of Queens, and took their places at a long table in the basement dining room.

At the head sat Michele Miranda, 75, twice charged with murder and twice cleared, whom the FBI named consigliere to one of the New York Mafia families.

Beside him sat Joseph Colombo and, next to Colombo, the tall, gaunt Carlo Gambino. Born in Palermo in 1902, Gambino would one day claim the title capo di tutti capi, boss of all Mafia bosses in America.

Carlos Marcello had come from New Orleans with his brother, Joseph, along with Santo Trafficante, the gruff leader of the Tampa branch of the syndicate.

They had ordered their drinks when New York police burst into the basement room and arrested all thirteen.

Each walked out on…

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The doctor found Carlos with severe dehydration and three cracked ribs. He recommended bed rest.

Since Mike Maroun had a travel visa, he volunteered to fly home for help while Carlos continued healing.

Carlos Marcello had better places to be than the Capitol of Honduras.

Abandoned inside the Honduras border, Carlos and his attorney wandered lost in a jungle until two “banditos” approached them yelling in a language the Americans could not understand.

Carlos reminded Mike Maroun of the three-thousand dollars in their wallets and threw himself and Mike Maroun down a hillside to escape the highwaymen.

Later, they discovered the two “banditos” were local tour guides paid by the soldiers in El Salvador to help two lost …

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He knew the routine the way he knew Jefferson Parish.

But on this day, his case officer told him to sit.

Carlos does not sit. He stands in the doorway. Something is off. The case officer, cordial most days, now won’t look him in the eye.

Two uniformed men step in from the hallway. One of them takes Marcello’s wrist, the handcuffs click, and the other officer reads a deportation order.

Carlos asks to consult with Philip Smith, the New Orleans attorney who accompanied him to the meeting.

The answer is no.

Carlos asks to stop at home for a suitcase and clothes.

Another no.

He asks to call his wife.

The answer is still no.

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