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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, Florida — a Korean War veteran, a Coast Guard man. Shot four times: chest, side, leg, chin. His right hand, stiffened in rigor, still pinched a cigarette butt between two fingers when the deputies reached him.

Within days, five men were behind bars.

Two weeks later, the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office turned them all loose. Not enough evidence, Chief Deputy Odom Graves told reporters.

That was 1973. It is still not enough evidence today.

Ten years after I watched them pull Trathen from that briar patch, I was a journalism major at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond.

I ate lunch most days at the Hi-Ho Barbeque on West Thomas Street. Prices were lower than anywhere near campus. But the real draw was Miss Celeste.

Celeste Alexander worked the Hi-Ho counter for decades without a cash register of any kind. She kept it all in her head — orders, faces, names, conversations from years back. Until her death in 2002, she remembered everything.

She remembered Trathen.

“He sat right over there. With those two mafia types. He had pork with cheese. The other two had beef dressed, but the dead man had pork.”

She told me that in 1982. Described it like it happened that morning. Then she leaned on the counter and lowered her voice.

“Narcs coming through here say he was undercover. Some crazy drug thing. Watch. They won’t catch them. Not ever. Mark my word. Somebody big covered up the whole thing.”

Miss Celeste was not the kind of woman who wasted words.

Shortly after the murder, she identified one of those mafia types for the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office. Leonard L. “Curly” Shipley, 48, of Kenner. Deputies booked him as a material witness.

Sheriff Taft Faust charged Paul Wayne George, 27, of Shreveport with the murder itself, and added three New Orleans residents — Louis Matranga, Leonard B. Johnson, and Jessie A. Martin — as accessories after the fact.

The FBI helped piece together what these men shared. Every one of them had prior arrests for armed robbery or drug trafficking — and every one of them worked at nightclubs owned by Carlos Marcello, the man FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover put on record as New Orleans’ top hoodlum.

Jefferson Parish deputies found Louis Matranga the next day. He was eating lunch at Marcello’s Town and Country Motel on Airline Highway. They picked him up with $36,000 cash and a stolen safe in his back seat.

“Louie” Matranga was not a random name in New Orleans organized crime. His ancestor Tony Matranga is credited with bringing the mafia to Louisiana in 1857.

The family ran the organization through the early twentieth century before Sylvestro “Silver Dollar Sam” Carolla took the underboss role.

The government deported Carolla in 1944, which handed authority to his own underboss — Carlos Marcello.

The men eating beef at Hi-Ho Barbeque the day Trathen ordered his last pork sandwich ran in those circles. That is not speculation. That is their rap sheet.

The charges didn’t hold.

On October 10, 1973, the LPSO cleared all five men — George, Shipley, Matranga, Johnson, and Martin — of any involvement in Trathen’s death. Chief Deputy Graves said the evidence wasn’t there. The men walked.

Paul Wayne George didn’t stay lucky. On August 22, 1974, The Acadiana Advocate reported that an unidentified assailant shot him six times outside a nightspot he owned on US 167 southwest of Lafayette, around ten-thirty at night.

Lafayette Parish Sheriff Carlo Listi told reporters that everyone knew George was involved in organized crime.

But nobody was charged with that killing either.

As for Curly Shipley — the man Miss Celeste put at Trathen’s table — his name surfaced again in 1997.

Former Hattiesburg, Mississippi Sheriff Leroy Hobbs, then serving time for trying to bribe Governor Edwin Edwards into pardoning convicted hitman Kirksey Nix, Jr., identified Shipley as the “racketeering representative” who had paid him to make the approach.

Nix, for what it’s worth, was the man who killed New Orleans grocery magnate Frank Corso and the wife of Sheriff Buford “Walking Tall” Pusser. He also ran a sex-for-sale operation out of Angola State Penitentiary through the 1990s.

These are the men who had lunch with John George Trathen the afternoon before his body turned up in a briar patch off the Tickfaw River.

Trathen’s murder has never been solved. No one has ever been convicted. The LPSO cleared the file fifty years ago and has not reopened it since.

Miss Celeste went to her grave in 2002 knowing more about that last meal than any detective ever put in a report. She told me what she saw, named who she saw, and then told me, flat out, that somebody with pull had buried the whole thing.

She wasn’t wrong about much.

A Korean War veteran and Coast Guard man came to Hammond, ate pork with cheese at a counter on West Thomas Street, and ended up shot four times in a river bottom two miles down the road.

The men across the table from him went free. The man charged with his murder got shot six times a year later in Lafayette Parish. The witness who could put them all in the same room died without ever testifying in a courtroom.

There’s no crime in eating a Hi-Ho sandwich. But I’ve spent forty years wondering what those men talked about at that lunch — and whether John George Trathen knew, before he finished his pork with cheese, that he wasn’t going home alive.

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 found Kassie’s body inside, fully clothed, phone in her hand, the apartment otherwise undisturbed.

Nothing was missing.

Nothing except her blue book sack.

No robbery. No sexual assault. No apparent motive. Just a kicked-in door, a lifeless nineteen-year-old, and a missing book bag full of class notes.

Decades passed.

No suspect. No blue book sack.

Then, in 2018, the Baton Rouge Police Department announced a break. DNA pulled from a single glove left at the crime scene, they said, matched a man named Travis Dwight Green, 49, a death row inmate sitting in the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas. BRPD issued a warrant.

Case closed, the department seemed to suggest. Mystery solved.

However, the Polunsky Unit is no ordinary jail. It is what Polk County, Texas calls its “concrete tomb” where inmates stay locked down twenty-two hours a day, no phones, no media, no contact with the outside world.

Travis Green may not have known Louisiana charged him with anything. And because he sits on Texas death row, the district attorney’s office cannot extradite him. He will never stand trial for Kassie’s murder. Not unless Texas overturns his sentence first.

Travis Green is presumed guilty. Case closed.

But Defense Attorney Johnny Cochran had a saying: if the story doesn’t make sense, you must find for the defense. If the glove doesn’t fit…

Let me prove now that this “airtight” case doesn’t hold water.

Start with the lab that tested the original DNA sample.

The Louisiana State Police Crime Lab has an impeccable reputation and a solid record. But Green’s original DNA markers were not collected by the LSP.

They were collected by the Houston Crime Lab, then entered into CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Indexing System, where Louisiana eventually found the match. That distinction matters, because the Houston Crime Lab’s record reads like a criminal indictment of itself.

In 2002 — just three years after Kassie’s murder—an independent audit shut the Houston lab down after finding hundreds of convictions based on flawed or incomplete testing.

In 2003, Josiah Sutton walked out of prison after an independent DNA retest — he’d served four years for a sexual assault he did not commit.

In 2004, investigators found 280 boxes of lost evidence in the building, including body parts and a fetus, tied to eight thousand cases going back to 1979.

In 2005, analysts were caught faking tests and hiding evidence.

In 2006, the Houston Cold Case Squad used Houston lab DNA to charge Travis Green himself with the 1988 rape of an 82-year-old woman — then discovered Green was behind bars when the attack happened.

That is the same lab that first put Travis Green in CODIS.

Despite their shoddy reputation, only their work says Travis Green killed Kassie Federer.

Fortunately, BRPD Sergeant Don Copolla, Jr. did not simply accept the Houston match. His detectives drove to Livingston, Texas, sat across from Green in the Polunsky Unit, and collected a fresh swab. And Copolla refused to send that sample to Houston. That sample went to the LSP Crime Lab, and Louisiana State Police confirmed a DNA match to the glove.

So the DNA is real. Green did kill Kassie?

Not so fast.

DNA on a glove only tells us who touched the glove. It says nothing about when or how or why.

The timeline is where the LSP case falls apart.

On September 2, 1999, Travis Green raped, strangled, and beat nineteen-year-old Kristin Loesch in Houston while her boyfriend slept on her couch.

On September 10, Houston detectives called Green in for an interview about Loesch’s murder.

Three days later — September 13 — Green allegedly drove four hours east to Baton Rouge, kicked in Kassie Federer’s apartment door, shot her to death, stole a book bag, and drove four hours back to Houston.

On September 16, Houston detectives arrested him at his residence. Four days after that, Green stood before a judge and pleaded guilty to killing Kristin Loesch.

Think about that sequence. A man under active murder investigation in one city detours to commit a second, apparently random murder in another city four hours away, then returns home and turns himself in.

He used a gun on Kassie. He strangled Kristin Loesch with his hands. Two completely different methods, two completely different victim profiles, no apparent connection between the victims.

Oh, and don’t forget, Green stole a college student’s book bag.

Why?

Green’s record runs long — two stretches in prison, first for receiving stolen property, then for aggravated assault. The state of Texas cut him loose from parole four months before he killed Kristin Loesch.

But armed home invasion followed by a single gunshot and a stolen book sack doesn’t fit the pattern.

I am not arguing Travis Green is innocent. His record says otherwise, and the LSP Crime Lab doesn’t make many mistakes.

But Kassie Federer’s family deserves more than presumptions. They deserve certainty. They deserve a trial, testimony, cross-examination — everything the justice system is supposed to provide before it closes a case file and moves on.

Instead, they got a warrant served on a man in a concrete box who will never see a Louisiana courtroom, and a case quietly marked resolved.

Johnny Cochran would have had questions.

As do I.

If the glove left on Kassie’s apartment floor belonged to a 230-pound, six-foot-two man under active homicide investigation in Texas, why did he drive to Baton Rouge to shoot an LSU student he had no known connection to?

And what did he want with Kassie’s book sack?

If you know something about what happened on Park Boulevard on September 13, 1999 — anything at all — please call me or someone in the Baton Rouge Police Department’s cold case unit.

When Kassie Federer came home from class that Monday afternoon, she had the rest of the day ahead of her. She deserved the rest of her life.

Somebody took that away from her.

Her case file says we know who.

I’m not so sure.

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