Who was the second man at KK's Corner?
Three people were shot to death in a convenience store cooler outside Lake Charles in 1997, one man went to death row on confessions that contradicted each other, but his accomplice remains free.
Virginia Johnson pays for her gas and walks out into the wet heat a little after midnight.
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.