192. The 'Jeff Davis 8' 40:29

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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. I'm the husband. Okay, everyone, if you are listening on podcast, can you please give us a five-star review? And if you are watching on YouTube, please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe. It really helps us out with the algorithm, and it's just a great way to support the podcast, and it's easy, too. So thank you so much for listening. We love you.

As well, if you listen on Apple Podcasts, there is a little follow button. If you can hit that follow button, that helps us out a lot. We hate to beg, but you know. Gotta do what you gotta do. Gotta do what you gotta do. All right, Gary, you got your 10 seconds. Another year, another Thanksgiving, another year of turkey. Talked about this last year. If you're a turkey fan, good for you. If you're not, then I feel you. But actually, turkey was better this year. It was actually pretty good turkey.

And something that I think we need to try next year. And if you're in the fire department or public safety or anything, you're going to hate that I'm saying this, but a fried turkey, a deep fried turkey. I feel like every year I see those videos of people deep frying their turkeys. There's obviously a lot of, you know, stupid people out there who do it the wrong way and everything explodes and it isn't good. But there are some good looking ones out there. Have you seen those? No.

Oh my gosh. You haven't seen those? No. Oh, they get a big, like huge thing of oil, like a huge bucket, whatever you want to call it. And they take the turkey and they slowly put it in there. They deep fry it for, I don't know how long, 20 minutes. I don't even know how long it would take. And they take it out and it's just crispy golden turkey. I feel like we need to try that. So if you have done a deep fried turkey, let me know. Let me know how it is. And if you haven't and you're against it, I'm sorry.

But I don't know. It just sounds so good. Other than that, we went on my birthday trip. Ah, yes. Sorry. Forgot about Peyton's birthday trip. Yeah. We did go to Cabo. It was fun. What do you think? Oh, it was really fun. It was so much fun. It was a good birthday trip. Peyton's real birthday is actually tomorrow. Tomorrow? Yes. Tomorrow, babe. I didn't know that. All I know is Daisy's is coming up. Daisy's is coming up too. Hers is on Monday.

So the day this episode comes out, it is Daisy's birthday. Yeah, everyone wished Daisy a happy birthday. All I know is when we were in Cabo, they were singing happy birthday to me. And it was so funny. They couldn't get the candle lit. And it was hilarious. It was funny. We had a good time.

It was a good time. It was a good getaway. We're back in action. Ready for a new MWMH episode. Oh, also before I hop into it, before we hop into it, we're working on new merch. We're sorry it's been taking so long. We've been going through just some complications there, but we figured some things out. We're hoping to have new merch soon.

hoping in the next week or two yeah so we'll keep everyone updated and if we can't get merch launched in time for people to get them before the holidays you for christmas

then we're probably just going to wait to the new year because we don't want to leave anybody hanging. Okay, jumping into our sources, we have Murder in the Bayou, Who Killed the Women Known as the Jeff Davis Eight by Ethan Brown, WashingtonPost.com, TheNewYorkTimesBiography.com, Medium.com, Rollingstone.com, FoxNews.com, Investigation Discovery, The Daily Beast, Oxygen.com, Cosmopolitan.com, TheAdvocate.com, AETV.com, and KATC3.com.

Okay, there are plenty of reasons why homicide cases don't get the investigations they deserve. It may be due to lack of resources, lack of funding, understaffing, particularly when it comes to lower income communities. And unfortunately, it's a lot more common in cases where the victim is marginalized. We've talked about this multiple times on the podcast.

people who might have lived with a substance abuse problem or happen to be a sex worker. And if the victim fits the mold of all three, well, the case is almost guaranteed to get buried under the files of an overcrowded desk. But it gets harder to turn a blind eye in a case like today's when multiple women from the same town and the same inner circle all turned up dead the

the same way over the course of a few years. And while some cried serial killer, others wondered if those cases might have gotten buried under a host of excuses and corporate bureaucracy for a darker reason. So it's May 20th, 2005. A man named Jerry Jackson is unloading his fishing gear on a bridge overlooking the Grand Marais Canal, just outside of a little town called Jennings, Louisiana.

He cracks open a can of soda, baits his hook, and is about to cast his line into the fresh water below when he spots something floating in the water. He thinks to himself, is that a mannequin? He's just seen a story on the news about how someone was stealing mannequins from shops around town. But then it dawned on Jerry. Mannequins shouldn't attract bugs, and this lifeless figure is swarming with them.

So Jerry scrambles for his cell phone, dialing 911, and about 10 minutes later is answering questions from the police while watching that lifeless body get scooped out of the muddy waters below. The woman can't be older than 30, still in blue jeans and a white blouse. Her body shows little sign of injury aside from a tiny scab on her scalp.

A toxicology report determines she has antidepressants as well as cocaine in her system. Her blood alcohol content is a whopping 0.16, two times over the legal limit, leading authorities to suspect that she likely died of drowning or asphyxiation. And once authorities run her fingerprints, they're able to determine the identity of their victim. A

A 28-year-old Caucasian woman, about 5'3 and 104 pounds, named Loretta Chason, a mother of two and a Jennings native, who also happened to be a local sex worker. Prior to her death, Loretta had been battling a cocaine addiction. Her marriage of five years was falling apart, and it wasn't uncommon for Loretta to disappear for a few days at a time to score a fix.

But she always found her way back home, back to her husband and kids. She tried to clean herself up, go to rehab, get on the straight and narrow. But drugs always found a way back into Loretta's life. Her husband claimed the last time he saw her was on May 15th, five days before she turned up dead. She'd returned home from another bender asking for some cash to buy food. Then she said goodbye to her two sons, not knowing it would be the last time that she'd get to hug them.

The last time Loretta was seen alive was on the morning of May 17th, three days prior to her body turning up in that canal. She was spotted climbing into a truck at a gas station with a local pimp named Frankie Richard. The two were later seen at a hotel-turned-brothel called the Boudreaux Inn.

There, she allegedly used drugs along with two other sex workers named Muggy Brown and Nicole Gilroy. Remember those names for later. But after that, Loretta's trail went cold. So that was her last day, essentially, that we know of. Now, I think it's important for me to kind of

Paint a picture of what Jennings, Louisiana was looking like during this time. Jennings is about three hours west of New Orleans, just north of the Gulf of Mexico. And according to many, it's the boudin capital of the world, a kind of Cajun sausage.

Now, technically, Jennings lies in Jefferson Davis Parish, and parishes were essentially like little religious counties established back when the French and Spanish occupied the land there centuries ago. Jennings, at least in 2005, was a town of only about 10,000 people, so it's not an overwhelmingly large community by any means.

Still, there's a pretty big cultural divide. North of the railroad tracks, you have the upper class, your lawyers, your judges, your businessman. But south of the tracks, you'll find the working class people of Jennings, the oil field workers, the plumbers, the mechanics, many of whom rely on the industry in the next parish over where towering oil and gas refineries pepper the landscape.

contaminating food supplies and leaking toxins into the groundwater. A whole other issue I won't get into, but if you remember the opening credits from True Detective season one, which was allegedly inspired by this case that we're talking about today, that's the vibe of Jennings and the surrounding areas in a nutshell. Gray, bleak, ominous, foreboding, convoluted.

compound that with a drug trade that's been taking over the local slice of the I-10 freeway and suddenly Jennings sounds like a pretty tough place to get by especially because the mysterious deaths didn't stop with Loretta

Cut to June 18th, less than a month after Jerry Jackson discovered Loretta's body floating in the murky waters. That evening, a group of boys were out catching frogs in a swamp off of Highway 102. Just a quick turnoff from the famed drug trade route I mentioned, the I-10. And there, well, they spotted something out of place. A dead body floating closer to the banks.

After the boys called 911, police recovered the remains of another young woman. She's black, she's wearing jean cut-off shorts, and she happens to have a deep incision across her neck. Her hands were also badly bruised, and her face was unidentifiable. After a few hours of digging, police identified the woman as 30-year-old Ernestine Mary Daniels, another sex worker in the area who's been missing for the last two days.

Even outside of their line of work, Ernestine and Loretta shared a similar history. Ernestine had her fair share of substance abuse and a failed marriage. In times of clarity, she tried to get clean by turning to God, only to find the problems bigger than herself. The biggest difference between the women was Ernestine had her fair share of racist encounters around town. After her death, Ernestine's sister Jessica recalled a disturbing interaction they'd had with an officer while walking home one night.

It was back in 2004 when an unmarked police car pulled up alongside them and began questioning them about where they were going. The officer then called Ernestine names, bringing up her substance abuse issues and her line of work. When Jessica stood up to the cop, Ernestine tried to convince her to just keep walking, ignore his threats. Until he made one they'd never forget. He told the sisters he would kill them the next time he saw them.

When Jessica called the local police station to report the threats, she claimed they just laughed at her, refusing to file an actual report, which would be so frustrating to be like, hey, I was walking home. One of your cops severely mistreated us and they do not take you seriously at all.

Now, after Jessica heard about her sister's death, this encounter obviously stood out like a sore thumb. But rumor had it, Ernestine was dealing with a few other shady characters on the last night she was seen alive. That was June 16th, 2005, when Ernestine was spotted with two clients,

a man named Byron Chad Jones and his friend Lawrence Nixon. Knowing this, police focused their attention on Jones and Nixon as potential suspects in her death, and eventually Nixon's wife gave the police a good reason to make an arrest. She claimed on the night of Ernstein's death, the men came back to her house with a bulging, blood-soaked garbage bag. They left the bag out on the porch outback until a white vehicle came and picked it up.

Even their teenage daughter admitted her father came home covered in blood that night. So this is the guys that she's last seen with. Uh-huh. And now two different eyewitnesses have said, yeah, they were covered in blood. They had this bloody bag. No, they were two men. Then why did you say a teenage daughter? He has a teenage daughter. Who? Nixon. One of the guys? Yeah. Okay. Okay.

So in early 2006, the two men were actually finally arrested and charged with second degree murder. What was strange, however, was the Jennings Police Department didn't examine the Nixon household as a crime scene until 15 months after the crime was committed, at which point they claimed the scene, quote, failed to demonstrate a presence of blood.

Which like... Duh, it's been 15 months. Obviously. That's a lot of time to get things cleaned up. What's worse though was after this determination, police dropped the charges against both men claiming they didn't have enough evidence to make a case. The first girl that died, was her family ever...

Did they ever suspect that it was foul play or did they think it was drugs? They suspected foul play. Okay. So this makes you wonder, was this just shoddy police work? Like why wait 15 months and then obviously you're going to have to drop the charges because now any physical evidence you had that possibly could tie them is long gone. Well, they're in a small town.

They probably don't care, especially for those who are sex workers. Yeah. If they have drugs and alcohol in their system, it probably just seems easy to say, hey, they had drugs and alcohol and we're moving on. Yeah.

Or were the police protecting these guys in some way? Like, there's just so many questions and what ifs. Yeah. Well, come March 18th, 2007, the stack of case files at the Jennings Police Department was about to get a little bit taller. That day, police responded to a call about a third body in the Petty John Canal right on the outskirts of Jennings. So three bodies in three months. Well, and it's kind of like...

Can you imagine living there in this town of 10,000 people? Yeah. And you've just got women's bodies just washing ashore. Like that would be so scary. Yeah, it's a little weird. This time the victim was naked aside from a gold ring and a sock. And I will say...

The M.O. is not clear. There's nothing that's like besides that it's three women in a small town. There's nothing across so far. I mean, sex workers. Sex workers. Yes. I mean, I feel like it's a I feel like there is an M.O. Sex workers who are doing drugs. But all of it is so like one slashed across the neck. Yes. One might have been asphyxiated. This one's naked. There was a tattoo somewhere.

on her lower right leg of two locking hearts. She was another young Caucasian woman who'd been reported missing just a few days before. Her name was Kristen Gary Lopez. Okay, most beauty brands just don't really understand my hair, but Proz does. They have a formula that specifically addresses my hair, which makes sense because it's tailored just for me. You literally get on, you take a quiz,

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Like the first victim, Kristen's cause of death was left as undetermined, seeing as she had no facial, rib, or scalp injuries. Although investigators suspected her cause of death was also likely asphyxiation. While Kristen was certainly a bit younger than the previous victims, she still had a history of drug abuse and was earning cash through sex work. I guess if

If it's one or two people, it's like, okay, coincidence, what's going on, blah, blah, blah. But I feel like by the time you get to the third person, you got to start figuring things out. I think technically it also takes three bodies to...

be clarified as a serial killer. To get the attention of people, yeah. So unlike the other victims, though, Kristen was living with an intellectual disability and had been mostly abandoned by her parents and left to fend for herself. By now, it should have been apparent to the Jennings PD that there was definitely something wrong. Women aged between 20 and 30, all of them with a substance abuse problem, all of them sex workers who knew one another. Keep in mind, all three of these girls know each other.

All of them found dead in bodies of water, and it didn't stop there. In May 2007, the body of a 26-year-old Caucasian woman named Whitney Dubois turned up near some crawfish ponds on Highway 102. This was not far from where Ernstein's body had been found. Like Kristen, Whitney was left totally nude. Whitney also had a high blood alcohol content level and had a history with sex work and drug abuse.

Unlike the others, Whitney's face had been severely beaten before her death.

Now, throughout the investigation, there was one name that kept coming up while questioning witnesses in each investigation. Yep. A man named Frankie Richard, who we already kind of mentioned. Yeah. He was said to have been like a father figure to Kristen Lopez, was one of the last people seen with Loretta before she died, and was a well-known pimp with a violent past who'd done business with all of the prior victims. Which...

Hmm. Interesting. I wonder if the pimp would be killing them, but I doubt it. It seems a little too sketch. He's going to be the first one that's going to be talked to. Well, and also, it's like killing your employees. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Sure. He's making money. That's right. So Frankie was born and raised in Jennings, who after high school tried to make an honest living by getting a job in the local oil business.

But after a workplace accident left him with a broken back in 1980, Frankie took his settlement and opened up a strip club. With the new business came a few occupational hazards, like having to navigate the drug trade that was inevitably passing through his bar. And Frankie figured it was just easier to join than to beat.

Yeah. The drug trade. Okay. Frankie began dealing himself and offering out his employees for sex work on the side. If you can't beat them, join them. The central hub for their trysts was the Boudreaux Inn, a small motel with a bar and a restaurant just off the I-10, which if it sounds familiar, it's because it's already come up in this case.

By the mid-2000s, Frankie was working with a large group of Jennings women, including Kristen, Loretta, and Whitney, three of our victims. But Frankie claimed their relationship was more than sex, drugs, and money. He said he forged a deep bond with a lot of these women because they shared similar traumas throughout their lives. He saw them as partners who were trying to slay their addictions together. Hmm.

That sounds... I don't know. He says they were trying to break the vicious cycle they were in and one day start new lives somewhere else. Which...

It's such a bullcrap because that's not what he wants for them. Because he wants them to keep making him money. So he's just saying that to make himself look good. According to Frankie, the business only was meant to be a stepping stone. But Frankie wasn't the hometown hero he was painting himself out to be. He admitted to having a violent past, a criminal record, a bad crack addiction. And while he claimed he saw his women more like family, he also had sex with them too.

Still, it surprised Frankie when in May 2007, he saw his photo plastered all over local news channels as a wanted man in Kristen Lopez's death. By the 16th, Frankie was in handcuffs alongside his niece, a childhood friend of Kristen's who was also considered a suspect in her death. It was a girl named Hannah Connor. The police based Frankie's arrest off of one major piece of witness testimony.

That night before Kristen had died, she and Frankie had gotten into a fight while she'd stolen some things from his motel room. Meanwhile, Frankie maintained his innocence. He claimed he had nothing to do with any of the women's deaths. And although he was the last person seen in some of them and got in a fight with another, he's like, no, no, no, it wasn't me. But instead, he believed that these women had lost their lives because they'd seen or heard something that they weren't supposed to know and that it wasn't from him.

Now, it's possible Frankie was telling the honest truth because a short time after his arrest, all charges were dropped against him and his niece. Once again, police stated there just wasn't enough evidence to convict them of the crimes against them. I mean, how hard can it be? I mean, I say that knowing it is hard, but it's a town of 10,000 people, right? So, I mean...

There's got to be, it has to be someone who's killed someone before. Like, I don't know. It just seems it shouldn't be too hard to figure out what's going on. And it's not like in previous serial killer cases that we've done where they're traveling town to town, state to state. Yeah. He's obviously still in that town killing girls. Yes. Every month. And it's very obvious who his victim pool is.

Like you probably have a limited number of women who he's going to pick next. Yeah. But Frankie had been in rehab during one of the murders. So they released the charges. This obviously gives him an alibi. So police were back to square one with little to no suspects. And by the spring of 2008, whoever was killing the women of Jeff Davis was about to claim their fifth victim. All right.

It was Thursday, May 29th, 2008, almost a year after Frankie Richards was arrested. That day, the family of 23-year-old Laconia Muggy Brown received a call about their missing granddaughter. Her body had been found.

Muggy was fully clothed, still wearing her peach tank top and denim cut-off shorts. She had several incision wounds around her head and neck. But unlike the others, Muggy was discovered in the middle of a rural road. So not in a body of water, and her body was doused in bleach. Interesting. All right, so something went wrong. Muggy's grandmother, Bessie, said she last saw her granddaughter the previous Friday around 8.30 p.m. when Muggy came to tell her she was going to a friend's to have dinner.

Only Muggy never came back, which was out of character for her since she had a young son at home as well. Oh, man. Muggy had also fallen into the wrong crowd, frequenting the Boudreaux Inn and getting mixed up with substance abuse prior to her death. She also knew all four of the Jeff Davis victims so far, which may be why Muggy said what she said to her grandmother before she died. She claimed she had a feeling something bad was going to happen. She worried she might turn up dead next, which you can't.

You can't. I mean, of course these women are thinking this. Because all their friends are dying. I mean, they're all in sex work. I mean, and it isn't too crazy to me that they all know each other. I mean, they're all in the same line of business. So...

I just think someone out there is just killing them because they feel like it. Like, I don't know if I think there's something they heard wrong. I just think we have a serial killer out there. Three months later, at the end of August 2008, another young woman disappeared from Jennings. 24-year-old Crystal Shea Benoit Zeno.

Two weeks later, a group of hunters discovered her dead body naked on a river embankment. Crystal, again, knew the other girls, worked with them, had a substance abuse problem. Only her remains were so decomposed that an autopsy gave them little indication of how she died.

Then on November 15th, 2008, the body of 17 year old Brittany Gary was found dead off the side of another rural road. This is getting to a point. This is, this is really, this is dumb. Like how can there be this many bodies and people being killed?

And you're in a small town and there's nothing. And they're all friends. And they're all friends. Like, come on. Like Loretta, her cause of death was believed to be asphyxiation. Making matters even more complicated, Brittany Gary was the cousin of the fourth victim, Kristen Lopez. All right. Her death brought the Jeff Davis headcount to a total of seven. And it wasn't until then, December of 2008, that the Jefferson Davis parish sheriff, Ricky Edwards-

finally established a task force to collectively investigate these murders. Thank you, man. Seven women. It only took seven bodies, but there you go. Finally doing your job. Edwards announced publicly that it was their belief the crimes were all committed by what he called a common offender, which... Yeah, woo! Maybe he's really busy. Good job, good job, good job. I mean, this was far too little too late, in my opinion, especially because the task force had an idea of who was going to be next, and they were still...

Unable to stop an eighth murder from happening. I mean, you know who the next victims are. Protect them. Put some police out canvassing the area while they're working. Like,

Just do what you can to help. This is so weird. That victim's name was Nicole Gilroy, a 26-year-old sex worker who knew each of the previous victims, who had a long rap sheet in Jennings, but mysteriously had most of her charges wiped clean. And according to Frankie Richard, Nicole knew a lot about what was happening in the seedy underbelly of Jefferson Davis Parish.

Much like Muggy, Nicole was extremely paranoid in the weeks before her death, refusing to even bother planning her 27th birthday as she insisted to her mother she wasn't going to make it to 27. And sadly, she was right. About two weeks before her birthday, Nicole's mother filed a missing persons report. By that afternoon, on August 19th, Nicole was found dead along the I-10 highway. She was the first victim to be found outside of Jefferson Davis Parish.

A toxicology report showed she'd been under the influence of cocaine and painkillers, and while no trauma could be detected, they suspected her cause of death to be asphyxiation as well. With one more life taken, the women were now known as the Jeff Davis Eight.

The task force cried serial killer, despite the fact that serial killers rarely go after a group of people who all know one another or stay in the same state. Plus, the way that the police were handling the case gave many Jennings residents cause for concern. Family members of the victims told the Jennings Daily News that they were never once contacted or questioned by law enforcement about their loved one's death or disappearance. So it just stops at eight? Like, there's eight people and he's like, okay, I guess that's enough? Yeah.

Well, obviously it's caused a bit of attention by now. It's now in the media. People are calling them the Jeff Davis 8. So he's just taking a break. Well, and...

I think it says a lot that the family members are like, we were never even questioned. That means police aren't even taking the time to get to know the victims. No one did anything. Yeah. Loretta Chasen's husband, Scott asked the same question we did. Why the heck did it take seven victims for them to finally start a task force? And when you look at the history of both the Jennings police department and the Jefferson Davis sheriff's department, it's no secret. They've both been steeped in scandal and corruption before. This wasn't the first investigation that,

That was a little weird. Outside of the Jeff Davis 8, there were 12 other homicides in the area that had been left unsolved since the 1990s, which for such a small place is kind of insane.

It's considered not only a very high homicide rate, but an incredibly low clearance rate, particularly for smaller communities like Jefferson Davis Parish. Those who'd lived in the parish their whole lives also said it was a well-known secret that the police were heavily involved in the local drug trade. Interesting.

Which proved to be more than just gossip when in March of 1990, two men robbed the sheriff's station, sealing back 300 pounds of confiscated marijuana. That's hilarious. Yeah, they just robbed the station so easily. So easily, but get this. It was said to be an inside job performed by the chief deputy sheriff and... Oh my gosh. Surprise, surprise, our old friend Frankie Richards. So they just gathered up

all the marijuana and then robbed themselves in 1993 the sheriff dallas cormier pleaded guilty to improper dealings with inmates and using public funds to buy cars and guns for personal use so in 1993 the sheriff pleads guilty in 2000 a jennings officer killed a fellow cop and his wife inside their home and then shot and killed the responding police officer in october 2003 eight

female Jennings officers filed a sexual violence and harassment lawsuit against several male officers. Everything is falling apart. Then in 2013, the evidence room was robbed again of cash, pills, cocaine, and marijuana, this time by a former police chief named Johnny Lasseter. So the hits just kept on coming and they all seem to point back home to themselves. They need to completely gut the entire force. Yes.

Knowing all of this, Jennings residents were beginning to suspect that the people who were meant to be protecting their wives and daughters may have actually been the ones leading them to their deaths. Or killing them. Yes. See, all of the Jeff Davis 8 had something else in common, a detail that I haven't mentioned yet.

They all reportedly worked as informants for the police department. Interesting. Okay. Typically in regards to what was going on in the local drug trade at the time. So they were informing the police about,

But as we know, the police are also involved in the drug trade. Yeah, that doesn't make sense because the police are involved in this. Why would they need informants? Maybe because it's like a little mini war going on in the drug trade. This whole thing is so twisted. Which if you think this would also explain why many of them were paranoid in the weeks before their deaths. Because not only were they sex workers, young women, they were also like, I'm an informant and all these women were informants. Mm-hmm.

Some of them were also interrogated about the other women and then showed up dead themselves. For example, Muggie Brown, the fifth victim, was brought in for questioning about Ernestine Patterson after she died.

There were also rumors that Muggy had spotted Loretta's body in the canal before it was reported to police by Jerry Jackson. Kristen Lopez was also questioned by police in regards to Loretta's murder. Now, wouldn't you think if your witnesses were turning up dead, you'd do something more to protect the people coming in to give statements? I mean, it is literally the police's job to protect and serve.

Barbara Gilroy, Nicole's mother, thinks her daughter might have actually witnessed the police themselves committing a crime and that's why she was silenced. Are you catching the media buzz around Sonobello? Yes. Their micro laser fat removal is crazy popular because it makes stubborn fat disappear in just one visit.

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So after Kristen Lopez was found dead on March 18th, 2007, a chief investigator for the sheriff's office named Warren Gary, which this is the third Gary brought up in this case. There's a lot of Garys. Good thing my name's Garrett and not Gary. They're all different, but this one is the chief investigator. He bought a truck.

He bought a truck. Yes, but it was not just any truck. It was a Chevy Silverado, one that was sold to him by an incarcerated woman named Connie Siller. Correct.

who happened to be a close associate of Frankie Richards, which red flag because cops really shouldn't be buying things from inmates. Number one, like this is a little weird, but to make matters worse, that truck, according to witnesses, was seen picking up Kristen Lopez on the day she disappeared. And one witness claimed to see blood inside of the truck before it was sold. Only Warren Gary didn't keep the truck for long. He bought it for about $8,000 on March 29th, got it cleaned up, inspected,

inside and out, and then resold it for $15,000 on April 20th. Now, no one at the sheriff's department seemed to care that Warren had bought and possibly destroyed a potential piece of evidence. Like this is a truck that is part of the investigation and your chief investigator goes and buys it and flips it. Yeah.

Not at all. In fact, Warren was then promoted to become head of the evidence room. Now, there was one Jennings police officer named Jesse Ewing who thought, this all sounds a bit unprofessional, to say the least. Like, we have all these girls missing, and then our chief investigator purchases a truck that's supposedly a piece of evidence, cleans it, and flips it, and then gets promoted to head of evidence, which he might have potentially disturbed one piece of evidence.

So Jesse's like, this is a little weird. Buying things from inmates is a problem in itself. So he interviews some of the people that knew Frankie and the woman who sold him the truck. And they tell him, oh, yeah, they offloaded that onto Warren Gary so he could help them destroy evidence. So they just outright say, yeah, he was helping destroy evidence. Okay. Yep.

So Jesse takes this information, hands it to a private investigator who hands it over to the FBI. It almost seems fake. Like this is so obvious. It can't be real. Right. Only Jesse isn't praised for this revelation. So he goes and hands this over and he's not praised. He's punished. He's arrested for obstruction and mainly for handing that info over to a PI first rather than the next chain of command. So he gets in trouble for not following the

chain of command. Yeah, but they gave it to the FBI, correct? Eventually, yeah. But Jesse's career in law enforcement is over after this. They fire him. Yeah, yeah. And that truck was never tracked down as evidence. There could have been hair, blood, or other DNA in there that might have gotten police a step closer to solving the deaths of eight young women. There's got to be... There's got to be a chain of command. Like, if your entire department is corrupt, like, where do you go? I...

I don't know. I don't know either. The state is my guess. I don't know enough about the chain of command and police force to know how that works. But after Warren Gary got rid of that truck, no one saw the thing again, which makes you wonder.

Was the police working alongside Frankie Richard in some way, protecting him for some reason? Like, why fire someone who comes forward and says this is weird? Yeah, I'm sure they're making them a ton of money through drugs. After all, it seemed he'd been working with them since the 1990s when they first raided the evidence room together. So maybe their ties ran deep.

We also have to take into account the fact that Frankie had a history of charges being pressed against him only to have them dropped later on. And I'm not talking about drug possession or things like that. I'm talking about rape and murder charges that just vanished from his record. Even more mind blowing. Some witnesses claim Frankie had a key to the task force office that he would just come and go day and night. Now, why would the best and honestly only real suspect in the case get a key to a police office? Yeah. Like he's a pimp.

That's weird. So even if there was no cover up on behalf of law enforcement, this case points to an equally large problem that in some cases police just refuse to take an investigation seriously when their victims are low income, have substance abuse issues or are forced to resort to dangerous occupations like sex work, which is a huge problem when sex workers in particular are a lot more likely to be targeted in a murder. Of

According to a recent study, over the last decade, sex workers were the victims in about 43% of murder cases. Wow. And unfortunately, authorities are struggling to spend the same time and resources on them as they would on someone with more money and influence. One resident named Mary Drake said what we're all thinking in a 2019 documentary claiming, quote,

You can go out there and find nine or ten people for a murder of one man in Lake Arthur in a couple weeks' time, but you can't find the murderer of eight women over a certain amount of years? What does that tell you? It's self-explanatory. To not be concerned about who murdered these women and to not give their families closure, it's just wrong. Also, wait, what's going on at the police department? Like, did they get investigated? Like, what's happening?

I mean, it goes all the way back to 2013 and they might have swiped and cleaned house or whatever. But even now, there's still eight women whose deaths are unsolved. Wait, so there's still people working at that police department that...

Were there during this entire corruption? I mean, I'm not for certain. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if they cleaned house. That seems insane. That seems insane to me. And I'm not necessarily calling them out, but kind of like, I just think that maybe we should look at the Jeff Davis. There should be some responsibility that's taken. Yeah. And if it's like, Hey, if there were people in law enforcement who were, uh,

Maybe didn't commit these murders, but we're trying to protect people who had a hand in it or were being shady with evidence. Look into it.

Let's get it solved. Let's figure it out. It's hard. I mean, if the police department is still corrupt over there, what do you... I don't know. Like the FBI would have to get involved at that point. Yeah. Which I'm surprised they didn't with eight deaths. But like you said, it's probably because they're sex workers. If it was eight deaths that weren't sex workers, the FBI probably would have gotten involved. It's also like... That's insane. No one wants to point out the flaws in their own system. For sure. Yeah. Which...

We should be doing, but no one wants to do it. So that is the story of the unsolved death data state. I can't believe that's not solved. Someone go solve it. I know. I wish I could go solve it. I'd probably get killed while I'm trying to solve it. So I'm not going to go do it. Whatever was going on, I'm just going to say it now. There was some shady drug...

There was some crap going down. And I think that no matter what was happening, even if the women's deaths were completely unrelated, someone somewhere along the line covered things up. They were 100% related. They were unrelated. All right, you guys, that is our case for this week. And we will see you next time with another episode. I love it. I hate it. Goodbye.