That’s when he saw a trailer for the first season of True Detective. He’d spent years compiling the story, but by the fall of 2013 it was languishing in editorial limbo at a men’s magazine. It seemed that a new lead, a new horrifying implication, or a new allegation against a high-level individual came up every time Brown scratched the surface of the case. Indeed, women who provided information on the first few cases wound up victims themselves.” And most compelling, Brown writes, “is that most if not all of the Jeff Davis 8…witnessed other murders. A prison nurse and a sergeant who had tried to voice some of their concerns were subsequently fired from their jobs. There were allegations that officers had sex with the women who later became Jeff Davis 8 victims, and the task force was, Brown writes, “a near case study in conflict of interest.” There was also evidence in the Jeff Davis 8 cases – including the truck where one of the victims had her throat slashed – that was seemingly tampered with or was removed from the parish entirely.
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Whenever he was back in New Orleans, Brown used Louisiana’s excellent public records laws to request thousands of legal documents, police personnel files and building liens, which he pored over.Īccording to Brown’s book, what the evidence started pointing to was not a serial killer evading capture but a steady escalation of blatant misconduct by law enforcement. Many of his witnesses had been frequenters of the Boudreaux Inn, a now-shuttered motel where the town’s drug dealers and sex workers would convene to get high and see clients. Over the next couple of years, Brown made repeated trips to the parish, interviewing sex workers who knew the victims, drug dealers, former cops, and witnesses that had been brought in by the multiagency task force assembled to help with the case. We’re sure you’ve never seen anything like this in your life.’ And these were cops.” “And they said, essentially, ‘Welcome to Jennings. Later that day, speaking with some former police officers, Brown recounted his experience. Could this really be chalked up to police incompetence? Brown was shocked – after all, this was the murder of someone intimately connected to other homicide victims. What the evidence started pointing to was not a serial killer evading capture.īrown drove to the crime scene – Deshotel had been shot to death in his home – and found it in chaos: Not only had the police not secured the scene or created a perimeter, but people were wandering in and out of the house, sometimes taking items with them. “I met him around sunset one evening and I woke up the next morning to the news that he’d been murdered a few hours earlier.” “He was either in a wheelchair or on crutches, and he made an impression just because he had been shot and he was kind of a mess,” Brown tells Rolling Stone. Deshotel was a street player in town who had dated two of the Jeff Davis 8 victims. Halfway through the trip, he met a drug dealer named David Deshotel, who had recently earned the nickname “Bowlegs” after a gunshot wound to the leg left him with a limp. If Jennings seemed like any other rural Louisiana town at first glance, it only took a few days for Brown’s suspicions to grow deeper. Sherri Papini Sentenced to 18 Months in Prison for Faking Her Own Kidnapping And, as Brown writes, “all eight of the victims snitched for local law enforcement about the Jennings drug trade.” They were all living in poverty and had criminal records filled with drug use and petty crime, often supporting their respective habits with sex work. All of them were from South Jennings, the poor side of town, and knew each other. Though the victims’ causes of death varied – several had or appeared to have asphyxiated, two women had their throats slashed – the women of the Jeff Davis 8 had plenty in common. It sounds like the plot of True Detective, but when the details are laid out all at once, as they are in Ethan Brown’s mesmerizing new book Murder in the Bayou, it starts to make the hit HBO show seem downright restrained – and the bayou look a lot like the rest of the country. For years, the police department has implied that a serial killer was in the parish’s midst, but it’s been over a decade since the killings began, and the cases remain unsolved. Between 20, eight women from the town of Jennings, Louisiana, in Jefferson Davis Parish, were murdered, their bodies dumped in crawfish ponds and canals in the area. The details of the Jeff Davis 8 murders are so incredible – and so quintessentially bayou – that if they were fiction they’d seem a little heavy-handed.