The Bayou Strangler

by Fred Rosen

  During the external examination, Garcia noted that Vincent had been wearing blue jeans, blue boxer underwear, white socks, a white T-shirt, and a reddish-green long-sleeved plaid shirt. Inside the right front pocket Garcia found a key ring with two keys. In the right pants pocket were four pieces of crack, the deadly, addictive, and relatively cheap cocaine derivative.

  Dr. Garcia placed the drugs, keys, and loose change in evidence envelopes, which she turned over to Shelby and Fanguy. Then Garcia got to the heart of it. She noted two linear abrasions on the right upper chest crossing the right breast, two superficial cuts on the lower right side, and a small superficial scrotal abrasion.

  She saw the ligature marks on Michael Vincent’s wrists. Garcia looked at Vincent’s brown eyes and noted “fine pinpoint conjunctival petechiae bilateral and one coalescent focus of sclerotic hemorrhage on the right.” Petechiae are red dots under the skin caused by capillaries that have leaked. There can be many medical reasons for this kind of condition, including autoimmune disorder, viral infections, bone marrow disorder, and bloodstream infections.

  If you ruled out all of those natural reasons, petechiae is a sure tip-off to strangulation. The condition occurs when the vessels burst in the eye due to pressure on the throat. The burst capillaries then cause the red dots under the eye tissue.

  Examining the mouth, Garcia saw that Vincent had one solid-gold-capped tooth. The rest of his teeth were in fairly good condition. Vincent had been lucky that way. Dental care was not exactly the most important thing in a street hustler’s milieu. He certainly didn’t have dental insurance and neither did the people he hung out with.

  The pathologist used her scalpel to open the body and a saw to take off the skullcap, in the usual autopsy fashion. She noted no brain abnormalities or hemorrhaging. As for the trunk, there were no abnormal fluid accumulations in any body cavity. That meant no internal bleeding from beatings, guns, knives, or anything else.

  Finishing her examination, the coroner saw a tattoo of the letters “E.O.G.” on the back of the right hand, and a tattoo with the name “Vincent” on the back of the left hand. Garcia concluded her findings as follows: “DIAGNOSES – Circumstances surrounding death are unclear but subtle findings at autopsy suggested that homicidal asphyxia is the cause of death. Manner of death is homicide.”

  Homicides due to asphyxia are not only relatively uncommon, the term itself, “homicidal asphyxia,” is rather vague. Depriving a victim of oxygen can be done in a variety of ways. One way, as indicated in Vincent’s case, was squeezing the soft tissues of the neck. When his brain had been denied oxygen for a little more than three minutes, Vincent died.

  What was not noted in the autopsy report was whether the victim had been raped. Once again, a matter of linkage. If Vincent hadn’t been, then it could be the work of another killer. None of it, though, really made any difference. The killer had left nothing behind—no semen, no body fluids, no prints, no fibers. Once again, nothing.

  He may have been sloppy in the way he dumped his victims, as Thornton had supposed, but he seemed to be forensically aware. Nobody had seen the black Sonoma truck driven by the portly guy with the mustache and goatee when he dropped off his latest kill on the barbed wire fence in the middle of the night.

  The sex with Vincent had been good, but Dominique really got his sexual high from killing. It was something indescribable even to himself, let alone to anyone else. All he knew was that he had to do it. For the police, the disposal of Vincent’s body in the open was a tip-off that the killer had changed his MO, a warning that what was to come was the unexpected.

  In order to put all the pieces together, a task force would be necessary. Usually commissioned by the state, such a task force would combine local, state, and federal resources into one unit assigned to tracking down the serial killer. But getting the approval from the upper echelons in the state hierarchy to form such a task force had not yet occurred.

  Complicating matters, the killings stopped for … six months … twelve months … eighteen months … twenty-four months. For two years, the serial killer was suddenly inactive. Thornton and the rest of the cops investigating the killings were at a dead end. In itself, that wasn’t unusual.

  It was the cat-and-mouse game that some serial killers like to play.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pizza Man

  Louisiana wasn’t the only state with a serial killer on the loose. Kansas was having a similar problem with another gentleman who enjoyed killing.

  Dennis Rader was leading an anonymous life as a dogcatcher in Park City, a suburb of Wichita, Kansas. He hadn’t murdered in more than a decade. After killing ten times, he had stopped. Police were still looking for the self-branded BTK serial killer, while his alter ego, Rader, was doing public service announcements in his dogcatcher role.

  Back in Louisiana, Dennis Thornton did not let up, even if the killer had. He kept scanning the reports of Southern Louisiana murders, looking for a lead. Nothing came up. He couldn’t figure it out. What had happened? Had the guy moved out of state? There were no BOLOs (Be on the Lookout) from other states that would indicate a killer with the same MO.

  In between the demands of his regular caseload, Thornton kept looking. But once again, Ronald J. Dominique

  hid in plain sight—and simultaneously got in some good eating. Al dente.

  Dominique came from Thibodaux, the county seat of Lafourche Parish, halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. He grew up there, in a small town where everyone knew everyone’s business. He attended Thibodaux High School, where he was in the glee club and sang in the chorus. Although Dominique was in the closet in school, that didn’t stop his classmates from ridiculing him for being gay.

  With six siblings, Dominique came from a very large family. As a child, the future serial killer claimed that a priest molested him. His parents didn’t believe him, though priest molestation was not an unusual occurrence at the time. As later events would prove, the Catholic Church and local police in many venues from Boston to Los Angeles conspired to protect pedophiliac priests.

  Dominique’s accusations did nothing to endear him to his parents.

  The first time Dominique had a run-in with the police was in June 1985, when he got caught making “dirty phone calls.” Arrested and charged with telephone harassment of some of the parish’s local residents, he pleaded guilty. He was smart enough to pay a seventy-four-dollar fine plus court costs to avoid jail time.

  If someone in law enforcement had been tracking Dominique in the first place, he could have been flagged as someone to watch. Unfortunately, at that time authorities didn’t keep tabs on sex offenders. And he behaved himself. Dominique stayed out of trouble with the law for almost nine more years. He next appeared on law enforcement’s radar in May 1994. Like too many, he was arrested and charged with drunk driving. Again, nothing suspicious there.

  It wasn’t until two years later that Dominique’s nocturnal activities turned serious.

  “He’s trying to kill me,” a man screamed loudly as he fled from Dominique’s bedroom window.

  Neighbors heard the scream and immediately called the parish police. Arriving quickly, Lafourche Deputy Sheriff Jimmy McKay arrested Dominique for forcibly raping the partially clad young man and booked him on a $100,000 bond. Dominique couldn’t make the bond. So, while the case was winding its way to trial, Dominique spent three months in the county lockup.

  Dominique would later claim that during the time he was in custody, prisoners raped him, making his anus particularly susceptible to splitting during sex. That made him determined never to return to jail. Yet if Dominique were convicted of rape, he would serve hard time in Angola, the state’s notorious prison for its worst felons.

  Finally, Dominique caught a break. The district attorney found himself without a complainant. The young man who claimed that Dominique had raped and almost killed him could not be found
. Dominique then had the constitutional right to file a writ of habeas corpus.

  Habeas corpus is a judicial mandate that orders the prosecution to bring the defendant to court, to determine whether he is being imprisoned unlawfully, without evidence. If there was no complainant, there was no case. In November 1996, the judge continued the case indefinitely, meaning there would be no prosecution.

  Ronald J. Dominique was set free, yet his jail time had a profound impact on his life and, eventually, the lives of others. At all costs, he was determined never to go back. He vowed that anyone who threatened him with going to the police over anything he did would wind up dead.

  From 1997 through New Years Day 2000, Dominique followed through on that vow.

  After that, he didn’t kill again for two long years. During that time, Thornton wondered what had happened to the serial killer he had been tracking. The answer to Thornton’s question was twofold. The first was that Dominique had gotten in trouble with the law, but not for rape and murder. The wannabe Patti LaBelle impersonator had received a summons in May 2000 to appear in a Houma court on charges of disturbing the peace.

  What had happened? Well, Dominique had argued forcefully with someone in public, so loud that police were called. Since it was a simple misdemeanor, he was able to plead guilty and pay a fine to avoid even appearing in court. Once again, a court unknowingly offered mercy to the killer. And once again, Dominique still couldn’t stay out of trouble.

  Almost two years later, on February 10, 2002, the Bayou Blue man was arrested in Houma for allegedly slapping a woman during a Mardi Gras parade. Dominique had accused a woman of hitting a baby stroller in a parking lot with her car. Though the woman apologized, Dominique continued his verbal assault. Finally, the anger boiled to the surface and he couldn’t contain it.

  It is exceedingly rare in the middle of his killing cycles for a serial killer to keep getting in trouble with the law. If a serial killer has a record, it’s usually low-level offenses that take place prior to the killings.

  And, once again, a police force that had no idea who he really was made a deal. In itself, there was nothing unusual about that. Low-level offenders like Dominique frequently make deals that keep them out of jail. This time, the deal was that instead of standing trial, Dominique was able to enter a parish offenders program.

  Such alternative sentencing programs had become common in Louisiana. The idea was to give the offender a second chance while trying to curb future criminal behavior. Alternative sentencing also reduced the number of felons in prison and saved taxpayers their hard-earned wages.

  This time, Dominique made the most of the chance that the state gave him. He was a model citizen to the others in the parish program. Meeting all the conditions so he could be discharged and avoid police contact, he came back into society in October 2002. By then, Dominique was busy with his second job.

  There isn’t a place in the United States that doesn’t have at least one Domino’s Pizza franchise. Houma had three. If you happened to live in Houma and you ordered a pizza from Domino’s, serial killer Ronald J. Dominique was one of the deliverymen who would come to your door.

  But Domino’s alone couldn’t cut it. He still needed more than the pizza money to pay his bills. So Dominique delivered pizzas in the evening while maintaining the day job at the produce company. Work seemed to fill up his time and, for a while, he appeared redeemed. He seemed to enjoy helping people. He was a good employee and tried to be a solid member of the community.

  The local Lions Club boasted the dubious distinction of signing up the serial killer as a full member. Dominique spent weekend afternoons calling out the Bingo numbers for senior citizens, because he genuinely liked helping out.

  The Lions Club membership director would later recall that he was well liked by everyone there. Maybe Dominique had finally found a place where he felt accepted. But he had other ideas.

  “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

  That was the tagline for the hit Ridley Scott film Alien (1979). The line was particularly significant for what Dominique had in mind. Open-area isolation … “No one can hear you scream,” just like the one sheet for the movie said. Killing in seclusion was just the smart thing to do.

  Delivering pizzas all over Houma, Dominique got to see all the young, attractive men. The hustlers, mostly black, working the streets, looking for tricks or drugs or both. Some were gay, some straight; made no difference to him. He just wanted to get them into his car without a struggle.

  It required a delicate tongue and maybe some visual stimulation: flashing money. Serial killers like Dominique rely on guile more than force to ensnare their victims. They are con men. But while the hustler thought it was a simple business deal, Dominique was setting him up for something else entirely.

  In order to get his prey into a wide, open space where no one would see or hear anything, Dominique went to his brother-in-law Sam Trimble, who unwittingly helped him. Trimble worked at the remote Dixie Shipyard. To get to it, you had to ride three miles over a rutted dirt road that passed through the bayous. It’s terrible on the suspension.

  Apart from some rusting hulks tied up to the weathered wooden dock in front, the place was desolate. Dominique pulled his trailer over to the middle of a field, where there was nothing around. It was so dark here at night the stars stood out bright in the sky. There wasn’t a whisper on the breeze. Such a remote, isolated site would do well.

  But there was the problem of body disposal. Pathologists have made a study of how bodies fare in the bayou. They’ve learned that warm bayou waters accelerate decomposition, making subsequent identification difficult. The longer a body remains in the bayou, the harder it is to identify.

  Going inside his trailer, Dominique looked in the mirror. Staring back was a man who was unattractive to himself and to other men. He didn’t have sex with men that he didn’t buy. What would it be like to have a real relationship? To love someone else who loved him? He was a sociopath. Dominique was not capable of feeling such love.

  He may have been good calling the Bingo numbers at the Lion’s Club, but nobody wanted to socialize with him, let alone be his friend. It wasn’t that he was unfriendly or impolite. People at work identified him for what he was: a loner who kept to himself. By all accounts, Dominique was someone who kept his distance.

  In spite of the FBI’s involvement and the growing number of murder victims, the story of the Southern Louisiana serial killer failed to be reported nationally. The victims just didn’t rate a line of print or a single sound bite.

  It wouldn’t have made Thornton feel any better to know that the man he was hunting had already killed ten men, tying him with Kansas’s now notorious BTK serial killer who was responsible for killing ten and was still at large at the time. BTK killed white, middle-class people. Because of his choice of victims, BTK’s activities rated extensive headlines during his three-decade-long killing spree.

  The people of Wichita were still on the alert for BTK, but by 2002, in the wake of Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers, the nation had a whole lot of things more important to worry about. America’s citizens were on high alert. Where would the terrorists strike next? People were more observant and suspicious. Up in Houma, Louisiana, people were no less paranoid. Little American flags had been attached to every car all over town. No one suspected the real danger in their midst was a serial-killing pizza deliveryman. He wasn’t a foreigner. He wasn’t a Muslim. And he wasn’t a stranger. He was homegrown.

  At that very moment, Dominique was restless. He knew—and longed for—the feeling of tying a guy up with his rope, then forcefully pushing his cock into the guy’s ass, his cock pulsating, his strong hands tightening around the guy’s neck as he struggled. Sometimes, he used a belt or a rope instead.

  Of course, he needed to be extra careful of anal sex. The last thing he needed was another operation.

  Befor
e he went to prison and was raped, he had been working offshore on one of the oil platforms, back in the early 1990s, and the black pepper he ate went down through his stomach, through his colon and into his rectum. In his ignorance, Dominique believed it was the black pepper that led to his operation and the tight stitch-up. It was actually due to a bacterial infection.

  CHAPTER SIX

  John Doe

  Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes, October 6, 2002

  Kenneth Fitzgerald Randolph Jr. was a Bayou Blue man. He lived near the serial killer, at 146 Charter Court off Bayou Blue Road. He was convenient.

  Randolph was five-foot-ten and 150 pounds of muscle. He had close-cropped black hair over a low forehead, deep-set brown eyes, a broad nose, and thick lips that concealed a knowing smile. His twentieth birthday was coming up on August 29, but if he didn’t watch it, he might spend it behind bars.

  About two years earlier, at age eighteen, Randolph had had his first arrest for “carnal knowledge of a juvenile.” Randolph was accused of having consensual sex with a person whose age was, according to official documents, “between thirteen and seventeen.” His next arrest was for “criminal damage of property.”

  In Louisiana, this is a serious felony, punishable by up to fifteen years of hard labor. But Randolph got a minimum sentence, which saw him quickly back on the street. Yet, he just couldn’t stay out of trouble. He was arrested a second time for having sex with an underage person. The age is not referred to specifically in official documents to maintain the teen’s anonymity.

  So far, Randolph had avoided hard jail time through the kinds of compromises common in the criminal justice system. But he liked having sex with kids, a crime the perpetrator usually doesn’t stop until he himself is stopped. Five months later, Randolph had sex with a third child.