The Bayou Strangler

by Fred Rosen

  Dominique’s appearance certainly seemed ordinary. Not unusual. Only in movies and on TV do bad guys look especially bad. Actors who look evil are cast in evil roles. It’s called typecasting, an immediate, shorthand way for directors to telegraph to the viewer who a character is.

  Nevertheless, Thornton had the same suspicions as Bergeron. But like his partner, he gave no indication of them to the suspect.

  “We have some questions we’d like to ask you regarding a case we are working on,” Thornton informed him casually. “Would you come with us for an interview?”

  This was part of the policeman’s art: persuasion. Dominique was not under arrest and he didn’t have to go with them. The idea wasn’t to spook the guy, but rather the direct opposite. It therefore came as no surprise when Dominique responded politely.

  “Sure.”

  Cooperating with their wishes, Dominique accompanied the two detectives to their headquarters. Inside the small, drab interview room of the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office, Dominique was offered a chair. The detectives took the two seats opposite him, across a table. On the table was a tape recorder. Dominique remained very calm. Strangely enough, it was the cops who were nervous.

  “It was like, ‘We gotta do this.’ I had never heard of anything like this before,” Thornton said later. “So many murders, all of the men raped. What kind of person would do that?”

  The detectives, who’d never tackled such a case nor sat in such close proximity to a potential serial killer—potentially the most prolific in the first decade of the new century—suppressed their feelings and forged ahead.

  They followed procedure, first reading Dominique his Miranda rights, then asking him to sign forms that waived his right to have an attorney present during questioning. Dominique complied willingly with their request. He was calm, cool, collected. Thornton turned on the tape recorder.

  “Okay, Mr. Dominique,” Thornton began in an even voice. “We had a complaint from a John Banning. He’s a parolee. He said he had been at your trailer on Bayou Blue and that you had tried to tie him up.”

  “I’m gay,” Dominique answered quickly, perhaps too quickly. “Tying up John was just part of a sex game, nothin’ more than that.”

  Like many serial killers, Dominique was a con man. If he were a sociopath, it would probably have been easy for him to pass a lie detector. Because serial killers don’t feel guilt over the deaths they cause, their lying doesn’t usually register with the machine. Even a person who did have a conscience but remained calm while connected to the machine could sometimes pass.

  That’s why polygraph evidence is not admissible in court. But the police had one forensic way to tie Dominique to the homicides: the recovered hairs and semen on the bodies that remained unidentified. But before the lab could test the forensic evidence, Dominique would have to consent to give them samples. Could they convince him to cooperate?

  Thornton posed that request. For the first time, Dominique broke his cool.

  “What’s all this about?” he asked warily.

  “Mr. Dominique, we’re just trying to clear these cases we’re working on, and so if you could help us, that would be wonderful.”

  Thornton stiffened, trying not to show his anxiety. He had nothing to worry about. His education and experience became a bear trap that Dominique stepped into when he nodded his consent to the procedure to get his DNA.

  “I don’t have anything to hide,” Dominique stated.

  The grammar was correct. However, the words had the ring of a lie. Time to go to the hilt.

  “What we’re gonna do,” Bergeron continued matter-of-factly, “is ask you to sign this Consent to DNA form.”

  Bergeron was trying the warm approach that often put suspects at ease. Dominique looked over the form, saw nothing wrong, and signed it. He had a feral intelligence that had enabled him to escape the police those eight years, but he was still not a criminal—let alone legal—mastermind. With the form signed, the detectives summoned police technicians.

  The technicians came in and took hair samples from Dominique and swabs from inside his mouth. The samples were carefully placed in evidence containers and labeled. It was important to maintain the chain of custody, so if they did get a match, a defense attorney would have difficulty challenging it in court. Now they finally had the opportunity to try their DNA tests to tie him to the murders.

  The samples would be sent to the police lab. Technician Allan Barry would compare them with the evidence gathered from the victims. The hope was for a nuclear-DNA match that would nail Dominique conclusively. If, however, it came back with a positive mitochondrial match, that would still be strong circumstantial evidence, enough to file charges for murder.

  After he had done his best to help the cops convict him, Dominique was thanked profusely by Thornton and Bergeron for his cooperation. They told him he was free to go and offered to give him a ride back to his trailer, which he accepted. They drove him back, dropped him off, and then reversed direction back to their office.

  Now that they had a prime suspect, they brought John Banning in for questioning. He explained how Dominique had used the ruse of fucking a white girl to get him into the car. That might account for how he persuaded his straight victims into homosexual encounters.

  “What would you have done if he tried to force you down?” Thornton asked.

  “Brother, it would have been like Pearl Harbor!” Banning answered succinctly.

  After Banning was dismissed, Thornton had another idea.

  “Let’s go back into the database.”

  Bergeron nodded.

  “Maybe there was something that was overlooked.”

  They began by opening the database of sex offenders.

  “Let’s make sure we cover the guys who were charged, but not convicted,” said Thornton.

  Surprise, surprise. Dominique had a record after all. Up came the old rape charge in Thibodaux Parish from the late 1990s. On August 25, 1996, Dominique was arrested for committing forcible rape and held on a $100,000 bond.

  “According to neighbors, a partially dressed young man escaped from the window of Dominique’s home in Thibodaux, screaming that he had tried to kill him. When the case was brought to court, the victim could not be found to testify. In November 1996, the judge continued the case indefinitely.”

  It was similar to what had happened with Banning.

  “He wasn’t convicted,” Thornton said over Bergeron’s shoulder.

  And there was more. They found the 2002 assault he had been involved in.

  On February 10, 2002, Ronald J. Dominique screamed at a woman who, he said, had hit a baby stroller with her car. This was in a parking lot at a Mardi Gras parade in Terrebonne Parish. Allegedly, the woman apologized, but to Dominique, the picture of righteousness, that wasn’t enough. So he kept screaming at her until, finally, he slapped her face. Once more he was offered a deal.

  Dominique agreed to go into a parish alternative-­sentencing program in lieu of trial. In October 2002, he was released from the program, having met all conditions of his deal. It was because of Dominique’s court problems during that period of time that he did not troll and kill. He was too busy satisfying the conditions of his deal on the lesser charge.

  Two years earlier, in 2000, Dominique had gotten a ticket for disturbing the peace. He’d pled guilty and paid a fine. But things didn’t stop there. The detectives found that on May 15, 1994, Dominique got busted for drunken driving. And going back nine years before that, on June 12, 1985, they discovered his arrest for making the dirty phone calls, for which he pled guilty, paying the fine and court costs.

  There were also two more rape charges: Dominique had been accused of sodomizing two men. Both charges were later dropped.

  “Let’s see what happened,” said Thornton.

  The charges were in Thibodaux Parish, so Be
rgeron called the Thibodaux Parish Sheriff’s Office. Speaking to detectives there, she explained that they were part of the task force working on the Southern Louisiana serial-killer case. Without telling them what she had already found out, she asked, “Could you go through every sex offender in the parish and see if Ronald J. Dominique comes up for raping men?”

  Keeping Bergeron on the line, the Thibodaux detectives looked, but couldn’t find anything. Dubious as to their conclusion, Bergeron drove over to the Thibodaux Parish Sheriff’s Office and personally went through the sex-offender files herself. When she returned to Terrebonne, she held two files in her hands.

  “Those guys claimed they couldn’t find anything on Dominique,” she said, a trifle sarcastically.

  They had apparently misplaced or just failed to find the files, which she handed to Thornton.

  “The charges were dropped for lack of corroborating evidence,” she continued.

  Thornton called the investigating officer on both cases, Sam Alper, who was, to say the least, surprised that Dominique was their serial-killer suspect. He remembered him all right.

  “He had this persecution complex about being gay. He said that being gay left him open to ridicule.”

  Despite the fact that both detectives felt they were closing in, they were forced to go slowly. There wasn’t enough evidence to convince the higher-ups to commit the monetary resources to surveil Dominique full-time. They could, and did, have squad cars go by his trailer, but they couldn’t keep track of him 24–7.

  Still, Thornton and Bergeron knew they had the right guy. They needed to stop him before he murdered again.

  Going back over the old reports of the killer’s murders, Thornton and Bergeron saw that at least three of the victims had been picked up near the Sugar Bowl Motel on Highway 182. Locals called it New Orleans Boulevard.

  “Let’s put a roadblock out there. It might slow him down and give him some pause,” Bergeron suggested to her partner.

  Thornton agreed. The detectives requested that a roadblock be put up on New Orleans Boulevard until the case was finished. Cars would be regularly stopped and searched for anything suspicious. If they were right about it being one of the killer’s trolling grounds, they had just it cut off.

  It was a good idea, but it didn’t take into consideration the killer’s ingenuity. While they had, indeed, cut off one of his trolling grounds, he could simply find another to replace it. Dominique was intimately familiar with Houma’s unique landscape.

  Nick Pellegrin was a young hustler who needed money.

  On November 5, 2005, he was working on his house when the meter reader arrived. Pellegrin noticed he was sort of heavy—strikingly so, given his short height.

  “How you doing?” asked Dominique brightly.

  Pellegrin answered that he was fine, just doing some work on his house.

  “Hey, how about I come by later, after work, and we go and have some fun?”

  A proposition of sex for money, as old as the Bible.

  Pellegrin who was twenty-one years old and white, needed the money. He readily agreed but had to finish the job he was doing. Could Dominique come back when he was finished? Promising to do just that, Dominique returned hours later and picked him up. Dominique then drove to his sister’s house. As dusk was just beginning to settle in, he opened the door of his trailer.

  Nick Pellegrin entered into hell.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Getting the Goods

  Lafourche and Thibodaux Parishes,

  November 2005–December 2006

  This time, Dominique had to be much more careful not to allow his victim to scream. Before, his trailer had been in an empty field where no one could hear him kill. Here, with the trailer parked next to his sister’s house, not only she would hear the sound, but also anyone else around, including the churchgoers right across the street.

  Four days later, Pellegrin’s fully clothed body was discovered in a wooded area in Lafourche Parish. There were ligature marks on his wrists; Bergeron and Thornton were summoned. When they arrived at the dump site, they were royally pissed off. The killer had slipped right through their roadblock.

  The two detectives attended the autopsy, in which the coroner determined the manner of death was homicide due to strangulation. There was a scalp laceration at the back of the head and ligature marks on the wrists.

  “Maybe he knocked the guy out before he killed him,” Thornton posited. “That would account for the head laceration.”

  “That makes sense,” his partner answered, “especially since some of the other victims have those injuries.”

  Thornton still had no answers, just the bare facts. Nick Pellegrin had been strangled and raped. That was consistent with the previous twenty-one murders. Pellegrin was victim number twenty-two. The two detectives went to notify his next of kin.

  After that, with their duty done, they went back to the sheriff’s office where they discussed bringing Dominique in immediately. The problem was a lack of evidence, any evidence, either direct or circumstantial. The results of the DNA testing on Dominique had not come in yet., Because it’s highly skilled and sensitive work to go into the building blocks of human genetics and match them up, DNA testing can take months. The only thing they could do was wait.

  When the results came in days later, it was Thornton who took the phone call. He listened, said a few words, nodded, and smiled. Then he hung up the phone.

  “Remember those Caucasian chest hairs on Oliver Le­Banks?” said Thornton.

  “I remember reading about them,” Bergeron answered.

  “We got a positive match for Dominique’s DNA. But it’s a mitochondrial match.”

  They both knew what that meant. Without the nuclear DNA match, it could just as easily be someone in Dominique’s family. Charging was easy; conviction was hard. They needed more to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt. The good news was that they had enough evidence on Dominique to commit additional resources to the chase.

  A 24–7 surveillance unit was set up immediately. In the parking lot of the church across the street from Dominique’s trailer, the Feds had a huge van outfitted with eavesdropping and taping equipment, as well as night scopes. They even employed a helicopter to pass over the trailer to take pictures from the air and track Dominique if he left.

  Church parishioners obviously knew something was going on.

  “It was really strange,” said one Bayou Blue parishioner, who just happened to worship there. “We knew something was up, but had no idea what it was.”

  How could anyone not know something was up, including Dominique, when the police presence was so obvious? The killer knew the detectives were on to him. For Dominique, it had been a challenge to kill at his sister’s house without her knowing, and then dispose of the body by passing silent and undiscovered through the increased police presence on Houma’s streets.

  That after being questioned by the police! Now the net was tighter. Should he plan an escape or stay put? Rattled, he wasn’t sure which way to go.

  Meanwhile, Bergeron and Thornton established a timeline that matched up all twenty-two victims to Dominique’s movements, residences, and jobs. They knew where he lived and worked when the men were killed. They discovered that Ronald J. Dominique was always living and working near to where the victims had disappeared.

  The more they looked at the timeline, the more it fueled their conviction that they had the right guy. But they needed more facts, not to mention evidence to make the charges stick. If Dominique were tried and acquitted for lack of evidence, the double-jeopardy clause in the Constitution might prevent trying him again.

  For his part, Dominique had not been up to the police pressure. He stopped cold until he could figure a way to kill undetected. During the summer of 2006, the task force continued its investigation unabated.

  “We were sitting o
n Oliver LeBanks’s mitochondrial DNA,” Thornton explains. “Then we got another DNA hit, this time on Angel Mejia.”

  Mejia had been the eighth victim, murdered in 1999.

  “Dominique had left some of his semen in Mejia’s rectum,” Thornton remembers. “At least we thought it was his. It wasn’t nuclear but it was mitochondrial. We knew there was a connection.”

  But again, a mitochondrial-DNA match could have meant Dominique or anyone in his family. They decided to keep watching him. Task-force funds were limited, but they needed to surveil him 24–7 to stop him from killing again while they built their case.

  “We surveilled him on our own time,” says Bergeron. “It took us away from our families, our regular responsibilities. We missed weddings, graduations, other family events because we just wanted to get him. Many times, we would be working with only a few hours’ sleep.”

  And the higher-ups expected results. The police had spent a lot of time shadowing Dominique and still there were cracks in the wall. One day, Dominique noticed a police car in the rear-view mirror of his Sonoma. With a few sharp turns, he shook the tail, leaving him free, once again, to kill.

  Christopher Sutterfield was last known to reside on St. Charles Bypass Road in Thibodaux Parish, Dominique’s old killing grounds. A twenty-seven-year-old white male, Sutterfield had been visiting some friends in Houma when he disappeared on October 15, 2006. The next time anyone saw him, he was dead. This time, it was a “fresh kill”—that is, the body was discovered shortly after death.

  Sutterfield was dumped off Highway 69 in Iberville Parish. Dominique had really gone farther out this time to do his dumping. The task force was contacted. Bergeron and Thornton drove out to the dump site, where they encountered Sutterfield’s fully clothed body. Immediately, they looked for and saw the ligature marks.