By Kristina Irwin
I am going to begin this column with context before I get to the crux of a broader study of active serial killers. As a teenager, I did not realize that free roaming my hometown put my best friends and me in the path of predators. We had a police officer who was kidnapping and raping women in my hometown. New Orleans and Baton Rouge, both roughly an hour from me, had active serial killers. A man in my hometown started kidnapping and raping young gay men the same month my best friend, (a gay male) started our junior year of high school. Within a few months, this man, too, became a serial killer. I also did not realize that by the time I started college, at least four active serial killers were closer to not just myself but my family. Ironically, my brother, a gay male, would move from our hometown, perhaps because he knew of the Bayou Strangler serial killer, only to move into the same complex in which Murray Pace would be murdered by another serial killer.
I may have not been born in Louisiana but it is the first place that truly felt like home. Like most teenagers, I was comfortable and felt invincible. For someone who spent the better part of their live thriving on cop shows and books celebrating the noble work of cops and lawyers, who truly believed in helping people, (i.e. John Grisham’s Jake Brigance, Matlock, Perry Mason, and Law and Order’s Jack McCoy) I did not know that in the shadow of cities like Baton Rouge and New Orleans, there were living breathing beasts even worse than the alleged NOLA Vampires or Rouge Garou hiding in the bayous.
The FBI suggests that at any given time there are 25-50 active serial killers at any given time in the United States. The 90s and early 2000s may as well have been known as the Devil’s Decade because there wasn’t just one serial killer active in the state at the time. It was the first hint of killer clowns and mysterious white panel vans abducting kids off the side of the road. After watching Serial Killer Capital on Peacock, I realized that my own life is more connected to true crime, specifically serial killers, even more than I thought. Louisiana itself was also no stranger to serial killers, either. Even before the mysterious Axe Man of New Orleans preyed on New Orleans in the shadow of the Great Depression, Google lists a female serial killer known as Bricktop, active in the 1840s.
How does this come full circle to my life as a criminologist in training? I first moved to Louisiana in 1996. If you believe in a higher power, this is where you first start learning of my point. In 1996, there was a swat trained police officer named Chad Louivere, in my hometown. He was pulling women over, abducting them, and raping them in the sugar cane fields, terrifying them of tales that he was a cop and protected. He would then abandon them. My dad stopped trying to teach me how to drive. This was explained away as being grounded for being dumb enough to walk home close to midnight from my best friend’s house, several miles away, and for making a C in French 2 because I was too involved with unnecessary things like the undue influence of an older inappropriate boyfriend. What I didn’t know was women were being found abandoned, beaten and raped in sugar cane fields. I also did not know about the serial killers active in both New Orleans and Baton Rouge. I also did not know that I was also about the man raping and killing gay men in the area. My mom did make up for drag shows. My two closest friends were gay, my best friend, and the man I would end up taking to prom. More about him later, but later it was suggested that us out walking alone was all of us being at risk.
I also did not know that in Baton Rouge Sean Vincent Gillery had started his serial killing spree in Zachary, LA in 1994. Not that I went to Baton Rouge, but I was being steered more to look at Nicholls rather than LSU and UNO that were on my top five list of schools. Names of people I was vaguely familiar with were said to have passed away. No context. Perhaps it was because I was a shallow teenager to some extent. My 1996 was consumed with the alleged mugging of my favorite wrestler in New York and the legit murder of one of my favorite singers, Selena Quintilla by her fan club president. Shawn Michaels and Selena Quintilla were real to me more than strangers from Baton Rouge than celebrities from Texas.
The fact that the news said police in Baton Rouge were looking for white long-bed pickup trucks did not faze me. I was in Houma, an oil town. Everyone who worked in the oil field had these trucks. They were fleet. My dad had one. His two best friends drove these trucks. If we went to the summer family day, the entire lot of Tetra Technologies was filled with these vehicles. Just the same as at Haliburton and Sonoco, etc. These trucks were as familiar to me on a daily basis as the semis that I see every night in my current job. Similar issues surrounded the Amber Hagerman kidnapping in Texas. She was abducted into a black pick up. She was not much younger than my little sister, but still. Pickup trucks in the south are like leaves on trees. They are everywhere.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the nature of growing up in Louisiana because we did not just have our homegrown serial killers, we had transient killers like Robert Ben Rhodes who would travel in a Semi with a specially modified sleeper cab that he turned into a torture chamber. Samuel Little had traveled through in the 1980s and it's quite possible the infamous killing team of Otis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas could have been through.
Certain serial killers have quotes or quirks that stick with me even more so than Ted Bundy, actively using his law school education to aid police in not only better understanding serial killers, but in actively aiding profilers with information that proved crucial in capturing Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway. I filed a story about Rhodes away until I watched Serial Killer Capital. I knew about Derek Todd Lee as I began to gather research for my thesis. He did not fit the standard definition for a serial killer, (white male 18-45).
Sean Vincent Gillis made a statement to the police that made everything come full circle. The carefree teenager to the criminologist…..to paraphrase: “When you come face to face with another ‘hunter’ you just know, and there is some kind of honor code.” This was to an officer when he was asked if anyone ever saw him or if he knew of the other murders. He would not give a description of the other killer. He did not even mention if this killer was white or black. He did mention that he had considered calling on Derek Lee Todd, but only because Todd had gotten too close to his woman, who was working at a twenty-four hour gas station. For whatever reason, the honor code, or the acknowledgment that Gillis mentioned, saved his woman because Todd left her alone. This raises the idea, how many were actively in Baton Rouge. If this killer was not Todd and not Jeffrey Guillory, the third of the identified serial killers preying on Baton Rouge in the early 1990s, early 2000s, who was it?
All documentaries and our education tells us that this was the early stages of DNA. We did not have CODIS. As seen for years with serial killers, like Zodiac and Son of Sam. If the killings do not happen in the same geographic comfort zone, there are jurisdiction issues. It takes awhile for law enforcement to connect the dots and then of course, who gets the credit when the case is solved.
They say it takes one to know one. Even people with severe mental health issues, and granted, there is some sociopathic or psychopath involved with many serial killers. They recognize each other. They confront each other and sometimes, these conflicts are done for sport. A can you top this kind of display, which, in my untested opinion, is currently going on in Long Island with their Long Island serial killers. The difference between Bundy’s rational legal mind and Gillis’ who seemed bent toward a demented brotherhood built on honor of hunting what Zodiac called, “The most dangerous game,’ was this twisted sense of an honor code.
Robert Ben Rhodes called his, “The Laughing Death Society,” allegedly. A woman wrote of an escape from a trucker who claimed to be a serial killer. It has been attributed to Rhodes, but a lot of the bodies found at truck stops were runaways or prostitutes, the high risk population, as we are coached to call them. The killer who picked up that author hitchhiking took credit for the prostitute disposed of in the dumpster as if she had been garbage.
The Laughing Death Society was supposed to be a brotherhood of murder and depravity. Again, could this be true, or one of the tools used by a practiced serial killer, with miles of open road to increase his satisfaction, to bide his time before the physical torture started?
It makes me wonder if they can identify each other or in that vast black hole known as The Dark Web, do they really have some secret society, where they boast to each other of their kills? In some cases, like Bundy, his rational legal mind seemed to know/understood that he was uniquely qualified to help law enforcement catch those who preyed on their fellow humans. Sean Gillis, even admitted that he only considered selling out Derek Todd because he got too close to something that belonged to him. The killer he locked eyes with was also disposing of a body. They knew what the other was doing and never spoke. It was as if some unspoken understanding as two alpha predators who come across each other on neutral ground.
I have seen a similar attitude in my retired k-9. He is used to being the dominant animal. As the older fur brother, he was in the dominant role over our younger lab. He used his broad shepherd body and deeper bark to correct our sleeker lab. However, when the neighbors pitbulls came to our yard, they were a united front, despite the XL being bigger than both of them. Yet, if the XL stayed in his own yard, they would bark once and then stare at each other across the fence line. Each male dog would watch the other when they’d mark their yard’s border as a warning. A constant stare and a slight head movement as each guard dog ensured that the invisible line was not crossed and their female owner was not even sniffed without a warning growl.
If these serial killers follow the thinking of the Zodiac Killer, as humans are the most dangerous game, perhaps we should see them as dangerous animals who prowl the shadows. Until we can identify them and prosecute them, then they do not get the right to be seen as human. If we cannot identify the predator stalking who they see as a weak part of the pack, to be sacrificed, then we treat them with the same kind of dangerous respect given when we come across a snake we cannot identify, because often they do act as a trapped animal. They rarely tend to be as amused as Berkowitz when he smirks, “What took you guys so long?”
Editor's note: this piece ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. It is a personal essay rather than a case report. The cases it touches, checked here: Sean Vincent Gillis has four convictions with eight deaths attributed; Samuel Little has eight convictions, sixty confirmed by the FBI and ninety three confessed; Henry Lee Lucas has eleven convictions, around three regarded as credible, against some six hundred confessed. Robert Ben Rhoades, spelled Rhodes here, is carried at three to four. The claim that Ted Bundy's interviews were crucial to catching Gary Ridgway is a durable piece of folklore: Bundy was consulted by Robert Keppel during the Green River investigation, but Ridgway was identified in 2001 by DNA, eleven years after Bundy's execution. The FBI's estimate of twenty five to fifty active serial killers at any one time is an often quoted working figure, not a count.