What implicated Daniel Blank was a burglary nobody died in. On July 7, 1997, a date some filings give as July 6, Leonce and Joyce Millet, both sixty-six, were shot outside their home in Gonzales, in the Louisiana river parishes. They survived, and they gave police a description. A composite sketch went out to the media.
Two people said it looked like Blank. One was an anonymous caller. The other was Elton Cloutare, a security guard at the Square Deal Casino in Sorrento, which is the connection the whole case rests on: he was killing for money to gamble with, and a man who watched him gamble recognized his face.
By then six people were dead. Victor Rossi, forty-one, had hired Blank at his auto repair shop in Prairieville, and on October 27, 1996 he was beaten to death with a baseball bat at his home in St. Amant. Barbara Bourgeois, fifty-eight, woke on the night of March 18, 1997 to find an intruder in her house at Paulina, where the phone lines had been cut; he beat her with a vacuum cleaner, fracturing her nose and sternum. Lillian Philippe, seventy-one, came out of her bathroom in Gonzales on April 9 and met him ransacking the house, and was stabbed to death; her sister-in-law found her the next day. Sam Arcuri, seventy-six, and his wife Louella, sixty-nine, were beaten to death together in their home at LaPlace on May 9. Joan Brock, fifty-five, the wife of a former employer, was killed in her back yard in LaPlace on May 14. Cash, jewelry and checks were taken.
A task force had been working the series: the sheriffs' offices of Ascension, St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes, the Gonzales police, and the New Orleans office of the FBI.
They found him in Onalaska, Texas, where he had set up an automotive repair shop that August; he had been living in Sorrento while the killings went on. His girlfriend was also arrested, accused of driving him to many of the scenes, but she was never convicted. On November 13, 1997 a Texas officer and a detective from the Ascension Parish sheriff's office came to the shop and asked whether he would talk to them at the county courthouse annex. He was not arrested and not handcuffed, and he went with them. The interview room had a video camera in plain view. He confessed that day and again the next, and he was arrested on November 14. The taped confession ran to about twelve hours, and his lawyers have always said it was coerced and made without a lawyer present, after he had denied the killings several times.
He confessed a third time at Angola in April 2000, after he had already been convicted.
The cases were prosecuted separately and in different parishes, which is why the sentences differ and why accounts of them do not agree.
He was indicted for the Brock and Arcuri murders in early December 1997, for Rossi and Philippe on December 12, and by January 1998 for all six deaths and two counts of attempted murder over the Millets. He pleaded not guilty to everything. In April 1998 a court sealed the evidence to protect his right to a fair trial, and in December 1998 he tried to escape from a courtroom and was caught. For Lillian Philippe the state gave notice it would seek death. The trial was moved to Terrebonne Parish on a defense motion. Some reports describe an Ascension Parish jury. The trial opened on July 21, 1999, and after about two and a half hours of deliberation the jury convicted him on September 2, 1999, a date other accounts give as September 3, and at the penalty phase unanimously returned death, finding two aggravating circumstances: that he had been committing an aggravated burglary, and that the victim was sixty-five or older. Judge John L. Peytavin sentenced him on December 9, 1999, when he was thirty-seven.
That sentence has never been set aside. The Supreme Court of Louisiana affirmed it on direct appeal on April 11, 2007 and refused a rehearing that June. A post-conviction petition filed in July 2015 was rejected on September 30 by Judge Jessie LeBlanc, who held that his detailed confession was something only the killer could have given, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana turned it away on May 13, 2016. LeBlanc had signed a death warrant on January 20, 2016 setting his execution for March 14; the same court stayed it on February 17.
The other cases went differently. A second jury convicted him of murdering Joan Brock on April 8, 2000, and on October 20 Judge J. Sterling Snowdy sentenced him to death a second time. That conviction and sentence were vacated in 2006 over a clerical error in the trial record, and in July 2009 he pleaded guilty rather than be tried again and received life without parole; an appeal against the Brock conviction failed on January 25, 2011. On February 7, 2001, the day after his trial for Barbara Bourgeois opened, he changed his plea to guilty and Judge Alvin Turner gave him life without parole; that count is described in some accounts as second-degree murder. On November 14, 2001 he pleaded guilty to murdering Sam and Louella Arcuri and Snowdy gave him two more life terms. He was never tried for Victor Rossi. In the St. James prosecution alone he filed more than thirty pre-trial motions, including attempts to suppress all three confessions.
What is happening now is a federal habeas case in the Middle District of Louisiana, filed in 2017 by Gary Clements of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana in a petition of 622 pages and later taken over by federal public defenders and the lawyer Letty Di Giulio. On October 5, 2021 U.S. District Judge Brian A. Jackson ordered police agencies to turn over a baseball bat, fingernail scrapings and cigarette butts for new DNA testing at Bode Technology in Virginia and allowed a review of fingerprints. A separate discovery request was refused by a magistrate judge in November 2021; he sought review, and the warden did not oppose it.
Testing already done had found that DNA from three scenes did not come from Blank: unidentified male DNA on the bat used to kill Victor Rossi, unidentified male DNA under Sam Arcuri's fingernails, and male and female DNA on cigarette butts at the Millet home. The work stalled for two years after a defense expert died and the state sought his agreement not to sue if he were exonerated; in December 2023 Jackson condemned that demand and ordered the lab to proceed, and the State Police completed the fingerprint review in January 2024. Di Giulio argued that the only evidence connecting him to all of the crimes was his confession, so that a successful challenge to one case undermined them all. No ruling on the results had been reported by 2026.
In June 2023 he was among the fifty-six Louisiana death row prisoners who petitioned Governor John Bel Edwards for clemency; the pardon board rejected all of them that July as filed too soon after recent court rulings. He remained on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola when Louisiana resumed executions with the nitrogen execution of Jessie Hoffman Jr. on March 18, 2025, one of some fifty people then awaiting execution in the state, and was still listed there in 2026.
He was born on June 28, 1962, at Paulina in St. James Parish, the parish where two of the six died.