Ronald Joseph Dominique was born in Thibodaux, Louisiana on January 9, 1964. He was small, unwell, repeatedly arrested for minor offences, and by the 2000s was living between a trailer, his sister's house and homeless shelters in Houma. He had been arrested in 1996 on a rape complaint that was dropped.
Between July 1997 and October 2006 he killed at least twenty-three men across six parishes in the bayou country south-west of New Orleans. Almost all were poor, many were homeless or working as prostitutes or using drugs, and most were Black.
He offered money, or work, or a place to stay, or drugs. In several cases he told them his wife wanted to watch them have sex and would only agree if they let themselves be tied. He raped and strangled them and dumped the bodies beside cane fields, in ditches and along back roads. The Louisiana press called him the Bayou serial killer.
The men named in the record are Kenneth Randolph, Michael Barnett, Leon Lirette, August Watkins, Kurt Cunningham, Alonzo Hogan, Chris Deville, Wayne Smith and Nicholas Pellegrin. They were aged between sixteen and forty-six.
The disappearances were investigated across a patchwork of parish jurisdictions that did not readily share information, and the victims were people whose absence often went unreported for weeks. A multi-parish task force was formed in 2005. Eight years in.
He was arrested in December 2006 after a man he had approached at a shelter told police, and DNA linked him to the series.
He confessed to twenty-three. In September 2008 he pleaded guilty to eight counts of first degree murder and rape in exchange for the state not seeking death, and was given eight consecutive life sentences without parole. He is held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
His is the largest confirmed series in Louisiana's history and one of the least known in the United States. Nine years, six parishes, twenty-three men, and no jurisdiction that had enough of it in front of them to see a series. Almost everyone who has written about the case attributes both facts, the length of it and the obscurity of it, to who the victims were.