In November 2006 a Bayou Blue man named Ricky Wallace, whose friend Chris Deville had been found dead the year before, went to the police with a story about a neighbor. Earlier that year, he said, the man had invited him back to his trailer with the offer of drugs and sex with a woman, then tried to persuade him that the woman liked bondage and asked to tie him up. Wallace refused and was allowed to leave. He was a drug user who had lied to police before, and detectives doubted him at first. They questioned the neighbor anyway, and while he was at the station the man agreed to give a blood sample. Within about a week his DNA matched semen left on the bodies of two men killed in the late 1990s, Oliver LeBanks and Manuel Reed. On December 1, 2006, detectives picked up Ronald Joseph Dominique, forty-two, at the Bunk House Inn, a homeless shelter in Houma, and within three hours he had confessed to raping and killing twenty-three men. He told them he had known it was only a matter of time, and had moved out of his sister's house so as not to cause her trouble when they came.
The killings had run for nine years through six parishes of the bayou and sugarcane country west and south of New Orleans: St. Charles, Jefferson, Lafourche, Terrebonne, Assumption and Iberville. Eighteen of the dead men were Black and five were white; their average age was twenty-five. Most were poor, and many lived on the street, used drugs or traded sex for money, though not all of them were gay and several families insisted afterward that their sons had been none of those things. They were strangled or suffocated and left in cane fields, ditches, canals, dumpsters and along back roads, and many were found without shoes, a detail that eventually helped investigators see the deaths as one series. After his conviction the FBI called it the most significant serial homicide case in the country in two decades, in both the number of dead and the length of time, and outside Louisiana it drew little attention.
Dominique was born in Thibodaux on January 9, 1964, the youngest of six children of poor laborers who lived in a trailer park on the edge of town. At Thibodaux High School he was overweight, withdrawn, in poor health and bullied; he sang in the school choir but did not play sports, drink or use drugs, and was treated as an outcast. Shortly before he finished school in 1983 he realized he was gay and went several times to a gay bar, where classmates saw him, and when they harassed him for it he fiercely denied it. He enrolled at Nicholls State University to study computer science and dropped out in the mid-1980s. On June 12, 1985, he was fined $75 for making obscene phone calls, and in May 1994 he was fined for drunk driving. He held a string of low-paying jobs, lost several of them over discipline, and lived for long stretches off his mother and his older sister, staying with each of them in turn. He never married and had no children. He spent much of his free time in gay bars, often performing dressed as Patti LaBelle, whom he idolized, and was looked down on by much of the local gay community.
On August 25, 1996, a partly clothed young man jumped from a window of the sister's house in Thibodaux, where Dominique was living, and told neighbors that Dominique had raped him and tried to kill him. Dominique was arrested and held on a $100,000 bond. By November prosecutors could not find the young man or confirm who he was, and the case was dropped. Dominique later told investigators that he had been sexually assaulted by other prisoners while he was held, that the charge had left him afraid of prison, and that he killed his victims so that none of them could send him back.
The first death he confessed to was that of David Mitchell, nineteen, who was hitchhiking home from his grandmother's house after a relative's birthday party in July 1997 and was found on July 14 in a roadside ditch near a wooded area in St. Charles Parish. There was ditch water in his lungs and no sign of injury, drugs or alcohol, and his death was ruled an accidental drowning, although his father insisted he was a strong swimmer, the water was low, and his trousers had been pulled down to his ankles. Gary Pierre, twenty, was strangled in the same parish that December and found fully clothed. Larry Ranson, thirty-eight, a homeless man, was killed on July 31, 1998, and was the first he tied up. In early October he met Oliver LeBanks, twenty-seven, in Metairie; LeBanks had lost his job over drug use not long before, and his body was found on the outskirts of Metairie on October 4. That same month he picked up Joseph Brown, sixteen, in Kenner, struck him on the head and strangled him with a plastic bag. Bruce Williams, eighteen, died the next month.
In May 1999 he picked up Manuel Reed, twenty-one, in Kenner, and left his body in a dumpster in the industrial zone about a mile from where Brown had been found. Angel Mejia, whose age is given as twenty-one in one account and thirty-four in another, died a month later; Dominique tried to put him in a dumpster that turned out to be full and left him in the street, tied with rope. Mejia, Brown and Pierre had all lived near one another. Mitchell Johnson, thirty-four, was taken to woods outside Metairie that August and found naked on September 1. Michael Vincent, twenty-three, was killed in Lafourche Parish in January 2000, and Kenneth Randolph Jr., twenty, a neighbor in his trailer park, that October. Anoka Jones, twenty-six, met him in Houma on the evening of October 12, 2002, and was found hours later under a highway overpass.
Late in 2002 he and his sister moved to Bayou Blue, and he found work with a power supply company checking electricity levels, a job that sometimes sent him traveling. Datrell Woods, nineteen, was left in a reed field with his bicycle and not found until May 24, 2003; because he had asthma, his asphyxiation was taken for an accident. Larry Matthews, forty-six, homeless and never reported missing, was lured to his home in October 2004 and identified only by fingerprints. Michael Barnett, twenty-one, the first of the white victims, was found on October 24, 2004. Leon Lirette, twenty-two, killed in February 2005, had lived with both Barnett and Anoka Jones and had been the prime suspect in Jones's death, because he was the last person to see him.
The pace picked up at the end. August Watkins, thirty-one, was killed in April 2005, and Kurt Cunningham, twenty-three, a few days later. Alonzo Hogan, twenty-eight, was killed that summer in St. Charles Parish, and Wayne Smith, seventeen, in Terrebonne, where his body was so decomposed in a canal when it was found days later that no semen could be recovered. Deville, forty, was hitchhiking out of Napoleonville after Hurricane Katrina in September 2005 when he was killed; his skeletal remains were found in a reed field the next month and identified by ID cards and belongings beside the body. Nicholas Pellegrin, twenty-one, was killed in Lafourche Parish in late November. He had borrowed $400 from drug dealers, missed the payment and been threatened, so his death was treated as drug-related until Dominique confessed.
The last was Christopher Sutterfield, twenty-seven, of Thibodaux, whom Dominique had met in the summer of 2006 and begun seeing. On October 14, 2006, Dominique picked him up at the Hebert Motel and took him to a storage facility, where they had sex; then, according to the authorities, Dominique struck him on the head and strangled him, and left the body in Iberville Parish. Sutterfield's friends and relatives had last seen him with a man driving a black SUV but could not describe the driver.
The method, as Dominique described it and police later summarized it, rarely changed. He met men on walks, on drives in his pickup and in gay bars, and offered them alcohol, drugs, a place to stay or money for sex, or showed them a picture of an attractive woman he said was his wife or girlfriend and told them she wanted to have sex with them. Once they were at his home he asked to tie them up. Those who agreed he raped and then killed. Those who refused were let go unharmed. In his confession he maintained that the men had consented to being tied and handcuffed because they wanted the money. Ricky Wallace was one of the men who refused.
For most of those years nobody treated the deaths as a series; each parish handled its own bodies. It was after August Watkins was found in April 2005 that police finally connected the killings in Kenner and Houma through their method and began to consider that one man was responsible, and brought in the FBI. By then eighteen of the men had been found in four parishes. A multi-agency task force was formed that month, headquartered at the Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Office in Lockport, and it had been working for more than a year and a half when Wallace came forward. "Without Ricky, maybe it would have taken longer to track the right suspect," a task force leader, Dawson Foret, said later.
He was booked first for Reed's death, on charges of first degree murder and aggravated rape, and for the second degree murder of LeBanks. Detectives went through his confession looking for lies. "We believe he was telling the truth when he gave his full confession," said Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Jerry Larpenter. "We were looking for lies." The task force set about checking each killing he described against the evidence it held.
Terrebonne Parish prosecutors could have sought death. Assistant District Attorney Mark Rhodes said he told the families he was confident of a guilty verdict and a death sentence on all eight counts there, and just as confident the case would then be tied up in appeals for twelve to fifteen years or more. The families wanted a quicker end, he said. He said later that death would have been easier on Dominique than prison, which he feared.
On September 23, 2008, in the courthouse in Houma, Dominique, forty-four, pleaded guilty to eight counts of first degree murder, for Michael Barnett, Kurt Cunningham, Chris Deville, Alonzo Hogan, Leon Lirette, Nicholas Pellegrin, Wayne Smith and August Watkins, and gave up his right to a jury trial and to any appeal. Almost thirty of their relatives were in the room. Dressed in white prison clothes, his hands cuffed in front, he sat staring at the defense table while they wept and described what he had done to their lives, and he stood hunched with his head bowed as District Judge Randy Bethancourt read out the sentences and the names. "The lives of eight young men were taken from these families by the actions of the defendant," Rhodes told the court. "He knew nothing about them or their families and he callously killed the victims and left a lifetime of pain as their legacy." Kurt Cunningham's brother Chris, sobbing, told the court he would miss his brother until the day he died, and then turned to Dominique. "I hope hell finds you fast," he said. "He devastated this small community," the district attorney, Joseph Waitz Jr., said afterward. A ninth body found in Terrebonne had turned out to belong to a man killed outside the parish.
Bethancourt imposed eight consecutive life sentences without parole. His lawyer, Richard Goorley of the Capital Assistance Project of Louisiana, said that any further prosecution would waste taxpayers' money, since he was already serving life. Lafourche Parish disagreed. In the first week of December 2008, in Thibodaux, Dominique pleaded guilty to the second degree murder of Christopher Sutterfield, which carries life, and waived a trial there. Judge Bruce Simpson told him that his earlier convictions would have no bearing on the sentence, since one conviction does not take the place of another. After Assistant District Attorney Stephen Caillouet read out the facts, Simpson asked whether the state would reach the same conclusion at a trial, and Dominique said yes. Sutterfield's family was in the courtroom and chose not to make a statement.
That made nine convictions. The other fourteen deaths he confessed to, most of them in Jefferson and St. Charles parishes, have not produced murder convictions. He is held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The case was the subject of the 2011 documentary Bayou Blue.