Ronald Dominique was arrested on the afternoon of Friday, December 1, 2006, at a homeless shelter in Houma, Louisiana. He was 42, overweight, nearly out of money and walking with a cane. Within hours, investigators said, he was describing to them how he had killed one man after another over almost ten years. By the following Monday the Terrebonne Parish sheriff announced that Dominique had confessed to killing 23 men and teenage boys, aged 16 to 46, whose bodies had been found in cane fields, ditches and remote roadsides across the bayou parishes south and west of New Orleans.
Most of the dead were poor. Many had no fixed address, walked or rode bicycles to get around, and had run into trouble with drugs. For years their deaths had been handled one at a time by separate sheriffs' offices and police departments. A multi-agency task force formed in 2005 was still searching for a pattern when a man who had refused to let Dominique tie him up came forward. Dominique pleaded guilty in 2008 to nine of the killings, eight in Terrebonne Parish and one in Lafourche Parish, and was sentenced to life in prison. The other 14 deaths he described were never brought to trial.
Dominique grew up in Thibodaux, the seat of Lafourche Parish. The Houma Times reported that he graduated from Thibodaux High School in 1983, that he studied computer keyboards at Thibodaux Vo-Tech, and that he worked at one point as a convenience store manager. He was later described in court as having held a series of low-paying jobs. He never married.
At the time of his arrest he was 42 years old. The Houma Times described him in 2010 as 5 feet 7 inches tall and about 280 pounds; an Associated Press report from his 2008 sentencing put his height at 5 feet 5. He had a heart condition, and at his first court appearances in 2007 he was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair. Until the week of his arrest he had been living with a relative in Bayou Blue, a rural area near Houma, where his camper was parked behind a trailer. That week he moved into the Bunk House Inn shelter in Houma, telling another resident that he had enough money for five or six nights at $10 a night.
The AP reported that he had been charged at least seven times over the years and jailed twice, mostly for minor offenses: traffic violations, simple battery, and a peace offense involving offensive language.
Two earlier complaints of rape against Dominique became public only after his arrest. Both were reported by The Courier of Houma and the Daily Comet of Thibodaux in December 2006, in accounts carried by the Associated Press.
In 1993 a man from Houma told Thibodaux police that Dominique had tied him up and raped him at gunpoint. The officer who took the complaint did not make an arrest. In 1996 a man from Thibodaux gave the same officer an account that the papers described as nearly identical. This time Dominique was arrested, on August 25, 1996, and jailed. The charge was first aggravated rape and was later reduced to forcible rape. The case never went to trial. Prosecutors said they could not pursue it because the complainant could not be found; the man later told reporters that the authorities never tried to contact him. Dominique was released in November 1996 without being prosecuted. The Houma Times, in a 2010 summary, described the 1996 case as one in which he pleaded not guilty and the trial was continued without a date. The officer who handled both complaints died in 2003.
Dominique's own account to police at the time, as the newspapers reported it, was that he had picked up both men and brought them home for sex, that they had asked to be tied up, and that when they then demanded money he showed them a gun and told them to leave. "I would never hurt nobody," he told police. Neither complaint ended in a conviction, and neither was tested in court.
After his 2006 arrest, Terrebonne Sheriff Jerry Larpenter said Dominique told investigators that his short time in jail in 1996 had left him determined never to go back. "He said he killed them because he didn't want to get caught," Larpenter said. The first death Dominique later confessed to was discovered about eight months after his release.
David Levon Mitchell Jr. was 19 and lived in Luling, in St. Charles Parish. His family called him "Tweedy." He had graduated from Hahnville High School, where he wrote for the school newspaper and made the honor roll, and he worked at St. Charles Parish Hospital. He hoped to become a parish coroner or a mortician. On a Saturday night in the summer of 1997 he went to a wedding reception and then a family birthday party. An aunt dropped him at his grandmother's house in Killona, where he was to wait for an uncle to drive him back to Luling. The uncle did not come, and the family believes he tried to hitchhike. When he did not turn up for work on Monday, his supervisor called. His body was found on July 14, 1997, near a wooded stretch of road in Hahnville. Dominique confessed to his killing nine years later.
Mitchell's family told the St. Charles Herald Guide in December 2006 that they were hurt by public statements describing all of the victims as men who led risky lives and hitchhiked often. "He never hitchhiked frequently, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time," his aunt said. His mother still bought him gifts every year, she said.
Gary Pierre, 20, of Boutte, was found on December 14, 1997. Larry Ranson, 38, of St. Charles Parish, was found on July 31, 1998. Oliver LeBanks, known as "Boe," was found on October 5, 1998, on Stable Drive in Metairie, in Jefferson Parish. AP gave his age as 27; The Houma Times gave 26. He had died of asphyxiation. Joseph Brown, 16, of Boutte, was found on October 20, 1998, and Bruce Williams, 18, of New Orleans, on November 27, 1998.
Manuel Reed was found in a garbage bin in Kenner in 1999. The dates and ages given for him vary: AP put his death in May 1999 and his age at 20; an AP list of the task force's cases gave his age as 21 and the date he was found as April 30, 1999; The Houma Times gave 19 and May 30, 1999. Angel Mejia, 21, of Kenner or Boutte, was found on June 20, 1999. In 2005 Kenner police said they believed Reed's death was linked to those of Joseph Brown and Angel Mejia. Mitchell Johnson, 34, of Kenner, was found on September 1, 1999.
LeBanks and Reed were both strangled. Both were found shirtless and missing a shoe, in remote places. Those details later helped tie their deaths to the others.
From 2000 the deaths moved southwest, to the Houma area. Michael Vincent, 23, of Houma, was found on January 1, 2000. Kenneth Randolph, 20, of Houma, was found on October 6, 2002, and Anoka Jones, 26, of Houma, a week later, on October 13, 2002, under a highway overpass in Boutte.
Datrell Woods, of Houma, was found on May 26, 2003, in a sugar cane field in east Houma, next to the bicycle he used to get around. AP gave his age as 18 in 2005 and as 19 in its 2006 list. Larry Matthews, 46, a homeless man from Thibodaux, was found on October 10, 2004. Michael Barnett, 20, of Houma, was found on October 25, 2004, inside a mini-storage unit less than a mile from where Woods had been found. When Dominique checked into the Bunk House Inn two years later, the shelter's founder put him in a back room under camera surveillance; that room had once been used by Barnett.
Leon Paul Lirette Jr., 22, of Houma, was found on February 20, 2005; his remains lay on the grounds of the Houma air base. August T. Watkins III, 31, of Houma, was found on April 9, 2005, in a ditch that AP placed in Lafourche Parish. Kurt Michael Cunningham, 23, of Houma, was found on April 28, 2005.
Alonzo Hogan was 34; the AP list gives his hometown as Raceland. His sister described him to The Houma Times as a quiet man who loved fishing and rode his bicycle everywhere. In court she said he never bothered anyone. On Friday, July 1, 2005, he left her house on his bike while he waited for a friend to take him fishing. His body was found the next day at La. Highway 306 and Rivet Lane in Bayou Gauche. The autopsy found that he had been strangled. His daughter was born on September 7, 2005, two months after his death. "She is just like him," his sister said in 2010.
Wayne Smith was 17 and a 12th grader at Ellender Memorial High School in Houma. His mother said he was learning welding and had turned his life around. He was killed in August 2005; the task force's list gives August 16 as the date he was found. His body was in such a condition that his mother could not see him before the burial. "I just buried a box," she said in January 2007.
Chris Deville was found in a cane field. By the time he was found, his sister told the court in 2008, he was only bones. "We had to bury bones," she said. She told the court that he still had respect for their mother. His friend was the man whose account would later lead investigators to Dominique.
Nicholas Pellegrin was 21. His sister said at the sentencing that he had been having problems, and that the family never got to tell him that they loved and missed him. "My brother didn't deserve for anything to happen to him," she said at the December 2006 news conference where Dominique's confession was announced. His mother said the news "hurts a lot."
Christopher Charles Sutterfield, of Thibodaux, was the last. He was 27, according to The Houma Times. On October 14, 2006, according to the facts read in court in Lafourche Parish, Dominique picked him up at the Hebert Motel and drove him to a storage facility, where Dominique struck him on the head and strangled him. He left the body in Iberville Parish, near the Tippy Canal Boat Landing on Louisiana Highway 69, where it was later found and identified. A November 2008 report gave the date of death as October 15, 2006. Sutterfield was killed about seven weeks before Dominique's arrest.
The task force recorded that the 23 men had an average age of 25 and that 18 were Black and five were white, according to The Houma Times. Their bodies were found in six parishes: St. Charles, Jefferson, Lafourche, Terrebonne, Assumption and Iberville. Early AP reports said seven.
Police and prosecutors described the men in broad terms: poor, many of them homeless, many with drug problems, some who had traded sex for drugs. Houma police said in 2005 that the five Houma men then in their files had records involving illegal drugs, prostitution or both, and that they moved through high-crime areas on foot or by bicycle at night. Those descriptions were contested by at least one family. David Mitchell's relatives said he had a job, had never abused drugs or alcohol, and rarely hitchhiked. Several of the men have little on the public record beyond a name, an age, a hometown and the date they were found.
For most of those years the deaths were not treated as connected. The men were found across several parishes, each with its own sheriff, and in the towns of Kenner, Houma and Thibodaux, each with its own police department. AP reported that the men had been strangled without the bruises or broken bones that would point to a struggle. Three were found in the same sugar cane field. Some were missing their shoes.
In April 2005, after Watkins's body was found, the Houma police chief, Patrick Boudreaux, said that the deaths of five Houma men over about two and a half years might be the work of one killer, and his department asked the FBI to help with databases and profiling. The same month, with 18 bodies found in four parishes, a multi-agency task force was formed. It was led by the Louisiana Attorney General's Office and based at the Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Office in Lockport. Its core members came from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, the Louisiana Department of Probation and Parole, the Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Office, the Attorney General's Office, the FBI's New Orleans office and the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's Office. By December 2006 six parish sheriff's offices, the Houma and Kenner police departments, Louisiana State Police and the FBI were all involved.
The investigators said later that the case gave them little to work with. Capt. Dawn Foret of the Terrebonne sheriff's office, who spent almost two years on the task force, said there was little forensic evidence and that the victims usually did not know the man who killed them. Larpenter said the case was hard to solve because the killer did not look like a killer and because the victims often vanished for days or weeks before anyone noticed.
The task force kept working through 2005 and into 2006. About a year after it began, Bill Null of the state Department of Probation and Parole joined it and began using his contacts on the street.
The decisive lead came from a parolee. According to The Houma Times and the AP, a young man told his parole agent in 2006 about a man who had picked him up and wanted to tie him up for sex. By his later account, Dominique had passed him several times in his truck on a road in east Houma before offering him a ride, showed him a picture of a woman, and offered him sex with her and drugs. Dominique took him to a trailer in Bayou Blue and tried to tie him up. The man refused, and was allowed to leave. He came forward after his friend Chris Deville was killed. He identified the trailer and picked Dominique's photograph out of a lineup. Foret said in 2014 that his information "essentially put us on the right path." He is the only man known to have escaped.
Investigators interviewed Dominique several months before the arrest, and he gave a DNA swab voluntarily. The Houma Times reported in 2006 that the DNA matched evidence found on Oliver LeBanks and Manuel Reed. Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee said Dominique had given the sample without objection. "He was no trouble at all," Lee said. In 2010 The Houma Times reported that investigators waited about three weeks for a second match while watching Dominique around the clock. On the day of the arrest, officials said only that forensic evidence had led them to him, and The Houma Times quoted the investigators as saying there was no forensic evidence of the kind that had identified the Baton Rouge killers Derrick Todd Lee and Sean Vincent Gillis. Les Bonano, head of investigations for the Attorney General's office, credited "old-fashioned police work."
On the night of Wednesday, November 29, 2006, Dominique checked into the emergency shelter at the Bunk House Inn on East Main Street in Houma. The shelter had been founded in 1998 by Bobbie O'Bryan, a Houma police officer. It did not normally take people with violent or sexual criminal records, but because the task force was tracking Dominique, O'Bryan gave him a private back room under camera surveillance. Only O'Bryan and his wife knew. Round-the-clock surveillance began early on Thursday. O'Bryan called the experience nerve-wracking.
Investigators arrested Dominique there at about 3:30 p.m. on Friday, December 1, 2006, about 38 hours after he checked in. He went without resistance. He was booked on Jefferson Parish warrants: first degree murder and aggravated rape in the death of Manuel Reed, and second degree murder in the death of Oliver LeBanks. Investigators seized two recreational vehicles and a truck. That night the Attorney General's office announced the arrest in an investigation of the deaths of at least 22 men, and said that more charges were possible.
Dominique was taken to the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's Office for questioning. He confessed within three hours, The Houma Times reported, and over the weekend he went through the killings with investigators from the Terrebonne and Jefferson sheriff's offices. He had no lawyer during the questioning; he was indigent and one had not yet been appointed.
"We'd been talking to him just a short period of time and he just started giving it up," Larpenter said. On Monday, December 4, at a news conference in Houma, Larpenter announced that Dominique had confessed to killing 23 men between 1997 and 2005. "He stated how, when and where they were killed," the sheriff said. Officials said the confession held up because Dominique gave details that had never been released. Larpenter said the motive was "without a doubt" sexual, and that Dominique told investigators he had sex with each man. Larpenter speculated that Dominique might have wanted to clear his conscience, and said he thought Dominique had come to like killing.
The same day, Terrebonne Parish filed nine more counts of murder, bringing the number against him to 11: ten of first degree murder and one of second degree murder. District Attorney Joseph Waitz Jr. said he would seek the death penalty. Jim Bernazzani, the FBI special agent in charge in New Orleans, said FBI profilers considered it the most significant serial killing case then active in the country, by the number of victims and the span of time. "A serial killer like this hides in plain sight," he said.
Larpenter also said two other Terrebonne killings with similar features remained unsolved and that Dominique had denied any part in them. "This is still an open case," the sheriff said.
The method that Dominique described, and that investigators summarized, changed little. He approached men on the street, often when they were walking or riding bicycles, and offered a ride. He offered money for sex, or drugs, or showed a photograph of an attractive woman he said was his wife and told the man she wanted to have sex with him. He was not married. At his home he asked the man to let himself be tied up. Those who agreed, he raped and killed, strangling or smothering them; those who refused were allowed to leave. "Once he got those ropes on them, they were his," Larpenter said. "He's nothing on the street, a nobody. But here he had power."
Detectives said he looked for men along La. Highway 182, where low-budget motels were linked to drugs and prostitution, and in the Mechanicville neighborhood of east Houma. He left the bodies in isolated places. In recordings of his interviews with detectives, asked why he chose the places he did, he can be heard saying, "Because it was dark."
The two killings Dominique was first booked on did not go forward. On Monday, January 8, 2007, in a Jefferson Parish courtroom, Assistant District Attorney Paul Schneider told State District Judge Martha Sassone there was no probable cause to hold Dominique for the deaths of Reed and LeBanks. Dominique had said he killed both men in New Orleans and left their bodies in Jefferson Parish, according to Capt. James Gallagher of the Kenner Police Department, and Schneider said the investigation showed the killings took place in Orleans Parish, which meant Jefferson could not prosecute. Defense lawyers had already argued in court papers that the authorities lacked the evidence to hold him. New Orleans police said they had not yet interviewed Dominique. Schneider said charges in other Jefferson Parish cases were possible. No later charges in Jefferson or Orleans parishes were reported.
In December 2006 Dominique was indicted in Terrebonne Parish on nine counts of first degree murder, for the rape and killing of nine men in Terrebonne Parish between 2002 and 2005. Bond was set at $9 million. The nine named in a January 2007 report were Wayne Smith, Kenneth Randolph, Michael Barnett, Leon Lirette, August Watkins, Kurt Cunningham, Alonzo Hogan, Chris Deville and Nicholas Pellegrin.
On Tuesday morning, January 16, 2007, he was wheeled into a Houma courtroom in a red prison jumpsuit. Before State District Judge Randy Bethancourt he said "not guilty" quietly to each count. Relatives of his, and relatives of the dead, were in the room. His public defender, Anthony Champagne, declined to comment.
Angela Smith, Wayne Smith's mother, had come to see him. Seeing him, she said, she had wanted to get out of her chair and go after him. She said she wished she could ask him why he had killed her son and what his last words had been. Her family did not want Dominique executed; she wanted him to stay in prison and suffer. Waitz said he would meet the district attorneys in the other parishes to plan a joint approach.
The capital case in Terrebonne took 18 months to resolve. The prosecution was led by Assistant District Attorney Mark Rhodes, who also served as lead prosecutor for the task force. Rhodes said he told the families he was confident of a guilty verdict on all eight counts, and that a death penalty case could be tied up in appeals for 12 to 15 years or more. Waitz said the appeals process typically took at least 12 years, and would take longer with so many killings. The families wanted the case finished so they could begin to heal, Rhodes said. They asked for life sentences, and the state agreed. In the documentary Bayou Blue, Rhodes said that death would have been less traumatic for Dominique, who was afraid of prison.
The ninth Terrebonne count was not part of the plea. Prosecutors said that the ninth body found in the parish had turned out to be that of a man killed outside it.
On Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at the Terrebonne Parish Courthouse in Houma, Dominique, 44, pleaded guilty to eight counts of first degree murder. The eight men were Michael Barnett, Kurt Cunningham, Chris Deville, Alonzo Hogan, Leon Lirette, Nicholas Pellegrin, Wayne Smith and August Watkins. Under the agreement he gave up his right to a jury trial and his right to appeal, and the state did not pursue the death penalty. The hearing lasted about 90 minutes. Judge Randall Bethancourt asked him about his schooling and his work history. Asked whether he wanted to make a statement, he said no. He answered the judge with "Yes, sir" and "No, sir."
Almost 30 relatives of the dead were in the room, and seven gave victim impact statements. "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." Rhodes likened Dominique to a two-headed hydra.
Chris Cunningham told the court he would miss his brother Kurt for the rest of his life, and then spoke to Dominique directly. "I hope hell finds you fast," he said. Deville's sister described burying only bones. Hogan's sister said he did not deserve to die, "not like this." A letter from Wayne Smith's mother was read aloud; she wrote that she never got to say goodbye. Nicholas Pellegrin's sister said the family never got to tell him they loved him. Not every relative spoke in anger. Hogan's sister told the court she forgave him and that his punishment was not hers to decide.
Dominique stood hunched, his head bowed, as Bethancourt read the sentences and the names of the eight men: eight consecutive terms of life in prison. "He devastated this small community," Waitz said afterward, and he noted that the parish had seen more killings in this one case than in a typical year. After the hearing a member of Dominique's family spoke privately with the victims' relatives in the courtroom; Rhodes called that gesture magnanimous.
Dominique's lawyer, Richard Goorley of the Capital Assistance Project of Louisiana, said further prosecutions would waste taxpayers' money because his client was already serving life. Waitz said Terrebonne would share its evidence with Jefferson, Lafourche and St. Charles parishes if they chose to prosecute.
Lafourche Parish did. In November 2008 Dominique was moved from Angola to the Lafourche Parish Jail to face a charge of first degree murder in the death of Christopher Sutterfield. District Attorney Cam Morvant II had not said whether he would seek death. On November 6, 2008, his office and Dominique's lawyer, Chris Boudreaux, signed an open-file agreement to share case information.
In the first week of December 2008, in Thibodaux, Dominique pleaded guilty to the second degree murder of Christopher Sutterfield. Second degree murder carries life imprisonment in Louisiana. He waived his right to a trial in Lafourche. State District Judge Bruce Simpson told him that his earlier convictions would have no bearing on this sentence: "one conviction does not take the place of another." Assistant District Attorney Stephen Caillouet read the facts. Simpson asked whether the state would reach the same conclusion at trial, and Dominique said yes. Sutterfield's family was in court and chose not to give a victim impact statement.
Dominique was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola after his 2008 plea. The Houma Times reported in December 2010 that he was kept in a single cell for 23 hours a day and had received two disciplinary write-ups. A 2014 report on the documentary Bayou Blue said he was still serving his sentences at Angola. Because he waived his right to appeal in the Terrebonne case, no appellate court has ruled on the convictions.
Fourteen of the deaths he confessed to were never brought to trial: David Mitchell and Gary Pierre in 1997; Larry Ranson, Oliver LeBanks, Joseph Brown and Bruce Williams in 1998; Manuel Reed, Angel Mejia and Mitchell Johnson in 1999; Michael Vincent in 2000; Kenneth Randolph and Anoka Jones in 2002; Datrell Woods in 2003; and Larry Matthews in 2004. These are listed by the dates their bodies were found. Kenneth Randolph was one of the nine men named in the 2006 Terrebonne indictment, but his death was not among the eight in the plea. For LeBanks and Reed, DNA evidence linked him to the bodies, according to the Jefferson Parish sheriff; for the others the link rests on his confession, which investigators said contained details never made public. No court has tested any of the 14.
The Houma Times spoke with several of the families in 2010 and 2014. Albert Barabin, Chris Deville's father, said that people who do wrong should pay for it. Octavia Jones, Wayne Smith's grandmother, said she supported a sentence under which Dominique would suffer. The families said the case was still painful to revisit. Hogan's sister spoke about the daughter he never met.
After the arrest, people from across the United States contacted the Terrebonne sheriff's office about unsolved deaths in their own families. Foret said investigators could not link Dominique to any case outside Louisiana. Nearly ten years after the arrest, she said, the case still felt fresh.
The case drew little national attention. The filmmakers Alix Lambert and David McMahon made a documentary about it, Bayou Blue, which was screened at the New Orleans Film Festival and released on cable, video on demand and DVD in April 2014. Lambert said the story had gone largely untold partly because of the issues it raised in south Louisiana, including homophobia, a gay killer and victims who were poor or using drugs, and partly because it was overshadowed by Hurricane Katrina. Four victims' families agreed to speak on camera, along with investigators from Terrebonne and Jefferson parishes.
Proven by final judgment (guilty pleas): the first degree murders of Michael Barnett, Kurt Cunningham, Chris Deville, Alonzo Hogan, Leon Lirette, Nicholas Pellegrin, Wayne Smith and August Watkins (Terrebonne, September 23, 2008), and the second degree murder of Christopher Sutterfield (Lafourche, December 2008).
Confessed but never tried: the deaths of the 14 other men listed above. For two of them, LeBanks and Reed, DNA evidence was reported; Jefferson Parish dropped those charges because the killings were found to have taken place in New Orleans.
Earlier complaints: a 1993 rape complaint that produced no arrest, and a 1996 arrest on a rape charge that was never prosecuted. Neither led to a conviction. The Houma Times wrote in 2006 that he had been charged twice in the early 1990s in Lafourche Parish with aggravated rape; the more detailed AP and local reports say the 1993 complaint brought no arrest.
Accounts differ on several details: the span of the killings (officials gave 1997 to 2005 in 2006 and 2007, but Sutterfield was killed in October 2006); the number of parishes (six in The Houma Times, seven in early AP reports, four in 2008 AP sentencing reports); the ages of LeBanks (26 or 27), Reed (19, 20 or 21), Woods (18 or 19) and Sutterfield (21 or 27); the date Reed's body was found (April 30 or May 30, 1999); the date Sutterfield was killed (October 14 or 15, 2006); and Dominique's height (5 feet 5 or 5 feet 7). Officials' description of all 23 men as homeless was disputed by David Mitchell's family.
1983: Dominique graduates from Thibodaux High School.
1993: a Houma man tells Thibodaux police that Dominique raped him; no arrest is made.
August 25, 1996: arrested on a rape charge after a second complaint; the charge is reduced to forcible rape.
November 1996: released without prosecution after prosecutors say the complainant cannot be found.
July 14, 1997: David Mitchell Jr., 19, is found in Hahnville, St. Charles Parish.
December 14, 1997: Gary Pierre, 20, is found.
1998: Larry Ranson (July 31), Oliver LeBanks (October 5, Metairie), Joseph Brown (October 20) and Bruce Williams (November 27) are found.
1999: Manuel Reed (Kenner), Angel Mejia (June 20) and Mitchell Johnson (September 1) are found.
January 1, 2000: Michael Vincent, 23, is found.
October 2002: Kenneth Randolph (October 6) and Anoka Jones (October 13) are found.
May 26, 2003: Datrell Woods is found in an east Houma cane field.
October 2004: Larry Matthews (October 10) and Michael Barnett (October 25) are found.
February 20, 2005: Leon Lirette, 22, is found.
April 9, 2005: August Watkins III, 31, is found.
April 2005: Houma police ask the FBI for help; a multi-agency task force forms, based in Lockport.
April 28, 2005: Kurt Cunningham, 23, is found.
July 2, 2005: Alonzo Hogan, 34, is found in Bayou Gauche.
August 2005: Wayne Smith, 17, is killed.
2006: a parolee who refused to be tied up tells his parole agent about Dominique; Dominique gives a DNA swab.
October 14, 2006: Christopher Sutterfield is killed; his body is left in Iberville Parish.
November 29, 2006: Dominique checks into the Bunk House Inn in Houma.
December 1, 2006: arrested at the shelter on Jefferson Parish warrants; confesses within hours.
December 4, 2006: the sheriff announces a confession to 23 killings; nine Terrebonne counts are filed.
December 2006: indicted in Terrebonne on nine counts of first degree murder.
January 8, 2007: Jefferson Parish prosecutor says there is no probable cause to hold him for the Reed and LeBanks deaths.
January 16, 2007: pleads not guilty in Houma.
September 23, 2008: pleads guilty to eight counts of first degree murder; eight consecutive life sentences.
November 6, 2008: Lafourche open-file agreement signed.
December 2008: pleads guilty in Thibodaux to the second degree murder of Christopher Sutterfield.
December 2010: reported in a single cell at Angola.
April 2014: Bayou Blue is released on DVD and video on demand.
April 8, 2014: latest report read placing him at Angola.