Russell Ellwood was a taxi driver in New Orleans in the early 1990s. In 1998 he was indicted in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, on two counts of second-degree murder, accused of killing two women in the winter of 1993. In March 1999 the state dropped one of the counts. In June 1999 a jury in Lafayette convicted him of the other, the second-degree murder of Cheryl Lewis, and in August of that year he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
That is the whole of his record as a convicted offender: one death, one conviction. The case is nonetheless written about as a serial-murder investigation, because when Ellwood was arrested in 1998, officers described him as a suspect in a long series of killings of women across the greater New Orleans area, and a multi-agency task force had spent three years working on the theory that one man was responsible. The charges that reached a courtroom were far narrower than that theory, and the distance between the two is the substance of the case.
In May 1995, law enforcement agencies in the New Orleans region formed a joint task force to look into a string of killings of women. L'Observateur, the weekly newspaper of St. Charles Parish, reported in March 1998 that the task force was led by Lieutenant Sue Rushing of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and that it was pursuing a suspected serial killer. The deaths under review went back to August 1991, and the most recent was believed to have occurred in 1996. By February 1999 the same newspaper put the number of homicides in the task force's inquiry at 26, committed in the greater New Orleans area between 1991 and 1996.
The task force was not a stable body. In a statement later gathered by the FBI, Rushing wrote that it had come apart for the third time because of funding problems, and described inadequate equipment and low morale among its members. Its work centered on a federal grant application to keep an inter-agency effort alive.
The appeal court's account of the inquiry says that Ellwood became a suspect after a sheriff's deputy reported stopping him near the site of one of the deaths. By then the investigators had also considered a former New Orleans police officer, who by 1998 was regarded as a suspect in only one death, that of a former girlfriend in April 1995. That man was not charged in connection with the task force's wider inquiry.
Cheryl Lewis lived in Bridge City, in St. Charles Parish. The indictment on which Ellwood was convicted, as amended in March 1999, alleges that Lewis was killed on or between January 31, 1993 and February 9, 1993. L'Observateur gave her age as 31 in March 1998 and as 30 in later reports.
Delores Mack lived in Metairie, in Jefferson Parish. L'Observateur gave her age as 41 in March 1998 and 40 in later reports. The two women died within days of one another, and the Sheriff of St. Charles Parish, Greg Champagne, described the case against Ellwood in March 1998 as largely circumstantial.
Little about either woman as a person is on record. Lewis's mother, who testified that she never saw Ellwood with her daughter, is the only relative who appears in the court record.
According to the Fifth Circuit's summary of the trial record, about a year after the deaths two off-duty deputies came upon Ellwood in his parked taxi near Hahnville, and the explanation he gave for being there did not hold up.
Ellwood left Louisiana. The investigators traced him to Sebring, Florida, where task force members interviewed him over three days in July 1997. L'Observateur, writing in March 1998, said investigators had interviewed former Florida inmates of Ellwood at Sebring in October 1997 and that those men reported he had told them he had killed women in Florida. The two accounts give different months for the Sebring interviews; both place the investigators there in 1997.
In August 1997 Ellwood was arrested in Florida on an unrelated charge and spent 85 days in jail. He then moved to Canton, Ohio. In November 1997 he was interviewed there, with a former homicide detective present. He first denied having told a fellow inmate about the killings, then admitted on tape that he had spoken to him. The court record says that off tape he made a further remark to the detective about a woman, and that he then denied having said it. The record adds that he made a similar remark to a sergeant.
His lawyer before trial, Maria Chaisson of Destrehan, disputed all of this. She said there was no physical evidence against him and that he had not confessed. At trial he testified that he had told other inmates he was a murder suspect, not that he had committed the crimes.
Ellwood returned to Louisiana voluntarily on January 16, 1998, to answer an outstanding traffic warrant. He was already serving a four-month sentence in Jefferson Parish for speeding and contempt of court when, on March 3, 1998, Sheriff Champagne announced that he had been booked on two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Lewis and Mack. He was then 47. Bond was set at $1,050,000.
On March 23, 1998, the St. Charles Parish grand jury indicted him on the two murder counts. L'Observateur reported that the indictment also charged perjury, based on his grand jury testimony that he had been denied a lawyer during questioning by detectives; the later appeal record describes only the two murder counts. He pleaded not guilty on April 9, 1998. Assistant Attorney General Doug Freese prosecuted the case in the 29th Judicial District Court.
When the arrest was announced, Champagne said Ellwood was suspected in at least 25 murders, from Algiers, a district of New Orleans, to Tangipahoa Parish. None of those killings was charged.
Within months of the indictment the investigation itself came under challenge. On November 9, 1998, L'Observateur reported on a 36-page FBI compilation of statements from officers involved in the inquiry, which Judge Kirk Granier's court had released. The statements, which the newspaper presented as the officers' claims and not as established facts, alleged that Rushing had tampered with evidence, padded payroll and become personally involved with potential witnesses.
A Jefferson Parish detective, Philip Ramon III, told the FBI that Rushing had rushed to judgment, accepted information that was plainly wrong and left out information that pointed the other way in order to obtain an indictment against Ellwood. One example involved a former live-in companion of Ellwood, who had told investigators that he had a tattoo and that he had killed another woman. The woman she named was later found alive in a jail, and Ellwood had no such tattoo. Ramon also said that evidence from the Lewis and Mack cases could not be located and that he believed it had been destroyed. Rushing planned to ask Judge Granier to quash the indictment. Ellwood's lawyer said the report confirmed his claim that he had been set up.
The state conducted its own review of the evidence. On February 24, 1999, L'Observateur reported that the Mack charge would be dropped. Freese said new evidence, which came from Ellwood's own family members and not from the defense, showed that Ellwood had been in Ohio closing a bank account with his brother at the time that was relevant to Mack's case. Jefferson Parish investigators uncovered the alibi while reviewing evidence after the claims about Rushing. Freese said the alibi was valid.
The state entered a nolle prosequi on the Mack count on March 2, 1999, and amended the Lewis count to allege the January 31 to February 9, 1993 window. Ellwood was arraigned again and pleaded not guilty.
Freese told the newspaper that if the Mack charge had stayed in the case a jury might have cleared Ellwood of the Lewis killing as well, and that he still believed the evidence pointed to him. Ellwood's lawyer, Maria Chaisson, said the state had no evidence worth anything in the Lewis case and did not know when she died, and she expected the case to collapse. Chaisson also won a change of venue because of pretrial publicity, and the trial was moved from St. Charles Parish to Lafayette.
The trial began on June 8, 1999, and lasted three days. The Fifth Circuit's opinion lists the state's evidence in five groups.
Three women testified that they had seen Ellwood with Lewis. Four fellow inmates testified that Ellwood had described killing women, in some cases with details that matched this case. Four other women described earlier encounters with him; none of them had gone to the police at the time. An expert witness gave an estimate of the time of death. Ellwood testified that he was in New Orleans from January 31 to February 9, 1993.
Each witness with a criminal record testified to it, and each said the state had given them nothing in return, so the jury knew the grounds on which the defense attacked their credibility. Ellwood denied knowing Lewis or the women who named him and denied confessing.
The jury was unanimous. It found him guilty of second-degree murder as charged. On August 17, 1999, he was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor, without benefit of parole, probation or suspension of sentence.
Ellwood's appeal raised one point: that the evidence was insufficient. He argued that the case rested on unreliable circumstantial evidence and that nothing physical linked him to Lewis. On February 28, 2001, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal of Louisiana (Judges Sol Gothard, Susan Chehardy and Walter Rothschild, with Gothard writing) affirmed the conviction.
The court applied the standard from Jackson v. Virginia and Louisiana's rule on circumstantial evidence. It held that his repeated admissions, the sightings of him with Lewis, his own admission that he had been in the area, and the similarity between this case and his earlier conduct were enough to exclude a reasonable theory of innocence. It said it would not reweigh the credibility of witnesses, which was a matter for the jury.
The court found one error in the record. At sentencing the trial judge had told Ellwood he had three years to seek post-conviction relief; an amendment effective August 15, 1999 had cut that to two years. The case was remanded for the trial court to give him written notice of the two-year period and to file proof within ten days. Apart from that instruction, the court affirmed.
Ellwood is the one person convicted as a result of the task force's work. The death of Delores Mack and those of the other women the task force examined have no conviction attached to them. The dismissal of the Mack count rested on an alibi that the state accepted. The statements attributed to him by fellow inmates in Florida, about killings there, led to no charge in Florida. The number of 25 or 26 deaths comes from officials describing the scope of an investigation in 1998 and 1999; it is not a count of killings attributed to him, and no court has found him responsible for any death beyond that of Cheryl Lewis.
The record also leaves open how the FBI's compilation of officers' statements was resolved. L'Observateur reported on November 9, 1998 that Rushing planned to move to quash the indictment; how that was decided is not on record, and the claims about her conduct remain the claims of the officers who made them.
August 1991: earliest of the deaths reviewed by the task force, as reported in 1998.
January 31 to February 9, 1993: the period in the amended indictment for the death of Cheryl Lewis.
1994 (about a year later): off-duty deputies come upon Ellwood in his parked taxi near Hahnville.
May 1995: multi-agency task force formed.
1996: most recent death reviewed by the task force, as reported in 1998.
July 1997: task force members interview Ellwood in Sebring, Florida, over three days.
August 1997: arrested in Florida on an unrelated charge; 85 days in jail.
November 1997: interviewed in Canton, Ohio.
January 16, 1998: returns to Louisiana on a traffic warrant.
March 3, 1998: booked on two counts of second-degree murder; bond $1,050,000.
March 23, 1998: indicted by the St. Charles Parish grand jury.
April 9, 1998: pleads not guilty.
November 9, 1998: report of the FBI compilation of officers' statements is made public.
February 24, 1999: state announces it will drop the Mack count.
March 2, 1999: nolle prosequi on the Mack count; Lewis count amended.
June 8, 1999: trial begins in Lafayette; three days; unanimous guilty verdict.
August 17, 1999: sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor without parole, probation or suspension of sentence.
February 28, 2001: Louisiana Fifth Circuit affirms and remands for written notice of the post-conviction filing period.