Bayou Justice: More Louisiana True Crime Stories: Bayou Justice, #3

By HL Arledge

Bayou Justice Book 3: More Louisiana True Crime Stories

More cold case murder mysteries and true crime histories with mafia hits, unsolved murders, crooked politics, missing persons, cult rituals, lost gold, and missing girls gone wild in the land of gators, gumbo, strippers, hurricanes, mardi gras, and voodoo.

 

More Bayou Justice from investigative journalist and broadcaster HL Arledge

Louisiana's foremost expert on true-crime, and a thirty-year veteran investigative journalist, HL Arledge revisits those tantalizing questions, meeting the state's most colorful characters along the way. This book revisits and updates the most infamous of those Louisiana true crime newspaper reports, offering convincing and controversial conclusions, and deconstructing evidence and widely held beliefs, revisiting each case with fascinating, surprising, and often haunting results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bogart Books
• Release date: Aug 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201482862

HL Arledge

HL Arledge is the author of Bayou Justice, a twice-weekly true crime newspaper column featuring exciting or notable crime-related stories often focusing on cold case files in South Louisiana; stories based on interviews with key players, among them: police investigators, lawyers, victims, and their families. HL Arledge is well established as a journalist, IT Professional, and story teller. Not only is he published in the periodicals and professional journals. HL works in Louisiana state government and lives with his beautiful wife in a farmhouse just north of New Orleans. HL Arledge also writes quirky crime fiction. Literary Agent Elizabeth Pomada said he should describe himself as Elmore Leonard with a southern accent. HL's short stories have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Twilight Zone, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

Book preview

Lady in the Lake

In May 2022, I started conversations between the St. Tammany Parish Coroner’s Office and the Buffalo New York Police Department, asking their labs to coordinate DNA testing. After 36 years, investigators may finally name the 20-something-year-old girl found tied naked to the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain.

An outdoorsman fly-fishing snagged the woman’s nude body on June 19, 1986, just east of the Interstate 10 twin spans, about fifty yards from the north shore of the lake. An autopsy revealed the woman, who had a plastic bag duct-taped over her head and a 22-pound weight tied to her neck, died of asphyxiation.

Two other findings from the autopsy surprised investigators. First, the victim had breast implants, and second, she was seven to 12 weeks pregnant. These facts bred hope they would find her quickly, but 36 years later, the identity of the Jane Doe investigators dubbed the Lady in the Lake remains a mystery.

Tuesday, July 15, 1986, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office released a painted illustration of the victim to local television stations and newspapers. The distributed image, a retouched morgue photograph, depicted a young, pretty woman with big eyes and a slightly upturned nose.

An accompanying news release described her as white, 20 years old or younger, 5-foot-7 inches tall, and weighing 100 to 120 pounds. The report said she had shoulder-length auburn hair and small, old scars on her right knee, right wrist, and upper abdomen. A broad tan line on her left ring finger suggested she had worn a wedding ring for an extensive period.

The victim’s body bore no significant wounds, and her blood contained minimal amounts of caffeine and alcohol. The coroner believed she died less than 24 hours before the fisherman found her body.

In the two weeks between that day and her burial in the Potter’s Field area of Greenwood Cemetery in Slidell, sheriff’s detectives investigated over two hundred leads and inquiries, eventually finding them fruitless.

Unsuccessfully, they tried to identify the woman by tracing her breast implants. Markings on the implants revealed their size, two-hundred cubic centimeters, and the manufacturer’s name, Cox-Uphoff International of Costa Mesa, California, but no Louisiana surgeons admitted to using implants from this company.

Inspector Harvey Pratt of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation created the illustration distributed with the release. I spend most of my time repairing damage to facial features, he later explained to a television reporter.

Pratt said he taught himself to retouch photos by hand. He pioneered the process for law enforcement use in 1982, five years before the release of Adobe Photoshop. He used morgue photos, physical descriptions, and anthropological theory to brush out wounds, bloating, and discoloration, and he repainted the eyes and hair to give the subjects life.

Pratt had produced over fifty retouched photographs for law enforcement agencies before the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office contacted him. He said those photos had helped put names to thirty-five bodies. One family claimed a corpse the day after police released his illustration, but others took years.

Seventeen years after investigators distributed Pratt’s illustration of the Lady in the Lake, authorities still had not found the victim’s name or origin, but they still found hope. Working together, law enforcement and non-profit agencies established open-source and publicly accessible missing person databases online and nationwide.

On September 4, 2003, after learning of physical similarities between the Lady in the Lake and an Ohio teenager missing since May 1981, authorities exhumed the body from Potter’s Field. But an analysis of dental impressions conducted by Louisiana State University (LSU) forensic anthropologist Mary Manhein ruled out a match.

Manhein, a thrice published author, directed LSU’s Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services (FACES) lab, known for developing facial reconstructions. Called The Bone Lady for her ability to cull details about a person’s appearance and lifestyle from skeletal remains, Manhein took this opportunity to revise the original description of the Lady in the Lake.

The Lab Director described the victim’s height as between 5-foot-2 and 5-foot-4, three inches shorter than previously thought. The St. Tammany Parish coroner had estimated the woman to be in her late teens, but Mary Manhein told reporters she was in her mid-twenties.

Dr. Manhein’s examination found a previously undetected right hip fracture and plastic surgery on her nose.

She had beautiful, perfect teeth, Mary Manhein told reporters. This suggests she probably came from at least a middle-class family that could afford regular dental care.

The FACES lab extracted DNA from the woman’s bones and teeth and updated the online databases. But Mary Manhein believed the break in the case would come from the lab’s facial reconstruction.

She described how the lab made the model by placing tissue-depth markers on a cast of the woman’s skull and applying just enough clay to cover the tags. She said the result is much more exact and lifelike than the illustration from 1986.

Buried in the ground, there was no hope of her ever being identified, Mary Manhein told The Times-Picayune in 2003. And I firmly believe no one should go to their grave without a name.

When Mary Manhein retired in 2015, police still had not named the Lady in the Lake. Not one missing person in the national databases matched her description. But, unknown to investigators, that would change in 2019.

In 2022, a Nevada drought allowed authorities to find two murder victims at the bottom of Lake Mead in a national recreation area near Las Vegas. The resulting news stories prompted me to recall our Lady in the Lake and revisit those national databases.

In 2019, the Buffalo Police Department added to the missing person databases a young mother who vanished from Erie County in western New York between 1983 and 1985. Kathryn Grace Knox Zedick, a 21-year-old mother of two, weighed 120 pounds and stood 5-foot-2. She had auburn shoulder-length hair and perfect teeth.

If DNA specialists can prove Kathryn is the Lady in the Lake, we have solved a 36-year-old mystery, leaving three others untouched. How did the victim arrive in Louisiana? Who got her pregnant? And who smothered her with a plastic bag before dumping her in Lake Pontchartrain?

The Horse-eating Cat

In January 1868, the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper reported:

Edward Kinchen, a useful and respectable citizen of Livingston Parish, was murdered by parties unknown December 19 near his house alongside Bayou Barbary. He had been out hunting hogs when his horse returned home without him. Family members tracked the horse and discovered the body.

The Baton Rouge Tri-Weekly Gazette added:

Woodsman Milt Powers believes Ed Kinchen was killed by a seven-foot panther, one of the largest and most ferocious known in Louisiana. The beast has been depredating in the north part of Livingston Parish for seven months or more. Powers brought his dogs from Baton Rouge to take the beast’s scalp. Sadly, Powers believes his dogs may have forced the beast down to southern parts of the parish, causing Kinchen’s death. Before a citizen’s committee hired Powers, the panther destroyed six one-year-old colts, seizing them from their owners’ yards. Locals refer to the beast as Horse-eater.

However, within days, the New Orleans Weekly Republican vindicated Horse-eater in Kinchen’s death:

Contrary to earlier reports, a panther did not kill Ed Kinchen. Searchers found his body in the Killian wilderness, miles from Kinchen’s Springfield residence. They shot him through the body and head. The Picayune got it wrong again. The same correspondent also reported that someone shot Stephen Durden, a worthy and reliable negro, for giving a Democratic speech in Hammond, Mississippi. He described a rape at Tickfaw Station in Mississippi. Neither Hammond nor Tickfaw Station is in Mississippi. Both places remain in Livingston Parish, where they belong. If a correspondent cannot accurately record his writing location, how can we trust what he is writing about? Trust this report. Someone murdered Ed Kinchen.

The Baton Rouge Daily Advocate added:

A musket ball passed through Ed Kinchen’s chest, and buckshot shattered his skull. Near the dead man lay the carcass of a hog, and it is supposed that the slayers shot the unfortunate man after he detected predators rustling his stock.

On May 18, 1868, a Livingston Parish grand jury indicted Brandon Watkins and Peter Nelson for the murder of Ed Kinchen. Family members testified that the two men from New Orleans came to the Kinchen homestead looking for the owner hours before his death.

The grand jury agreed. Kinchen had been killed with a musket ball through his chest and buckshot to the face. Two different types of ammunition equated to two guns and likely two shooters.

The following October, a granted change of venue moved the trial to St. Helena Parish. In St. Helena, Peter Nelson told district attorney Bolivar Edwards that Brandon Watkins alone killed Kinchen and agreed to testify against Watkins in exchange for his freedom.

On November 12, Edwards entered a nolle prosequi for Peter Nelson, setting him free. Judge John Howell found Brandon Watkins guilty as charged.

On appeal, Defense attorney C. J. Bradley presented evidence that the jurors who indicted Watkins were not residents of the judicial district and filed a motion to quash the indictment. Judge Howell denied a Defense request for a continuation and overruled the motion to suppress.

Peter Nelson returned to New Orleans as a free man.

Brandon Watkins died in prison.

Over a century later, descendants of Edward Kinchen have never learned why two men from New Orleans rode horseback to Livingston Parish and killed a local rancher and hunter. Today, I do not have the answers. However, I have found clues while researching another question: Who was Peter Nelson?

On December 4, 1854, a deckhand deserted a ship called Colonel Cutts in New Orleans. Three months later, the deserter, claiming to be a former Swiss police constable, Peter Nelson, accepted a Night Watchmen position with the New Orleans Police Department.

He walked a beat on Girod Street for eight months in one of the city’s most dangerous areas. He took home a weekly salary of $12. At 8:30 July 6, 1855, a ruffian named William Corbitt attacked Officer Nelson near the Fulton and Levee Street dock. Corbitt sliced Nelson’s left cheek with a razor wrapped in burlap to form a crude knife handle.

Bedridden for a month, on August 1, Nelson petitioned the city to reimburse him for his missed paychecks. However, before the Board of Alderman rendered a decision, Colonel Cutts’ captain saw Nelson’s name in the newspaper and filed charges against him for desertion.

Four months later, a maritime court released Nelson from jail, and the New Orleans Police Department reinstated him.

On July 21, 1856, over a year after being injured on the job, the Board of Alderman reimbursed Peter Nelson $45 for the month he lay in bed. That day, he resigned, saying he had an offer of employment on the docks.

Peter Nelson appeared twice more in Louisiana newspapers. The first followed his arrest for the murder of Ed Kinchen. The second was his obituary, appearing in the New Orleans Item on December 2, 1881. Unfortunately, the Mortuary Notice did not describe the cause of death, but among his pallbearers was a wealthy Sicilian impresario named Joseph Macheca.

In Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, historian Michael Kurtz describes Macheca as the founder of the Innocents, a protection club of private watchmen established to protect Sicilian commercial interests.

Professor Kurtz recently retired from Southeastern Louisiana University. At odds with other historians, he insists no evidence proves Macheca’s organization was a black hand operation. Likewise, his article, Organized Crime in Louisiana History: Myth and Reality, refutes reports that the Innocents preceded what later became known as the New Orleans mafia.

As for Horse-eater, F. T. Cochran, a one-legged Civil War veteran from Colyell, trailed the panther six hours before his dogs treed the beast. By then, the predator had killed seven colts and innumerable calves, sheep, and hogs over 12 months. Unable to carry the 8-foot cat back to civilization, the hunter returned with a paw as proof of his kill. According to the Baton Rouge Daily Advocate, the foot measured 6-by-4 inches and weighed more than 1 pound.

Donna Kimmey Update

Sunday afternoon, I telephoned the residence of 79-year-old Richard Rigwood in Livingston, Montana, and a man answered.

I explained I was a news reporter and asked if he lived in New York in the 1960s and whether he had visited New Orleans in 1962.

What’s this about? he asked, and I answered him with another question. Do you remember a girl named Donna Kimmey? I asked.

Without further comment, he hung up the phone and did not answer later calls from my number.

Two weeks ago, Donna Kimmey’s family contacted me, specifically her cousin, Belinda Moore. Belinda said, Donna was my mom’s first cousin. Her mother and my grandfather were brother and sister. They grew up next door to each other.

She said the family knew less of the details than I had reported, but they appreciated how I kept the unsolved murder alive. My dad, Guy Summers, drove Donna’s dad, Jack Kimmey, to New Orleans to identify the body, she said.

We have grown up with this mystery hanging in the balance all of our lives, she recounted. We had just moved into a new house before the news came. The day we found out, my mom left something cooking. For years, our new house was smoke damaged, a constant reminder of the day we lost Donna.

At 10:00 a.m., December 17, 1962, a bellhop at the New Orleans Hilton Inn discovered the mostly nude body of airline flight attendant Donna Kimmey, strangled in her motel room. The coroner found no evidence of a sexual assault. However, police believed Kimmey’s killer stole $50 from her wallet.

On April 30, 1963, an Associated Press report from New York City announced:

Police say a former Seattle ranch hand admitted to strangling an East Side barmaid last Saturday morning and another young woman in New Orleans. The Jefferson Parish District Attorney indicted him there earlier this year.

NYPD arrested Richard Peter Rigwood, 20, inside a Times Square tavern, the report continued, adding, Police quoted him as admitting to both the New York and New Orleans slayings.

According to the news report, Rigwood told Police Inspector Raymond Maguire he was sorry about the killings and did not know what made him commit them. Rigwood told Maguire he strangled the women shortly after meeting them because they refused to have sex with him.

Attorneys Alfred Norick and Jack Rosenberg, Rigwood’s court-appointed counsel, ordered a psychiatric test, revealing that Rigwood suffered from emotional instability but was legally sane.

Norick carefully explained to the accused his rights regarding the trial and the probability of his receiving the death sentence if the prosecution suggested that he committed similar homicides in Louisiana.

On September 23, 1963, Rigwood pleaded guilty before Judge Charles Marks and Assistant District Attorney Alexander Herman.

From the transcript:

THE COURT: And is this plea being made voluntarily by you and of your own free will?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

THE COURT: And do you plead guilty to the facts that on or about April 26, 1963, in the County of New York, you did meet one Vincenza Marone, also known as Dolly, at a particular bar in the City of New York, and that you took her to her home in a taxicab? Do you plead guilty to those facts?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes, sir.

THE COURT: And do you also plead guilty to the facts that when you did get her to her home and her apartment, that this girl Dolly, or the deceased, Vincenza Marone, stated to you, Aren’t you going to put me to bed? and that you undressed her and put her to bed, and then you got undressed and got into bed with her? Do you plead guilty to those facts?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

THE COURT: Do you also admit that Vincenza Marone, at such time, was awake and was not unconscious?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes, sir.

THE COURT: And do you also admit that when you got into bed that you, as you stated, started making advances more or less to have intercourse with her and that she said, No, quiet down, and started fighting? Do you admit those facts?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes, sir.

THE COURT: Did you start to choke her, the deceased, Vincenza Marone, also known as Dolly?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes, sir.

THE COURT: And did she start to scream and say, Don’t. You have a family. You have a mother. How about your brothers and sisters? or words to that effect? And that you then hit her on the head with some statue? Do you plead guilty to those facts?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes, sir.

THE COURT: And did you then finish choking her?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes, sir.

THE COURT: And after that, did you go into the bathroom, take a bath and come out, see her at that time, and was she all bloody?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes, sir.

Judge Marks sentenced Rigwood to life in prison. In many appeals, Rigwood said the District Attorney told him pleading guilty would get him out in 12 years on good behavior and protect him from the electric chair.

A parole board released Rigwood in October of 1989. He married soon after and lived in Frewsburg, New York, until his wife’s death. He then moved to Livingston, Montana, and lived with his sister until her death.

In addition to Donna Kimmey’s murder, Richard Peter Rigwood never stood trial for the murder New Orleans indicted him for in 1963, the strangulation of 30-year-old Patricia A. Carlton.

A friend of Rigwood’s found her body in his apartment after Rigwood left for cigarettes and never returned. He told police that the blood trickling from the side of her face startled him.

Although someone murdered 22-year-old Donna Kimmey following a method of operation mirroring Dolly Marone’s murder, even down to the stolen $50, police never considered Rigwood a suspect in the flight attendant’s murder.

However, one week before Donna Kimmey died, New Orleans police found two more victims of strangulation.

Two blocks from what would later be the Patricia Carlton crime scene, someone strangled 22-year-old Catherine L. Linden in an apartment on Elysian Fields.

Next to her, police found the body of her 3-year-old son, Ricky. A bloodline had trickled from the right side of his mouth and dried.

Belinda Moore said of her murdered cousin, Thank you for keeping her memory alive. She was beautiful and did not deserve to die that way.

Burned in Port Vincent

In 1979, a deputy with the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office discovered two bodies smoldering in a fishing camp behind a Port Vincent bar. One month earlier, ten miles away, the same department found a woman’s body burning in a roadside ditch. All three murders remain unsolved today.

Three years later, on a Saturday night in 1982, I was working the evening shift at WFPR when my phone rang. My old buddy, HL, local musician Ronnie Barnes said on the other end. The boys and I got our new record today. Meet me for breakfast at the Pit Grill after tonight’s show. I’m buying. You gotta hear this song.

In those days, You gotta hear was local musician code for I’d like you to convince Music Director Richard Dees to put my song in rotation.

I agreed, but I had two hours to kill between my shift