Three murder victims torched 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 worked the evening shift at WFPR when my phone rang. “My old buddy, HL,” local musician Ronnie Barnes said on the other end. “Me and the boys 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 to breakfast, but I had two hours to kill between my shift ending and the time Ronnie’s band, “Backbone,” stopped playing. To pass the time, I stopped by Natalbany’s Blue Fountain Lounge to catch the end of the band’s set.

As Ronnie’s brother, Timmy, recited the George Jones monologue from “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” I spotted someone I knew sitting in a dark corner. Several years older, Leland Sykes had managed the Holden Rockets basketball team when I was a freshman in high school. I couldn’t think of a more clean-cut, straight-laced kid from school, yet he sat with a group of known drug dealers. When the set ended, I told Ronnie, “I know that guy. Went to school with him.”

“Then you know a Narc,” Ronnie shot back.

“Okay,” I said, “I did hear he became one of Odom Graves’ deputies after school.”

Handing me a vinyl 45 of his single, “Chicken Pickin’,” Ronnie said, “I hear he works for Livingston during the week. Weekends, he’s an undercover agent for Tangipahoa, Baton Rouge, and others. St. Tammany and Ascension, I think.”

That explained quite a bit. As I write this, Leland Sykes is the executive director of the Louisiana Narcotics Officers Association and, at the National Narcotics Association, he serves as South Central Regional director, governing Louisiana, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas.

Thursday, January 25, 1979, newspapers reported that Leland Sykes, an “off-duty” Livingston Parish sheriff’s deputy, drove from Gonzales to his home in Holden. He crossed the Amite River bridge in Port Vincent shortly before 4 a.m. “Several miles away,” Sheriff Odom Graves told a State Times reporter, “He saw the glow of a fire over the treetops and went to investigate.”

“After initially having difficulty locating the source of the blaze,” Sykes told the Denham Springs News, he found the camp on Guitreau Lane engulfed in flames.

“There wasn’t a soul around,” he said, so he drove back to the bridge, found a phone at a nearby business, and reported the fire to the sheriff’s office and Fire Protection District 4.

The fire district dispatched two pumpers to the scene, and the French Settlement Volunteer Fire Department joined them with their equipment.

After extinguishing the fire, the firefighters, assisted by Sykes, found one victim’s skeletal remains in a bedroom inside the three-room cabin. Later that morning, detectives found a second badly burned body in another small bedroom.

That morning, sheriff’s office investigators and Port Vincent police officer Don Jahnke tentatively identified the victims. However, the coroner did not make positive identification until that afternoon because of the severity of the victims’ burns.

At a news conference, Sheriff Odom Graves identified the victims as Dale Mark Michael, 27, and Bernard Ambrose Sheets, also 27. Both men were estranged from wives and children in Gonzales. Both had criminal records for burglary and marijuana distribution and sales.

Guitreau Lane parallels the Amite River, a waterway lined with rental units in 1979, mostly camps and trailers on stilts. The burned cabin, a wood-frame shack covered with tin sheets, bordered Grey’s Creek, a river inlet. Flames leveled the structure, disintegrating both house and garage, destroying the motorcycle and pickup truck inside.

Although the Louisiana State Fire Marshal joined the sheriff’s office in their investigation, the team made no arrests associated with the arson or the murders. However, off the record, one sheriff’s deputy told me investigators connected the deaths to a similar murder, less than one month earlier, just ten miles away.

Between 4 and 5 on a Sunday morning, an unidentified “passing motorist” discovered a woman’s body burning in a ditch next to Louisiana Highway 42. Sheriff Odom Graves told the Baton Rouge Advocate that the young, unidentified woman burned to death after someone doused her body with a “flammable liquid” and set her body on fire.

At the scene, deputies found flames still leaping three to four feet into the air and put out the blaze with a fire extinguisher.

The sheriff told reporters that specialists at Doctor’s Memorial Hospital performed the autopsy. The examination ruled out suicide but could not determine the type of accelerant used to burn the body.

Burned too severely to determine ethnicity, the body belonged to a woman in her 2os. Five-foot-ten, she weighed between 200 and 250 pounds. Sheriff Graves said investigators found empty fuel containers at the scene. He suggested the slayer or slayers killed the woman elsewhere before dumping the body near the crossroads, Louisiana Highway 42 and Frost Road, also called Louisiana Highway 63.

Since deputies found the woman nude, investigators assumed her clothes had disintegrated. Deep red burns and blisters covered 100% of her body.

For over a year, investigators attempted to identify the victim, contacting authorities in surrounding parishes. They found no missing person reports filed with law enforcement agencies. Today, over four decades later, police still have no break in the case.

Where there is smoke, there is fire.

Looking back, I think of Deputy Leland Syke’s 4 a.m. road trip to Gonzales, and I wonder if he could have been the motorist who made the other 4 a.m. discovery the month before. I also wonder if there was a link between these similar crimes.

Perhaps someone murdered Bernard Sheets and Dale Michael in retaliation for the killing of the unidentified woman? I hope this report will prompt concerned citizens to step forward and tell us why the young lady died, or, at least, what her parents named her.