Steel Magnolias murder featured in new book
Hollywood filmed the movie Steel Magnolias, in Natchitoches, Louisiana in 1989. The comedy-drama starred Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Olympia Dukakis, and Julia Roberts, and focused on a group of ladies in a small southern town coping with the death of one of their own. Within a year of the film crew leaving town, someone confessed to murdering a little girl in the house where they filmed the movie.
The owner of the house confessed to raping and strangling her when she arrived at his door, selling candy for school. The police never found her body, and today, officially, 11-year-old Averie Evans remains a missing person.
Although I have never reviewed the grisly crime in this newspaper column, I feature an exhaustive look at Averie’s disappearance and alleged murder prominently in my new book, More Bayou Justice: South Louisiana Cold Case Files, released to book stores this week from Bogart Books.
Here is an excerpt from the new book:
At 7:28 on a Tuesday afternoon, November 6, 1990, Joann Evans called the Natchitoches Police Department to report her 11-year-old daughter missing from their eastside neighborhood.
With tears in their eyes, several times in the week following Averie Evans’ disappearance, Richard and Joann Evans spoke to reporters from the living room of the family’s small one-story house on Shady Lane.
Rick Evans had been in a Monroe hospital when Joann called about Averie’s disappearance. “Who would ever think something like this would happen?” he asked. “Our searches have turned up nothing,” Rick said, “All we can do now is sit by the phone and wait.”
“But we’re her parents. We’re not giving up,” Joann added, her voice firm, despite the tears. “I don’t care how long it takes. We will find her,” she said.
Averie, Joann said, stood 5-feet-tall and weighed 101 pounds. She had brown, shoulder-length hair. Her mom last saw her riding away on her 20-inch white, pink, and purple Murray bicycle with beads on the back spokes.
Joann said there was nothing unusual about the afternoon Averie disappeared. Averie came home from school and wanted to sell her candy. She played violin for the string orchestra at Natchitoches Junior High and was very enthusiastic about the group, her mother said.
Joann said Averie did not sell any candy the weekend before because their family had gone fishing.
Averie promised her mother that she would not be late. “We had somewhere to go later,” Joann said. “She was always very prompt, reliable, so I didn’t see any harm.”
Rick said they never worried about their daughters going into the neighborhood alone. “She had been in the neighborhood selling those candy bars off and on for three or four weeks,” he said. “I wish I knew what happened.”
Joann expected Averie home before five that Tuesday afternoon, and a neighbor, Truey Flenniken, said she should have made it. Averie left her house at the corner of Fifth and Stephen Street at 4:30, and the bicycle ride to her house should have taken less than four minutes.
“We have lived here for 11 years, and I don’t remember anything like this happening,” Truey told Greg Kendrick of The Shreveport Times.
Truey bought three candy bars that afternoon while Averie visited with her daughter, Sonya.
“At 4:30, Averie got up from watching TV and told Sonya that she had to go,” Truey remembered.
As she walked to the door, Averie said she had two more candy bars left to sell, and she knew where to sell them “real quick” on her way home.
Neither Truey nor Sonya ever saw Averie again.
Truey said Averie and Sonya attended school together and were very close. “If she were in trouble or planning to run away, she would have told our little girl,” Sonya’s mother said.
“Averie is bright and ambitious; not the kind of girl to run away,” Rick Evans agreed. “We read her diary after she disappeared. Our daughter was looking forward to the coming days.”
Joann, Truey, and Sonya told police that Averie left both homes wearing a lightweight black sweater and blue jean vest over black jean slacks.
The disappearance of this small community’s 7th-grade honors student stunned the small Louisiana town, but the city and people of Natchitoches rallied to assist. Hundreds of volunteers distributed posters to tourists, while others posted them in business windows and on light poles throughout the town.
Others remained home behind locked doors, praying.
Like my first volume, the new book features updates to a long list of cases featured in the Bayou Justice column, primarily unsolved murders, missing persons, and other mysteries from south Louisiana.
The book revisits the ritualistic murder of Blanche Montz, who may have practiced voodoo near Bayou Manchac. From that same area, several chapters delve into the disappearance of Audrey Moate and the shotgun murder of her lover, Thomas Hotard, and the book also recounts Bayou Manchac’s oldest mystery, the unsolved murders of a group of fishermen over 80 years ago.
Elsewhere in Tangipahoa Parish, the new book revisits the Breland Murders, the Catfish Hostage incident, the Night Watchmen murders, and the stories of Typhoid Tessa and the Devil Swamp Cult, along with the murders of Father Hunter Horgan and the Notorious K. J. Griffin.
The new book also shares the latest news of the murders of Nanette Krentel, David Bell, Huey Courtney, Corey Kitts, Mike Erdey, and a host of mysteriously murdered women, including Donna Kimmey, Rachel Davidson, Charlotte Sauerwin, Debbie Lindsey, Angela Bond, Melinda Schubert, Pam Kinamore, Donna Arceneaux, Kimberley Womack, and Janessa Hartley.
For the historians, the new book recounts gunfights at Albany bars and the civil rights march from Bogalusa to Baton Rouge, and the upheaval as the group walked through Livingston Parish and Klan Country. It follows Cajun Chef and Humorist Justin Wilson as he tracks the killer of a legendary Zydeco musician, and recounts the death of accused serial killer Frankie Richard. The Strangler, serial killer Peter Rigwood is also chronicled in the volume.
The book also remembers lost heroes, several fallen law enforcement officers who died protecting and serving South Louisiana.
More Bayou Justice: South Louisiana Cold Case Files can be ordered today wherever books are sold and will soon be on store shelves throughout south Louisiana.