St. Helena Strangler escapes justice

Monday morning, November 12, 1979, two hunters discovered the body of a teenage boy at a garbage dump in Darlington, east of Greensburg. The circumstances of his death matched at least two others in the area, leading the St. Helena Parish Sheriff’s Office to suspect they had a serial killer walking among them.

That afternoon, a spokesperson for the sheriff told reporters how the killer tied the neck, hands, and feet of the unidentified youth with a nylon cord. The boy, he said, was white. He estimated the victim’s age between 14 and 15 years old.

The representative said the hunters found the body mid-morning at the Second Ward Dump on a parish road a mile south of Darlington Baptist Church. They found the body in plain sight, thirty feet from the road. The spokesperson said it appeared someone drove into the dump and threw the body from the left side of a vehicle. He said deputies at the crime scene believed the killer had strangled the victim, but this would need to be confirmed by the parish coroner, Dr. L. E. Stringer. The state police crime laboratory, he said, would assist Stringer.

Another teenager recalled the day vividly. “My parents were close friends with a family from Greensburg, and we often spent time there with our parents. My dad’s closest friend, Jack Foster, worked for the Department of Highways and as a volunteer deputy with the St. Helena Parish Sheriff’s Office under Sheriff Duncan Bridges. Mr. Jack enjoyed law enforcement work and spent more time on that than with his paid employment. I recall him doing some local narcotics work and other similar stuff. Sometimes, he needed a photographer and would call my dad.”

“One weekend during deer season of ‘79 outside Mr. Jack’s house, my brother and I poked around the yard while my parents spoke with Mr. Jack and his wife, Miss Marie. Dad called us inside and Mr. Jack said, ‘Boys, I want ya’ll to look at what hunters just found in the woods. I’m wondering if you boys know this kid,’ and he handed us two color 8 x 10 photos.”

“There was a kid about my age, lying on his side on the lightly pine-straw-covered ground. He had a stark white complexion with long, fine, and straight blond hair that rose upward from the top of his head, like someone combed it up and hair-sprayed it stiff. He wore jeans, oversized shoes, and a black T-shirt with the phrase ‘Sex is Better than Weed if You Have the Right Pusher’ across the back and ‘Sworn to Fun, Loyal to None’ on the front.”

“He was all tied up in some extremely weird configuration, multiple rows of 3/8 inch white cord across his body. I also remember layers of the longish hair streaming from the back of his head tucked evenly between successive rows of rope winding around his neck.”

Sunday, March 26, 1978, a group of fishermen found the body of 17-year-old Raymond Mark Richardson in the woods near East Cunningham Road, north of Pass Christian, Mississippi. Someone had tied the victim’s arms and legs in unusual rows of knots. In Biloxi, his parents told reporters Mark had been working in New Orleans at the Coney Island hot dog stand.

Harrison County Coroner Edgar Little, Jr. said the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office in New Orleans aided him in determining Richardson’s death was a homicide. “They helped,” he said, “because of the advanced decomposition of the body.” The coroner initially believed Richardson died of a drug overdose.

Friday morning, February 3, 1978, two hunters found the strangled body of 22-year-old Dennis Turcotte 100 feet off Louisiana 435 near Talisheek, 14 miles from Covington and 20 miles from his home in Slidell. St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Deputy Al Crump told reporters a New Orleans bellhop was the last known person to see Turcotte alive.

St. Tammany Sheriff George A. Broom told reporters the hunters found Turcotte clothed in T-shirt and trousers, but no shoes. His assailant had tied his hands and feet and wrapped the rope around his neck so that any movement caused the rope to tighten. The sheriff said Turcotte had been dead less than 24 hours and had died of strangulation.

The bodies of Richardson and Turcotte had been easily identifiable using the wallets in their pockets. However, the St. Helena victim had no identification. Investigators did not identify him until 2008, when Louisiana State Police Lieutenant Dennis Stewart matched the victim’s fingerprint with an arrest record at the Baytown Police Department in Texas. Daniel Dewey, 17, grew up in California but lived with his parents in Texas when he vanished in 1979.

Since outdoorsmen found the bodies of Mark Richardson and Dennis Turcotte near their homes, but found Dewey in another state, investigators suspect the killer may have lived near Greensburg or was a member of a hunting camp in St. Helena Parish.

“There could have been other local cases,” Sheriff Broom told reporters, “Or the killer could have been a traveler. Resident or copycat, we may never know.”

In 1978, someone strangled three teenage girls in Morgan City, Louisiana. The killer of Mary Leah Roderman, 16; Bertha Gould, 14; and Judy Adams, 15; also escaped police identification.

And in the Chicago area during this same period, John Wayne Gacy attacked 33 young men between the ages of 14 and 22, strangling the majority. Gacy’s last victim, Robert Piest, age 15 in 1978, escaped but described his would-be killer’s approach. He dressed as a clown and asked, “Care to see a neat little rope trick?”