Store clerk’s murderer walks among us

On Tuesday, January 8, 1991, the Associated Press reported police feared someone had kidnapped a Covington woman. The report said, “St. Tammany Parish deputies plan to search again today for a convenience store clerk kidnapped during a robbery. The night she vanished, Jerry C. Monus, 56, had been working the overnight shift at the Jr. Food Mart 60 miles north of New Orleans.”

Dorothy Walker, the store’s day manager, arrived at 5 that Monday morning to find Jerry Monus and the store safe and cash register missing. The night clerk had left her purse in the store, her pickup parked outside, and food cooking in an electric oven.

The following day, the news reports became grimmer.

United Press International reported, “Police found the body of a convenience store clerk kidnapped during a robbery in the Bogue Chitto River, Tuesday, according to a spokesperson for the St. Tammany Sheriff’s Office.” Deputies found Jerry’s body in nearby Washington Parish, near Enon, twenty miles northeast of Folsom, near the junction of Louisiana Highways 25 and 40.

The Associated Press revealed, “The Washington Parish Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday got a call from hunters who found a bloody bone on the southern bank of the river, said sheriff’s department official Larry Ciko. Washington Parish Deputies searching the nearby woods, found blue jeans and underwear identified as belonging to the missing woman.”

Called to the scene, St. Tammany Search and Rescue officers found the body two hundred yards downstream at 10:52 Wednesday morning. They found the body stuck on a log, partly nude, with only a sweater bunched around her throat.

Before tossing Jerry off a bridge, her slayer covered her mouth and eyes with gray duct tape. The monster used a small rope to tie her hands and ankles together behind her back, just before firing a shotgun into the back of her skull. The bone found by the hunters was a skull fragment.

An autopsy conducted by the St. Tammany Coroner the following weekend sought to determine the time of death and whether the monster raped Jerry before murdering her.

The Jr. Food Mart Corporation offered a 5,000 dollar reward the Monday Jerry disappeared. They raised it to 10,000 dollars after police found her body and to 15,000 the following year.

Detectives did not know if the robbers forced their way into the store or if Jerry opened the door and let them in. A rear door appeared broken, and police believed the store normally closed to restock every morning between 2 and 4. Police suspected the robbery occurred between those hours. Unfortunately, would-be store patrons saw a dozen pickup trucks and vans at the store during that period.

The thieves drug a 400-pound safe, containing 8,000 dollars, out the back door, leading investigators from both St. Tammany and Washington Parishes to initially believe three vigorous men stole the safe. Later, the FBI identified the tire tracks of a dolly used to move the iron box.

One week after Jerry’s disappearance, St. Tammany Parish Coroner Ted Brzustowicz said an autopsy showed a high-powered rifle, not a shotgun, created the wound in the back of Jerry’s head. He could not determine whether anyone had raped her.

Larry Ciko told a television crew, “We have some possible suspects from other cases, but we don’t know if Miss Monus knew her abductors or if they killed her because they thought she saw them or knew something. They may have been regular customers at the store. We just don’t know.”

He said authorities believed someone kidnapped Jerry, planning to force her to open the safe, and then killed her so she could not identify her abductors.

St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Patrick Canulette said the safe robbery was one of about twelve in the previous three weeks involving convenience stores in his parish. He said there had been about one hundred similar convenience store robberies during the same period in New Orleans, but the Folsom case was the first in South Louisiana involving kidnapping and murder.

“Whoever it was who did this,” Sheriff Canulette said, “Is a brutal, brutal group of individuals. This is a horrible crime. This is the most brutal and heinous murder I’ve seen in my eleven years as sheriff and my twenty years in law enforcement.”

Two weeks later, investigators hoping for a break in the case began intensive questioning of Jerry’s family members, focusing primarily on her husband.

St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s detectives and FBI agents questioned John Monus over multiple days. The sheriff told reporters that investigators questioned the husband, an employee of ITT-Hartford Insurance Company in New Orleans, “in hopes he can give us something that might suggest who is responsible for this horrible crime.”

But the sheriff declined to say if investigators considered John Monus a suspect.

“We are pursuing a lot of information. We have received a staggering number of telephone calls from people with potential leads. We are following them all, in hopes they lead somewhere,” Sheriff Canulette said.

“We are talking intensively to not just the husband, but other family members as well. The FBI is trying to develop a profile of potential suspects, and we are assisting all we can.”

Seven years later, Sheriff Canulette left office, replaced by Sheriff Jack Strain, who vowed during the election to make an arrest in the Jerry Monus case. In January 1998, his office charged Wayne Fussell, 42, of Franklinton with Jerry’s murder.

Fussell had gone to prison in 1992 for the rape of a woman in Amite. However, according to the grand jury that set him free, the sheriff’s office offered no evidence to suggest he killed Jerry Monus.

Two decades later, the murderer of Jerry Monus still walks free.