Governor’s mistress meets murder victim, vanishes

On May 27, 2022, Rebecca Pauline Gary, who family members say was the mistress of a Louisiana governor for fifteen years, may turn sixty-six. However, most believe someone murdered the 32-year-old college clerk the week she vanished, days before New Year’s Eve thirty-four years ago.

On a Sunday morning, December 18, 1988, “Becky” placed her 12-year-old daughter, Jamie, on a Greyhound bus in Baton Rouge, instructing her to remain seated until her grandmother took her off the bus in Shreveport.

Jamie never saw her mother again.

“It was like the ground opened up and swallowed her,” 45-year-old Jamie Williams told me this week. “She called my Aunt Joyce two days after Christmas, saying things weren’t working out in Baton Rouge and that she would be in Shreveport soon.”

“Weeks later, my aunt talked to the apartment manager in Baton Rouge. Mom had not paid rent and wasn’t answering her door,” Jamie said.

I contacted Jamie after speaking with Mary Manhein, the retired director of the Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services (FACES) Laboratory at Louisiana State University.

After discussing another case, Mary said, “I applaud what you are doing. I love that you are working on these cold cases. One I have always hoped to see resolved dealt with a young mother. Her name is Rebecca Gary. She went missing on December 27, 1988. It was the strangest of cases.”

The apartment manager at the Airline Highway complex where Becky Gary lived last saw her enter her apartment on Christmas Day, 1988. Three days later, a friend of Becky’s, a black female, begged the landlady to open Becky’s door, saying something was wrong. Becky was not answering her phone or her door.

Inside the apartment, the two women found a coffeepot burning next to a pair of empty cups on the counter. Becky was not in her apartment, but a partially packed suitcase sat on the bed next to five framed photographs that once adorned Becky’s walls.

The apartment manager unplugged the coffee pot and left, not returning until the second week of January, with Becky’s brother beside her. The landlord had called the emergency number on Becky’s rental agreement, and her brother in Biloxi answered.

Becky’s car still sat in the parking lot, and inside, the apartment appeared as before. However, the two found Becky’s driver’s license, purse, and car keys in her bedroom.

In addition to the clothing in the suitcase, other garments hung in the closet. They found a tub filled with water in the bathroom, and on the counter, torn into shreds, an autographed portrait of Louisiana governor Edwin W. Edwards.

“We moved a lot,” Jamie remembered, “But the year before we lived on Airline Highway, we lived near the capitol. That is when I met the governor. He liked to rent us a suite at this upscale resort hotel called The Inn on the Lake.”

In 1987, The Advocate newspaper said of the hotel, “The Inn on the Lake has seen four governors traverse its halls for official functions, and the list of legislators is too numerous to count. Much history and many decisions are discussed and debated informally over lunch or dinner at Chef Bailey’s Lakeside Restaurant inside this hotel.”

“When the governor wanted to spend time with Mom,” Jamie remembered, “He would send me to that fancy restaurant with his bodyguards. I could order anything on the menu, anything at all, free of charge.”

Becky and Jamie’s apartment complex “near the capitol” had a reputation in the 1980s as the facility where Louisiana legislators housed their mistresses. Someone murdered one such lady there in 1987. I asked Jamie if she remembered speaking to newspaper reporters about the murder the year before her mother disappeared.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “My mother’s friend, Sherri. That was terrible.”

The Advocate described Sherri Lynn Daigle “as an impressionable 18-year-old who loved butterflies.” The newspaper said Sherri’s neighbor, Rebecca Gary, described the victim as always having a smile on her face.

The report said, “Jamie Gary, a 10-year-old girl who lived in the building next to Daigle, developed an instant friendship with her.”

“She was always in a good mood,” Becky remembered. One week before her murder, she told reporters, Sherri put on a Halloween mask, slipped into Becky and Jamie’s side of the duplex, and “scared the hell out of us.”

“That night, we laughed so hard. She was really cutting up,” Becky told the paper. “Jamie just loved her.”

Sherri moved to Baton Rouge from a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, in January 1987 to live in a duplex “a friend” rented at 634 State Capitol Drive, next door to Becky and Jamie.

Sherri, learning she was four months pregnant, dreamed of a future with her lover, but it was not to be. Instead, two men, dumpster diving, found her body at 5:30 on a Thursday evening, May 7, 1987, stuffed head-first into a concrete septic tank, forty feet from a vacant house off Siegen Lane near Highland Road.

Coroner Hypolite Landry’s report said Sherri and her unborn child drowned in the tank after someone bludgeoned her skull with a hibachi grill.

Sheriff’s Office detectives questioned Becky and others before arresting 27-year-old George Bernard “Benny” Brown of 555 Spanish Town Road, booking him first as a fugitive from Travis County, Texas, for a parole violation. He failed to register in Baton Rouge as a felon and would not explain to police why he moved to Louisiana.

Detectives found fresh scratches on Brown’s body that matched fingernail scrapings collected during Sherri’s autopsy.

Brown’s murder trial began on March 14, 1988, the day Edwin Edwards vacated the governor’s mansion for the new governor, Buddy Roemer, and the day Becky Gary moved from her apartment on State Capitol Drive.

Two weeks later, a nine-woman, three-man jury convicted Brown of second-degree murder, and Judge Mike McDonald sentenced him to life in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

Becky put Jamie on a Greyhound one year later, but not before telling her of the large manilla envelope she carried everywhere. “If anything happens to me,” she told Jamie, “You’ll find the envelope taped under my mattress.”

Unfortunately, the envelope vanished with Becky. However, another packet of papers would later take its place, supplying crucial evidence in the case.

In June 2021, a 93-year-old Edwin Edwards placed himself under hospice care, and the East Baton Rouge Parish Sherriff’s Office released their files on Rebecca Gary’s disappearance.

Copies of those files arrived in Shreveport the day Edwin Edwards died.