Fortune in voodoo gold still missing 136 years later

This column is part one of another chapter from the history of Bloody Tangipahoa. Like something from a movie, circumstances revealed in this two-part report suggest members of a Tangipahoa Parish sheriff’s posse succumbed to a curse after relieving a voodoo doctor of a fortune in gold.

Wednesday, April 23, 1886, a nanny named Lydia Ploughman told sheriff’s deputies that just before dawn, three hooded men with shotguns robbed her employer’s Bayou De Sair plantation and set the home ablaze. She awoke and smothered the fire, she said, as the robbers climbed back over a fence at the rear of the house.

Later that morning, the homeowner, Mrs. Joseph Brecher, a widow of two years, and her son, Nick, returned home from an overnight trip and discovered 16,300 dollars in gold coins, over half a million-dollar value today, missing.

The Times-Picayune reported:

“The money was in a tin bank box, and the bank box was in an oak trunk which stood in front of a single bedstead that occupied an entire side of the room. John Henry Green, a farmhand left in charge of the house, slept in an adjoining room. In a smaller space in the rear slept Lydia Ploughman, the children’s nanny. At the other end of the house slept Mrs. Brecher’s daughter, Olivia.”

“The thieves entered the house without breaking bolts or doors or opening windows. Reaching the room where the trunk was, they drew it out from the corner and tried to open it but could not. The iron bands encircling the trunk and locks proved too staunch for their crude tools.”

“Concerned the noise would awaken occupants of the home, the thieves turned the trunk upside down and attacked the bottom with a railroad spike or bolt. The thin bottom yielded readily, and the thieves escaped with the treasure, but not before drenching the room with coal oil and applying a match to burn the place down.”

“When Mrs. Brecher discovered her loss, she sent her eldest son back posthaste to New Orleans for the police. Although the crime occurred in the parish of St. John the Baptist, Captain Leonard Malone sympathized with the people and assigned New Orleans Detectives Joseph Pecora, Dick Kerwin, and Thomas Littleton to investigate the affair.”

After inspecting the crime scene, the detectives arrested the nanny and the farmhand, delivering them to the Amite City jail. They remained locked up for seven days before Judge Robert Reid ordered their release. The detectives had no solid evidence against them.

Out of jail, John Henry Green, a tall, stout 23-year-old, returned to work in his assigned section of the plantation, working as if the arrest had never happened.

Neither the New Orleans Police nor the St. John Parish Sheriff’s Office made any progress in finding the missing gold until July 17, 1886. That day, NOPD arrested William Stevens, Daniel Burke, Ben Davis, and John Campbell. Each had possessed or tried to exchange some of the two-and-a-half-dollar gold pieces stolen in the De Sair robbery. Under interrogation, each man arrested confessed to having traded goods or services for the gold pieces, and each had bartered with John Henry Green.

Detectives Pecora and Littleton rushed back to De Sair, but Green and his wife, Constant Thomas, had packed and gone.

Months of bulletins circulated to law enforcement nationwide paid off on Wednesday, August 4, 1886, when Edwin Shaver, the police chief in Salisbury, North Carolina, telegraphed NOPD. Chief Shaver had Green in custody and asked to extract the two-thousand-dollar reward from the booty once he found the gold.

Detective Kerwin caught the next train to Salisbury, carrying a signed warrant in hand, charging Green with burglary and grand larceny.

In Salisbury, police found five dollars on Green, who claimed his wife had another four hundred in treasury bonds, but neither party, he insisted, had any gold.

Visiting Constant Thomas, Kerwin did what police interrogators do best; he lied. He told Mrs. Green her husband had sent him to retrieve the gold and promised to release the prisoner once she turned over the loot.

After much debate, Constant produced a wooden box holding 1,921 dollars, some in treasury bonds, but most in two-and-a-half-dollar gold pieces.

On August 14, 1886, The Times-Picayune reported:

“Back in New Orleans, Green, in a written confession, said he had nothing to do with planning the robbery. Lydia Ploughman, he said, left in charge of Mrs. Brecher’s children, had opened the door for her husband, and he committed the theft. Then, by train, Alex Ploughman shipped the gold to New Orleans, and Green blackmailed him for part of the spoils.”

On August 13, Detective Pecora arrested Alexander Ploughman at De Sair Station and jailed him in New Orleans.

On September 4, 1886, Le Meschacébé (French for The Mississippi), a Creole newspaper written in the local Kouri-Vini dialect and published in nearby Lucy, Louisiana, summarized the total amount of gold recovered:

“Out of the 16,300 dollars in gold stolen, police recovered 1,921 dollars in Salisbury and collected another forty dollars from Ben Davis. In addition, they dug up 872 dollars in gold coins from John Campbell’s Garden and found a roustabout named Fred Robertson with another one-hundred dollars in gold pieces. These amounts total approximately one-sixth of the gold stolen from De Sair last April.”

In time, John Henry Green altered his confession, admitting to helping Alexander Ploughman steal the gold. However, he insisted that the gold did not belong to Mrs. Joseph Brecher. Her late husband, Green said, had kept the money for Doctor Solomon Hastings, a voodoo healer. They returned the gold to “Doc Soul” in New Orleans, he said, to keep Mrs. Brecher and her children alive.