Florida mob witness killed in Louisiana bayou
On January 23, 1968, a 22-year-old cocktail server led police to a remote area near the north shore of Bayou Sauvage. Twenty-one miles east of New Orleans, at the city limits where Chef Menteur Highway, U. S. Highway 90, splits with Ridgeway Boulevard, the waitress pointed across a lagoon to an area only accessible by boat, where investigators could see a partially submerged car.
Traversing the bayou onboard a National Guard watercraft called “The Duck,” police found a human skull and torso in the vehicle’s backseat and a man’s wallet with one-hundred and seventy-five dollars. They found the victim’s remaining bones scattered along the shore behind the car’s rear bumper.
Three days later, a grand jury indicted the waitress, Donna Jean Craighead, and Edward James Hall, Jr., a 19-year-old heavy equipment operator, charging both with murder. The jury also indicted Donna Craighead’s younger brother, James Buford Craighead, alleging the 25-year-old was an accessory after the fact.
Details of the closed grand jury hearing are unknown. Journalists learned only that the jury watched “televised interviews” with Donna Craighead and Eddie Hall and that the jury heard testimony from James Craighead’s wife, Lois, and John Clements, a hostile witness who lived with Donna Craighead.
Moments before the grand jury met, Orleans Parish Coroner Nicholas Chetta told reporters his office had identified the skeletal remains as those of Harold Wayne Galt, a 54-year-old accountant from Orlando, Florida. Dr. Chetta said deformities in the bones matched x-rays in Galt’s medical records from Florida. The skeleton also had intact false teeth and a pin in the hip, matching those of the missing accountant.
The coroner said his office believed someone stabbed Galt to death in the backseat of his car.
Harold Galt worked for Blue Goose Growers for ten years before vanishing from his Orlando apartment four months earlier. Before working for the citrus importers, Galt managed the Durham Young Hospital in Leesburg, Florida. In 1951 and 1952, he served as Leesburg’s city clerk.
Thursday morning, September 23, 1967, Galt’s son-in-law, Dayne Piercefield of Tampa, called the Orlando Police Department and reported Galt missing. Interviewing the owner of Anthony’s Bar on Silver Star Road in Orlando, detectives learned that two weeks earlier, a bleach-blond named either “Donna Casque” or “Donna Gasque” quit her job there. She told her boss that a customer named Harry had offered her a ride back home to Louisiana.
Police also told Piercefield that his father-in-law, divorced and living in Orlando, had gone on a spending spree. They had traced Galt’s credit card expenses in every state, from Florida to Louisiana. The last charge, they said, he made in New Orleans.
In New Orleans, Piercefield told NOPD the Orlando police were wrong. Galt, he said, was “tight with his money” and had fractured a hip in October. He could not drive. He could walk, Piercefield added, but only with a “four-legged walker.”
At an apartment rented by Galt in the Howard Vernon complex at 600 West Colonial Drive in New Orleans, the manager told Piercefield that Galt rented the apartment a year earlier but only stayed there occasionally. He said Donna Casque was the stage name for a dancer named Donna Craighead. Craighead, he said, also lived in the complex but in another apartment with her boyfriend.
The manager last saw Galt and Casque the same day, September 22.
After Piercefield related this information to NOPD, one officer recognized the name, Donna Craighead. In July, undercover officers in Josie’s Lounge on Rampart Street booked her with “crimes against nature” after she and another girl offered to meet them at a motel for a two-hundred-dollar “sex show.”
One year earlier, she applied for a beer permit as proprietor of “The Embassy Lounge” on Chef Menteur Highway. However, the Louisiana Alcohol Beverage Control board declined her application after discovering she danced at the club but did not own it.
After speaking with Piercefield, detectives found Donna Craighead working at the Mardi Gras Lounge on Bourbon Street, where she agreed to take them to Galt’s remains.
At trial on June 26, 1969, Craighead and Hall pleaded guilty. District Court Judge Edward Haggerty, Jr. sentenced them without learning their motives or why the disabled Florida accountant kept an apartment in New Orleans. As a result, Eddie Hall lived the rest of his days in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The judge sentenced Donna Craighead to serve twenty years at the St. Gabriel Women’s Prison.
The day police arrested Donna Craighead, The Tampa Times newspaper ran the story of the arrest on the front page, along with her photograph. Above her photo, the headline of another story read: “Crime committee formed to rid the state of mafia.”
The story read: “In Miami Tuesday, State Senator Robert Shevin announced the formation of a legislative crime committee willing to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ and rid Florida of the Mafia.”
“Sweeping statewide subpoena powers, Shevin said, will permit the nine-member bipartisan committee to zero in on criminal elements that in the past found sanctuary by crossing city and county lines.”
“The Miami Democrat promised the committee would run a hard-hitting, no-nonsense probe, putting under a microscope the books, records, and witnesses necessary to spotlight all organized crime operations.”
“Shevin said the Mafia and organized crime are the announced target of the probe. However, his committee also planned to investigate corrupt officials. Neutralizing local law enforcement, he explained, is central to organized crime operations. He said it only takes a small minority in key positions to allow the rackets to flourish.”
Senator Shevin told the newspaper his committee would have statewide subpoena power. He said they had prepared a list and that no one on the list would escape testifying before the committee. However, one man on his list would not see a subpoena—an Orlando accountant named Harold Wayne Galt.