41-year-old pot box murder still unsolved

In late February 1982, the post office returned a box to a cosmetics company in Thousand Oaks, California. Opening the box, company representatives found more than makeup. Someone had repurposed the parcel, filling it with bricks of high-grade marijuana.

Investigators sought to interview the South Louisiana cosmetics consultant who originally received the package but could not. One week earlier, someone killed the event host driving home from her last sales party.

Anglers found Catherine Ann Corbello Martin, 20, floating face down on Black Bayou, south of Lake Charles, in Calcasieu Parish just after eight in the morning, February 18, 1982. Someone had tied her hands behind her back, stabbed her seventeen times in the chest, strangled her, and dislodged her right eye from its socket.

Just before midnight, February 17, the Beauregard Parish Sheriff’s Office received a call about a loud truck, a two-tone dark red GMC or Chevy, on Louisiana 101, a gravel road. Responding, a sheriff’s deputy found Catherine’s car blocking the roadway near the Jefferson Davis Parish line, not far from her home in Iowa, Louisiana.

Investigators noted a dent on the driver’s door, not in the side of the door, but on the edge, meaning the door had been open when hit by a blunt instrument. Catherine’s car keys were in the ignition in the off position, and the car was in park. Someone had lowered the driver’s side window three inches.

Catherine’s purse sat open on the passenger seat, but nothing appeared missing.

Since his office found the victim’s vehicle in his parish, Beauregard Parish Sheriff Ledel “Blackie” Forestier — amid a re-election campaign — insisted on investigating the case personally.

Catherine’s body, being recovered in Calcasieu Parish, meant another sheriff’s office had jurisdiction over the case. However, this detail did not detour Sheriff Blackie.

Gillette, famous for razors, had just become a significant contributor to Sheriff Blackie’s re-election campaign, and Gillette owned JAFRA, the cosmetics company that employed Catherine Ann Martin.

Concerned a drug dealer might be compromising JAFRA’s distribution methods, Gillette also contracted Mike J. Powell, an Intercept private investigator retired from the Los Angeles Police Department, to consult with Sheriff Blackie on the case.

Later, hunters found a bloody flathead screwdriver, a duckbill hammer, and the victim’s JAFRA cosmetic bag near Rabbit Island under the Interstate 210 Bridge. Sheriff Blackie sent photographs of the two murder weapons to Mike Powell.

Discovering paint fragments, the blue color of Catherine Martin’s car, embedded in the hammer’s oak handle, Mike Powell theorized Catherine’s attacker used the hammer to subdue her at the car, dislodging her eye after first missing and striking the car door. Based on arterial spray found near the body, the investigators believed the death blows, seventeen stabs from the screwdriver, occurred after Catherine’s attackers moved the body.

Catherine’s husband, Eddy, told Mike Powell his wife was known for her exceptional beauty. As a result, men stared at her anywhere she went. Eddy said his wife called him at nine the night she died, saying she was leaving the party and headed home.

Eddy also told Mike Powell of two men in a loud truck who recently repaired the couple’s mobile home after a storm. These guys, in their 20s, gave Eddy an eerie feeling, he said, when he caught them smoking pot and gawking at Catherine hanging clothes on the line. Then, he remembered they parked their loud truck near the trash pile where Catherine routinely burned boxes.

A duckbill hammer, Mike Powell knew, was a tool unique to truck drivers and service workers. So he relayed the news to Sheriff Blackie, who shared the information with his colleagues at the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office.

And the police officers there laughed at him.

Two days earlier, Calcasieu Parish detectives Donny Fittz and John Fryar III had returned from Florida with a signed confession. Serial killer Ottis Elwood Toole claimed to be the monster who killed Catherine Ann Martin.

Detective Fittz told the Associated Press that while he and Chief Detective Fryar questioned Toole in a Florida jail, “over 100 detectives lined up in the hall waiting to see him about murders.”

When Ottis Toole died in prison in 1996, this “serial killer” was better known as a serial liar. The court convicted him of arson and two counts of murder. However, he erroneously confessed to killing hundreds more and entertained investigators with wild stories of growing up in a satanic cult.

Today, authorities agree Ottis Toole, a man with an IQ of 75, falsified most of his confessions to gain favorable prison treatment.

He did not kill Catherine Martin, but because of his claim, neither Calcasieu nor Beauregard Parish followed up on the leads provided by Mike Powell and Sheriff Blackie. As a result, all case evidence, including the crime scene photographs and murder weapons, is now lost.

Sheriff Blackie lived much of his life in Jennings, Louisiana. He identified as Cajun and spoke both French and English. Blackie grew up on a rice farm, training horses. He served two terms as sheriff and retired as Chief Investigator of the Jefferson Davis District Attorney’s Office.

However, Blackie Forestier was best known as an accordion player. With his band, Blackie and The Cajun Aces, he toured the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia before his induction into the Cajun French Music Association Hall of Fame, the Belizaire’s Restaurant Hall of Fame, and Louisiana’s Cajun Music Hall of Fame, shortly before his death in 2000.

The murder of Catherine Ann Martin remains unsolved.

For insight into how Mike J. Powell and Sheriff Blackie built their case, I highly recommend Mike J. Powell’s new book, Escaping the Kill Zone. Chapter 21 is entitled, Murder in the Black Bayou.