What really happened to Selonia Reed?
Monday afternoon, January 30, 2023, in courtroom number one inside the Tangipahoa Parish Courthouse in Amite City, Judge William Dykes of the 21st District Court sentenced Reginald Lathan Reed, 60, to life in prison without the possibility of parole or probation.
Six minutes earlier, Judge Dykes denied a motion for a mistrial from Defense Council Vanessa Williams. She claimed a juror disobeyed the judge’s orders and tried to learn more about the trial from the internet. However, echoing Prosecutor Taylor Anthony’s objection, Judge Dykes said there was nothing to learn on the internet since “no media was present in the courtroom” during the trial.
I sat in the second row with Selonia’s family, grinning.
The defense attorney’s karmic chickens had come home to roost.
At the start of Reed’s murder trial on November 15, 2023, court records show “Vanessa Williams made an oral motion for the sequestration of witnesses.” Judge Dykes granted the motion but excluded all victims and family members.
Before that day, I had sat with Selonia’s sisters anytime they attended court. This motion barred me from attending the trial. The Defense subpoenaed me as a witness but never called me to testify.
Three days later, a jury found Reginald Reed guilty of second-degree murder, and in January, Vanessa Williams filed a motion for appeal with the First Circuit Court.
You may wonder why Reginald Reed wanted me out of the courtroom.
Outside of the time the 26-year-old teller cashed a check for me at Citizen’s National Bank, I hardly knew Selonia Ophelia Smith Reed.
Reginald Reed likely first read my name in 1997.
That year, The Hammond Vindicator, The Ponchatoula Times, and The Amite News-Digest newspapers ran a guest editorial I wrote entitled, “Whatever happened to Selonia Reed?” On the tenth anniversary of the crime, the article recounted the publicly known facts regarding what I described as “a Manson-style murder.”
The editorial prompted WFPR News Director Mary Pirosko to invite me onto her radio show, Hammond America. I recited the article and discussed the crime on the air as the host took calls from angry citizens. Listeners, surprised the Hammond Police Department never charged anyone with her murder, again made Selonia Reed the talk of the town.
Four months later, the man who killed Selonia announced his candidacy for mayor of Hammond. Reginald Reed told The Advocate newspaper in January 1998, “It is time Hammond had a black Republican mayor, and that mayor is me.”
On a rainy Sunday morning, August 23, 1987, a Hammond police officer found Selonia’s blue 1986 Chevrolet Sprint parked near John’s Curb Market, a convenience store on East Thomas Street, three blocks from the police station and within walking distance of Selonia’s home at 1314 Apple Street.
Inside the car, police found Selonia’s partially-clothed body slumped in the passenger seat, the handle of an umbrella visible between her legs.
Before or after sexually assaulting her with the device, court records suggest, her husband beat her face profusely. Her assailant also stabbed her in the chest and neck with an instrument the caliber of a Phillips screwdriver.
Before exiting the car, evidence suggests Reginald Reed drew or wrote something in his wife’s blood with a white substance. Coroner Dr. Vincent Cefalu said whatever it was, it did not melt in the August heat.
Selonia died, the coroner said, from three stab wounds in the right middle lobe of her lungs and one in the right atrium of her heart.
In court, Reginald Reed told police he was playing video games with their 6-year-old son the night of the murder and fell asleep on the couch. Selonia, he said, had gone to meet a co-worker at a bar. Investigators questioned Reed on the day of the murder. They also interviewed the co-worker who knew nothing about meeting Selonia at a bar.
Police questioned nearly 100 people that week, including Jimmy Ray Barnes, a handyman one witness saw with Reginald Reed the night of the murder.
Both men were in the carwash next to the convenience store, where police found Selonia’s body the following morning. The witness wrote down the license plate number of the SUV the men drove—Reginald’s mother’s car. Hammond Police Detective Vincent Giannoble testified in court that the witness also selected both men from a lineup of Polaroid photographs.
Hammond police arrested no one, and the case grew cold.
In 2011, Barry Ward, a Louisiana State Police investigator, sought permission to examine the evidence, hoping DNA advances might bring an arrest. Inside Selonia’s car, police had collected: a child’s toy, an umbrella, a purse, a wallet, a comb, some makeup, photographs, credit cards, and a cigarette butt.
A forensics test found saliva on the cigarette matched the DNA of Jimmy Ray Barnes. Unfortunately, Barnes fled the state shortly after the murder, and Sergeant Ward did not have the resources to locate him.
One year later, I returned to Louisiana after living for ten years in California.
I began writing Bayou Justice in 2017, asking again, “Whatever happened to Selonia Reed?”
In October 2018, Hammond Police Chief James Stewart told me how recently retired investigators had closed the case on their way out. The closure or “disposition” code translated to “cleared by exceptional means.” This code means investigators identified the perpetrators but, for one of various reasons, could not prosecute.
I quoted the chief and recounted an interview with Dr. John Boulahanis, a law professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. Dr. Boulahanis co-authored a study entitled, Homicides Exceptionally Cleared and Cleared by Arrest.
“Here’s how it works,” Boulahanis explained. “Most large police departments have something called Felony Review. Before investigators make an arrest, they call the prosecutor’s office and provide a summary of the evidence they have. The prosecutor decides whether there’s enough evidence to arrest. And sometimes the prosecutor says no. We need more.”
“If law enforcement disagrees. They think they have enough evidence and have exhausted all of their means. In that case, they can then file paperwork under this barred-to-prosecution option that allows them to clear the case by exception. Once they clear a case, they don’t return to it.”
Three months later, on the day Hammond Mayor Pete Panepinto dismissed Chief Stewart, the Hammond Police Department Assistant Chief, Thomas Corkern, emailed me. He wanted me to know that the Selonia Reed case was active again. This time, he said, the District Attorney’s Office, the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office, and the Louisiana State Police would jointly conduct the investigation.
One year later, District Attorney Scott M. Perrilloux spoke to Lil Mirando of The Daily Star. “I was able to assign [the case] to someone who went back and reviewed all of the prior investigative materials,” he said. “And we felt like it was now a prosecutable case.”
Taylor Anthony joined Scott Perrilloux’s team one month before Chief Stewart told me the case was “closed by exception.” The sharp Assistant District Attorney is a Tangipahoa Parish native. However, he made a name for himself, trying drug dealers and cop killers in Orleans Parish. In 2017, Anthony earned praise from the FBI after successfully prosecuting a child pornography case.
According to Assistant District Attorney Anthony, he and Barry Ward went back through the evidence collected by Hammond police detectives. Then, they worked the murder like a new case and convinced the DA to fund a trip to Alabama to locate Barnes.
Jimmy Ray Barnes, 61, testified in Reginald Reed’s trial. Barnes received a five-year sentence, and the 21st Judicial Court released him in January 2023 for time served.
The Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office indicted Reginald Reed in Hammond on June 21, 2019, for second-degree murder. Judge Dykes sentenced him to mandatory life without parole four years later. Assistant District Attorney Taylor Anthony prosecuted the case, along with Assistant District Attorney Angel Monistere.
As for motive, Reginald Reed took out five life insurance policies on his wife, covertly through two life insurance companies. Court records show three of those policies were issued days before Selonia Reed’s murder. Including an accidental death benefit rider, the payout of all policies totaled $707,682.