Baton Rouge Madam’s death: suicide or murder?
In 1995, long before we knew the name Jeffrey Epstein, the trial, imprisonment, escape, and suicide of a woman newspapers called “The Baton Rouge Madam” made national news.
Investigators arrested Jeffrey Epstein on July 6th, 2019, charging him with the sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York. He died in his jail cell on August 10th, 2019. The medical examiner ruled his death a suicide by hanging. Epstein’s lawyers disputed the ruling, noting cameras monitoring his jail cell conveniently malfunctioned the night Epstein died. As a result, public skepticism has fueled numerous conspiracy theories in the case, most stemming from Epstein’s elite clientele—celebrities, politicians, and billionaires—who frequented Epstein’s private island brothel community.
According to the Associated Press, in 1996, federal investigators said “Baton Rouge Madam” Sylvia Landry’s little black book read like a “Who’s Who of Baton Rouge” elite. They would not divulge any names to the AP beyond that of a Baton Rouge television anchor arrested that same year. However, rumors circulated that Sylvia Landry’s clients included two senators and a governor.
Sylvia Landry, 39, joined Louisiana’s rich and infamous in April 1994 when city police busted her for running a $436,000-a-year call-girl operation disguised as escort and house cleaning services.
In July 1995, she pleaded no contest in state court to five counts of pandering and three counts of enticing women into prostitution, and a federal judge sentenced her to six years in prison for ten counts of interstate prostitution charges.
Court testimony and exhibits revealed that Sylvia Landry did not have a little black book. Instead, she had 11 books of telephone messages containing client names and appointment times, documenting over 1,900 dates for the women employed by her three escort services from 1992 through 1994.
After her trial, those books and other evidence from Landry’s trial became available for public inspection at the U.S. District Court Clerk’s Office. However, people wanting to inspect Landry’s records did not have free rein. Federal District Court Clerk Richard Martin required the public to review the documents in the presence of one of his staff members.
“No one will be able to look at them without one of my people standing over them,” Martin told the Associated Press. The concern, he said, was that someone might remove some of the information.
“There’s no way of knowing whether a page is missing,” Martin said, “But it appears that [the books] may interest somebody.”
One person interested in the evidence was Tom Walsh, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Landry on state prostitution charges.
Landry had pleaded innocent to an indictment that charged her with enticing eight women into prostitution.
Walsh said he expected to use some phone message books and other evidence from the federal trial in his state case. Walsh said any clients listed in the phone message books and who purchased sex from Landry’s business would have something to worry about when the state brought her to trial.
In Louisiana, he said, it is illegal to buy sex from a prostitute. The crime is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison, a fine of up to $500, or both, he told reporters in 1995.
“If they’ve engaged in criminal conduct, yes, they have something to worry about from me,” he said.
In contrast, federal prosecutors expected to levy no additional charges against Landry, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Reese Davis. Federal law does not prohibit hiring or soliciting prostitutes within state lines, Davis said.
In the federal trial, investigators charged Landry with sending or transporting women to Mississippi for purposes of prostitution on ten occasions.
Five former prostitutes testified against Landry, and at least two of them testified about specific instances of selling sex in Baton Rouge. However, state prosecutors charged no clients with any crime related to the Landry case.
Walsh explained, “We try to be very responsible when prosecuting individuals for criminal conduct. I think the public would want us to be responsible in that area. That’s not to say that no one will be charged in this case. We just take it one step at a time,” Walsh said.
Notes on the phone messages alone do not prove who bought sex, he said. “In the old days, the madams would put the names of luminaries in their books to scare off people from prosecuting them,” Walsh added, declining to comment on whether Landry placed any names of well-known individuals in her message books to gain protection.
However, an examination of the books by The Advocate turned up the names of no well-known people. Most appointments [occurred] at motels, and Landry identified clients with codes and occasionally first names.
One man, whose name appeared repeatedly in the phone messages, paid $200 for a five-minute date in July 1993, one message revealed. Another man paid $2,700 for 11 dates with various women in one month beginning in October 1993, messages for that period showed.
Other public documents included business cards, credit card slips and other items from Landry’s three businesses, including a certificate showing that her largest company, the Dial-A-Date Escort Service, was a Baton Rouge Area Convention & Visitors Bureau member.
On August 4th, Sylvia Landry, after reportedly flirting with guards during their lunch break, walked out the front door of a federal minimum security prison housing 670 female inmates ninety miles northwest of Houston near Bryan, Texas.
One day later, blood hounds located Landry five miles from the prison in the nearby woods covered with scratches and insect bites.
The following Sunday morning, August 6th, Landry’s jailers found her corpse hanging from a torn bedsheet attached to an iron cage covering a smoke detector.