Murdered children bring nightmares, hopefully
This job leaves me wondering how some people sleep at night.
Last April, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office charged a Louisiana woman with first-degree murder and obstruction of justice for allegedly killing her boyfriend’s 6-year-old daughter and burying the remains in a bucket in her mother’s front yard, authorities said.
Investigators accused Hannah Landon, 43, of murdering little Bella Fontenelle and burying her remains in a 5-gallon chlorine bucket in the front yard of the girl’s biological mother’s home, according to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Less than an hour after Bella’s father reported her missing, investigators found the girl’s remains outside the house on Sedgefield Drive in Harahan, 11 miles west of downtown New Orleans, on April 27, 2023, Sheriff Joseph Lopinto told reporters that week. The mother’s home was less than two blocks from where Landon lived with Bella’s father, the sheriff’s office said.
According to the coroner’s office, Bella had multiple blunt-force trauma injuries to her head. They were unable to determine whether she had been beaten with a hand or some other object, but believe someone strangled the young girl to death.
At least someone is awaiting trial in this horrendous case. I know of a child’s murder that was equally horrendous where investigators found no one to charge, and the case today is over five decades old.
Sunday, June 30, 1974, Bryan Keith Garrison, son of Beatrice Garrison of 638 Eighth Street in Franklin, was found bleeding in the thick weeds of a vacant lot near his home. The boy was three years old.
The St. Mary and Franklin Banner reported that neighborhood children found Brian’s crumpled and bleeding body at about 7 p.m., barely alive. Despite the efforts of Acadian Ambulance to save his life, he was dead on arrival at the Franklin Foundation Hospital.
St. Mary Parish coroner G. P. Musso said someone stabbed the boy sixteen times into his neck, face, and chest. However, the coroner said he could not confirm if the wounds were the only cause of death.
A $1200 reward offered by community leaders seeking information leading to the arrest of the murderer sat unclaimed for eighteen months while police and concerned citizens continued the search for possible leads.
Police arrested one man, but an assistant district attorney set him free after a grand jury reviewed the evidence against the man and ruled his arrest a non-true bill.
Reporter Walter Johnson said investigators found a blood-covered oyster knife fifty feet from the little boy’s body, beginning an investigation they worked for months around the clock,
“There was a tremendous lack of cooperation among the neighbors,” one investigator told Johnson. “We’d question them for maybe up to five hours before they would offer any semblance of an account. Unofficial sources indicated the murderer lived in the neighborhood, but no one would talk.”
In 1975, “Operation Assist,” the community group that collected the reward, returned the money to donors when the police felt forced to give up on the case.
O’Neil Chube, spokesperson for Operation Assist, told The Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, “We have reluctantly decided to refund the reward money to those who helped us finance the project.”
He said his group members even went into the neighborhood to talk to residents who might not trust the police to protect them, trying fruitlessly to gather information. Eighteen months later, he said, “Like the police, we exhausted every possible lead.”
In the case of 6-year-old Bella Fontenelle, security cameras captured someone resembling Hanna Landon hauling a ten-gallon bucket in a child’s wagon through the subdivision where police found Bella’s body.
Investigators did not have that luxury in 1974.
What possible motive could the killer for murdering a toddler have beyond being pure evil? And being pure evil, they likely killed again. Or perhaps they had killed others before 1974? Maybe that is why the neighbors felt afraid to talk.
Someone in Franklin, Louisiana, stabbed a three-year-old sixteen times and tossed his body into a briar patch. Not only could they sleep at night, but so could the frightened neighbors who knew the killer’s identity.
They knew, and if they are still among the living, they know. They have slept with this knowledge for fifty years. Personally, I hope it’s been fifty years of nightmares for them.