If you hear I committed suicide, I didn’t
Retired safety manager John Barnett was to answer questions Saturday as part of a deposition related to a legal dispute with his former employer, Boeing, related to safety concerns he had raised. He never made it to court.
His legal team asked his hotel to check in on him. Hotel Security found John Barnett dead inside his truck in the parking lot.
The week before his death, Barnette told friends and family, “If you hear I committed suicide, I didn’t.”
Hearing this got me thinking of the numerous “suicides” in local history that may or may not be self-inflicted. This story ends with two such deaths.
In 1987, a Hammond woman and a man living in Pennsylvania testified before a seven-woman, five-person jury in Amite. While the jury, the press, and Ad Hoc Judge Cleveland Marcel listened intensively, Barbara Rogers Dickerson Hebert and Jesse Lord collectively recounted the following events:
According to both testimonies, on April 24, 1981, Barbara’s former lover dropped by her mobile home in Hammond. Lord said the couple sat reminiscing about old times and wishing they had money. The conversation, he said, soon turned to consider potential targets they might find to rob.
Barbara, according to Lord, suggested they phone Walter Tally, Jr., whom she described as a traveling drug dealer making his rounds from the Bogalusa area. When her friend agreed, Barbara called Tally and invited him over, telling him they were interested in buying some marijuana.
Inside the mobile home, Lord said, Tally opened a briefcase containing $10,000 in cash along with a $20,000 cache of cocaine. Lord said he had gotten the story from Barbara’s former lover and that he could have been mistaken about the value of the briefcase contents. It may have been $20,000 in cash and only $10,000 in cocaine, he said.
Viewing the contents of the briefcase, according to both witnesses, Barbara’s former lover pulled a .38 caliber handgun from his pocket and taped Tally’s mouth and limbs with duct tape before forcing him from the mobile home and into his car.
With Barbara in the passenger seat and Tally lying across the backseat, according to both testimonies, they drove from Hammond until they came to an overpass near Bayou Manchac. There, both said, on the road beneath the Interstate 55 twin-span bridge, Barbara’s former lover pulled Tally from the backseat and drug him near the back bumper of the car.
The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Charles Genco, added, “[Tally’s] attempts to plead for his life were muffled by the tape pulled over his mouth.”
Barbara testified that while Tally and her former lover stood outside the car, she heard a single gunshot. Moments later, her former lover returned to the vehicle without Tally and drove them back to Hammond.
Lord testified that Barbara’s former lover considered killing her and leaving her body on that dark road along with Tally’s. However, something Barbara said caused him to change his mind.
The coroner’s report said Tally died from a close-range shot to the back of his head.
Four police officers also testified in court that day, describing how law enforcement had discovered Tally’s burned car in nearby Livingston Parish and how the murder weapon—the .38 caliber handgun—was never found.
The 21st Judicial District Court granted Barbara Rogers Dickerson Hebert immunity from prosecution before the trial began. She was also on probation for a drug conviction.
The biggest question in the case related to identifying Barbara’s former lover. The prosecution (and Barbara, their star witness) identified the killer as Johnny Dickerson, Barbara’s ex-husband. The defense team—and at least four witnesses—contended that instead of Dickerson, a federal inmate named Brian Foret actually accompanied Barbara that night.
In his closing arguments, Baton Rouge defense attorney Mike Walsh said Barbara Hebert testified falsely against Dickerson out of jealousy and revenge related to his relationships since their divorce. He recounted witness testimony saying Barbara had said she lied to police and that Foret robbed and shot Tally.
Willie Johnson, chief criminal deputy for the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office, said investigators had not heard about Foret’s potential involvement in the case before the trial opened.
Brian Foret’s father testified that his son died of cancer in 1983 and that, at the time of Tally’s murder, his son could barely walk.
Asked about witness Jesse Lord’s testimony regarding Dickerson’s confession to him and Lord’s life sentence for kidnapping, Charles Genco said, “Like relatives, you can’t pick your witnesses in a murder investigation. You’ve got to take the people who know the information.”
On June 3, 1987, a jury of 12 voted 11-1, finding Johnny Dickerson guilty of second-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, and armed robbery. The mandatory sentence for both second-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping is life without parole.
Genco praised investigators from the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office and DA investigator Murphy Richardson for locating witnesses vital to the investigation.
“Tally should not have been involved in narcotics,” Genco said. “But he was a human being who had a heart and walked and talked just like us. He had a right to live. It was hard-fought, but I am glad the jury accepted our case.”
This story has a sad footnote: the suicides I mentioned at the start of this column.
Two years before the Tally murder, Independence Police Department investigators found Johnny Dickerson’s older brother, David Dickerson, 35, along with David Dickerson’s 20-year-old wife, Tina Leto Dickerson, both dead from gunshot wounds to the chest. Investigators discovered no note but officially recorded both deaths as self-inflicted.