Justice catches up with Goodyear Killer
Last week, we recounted the multiple crimes of the Goodyear Killer, 23-year-old Charles Ray Spears of Greensburg, and the many times he escaped justice. After a defense attorney used police collaboration to build a case for coercion, the New Orleans District Attorney dropped all charges in the murder of Ernest Smith. In Slidell, Judge Wallace Edwards sentenced David E. Lewis to die following the robbery of the Champagne Jewelry Store, the near-death of store clerk Betty Hodge Graves, and the execution of Sergeant Earl Alfred, the first black officer to serve with the Slidell police department.
Goodyear Killer’s rampage remembered
Before newspapers across the state labeled him the Goodyear Killer, 23-year-old Charles Ray Spears escaped from the Jackson Barracks work-release center run by the Louisiana Department of Corrections, where he served time for petty theft. Eleven days later, he landed in Hammond, where he handcuffed two employees of the Goodyear Tire Center back-to-back and shot them in the head.
DNA identifies victim in Slidell cold case
This week, several readers contacted me asking if authorities had identified Slidell’s Lady in the Lake. Unfortunately, the answer is no. However, a similar cold case is now one step closer to being resolved due to DNA.
Police suspected teens died in snuff film
On June 13th, 1967, two St. Tammany Parish fishermen found Patricia Ann Purcell and Joyce Ellen Galloway’s bodies. Someone had savagely beaten the 17-year-old girls to death, leaving them nude, floating in the East Pearl River near the Louisiana-Mississippi border. After interrogating 56 men related to the case, only one suspect remained, a 34-year-old truck driver and men’s magazine photographer named William Carroll Vincent, Jr.