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.
Teen murders unsolved 50 years later
On August 8, 1971, five years before the first Crime Stoppers organization formed, in a front-page story, The Times-Picayune newspaper offered a $2,000 reward for information regarding the murders of two teenage girls four years earlier. Today, over five decades later, the prize remains uncollected