Holden black widow escapes Angola electric chair
Margaret Jean Davis admitted to shooting her common-law husband on August 9, 1961, inside their home one mile south of Holden. Robert Ellis Harrison’s homicide marked the third time Margaret Jean became widowed after a suspicious and violent death.
Florida mob witness killed in Louisiana bayou
On January 23, 1968, a 22-year-old cocktail server led police to a remote area near the north shore of Bayou Sauvage. Twenty-one miles east of New Orleans, at the city limits where Chef Menteur Highway, U. S. Highway 90, splits with Ridgeway Boulevard, the waitress pointed across a lagoon to an area only accessible by boat, where investigators could see a partially submerged car.
Loranger murders in same location, decades apart
At dusk, near a Loranger community called Mixon’s Corner, Sunday, August 27, 1950, a two-man search party found a log truck abandoned. Minutes later, the searchers found the driver’s body in the woods fifteen yards from his vehicle. Twenty-three years earlier, the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office discovered another body in the same wooded area and arrested a log truck driver for the murder—the same truck driver killed there in 1950.
Orleans Trial of the Century frustrates historians
The murder trial became an unprecedented media sensation. The news media breathlessly reported the most incidental details of events inside the courtroom. Satellite trucks lined the perimeter of the courthouse, and television stations hired special correspondents to cover the case. When the Defense rested, everyone involved in the trial celebrated celebrity status, especially the assembled “dream team” of lawyers and forensics experts, the best money could buy.