Did Covington hitman kill New Orleans hairstylist?
On August 11, 1980, Roy L. Cooper, 51, brother of Covington Mayor Ernest Cooper, shot and killed his daughter’s former boyfriend, Charles Olan Thrash, 52, a career criminal and reputed Dixie Mafia hitman.
When Thrash died, investigators lost their prime suspect in two notable murder cases. In May 1983, Mobile, Alabama District Attorney Chris Galanos closed the 1973 unsolved murder of newspaper editor Arch McKay, telling associates he felt convinced the late hitman killed him. “We don’t know who hired him killed or why,” he told reporters that same week, “But we’re certain we ...
Store clerk’s murderer walks among us
Called to the scene, St. Tammany Search and Rescue officers found the body two hundred yards downstream at 10:52 Wednesday morning. They found the body stuck on a log, partly nude, with only a sweater bunched around her throat.
Odd links in multiple St. Tammany Parish murders
Clarence Chappell Jr. of Folsom lost two parents to homicides, 10 years apart. Questions are still unanswered in both tragedies.
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.