“And they said, essentially, ‘Welcome to Jennings. Later that day, speaking with some former police officers, Brown recounted his experience. Could this really be chalked up to police incompetence? Brown was shocked – after all, this was the murder of someone intimately connected to other homicide victims. What the evidence started pointing to was not a serial killer evading capture.īrown drove to the crime scene – Deshotel had been shot to death in his home – and found it in chaos: Not only had the police not secured the scene or created a perimeter, but people were wandering in and out of the house, sometimes taking items with them. “I met him around sunset one evening and I woke up the next morning to the news that he’d been murdered a few hours earlier.” “He was either in a wheelchair or on crutches, and he made an impression just because he had been shot and he was kind of a mess,” Brown tells Rolling Stone. Deshotel was a street player in town who had dated two of the Jeff Davis 8 victims. Halfway through the trip, he met a drug dealer named David Deshotel, who had recently earned the nickname “Bowlegs” after a gunshot wound to the leg left him with a limp. If Jennings seemed like any other rural Louisiana town at first glance, it only took a few days for Brown’s suspicions to grow deeper. He Fraudulently Got Three Tom Brady Super Bowl Rings. And, as Brown writes, “all eight of the victims snitched for local law enforcement about the Jennings drug trade.”

They were all living in poverty and had criminal records filled with drug use and petty crime, often supporting their respective habits with sex work.

All of them were from South Jennings, the poor side of town, and knew each other. Though the victims’ causes of death varied – several had or appeared to have asphyxiated, two women had their throats slashed – the women of the Jeff Davis 8 had plenty in common. It sounds like the plot of True Detective, but when the details are laid out all at once, as they are in Ethan Brown’s mesmerizing new book Murder in the Bayou, it starts to make the hit HBO show seem downright restrained – and the bayou look a lot like the rest of the country. For years, the police department has implied that a serial killer was in the parish’s midst, but it’s been over a decade since the killings began, and the cases remain unsolved. Between 20, eight women from the town of Jennings, Louisiana, in Jefferson Davis Parish, were murdered, their bodies dumped in crawfish ponds and canals in the area. The Lizzie Borden House where her parents were found murdered is now a popular tourist attraction and was featured on an episode of 'Supernatural.The details of the Jeff Davis 8 murders are so incredible – and so quintessentially bayou – that if they were fiction they’d seem a little heavy-handed. But the townsfolk of Fall River never stopped believing that she was guilty and ostracized her for the rest of her life. Police could find no evidence of who committed the crime, but arrested their daughter Lizzy and charged her with murder.īecause the evidence against her was purely circumstantial, she was acquitted after the jury deliberated for less than an hour. On August 4, 1892, Andrew Jackson Borden and his second wife, Abby, were bludgeoned to death with an ax, New England Today reports. That might not be how the original rhyme goes, but it is more accurate since Lizzie was acquitted of her parents' murder in 1893. Lizzie Borden allegedly took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks, when she saw what she had done she allegedly gave her father 41. The Borden home in Fall River, Massachusetts.ĭonna Hageman/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

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