The Bayou Strangler: Louisiana’s Most Gruesome Serial Killer
By Fred Rosen

The crimes:

Between 1997 and 2006 Ronald Joseph Dominique raped and murdered (mostly by strangulation) 23 men and boys in the bayou region of southern Louisiana. In order to avoid the death penalty he pled guilty to eight counts of murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

The book:

In his book American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950 – 2000, Peter Vronsky describes that time frame as a sort of demonic golden age of murderous predators, both in terms of their activity and their fame. Here’s how I summarized the point Vronsky makes in my review:

The numbers are remarkable. In the 1950s there were 72 reported serial killers in the U.S. In the 1960s, 217, in the ‘70s 605, in the ‘80s 768, and in the ‘90s 669. But then a trailing off, with 371 in the 2000s and 117 in the 2010s.

There’s more to the story than just these statistics. Anyone who reads much in this area will know that these same epidemic years (1970-2000) didn’t just produce a greater number of serial killers but all of the names that are still most recognized today: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), Richard Ramirez (the Night Strangler), Jeffrey Dahmer, and many others known almost exclusively by their nicknames: the Hillside Strangler, the BTK Killer, the Green River Killer et al. But since Dahmer, what killers have caught the public’s imagination and the media’s eye in the same way? Vronsky lists off eighteen of the more prominent, only to say “If you haven’t heard of them, you are not the only one. Some didn’t even have monikers.” I count myself among the ignorant, pulling a blank on all eighteen.

Have serial killers changed? Has the way we cover them changed? Or are we just not as interested as we used to be?

And as for after those eighteen post-Dahmer killers I pulled a blank on, here’s another list from Vronksy:

The few hundred “freshmen” serial killers (as opposed to “epidemic era” Golden Age carryovers) apprehended over the last twenty years are just as anonymous as those arrested in the 1990s following Jeffrey Dahmer. Who has heard of Terry A. Blair, Joseph E. Duncan III, Paul Durousseau, Walter E. Ellis, Ronald Dominique, Sean Vincent Gillis, Lorenzo Jerome Gilyard Jr., Mark Goudreau, William Devin Howell or Darren Deon Vann?

Did you catch the name of Ronald Dominique dropped right in the middle there? Because it’s this anonymity that Fred Rosen begins with as well. “You’d think,” he begins, that “the serial killer who killed more victims than any other serial killer in the United States during the past two decades . . . would have been enough to generate books, movies-of-the-week, films, TV-magazine broadcasts, and podcasts.” But that didn’t happen in the case of Dominique.

Why not? “The sexuality of the killer and his choice of victims got in the way.”

I’m not so sure about this. John Wayne Gacy makes Vronsky’s list of famous killers of the golden age, and of course Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the best-known serial killers in history. Both were gay. I think the thing about Dominique is he just wasn’t very interesting in any way. His crimes were merely brutal and callous, without anything about them to make them stand out. He wasn’t a cannibal or a killer clown but just a short, chubby loser without any friends who lived in a trailer hooked up to his sister’s power, drifting from one dead-end job to another (meter reader, pizza delivery guy, etc.) before finally being arrested in a flophouse. The fact that he was for a time a drag performer who liked to dress up as Patti LaBelle was about the only bit of colour in his drab existence. As Rosen’s references to films and movies-of-the-week suggest, Dominique had no star power. Even his crimes weren’t media sexy, with no signature elements, which left the police able to work in relative peace because the murders weren’t being played up. Indeed, they were barely covered at all.

Invisibility is a super power enjoyed by many serial killers. I don’t mean this in reference to Dominique’s mostly invisible victims, though that was in play here. A lot of serial killers prey on victims who are not immediately missed when they disappear. I think Rosen is probably right when he says that “Dead black men, gay or not, doesn’t sell on the news,” and that “If Dominique had only chosen different victims, whose lives were more valued by society, then the state might have acted earlier.” But that’s not what I mean by invisibility.

What I mean is that Dominique was himself someone who nobody cared about. When finally arrested few people believed him capable of killing so many people, and this was not a moral judgment. He was just so unprepossessing. This in turn allowed him to work quietly for nearly a decade without anyone seeming to notice. He didn’t seek notoriety by writing letters to the police or to newspapers, but at the same time he did little to conceal his tracks. Even his use of a condom when raping his victims was probably attributable to his fear of infection, as he was a pronounced hypochondriac, rather than a desire not to leave any DNA evidence.

In such cases I’m reminded of the scene in The Collector where the kidnapped Miranda says to her captor Freddie “Look, people must be searching for me. All of England must be searching for me. Sooner or later, they’re going to find me.” He coolly replies: “Never. Because, you see . . . they’re looking for you, alright, but nobody’s looking for me.” Like Dominique, he was invisible.

And so “the worst serial killer of the new millennium” is someone even true-crime buffs may know nothing about. Rosen tries to build him up, saying things like “If Dominique were a nineteenth-century gunslinger, he would have twenty-three notches on his gun,” but it just doesn’t work. Dominique wasn’t a gunslinger, but a violent, lonely, and bitter gay man who may have been motivated to kill people as much by boredom as anything else.

I can’t say I really liked the book. I found it disappointing. Perhaps a lot of this was because I had been looking forward to it, seeing as I’d never heard of Dominique before this. But I subsequently felt like I got more information out of a 40-minute documentary I watched on his murderous career than I did from Rosen. I appreciated the book clocking in at under 200 pages, but one effect of being so quick was that the events started to blur and it got hard to keep track of Dominique’s location and employment at various times. The photo section at the back was inadequate and I felt like maps of the region would have been really helpful. There were also a number of little flourishes I didn’t care for, like the aforementioned references to the notches on a gunslinger’s gun. Another moment came when an acquaintance of one of the victims describes him as being “a little off mentally” and so incapable of selling dope. “Not that you had to be smart to be a drug dealer,” Rosen can’t help adding. I thought this was being flip. I think that to be a successful drug dealer (meaning at a minimum one who is capable of making a bit of money and staying out of jail) you probably do need to be pretty smart.

Noted in passing:

“Louisiana’s Most Gruesome Serial Killer”? This struck me as a bit of cover-bait sensationalism on at least two counts. First: what was the competition? While I’m no great student of serial killers, I had heard of the infamous Axeman of New Orleans. Wasn’t he more gruesome? He did hack people to death with an axe, after all. Second: is “gruesome” the right word? The dictionary definition is “inspiring horror or repulsion,” but I think every serial killer does that. The actual etymology goes back to a Germanic word for “shiver.” Personally, I’ve always linked it to gore. But Dominique didn’t butcher his victims. In fact, he seems to have been a tidy killer, leaving very little in the way of physical evidence behind. Rosen tells us that during his taped confession, “the gruesomeness of [Dominique’s] crimes made even seasoned pros cringe,” but I don’t know what evidence there was for that. Dominique raped his victims and then strangled them, disposing of their bodies later by throwing them on the side of the road. Which, while brutal behaviour, isn’t what I’d characterize as gruesome.

Sticking with preliminaries, the epigraph comes from Ernest Hemingway: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” This is a blustering bit of machismo taken from a column Hemingway wrote for Esquire magazine about fishing that later turned into the core of The Old Man and the Sea. I don’t know what it has to do with Dominique’s hunting humans. He certainly didn’t hunt armed men, the most dangerous game, but rather, like most serial killers, sought out the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.

In my notes on Monster I was impressed at the number of gay bars in big cities. Apparently there were 8 in Milwaukee at the time, and over 70 in Chicago. According to Rosen, in the 1990s there were “exactly two gay bars” in the town of Houma, Louisiana. This surprised me, as the population of Houma was only around 30,000 at the time, and it doesn’t seem like it was a very “metro” community. I live in a university town of just over 140,000 and when I checked online we didn’t have any gay bars, but only LGBTQ-themed nights at a couple of establishments.

The attempt to take fingerprints from one of the victim’s skin is something that one of the detectives learned from watching CSI. “Somewhere,” Rosen writes, “CSI star and producer William L. Peterson must be smiling. His TV show was helping to solve a real-life serial-killer case!” That’s a feel-good moment, I guess, but it made me wonder why a homicide detective hadn’t picked up on this from any of his training.

Takeaways:

If a stranger asks if he can tie you up, the correct answer is always No.

True Crime Files

Empty Promises and Other True Cases
By Ann Rule

The crimes:

“Empty Promises”: Jami Hagel married Steve Sherer in 1987 but things didn’t go well. Sherer turned out to be a nasty drunk and a violent control freak. Jami disappeared in 1990 and ten years later Sherer was convicted of her murder, though her body was never found. Later, while in prison, Sherer tried to hire someone to kill his in-laws.

“Bitter Lake”: a brutish man beats his ex-girlfriend and her 3-year-old son to death.

“Young Love”: when a young fellow’s girlfriend breaks up with him and heads off to university he continues to stalk her and eventually blows himself up in her dormitory.

“Love and Insurance”: a gay librarian meets up with a man who promptly gets him to take out a life insurance policy.

“The Gentler Sex”: two stories both dealing with women who enlist partners in plots to kill their husbands. The second woman doesn’t realize she’s trying to hire an undercover cop to do the hit.

“The Conjugal Visit”: a convicted kidnapper and killer escapes from a motel while enjoying a conjugal visit . . . with his niece. Such visits were new at the time and the system clearly had a few bugs.

“Killers on the Road”: a pair of bad guys rob a bank and go on a murder and kidnapping road trip.

“A Dangerous Mind”: a woman lets her brother stay with her in Seattle, forgiving of the fact that he is a violent psychopath. He kills her daughter.

“To Kill and Kill Again”: 18-year-old Gary Grant kills and rapes a couple of young women and then a couple of even younger boys.

“The Stockholm Syndrome”: a young couple meet up with a killer while out camping. He kills the husband and gets the wife to go along with a cover story until she breaks free from his sinister influence. This was also the final story in the Rule collection Without Pity.

The book:

“Empty Promises” runs just over 200 pages and the nine other stories 30-40 pages each. This made sense as there wasn’t as much to them. Ann Rule does her usual proficient job with the material, but it’s very familiar ground, especially for her millions of devoted readers.

But then let’s face it, most murders are pretty routine. As Poirot explains to Hastings in Peril at End House, there are really only a couple of motives for murder, excluding “homicidal mania” and “killing done on the spur of the moment.” The two motives are (1) gain (that is, greed), and (2) crime passionnel: hate, “love that has turned to hate,” or jealousy. Or, as Rule lays it out when describing female killers (and the point she starts out by making is equally applicable to men):

There are really only two reasons why the vast majority of women kill: for love – very broadly defined to include passion, revenge on a faithless lover, jealousy, or a desire to clear away obstacles to an affair – or for money. The promise of riches tends to bring out the wickedness in some women. Whether it be for love or money, women plan murder with far more care than do men. They seem to be able to delay gratification longer than their male counterparts. One might say that, even in homicide, women enjoy more foreplay than men.

I don’t know if this is strictly true, but the point about “love or money” – Poirot’s “gain” or crime passionnel – is spot on. Most murders are committed by people who know their victims, and take place in domestic settings. And so the same situations repeat again and again, and we see the same red flags being ignored by those at risk.

The early stories here are of the relationship variety, with the last few being examples of “homicidal mania.” And the relationship angle is always pretty much the same. Rule even gives a road map in her Foreword:

we can see long before relationships escalated to a point where murder was committed, there were lies. There are people, both men and women, who pretend to be someone they are not. They make commitments, agreements, assurances, pledges, and vows – promises – to get what they want. When they abuse the trust of those who believe them, those empty promises often lead to violent death.

This is a bit of a shoehorning to get the book’s title into the mix, but the basic point about escalation stands. Before things get to murder there are usually lots of red flags. In previous reviews I’ve done for the True Crime Files I’ve flagged some of these. For example, my takeaway from All That is Wicked was that

If your whole family is against you marrying someone, best give the matter further consideration. If they become even more insistent that you leave your spouse when the marriage goes south, you should admit you made a mistake and get out before things get any worse. Because they will.

Definitely advice Jami Hagel might have taken in the title story here. Though as I also said in my notes on She Wanted It All, there’s no talking to someone who has convinced him or herself that they’re in love. And this is a point I know I’ll be making again.

Another red flag has to do with partners suddenly taking out large life insurance policies on you. I mean, you’d think that one was pretty obvious but it seems not to have made much of an impact on the unfortunate librarian in “Love and Insurance.” Indeed, life insurance policies play a major role in several of the stories here. Not saying that life insurance is a bad thing, but these policies definitely lead to what’s known in the industry as a moral risk. Rule underlines the takeaway here: “Perhaps all marital insurance policies should read ‘And to my beloved wife, the proceeds of my life insurance . . . with the express exemption that this policy is null and void if she kills me.’”

Other lessons to be learned from relationships that go south in such a dramatic fashion? Well, “open” marriages are probably a bad idea. And if you are planning or in the midst of a divorce it’s best to make a clean break. Don’t go back to the house or agree to a private meeting with your ex (or soon-to-be ex). This is what led to the murder of Charla Mack as recounted in John Glatt’s Love Her to Death. Again, Jami Hagel received due warning about this. Her mother didn’t want her seeing Steve again but she arranged a meeting where he immediately stole her purse. Then she went back to her house after her lover pleaded with her not to. In the story “Bitter Lake” the victim is also warned about meeting up with her brutish ex-boyfriend “but she believed she could handle him.” There’s definitely a lesson to be learned here. If it’s over, it’s over. Don’t just move on, run away and don’t look back.

So if the sort of information you can glean from these cases isn’t new, it is at least useful. That’s one of the benefits of reading enough true crime that it comes to seem generic: the key points and takeaways get drummed into your head. And the early cases here are quite generic, for all their tragedy. Even the book’s cover is a throwaway effort. I originally thought that big red maple leaf meant there was going to be some Canadian content, but there’s none of that. Then there’s a picture of a computer mouse and cord, but most of the stories are quite old, set in the 1970s. And even in the newer ones PCs don’t play any part. So no maple leaves and no computers. That’s a really misleading cover. A wedding ring does play a role in “Empty Promises” and another ring has a particularly nasty part to play in “Bitter Lake,” but that’s it for relevance.

Noted in passing:

“Experts on domestic violence have a rule of thumb; it takes seven beatings before a woman or a man will find the strength and the courage to leave.” I’d never heard of this before. It struck me as high. I would have thought a “three strikes and you’re out of there” rule would have been more the norm. I’m also familiar with the saying that if a spouse or partner hits you once, they’re going to do it again. So once should be enough. I don’t know if it’s always a matter of having strength or courage to leave though. I think a lot of people fool themselves into thinking things are going to get better, and they’ve already got so much invested in a relationship they don’t want to just write it off as a sunk cost in a failed joint enterprise. Of course they should, but that’s another matter.

Takeaways:

You’re most likely to be killed by someone you know, and indeed someone you’re living with. Staying single has its upside.

True Crime Files

22 Murders: Investigating the Massacres, Cover-Up and Obstacles to Justice in Nova Scotia
By Paul Palango

The crime:

On the night of April 18, 2020, Gabriel Wortman got dressed up as an RCMP officer and into a car made to look like a police cruiser, then went around shooting up the community of Portapique, Nova Scotia. The next day his murder spree continued as he hit the road. By the time he was finally shot by police at a gas station he had killed 22 people. In the days that followed the RCMP would come in for a great deal of criticism over the way they handled the situation and many questions remain unanswered.

The book:

As the subtitle indicates, this is not a narrative history of Wortman’s 13-hour rampage, setting out to provide a definitive account of what happened and why. That’s a story that may never be told, some of the reasons for which are gone into here. Instead, what we get is more of a reporter’s notebook on the tragic events and their fallout, with much to say about the RCMP’s response to it and its media coverage.

Though I’ve never been one to rush to the defense of the police, I initially resisted being taken where Paul Palango was clearly going, which is that the RCMP were involved in a cover-up of their actions (and possibly a cover-up of some deeper relationship they might have had with Wortman). This is the sort of thing that is usually sneered at as conspiracy thinking, with calls for tin-foil hats and the theme from The X-Files playing in the background. But that’s unfair, as conspiracies do exist and in fact can be perfectly mundane, which seems to have been the case here.

“The more research we did,” Palango writes, “the clearer it was becoming evident that this was no conspiracy theory, as my detractors would have it, but rather a bona fide conspiracy.” The thing is, conspiracies are often equated in the public’s mind with highly-involved and sinister machinations when in fact they are often just part of the normal operation of many large bureaucracies or big corporations (Adam Smith: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”).

That seems to have been the case here, as the RCMP, an almost entirely unaccountable organization, has become the preserve of what Palango (borrowing language from The Wire) derides as “house cats”: public employees who have become comfortable in well-appointed sinecures. Within such a government bureaucracy, the code of silence and CYA (Cover Your Ass) are the only operational rules. One rises through the system not by being productive or particularly good at one’s job but by being well connected (family matters in the RCMP) and by steadily advancing to positions that come with higher pay and better benefits but that are really just empty titles without any duties or responsibilities. And all the time the force becomes more and more top-heavy, with proportionately fewer boots on the ground. And these house cats cost a lot of money. One of the numbers Palango throws out is that government employees who move for work (soldiers, civil servants, and Mounties) cost the public purse $500 million a year. Wow! $35,000 per homeowner! That’s a hell of a perk.

In short: welcome to the blighted and bloated world of middle management and office administration. A world that isn’t a conspiracy so much as just the kind of thing you get given the natural and universal habit of people in positions of power and privilege to use those positions to feather their nests. One needn’t attribute to malignancy what is simple laziness and self-interest.

Where conspiracy enters the picture is with the cover-up. Or, as Palango puts it, “a massive cover-up . . . one that tested the natural laws of conspiratorial physics.” Is this going too far? To be sure, police were put in a difficult situation, as Wortman was no ordinary mass killer. There was a lot of confusion on the ground. But right from the get-go the Mounties had trouble keeping their story straight and clearly misinformed the public on several occasions as to what they knew and when they knew it (Palango isn’t reluctant to call them out for “lying”). With the help of a deferential and even pliant media they sought to put forward their own narrative while attacking anyone who would question it.

The official story about Portapique was shaping up to be a perfect modern fairy tale – the Monster and the Maiden. It was a macabre morality play and just about everyone in the media was eager to put it to music. The RCMP’s excuses for its failures were treated with less than an ounce of skepticism. The belief that the media have a duty and responsibility to hold institutions accountable seemed to be overridden by the undeniable and unhealthy deference to authority that permeates much of the Canadian psyche.

So true. So very true. Sing it, Paul!

For example, that reference to the Monster and the Maiden is directed at something Palango spends a lot of time trying to understand: what was going on between Wortman and his wife just before he went on his homicidal bender. Unfortunately, he keeps coming up against the “feminist lens” that was being used to portray her as a victim of domestic abuse. Palango refers to this as “coddling,” but it worked, and it’s still unclear what happened to her on the night of April 18.

As we all know, there are powerful incentives for claiming victim status. Victim credentials absolve you of all responsibility for your actions and allow you to make calls upon public sympathy that can be further exploited. The most egregious example in this case was the number of Mounties who claimed stress leave immediately after Wortman’s rampage. Apparently there were seventy of them. Seventy! In order to deal with their trauma they took the summer off, which came with a bill to the province of Nova Scotia of $3.75 million for hiring replacement officers. Meanwhile, as Palango reports, “The ‘sick’ Mounties got full pay and lounged around their vacation properties, many posting photos on social media.” This shit has to stop. I’ve posted before about the abuse of diagnoses of PTSD and I’ll just repeat here that it’s a disgrace. But I digress.

Given the combination of silence and misinformation the public began to lose trust in the official line. And this is the really bothering point. We live in a post-truth age of alternative facts and false narratives, thinking that shadowy elites in the media and the deep state are lying to us about everything. So when we see a case where something is clearly wrong about the story government spokespeople and newspaper editorials put forth, it deeply damages the foundation of our social bonds. I mean – and I say it this time without irony – if you can’t trust public institutions like the CBC and the Mounties, and I don’t think we can, then who can we trust? Put another way, what if all the sketchy-sounding podcasters who inveigh against the mainstream media and who are always “just asking questions” turn out to be right? Or if not right, at least have a point? This is something Palango is very aware of, pointing out “repeatedly that this is the kind of situation that leads to the flourishing of so-called conspiracy theories.”

It’s not a good place to find ourselves in. There was, inevitably, a board of inquiry into Wortman’s rampage. The Report of the Mass Casualty Commission came out in March 2023 (after this book was published) and it was highly critical of the RCMP, but this is not accountability. At some point something has to be done to restore public trust in such basic institutions as the police and the media or we are in trouble. It’s interesting that just a year before 22 Murders came out there were a couple of other Canadian true crime books that also raised disturbing questions about police (mis)conduct: Justin Ling’s Missing from the Village, on the Bruce McCarthur case that shook the gay community in Toronto, and Silver Donald Cameron’s Blood in the Water, which focused on the ineffectiveness of the Nova Scotia RCMP in dealing with a Cape Breton ne’er-do-well who ended up being killed (I reviewed both books together). Something isn’t working here, and whether you agree or disagree with Palango’s approach you have to give him credit for addressing what has become a real and growing problem.

Noted in passing:

A couple of points came up while reading 22 Murders that I’ve addressed before, but they’re worth returning to for further context.

The first has to do with how swiftly some crimes, no matter how sensational at the time, disappear from our memory. Wortman’s murderous rampage was a huge story, especially in Canada where these kinds of mass killings aren’t everyday occurrences. That said, I have to admit that only a few years after these events I’d already confused them in my head with the 2014 shootings in Moncton, when Justin Bourke shot five RCMP officers, killing three.

Palango has his own experience of this on a visit to a local pharmacy a little over a year after Wortman’s spree.

The thirtyish pharmacy assistant knew a little about me from the pharmacists, who knew a lot about what I had been doing.

“I hear you’re writing a book,” she said. “What’s it about?”

“Gabriel Wortman,” I said.

“Who?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“The Nova Scotia massacres,” I responded. Noting that she was still drawing a blank, I added, “The shootings last year.”

“Someone got shot?” she asked with a look of both astonishment and concern.

It’s surprising the assistant hadn’t heard of the shootings, but maybe not so surprising that she didn’t twig to Wortman’s name. This brings me to the second point I wanted to bring up: the policy in many media outlets, in Canada and internationally, of not providing the names of mass shooters in news reports.

As I’ve said before, I understand where this is coming from, especially in cases where a killer is looking to gain notoriety for a repugnant cause, for which they’ve prepared a manifesto. Think cases like Anders Behring Breivik, Elliot Rodger, and Brenton Tarrant. It’s also true that, with celebrity, or attention, as the only coin of the realm, one doesn’t want to give such individuals anything that smacks of a posthumous victory, much less a platform. That said, deliberately setting out to turn mass killers into anonymous unpersons strikes me as too ideological, while taking the news media away from its core duty to report all of the facts. We don’t call Hitler “the German dictator” by convention. No, the “five Ws” of journalism begins with “Who?” and that’s the way it should be. Alas, in 2020 this was no longer true, or even considered best practices:

A month or so after the massacres, just about every major news outlet had taken the same “ethical” position that it was not going to name Gabriel Wortman. He would only be known by his initials or some euphemism – the shooter, the madman or the denturist. His was a name not to be spoken.

On the front page of the Halifax Chronicle Herald the official editorial policy was announced: “we will only publish the murderer’s name and photo responsibly, when it serves the public good.” This struck me as very dangerous. Who decides what serves the public good? I can get on board with not publishing photos of the crime scenes, but the name of the perpetrator? As Palango puts it, “The rationale for this proud self-censorship was that naming Wortman would only glorify his actions and provide a model for others like him.” How so? Wortman wasn’t looking to go out in a blaze of media glory. He didn’t leave any manifesto or suicide note that I’m aware of. What sort of a model for others would his name provide? His use of a car made up to look like an RCMP cruiser was widely reported, with pictures of it popping up everywhere, and that’s the only aspect of the case that I would have thought another mass shooter might want to imitate.

I’m just not buying it. In such cases the killer’s name is part of the story, and it belongs in the story and not hidden behind some virtue signaling by the press. As Palango demonstrates, there was already far too much ideological and political shaping of the narrative of these events going on in the press and in statements made by the authorities.

Takeaways:

Does it matter that the truth is out there if nobody cares?

True Crime Files