Original subtitles

[deep haunting music]

[heavy bang]

- I was like, blown away.

And he went from being tender-hearted

to being a monster.

[mysterious music]

- Houma police have identified the body

found off of Woodland Ranch Road.

Suspicious deaths

in the Bayou region

may also share the same killer.

- All that I know, my son is dead,

and can't nobody bring him back.

[mysterious music]

- I just felt his death was more suspicious than that.

- Something just didn't seem right.

[mysterious music]

- [Reporter] The victims, which range in age from 16 to 46,

had all been strangled or suffocated.

- They're accusing someone in our community

of being a serial killer.

- The numbers of bodies could increase to up to 20.

- [Sam] He was not going to stop until he was caught.

[deep boom]

[mysterious music]

- [Khadija] He was abnormal.

He wasn't like all the other boys.

- It's just building up,

something in his mind just snaps.

- Let's not forget that some people are just freakin' evil.

[intense music]

[haunting music]

- I'm the daughter of a police officer.

She was a police officer for 32 years.

So, watching her move through her career,

I wanted that same reward.

Bringing justice to people,

and kind of the fight for the underdog.

[slow somber music]

[indistinct police radio transmissions]

The passerby had reported that he had saw a body in a ditch

along highway 3160 in St. Charles Parish.

[mysterious music]

It was a very remote location, very dark and secluded.

When I made my way up to the ditch,

I did observe the body in the drainage canal.

[mysterious music]

The body was fully clothed with a shirt and pants on,

but the pants were down to the ankles.

And there was one shoe on and one shoe off.

July in Louisiana can be brutal

as far as the heat temperatures.

So, he was in a state of decomposition,

which was why it was hard to be able to tell,

just from an arm and a leg,

his race or his sex at that time.

And, there were no signs of any foul play,

no obvious signs of any blunt force trauma to the body,

but a suspicious death because of the location

and his positioning in the water.

My detective mode definitely kicked in at that moment.

My initial assumption was that was a secondary crime scene,

and not where the actual murder took place.

[doors bang]

[tense music]

He had an identification card in his wallet,

so we were able to identify him as David Mitchell.

[suspenseful music]

- The cause of death was found to be drowning,

'cause he had obvious water in his lungs.

But I don't think the

detectives really said,

"No, this is just an accident,"

and moved on.

- The manner of death was left undetermined,

because we could not figure out why he ended up there.

That road is not a commonly-traveled road.

- Something just didn't seem right.

[slow somber music]

- David Mitchell's family was obviously distraught,

as any family would be.

It was a very difficult notification to make.

As a parent myself, I couldn't imagine getting that knock

on my door.

Upon talking to the family about him,

he was not known to be in any trouble.

He was actually a pilot student at one of our first

private Christian schools in St. Charles Parish.

He excelled in school.

He had no known drug history, no criminal history,

very supportive, well-liked family.

He was not a person that would have put himself

into a high-risk situation.

I lost many nights of sleep

because we just could not get to the bottom of it.

[mysterious music]

[haunting music]

- When we were growing up,

it was like four or five stop lights.

All of it was cane fields behind the houses.

Everybody knew everybody like, if you did something wrong,

"If your mom don't beat ya, I will,"

that kinda thing going on.

[haunting music]

[dog barks]

Louisiana, by and large is very remote,

very rural, surrounded by bayous and swamps.

The people that live in this community,

they are fishermen, they work the land.

It's a hard labor town, and it's small and it's insular.

[children chattering]

- I met Ronald Dominique in middle school.

He was the youngest child of several brothers and a sister.

He told me that his dad and mom

were struggling to make them ends meet.

- His father was not the nicest person in the world.

[spooky music]

Was sort of a disciplinarian,

so Ronald never got along with him.

His mother's relationship, just seems kind of estranged.

- Growing up in extreme poverty,

and being one of eight children,

there was no time to really nurture your child

and support your child.

It's really about survival of the fittest.

Ronald's really not getting the attention that he needs.

His personality was very meek.

- Dominique was a sweet guy.

Caring, tender, never got into trouble,

but he was teased 'cause he always hung around

with the girls.

[spooky music]

- Especially in the 1960s in rural Louisiana,

the idea that a boy is supposed to be playing sports

with his friends,

not having tea with the women in the family like Ronald did.

He didn't really fit the mold of masculinity

in rural Louisiana.

- [Ronald] I have anger for everything that was,

just the way I've been treated.

My family, some of them.

- He was abnormal.

He wasn't like all the other boys.

And so, that just made him sort of retreat

into his own world.

[children chattering]

[eerie music]

[haunting music]

[deep rhythmic music]

- Once we exhausted everything we can do

in the David Mitchell case, we just suspended it.

The case remained a drowning,

because that's physically how he died.

I just felt his death was more suspicious than that.

And, in the end it was.

[tense mysterious music]

I remember receiving a call,

I guess around six in the morning,

that there had been a black male

found on the side of a street.

- He was found in the East Bank of St. Charles Parish,

remote area, rural area.

- Upon examining the body at that time,

there were signs of trauma.

[haunting boom]

There were ligature marks around his ankles,

and there was some superficial bleeding on the forehead.

Just like the first body of David Mitchell,

red flag for me was that he had been killed elsewhere

and disposed of on this remote street.

Gary Pierre came from a poor family

living in one of our housing developments.

His mother did not display him to be

any type of troublemaker or high risk taker.

In comparing the two cases, there were some similarities,

the locations where their bodies were found, race, and sex.

They were known to travel by foot or by hitchhiking.

But there were differences.

David Mitchell had no physical evidence on the body

of any injury.

With Gary Pierre, there was signs of compression

to the left side of his neck.

- Strangulation is kind of unusual.

It takes vulnerability of the victims and closeness,

that is intimate.

- At this point with these two cases,

we just didn't have enough to find out what happened

to either one of 'em.

[mysterious music]

- And then, we found another body.

Larry Ranson was found in the same area as Mr. Mitchell.

[mysterious music]

His cause of death was asphyxiation by strangulation.

- Having three dead bodies in St. Charles Parish

was a shock to the sheriff's office,

as well as the parish as a whole.

So we still have a killer on the streets.

[eerie tones]

[deep mysterious music]

We realized, when we had body number three,

we knew in our guts that something wasn't right.

We had lack of witnesses

because it was a very remote location.

And, there was no physical evidence

that could lead us to the next step.

There's nothing worse than us

not being able to tell these mamas,

"This is what happened to your son."

And, being a mother myself,

I think that's what I took the hardest

is that I couldn't give these mothers

the answers that they needed.

[mysterious music]

We definitely had a hunch at this point,

these three cases were committed by same offender.

I anticipated another body.

- As far as St. Charles is concerned,

we were not seeing any more bodies.

- Where's he gonna strike next?

[haunting banging]

[mysterious music]

- We received a call of a body laying on the side of a road

in an area by a construction yard,

maybe 50 feet from Lake Pontchartrain.

The victim is a young male without a shirt.

[mysterious music]

Normally you look for gunshot wounds, stab wounds.

This one didn't have any outward injuries.

Since it was by a construction yard that had a camera,

the first thing goes through your mind is,

"I hope it's recording."

So we met with the construction yard staff.

They reviewed it and said, "Yes, it's captured.

Yes, it's recorded."

[mysterious music]

"But you're not gonna be able to tell anything

other than it had two headlights and two taillights."

[haunting boom]

There was nothing that we got out of it.

During the autopsy, we learned he was strangled.

That was puzzling to me,

because we don't get too many strangulations.

And we fingerprinted the victim,

and we were able to put a name to the face.

[mysterious music]

Joseph Brown, who last resided in St. Charles Parish.

Well, I'd learned that he was last seen

walking in and around the neighborhood,

headed to a convenience store.

And that's the last anybody saw him.

Jefferson Parish had a homicide victim.

[mysterious music]

And the cause of death was asphyxiation by strangulation.

[daunting music]

We sent it to the lab, and when you get something back,

they're not gonna give you a name.

So nothing comes up.

[daunting percussion music]

It's very tough because there's little evidence,

there's no suspect, so it's frustrating.

[school bell rings]

[tense steady music]

- So, I started Thibodaux High in August of 1982.

One of the first and only people that ever spoke to me

was Ronald Dominique.

He must have noticed me,

'cause he came up to me and said, "Hi,"

asked me how I was doing.

We'd eat lunch together.

If I bought a bag of chips, we'd share the bag of chips.

- He wasn't a typical male from that area.

And so, I think his problems start to emerge in high school.

- Hike, hike.

- [Craig] High schools, for the most part,

very terrible places to be for a kid who's different.

- He just had that different walk about him.

His hips had more swivel than mine do.

And I never saw that walk from anybody else in school.

[deep somber music]

- [Ronald] People call me a queer.

They call, tell me all kinds of stuff that's not called for.

- The only time you ever heard about homosexuality

was in a very cold, clinical sense,

like it was a mental problem, or in a criminal way.

There was just not a lot of understanding

of what it meant to be gay.

- I went to homecoming with him,

but he just didn't dance with me.

All night long he danced with another guy.

I just sat there,

my eyes covered.

They teased him immensely after that.

- He talks about a couple of times in the bathroom

when people would confront him,

they'd grab him and pull him down like they were gonna

make him suck their [beep].

Then they'd laugh.

Any situation they had to demean him, they would use it.

[haunting music]

- With Ronald, not having any close allies,

and he's not really able to be his true self.

He really had to bottle up these feelings,

and bottling up your feelings can only last for so long

before they explode in one way or another.

[haunting music]

- With the hair on a body, we had a profile

of a middle-aged Caucasian, and that was about it.

That's when we found out St. Charles Parish

had three victims that they found

and determined to be dumped on the side of a roadway.

[tense music]

- We were comparing notes,

networking about our cases.

That was when I realized, personally,

that we have something here,

this is tied together.

- All black males,

approximately the same age,

social economic status, hitchhiking.

So the victimology was all the same.

- We said, "I think we're dealing

with the same offender here."

- You have these

young, well-built people

that aren't fighting for their lives.

[haunting boom]

- All these individuals, they got street smarts,

one of them would've fought.

They're gonna have some kind of injury to the hands,

the face, something.

But, there was never, ever an indication

that that was the case.

[haunting music]

- We thought

that they may have been drugged.

We do toxicology tests,

and they came back with nothing.

- So how is the perpetrator able to get these victims

in the position to set 'em up for their death?

[dramatic banging]

[haunting music]

- We having young black males

dumped on the side of the road, that are strangled.

We don't know why.

[dramatic banging]

[mysterious music]

- With the nine bodies total,

we obviously had a serial killer on our hands.

- But, because the victims were low income,

that didn't grasp the media attention.

If like, somebody's killing our children,

yes, we would've had a lot more interest and leads

that were called into us.

[haunting music]

During the autopsy, we do a rape kit on all victims,

and on Manuel Reed,

we identified foreign semen on his body,

and were able to establish a DNA profile.

[mysterious music]

But in the system, it didn't get any matches.

- That definitely switched the dynamic of the cases

when Manuel Reed's evidence was discovered,

because now we have a sexual assault.

We possibly have a rape.

One issue that stood out with me,

is obviously the lack of defensive wounds,

lack of a struggle.

- [Sam] We knew it was all connected,

but we truly did not know what the lure was.

- So we had to rely on just hitting the streets

and doing that old-fashioned police work.

[tense music]

- We increased patrols in and around the area

where we knew bodies were being dumped,

to see if something was unusual.

Interviewing people in the neighborhood

of where these victims lived.

- We found an individual who was walking

on Veterans Boulevard, at night,

was approached by a gentleman in a truck,

and on three different occasions,

stopped to ask him if he wanted a ride,

and believe this individual was very street savvy, and said,

"I'm not gettin' in the vehicle with ya."

He did go to the police and they developed a sketch.

- And soon as we started doing that,

the killings just stopped all together, there was nothing.

[dramatic swoosh]

- We got into panic mode when there was no more activity.

But it's like, when are we gonna find him?

We're beating ourselves up,

because we should have caught this person,

and we haven't at this point.

[daunting music swells]

[mysterious music]

- Once Ronald comes out as gay,

he really works at becoming part of that community.

And one of the things that he does,

is he starts to perform at local drag shows.

So you can imagine from Ronald's perspective,

that this is his opportunity to really shine.

- He was dressing half as a woman, half as a man to sing,

and that they booed him off the stage many times

'cause he just couldn't get it.

[haunting music]

- What happens is that once he starts performing drag,

he ends up being bullied by the gay community.

So once again, he's rejected,

and this rejection hurts because this is his tribe.

But the reality is, his performance is lackluster

because he doesn't know how to shine.

- I was in the bar one night shootin' pool,

he walked up and put quarters down.

[pool balls clinking]

He was just this quiet guy, didn't say much.

- Remember, he doesn't have a template

for how to have a relationship.

He hasn't had a romantic relationship

or even a traditional friendship up until this point.

- The way Ronald presented himself,

he definitely wasn't going to win a popularity contest,

because he was so closed off.

[haunting music]

- And so this rejection hurts even more

because this is a community

that he was really seeking acceptance from.

- And it's just building up, it's there,

and it's just building up, your mind is building it up,

it's making it worse.

And things happen, something's going to one day set it off.

[haunting music]

- There's really no words

to describe it,

to have that many victims

and not be able to bring

anybody to justice.

[haunting music]

There was a lull for a couple of years,

and then yes, the killer did come back with a vengeance.

And it was obvious that yes,

it was at the hands of the same individual.

- Houma police have identified the body

found off of Woodland Ranch Road.

Datrell Woods was only 18 years old when he died.

- Been a very frequent series.

- [Reporter] The body of 21-year-old Michael Barnett

was found in an empty storage shed.

Barnett last said he was going to meet a girl,

and never returned.

- Now we got white male victims also.

- [Reporter] Sunday evening, the body of a 22-year-old man

was found partially hidden in brush.

- The bodies were ending up everywhere.

- [Reporter] Suspicious deaths

in other parts of the Bayou

region may also share

the same killer.

23-year-old Kurt Michael Cunningham was found face down

in a drainage canal.

- He was definitely out of control.

Now we had 20 victims,

and there's no words to describe

the helplessness at that point.

- I think they better get him.

- [Interviewer] Yeah, they're killing,

all the victims are male.

- Well, whether it's male or female, they need to get him.

[siren wails]

- I really can't say if it is tied

to all the other killings, but that's all that I know,

my son is dead and can't nobody bring him back.

- [Reporter] And while investigators

from all over the region

continue on the serial killings,

Wayne Smith's family is anxiously waiting for answers

that he too may have been

killed by the Bayou Strangler.

[tense music]

- We had a picture of every victim on the wall,

and every day you walk in it, you see it,

and it's like, "Is there a break?

Are we gonna catch him today before he kills somebody else?"

[mysterious music]

- We knew he was not going to stop until he was caught.

[slow somber music]

[birds cawing]

[tense haunting music]

- During this time, Ronald Dominique

worked several low-wage jobs,

and he's able to save up enough money

to get his own trailer.

And, this is when maybe he's able to really start to pursue

relationships with men.

- But maybe for Ronald, it's just, it becomes too dark.

[eerie music]

- In 1996, Ronald meets a gentleman

walking on a secluded road.

He gets the young gentleman to come back to his trailer

to smoke some weed and have some fun.

- He just picked him up hitchhiking.

I mean, he just talked him into it.

[eerie music]

- They arrest Ronald for sexual assault.

While he's jailed, he is raped.

[haunting music]

And brutalized, that it ends him in the hospital.

- He brought that up at every meeting we had,

he brought that up.

- Ronald only spends three months in jail

because the victim could not be located,

and so the charges were dropped.

- I think the incident in jail, when he's raped,

that's the event he expressed most.

So that's a turning point for Ronald.

It's the worst thing ever happened to him.

He's physically debilitated, and so something in his mind,

just snaps.

[haunting music]

- All the victims in these cases,

no matter their background,

they were a person to me, and they were somebody's child.

And then there was a break in a case.

[tense music]

- His story was, a white male

approached him

in a small pickup truck,

showed him a photograph of a young white female,

and asked him, would you like to have sex with her?

She'll pay you.

So he gets in the truck with this white male.

[eerie music]

The white male tells him, "Well, the female's afraid of men.

She's a abuse victim, I have to tie you up first,

before she comes in the room."

The person immediately said, "You're not tying me up,"

and walked out, and that was the end of the story.

- Our biggest question had been,

how was he getting these victims?

- He was able to manipulate them

through the lure of the sex.

- When he said, "I have to tie you up,"

and it made total sense of how these people

were unable to fight back.

Person that came forward

knew where the travel trailer was at.

Find out who lives in the trailer,

do a criminal history on him,

and find out he's been arrested before

for aggravated rape of a male victim.

- He was identified as Ronald Dominique,

and he became the serial killer suspect.

[tense suspenseful music]

- Ronald Dominique, this is the first time we had any name

possibly being involved in these killings.

We had two task force members go to his house

and ask him to come back to the sheriff's office.

And I was surprised when I saw him for the first time.

There's nothing extraordinary about him.

He is a overweight, balding male.

- He wouldn't appear to physically be this person

that would be capable of killing all of these people.

It was shocking.

- When we asked, "Do you know anything about killings,

people being dumped in and around the area?"

And he didn't know anything.

[mysterious music]

During the initial interview,

we're still trying to establish

a direct link between him and one of these victims,

enough to get an arrest warrant, to put him in jail.

And that's when we asked him to swab his mouth,

to establish a DNA profile for him.

[tense music]

- We're just waiting for lab work to be done

on the forensics, and here again, we have another body.

[mysterious music]

- It was disturbing to say the least,

because we think we have our guy,

and he still kills somebody.

- The one that really bothers me the most is this one.

Don't know whether he was taunting us or not.

That indicates affirmly of how out of control he was.

- The pressure is now really on for us as investigators

to get this done and over.

[mysterious music]

- The lab called and said,

"Ronald Dominique's profile matches the foreign DNA

on these victims."

[haunting music]

- And when we found out that it was a positive match,

it was just the best feeling in the world.

But then it was sad that it took this long

to finally get to this point,

that all of these people are gone,

and there's a sense of guilt

that this couldn't have been done sooner.

[tense suspenseful music]

- We had physical evidence on only two homicides.

The only direct evidence that we gonna have,

associating him with 21 of 'em,

is him telling us he killed them.

We need the confession.

- We exhausted every question to try to get him to admit,

wouldn't admit.

So then we confronted him with the DNA match,

and we explained what a DNA match is,

it's pretty much exact.

There's no way to explain how your DNA

was removed out of this victim.

And, that's pretty much the time he ultimately

started admitting to these homicides.

[haunting music]

- David Mitchell needed a ride back into town.

He might often hitchhike or get rides from other people.

- Oh, he's got a long way to go, it's dark,

there's not many street lights.

It's not a great place to walk.

- Ronald sees a young man alone, walking at night,

and this is the perfect opportunity.

- And so here's this little chubby white guy,

he said, "Hey man, you want a ride?"

[tense music]

- [Ronald] I looked over and I saw a guy

and he flagged me down.

- David Mitchell was offered a ride by Ronald Dominique.

- [Ronald] He started asking me

if he could make a few dollars,

and he said anything would help.

These guys, all they want is money,

so I brought him to the RV.

- Once David got into Ronald's truck,

he lured him to his trailer by offering money.

For a 19 year old, who lives in poor Louisiana,

any opportunity to make money is something that

you know, they're not gonna pass by.

- [Ronald] After we fooled around,

he started telling me, "I need more money than that."

I told him, "I don't have no more money."

And he said, "Either you come up with it,

or I'm going to the police."

I was scared that they wouldn't believe my story,

and they'd bring me to jail.

- He can't stand going back to jail,

'cause he thinks of being raped.

- He was so traumatized by the experience of being in jail,

that he was unwilling to leave a victim alive.

- [Ronald] I got so scared, I started choking him.

I choked him with an extension cord.

- He's got that individual's life literally in his hands.

So it really is about power and control.

- [Ronald] The next thing I know, he wasn't breathing.

[static buzzing]

- That's where it becomes unbearable.

In the slightest provocation, he just strangled him.

- [Ronald] I put his clothes on, and I drove off,

and I just drove and drove.

And all I remember is streets and lights.

I ran around the car,

and I pulled him out of the passenger side.

I hurry up and I grabbed him, pushed him in the ditch,

and then took off.

I just wanted to get out, out of town and go home

and just forget about everything.

[haunting music]

- This is the beginning of a pattern

that escalates from here.

Ronald Dominique is developing a template to use,

where he can lure men back to his house

and gain control of them.

[dramatic banging]

[haunting music]

- In Southern Louisiana, a shocking confession

from an alleged serial killer.

Ronald Dominique was charged with 11 counts of murder.

Police say he admitted to killing 23 men over eight years.

The victims, which range in age from 16 to 46,

had all been strangled or suffocated.

- It was a relief, we didn't have to see another face

on the wall,

that we didn't have to talk to any more family members,

informing them that a loved one was found dead.

[haunting music]

- With Ronald Dominique, his past life experiences

of being demeaned, of being cast aside by society,

really played a heavy role

in how he made sure that he was controlling his victims.

And for someone who was powerless,

this is the one act that would actually give them the power

that they so desperately seeked in their life.

- Ronald Dominique is not unique

in that he had troubles growing up gay.

A lotta people have experienced that,

and we don't turn out to be serial killers.

If his victims had been upper class white people,

I think the case would've turned out differently.

Probably would've been apprehended sooner.

- Looking back, these cases,

although they're closed and have finally been put to rest,

will never leave

the investigator.

Even all these years later,

I think of everyone of 'em.

[mysterious music]