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NARRATOR: Over 10 years, the bodies of 23 men are found. The only suspect for their murder seems an unlikely fit.
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RICHARD GOORLEY: He was the most unthreatening individual I could-- I could think of.
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MICHAEL GLASER: He didn't look like someone that you would consider a serial killer, or someone capable of killing 23,
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you know, grown men. NARRATOR: How did a prolific killer stay under the radar for so long?
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DEEDEE THURSTON: This is a serial killer you've never heard of. [SOMBRE MUSIC] The story was that a White guy in a pickup truck
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approached him while he was walking down the street. Said he had a family member that was a victim of abuse,
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showed a picture and lured him in where she will pay you for sex. She's a-- she's a domestic violence victim.
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She's afraid of men. RICHARD GOORLEY: I believe it was his niece's photograph that he used to entice
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men to come to his place. That was the photograph he used to say, look my wife wants to have sex with you.
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Here's what she looks like. MICHAEL GLASER: The person that-- that told us this story actually got into the pickup truck,
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and the perpetrator actually let him bring him to a trailer. And once he got into the trailer,
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he said, well, before the girl comes in, being that she's afraid of men, I have to tie you up.
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He felt the only way he could become intimate with someone else was by holding them at gunpoint,
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tying them up, and then forcing himself on them. MICHAEL GLASER: And that's when he kind of changed his tune
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about, you're not tying me up. You're going to bring me back wherever you picked me up from.
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And being the type of person he is that probably doesn't want confrontation, brought the--
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the person back to where he picked him up. He was able to identify and show us, you know,
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where this trailer was located. And came up with all the residents there. And, you know, Ronald Dominique had a stood out as being a male
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that we didn't think was married. You know, he lived on his sister's property in a trailer in the front yard.
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After that, we started some surveillance on him, and it didn't amount to-- to anything.
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He worked at a oil field supply company doing some kind of just manual labor. He didn't leave the house, didn't go to bars,
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didn't frequent anywhere. He would just sit at home. So we still didn't have anything to tie him into these bodies.
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Let's put it this way, he wasn't scary. Wouldn't scare anyone. Kind of taken aback by how someone that looked like he did
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would be capable of committing all these offenses that he was accused of. And we also met him and talked to him,
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and just didn't fit my preconceived idea of what a serial killer would would be like.
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I mean, he was the most unthreatening individual I could-- I could think of. My name DeeDee Thurston.
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I was a reporter at The Courier in Houma, and I was leading the coverage. I'd gotten a tip from a police source
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that they had suspicions that they had a serial killer. Before Katrina, it was so sparse,
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and the bodies were so spread out over so many parishes. The body dumps were so remote and so far from each other
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that I don't think we'd put it together yet. It wasn't until the end there that it seemed to escalate,
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and the bodies seemed to start piling up, that we were getting quite a lot there at the end.
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By then we knew we had a serial killer. MICHAEL GLASER: But he wasn't in the system.
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We knew he was arrested previously, accused of raping a male. So he was high on our radar with just that,
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but didn't have anything to connect him with the crimes in itself. So we made the decision to approach him and interview him,
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and ask him that we-- we're investigating a bunch of crimes where, you know, we have victims being dumped
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on the side of the road, and we're running down every one that had had an arrest, you know,
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in Terrebonne and Lafourche parish. Initially, the first one, we had no idea that we were
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dealing with something larger. We worked it as trying to find-- identify the victim.
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Where did he come from? Try to find out how the perpetrator got here in the city of Kenner to discard a body.
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First one we had was discarded on the side of a roadway. Several months later, we had one discarded near a trash
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bin, a trash dumpster. Followed several months after that was-- one of these victims
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was placed on the ground outside of the same type of, you know, trash dumpster. The bodies were disposed of where they were going
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to be found the next morning. Someone would have seen them. DEEDEE THURSTON: Nobody knows about Ronald Dominique
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because he killed people who were marginalized. He killed people who lived a high risk lifestyle
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and didn't necessarily garner a lot of sympathy from people outside their family.
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BRIAN FREDERICK: His profile, his victim profile, was homeless, people that were down and out,
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addicted to drugs perhaps. And in several of the cases, we know that Dominique offered these individuals,
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who weren't always gay, drugs. Lured them to his house, and that's where he pulled the gun
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and tied them up, and then proceeded to rape them. At the time that Dominique was committing his-- his crimes,
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there were two other serial killers loose in South Louisiana. They were Derrick Todd Lee and Sean Gillis.
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Both of them were attacking, kidnapping, raping, and killing young attractive women.
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So naturally, that got a lot more publicity than someone who was accused of killing street people.
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The victims were not all, but mostly homosexual. It didn't have the-- the grip that killing
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young beautiful women does. That's what was getting all the publicity at the time
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that Dominique was-- was committing his crimes. DEEDEE THURSTON: You know, I live in a very small town,
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and word got out quickly. And people came up and they said, you know, what's going on?
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Why are these people coming to interview you? And I said, well, there's a serial killer
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that I investigated. And they immediately thought I was talking about Derrick Todd Lee.
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And everybody knows about Derek Todd Lee, but nobody knows about Ronald Dominique.
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He seemed to like Black men. Slight Black men. Not big brawny guys, but lean, thin.
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I think of his 23 victims, 18 or 19 of them were Black. RICHARD GOORLEY: Basically invisible people.
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The ones that you drive by and you look at and you give no second thought, other than say, you know,
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look at that bum. MICHAEL GLASER: The physical evidence, the hair fibers or anything like that, that stuff
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was all collected during autopsy and on the scene. We had several DNA profiles developed,
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you know, from the Jefferson Parish cases, mitochondrial DNA, which is hair. You know, you can get it off of there.
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And then the nuclear DNA, which is, you know, seminal fluid off of one of the victims
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here in the city of Kenner. But he wasn't in the system. These were guys who had their own way to get around.
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They're walking between 10:00 and 2:00 in the morning. They're getting-- they're getting
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in a truck with some stranger. NARRATOR: In the year 2000, another body is found,
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23-year-old Michael Vincent. He had been dumped on a barbed wire fence, strangled,
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had rope marks on his wrist. This body was found 40 miles away from the previous killing
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fields in Houma. MICHAEL GLASER: We-- we kind of thought of these as two different series of homicides.
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You had the nine victims that were here in metro New Orleans, and then all of a sudden metro New Orleans
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doesn't get any more of these dumped bodies of the-- of the same, you know, type victim.
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They all started coming down, you know, several miles lower-- in lower Louisiana, down, you know,
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in and around the city of Homa. NARRATOR: For almost three years there were no more bodies in Houma, but in October 2002
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that changed. Kenneth Randolph Jr., Anoka Jones, Dattral Woods, 19 years old and dumped along with his bicycle
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in a sugarcane field. It seemed like every time we turned around there was another body.
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Well, you have the same young person that walks the streets being discarded in, you know, places where they
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will be found the next morning. But we're still had no idea. These were people who, they were necessarily homeless,
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but they might have stayed with this person this night, and this family member that night.
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So it wasn't unusual for them to go off the grid for a day or two. So sometimes families didn't want to report them missing
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right away, or sometimes they did, but they weren't necessarily living a lifestyle that police
00:11:03
were easily able to reconstruct their previous 24 hours. MICHAEL GLASER: You know, we're working, you know,
00:11:10
day and night trying to develop a suspect, only, you know, to wake up the next morning to we have another victim.
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NARRATOR: The equation in November 2006 was this, 23 men had died violently since 1997, without their killer or killers
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being brought to justice. Ricky Wallace had led police to Ronald Dominique. Had he killed some or all of the men?
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And if so, what had made him into a serial killer? The investigation was really only at the beginning.
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RICHARD GOORLEY: When we go investigate people, we do, we go back and try to find out
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people who knew him when he was growing up, teachers, people he worked for. And we found with Dominique, he really didn't
00:12:05
have any long-lasting friends. We found out basically that he was a loner. You know, he lived in a trailer on his sister's property.
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You know, in high school, didn't really have any friends. Lived in a trailer in Bayou Blue.
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Lower income, just regular everyday working folk. He grew up in Lafourche parish.
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He went to Thibodaux High School. He was not a popular guy. My understanding is that he didn't
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come to terms with his homosexuality until late in his teens. I'm told that he was bullied.
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So high school was rough for him. NARRATOR: Dominique's sense of isolation may perhaps have been made worse by a disturbing incident
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as a young child. RICHARD GOORLEY: Dominique's father suspected his mother of having an affair.
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So the father gathered up Dominique and his sister and drove him to the mother's brother's house.
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And they burst in and found the mother and her brother in bed together, obviously, having sexual relationships.
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BRIAN FREDERICK: The morality that should underpin healthy sexual relationships is now called
00:13:17
into question in a big way. RICHARD GOORLEY: In every one of the cases I've looked at where there was a serial killer,
00:13:23
there was a mother that would be looked at as an immoral person. But when you look at your mother and she's not a saint,
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you know she's not a saint, that she's promiscuous, that has to have an effect on Id,
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to make you lose some sort of-- of something that holds us all together. NARRATOR: Despite their complex relationship, after graduating
00:13:47
high school in 1983, Dominique continued to lean on his mother for support. He always lived with either his mom or his older sister.
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He didn't amount to much of anything, other than he worked in some, you know, some kind of labor intensive menial job, working
00:14:04
in a-- a supply business. He had a bad attitude. He felt that he was inferior, you know, couldn't
00:14:11
get a girlfriend or boyfriend. He was kind of, you know, a little overweight. He was just--
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really aimless life. No one. No friends. No one to be in love with or to love him.
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NARRATOR: Eventually, Ronald Dominique did grow confident enough to acknowledge his sexuality.
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According to local journalist DeeDee Thurston, who has acquaintances in common with Dominique,
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his presence in Thibodaux gay bars was not altogether welcomed. Even when he came out of the closet
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and was part of the gay scene, he really wasn't accepted there either. RICHARD GOORLEY: He was short and obese, non-threatening, shy
00:14:57
or at least standoffish, tend to complain some about his-- about his situation, whether it be his surroundings,
00:15:05
or the food that he's given, that sort of thing. I don't want to say he had no redeeming qualities,
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but he was-- nothing about him really stood out. NARRATOR: The only time Dominique came alive
00:15:19
was when he was on stage. His favorite thing was being a female impersonator. He liked to dress up like Patti Labelle and imitate her,
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but he wasn't very good at it. It was a parody of Labelle. And this could have been a way for him
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to get out of his skin, if you will, become someone else. He was powerless in his everyday life.
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He had menial jobs, he couldn't hold on to those. I think men, they find their worth
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in their ability to provide, and he wasn't even able to do that. This female impersonation, this act
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where he was inviting others to laugh at him, he's in control of that. Now, whether this predated his-- his sensibilities-- but this
00:16:06
is a marker. Control is a marker. And we know that with the serial rapes. Rape has nothing to do with love,
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or affection, or intimacy, or sex. It's a control issue. And yeah, the trappings of it were there in the act.
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NARRATOR: In 1993, Dominique, aged 29 years old, moved into his own place, or almost his own place.
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He lived on his sister's property in a trailer in the front yard. NARRATOR: What detectives learn as they build
00:16:35
a case against Dominique, is that the trailer was the scene of an alleged rape. After luring a man there with the promise of drugs,
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Dominique allegedly handcuffed him and was said to have raped him at gunpoint. DEEDEE THURSTON: The story goes that the victim
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jumped out the window and ran away yelling. NARRATOR: Questioned, Dominique insisted that on both occasions
00:16:58
he and the men had had consensual sex, after which they'd tried to rob him, forcing him to pull
00:17:05
a gun to defend himself. He was not believed. He was arrested. I think he spent three months in jail.
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They never followed through with the case because they could never locate the victim again.
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So nothing ever came of that. NARRATOR: While incarcerated, another incident occurred that may have shaped his future.
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They put Dominique in jail, and while he was in jail, he was brutalized. NARRATOR: Violently raped by another inmate,
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Ronald Dominique was left with lasting injuries. Released in November 1996, to live once again
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in his older sister's yard. Police, later digging into his background, would notice a startling coincidence.
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And then we realized that the sister lived right here in St. Charles Parish, within a few feet of the St.
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Charles Parish homicides. You know, three bodies, you know, where they were dumped in St. Charles Parish.
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And the sister moved, and the homicides moved. So all the homicides moved at the same time
00:18:02
this family moved, and Dominique followed them to live on his sister's property.
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No defensive wounds or no-- no evidence of a big struggle. Because some of these people were decent size, you know,
00:18:24
men. Even though they were-- they were young in age, they were, you know, pretty much tall and big in stature,
00:18:30
some of them. If you're strangling a-- a grown man, that-- that takes some muscle
00:18:35
and it takes some rage, I would think. He's not a tall guy. What is he? About 5' 5"?
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He's obese. He's not very imposing physically. He doesn't look like the kind who could take on a--
00:18:51
a grown man and come out on top. He looked like just some little-- little guy that-- that really had nothing going for him.
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He's overweight. He had a bad heart. Fat and flabby. There was nothing physically about him
00:19:04
that would make you think that this person was capable of killing anyone at all with his hands.
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If you look at a lot of serial killers through the years, they don't stand out. They fit in well.
00:19:16
This guy fit in well at what he did. I mean, he didn't do anything. He didn't do anything to call attention to himself.
00:19:22
He, you know, never gotten many arguments, you know, with the sister, with anybody else in the community.
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He kind of just stayed alone. NARRATOR: Could this small, feeble drag queen now in custody really be the man cops were looking for?
00:19:35
There was really nothing we overlook that would have identified him as a suspect.
00:20:06
DEEDEE THURSTON: He would dump them. It might be a sugar cane field, it might be under an overpass,
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it might be in a ditch. They weren't always found right away because it was really remote places.
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In South Louisiana, in the summertime, in the heat and the daily rains, it would degrade a body,
00:20:26
it would degrade a dump site pretty quickly. So there wasn't always DNA to find.
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No gunshot wounds. They were all, you know, strangled in some form. DEEDEE THURSTON: When they realized that we have
00:20:45
these dead people that all have the common denominator, and that they have been tied up.
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And they figured out that it was happening in these jurisdictions, and they put this task force together.
00:20:59
MICHAEL GLASER: Well, we formalized the-- the task force in May of 2005. We had the attorney general's office, the Louisiana State
00:21:06
police crime lab, probation and parole, working it in and around the media. We're talking about some were found with-- missing a shoe,
00:21:15
some had no shoes. And they were trying to say that that was the trophy that this killer was-- was keeping, was a shoe.
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DEEDEE THURSTON: We think he just didn't finish dressing them. That's what first caused us to link some things together.
00:21:28
They were found without shoes. NARRATOR: At the Houma police department a special incident room was set up to focus
00:21:35
on catching a serial killer. MICHAEL GLASER: So from 1998 to 2005, we had somewhere around 19--
00:21:45
18 or 19. And it was full, you know, 8 and 1/2 by 11 printouts of-- the mug shot of a person's head.
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It was overwhelming at the time. We would get working, you know, leads, and people
00:22:01
calling in and giving us some kind of tip, and you would get hundreds. NARRATOR: On August 16, 17-year-old Wayne Smith
00:22:09
was found. His body, dumped in a bayou, was so badly decomposed that a cause of death was never determined.
00:22:18
It was another blow for detectives, another face on their white board. Then nature intervened to frustrate them further.
00:22:26
Hurricane Katrina made landfall. DEEDEE THURSTON: Katrina hit and everything just kind of went crazy.
00:22:38
MICHAEL GLASER: We kind of had to slow down a little bit because duties were spread all over the place at that time.
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DEEDEE THURSTON: A lot of those people from New Orleans evacuated to Houma. We had, in just a few days, 10 years worth of growth in Houma.
00:22:54
Our infrastructure wasn't up to it. We weren't really impacted in the way of storms by Katrina,
00:23:01
but just a few weeks later, Rita come through and it did-- and it did have a lot of damage locally.
00:23:07
And so, the communities were trying to recover from that. NARRATOR: As the cleanup from a devastating hurricane season
00:23:14
continued, the task force tried a new strategy. MICHAEL GLASER: In the task force meetings,
00:23:19
you know, we knew the perp wasn't 100% successful in one contact, one kill. And we also knew that whoever's doing
00:23:27
this is not 100% successful. Every contact with a person is going to end up with a--
00:23:32
a victim. So we were-- that's where the probation and parole aspect came in. So we had the probation and parole agents,
00:23:40
when they met with, you know, the people they were supervising, they would ask, is anything
00:23:45
out of the ordinary happening in and around this area? NARRATOR: As detectives waited for feedback
00:23:51
from men on probation, 40-year-old Chris De Ville went missing. On October 14, his body was found dumped in a cane field.
00:24:01
November 2005, another victim, Nicholas Pellegrin, 21, who had recently become a father.
00:24:10
After Nicholas' murder, there was a long, tense period of quiet from the bayou serial killer.
00:24:17
Cops wondered if he had simply stopped killing, or if he'd begun hiding the bodies instead of leaving
00:24:22
them out in the open. BRIAN FREDERICK: How many more went unreported, went undiscovered?
00:24:29
How many more are buried somewhere, discarded perhaps in a more organized way in the bayou?
00:24:36
We know that Katrina was so destructive that there were bodies lying around the bayou, right?
00:24:41
And so, it wouldn't have been uncommon to come across a body that was exposed to the elements.
00:24:58
DEEDEE THURSTON: The thing that brought it all down was when Ricky Wallace, who if memory serves,
00:25:03
his street name was Motor Mouth, told his parole officer that some dude had tried to tie him up.
00:25:09
MICHAEL GLASER: He says, look, the weirdest thing just happened to me. A White guy in a pickup truck approached him while he
00:25:16
was walking down the street. Took him to his trailer, told him-- gave him the spiel about my wife's going to come in here,
00:25:22
but we need to tie you up first. And he said, there's no way I'm going to do that.
00:25:27
MICHAEL GLASER: You're not tying me up. You're going to bring me back wherever you pick me up from.
00:25:31
DEEDEE THURSTON: Ricky Wallace and his coming forward was what put all this together.
00:25:35
MICHAEL GLASER: And he was able to identify and show us, you know, where this trailer was located.
00:25:41
So we drove by, got a bunch of license plate numbers and ran some records, everything, from that address.
00:25:45
NARRATOR: The address was on Bayou Blue Road, Houma, opposite a cluster of rusting industrial units.
00:25:51
And the name of one resident stood out. MICHAEL GLASER: You know, Ronald Dominique kind of stood out.
00:25:55
We knew he was arrested previously, so we just sent two people to make contact with him.
00:26:00
You know, one female investigator from Lafourche parish, and one from-- a male from Jefferson Parish.
00:26:08
And they interviewed him and he answered questions. Wouldn't admit to anything, but did consent to a buccal swab,
00:26:15
which is a swab of his saliva. They asked him for DNA, he gave it. He knew they were looking at him.
00:26:21
I don't know why he didn't say no. Some of the early cases, they weren't able to get DNA because of them being out in the elements.
00:26:29
You know, you throw somebody in a watery ditch, you're not going to get any DNA.
00:26:34
So it was the later cases that they were able to get DNA from. NARRATOR: Dominique may not have fully grasped the fact that he
00:26:40
was the prime suspect, in fact, the only suspect in 2003 homicides. And while the DNA swab was processed,
00:26:48
cops needed to make sure that the number did not rise. MICHAEL GLASER: And we knew that was our man, so 24 hours
00:26:54
a day we had someone, you know, watching him in his residence. It may be cars on the ground, people walking,
00:27:00
you know, even aircraft in the air. Because we, look, at that point, when we identified the killer,
00:27:06
there was not going to be any other, you know, any other victims. NARRATOR: In late November 2006, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's
00:27:13
Office heard from their crime lab about the DNA swab taken from Ronald Dominique.
00:27:19
The match was made with one of the Kenner cases. NARRATOR: Manuel Reed, found in a garbage dumpster in Kenner,
00:27:25
in 1999. They would also find a match with semen found on the body of 27-year-old Oliver La Banks,
00:27:31
discovered partially clothed on the outskirts of New Orleans in 1998. The evidence was building against Ronald Dominique.
00:27:39
When he realized that the police were following him and that his arrest was probably imminent, he left there
00:27:45
and he moved into the bunkhouse, which is a homeless shelter there in downtown Houma.
00:27:49
MICHAEL GLASER: And that's why, when we arrested him, was in a boarding house, you know, in the city of Houma.
00:28:10
NARRATOR: Dominique didn't resist arrest or tried to run. In fact, the officers who stealthily
00:28:14
entered the bunkhouse on December 1, 2006, and cornered their suspect, found it hard to believe they'd
00:28:20
got the right man. DEEDEE THURSTON: Two weeks before he was arrested, he was able to subdue, tie up, and rape a full grown man,
00:28:31
and then drag his body to where he dumped it. Then when he was arrested, he has a cane
00:28:36
and he can't even walk upright. He's having to be helped into the car by two officers.
00:28:42
RICHARD GOORLEY: His demeanor was-- was rather a passive demeanor. You know, there wasn't anything threatening about him.
00:28:50
DEEDEE THURSTON: They had Ronald Dominique in interrogation, and I just remember that it was like the floodgates open.
00:28:57
He just kept talking, and talking, and talking. He didn't seem to be holding anything back.
00:29:01
And he provided details of all these murders. No, early on, when-- his initial encounters, I really think,
00:29:08
weren't going to result in a killing unless something in his conversation, his interaction
00:29:14
with some of these people, he felt uncomfortable. RICHARD GOORLEY: The first victim,
00:29:22
which was an individual he picked up in the French Quarter for the purposes of having sex.
00:29:27
They went to a remote area, had sex, but the victim was apparently pretty rough on Ronald.
00:29:33
And Ronald complained about it, and the guy still kept on doing. So Ronald struck him in the head with a tire iron.
00:29:44
Once he knocked him out, realized that he doesn't have to deal with this pressure or problem
00:29:48
anymore. And then I think he-- he strangled him. NARRATOR: Having dumped the man's body at the roadside
00:29:56
and got away with it, Dominique realized he could have sex with men in a way that meant he was in control.
00:30:02
MICHAEL GLASER: The early victims he would meet in an automobile. The crime was committed in an automobile.
00:30:08
He would strangle them with either a seat belt-- and whenever he got the urge to go out and find a victim,
00:30:15
he would just work his, you know, little area, because he didn't drive far from, you know,
00:30:20
where he lived at the time to find a victim. DEEDEE THURSTON: I know that he picked up one fellow
00:30:24
outside a convenience store. He would pick people up on Bourbon Street, near the gay bar.
00:30:30
He would see them run their bicycle down the road. But he'd just go out between 10:00 and 2:00,
00:30:36
and whoever he came across, if they got in the truck-- He would go to areas where street
00:30:44
people, hustlers, would-- would frequent, stop, talk to them, make a determination whether they were interested in,
00:30:51
first of all, homosexual relationship for money. DEEDEE THURSTON: He offered them cash to have sex with him.
00:30:57
If they said, yes. He'd say, come on, get in. He would drive them to his trailer.
00:31:02
And he would say, well, look, I don't want you to hurt me. So in order to not be hurt, I want--
00:31:07
I want to tie you up before we have sex. And those who agreed to do it were tied up.
00:31:14
Then he would have sex with them and then strangle them, and then dispose of the body.
00:31:19
If he thought they were heterosexual, he had a picture of an attractive woman. He would say it was his girlfriend or his wife,
00:31:25
and he'd offer them money to come back and have sex with him. And he would use his niece's picture because she
00:31:31
was an attractive young lady. He would say that she was shy, and that she had been hurt in the past.
00:31:37
So the deal was that if you let me tie you up, then she will have sex with you and then
00:31:43
I'll pay you the money. And if the guy said, no, ma'am. I'm not interested. He let him go.
00:31:49
NARRATOR: Unattractive he might have been, but Dominique's unimposing demeanor had its advantages.
00:31:55
DEEDEE THURSTON: He didn't look like somebody that would hurt you. I mean, he looked like some mild mannered little guy,
00:32:00
and he was a smooth talker. And these were guys who really needed the money. I mean, what was he going to do?
00:32:08
5' 5", chubby little guy? What's he going to do to me? NARRATOR: Once dead, he would untie his victims
00:32:15
and haul them into his truck. MICHAEL GLASER: And he-- he would drive a decent ways,
00:32:19
you know, within the 12 miles in and around here to dump them off. But in rural-- down in South Louisiana,
00:32:28
he would drive a little bit further to discard, but still made no attempt to-- to hide them.
00:32:33
NARRATOR: As for why, Dominique's reasoning was less clear cut. RICHARD GOORLEY: Why'd he kill them?
00:32:38
According to the police, it was because at one time he was arrested for having sex with someone who reported
00:32:48
to the police, and he had to-- and they put Dominique in jail. But Dominique feared going back to jail.
00:32:55
DEEDEE THURSTON: He liked rough sex. He liked the rape, but he didn't like jail.
00:33:02
So after he tied up and sexually assaulted these individuals, he knew that the next step may be that they
00:33:08
go talk to the police. So in order to avoid going back to jail, he killed them. MICHAEL GLASER: Yeah, I don't think Ronald
00:33:20
Dominique is a high IQ person. I really don't. I think he's a simple person that had a simple plan.
00:33:26
How he came up with the actual thought, you know, the killing of someone, I don't think
00:33:32
it was the killing was the motive, I think it was a sex act that was his motive.
00:33:37
NARRATOR: But why attack other men at all? The answer, says criminologist Brian Frederick,
00:33:42
lies in the way he saw himself, and perhaps in his rejection by the local gay community.
00:33:48
What strikes me as sort of unfortunate is that he felt the only way he could become intimate
00:33:55
with someone else was by holding them at gunpoint, tying them up, and then forcing himself on them, right?
00:34:02
Again, power, again, control, but such low self-esteem to think that the only way he could be close to someone
00:34:11
was through this mechanism. Something happened to him that, whether or not it was a sexual fantasy
00:34:18
or it was some kind of something else that got him to come up with this, I guess, plan and scheme,
00:34:25
that if he wanted to have sex with a male, they had to-- I guess he was intimidated and couldn't do it on his own.
00:34:33
He had to kill them first. DEEDEE THURSTON: I think in the beginning he-- he killed as a way to avoid prison,
00:34:39
but it escalated to where he really enjoyed the entire process, from the rape to the murder.
00:34:46
It just got to where the interval in between murders became smaller and smaller, like he needed it more often.
00:34:54
RICHARD GOORLEY: The thing that was surprising to me, one of the things that's surprising,
00:34:57
was the fact that he was able to not only strangle these people, the strength that took, but also to pick up the bodies,
00:35:09
put them in his vehicle, and then take them someplace and dispose of them. I was trying to figure out how he could do that,
00:35:14
because he was-- he didn't strike me as being that strong of an individual. And then it dawned on me that he probably had a big adrenaline
00:35:26
rush when he was doing this. And that may have had some play in-- in why he did it,
00:35:35
and why he was able to-- to move bodies around, and that sort of thing. I think he got his power from dominating other men,
00:35:43
and eventually eliminating them. NARRATOR: Charged with the eight murders he had confessed to in Terrebonne parish,
00:35:50
where he'd been arrested, Dominique faced the death penalty. Tasked with saving his client from execution,
00:35:56
Richard Goorley made a deal with the prosecution. We discussed the ins and outs of the case,
00:36:03
came to the realization that trying eight capital cases in that parish alone would be burdensome,
00:36:15
not only on the parish's finances, but also on the families of the victims. DEEDEE THURSTON: All the appeals, it would be decades
00:36:23
before this would be over. The families would have to go through the trial over and over.
00:36:29
They would have to hear all these horrendous details of what happened to their loved ones.
00:36:35
And they-- they were not about hearing those gory details. I mean, it's violent.
00:36:42
It's-- to know that they went-- not only did they go through the pain of being killed, but they
00:36:49
went through the pain and humiliation of having that done to them. NARRATOR: In the end, the victims' families
00:36:56
agreed to allow Dominique to take a plea. He pleaded guilty to avoid a trial, to avoid the death penalty.
00:37:10
I mean, eight consecutive life sentences, that's, you know, that's one after the other.
00:37:16
That's what you give a cat. I guess once you've got eight life sentences, there's no reason to go any further.
00:37:23
He was convicted in Terrebonne parish. He's never come-- come back to face any charges here
00:37:28
in Jefferson Parish. You know, there's no need to waste the resources, you know, to prosecute him anywhere else.
00:37:33
You know, we just have open warrants for him if he ever does, you know, try to get out.
00:37:42
RICHARD GOORLEY: Each of them had a family that loved them and cared about them.
00:37:47
These were people that were hurting. I mean, their loved ones, in spite of the fact that their loved ones might have been homeless,
00:37:53
and street hustlers, or whatever, they still loved them. And they were angry at what happened.
00:38:01
DEEDEE THURSTON: This is a serial killer you've never heard of. He was prolific.
00:38:05
He got away with it for 10 years, and nobody knows who he is. I mean, the families, of course, were--
00:38:15
were in an uproar, but the community itself, I don't remember there being any kind of hue and cry.
00:38:23
He killed people who were marginalized. He killed people who lived a high risk lifestyle,
00:38:30
and didn't necessarily garner a lot of sympathy from people outside their family.
00:38:37
These are somebody's children, and they were raped and dumped in many storages, and sugarcane fields, and under overpasses.
00:38:50
They deserved better. [SOMBRE MUSIC] [MUSIC PLAYING]