Framed

Through the Looking-Glass

JIM McCLOSKEY

The small town of New Iberia sits on a bayou in southern Louisiana, surrounded by sugarcane fields, not far from the Gulf of Mexico.

It was first settled in the 1700s by French immigrants, later known as Cajuns, who were exiled there from Nova Scotia by the British.

Today, the town has around 30,000 residents, approximately half black, half white, and is the seat of Iberia Parish, “parish”

being Louisiana’s word for county.

New Iberia is the hometown of famous novelist James Lee Burke and his fictional detective Dave Robicheaux, an investigator for the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office.

The town takes pride in being near the original home of Tabasco sauce, Avery Island.

On March 30, 1976, on the rural outskirts of New Iberia, shortly before three o’clock in the afternoon, Louis Gladu was robbed and murdered while doing what he did every day, operating the Hasty Mart, a convenience store he owned.

He was found lying in a pool of blood by Katherine Eldridge, a customer who had just arrived with her two children, a five-year-old and a baby, to buy some soda.

Although near hysteria, she managed to call the sheriff’s office using the store’s pay phone.

The store was soon swarming with sheriff’s officers and forensic criminalists, twelve in all, including the Iberia Parish sheriff himself, Gerald Wattigny, who had first been elected to his job more than twenty years before.

The investigation was led by Captain Horace Comeaux, chief detective for the sheriff’s office.

This was a big case.

It was a particularly senseless and unprovoked murder that shook the small community.

Gladu, a sixty-two-year-old white man, had sustained a two-inch laceration above the right temple that knocked him to the floor.

He was then shot twice at close range while on his back, once in the heart and once in the nose, by a .32 caliber Clerke revolver.

He died immediately.

The cash register drawer was left open, and $200 had been stolen.

In their haste, the killer or killers had missed the $1,100 in Gladu’s wallet and another $695 in nearby paper bags.

Cigarette packages that had been displayed on the counter by the cash register now littered the floor.

Gladu’s glasses lay nine feet from his body.

Fresh tire tracks were discovered in a gravel driveway seventy-five yards down the road, on the opposite side from the Hasty Mart.

The police made plaster casts of the tracks.

On her way to the Hasty Mart, Eldridge told police, she had passed a light blue car about to turn out of the gravel driveway onto the state highway on which she was traveling, called Sugar Mill Road.

No sooner had she pulled off Sugar Mill into the store’s parking lot than that same car sped by, going very fast.

Nineteen-year-old pregnant Ellen Abney lived in a house trailer along the gravel drive.

Her dog’s barking awakened her from a nap shortly before 3:00 p.m., when she saw what she thought was a four-door dark blue car occupied by four black men turn around at the dead end of the driveway and pass her trailer on the way out.

Captain Comeaux had his office put out a BOLO ( be on the lookout ) to all units for a light blue, old model, four-door car occupied by four black males.

Six days of fruitless investigation followed with no suspects.

With Sheriff Wattigny pressuring Comeaux for an arrest, Deputy Sheriff Eddie Moore, the only black person on the force, came to the chief investigator’s rescue.

Moore called himself “Shaft,”

after the suave and successful black detective featured in the film series Shaft.

To live up to that image, Moore routinely wore three guns: one on his shoulder, one on his hip, and one on his ankle.

Looking to impress his boss, on April 5 he brought in Mary Arceneaux, a black woman and career criminal who claimed to have information on the Hasty Mart murder.

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Mary was thirty-five years old and already had an extensive criminal record.

In 1973, she had pled guilty to twelve counts of issuing worthless checks.

She received a suspended four-month prison term and was placed on a two-year probation.

In May 1974, she was charged with nine new counts of forgery and seven new counts of issuing worthless checks.

She pled guilty to one count of forgery and to all seven counts of bad checks.

The judge sentenced her to eighteen months on the forgery charge and an additional forty-two months on the check charges.

He suspended these latter charges, however, provided she abided by a two-year supervised probation that would begin after she had served her eighteen-month prison term.

The judge observed at sentencing that her “widespread propensity…to wrongfully obtain money is the result of her association with drug dealers.”

Released from prison in 1975, Mary began her two-year supervised probation.

She attempted to skip out on her probation in January 1976 but was eventually caught through a connection of Deputy Moore’s.

Her actions placed her in a legally vulnerable position: She was now facing a return to prison to serve the forty-two-month sentence that the judge had originally suspended.

By April 5, 1976, when she met with Captain Comeaux, she figured that if she could help him solve the Hasty Mart crime, he could wipe away her charges and keep her out of prison.

Comeaux questioned Mary about the murder, although she’d spent some time beforehand in a prep session with Deputy Moore and Deputy Chief Jim Desormeaux, who briefed her on the details of the crime.

During the interview with Comeaux she claimed that on March 29, the night before the Hasty Mart robbery, a man she had dated for fourteen months named Harold had picked her up at her house in St.

Martinville, nine miles north of New Iberia.

Two men she didn’t know were also in his car.

One was introduced as Vinny, but she was never told the name of the other man.

Harold drove them all to New Iberia; during the drive the three men talked of “hitting a store to rob it and kill that man and kill five people.”

She said they were in a blue, “not exactly old”

and “not too dark”

four-door Chevrolet.

After a while, Harold drove her back to her home in St.

Martinville.

The next day, Harold picked her up with the same two men.

When asked what time, she replied “around dusk.”

Comeaux made it clear he didn’t like this response (it would have been after the murder), letting her know it must have been “around twelve o’clock.”

Picking up on this, she quickly agreed it was “around lunchtime.”

After riding around for some time, she said, Harold drove the car onto a gravel road and parked there, seventy-five yards down the highway on the opposite side of the road from the store.

Despite being extremely obese and moving with difficulty, she claimed she had wanted to go in with the men, but was told to stay in the car.

Vinny and Harold arrived back at the car “full of blood,”

the unknown third man having mysteriously disappeared.

Vinny scolded Harold for not giving him a chance to shoot the victim, too.

Although she would have had an unobstructed view of the store from the car, Mary said she didn’t see the third man run away.

Mary then suggested that the three of them drive to her deceased grandfather’s property on Cypress Island, where Harold could bury his gun and bloody shirt.

During the interview, Mary was shown a book of mug shots out of which she picked a photo of David Alexander as the man she knew as Harold.

Comeaux discovered a little later that Alexander was never called Harold by anyone who knew him.

He was commonly called “Bro”

or “Cool Bro.”

Even though she said that she had dated him for more than a year, Arceneaux had no idea where Alexander lived, nor could she name any of his acquaintances.

At one point during the interview, she identified Photo #3 in a photo lineup as the third man who went into the store with Harold and Vinny.

According to the photo, his name was Sammy Derouen.

A few minutes later, when Comeaux wanted to know more about Derouen, she changed course and said he’d stayed in St.

Martinville and never came with them; it was another man who had participated in the robbery and then disappeared.

She then told Comeaux that she could take him to where Alexander had buried the evidence on Cypress Island.

With lights and shovels, Comeaux and four other deputies drove north to the island and dug where Mary directed.

They found nothing.

Comeaux returned from Cypress Island close to 11:00 p.m., but his night was just beginning.

By mistake, Herbert Derouen had been picked up for questioning instead of his brother Sammy, whom Mary had identified as the third person in Harold’s car.

Recognizing that they had brought in the wrong brother, the police brought in Sammy, too, and showed him to Mary.

She now insisted that Herbert Derouen was actually the third man in the car, not Sammy.

Although Mary’s shifting stories had at one point left Herbert Derouen behind in St.

Martinville, Comeaux nonetheless interrogated Herbert for hours through the night, the whole thing witnessed by Deputies Moore and Steve Woodring, as well as Mary, through a two-way mirror.

For several hours Derouen insisted he was innocent and knew nothing about the Hasty Mart crime.

Comeaux kept reciting Mary’s account of the crime, attempting to get Derouen to repeat it in a confession.

Frustrated by Derouen’s persistent denials, Comeaux once slapped him hard across the face.

Still, Derouen refused to confess.

Finally, Deputy Chief Desormeaux took over the interrogation in his office alone with Derouen.

To this day no one knows how he did it, but by 4:30 a.m.

he had extracted a verbal confession from Herbert Derouen, which he converted into a typed confession statement by 8:45 a.m.

that morning.

Derouen was a twenty-year-old with no criminal record.

He had lived with his grandmother since he was twelve.

With only one year of grade school and an IQ of 61, he was illiterate and could not tell time.

He worked part-time for a family friend as a carpenter’s assistant.

As hard as the police tried to get Derouen’s story to align with Mary’s, his differed in several ways.

In contrast to Mary, he claimed that there had been a second car involved in the crime.

Not only a second car, but a highly identifiable taxicab.

Although Mary had Derouen staying behind in St.

Martinville, Derouen said that he and a man named Ronnie Miller had gone to the Hasty Mart in Miller’s taxicab with a third man whose name he didn’t know; he referred to this unknown man as the “bumper-face boy”

because he had bumps on his face and neck.

Miller had supposedly followed the car David Alexander was driving to the Hasty Mart.

He parked in front of the store while Alexander parked across the street.

According to Derouen, Alexander had two people with him in the car—the “fat lady”

(Mary) and another man whose name he didn’t know.

He made no mention of the third man Mary had placed in Alexander’s car.

Derouen said that Alexander entered the Hasty Mart with three companions—Ronnie Miller, Bumper Face, and a man from Alexander’s car he did not know.

Derouen stayed outside the store by the front door.

Through the window, Derouen saw Alexander pull out a pistol and shoot the store’s proprietor.

Derouen panicked and ran away, but Bumper Face chased him down, pulled a knife, and forced him back to Miller’s cab.

The two groups returned to St.

Martinville for a short while.

Then Miller drove Derouen home.

Despite the absence of a second car in Mary’s story, Deputy Woodring arrested Ronald Miller, alleged driver of the purported second car, at his home at 4:40 a.m.

that morning, April 6.

Dumbfounded at his arrest for murder and armed robbery, Miller insisted on his innocence.

No statement was taken from him.

He was a thirty-year-old taxicab driver for the Williams Cab Company of New Iberia with no criminal record and a college degree.

He owned a white 1969 Plymouth sedan that he had driven full-time as an independent driver for the last three years.

As required by city ordinance for all “vehicles for hire,”

his car had Williams Taxi Co.

and its telephone and city permit numbers prominently lettered on both the driver and passenger doors.

It hardly seemed the kind of vehicle a criminal would use in the commission of an armed robbery and murder, leaving it parked in front of the crime scene in broad daylight.

Deputy Moore and Deputy Woodring also arrested twenty-six-year-old David Alexander at his home at 2:23 a.m.

that same day.

In 1967, Alexander was one of the first two blacks to graduate from New Iberia’s Catholic High.

He drove a dark blue Buick and since graduation had worked as a full-time taxi driver for his parents’ cab company, the Alexander Cab Company, a rival of the Williams Cab Company.

In 1972, he had pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana, and in 1974 to aggravated assault, wherein he had brandished a .22 pistol at a drunken man who was threatening him and his younger brother while they sat in their car following a barroom argument with the man.

For that, he spent several months in jail in a work release program and was barred by law from owning a gun, which he gladly obeyed.

Still, this earlier crime had landed him in a book of mug shots that made him vulnerable to Mary’s accusation.

Booked at 3:00 a.m.

for armed robbery and murder, Alexander insisted he had nothing whatsoever to do with the Hasty Mart crimes.

By the dawn of April 6, twelve hours after Comeaux had interviewed Mary, three people had been arrested and charged with the armed robbery and murder of Louis Gladu.

One was David Alexander, allegedly the driver of the blue car, and the other two were supposedly in the taxicab, Herbert Derouen and Ronald Miller.

Three suspects were still at large and unidentified—Vinny and the third man from Alexander’s car, and Bumper Face from the cab.

Up all night, Comeaux was not yet finished.

With the aid of daylight, at 6:45 a.m.

he once again took Mary to Cypress Island, still looking for the buried gun and bloody shirt.

They dug at several other places she indicated, but to no avail.

Finally, she admitted that she had lied about burying anything on Cypress Island.

Trying to soften the blow, at least temporarily, she told Comeaux that her boyfriend, Raymond Sam, had the gun used to kill Gladu.

But when Sam confronted her in front of the police, she broke down and admitted she had made up her boyfriend’s involvement.

Her lies and erratic accounts of the crime were wearing thin with some of the investigators, particularly Deputy Steve Woodring, but Captain Comeaux was in charge and determined to clear the case.

Regardless of any misgivings, he didn’t give up on Mary, who was finally able to identify the third man in Alexander’s car from a chance encounter.

Returning from Cypress Island that morning, Woodring, Moore, and Mary had driven by a group of black men conversing.

Looking at them, Mary seemed to be setting her sights on one of them.

But when a different man left the group, Mary’s wandering finger shifted and pointed at him as one of the Hasty Mart robbers.

His name was John Nelson Collins.

Mary identified him as the third man who had been with her, Alexander, and Vinny in the getaway car.

Collins was immediately arrested and brought to the parish jail, where Comeaux read him his rights at 10:45 a.m.

on April 6.

Collins was a twenty-five-year-old married father of three with no prior encounters with law enforcement.

He was a truck driver who could only work sporadically due to a congenital heart condition.

His father, who died the year before his son’s arrest, had been an Iberia Parish deputy sheriff under Sheriff Wattigny for twenty years.

Later in the day, Mary identified Dan Tharpe as a participant, too, most likely as “Vinny”

since she had already identified Collins as the third man in Alexander’s car.

Her identification was bolstered by the fact that Tharpe’s mother owned a light blue four-door Chevy.

Tharpe was charged with the Hasty Mart crimes and spent a few hours in jail before being released after the police confirmed his alibi.

At the behest of the police, Mary then took another shot.

She reviewed the mug book again and identified a photo of Harry Granger as the man in the Alexander car whom she had called “Vinny.”

Woodring and Moore picked up Granger the next morning.

He was booked for murder and armed robbery at 3:17 p.m.