Framed

Through the Looking-Glass#3

Because of a technicality in Louisiana criminal law, Preston Demouchet and Jerry Paul Francis were tried and convicted of armed robbery, not murder, for both the bank and hardware store crimes.

This in spite of the fact that the victims in both instances were fatally shot.

Nevertheless, for each crime both men were sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison, where they remain today.

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By July 1, 1980, there was a new sheriff in town.

Errol Romero, a former schoolteacher and political newcomer, ended Sheriff Wattigny’s twenty-four-year reign in a bitterly fought contest.

The first thing he did was fire Deputies Comeaux, Moore, and Desormeaux, whom he believed to be inept and corrupt.

Suspecting that Alexander and Granger may have been wrongfully convicted, he also reopened their case, launching an investigation that would last several years.

Former Iberia sheriff’s deputy Steve Woodring was one of the people Romero interviewed.

By the mid-1980s, Woodring had become an experienced investigator in the Baton Rouge Armed Robbery Division.

In an affidavit offered to Sheriff Romero, Woodring stated reasons why he was convinced all six men were innocent.

Among them was something that he had personally witnessed.

Prosecutor Burke “desperately wanted Miller and Collins to accept his immunity offer [to testify against Alexander and Granger] and pressed strongly for it.”

Burke knew that both men would have been far more believable on the stand than the mentally impaired Herbert Derouen or the career criminal Mary Arceneaux.

Detective Woodring witnessed Comeaux and Desormeaux, acting on behalf of Burke, make that offer to both men “numerous times.”

Woodring was deeply impressed by Miller’s and Collins’s refusal to accept the offer even though they were facing ninety-nine years if convicted.

Years later, Collins said he’d refused immunity because “I knew if I lied against those men, I’d never be free…not in here,”

as he tapped his heart.

Woodring had had concerns about Mary’s veracity from the very beginning.

Later he said that even Horace Comeaux started doubting her truthfulness, especially after she admitted she had lied about Alexander burying the gun on Cypress Island.

DA investigator Sonny Tyler had, in his own handwriting, in a document undisclosed at trial, described Mary as “a pathological liar.”

Woodring had encountered Mary again, in 1985.

His unit was investigating a string of armed robberies at Texaco gas stations in Baton Rouge.

Mary, again arrested on forgery charges, told Woodring and his colleagues that in exchange for money and dropping her charges, she would tell them the name of the Texaco robber.

She gave them a name and said the man had counted the stolen money in front of her.

The actual robber was caught several weeks later.

Not surprisingly, he was not the man Mary had falsely named.

Steve was amazed and thought, She’s doing it again.

When he confronted her, mentioning her testimony in the Hasty Mart case, he told her he suspected Deputy Eddie Moore had encouraged her to lie against those boys.

She ignored the question, complaining bitterly instead that Moore had taken money off the top of the cash payments the sheriff’s office had given him to give her for her Hasty Mart cooperation.

According to Woodring, she was paid several hundred dollars a month plus rent reimbursement from April through the September trial.

Sheriff Romero also spoke with one of the eyewitnesses in the Hasty Mart case, Katherine Eldridge.

She told Romero that the light blue car she’d seen near the crime scene had been smaller than David Alexander’s dark blue Buick, which she had inspected at the impound lot.

Deputy Comeaux had insisted that the car she had seen was Alexander’s, but she disagreed.

She knew cars.

She had worked at a mechanic’s shop.

Comeaux and Burke had rebuked her after she testified to the grand jury that the car had been light blue, warning her “not to pull a trick like that again.”

After countless interviews and an extensive file search and review that lasted several years, Romero presented affidavits to prosecutor Burke alleging that Comeaux, Moore, and Desormeaux had “intimidated witnesses, paid witnesses, and brutalized a witness [Herbert Derouen] for the sole purpose of having those witnesses testify to a fabricated story”

against Alexander and Granger.

Burke refused to bring charges against the former lawmen, claiming “lack of evidence.”

This back-and-forth created a firestorm.

In 1985, the three ex-deputies filed a civil suit against Romero for defamation.

It took four years of discovery and many depositions before the suit was settled in 1989 without a trial.

Although the civil suit halted Romero’s reinvestigation, the discovery demands forced Burke to produce several exculpatory documents from the Alexander and Granger files that he had kept secreted in his office since the trial, marked Do Not Remove From This Office.

Burke had not given Romero access to the files during Romero’s original effort to reinvestigate the murder.

As part of the civil suit against Romero, Herbert Derouen underwent a psychological evaluation in 1987.

During his interviews with the psychologist, Derouen continually asserted his innocence and lamented that he had lied, condemning innocent men out of his own fear of going to prison.

He claimed he wasn’t at the crime scene and had no idea who committed the crimes; that he was working that day for Morris Lee; and that he had spent nine months in jail for no reason at all.

The psychologist determined that Derouen’s intellectual functioning was consistent with that of a child in grade school, and that he could easily be persuaded to say what others wanted him to say, regardless of the facts.

At his deposition in the suit, Derouen testified that he had never been to the Hasty Mart until Comeaux took him there; he lied at trial because the police threatened him with prison unless he “told the truth.”

Centurion committed to the case in 1996.

By then Alexander’s and Granger’s direct appeals had been denied, as had two petitions for post-conviction relief.

In addition to launching an exhaustive multi-year reinvestigation that included scores of interviews as well as numerous courthouse and attorney archival-file searches, we alerted 60 Minutes to this gross and obvious miscarriage of justice.

In December 1998, the show aired its story, titled “Who Killed Louis Gladu?”

Ed Bradley was the correspondent.

Steve Woodring, still with the Baton Rouge police, told Bradley, “They are absolutely innocent.

I am absolutely certain of what I’m saying…Anyone who examines this case reaches the same conclusion, except the sheriff’s office and the staff of the DA’s office in Iberia Parish.”

Bernie Boudreaux, the multiple-term sitting district attorney, maintained to 60 Minutes his steadfast belief that the right men were in jail and were guilty.

In the broadcast, Bradley told the viewers that one of the reasons Boudreaux believes the defendants are guilty is because the testimony of Arceneaux and Derouen was “corroborated, consistent, and credible.”

When Bradley asked Arceneaux if she got paid for her testimony, she responded, “I sure did.

All I can say it was bribery.”

Bernie Boudreaux, however, said that “she was not paid anything.”

Woodring said she “received money from the sheriff’s department.

She was paid.”

Malcolm Roy told Bradley that “they framed those guys.

They knew what they was doing.

Not one of them was there.

I was stunned when they picked them up because these guys didn’t do this.”

John Collins and Ronald Miller, who had pleaded guilty to lesser charges to avoid life in prison, were interviewed sitting side by side.

Collins summed up the case neatly by saying, “Everybody that told the truth done time.

Everybody that lied went home.”

During our investigation, Centurion located the owner of the Candle Light Lounge, Geraline Mitchell, who blew a hole in Mary and Derouen’s testimony that they and the killers had all gathered there the night of the murder.

In an affidavit, Mitchell stated that she knew Mary very well.

She remembered telling the sheriff’s investigators that Mary was definitely not in her club on March 30, because by then Mary had been banned from the club for running up an unpaid bar tab.

Besides, Geraline had closed the club shortly after she opened it around six that evening, after her husband told her about the Hasty Mart shooting and instructed her to close the bar.

In 1997 Jerry Paul Francis explained to Centurion why he had recanted his confession with the fabricated bribery story: because Sheriff Wattigny had told him during the interview that “you’re just digging yourself a hole by confessing to something you didn’t do.

We’re just trying to keep you from putting yourself in real trouble by getting a lot more time.”

He said Comeaux “suggested that I was bribed into confessing.

So, I gave them what they wanted.”

Tortured by his false testimony against Granger and Alexander, Herbert Derouen told Centurion that “I think about it all the time.

I can’t sleep all these years with them boys in prison.

It’s always on my mind.”

Malcolm Roy’s brother Joseph swore in an affidavit that he did loan his brother his 1973 blue Pontiac LeMans the afternoon of March 30, 1976.

He recalled noticing a large quantity of quarters, eight or nine dollars’ worth, in the ashtray the first time he drove it after Malcolm returned the car to him that afternoon.

Malcolm had admitted to him that he was involved in the Hasty Mart crime.

Centurion was fortunate to obtain the services of New Orleans attorney Peggy Woodward.

Working alongside Centurion investigator Paul Henderson, she was indefatigable, producing a 179-page brief with 133 exhibits in support of a petition for post-conviction relief.

In the petition, she told the entire story of the shameful miscarriage of justice that led to the false conviction of David Alexander and Harry Granger.

It was filed in September 1999 in New Iberia’s 16th Judicial District Court, the original court of conviction.

The State responded with a sixty-seven-page brief that largely skirted the petition’s factual contentions and relied primarily on procedural arguments.

The petition then sat in Judge William Hunter’s chambers for two years.

On September 18, 2001, one week after the 9/11 attacks, Judge Hunter issued his denial of the petition.

His opinion was an exact copy, page by page and word for word, of the State’s brief, only it had his signature, not the DA’s.

The petitioners were denied two years later by the Louisiana Supreme Court without comment.

Following suit with the state courts, the entire federal judiciary rejected their application for relief, without explanation.

Without so much as a hearing, Alexander and Granger had exhausted all judicial remedies.

Their only chance for freedom now rested with the Louisiana parole board.

Overcrowding at Angola had resulted in a law that allowed parole eligibility to any inmate who was forty-five and had served twenty years.

This law qualified Alexander and Granger for parole—by now they had served close to thirty.

They knew the board would not look kindly on claims of innocence by its inmate applicants.

Parole boards want to hear remorse for crimes committed, not cries of “I didn’t do it.”

Nevertheless, they had what they felt was an overwhelmingly strong case for innocence and decided to go with that.

At the hearings in 2005 and 2006, Detective Woodring and former sheriff Romero appeared before the parole board and spoke with compelling conviction about their belief in the inmates’ innocence.

Gladu’s daughter, Ann Gladu Begnaud, wrote a letter to the board in which she gave a ringing endorsement of their release, stating, “I am convinced that tainted evidence convicted two innocent men of my father’s killing.”

She added that, from the very beginning when she attended the trial, she had had doubts about their guilt and expressed them to both the sheriff and the district attorney.

The men’s families also expressed their love and support of Alexander and Granger throughout the past thirty years and promised their support would continue should the board allow them to come home.

Last but not least, Centurion included a tape of the powerful 60 Minutes broadcast for the board’s review.

Once the hearings ended, right then and there, after a short caucus, the board announced its decision to grant parole.

Centurion later learned that the board had granted parole in large part because the three members of the panel had been convinced by the 60 Minutes piece that Alexander and Granger were innocent and should never have been in prison in the first place.

Embraced by his mom, Iris, outside the prison gates, Alexander went home on December 23, 2006.

His eighty-two-year-old dad, Iran, died of lung cancer two weeks later.

Granger’s day of freedom arrived on January 19, 2007, when his sister, Eva, picked him up and took him home to his mother, where she was waiting in the house in which he’d been raised.

Although his mother died in 2010, Granger still lives in that house and is a kitchen worker on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Alexander returned to his old job as a taxi driver for the family cab company.

He still drives a cab but is also now in charge of operations.

The two men are on lifelong parole with minimal supervision, but each must pay the State sixty-four dollars per month in parole administration fees and secure permission to travel out of state.

Granger is seventy and Alexander seventy-four.

Both are in reasonably good health and remain philosophical about their unjust thirty-year incarceration.

Granger says that even though the best years of his life were taken from him, he can’t play catch-up and has moved on; he’s basically enjoying a quiet, peaceful life.

Alexander feels blessed.

He’s in charge of his own life, is self-sufficient and independent.

He wonders if what happened to him was “destiny”; and anyway, “everything is in God’s hands.”

He notes with some satisfaction that he has outlived all those men who had a hand in putting him in prison, even Dracos Burke, who died at 102 in 2022.

Besides that, he says with a twinkle in his eye, his life now is far better than picking cotton and working in the Angola fields for twenty years at four cents an hour.

Over the years, observers of the case have often asked why the New Iberia authorities insisted on prosecuting David Alexander and Harry Granger when the real killers surfaced before the trial and offered confessions that comported with the facts of the crime.

There could be several reasons.

One is that it would have been embarrassing, even humiliating, to admit to the wrongful indictment of six people, an indictment that was the result of work done by the entire law enforcement community, including the elected sheriff and the most respected prosecutor in the district attorney’s office.

Another reason may have been the authorities’ fear that if they had gone after Demouchet, the real killer, their past leniency with him, despite his violent history, would come to light.

Demouchet was an informant for the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office and as a reward was softly treated by the local authorities for his many crimes.

But as violent as he showed himself to be, he should not have been on the streets the day Louis Gladu was gunned down.

The repercussions of such a revelation could have been devastating to the careers of New Iberia’s elected officials.

There is an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to the arrest and prosecution of the six Iberia men.

To David Alexander and Harry Granger, for whom it cost thirty years of life each, the experience was like peering through the Looking-Glass.

What was happening could not be real, but it was.

In his interview with 60 Minutes, John Collins had perfectly captured the way justice was turned upside down and backward: “Everybody that told the truth done time.

Everybody that lied went home.”