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.

—

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.

—

In her April 5 interview, when asked how tall Vinny was, Arceneaux replied "not that tall, but he's pretty tall." Granger was 5'5"—not remotely tall—and 113 pounds. His nickname was "Joe Willie." He was never called "Vinny" by anyone who knew him. Granger was twenty-two with an eighth-grade education and worked occasional odd jobs while still supported by his family. In 1973, he had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor theft and received a suspended sentence. He had stolen a valise from the backseat of a car. When he discovered it was a doctor's bag, he returned it. He had had no other charges since.

The next day, Thursday, April 8, Woodring and Moore brought in yet another person, Rene Jackson, for questioning. How he became a suspect is unknown. Derouen positively identified him as the third man in Miller's cab, whom he had referred to as Bumper Face. Jackson was booked and charged with murder and armed robbery at 12:25 p.m. that day. Like Derouen, he had no criminal record and could not read or write. He could only make a mark for his signature. Up until his arrest, at age twenty-three, he had lived with his widowed and caretaker father. With little schooling and unemployable because of his mental disability, he rarely left his neighborhood, and then only to go fishing. His sole means of travel was his bicycle. His face was scarred with extensive acne (perhaps why Derouen identified him as "Bumper Face").

According to a report prepared by DA investigator O'Neil "Sonny" Tyler, the illiterate Jackson was turned over to Comeaux and eventually "confessed." Tyler's report describes Jackson's suspiciously detailed and coherent confession to the chief detective, which provided specifics on the Hasty Mart crimes, naming all of those involved and their roles in the murder of Gladu, including his own. His purported confession coincided perfectly with Derouen's account of what transpired that day at the Hasty Mart.

Also included in Tyler's report, however, was an extremely emotional confrontation between Jackson's father (who had rushed down to the jail when his son was arrested) and Comeaux, who told him of Jackson's confession. His father demanded to see his son immediately. With Comeaux standing there, Jackson, weeping uncontrollably, told his father, "I didn't do it. I didn't do it. They're trying to frame me." While the deputies were booking Jackson, his father and brother were "raising hell" and had to be restrained. Jackson's father told Comeaux, "I'll go to my grave knowing Rene did not do this."

The case was now managed by prosecutor Dracos Burke, first cousin of mystery writer James Lee Burke and the top trial prosecutor in the district attorney's office that covered Iberia Parish and two other parishes. On May 10, 1976, a grand jury indicted the six men, all black, for the first-degree murder and armed robbery of Louis Gladu—David Alexander, Harry Granger, and John Collins allegedly in Alexander's dark blue car; and Ronald Miller, Herbert Derouen, and Rene Jackson allegedly in Miller's white taxicab. Mary was also indicted, but she and Derouen were given immunity in exchange for their testimony against the others. While Mary was freed, Derouen remained jailed because the authorities, mindful of his acute cognitive deficiencies, needed easy access to him for grand jury and trial preparation.

It had been one thing for the sheriff's investigators to hitch their wagon to Mary and Derouen's nonsensical stories, but it was no sure thing that a man of Burke's intelligence and experience would do the same. Imagine seven people traveling in two cars, one parked seventy-five yards away, the other, a white taxicab with its company name, telephone, and city permit number emblazoned on both sides, parked in front of a store. The three occupants of this white cab—the thirty-year-old owner of the cab and his two young, mentally impaired passengers—had to wait for the three male occupants of the other car to journey three-quarters of a football field's length to join them. Then the six, with no assigned roles, entered the store to rob it. Imagine these six people, most of whom had no criminal record and none of whom had ever associated with the others, walking unmasked into a small convenience store in broad daylight to commit an armed robbery. Why would the supposed two leaders, Alexander and Granger, bring along five other people, two of whom were mentally challenged, to assist in the robbery as accomplices?

Dracos Burke knew his star witnesses had told two different stories. Mary had mentioned only one car and said the three men in it robbed the store. She had a full and clear view of the Hasty Mart from Alexander's parked car; yet she never saw the white taxi, its occupants, or Jackson supposedly chasing Derouen. They were absent from her story. In contrast, Derouen had two cars and six men committing the crime. Burke also knew that neither the sheriff's nor the DA's investigators had developed any evidence or witnesses to refute the defendants' insistence that they had never known or associated with one another. And Burke knew that the police could not disprove Alexander's insistence that he had never seen Mary in his life, let alone dated her for fourteen months; nor had they found one person who called Alexander "Harold" or Granger "Vinny." Yet, unaccountably, Burke went along with this charade and prosecuted the whole lot.

—

What happened next, however, was stupefying. On July 1, one of the actual Hasty Mart murderers, seventeen-year-old Jerry Paul Francis, voluntarily confessed that he and twenty-four-year-old Preston Demouchet had committed the crime. It was just one in a long spree of nearly identical crimes they had committed together.

On May 10 (the same day the six men were indicted), Demouchet and Francis committed a midafternoon armed robbery of a hardware store in Rayne, thirty-eight miles northwest of New Iberia. During the course of the robbery, seventy-four-year-old Curtis Johnson, who'd been working alone in the store, was fatally shot. On May 24, close to three in the afternoon, the duo robbed another convenience store in nearby Jeanerette, eleven miles southeast of New Iberia. Demouchet pressed his .32 against the head of one of the store's two female employees lying on the floor. A car pulled up, causing the men to flee with money from the cash register, and most likely saving the lives of both women.

The bank robbery that ended their crime spree took place around noon on May 26 in the town of Parks, sixteen miles north of New Iberia. Demouchet shot the lone female bank teller, forty-eight-year-old Beverly Chauffe, in the head. She lingered for sixteen months before succumbing to her wound. Both men were caught on the bank's camera exiting the building. Before Demouchet shot her, the teller pleaded with him, "Oh Lord, please don't hurt me. It's only money."

After taking $10,000 in cash from the Parks bank, the two desperadoes ditched their guns in a sewage canal in New Iberia and fled to Demouchet's sister's house in Houston. The FBI apprehended them two days later based on information provided by Francis's mother, who saw him on the bank's camera footage, which was televised. The feds released them to the Louisiana parish authorities on June 23 for prosecution. Francis, realizing the law had him cold, voluntarily gave a detailed confession and led the sheriffs to the canal so they could find the guns.

After a two-day search that included draining the canal, both guns were found by Comeaux and sent to the crime lab for tests. One was a .32 Clerke revolver, which ballistics conclusively established as the gun used to kill Gladu.

Demouchet was a hardened criminal. In 1969, at the age of eighteen, after serving a one-year prison term for aggravated battery, he was sentenced to six years in Angola for several counts of burglary and another of aggravated battery. A few months after his release on parole in 1972, he was arrested for attempted murder, but apparently never prosecuted for the charge. Nevertheless, he was returned to Angola to serve the balance of his six-year sentence due to a number of parole violations. A month after he was paroled again, in August 1974, he fatally shot a woman in a crowded bar. On December 13, 1974, in a sweetheart plea deal with prosecutor Dracos Burke, the charge was reduced to negligent homicide with a three-year term in the Iberia Parish jail, not Angola. His sentencing judge told him, "I think the State is being very lenient with you, permitting you to serve your time here instead of Angola." As it turned out, he served only half that time. By early 1976, he was back on the streets of New Iberia, shortly before the murder of Gladu.

On June 30, a week after confessing to the Parks robbery, Demouchet's accomplice, Francis, unburdened himself further. Since he was illiterate, he dictated a letter to another inmate to send to Sheriff Wattigny. In it, Francis listed five crimes that he wanted to discuss with the sheriff because he knew his life was "washed up." Although he didn't specifically identify the Hasty Mart, one of the crimes he described was an armed robbery and murder on March 30 at 2:55 p.m. in New Iberia. This got the sheriff's attention. The next day, July 1, Sheriff Wattigny, Captain Comeaux, and DA investigator Sonny Tyler followed up with an interview. In the course of it, Francis revealed many details about the Hasty Mart job that were stunning in their accuracy and could only have been known by the police and the killer. Unlike Mary, he needed no coaching, because he was speaking the truth. Francis said the robbery happened between 2:30 and 3:00. He and Demouchet went in the front door. Demouchet shot the man while Francis was behind the register getting the money. Demouchet hit the man in the back of the head with a gun, then shot him twice where he fell, which was outside the counter area, in "the hall." Francis jumped over the counter and knocked some cigarettes onto the floor. The old man was wearing glasses. They took $200 in cash and a bag of change and left the register drawer open. Also, there may have been a witness who saw their getaway car—a woman in one of the trailers across the street.

Additionally, he told the lawmen that he was with Demouchet when Demouchet shot the lady in the Parks bank and the man in the Rayne hardware store. He added that Demouchet used the same gun to shoot both those two and "the old man" in New Iberia.

He prefaced his confession by telling the police, "You got them six boys in jail for nothing. Them boys didn't do that…it don't make no sense. Me and Preston Demouchet and ‘Shine' [Malcolm Roy, driver of their car] done that…Shine was driving his brother's car." For emphasis, later in the interview he reiterated: "It don't make no sense to let young boys that's up there suffer for something they didn't do." Sensing that these lawmen didn't believe or didn't want to believe his account of who really did the Hasty Mart job, he twice asked his questioners if they were "willing to put your life upon it that I wasn't at that store?" He then added, "I was there!" Francis was speaking from his heart. He was conscience-stricken and hell-bent on setting the record straight.

Knowing that Demouchet would never confess, Francis challenged the police to go see Malcolm Roy. He thought that if Roy knew he had fingered him, then Roy would admit he was there, too. The sheriff's department waited five days before they brought the eighteen-year-old in for questioning. July 6 was a gut-wrenching day for Roy. He gave several statements. As Francis predicted, in the first interview with Comeaux, he readily confessed to his involvement in the Hasty Mart stickup. He said he had borrowed his brother's car and, at Demouchet's instructions, had driven Francis and Demouchet to the Hasty Mart. It was 2:45 p.m. Demouchet told him to wait in the car with the motor running while they went inside "to get something to drink." Next thing he knew, Francis and Demouchet came running out of the store, Demouchet with blood on his hands and a gun, saying he "killed the bitch" (criminal speak for a victim, male or female); Francis was carrying a sack of change. Roy returned to New Iberia, dropped them off at the projects, and went to his mother's house, returning the car to his brother.

His account corroborated important elements of Francis's confession a week earlier. Demouchet was the shooter; Francis emerged with a bag of coins; and the time of the crime was 2:45 p.m. Neither Francis nor Roy knew that an eyewitness had described the getaway car as light blue, which was the color of Roy's brother's two-door 1973 Pontiac LeMans.

And then the unthinkable happened. The police refused to accept the killers' confession. They told Roy that they didn't believe him. In fact, Sheriff Wattigny threatened him with jail for lying. Under pressure to recant, Roy came up with another story, one that explained his confession to the sheriff. He said he wanted to go to jail to get out of his marriage. Wattigny and his deputies didn't choose to believe this either. They dragged his wife down to the station and watched—no doubt amused—as she chewed out her young husband. At last, dejected and defeated, Roy gave a third statement, this time with the help of the deputies. He said Iran Alexander (David's father) had offered him $45,000 to take the fall for his son; that Iran gave him a one-and-a-half-page typewritten story to memorize and instructed him to burn it, which he did. Once Roy signed this retraction (and false accusation of bribery) at 3:45 p.m. , he was free to go home with no charges.

Fearful of where it would lead, the sheriff's investigators did not investigate Roy's bribery claims, nor did they interview the car's owner, Roy's brother Joseph, to see if he had indeed loaned his car to Roy on the day of the Gladu murder. The sheriffs never showed Roy's car or took a photo of it to show to eyewitnesses Abney and Eldridge. They also failed to compare the car's tire treads to those found at the end of the gravel road.

Two days later, on July 8, Francis, too, retracted his confession, telling Comeaux and Wattigny in a statement suspiciously similar to Roy's that he had been offered $4,500 by Theresa Collins, John Collins's mother, to say her son was innocent and that Francis and the others were the guilty ones. He said that she had visited him in jail, giving him her offer in a typewritten note, which he'd had his cellmate read to him. Francis said he flushed the note down the toilet and was never contacted again by Mrs. Collins or anyone else about the offer. Nevertheless, he said this proposal inspired him to recant his confession. No charges were ever brought against Theresa Collins or Iran Alexander for their alleged attempts at bribery.

The prosecution now had what they needed to account for the Hasty Mart confessions of Francis and Roy. On July 14, DA Burke wrote a letter to the defendants' attorneys informing them of the false confessions and the bribery attempts by Iran Alexander and Theresa Collins. In this letter Burke stated, falsely, that Jerry Paul Francis's July 1 confession was "replete with inconsistencies and errors of fact…and the falsity of his account was quickly established."

The biggest challenge now for Dracos Burke and the sheriff's investigators was how to get the .32 Clerke out of the hands of Demouchet and into the hands of Alexander so they could make the case that Alexander used it to shoot Gladu. They came up with a "gun swap" story. It began in an interview with Demouchet in Burke's office on June 29 with Comeaux and Moore in attendance. According to Burke's notes, the interview's purpose was to determine how the .32 got used in the Hasty Mart crime by Alexander when the gun belonged to Demouchet. A one-hour conversation resolved the problem. Demouchet said that he loaned the gun to Alexander on March 25 so that Alexander could "pull a job"; and that Alexander returned it to him on April 2. This gun swap became official history when Comeaux took a statement from Demouchet on July 10. Demouchet told of "hocking" the pistol to Alexander on March 23 for twenty dollars with Alexander promising to return the gun to him the following week. Demouchet said he loaded the gun with five .32 bullets at Alexander's insistence. This time he said that Alexander returned the gun to him on April 1.

To make everything appear aboveboard, at an in-chambers meeting with trial judge Robert Johnson and the defendants' attorneys on August 4, Burke briefed them on Demouchet's July 10 statement, adding that the same .32 Clerke was used by Demouchet and Francis in a few other crimes, including "a bank robbery in Parks and a store in Rayne." He then sent them a transcription of Francis's recorded July 8 statement and Malcolm Roy's July 6 statement that recanted their confessions to the Hasty Mart crime and told of the alleged bribery attempts. The cover-up was complete.

David Alexander and Harry Granger were tried together on September 13–17, 1976. (John Collins and Ronnie Miller were given a later trial date because Collins's attorney needed a medical procedure.) Their original indictment for first-degree murder had carried with it a possible death penalty, but the U.S. Supreme Court declared Louisiana's death penalty unconstitutional in July while they were awaiting trial. Without a death penalty to aim for, the DA decided to try them solely for armed robbery, because that only required ten out of the twelve jurors to vote guilty. In the weeks leading up to the trial, Burke offered Granger total immunity if he would testify against Alexander. Granger refused, telling his lawyer to tell Burke that he had no idea who committed the murder and that he would not lie to point a finger at Alexander or anyone else.

The Alexander family could only gather $8,000 for an attorney. That was enough to retain the prominent Alexandria law firm of Camille Gravel, which assigned a young and promising attorney, Mike Small, to represent Alexander. Harry Granger was indigent and therefore had to depend on a court-appointed lawyer, the inexperienced Jerry Theriot, who proved to be inept and in way over his head, explaining to the jury that he would depend on Small since "Mr. Alexander's defense will be Mr. Granger's." He was hardly heard from again, rarely asking a question during cross-examination. At trial, the defense was hamstrung by Burke's refusal to turn over his witnesses' pretrial statements, maintaining that Louisiana law at the time only required him to provide them if they were "exculpatory." His response to Small's request for this information contained this preposterous line: "The State has no evidence exculpating the defendants."

At trial, Katherine Eldridge testified that she didn't see any cars on the road when she drove from her house to the Hasty Mart. Her testimony conflicted with what she had told others before and after the trial; namely that she had seen a light blue car about to turn out of the gravel driveway, which then sped by when she pulled into the Hasty Mart. This is what she had testified to in her original witness statement and to the grand jury. But now, she avoided mention of the car at the behest of Captain Comeaux, who had a vested interest in the car being dark, rather than light, blue. In addition, although the Acadiana Crime Lab had found that Alexander's tire treads did not match those in the gravel road, the authorities did not reveal this crucial fact to the defense. Such information, in combination with Eldridge's original witness statement, could have refuted Ellen Abney's and Mary Arceneaux's identification of Alexander's car at trial as the one used by the killers.

Mary Arceneaux and Herbert Derouen carried the load for the State. Both enhanced their pretrial statements. Key among Mary's many changes was her story about Cypress Island. Now, at trial, she testified that after the robbery, she and her fellow criminals drove to Cypress Island to kill time, making no mention of her earlier story about burying the gun and bloody shirt there. In fact, she now said she had no idea what Alexander had done with the gun. The last she knew, it was under his car seat wrapped in his bloody T-shirt. According to her, after Cypress Island they had returned to St. Martinville around dusk and gone to the Candle Light Lounge to talk for a while.

Mary also testified that she had never been convicted of any offenses other than the 1974 forgery charge, when, in fact, she had at least twenty convictions when she was in her thirties alone. That's not counting however many she had in her twenties. Burke stood silently by and let that falsehood go uncorrected. In post-conviction appeals, Burke inaccurately asserted that Mary's "trial testimony was consistent with her initial statements to law enforcement officers."

Derouen's trial testimony added significantly to what he had originally told his sheriff's office interviewers. Key among his additions was an account of a so-called dry run by all seven participants, who drove in two cars to the Hasty Mart the night before. Also for the first time, Derouen described Alexander running out of the store after shooting the victim and telling Miller to meet him in St. Martinville at the Candle Light Lounge. According to Derouen, Alexander was still wearing his bloody shirt when they met in St. Martinville and had put the gun under the driver's seat.

Small's cross-examination ridiculed Derouen's nonsensical version of events. Derouen had testified on direct that he got off work that day at 2:10. Small asked him to look at the courtroom wall clock and tell the time. He couldn't. Under Small's cross, Derouen admitted that none of the six who entered the store had any assigned roles to play there; that he just went along for the ride; that he didn't know any of them well; that he never gave any thought as to why six men and two cars were needed to hold up a store in broad daylight; that it didn't bother him that he was going to do something "bad" with people he didn't know; and there had not been any talk the night before about meeting at the club after the robbery. It just happened on the fly when David Alexander fled the store after shooting the man.

Burke intended to wrap up his case with witnesses Preston Demouchet and Jerry Paul Francis, but Demouchet came prepared to double-cross him. Demouchet denied he ever loaned the .32 Clerke to Alexander. He said it wasn't even his gun. He also disavowed the statement he had given the police on July 10 about the so-called "gun swap." Comeaux was the one who came up with that story, he said, and Demouchet had agreed to it just to get Comeaux, who was constantly harassing him, off his back. He concluded his testimony stating, "I've never given David Alexander no kind of pistol. None whatsoever."

When questioned in front of the jury by prosecutor Burke and cross-examined by defense attorney Small concerning his involvement in the Hasty Mart crimes, Jerry Paul Francis pleaded the Fifth a total of twenty-three times, repeatedly asserting his constitutional right not to incriminate himself. Both sides tried to use him to their advantage, asking questions that introduced their version of events. Burke asked him if he'd told Comeaux he was promised money to take the blame for the Hasty Mart killing. Small asked him if he recalled giving a detailed statement to Comeaux admitting that he committed the crime with Demouchet and Malcolm Roy. In both cases he pleaded the Fifth. With that, the State rested.

The defense attempted to establish Alexander's alibi for the afternoon of March 30 through the testimony of one Gail Guidry, who told the jury that Alexander picked her up in his cab at 2:30 to take her to work that day. Under cross, she conceded that she'd had help from the defense recalling that the day was March 30. Alexander's mother, the cab's dispatcher, was ready to present the taxicab logs for Alexander's fares that day, but Small did not call her because he noticed that the log for the 30th was printed neatly, unlike the log's other days. Granger was unable to present an alibi because his witnesses could only account for his presence on the 31st, not the 30th.

The key witness for the defense was Malcolm Roy. One week before the trial, Roy testified at a preliminary hearing, once again confessing to the Hasty Mart crime. Angered by his effrontery, the authorities arrested and charged him with filing a false police report—that is, his Hasty Mart confession. At trial, Small read his confession statement of July 6 and the recantation statement he made that same day. Roy bravely insisted that his confession was true and his retraction was false. He agreed that Small had warned him that by testifying he could be prosecuted for armed robbery and murder, and now for perjury, and that no one at any time had promised or provided him with any kind of benefit for his testimony. He then, once again, told the story of how he had committed the Hasty Mart crime with Demouchet and Francis. Under cross, Burke warned him that he was waiving his right not to incriminate himself. Undeterred, Roy told the jury that he was confessing because he hadn't been able to sleep and it had been on his conscience ever since March 30. He said that he had no idea Demouchet was going to rob the store, let alone kill anyone.

Morris Lee, Derouen's carpenter boss, informed the jury that he was positive Derouen worked for him from 1:00 until 3:30 the afternoon of March 30 and that he always drove him to and from work because Derouen had no means of transportation. He had shown Derouen's work records to Deputy Chief Jim Desormeaux. Under cross by Small, Desormeaux testified that he had known Lee for some time, and had no reason to doubt him, stating, "I thought he was telling the truth." Alexander testified, declaring his innocence. Granger reluctantly agreed not to testify, given his highly agitated emotional state throughout the trial.

Unfortunately, when it came time for his summation, Small was not up to the task. To the defendants' detriment, he gratuitously praised local law enforcement, including the sheriff's investigators and Burke, as men who would not lie or encourage their witnesses to lie. Other than currying favor with Iberia Parish law enforcement, his unwarranted defense of their integrity was inexplicable. He also expressed a hint of uncertainty concerning the defendants' innocence: "If they did this, they deserve to go to the penitentiary." At the same time, Small properly ridiculed the State's reliance on the conflicting and obviously false stories offered by Mary and Derouen, and mocked the State for dismissing clear and convincing evidence pointing to the guilt of Demouchet and Francis. Theriot's summation was incredibly brief—a mere two pages of transcript. He did little more than ask the jury to consider the concept of reasonable doubt that the judge would explain to them in his charge. Absent an advocate, Harry Granger never had a chance.

When the second day of testimony had concluded, the case went to the jury at 8:00 p.m. It is unclear from the record how long the jury was out, but it was the same day, September 17, that in a 10–2 vote, it returned verdicts of guilty for both defendants. When the verdicts were announced, Granger was so angry that he punched Steve Woodring, who was standing next to him, and then promptly fainted. On October 16, Alexander and Granger, standing together, faced the judge for sentencing. When asked if he had anything to say before sentencing, Alexander replied, "I didn't rob nobody. I didn't kill nobody. All of you here know it. They got a God in heaven, man." When he, too, was asked, Granger simply said, "I agree with him." The judge then sentenced each man to ninety-nine years of hard labor for the crime of armed robbery. Their next stop would be the infamous Angola state prison.

Not knowing what to do with Rene Jackson, the third man in Miller's cab according to Derouen, Burke decided to dismiss all charges against him. On November 30, Burke had Jackson committed to the Central Louisiana State Hospital for clinical evaluation. The treatment team diagnosed him with a severe intellectual impairment and noted that he didn't know his age and could not recite his ABCs or count. The report stated he had spent the last nine months in jail for crimes he insisted he didn't do. He was not considered dangerous by his team of doctors, and they returned him home a completely free man on December 7, one week after admission. This was the same man who Derouen claimed to the police in his first statement had chased him outside the store after the shooting and forced him back to Miller's car at knifepoint. On December 6, the day before Jackson was released from custody, his devoted father, who had vowed that he would go to his grave knowing his son was innocent, died of an asthma attack.

John Collins and Ronald Miller were terrified at the prospect of serving a ninety-nine-year sentence at Angola. Their trial was set for Monday, January 24, 1977. The chances of acquittal were slim, since the same witnesses used to convict Alexander and Granger would incriminate them. Surprisingly, Dracos Burke offered a lifeline. If they would plead guilty to accessory after the fact, he would dismiss the armed robbery and murder charges and allow them to spend their sentence in the parish jail rather than Angola. If the judge gave them the maximum, five years, they would be out in two to three years. He threw in home visits as a sweetener. Because the prospect of Angola prison was more than either could bear, and with the encouragement of their families and friends, they reluctantly swallowed the bitter pill of admitting involvement in a horrible crime in which they had not actually been involved. Collins had a wife and three children to consider and Miller, unmarried, had his mother to think of. Several days before the trial, the judge gave them the five-year maximum. They served two of those years and then came home on parole.

Ironically, both men lied, incriminating themselves, to avoid a possible life sentence in Angola, but earlier had refused to lie in order to incriminate Alexander and Granger as part of an immunity deal offered by Burke.

—

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.

—

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."