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Commutation of sentence.

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The recent commutation of Roger Stone’s 40-month federal prison term just days before he was scheduled to report to a penal facility to begin that term triggered an avalanche is criticism about corruption in the executive clemency process.

I know a thing or two about corruption and clemency.

In August 1986, my wife and I reported to the FBI about a massive pardons-selling scheme in place at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. It became the largest “pardons-selling corruption” investigation in Louisiana history.

Jodie  wore a wire for the FBI during their investigation of the scheme—a criminal enterprise that implicated former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, the governor’s executive counsel, his legislative floor leader, his pardon board chairman, a host of prison officials, and a litany of Dixie Mafia henchmen at Angola.

The whole scheme was laid out in my memoir, co-written with my wife, and released through a New York publisher in 2000, titled, “A Life in the Balance.”

To say we paid a hell of a price for being whistleblowers would be a proverbial understatement.

It nearly cost me my life as the hands of a Dixie Mafia henchman and most assuredly caused me to spend 20 more years in prison while every inmate who “bought a pardon” went free.

Being labeled an “FBI informant” resulted in my reputation as an award-winning prison journalist being criticized in a New York Times editorial (seriously, The New York Times said I had a higher ethical duty to protect journalism over a legal obligation to report criminal wrongdoing). It also produced articles in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review and a host of newspapers like the New Orleans Times Picayune critical of my FBI informant role.

And while the Times was editorializing against me for doing the right thing, the head of the Dixie Mafia was operating a $2 million “homosexual mail scam” inside Angola—a scam federal prosecutors would later say earned him at least $2. 4 million put away in three bank accounts the federal government could not touch.

I was told by Kirksey McCord Nix’s right-hand man and two State Police investigators that the mafia chieftain had put at least $500,000 in the Louisiana pardons selling pipeline through a Biloxi, Mississippi attorney named Peter Halat.

Halat had been law partners with a prominent Biloxi judge named Vincent Sherry since 1981.

In arrangements made by Nix’s wife, who was overseeing Nix’s criminal enterprise out of Halat’s law office, the attorney had supposedly given the money to a Mississippi sheriff, a longtime friend and hunting buddy of Gov. Edwards, as payment for a commutation of the life sentence Nix was serving for a 1972 murder that occurred in New Orleans.

Our exposure of the pardons-selling scheme, of course, disrupted Nix’s commutation plans.

After my debriefing by the FBI in November 1986 and my appearance the following month before a state grand jury, the State Police’s launched an investigation into a broad range of corruption issues at Angola. That investigation began to develop information about how widespread the Dixie Mafia’s influence was at Angola.

Without good reason, the Louisiana Corrections Secretary, reportedly at the direction of the governor, stepped in and ordered State Police investigators out of Angola. That action by the Secretary put an end to the State Police investigation into Nix’s multi-million dollar criminal enterprise.

The decision to end the Angola investigation occurred in February 1987.

With his commutation chances blown up by our exposure of the pardons selling scheme, Nix instructed Halat to return his $500,000. At the time, Halat was amassing a war chest for his eventual 1989 election as mayor of Biloxi. He needed Nix’s money to underwrite that election campaign.

Knowing how dangerous Nix was, Halat told the Dixie Mafia chieftain that Vincent Sherry had “ripped off” the money in order to secure his 1986 appointment to a state court judgeship.

That was a lie and a gross betrayal of the friendship Vincent Sherry had given to Halat.

Furious, Nix initiated a plan through a Biloxi strip club owner, with deep ties to the Dixie Mafia, to have Vincent Sherry killed. The strip club owner, Mike Gillich, was more than willing to orchestrate the contract killing Judge Sherry and, in fact, added the judge’s wife, Margaret, to the hit list because she had long crusaded against the corrupt influences of his strip club operations while she was on the Biloxi City Council.

Through arrangements reportedly made by Gillich, a contract killer was brought in from Texas to carry out the Sherry contract killings.

In September 1987, Vincent and Margaret Sherry were brutally murdered in their exclusive Biloxi residence. Their double murder drew national and international media attention.

The Sherry murders would not have taken place had the State Police been allowed to continue their February 1987 investigation into Nix’s corrupt enterprises at Angola. The plot to kill Judge Sherry was already in its early stages when the State Police investigation was abruptly shut down by the Louisiana Corrections Secretary. Had it been allowed to continue, that investigation would have led to the Sherry murder plot and their murders would have been averted.

Of course, the Corrections Secretary had the cover of the New York Times editorial to undermine the integrity of the pardons-selling investigation—all of which was used to create a tacit pathway to shut down the State Police investigation into Nix’s criminal enterprise.

In the wake of both the state and federal pardons-selling investigations, this is what the political landscape looked like in 1987-88:

 Gov. Edwards escaped liability as did his executive counsel; the legislative floor leader was indicted but acquitted at a jury trial; the pardon board chairman was indicted, pled guilty, and received a 5-year federal prison term; several prison officials, including the one who tried to broker the deal with me and Jodie, were indicted, pled guilty, and received probation; two Angola wardens, including the head warden, were forced to resign as were a laundry list of other prison officials; and all the inmates who bought pardons were allowed to keep them and they all were released from prison.

In March 1988, Louisiana’s first truly “reform” governor assumed the reins of power. One of his first actions was to reopen the Angola corruption investigation by naming an elite 17-man State Police task force to complete their 1987 investigation.

That task force investigation led state and federal authorities to Nix’s role in the Sherry murders.

An ensuing FBI investigation discovered the Dixie Mafia’ involvement in those murders. 

Subsequent federal prosecutions convicted Nix, the Texas hitman, the strip club owner, and Peter Halat for related conspiracies in the Sherry murders.

The hitman died in a federal prison and the strip club owner gained early release to die of cancer in the free world.

Halat served 15 years of an 18-year prison term before being released in 2012 and is now living in retirement with his wife.

Nix is locked away in a federal super max prison in Colorado where he will spend the rest of his life.

Three Dixie Mafia henchmen who cooperated with the initial 1987 Angola corruption investigation were mysteriously gunned down in different Louisiana parishes within weeks of their release from prison. None of their killers were ever captured.

And what about me and Jodie?

Just days after I testified before a state grand jury investigating the “pardons-selling scheme” and exploring corruption at Angola, Gov. Edwards, on the advice of his executive counsel, denied a 60-year commutation of my life sentence which had been unanimously recommended by his pardon board two years earlier.

It was calculated political revenge and a message to any other inmate thinking about telling what they knew.

The long and short of it is that Jodie and I refused to pay the $15,000 for my corrupt release in 1986.

Twenty years later, in 2006, we paid $25,000 to the best attorney in Louisiana to create a level political playing field in order to secure my parole release from the Louisiana prison system.

“Why didn’t you just pay the money to buy a pardon,” we’ve been asked a million times.

Because it would have been crime to do so  — and to this day I don’t give a f..k what the New York Times said, I had a greater legal obligation to report corruption than to protect any perceived “journalism integrity” a prison magazine may have had—incidentally, one of whose staffers had, ironically, paid $5,000 to buy a pardon.

That was my experience in the executive clemency arena.

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Executions

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Each in its own way has a distinct foul smell.

This past Wednesday the State of Texas executed Billy Joe Wardlow. He was 18 years old when he killed a man during a robbery attempt. It took the State 25 years to execute the man—despite a host of state legislators, neuroscientists and two members of his jury urging that he be spared that fate.

U.S. Attorney Bill Barr has been waging a year-long legal effort to have five federal inmates executed—one of whom was scheduled to die Monday but whose execution was postponed by a federal judge after the victim’s family, who do not support the execution, said their personal safety would be put at risk traveling through the Covid virus to attend execution process.

The three remaining federal inmates scheduled to die over the next six weeks probably will not be as fortunate as the federal inmate who just had his execution postponed. Pandemic be damn, the show must go on.

What does it say about the nation’s criminal justice system when state and federal governments find a need to execute people in perhaps the worst pandemic in our history?

It doesn’t say a lot – and that’s why choking, shooting, kicking, and beating innocent or minor offenders to death by the police in full view of the world is accepted by at least 50 million people in this country as “law and order;” and why the scolding, choking, stomping, beating, and actual murder of mentally challenged or otherwise unruly prison inmates is considered by even more people to be “effective disciplinary control” measures.

Though sanitized, lethal injection, the very method by which most condemned inmates are put to death in this country, is the cruelest, most inhumane, and most tortuous method ever devised to carry out state-sanctioned executions in this country.

Botched electrocutions (some of which set the condemned on fire), bungled hangings (some of which left the condemned dangling and kicking for as long as 27 minutes), and cyanide gas chambers (some of which left the condemned slamming their heads back against the metal pole of the death chair) pale in comparison to the methodical and indifferent protocol involved in a lethal injection—the condemned inmate strapped to a gurney as much as an hour before the execution process gets underway, IVs inserted in whatever veins are available, and a mixture of drugs sent coursing through those veins that literally paralyze and slowly suffocates the life out of the condemned inmate.

More than 132,000 people have died as a result of governmental incompetence, mismanagement, lies, and the politicization of the coronavirus pandemic—and governments at both the state and federal level are now effectively forcing the victim families to expose themselves to an execution process that could possibly kill them.

And for what?

Justice? Revenge? Or just plain human population reduction?

That is where we are, folks.

Some saying old folks should just step up to the plate, accept the virus, and get on down the road to death because they are on their last leg of life’s journey anyway. Let the young folks live and party in an open society.

May as well throw a few executions in the social mix just to show how hard, mean and callous we have become as a society.

I guess the government will be lighting the fires for the “witches” next.

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Life’s paradoxes.

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In 1968, C. Murray Henderson became warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, more commonly known as “Angola” or “the Alcatraz of the South.” The Tennessee native was hailed as a “reformer” who would bring Angola into the 20th century. He failed miserably at the task.

Henderson was tagged to be Angola’s warden by former Gov. John “Big John“ McKeithen.

An 18,000-acre prison plantation, Angola at the time was the largest prison in the nation, and like most other southern prisons was steeped in political corruption. McKeithen was the only governor in Louisiana history to campaign for votes inside the prison.

In 1964, Big John walked up and down the prison’s Big Yard passing out campaign buttons, telling the inmates, “tell your mommas and daddies to vote for Big John.”

During Big John’s two tenures in office (1964-1972), he rewarded the inmates with more than 2,500 pardons (most at a price of $1500) and “special paroles” (most at a price of $500). Big John never met a dollar he didn’t like.

Angola was not receptive to Henderson’s notions about “prison penology.” The prison was ruled by an entrenched all-white security force—most of who were either in the KKK or affiliated with the group. Security, and most inmate discipline, at the prison was maintained by “convict guards”—shotgun toting inmates, most of whom were lifers convicted of murder or rape, who enjoyed any opportunity to brutalize and kill inmates.

The hatred between convicts and convict guards made Lake Michigan look like a Petri dish.

A combination of Henderson’s professional incompetence, personal corruption, and alcoholism managed to transform Angola from a human sewage pit into “the bloodiest prison in America.”

A 1975 federal court ruling that declared the entire prison unconstitutionally “cruel and unusual” ultimately forced the 55-year-old warden to resign and return to Tennessee where he was tagged by Gov. Ray Blanton to be the “commissioner” of that state’s notoriously brutal prison system.

That gig lasted only several years before Blanton was convicted in a “parole-selling” scheme that landed him in a federal prison and Henderson without a job. Henderson did earn the penal distinction of letting James Earl Ray escape from the Tennessee Brushy Mountain Prison in June 1977 under his watch.

Henderson returned to Louisiana where he was placed in charge of the state’s hospital for the criminally insane – a St. Francisville facility that also came under intense Federal court scrutiny. He then met, and married, a local journalist and freelance writer named Ann Butler.

Together, the couple wrote and published several books about Angola, its famous characters and events. Butler would later state a creative claim to all the “writing” in the books, crediting Henderson with only being a source of information in those literary endeavors.

C. Murray Henderson was tortured by two insatiable human appetites: a need for professional recognition of his penal accomplishments and an abiding personal need for alcohol that begged 12-step intervention. These needs did not mix well.

The limited regional interest in Henderson’s “books” quickly faded. Time slowly chewed him up and spat out the ugly human remains. When the grandeur of being a great “book” author did not materialize, he was left with a troubled marriage, a sense of failure, and an unlimited supply of booze. It was a recipe for a human tragedy.

In 1998, that human tragedy exploded when Henderson, in a drunken state, shot Ann Butler five times with a .38 caliber pistol following a domestic dispute.

He then sat and watched the blood flow from her serious wounds. Although she survived the murder attempt, a series of painful operations and physical therapy wiped out her personal savings.

Henderson was convicted and sent to the Wade Correctional Center with a 50-year sentence. He was placed in the same unit where I was housed. He arrived at the prison facility just like any other inmate. Obviously disoriented, the former warden was humble, polite, and eager to please his new “inmate friends.” He regaled them with embellished stories about the inmates he had saved or whose releases he had secured through pardons or paroles.

The Angola he remembered, and spoke so fondly about with both inmates and guards, was not the same prison I knew. He recalled it as a place of love, respect, and honor among keeper and kept; a place of good food, clean living conditions, and a safe environment in which all the inmates’ personal needs were met.

The ex-warden became known as “Mr. Henderson” to Wade inmates and guards. He was accorded official deference with a litany of special favors and privileges. He had his own valet, an inmate who shined his shoes, cleaned his cell, and carried his meals to his cell. Henderson would buy the valet large “canteen orders” in exchange for the special services.

He had been in the unit only several weeks before he became crippled with gout and had to be put in a wheel chair. He could only be bathed in the prison infirmary. No one wanted that task, not even the valet. I volunteered to do it. Each day I pushed his wheel chair to the infirmary, undressed him in a large bath area, and bathed him.

I had never bathed another man in my life – and there I was bathing a former warden of Angola who had once been my bitter enemy; the man I had filed so many lawsuits against I couldn’t remember the number.

Life is indeed filled with paradoxes.

And there we were—two paradoxes. One of Louisiana’s most “rehabilitated inmates” bathing one of the state’s most “disgraced wardens.”

I listened to his Angola stories as I lathered his shriveled body with soap knowing they were lies—embellished recollections of an old alcoholic who had long ago lost contact with reality.

Still, I treated him with the utmost respect. I called him “Mr. Henderson.” I didn’t even call the Warden “Mister.” My wife, who had met Henderson on several occasions, thought the world of the old man. She was always extremely kind and affectionate toward him.

Gradually the old warden’s social standing began to erode – his quick temper, a sense of class arrogance, and constant “complaining” gnawed away at his popularity among fellow inmates.

But it was his perverse penchant for the Jerry Springer show – a program he watched religiously – and his prurient interest in hardcore pornography that did not sit well with those inmates who had placed him on a higher intellectual plain.

“Why that ole sonuvabitch ain’t nothin’ but another ‘dirty ole man’,” some exclaimed.

Then came the release of my memoir, “A Life In the Balance.” The book offered a markedly different view of Angola than the one Henderson had presented. While the former warden never said a word to me about the book, he made it clear to others that he was “furious” about the way he was portrayed in it.

Henderson conveyed his anger about “Balance” to Warden Kelly Ward who was not pleased with memoir either because it cast the state prison system in a bad light.

Ward’s anger was not surprising. He felt an allegiance to Henderson who had introduced him to the corrections field as a classification officer at Angola in the early 1970s.

So I was not surprised when Ward summoned me to the prison’s “security office” where he made it clear that he was not pleased with the way Henderson had been portrayed in the memoir.

 “You got your ‘facts’ wrong, Sinclair,” the warden charged, sitting behind the desk in the security office. “There was nothing in the public record that Warden Henderson was ‘drunk’ when he shot his wife.”

I was not intimidated by Ward. He was a pseudo-intellectual who had wormed his way through the corrections system to become a warden of his own prison.

“Jodie and I got our ‘facts’ right, Warden,” I replied. “Jodie got that information from Henderson’s own daughter. You want to fact-check that?”

We stared at each other across a chasm that could never be breached. Ward casually dismissed me with a wave of the hand toward the office door.

On the heels of “Balance,” Henderson’s conviction and sentence were upheld on appeal. He became more sullen, withdrawn.

Then he faced the publication of yet another book. This one titled “Weep for the Living” written by Ann Butler. It recounted her life with Henderson, including fresh and graphic details about how he tried to kill her. “Weep for the Living” shredded whatever remnants that were left of Henderson’s good name. He was truly crushed.

I still spoke to the ex-warden but only when necessary. My wife had a kindly sentiments for him. I did not share those sentiments. I could not forget the wasted blood, the official corruption, and brutality under his watch at Angola.

In 2003 the former warden sought, and was denied, clemency from the outgoing pardon board under the administration of former Gov. Mike Foster. He could not recover from that devastating denial. He accepted a prison death – and it came in 2004 in a prison infirmary at the Hunt Correctional Center near Baton Rouge. He was 84 years of age.

He died a beaten, and bitter, old man.

Two years after Henderson’s death I walked out of prison a free man. I survived the likes of him for 40 years.

Life’s paradoxes.

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MY TAKE ON “LOVE BEHIND BARS” BY RICHARD HAND

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It was 1971.  I was a young lawyer living in Baton Rouge who was appointed to represent a man on death row at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary.  The prisoner’s name was Billy Wayne Sinclair.  He had commenced an action on behalf of himself and other death row inmates to gain exercise rights and access to medical care.  Thereafter, I made many trips up to Angola, driving 25 miles or so north to St. Francisville and then another 15 miles west on a winding road through the Tunica Hills to the prison. 

I always had to steel myself for those trips.  For one thing, it always seemed to rain, and not just rain, but driving, bucketsful of water falling on the car, making the drive perilous. The guards were at best dismissive; at worst rude and coarse.  The noise, smells, clamor and cursing on the cellblock assaulted my senses.  The stories I heard assaulted my sensibilities.  I was always glad to get home to see and be with my young wife.

In her autobiography, “Love Behind Bars: The True Story of an American Prisoner’s Wife,” ” Jodie Sinclair tells of the myriad journeys, much longer and more arduous than mine ever were, that she made for 25 years to see Billy Sinclair, the former death row inmate that I represented 49 years ago.  

 She left her home in Houston every other weekend, without fail, to be with him, often for just an hour or two – wherever the arbitrary and punitive transfers engaged in by the Louisiana prison system landed Billy – first to Angola,  then to the State Police Barracks in Baton Rouge, then to the far northern reaches of the state to a prison just outside Homer, and finally to a prison just north of Lake Charles.

After reading Jodie’s book, you will hardly know what to think.  Could there possibly be a prison administration as venal, corrupt, and downright cruel as the one Jodie Sinclair found herself up against?  Could an East Baton Rouge family possibly have such deep political roots and connections as to be able to exact a measure of punishment (and revenge) so disproportionately extreme and punitive compared to other similarly situated prisoners?  Could the political machinations, hidden agendas, and blind alleys Jodie always seemed to encounter from every corner of Louisiana’s criminal justice system ever be exposed and brought to account?

Rather than providing answers, Jodie Sinclair’s book details the challenging and mind-numbing realities she faced and what she brought to the fight – endurance, courage, stubbornness, a razor sharp intelligence and a faith in her husband that refused to be shaken or denied. 

In his autobiography, a “Life in the Balance: The Billy Sinclair Story,”  published in 2000, Billy tells the improbable story of his  journey through an otherworldly harsh, unforgiving landscape, detailing the manner in which this country chooses to impose its punishments. 

Jodie’s autobiography “Love Behind Bars” tells a different story – one of a system, pockmarked with evil and an abiding disregard for the humanity of people who pass through it, that was ultimately defeated by the power and promise of two people in love. 

In the end, it is a singularly riveting love story, pure and simple.   And I urge you to pick it up and read it.  After you’ve finished, nothing will seem to exist beyond the power of your own abilities.     

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A serial rapist cop

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There have been a lot of cop stories lately but none like Ernest Randall Comeaux.

Between the late 1980s and mid-1990s a series of brutal rapes terrorized the southern part of Lafayette Parish as well as several adjacent parishes. The first rape occurred on November 2, 1986. It took the Lafayette Police Department nine years before it officially began investigating the possibility that the sexual assaults were being committed by the same assailant.

Finally, in 1997 the local police were able through DNA evidence to connect six of the rapes to one assailant. It was only then that the local police began looking for a “serial rapist.”

Comeaux was hired by the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Department in 1979. He rose rather rapidly through the ranks, becoming a detective in the department’s juvenile division investigating physical and sexual abuse of children. During that rise through the department, Comeaux was investigated on three separate occasions by the department’s Internal Affairs Division for reasons never made public.

But one complaint to Internal Affairs was made public.

In 1992, a girlfriend of Comeaux filed a complaint with Internal Affairs claiming she had been physically abused by the cop. The girlfriend told Internal Affairs that Comeaux should not be working in the juvenile division because he was a “sex addict” and was “sexually perverted.” The ensuing IA investigation was terminated as “inconclusive” and no action was taken against Comeaux. He remained in the juvenile division.

In September 1997, a law enforcement “task force” was set up to investigate the “serial rapist” case. In addition to the Lafayette Police Department, the task force included the parish sheriff’s department, the FBI, and the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Despite repeated rumors in the Lafayette community that the rapes had been committed by someone in “law enforcement,” the task force failed to investigate the rumors. The task force was disbanded after only seven months of investigation without producing any suspects.

Then in November 1998 Captain James Craft received information from an anonymous caller that investigators should “investigate Randy Comeaux” in connection with the rapes. Comeaux was still assigned to the juvenile division at the time. He also worked part time at a local supermarket as a private “security guard.” Craft and other detectives set up a surveillance of Comeaux’s work habits at the supermarket. They discovered he took a “smoke break” each night at the same time, always throwing the cigarette butt on the pavement nearby.

Following one of these smoke breaks (according to Comeaux), the detectives collected a discarded cigarette butt Comeaux had smoked. They conducted a DNA analysis of the salvia on the cigarette butt. It matched the DNA evidence collected in the “serial rapist” case. The detectives arrested Comeaux and he immediately confessed to being the rapist.

Comeaux is an enigma.

I got to know him in a protection unit at the Wade Correctional Center. The unit had initially been created for ex-cops convicted of criminal wrongdoing but soon morphed into a protection unit for pedophile priests, juveniles convicted as adults, and high-profile government witnesses (which is why I was housed in the unit).

Comeaux and I worked together in the prison laundry. That working relationship evolved into a talking relationship that opened the door to many long, philosophical discussions. The ex-cop spoke freely to me. I was a famous prison journalist, a published author, and a jailhouse lawyer. As strange as it may sound, I became Comeaux’s role model. He craved my attention and interest. He wanted me to either write his “story” or help him write it.

Although I got to know a lot about his personal life, I could never figure out the contradictions that seem to define him.

As a cop in the juvenile division, he came in contact with many children who had been physically and sexually abused. He despised the offenders who abused them.

“No matter what else can be said about me,” he said, “I did not molest children. I was not a child molester. My victims were grown women. They were not children. I’m not like some of the sick child molesting sonuvabitches in this unit. I’m not one of them.”

Yet, as a rapist, he could enter a woman’s home, force her to undress, stick his service revolver in her mouth, draw her panties over his head, and have sex with her. He always carried out his sexual assaults within hours of targeting his victims. He was, as the girlfriend described, a “sex pervert.” He didn’t seem to mind that label, but he deeply resented being called a “sex offender.”

Comeaux was a “good inmate.” He did not violate the rules. He obeyed instructions from prison officials. He diligently performed his prison job assignments. He despised official preferential treatment given to inmates and the corruption associated with that practice.       

Comeaux is serving six life sentences without the benefit of parole. Three of those sentences must be served consecutively. He has already made funeral arrangements for the death that will surely come in prison.

Yet, in a perverse way, he stubbornly clings to a remote hope that he will one day be a free man again. He is a devout Catholic who worships at the altar of the Virgin Mary. He loves the hope she inspires. He hopes that in the end the Virgin Mary will somehow spare him a prison death.

But he understands that a life sentence in Louisiana must be served without the benefit of parole. The only hope for release is through the state’s executive clemency process – a rare hope inasmuch as there are nearly 6,000 lifers in the state’s prison system, and that hope is even more remote for those offenders convicted of rape, much less serial rapes.

I did not like or dislike Comeaux. Everyone in N5 called him “Ernie.” He did not fit into the general prison profile of a sex offender. But beyond a doubt that is precisely what he was: “serial rapist” who stalked the community he was sworn to “protect and serve” in search of vulnerable women to rape.

Local law enforcement efforts to apprehend the “serial rapist” were criticized by victims as being inept. Some of the victims early on theorized the “serial rapist” was a cop. They conveyed to investigators that the rapist knew the right entry points into a residence, carried a .38 special, a flashlight, and had an air of authority about him.

The serial rapist “task force” did bring in a Canadian expert in “geographic profiling” to see if he could pinpoint a “red zone,” the area of the city in which the rapist lived. The expert in fact provided the task force with a “red zone” in which Comeaux actually lived. The task force was either unable or unwilling to do anything with that information.

With all the reports circulating about the serial rapist being a cop, it would seem logical that the task force would determine how many cops lived in the identified “red zone” area. The failure to investigate the “cop involvement” angle legitimized the criticism that local law enforcement never really explored that line of investigation because they didn’t want to “catch a cop.”

The “cop” criticism was fueled by other high profile episodes in the 1990s of cops being involved in violent sexual assaults in Louisiana’s Acadiana parishes. The police eventually solved the Comeaux “serial rapist” case, as they do in most cases, only after getting a lucky break: the anonymous caller suggesting the serial rapist was “Randy Comeaux.”

Comeaux told me that he had confided in only two people about the rapes – a local priest and a New Orleans attorney. One of those two was the anonymous tipster who violated a “privileged communication” to finger him as the “serial rapist.” I tend to believe it was probably the attorney.

Of course, Comeaux’s arrest inevitably triggered political recriminations. The task force was accused of a “cover up” because Comeaux had been one of their own. Victims of the sexual assaults filed civil lawsuits against the sheriff’s department as well as against Comeaux.

In the criminal case, the court appointed a public defender to represent him – and in a stunning, bizarre development, the ex-cop pled guilty within weeks of his 1998 arrest to the six counts of aggravated rape. He would later testify under oath that the decision to plead guilty was based on the legal advice given to him by his attorney.

Why would a man, especially an ex-cop with extensive experience in dealing with the criminal justice system, so quickly accept six life sentences to be served without the benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence?

The question begs scrutiny.

The appointed attorney initially advised Ernie to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. He then requested that the trial court appoint a lunacy commission to examine his client to determine his mental competency – not only at the time of the commission of the crimes but also his ability to understand the criminal proceedings being carried out against him at that time.

The attorney then abruptly abandoned the insanity strategy in mid-stream. Without getting a sanity determination, he advised Comeaux to plead guilty. That advice, and Comeaux’s decision to accept it, was influenced by a local criminal justice professor. An aspiring author and a friend of the attorney, the professor met with Comeaux in the local parish jail to discuss the guilty plea option. Comeaux later testified that this meeting had been arranged by his attorney.

“The professor told me,” Comeaux explained, “that I would serve twenty years on the life sentences. He led me to believe – and I did trust his advice – that I would receive sex offender counseling while incarcerated. The advice [the professor] gave me in no way matches the reality of what I faced once I got into the prison system. Life means just that – you spend the rest of your life in prison; you die in prison.”

“That professor lied to me,” Comeaux continued. “He did exactly what my attorney wanted him to do – paint a rosy picture that would entice me to plead guilty. I was in a terribly depressed state of mind. I had scarred and ruined the lives of my victims – not to mention what I had done to my own family, career, and life.”

Emotion seemed to grip Comeaux in the throat.

“I felt this compelling need to express remorse,” he resumed, struggling with the enormity of the situation. “I needed some sense of personal atonement – some way to say I was sorry to my victims, their families, my family, my daughter, my father, my mom. I was so wretched and guilt-ridden – and it was professionally unconscionable for my attorney to waltz that professor into the jail to induce me to plead guilty.”

Whether or not Comeaux was in a legally competent state of mind to understand all the ramifications and consequences of pleading guilty is subject to debate.

However, whether he was in his “right mind” when he committed the series of rapes is not matter of debate. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Some criminal justice “experts,” especially those particularly sympathetic to victims, stress that rape is a crime of violence rooted in the perpetrator’s need to have power over his victim. They minimize the role sexual desire plays in crimes of sexual violence.

That’s not what I learned from Comeaux.

He confided in me more readily than he would anyone else, even his family. I often questioned him about the rapes, probing his psyche in an effort to understand the crimes. He did not possess the common traits associated with other rapists. He was not egotistical, overly macho, or angry at women. He could be an intelligent, seemingly caring, and distinctly moral individual.

Comeaux, I believe, raped women for no other reason than sexual desire – and while the rapes may offer some evidence into his unusual, kinky sexual inclinations, they do not reveal an inclination toward the kind of violence exhibited by many rapists.

Most men, I think, will satisfy their sexual desires, no matter how unusual or kinky, with a willing female partner or a prostitute. But these relationships were too personal to provide Comeaux with a safe venue for his “different desires.”

He learned that after his girlfriend reported him to Internal Affairs.

In addition to his fear of being reported again to Internal Affairs, Comeaux’s self-image and his intense psychological concern about what others thought of him would not let him reveal his strange sexual desires in an intimate relationship. He could, however, release, or express, them through the crime of “rape” – a controlled situation in which he possessed complete anonymity.

How could a man stick a gun in woman’s mouth, and instruct her to tell him how good a lover he was?

“I was good,” Comeaux said. “Some of the women told me I was good. They even asked me to come back – and some didn’t even report the rapes.”

If some of the women he raped did not report the crime, it had nothing to do with their assailant. It was a byproduct of their own shame and embarrassment that forced them into silence.

“You sound as though you liked the sex of rape,” I said.

“I did,” Comeaux replied. “I raped for the sex. I needed the sex. I never raped when I was involved in a relationship with a woman. My sexual desires were, you know, basically met in those relationships.”

Unlike most rapists (who uniformly say, “the bitch asked for it”), Comeaux offered no excuses. His rapes were about satisfying his sexual desires.

“The one thing I am proud of,” Comeaux said, trying to put the best face on his crimes, “I never used my position in law enforcement to find a victim or to case a house. All my victims were randomly selected.”

To commit the kind of crimes Comeaux committed required a particularly disturbed psyche. He drove around neighborhoods he was familiar with. He was comfortable in the “red zone” in which he lived. He surveyed residences and apartment complexes, basing his decision to strike on both instinct and any vulnerability he detected about the dwelling.

“But you never knew who, or what, awaited you behind those locked doors,” I said.

“I really didn’t,” he agreed, “but there is a certain look to a ‘woman alone’ apartment. One of the first signs is the vehicle – most women drive smaller, foreign-made models. Once I was satisfied that it was a ‘woman alone’ residence, I then looked for the best point of entry – and after entry, you take what’s there.”

I understand the social influences of drugs, child abuse, housing projects, street violence, failed educational/religious institutions, and other socio-economic factors that populate prisons with all sorts of offenders.

But I did not understand the likes of Ernest Randall Comeaux – an ex-cop of education, career, social standing, and opportunity who threw it away because of sexual perversity.

He was similar to most of  the other ex-cops in the protection unit—men convicted of violent crimes of passion: sexually abusing children (including their own), raping women, or killing their wives and girlfriends. They could not come to terms with the fact that they were “criminal.” As a group, they believed their criminal conduct was simply a momentary aberration from their duty to protect and serve. They were really “good guys” with guns who protected everyone else from the “bad guys” with guns.

 “Why do you think he did it,” my wife once asked me about Comeaux.

“Fuck if I know,” I replied.

And I still don’t know. What I do know is that his perception of the rape was off the psychosis chart

“I really didn’t hurt any of my victims,” he said, as if that somehow lessened the gravity of the offenses. “And I did not rape any of them while I was on duty, and I did not use law enforcement resources in any way to accomplish those rapes.”

Comeaux found a peculiar honor in these distinctions, frequently expressing an intense dislike for other “corrupt” cops.

“I served my profession honorably,” he said. “I was a good, decent cop for almost twenty years. I worked with compassion and gave dignity to children who were victims of rape and sexual abuse. At least my victims were women – not children. I know what I did was wrong, but I never molested a child.”

That was the Comeaux I knew—a man who could never comprehended the physical degradation and psychological terror his crimes produced.

Two things I am certain about: the Virgin Mary cannot, or will not, save Comeaux from a prison death; and that he will die believing he was a “good cop.”

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author