Murder in the Bayou - Ethan Brown

"Murder in the Bayou," by Ethan Brown tells the true story of the murder of eight "sex workers" in small-town Louisiana over the course of just a four-year period. Eight related murders in any city is noteworthy, but eight separate related murders in a town of only 10,000 people is almost impossible to believe. Sadly, it really happened - and nobody in law enforcement there seems to have worried much about it while it was happening.

Despite the serial killer theory being pushed by local law enforcement, it had to have been obvious to anyone paying attention that the murders were directly related to what was happening within the prostitution/drug trade in Jeff Davis Parish.  This was not the work of some random serial killer mining the parish for easy victims.  That eight young women could die at the rate of one every few months over four years is astounding until - according to the author - one takes local law enforcement into account. Ethan Brown agues strongly that local cops, politicians, businessmen, and drug trade power players all were directly involved in the murders. And since to this day none of the murders have been officially solved, one certainly has to wonder if Brown is not correct.

The Eight Murder Victims

Ethan Brown is a brave man: he names names while detailing exactly what he thinks happened to each of the eight murder victims. Brown spent weeks in and around Jennings, Louisiana (home base for most of the animals so intimately involved with these women) interviewing as many of the key players as possible. What Brown learned from those interviews, and others with survivors of the victims, helps make sense of what life must have been like in Jennings between 2005 and 2009 when the women were disappearing at such a rapid rate. What you read will disgust you because if even only half of what Brown says in Murder in the Bayou is true, Jennings was a cesspool at the time - and it might still be one.  

Ethan Brown

Brown is one heck of an investigator, but unfortunately Murder in the Bayou itself is a bit of an organizational mess.  Brown does, for the most part, organize his book chronologically, but it is still sometimes difficult to keep up with the people who move in that world because so few of them are fleshed out to the point that they stand out from the crowd. That this is no In Cold Blood is not surprising, of course, but I can't remember when I've read a book in any genre that ends as abruptly and jarringly as this one. 

Bottom Line: If this book helps finds justice for eight young women who were brutally murdered in a town in which no one with any power seemed to care, it will have have done its job despite its shortcomings.  But the clock continues to tick...and tick...and tick.