Whenever he was back in New Orleans, Brown used Louisiana’s excellent public records laws to request thousands of legal documents, police personnel files and building liens, which he pored over.Īccording to Brown’s book, what the evidence started pointing to was not a serial killer evading capture but a steady escalation of blatant misconduct by law enforcement. Many of his witnesses had been frequenters of the Boudreaux Inn, a now-shuttered motel where the town’s drug dealers and sex workers would convene to get high and see clients.
Over the next couple of years, Brown made repeated trips to the parish, interviewing sex workers who knew the victims, drug dealers, former cops, and witnesses that had been brought in by the multiagency task force assembled to help with the case.
We’re sure you’ve never seen anything like this in your life.’ And these were cops.” “And they said, essentially, ‘Welcome to Jennings. Later that day, speaking with some former police officers, Brown recounted his experience. Could this really be chalked up to police incompetence? Brown was shocked – after all, this was the murder of someone intimately connected to other homicide victims. What the evidence started pointing to was not a serial killer evading capture.īrown drove to the crime scene – Deshotel had been shot to death in his home – and found it in chaos: Not only had the police not secured the scene or created a perimeter, but people were wandering in and out of the house, sometimes taking items with them. “I met him around sunset one evening and I woke up the next morning to the news that he’d been murdered a few hours earlier.” “He was either in a wheelchair or on crutches, and he made an impression just because he had been shot and he was kind of a mess,” Brown tells Rolling Stone. Deshotel was a street player in town who had dated two of the Jeff Davis 8 victims. Halfway through the trip, he met a drug dealer named David Deshotel, who had recently earned the nickname “Bowlegs” after a gunshot wound to the leg left him with a limp. If Jennings seemed like any other rural Louisiana town at first glance, it only took a few days for Brown’s suspicions to grow deeper. To Brown, something didn’t seem right, so in mid-2011 he spent a week in the parish, talking to residents and people who knew the victims, even though he didn’t have a story in mind at the time. Though the article wasn’t particularly long, it detailed the inability of Jefferson Davis law enforcement to get any leads on the case that had so far seen eight deaths – not negligible, especially in a town of only 10,000 residents. Brown was a writer and a private investigator living in New Orleans when he first read about the Jeff Davis 8 in a 2010 New York Times story.
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