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. And, as Brown writes, “all eight of the victims snitched for local law enforcement about the Jennings drug trade.”īrown 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.

They were all living in poverty and had criminal records filled with drug use and petty crime, often supporting their respective habits with sex work. All of them were from South Jennings, the poor side of town, and knew each other. Though the victims’ causes of death varied – several had or appeared to have asphyxiated, two women had their throats slashed – the women of the Jeff Davis 8 had plenty in common. It sounds like the plot of True Detective, but when the details are laid out all at once, as they are in Ethan Brown’s mesmerizing new book Murder in the Bayou, it starts to make the hit HBO show seem downright restrained – and the bayou look a lot like the rest of the country. For years, the police department has implied that a serial killer was in the parish’s midst, but it’s been over a decade since the killings began, and the cases remain unsolved.

Between 20, eight women from the town of Jennings, Louisiana, in Jefferson Davis Parish, were murdered, their bodies dumped in crawfish ponds and canals in the area. The details of the Jeff Davis 8 murders are so incredible – and so quintessentially bayou – that if they were fiction they’d seem a little heavy-handed.

Louisiana serial killer 23 victims