By Markel Eskridge
NYT Institute

Houma, La., looks like a tropical oasis surrounded by coffee-colored bayous with a blend of ancient cypress, magnolia and palm trees.

Houma is also home to drug dealers, prostitutes, crack addicts and a serial killer.

In this city of 32,000, Buron Street is an illustration of the contrasts. Turning left onto Mahler Street is a gated community with manicured lawns and waterway privileges.

To the right, less than three blocks away, is a one-story tan brick apartment building with a lawn of patches of grass and gravel. In one apartment two bare mattresses are piled on the living room floor.

This part of Buron Street, where drugs are easy to find, is frequently patrolled by police. This neighborhood is where a killer has found eight of what may be as many as 18 victims, law enforcement officials say.

They are men who have had run-ins with law enforcement authorities and lived life on the edge. Authorities theorize that the victims all needed money and that led to their deaths.

Houma Police Chief Patrick Boudreaux said, “We have yet to link all homicides. There is nothing concrete, but there is enough evidence to say they are all related.”

Most of the victims were only partly clothed and had one or both shoes missing. All the men were asphyxiated.

The first two bodies were found in Lafourche Parish on Louisiana 307.

Michael Vincent was found on New Year’s Day 2000, just off the road, north of Raceland.

Kenneth Randolph was found Oct. 6, 2002, further up the highway. Randolph’s body was naked. Authorities won’t say whether Vincent’s was as well.

Larry Weidel, public information officer for the Lafourche Sheriff’s Department, said, “The only connection these men have is that they are both from Houma and they were both found along the highway like the most recent victim.”

Authorities only began to suspect a serial killer was at work when they found the third body, Anoka Jones, 26, of Houma, on Oct. 13, 2002, a week after Randolph’s body was found. Jones’ body was under an overpass at U.S. 90 and Interstate 310. He, too, had been asphyxiated and his shoes were found nearby, according to Major Sam Zinna of the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Department.

The fourth victim, Datrell Woods, 18, was found May 27, 2003, lying on his back, next to his bicycle in a cane field behind a church. He had been asphyxiated and was found without a shirt and shoes.

Michael Barnett, 20, was victim number five. His body was found Oct. 24, 2004, in an empty storage unit a half mile from where the fourth victim was found.

Weidel said, “The lifestyles of these people were high risk, drifters. Some of them were probably bi-sexual, they weren’t gainfully employed and they operated underground. It is basically difficult to trace their whereabouts. If you look deep you may find they were inter-related in the lifestyles they lived.”

Leon “T-Paul” Lirette was the sixth victim. At the apartment house on Buron Street, a pregnant woman in her early 20s, who asked that her name not be published, talked a little bit about Lirette and Woods.

“If you knew these people, you could see that they were not bad people. The police and the news are talking about the crime lifestyle they lived, but if you really knew these people, you would see that they just needed help,” she said. “T-Paul would do anything to help his mother; his dad passed away three months earlier and his mom needed him. He was a nice guy. He didn’t do anything to hurt anybody. He was very outgoing.”

Recalling a memory of him, the woman, who described herself as a girlfriend of Lirette’s said, “He had pretty green eyes; he had not fully matured as far as facial hair.”

“Datrell was a sweet person, although he was addicted to crack.”

She said Lirette and Woods both had lived at a house at 1627 Buron Street, across from the apartment building, although they were not there at the same time.

Lirette’s mother, Judy, began to cry as she held an 8x10 photo of her son and talked about T-Paul, recalling the days leading up to when police told her he was dead.

On Tuesday, Feb. 15, he asked her for $5 for cigarettes and beer, she said, and then went to Laverne’s, a nearby bar.

She said she was told he couldn’t get in at first because of the beer in his hand, so he left it outside beside his cousin’s bicycle and went inside. She never saw her son alive again.

The next day, T-Paul called a cousin and was “drugged up” with marijuana and alcohol, Judy Lirette said. That’s the last time he is known to have been in contact with anyone but the killer. That same day his mother filed a missing person report.

“Thursday we searched the bayou to see if he was floating in the water; I was scared he was dead,” she said. “On Sunday, I was on the phone with my daughter, Shirley, when the police drove up slow. I told my daughter to call me back and the officer asked me, ‘Did I file a police report?’ I told him, yes, my boy.”

The police told Lirette her son’s body had been found in a field on Houma’s abandoned military airbase.

“They shipped his body to Jefferson Parish. The coroner said he had something in his system, but they did not know what it was,” she said, “I couldn’t see his body because it was decomposed. At the funeral they had his neck covered up and they only showed me the tattoo on his arm.”

In the small circle of victims, she said she also knew Anoka Jones and that he lived down the street and had been friends with her son.

She recalled the last time she saw Jones alive.

He was visiting her home and told her he was going to buy her husband a beer if he could get change for a $100 bill. He left her home, and she never saw him again.

The seventh victim, August Terrill Watkins III, 31, was found April 9 in a ditch on the side of U.S. 90.

Watkins is the only victim to have all of his clothes on when discovered.

A multi-agency task force that includes the FBI, Louisiana State Police, State Attorney’s office, St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Department, Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department, Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s office and the Houma Police Department is investigating the deaths.

On May 6, authorities arrested Johnny Billiot of Houma, after raiding his home, where they said they found child pornography. The Houma Courier reported that Billiot was considered a suspect in the killings, although he has not been charged in any of the deaths. He is being held on $250,000 bond, facing 20 counts of possession of child pornography.

Eight days before Billiot was arrested, police found the body of an eighth victim, Kurt Cunningham, 23, who had lived with Billiot, according to The Courier.

A schoolteacher who had known Cunningham when he was a student said he had been homeless and his only possessions were the clothes on his back and his skateboard.

“Kurt’s parents gave him to foster care when he was 3 or 4, 5 or 6, it doesn’t matter, and they gave him up, and didn’t have any contact with him,” said the woman, who had been an art teacher at the Genesis alternative school. She said Cunningham and his 7 siblings were all put in foster homes after their parents were divorced.

“My assumption is that they all managed to contact each other,” she said. “They stayed a family, but it was a family of children.”

“Kurt was the sweetest, genuine and child-like man,” she said.

“He would have never hurt a soul, Kurt would have never hurt a soul,” she said as she began to cry. “I loved Kurt dearly.

“He never knew where he would sleep,” she said. “The only thing I could think of was that whoever killed Kurt offered him a home. It had to be someone he trusted.”

Cunningham’s body was found April 28 in a ditch near Louisiana 307 in Lafourche Parish.

At the trailer home where she is staying, Judy Lirette says she can’t bear to hang the picture of her son on the wall.

She said she keeps it on the top shelf of the living room closet.

“The reason I don’t put this picture on the wall is because I can feel him telling me, ‘Mama I know who did it, Mama, I know who did it.’”