Making a Serial Killer - Season 1, Episode 10 - Ronald Dominique ... - Full Episode | Forensic Files

NARRATOR: Over 10 years, the bodies of 23 men are found. The only suspect for their murder seems an unlikely fit.
RICHARD GOORLEY: He was the most unthreatening individual I could-- I could think of.
MICHAEL GLASER: He didn't look like someone that you would consider a serial killer, or someone capable of killing 23,
you know, grown men. NARRATOR: How did a prolific killer stay under the radar for so long?
DEEDEE THURSTON: This is a serial killer you've never heard of. [SOMBRE MUSIC] The story was that a White guy in a pickup truck
approached him while he was walking down the street. Said he had a family member that was a victim of abuse,
showed a picture and lured him in where she will pay you for sex. She's a-- she's a domestic violence victim.
She's afraid of men. RICHARD GOORLEY: I believe it was his niece's photograph that he used to entice
men to come to his place. That was the photograph he used to say, look my wife wants to have sex with you.
Here's what she looks like. MICHAEL GLASER: The person that-- that told us this story actually got into the pickup truck,
and the perpetrator actually let him bring him to a trailer. And once he got into the trailer,
he said, well, before the girl comes in, being that she's afraid of men, I have to tie you up.
He felt the only way he could become intimate with someone else was by holding them at gunpoint,
tying them up, and then forcing himself on them. MICHAEL GLASER: And that's when he kind of changed his tune
about, you're not tying me up. You're going to bring me back wherever you picked me up from.
And being the type of person he is that probably doesn't want confrontation, brought the--
the person back to where he picked him up. He was able to identify and show us, you know,
where this trailer was located. And came up with all the residents there. And, you know, Ronald Dominique had a stood out as being a male
that we didn't think was married. You know, he lived on his sister's property in a trailer in the front yard.
After that, we started some surveillance on him, and it didn't amount to-- to anything.
He worked at a oil field supply company doing some kind of just manual labor. He didn't leave the house, didn't go to bars,
didn't frequent anywhere. He would just sit at home. So we still didn't have anything to tie him into these bodies.
Let's put it this way, he wasn't scary. Wouldn't scare anyone. Kind of taken aback by how someone that looked like he did
would be capable of committing all these offenses that he was accused of. And we also met him and talked to him,
and just didn't fit my preconceived idea of what a serial killer would would be like.
I mean, he was the most unthreatening individual I could-- I could think of. My name DeeDee Thurston.
I was a reporter at The Courier in Houma, and I was leading the coverage. I'd gotten a tip from a police source
that they had suspicions that they had a serial killer. Before Katrina, it was so sparse,
and the bodies were so spread out over so many parishes. The body dumps were so remote and so far from each other
that I don't think we'd put it together yet. It wasn't until the end there that it seemed to escalate,
and the bodies seemed to start piling up, that we were getting quite a lot there at the end.
By then we knew we had a serial killer. MICHAEL GLASER: But he wasn't in the system.
We knew he was arrested previously, accused of raping a male. So he was high on our radar with just that,
but didn't have anything to connect him with the crimes in itself. So we made the decision to approach him and interview him,
and ask him that we-- we're investigating a bunch of crimes where, you know, we have victims being dumped
on the side of the road, and we're running down every one that had had an arrest, you know,
in Terrebonne and Lafourche parish. Initially, the first one, we had no idea that we were
dealing with something larger. We worked it as trying to find-- identify the victim.
Where did he come from? Try to find out how the perpetrator got here in the city of Kenner to discard a body.
First one we had was discarded on the side of a roadway. Several months later, we had one discarded near a trash
bin, a trash dumpster. Followed several months after that was-- one of these victims
was placed on the ground outside of the same type of, you know, trash dumpster. The bodies were disposed of where they were going
to be found the next morning. Someone would have seen them. DEEDEE THURSTON: Nobody knows about Ronald Dominique
because he killed people who were marginalized. He killed people who lived a high risk lifestyle
and didn't necessarily garner a lot of sympathy from people outside their family.
BRIAN FREDERICK: His profile, his victim profile, was homeless, people that were down and out,
addicted to drugs perhaps. And in several of the cases, we know that Dominique offered these individuals,
who weren't always gay, drugs. Lured them to his house, and that's where he pulled the gun
and tied them up, and then proceeded to rape them. At the time that Dominique was committing his-- his crimes,
there were two other serial killers loose in South Louisiana. They were Derrick Todd Lee and Sean Gillis.
Both of them were attacking, kidnapping, raping, and killing young attractive women.
So naturally, that got a lot more publicity than someone who was accused of killing street people.
The victims were not all, but mostly homosexual. It didn't have the-- the grip that killing
young beautiful women does. That's what was getting all the publicity at the time
that Dominique was-- was committing his crimes. DEEDEE THURSTON: You know, I live in a very small town,
and word got out quickly. And people came up and they said, you know, what's going on?
Why are these people coming to interview you? And I said, well, there's a serial killer
that I investigated. And they immediately thought I was talking about Derrick Todd Lee.
And everybody knows about Derek Todd Lee, but nobody knows about Ronald Dominique.
He seemed to like Black men. Slight Black men. Not big brawny guys, but lean, thin.
I think of his 23 victims, 18 or 19 of them were Black. RICHARD GOORLEY: Basically invisible people.
The ones that you drive by and you look at and you give no second thought, other than say, you know,
look at that bum. MICHAEL GLASER: The physical evidence, the hair fibers or anything like that, that stuff
was all collected during autopsy and on the scene. We had several DNA profiles developed,
you know, from the Jefferson Parish cases, mitochondrial DNA, which is hair. You know, you can get it off of there.
And then the nuclear DNA, which is, you know, seminal fluid off of one of the victims
here in the city of Kenner. But he wasn't in the system. These were guys who had their own way to get around.
They're walking between 10:00 and 2:00 in the morning. They're getting-- they're getting
in a truck with some stranger. NARRATOR: In the year 2000, another body is found,
23-year-old Michael Vincent. He had been dumped on a barbed wire fence, strangled,
had rope marks on his wrist. This body was found 40 miles away from the previous killing
fields in Houma. MICHAEL GLASER: We-- we kind of thought of these as two different series of homicides.
You had the nine victims that were here in metro New Orleans, and then all of a sudden metro New Orleans
doesn't get any more of these dumped bodies of the-- of the same, you know, type victim.
They all started coming down, you know, several miles lower-- in lower Louisiana, down, you know,
in and around the city of Homa. NARRATOR: For almost three years there were no more bodies in Houma, but in October 2002
that changed. Kenneth Randolph Jr., Anoka Jones, Dattral Woods, 19 years old and dumped along with his bicycle
in a sugarcane field. It seemed like every time we turned around there was another body.
Well, you have the same young person that walks the streets being discarded in, you know, places where they
will be found the next morning. But we're still had no idea. These were people who, they were necessarily homeless,
but they might have stayed with this person this night, and this family member that night.
So it wasn't unusual for them to go off the grid for a day or two. So sometimes families didn't want to report them missing
right away, or sometimes they did, but they weren't necessarily living a lifestyle that police
were easily able to reconstruct their previous 24 hours. MICHAEL GLASER: You know, we're working, you know,
day and night trying to develop a suspect, only, you know, to wake up the next morning to we have another victim.
NARRATOR: The equation in November 2006 was this, 23 men had died violently since 1997, without their killer or killers
being brought to justice. Ricky Wallace had led police to Ronald Dominique. Had he killed some or all of the men?
And if so, what had made him into a serial killer? The investigation was really only at the beginning.
RICHARD GOORLEY: When we go investigate people, we do, we go back and try to find out
people who knew him when he was growing up, teachers, people he worked for. And we found with Dominique, he really didn't
have any long-lasting friends. We found out basically that he was a loner. You know, he lived in a trailer on his sister's property.
You know, in high school, didn't really have any friends. Lived in a trailer in Bayou Blue.
Lower income, just regular everyday working folk. He grew up in Lafourche parish.
He went to Thibodaux High School. He was not a popular guy. My understanding is that he didn't
come to terms with his homosexuality until late in his teens. I'm told that he was bullied.
So high school was rough for him. NARRATOR: Dominique's sense of isolation may perhaps have been made worse by a disturbing incident
as a young child. RICHARD GOORLEY: Dominique's father suspected his mother of having an affair.
So the father gathered up Dominique and his sister and drove him to the mother's brother's house.
And they burst in and found the mother and her brother in bed together, obviously, having sexual relationships.
BRIAN FREDERICK: The morality that should underpin healthy sexual relationships is now called
into question in a big way. RICHARD GOORLEY: In every one of the cases I've looked at where there was a serial killer,
there was a mother that would be looked at as an immoral person. But when you look at your mother and she's not a saint,
you know she's not a saint, that she's promiscuous, that has to have an effect on Id,
to make you lose some sort of-- of something that holds us all together. NARRATOR: Despite their complex relationship, after graduating
high school in 1983, Dominique continued to lean on his mother for support. He always lived with either his mom or his older sister.
He didn't amount to much of anything, other than he worked in some, you know, some kind of labor intensive menial job, working
in a-- a supply business. He had a bad attitude. He felt that he was inferior, you know, couldn't
get a girlfriend or boyfriend. He was kind of, you know, a little overweight. He was just--
really aimless life. No one. No friends. No one to be in love with or to love him.
NARRATOR: Eventually, Ronald Dominique did grow confident enough to acknowledge his sexuality.
According to local journalist DeeDee Thurston, who has acquaintances in common with Dominique,
his presence in Thibodaux gay bars was not altogether welcomed. Even when he came out of the closet
and was part of the gay scene, he really wasn't accepted there either. RICHARD GOORLEY: He was short and obese, non-threatening, shy
or at least standoffish, tend to complain some about his-- about his situation, whether it be his surroundings,
or the food that he's given, that sort of thing. I don't want to say he had no redeeming qualities,
but he was-- nothing about him really stood out. NARRATOR: The only time Dominique came alive
was when he was on stage. His favorite thing was being a female impersonator. He liked to dress up like Patti Labelle and imitate her,
but he wasn't very good at it. It was a parody of Labelle. And this could have been a way for him
to get out of his skin, if you will, become someone else. He was powerless in his everyday life.
He had menial jobs, he couldn't hold on to those. I think men, they find their worth
in their ability to provide, and he wasn't even able to do that. This female impersonation, this act
where he was inviting others to laugh at him, he's in control of that. Now, whether this predated his-- his sensibilities-- but this
is a marker. Control is a marker. And we know that with the serial rapes. Rape has nothing to do with love,
or affection, or intimacy, or sex. It's a control issue. And yeah, the trappings of it were there in the act.
NARRATOR: In 1993, Dominique, aged 29 years old, moved into his own place, or almost his own place.
He lived on his sister's property in a trailer in the front yard. NARRATOR: What detectives learn as they build
a case against Dominique, is that the trailer was the scene of an alleged rape. After luring a man there with the promise of drugs,
Dominique allegedly handcuffed him and was said to have raped him at gunpoint. DEEDEE THURSTON: The story goes that the victim
jumped out the window and ran away yelling. NARRATOR: Questioned, Dominique insisted that on both occasions
he and the men had had consensual sex, after which they'd tried to rob him, forcing him to pull
a gun to defend himself. He was not believed. He was arrested. I think he spent three months in jail.
They never followed through with the case because they could never locate the victim again.
So nothing ever came of that. NARRATOR: While incarcerated, another incident occurred that may have shaped his future.
They put Dominique in jail, and while he was in jail, he was brutalized. NARRATOR: Violently raped by another inmate,
Ronald Dominique was left with lasting injuries. Released in November 1996, to live once again
in his older sister's yard. Police, later digging into his background, would notice a startling coincidence.
And then we realized that the sister lived right here in St. Charles Parish, within a few feet of the St.
Charles Parish homicides. You know, three bodies, you know, where they were dumped in St. Charles Parish.
And the sister moved, and the homicides moved. So all the homicides moved at the same time
this family moved, and Dominique followed them to live on his sister's property.
No defensive wounds or no-- no evidence of a big struggle. Because some of these people were decent size, you know,
men. Even though they were-- they were young in age, they were, you know, pretty much tall and big in stature,
some of them. If you're strangling a-- a grown man, that-- that takes some muscle
and it takes some rage, I would think. He's not a tall guy. What is he? About 5' 5"?
He's obese. He's not very imposing physically. He doesn't look like the kind who could take on a--
a grown man and come out on top. He looked like just some little-- little guy that-- that really had nothing going for him.
He's overweight. He had a bad heart. Fat and flabby. There was nothing physically about him
that would make you think that this person was capable of killing anyone at all with his hands.
If you look at a lot of serial killers through the years, they don't stand out. They fit in well.
This guy fit in well at what he did. I mean, he didn't do anything. He didn't do anything to call attention to himself.
He, you know, never gotten many arguments, you know, with the sister, with anybody else in the community.
He kind of just stayed alone. NARRATOR: Could this small, feeble drag queen now in custody really be the man cops were looking for?
There was really nothing we overlook that would have identified him as a suspect.
DEEDEE THURSTON: He would dump them. It might be a sugar cane field, it might be under an overpass,
it might be in a ditch. They weren't always found right away because it was really remote places.
In South Louisiana, in the summertime, in the heat and the daily rains, it would degrade a body,
it would degrade a dump site pretty quickly. So there wasn't always DNA to find.
No gunshot wounds. They were all, you know, strangled in some form. DEEDEE THURSTON: When they realized that we have
these dead people that all have the common denominator, and that they have been tied up.
And they figured out that it was happening in these jurisdictions, and they put this task force together.
MICHAEL GLASER: Well, we formalized the-- the task force in May of 2005. We had the attorney general's office, the Louisiana State
police crime lab, probation and parole, working it in and around the media. We're talking about some were found with-- missing a shoe,
some had no shoes. And they were trying to say that that was the trophy that this killer was-- was keeping, was a shoe.
DEEDEE THURSTON: We think he just didn't finish dressing them. That's what first caused us to link some things together.
They were found without shoes. NARRATOR: At the Houma police department a special incident room was set up to focus
on catching a serial killer. MICHAEL GLASER: So from 1998 to 2005, we had somewhere around 19--
18 or 19. And it was full, you know, 8 and 1/2 by 11 printouts of-- the mug shot of a person's head.
It was overwhelming at the time. We would get working, you know, leads, and people
calling in and giving us some kind of tip, and you would get hundreds. NARRATOR: On August 16, 17-year-old Wayne Smith
was found. His body, dumped in a bayou, was so badly decomposed that a cause of death was never determined.
It was another blow for detectives, another face on their white board. Then nature intervened to frustrate them further.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall. DEEDEE THURSTON: Katrina hit and everything just kind of went crazy.
MICHAEL GLASER: We kind of had to slow down a little bit because duties were spread all over the place at that time.
DEEDEE THURSTON: A lot of those people from New Orleans evacuated to Houma. We had, in just a few days, 10 years worth of growth in Houma.
Our infrastructure wasn't up to it. We weren't really impacted in the way of storms by Katrina,
but just a few weeks later, Rita come through and it did-- and it did have a lot of damage locally.
And so, the communities were trying to recover from that. NARRATOR: As the cleanup from a devastating hurricane season
continued, the task force tried a new strategy. MICHAEL GLASER: In the task force meetings,
you know, we knew the perp wasn't 100% successful in one contact, one kill. And we also knew that whoever's doing
this is not 100% successful. Every contact with a person is going to end up with a--
a victim. So we were-- that's where the probation and parole aspect came in. So we had the probation and parole agents,
when they met with, you know, the people they were supervising, they would ask, is anything
out of the ordinary happening in and around this area? NARRATOR: As detectives waited for feedback
from men on probation, 40-year-old Chris De Ville went missing. On October 14, his body was found dumped in a cane field.
November 2005, another victim, Nicholas Pellegrin, 21, who had recently become a father.
After Nicholas' murder, there was a long, tense period of quiet from the bayou serial killer.
Cops wondered if he had simply stopped killing, or if he'd begun hiding the bodies instead of leaving
them out in the open. BRIAN FREDERICK: How many more went unreported, went undiscovered?
How many more are buried somewhere, discarded perhaps in a more organized way in the bayou?
We know that Katrina was so destructive that there were bodies lying around the bayou, right?
And so, it wouldn't have been uncommon to come across a body that was exposed to the elements.
DEEDEE THURSTON: The thing that brought it all down was when Ricky Wallace, who if memory serves,
his street name was Motor Mouth, told his parole officer that some dude had tried to tie him up.
MICHAEL GLASER: He says, look, the weirdest thing just happened to me. A White guy in a pickup truck approached him while he
was walking down the street. Took him to his trailer, told him-- gave him the spiel about my wife's going to come in here,
but we need to tie you up first. And he said, there's no way I'm going to do that.
MICHAEL GLASER: You're not tying me up. You're going to bring me back wherever you pick me up from.
DEEDEE THURSTON: Ricky Wallace and his coming forward was what put all this together.
MICHAEL GLASER: And he was able to identify and show us, you know, where this trailer was located.
So we drove by, got a bunch of license plate numbers and ran some records, everything, from that address.
NARRATOR: The address was on Bayou Blue Road, Houma, opposite a cluster of rusting industrial units.
And the name of one resident stood out. MICHAEL GLASER: You know, Ronald Dominique kind of stood out.
We knew he was arrested previously, so we just sent two people to make contact with him.
You know, one female investigator from Lafourche parish, and one from-- a male from Jefferson Parish.
And they interviewed him and he answered questions. Wouldn't admit to anything, but did consent to a buccal swab,
which is a swab of his saliva. They asked him for DNA, he gave it. He knew they were looking at him.
I don't know why he didn't say no. Some of the early cases, they weren't able to get DNA because of them being out in the elements.
You know, you throw somebody in a watery ditch, you're not going to get any DNA.
So it was the later cases that they were able to get DNA from. NARRATOR: Dominique may not have fully grasped the fact that he
was the prime suspect, in fact, the only suspect in 2003 homicides. And while the DNA swab was processed,
cops needed to make sure that the number did not rise. MICHAEL GLASER: And we knew that was our man, so 24 hours
a day we had someone, you know, watching him in his residence. It may be cars on the ground, people walking,
you know, even aircraft in the air. Because we, look, at that point, when we identified the killer,
there was not going to be any other, you know, any other victims. NARRATOR: In late November 2006, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's
Office heard from their crime lab about the DNA swab taken from Ronald Dominique.
The match was made with one of the Kenner cases. NARRATOR: Manuel Reed, found in a garbage dumpster in Kenner,
in 1999. They would also find a match with semen found on the body of 27-year-old Oliver La Banks,
discovered partially clothed on the outskirts of New Orleans in 1998. The evidence was building against Ronald Dominique.
When he realized that the police were following him and that his arrest was probably imminent, he left there
and he moved into the bunkhouse, which is a homeless shelter there in downtown Houma.
MICHAEL GLASER: And that's why, when we arrested him, was in a boarding house, you know, in the city of Houma.
NARRATOR: Dominique didn't resist arrest or tried to run. In fact, the officers who stealthily
entered the bunkhouse on December 1, 2006, and cornered their suspect, found it hard to believe they'd
got the right man. DEEDEE THURSTON: Two weeks before he was arrested, he was able to subdue, tie up, and rape a full grown man,
and then drag his body to where he dumped it. Then when he was arrested, he has a cane
and he can't even walk upright. He's having to be helped into the car by two officers.
RICHARD GOORLEY: His demeanor was-- was rather a passive demeanor. You know, there wasn't anything threatening about him.
DEEDEE THURSTON: They had Ronald Dominique in interrogation, and I just remember that it was like the floodgates open.
He just kept talking, and talking, and talking. He didn't seem to be holding anything back.
And he provided details of all these murders. No, early on, when-- his initial encounters, I really think,
weren't going to result in a killing unless something in his conversation, his interaction
with some of these people, he felt uncomfortable. RICHARD GOORLEY: The first victim,
which was an individual he picked up in the French Quarter for the purposes of having sex.
They went to a remote area, had sex, but the victim was apparently pretty rough on Ronald.
And Ronald complained about it, and the guy still kept on doing. So Ronald struck him in the head with a tire iron.
Once he knocked him out, realized that he doesn't have to deal with this pressure or problem
anymore. And then I think he-- he strangled him. NARRATOR: Having dumped the man's body at the roadside
and got away with it, Dominique realized he could have sex with men in a way that meant he was in control.
MICHAEL GLASER: The early victims he would meet in an automobile. The crime was committed in an automobile.
He would strangle them with either a seat belt-- and whenever he got the urge to go out and find a victim,
he would just work his, you know, little area, because he didn't drive far from, you know,
where he lived at the time to find a victim. DEEDEE THURSTON: I know that he picked up one fellow
outside a convenience store. He would pick people up on Bourbon Street, near the gay bar.
He would see them run their bicycle down the road. But he'd just go out between 10:00 and 2:00,
and whoever he came across, if they got in the truck-- He would go to areas where street
people, hustlers, would-- would frequent, stop, talk to them, make a determination whether they were interested in,
first of all, homosexual relationship for money. DEEDEE THURSTON: He offered them cash to have sex with him.
If they said, yes. He'd say, come on, get in. He would drive them to his trailer.
And he would say, well, look, I don't want you to hurt me. So in order to not be hurt, I want--
I want to tie you up before we have sex. And those who agreed to do it were tied up.
Then he would have sex with them and then strangle them, and then dispose of the body.
If he thought they were heterosexual, he had a picture of an attractive woman. He would say it was his girlfriend or his wife,
and he'd offer them money to come back and have sex with him. And he would use his niece's picture because she
was an attractive young lady. He would say that she was shy, and that she had been hurt in the past.
So the deal was that if you let me tie you up, then she will have sex with you and then
I'll pay you the money. And if the guy said, no, ma'am. I'm not interested. He let him go.
NARRATOR: Unattractive he might have been, but Dominique's unimposing demeanor had its advantages.
DEEDEE THURSTON: He didn't look like somebody that would hurt you. I mean, he looked like some mild mannered little guy,
and he was a smooth talker. And these were guys who really needed the money. I mean, what was he going to do?
5' 5", chubby little guy? What's he going to do to me? NARRATOR: Once dead, he would untie his victims
and haul them into his truck. MICHAEL GLASER: And he-- he would drive a decent ways,
you know, within the 12 miles in and around here to dump them off. But in rural-- down in South Louisiana,
he would drive a little bit further to discard, but still made no attempt to-- to hide them.
NARRATOR: As for why, Dominique's reasoning was less clear cut. RICHARD GOORLEY: Why'd he kill them?
According to the police, it was because at one time he was arrested for having sex with someone who reported
to the police, and he had to-- and they put Dominique in jail. But Dominique feared going back to jail.
DEEDEE THURSTON: He liked rough sex. He liked the rape, but he didn't like jail.
So after he tied up and sexually assaulted these individuals, he knew that the next step may be that they
go talk to the police. So in order to avoid going back to jail, he killed them. MICHAEL GLASER: Yeah, I don't think Ronald
Dominique is a high IQ person. I really don't. I think he's a simple person that had a simple plan.
How he came up with the actual thought, you know, the killing of someone, I don't think
it was the killing was the motive, I think it was a sex act that was his motive.
NARRATOR: But why attack other men at all? The answer, says criminologist Brian Frederick,
lies in the way he saw himself, and perhaps in his rejection by the local gay community.
What strikes me as sort of unfortunate is that he felt the only way he could become intimate
with someone else was by holding them at gunpoint, tying them up, and then forcing himself on them, right?
Again, power, again, control, but such low self-esteem to think that the only way he could be close to someone
was through this mechanism. Something happened to him that, whether or not it was a sexual fantasy
or it was some kind of something else that got him to come up with this, I guess, plan and scheme,
that if he wanted to have sex with a male, they had to-- I guess he was intimidated and couldn't do it on his own.
He had to kill them first. DEEDEE THURSTON: I think in the beginning he-- he killed as a way to avoid prison,
but it escalated to where he really enjoyed the entire process, from the rape to the murder.
It just got to where the interval in between murders became smaller and smaller, like he needed it more often.
RICHARD GOORLEY: The thing that was surprising to me, one of the things that's surprising,
was the fact that he was able to not only strangle these people, the strength that took, but also to pick up the bodies,
put them in his vehicle, and then take them someplace and dispose of them. I was trying to figure out how he could do that,
because he was-- he didn't strike me as being that strong of an individual. And then it dawned on me that he probably had a big adrenaline
rush when he was doing this. And that may have had some play in-- in why he did it,
and why he was able to-- to move bodies around, and that sort of thing. I think he got his power from dominating other men,
and eventually eliminating them. NARRATOR: Charged with the eight murders he had confessed to in Terrebonne parish,
where he'd been arrested, Dominique faced the death penalty. Tasked with saving his client from execution,
Richard Goorley made a deal with the prosecution. We discussed the ins and outs of the case,
came to the realization that trying eight capital cases in that parish alone would be burdensome,
not only on the parish's finances, but also on the families of the victims. DEEDEE THURSTON: All the appeals, it would be decades
before this would be over. The families would have to go through the trial over and over.
They would have to hear all these horrendous details of what happened to their loved ones.
And they-- they were not about hearing those gory details. I mean, it's violent.
It's-- to know that they went-- not only did they go through the pain of being killed, but they
went through the pain and humiliation of having that done to them. NARRATOR: In the end, the victims' families
agreed to allow Dominique to take a plea. He pleaded guilty to avoid a trial, to avoid the death penalty.
I mean, eight consecutive life sentences, that's, you know, that's one after the other.
That's what you give a cat. I guess once you've got eight life sentences, there's no reason to go any further.
He was convicted in Terrebonne parish. He's never come-- come back to face any charges here
in Jefferson Parish. You know, there's no need to waste the resources, you know, to prosecute him anywhere else.
You know, we just have open warrants for him if he ever does, you know, try to get out.
RICHARD GOORLEY: Each of them had a family that loved them and cared about them.
These were people that were hurting. I mean, their loved ones, in spite of the fact that their loved ones might have been homeless,
and street hustlers, or whatever, they still loved them. And they were angry at what happened.
DEEDEE THURSTON: This is a serial killer you've never heard of. He was prolific.
He got away with it for 10 years, and nobody knows who he is. I mean, the families, of course, were--
were in an uproar, but the community itself, I don't remember there being any kind of hue and cry.
He killed people who were marginalized. He killed people who lived a high risk lifestyle,
and didn't necessarily garner a lot of sympathy from people outside their family.
These are somebody's children, and they were raped and dumped in many storages, and sugarcane fields, and under overpasses.
They deserved better. [SOMBRE MUSIC] [MUSIC PLAYING]

Making a Serial Killer - Season 1, Episode 10 - Ronald Dominique & the Bodies in the Bayou - Full Episode

Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana communities in August 2005. But many bodies found in the bayou were the victims of someone much more sadistic.

A true crime series that focuses on what makes killers do what they do, taking insights from scientific experts, detectives and survivors.

Brief Summary

Ronald Dominique, a serial killer, murdered 23 marginalized men in Louisiana, evading justice for years before his arrest in 2006.

Key points

The Unlikely Suspect. Ronald Dominique, a seemingly harmless man, is revealed as a serial killer.
Marginalized Victims. Dominique targeted vulnerable individuals, leading to his crimes being overlooked.
The Drag Queen's Control. Dominique found power in female impersonation, contrasting his real-life struggles.
The Task Force Formed. Detectives unite to catch a serial killer after realizing the commonalities in the cases.
Hurricane Disrupts Investigation. Katrina complicates the efforts of the task force to catch the killer.
The Unseen Killer. Ronald Dominique, a prolific serial killer, evaded capture for a decade, targeting marginalized individuals.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This is a serial killer you've never heard of.

DeeDee Thurston introduces Ronald Dominique's story.

0:41WatchJul 29, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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