Families, lawmen struggle to understand killer

Alonzo Hogan never met his daughter. He never got to see himself in his baby girl, a similarity so striking that Hogan’s sister, Cynthia Zamora, can’t look at the now 5-year-old girl without the pangs of pain and absence rushing to the forefront of her consciousness.

“She is just like him,” Zamora said. “It hurts every time I see her. She wasn’t even born when he got killed. He wasn’t here to even see his little girl.”

The last time Zamora saw her brother, he departed her house on Friday, July 1, 2005 on his bicycle. On his bike, freshly cleaned “like he was washing a car,” he left on a journey to kill time while waiting for Zamora’s ex-husband to arrive and join him on fishing trip.

“Alonzo was a quiet person, which everybody knew out there,” Zamora said. “He was very few in words. If you didn’t say nothing to him, he wasn’t going to say nothing. All he liked was his little hobbies, and his hobby was fishing. He would fish every day if he could.

“And if he didn’t fish, he would ride his bike every day. That was a car to him. He would ride his bike to Houma, ride his bike to Thibodaux. He would ride his bike everywhere.”

The body of 34-year-old Alonzo Hogan was found the next day at La. Highway 306 and Rivet Lane in Bayou Gauche. According to the autopsy report, he was strangled.

“He was on the slow side, but he didn’t bother nobody,” Zamora said. “He had his little friends he would hang out with and stuff, but other than that, he would just stay to himself. He never gave anybody no trouble. He never bothered anybody, so nobody never bothered him.”

Hogan’s death would later be attributed to the chaos caused by a now 46-year-old man; a Thibodaux High graduate in the class of ’83 and a Bayou Blue resident; a 5-foot-7, 280-pound man who tormented, killed and inflicted irreversible tragedy among the family members of murdered men across southeastern Louisiana.

By the time he was arrested on Dec. 1, 2006, Ronald Dominique had killed 23 men whose average age was 25. The bodies were found across six parishes: St. Charles, Jefferson, Lafourche, Terrebonne, Assumption and Iberville.

Eighteen of his victims were black and five were white. According to authorities, most lived a transient, drug-abused lifestyle and roamed the streets under the moonlight. None were physically overbearing, a product of the way they lived their lives.

But from Dominique’s perspective, that only made them an easy target.

In April of 2005, after the bodies of 18 victims had been found across four parishes, a multi-agency task force was formed and headquartered at the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office in Lockport.

Former Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Jerry Larpenter said the nature of the murders made the cases especially difficult to solve without a corroborated effort.

“Here you got a guy that doesn’t look like a serial killer, and his victims, when they leave home, they might leave home for days or weeks and not contact anybody because several of them were looking for money to survive,” Larpenter told the Tri-Parish Times. “And by survive, I mean they had drug problems. Several of them had drug problems, or the lifestyle that they led to their demise”

The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office was the lead agency of the task force, which was comprised of agencies from each of the affected jurisdictions.

At times, there was a very high amount of law enforcement actively involved, but during the lulls in Dominique’s strikes, it was basically six core members.

“If we’d have a fresh body, you’d have 50 people in the room, bosses from all over,” Dawn Foret said. “But once the hot leads ran down, it was pretty much the core group.”

The core group, according to Foret, included Dennis Thornton of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, Bill Null of the Louisiana Department of Probation and Parole, Todd Charlette of the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office, Jeff Bergeron of the state AG office and Barbara O’Donnell with FBI New Orleans.

The prospects of knowing there were 40-50 people who needed to be interviewed was daunting at times, Foret said.

“We needed to get them done as soon as possible, but there was only four or five of us able to do it. It was overwhelming, but we got through it.”

And the pressure? When it was formed, the task force was charged with catching a man who had been killing for nearly eight years. Devoid of a suspect, they understood that the unknown serial killer would strike again.

“Absolutely,” Charlette said. “You’ve got over 23 bodies. Next thing you know, they’re getting dumped in your parish. It’s like, ‘Oh, s***. Here we go.’ So yeah, it was a big deal for me when I was assigned to the task force. I had never done anything like that before.”

But despite the extra hours chasing leads and interviewing people deemed important, the task force struggled to gain ground on identifying a suspect because of the way the bodies were handled.

“When this guy killed somebody, he didn’t know where he was going to dump the body,” Null said. “He would just put the body in the back of his truck and he’d ride and find some lonely, abandoned road somewhere where all of your evidence was destroyed by nature, by rain, water or whatever.

“He was actually very good at what he was doing, dumping the bodies, because he was destroying a lot of evidence,” Null explained. “He just didn’t destroy all of it, and that led to his identity.”

Deep in the shadows, in dark stretches on lonely streets, Ronald Dominique would approach his prospective victims in a dark pick-up truck. He carried with him a passenger, a fabricated tale to complement a woman’s picture he would use as a tool in his murderous rampage.

As the taillights on his truck glowed red, the serial killer would relay the tale to the man outside his window. He would launch into a rehearsed story, perfected lies about the woman in the picture.

He would outline her emotional fragility and her willingness to pay for sexual satisfaction so long as the beau would submit to a stipulation n bondage.

“Dominique showed Co-Billy (one of Dominique’s final would-be victims who later relayed the story to the task force) a picture of a woman and told him that this woman had been raped when she was young but still likes to have sex,” said Null. “She would pay him for having sex with her if he would allow himself to be tied up where he could not hurt her.

“The best we can tell this was a picture of a woman he would have just got out of a picture frame. It was nobody that he knew.”

Those who believed the Bayou Blue man’s deceit would be taken to his home, where Dominique would reiterate the conditions: the woman in the picture will appear upon the surrender of power.

“That, I didn’t believe from day one,” Zamora said. “[The detective] said he lured them in by showing each one of them a picture of a girl he had. And [the detective] said she was a beautiful girl. And [the detective] said [Dominique] would tell them he would let them have sex with the girl.

“That’s how he lured them in to him. I didn’t believe that because even though my brother is on the slow side, I just can’t see him being that easy just to believe that.”

Should the target change his mind and refuse to be tied up, he was liberated, free to ponder whether or not the unseen woman existed. The forfeiture of power was necessary not for the scorned woman, but for Dominique’s own security so that he could commit his wicked acts of self-indulgence without risk.

According to court documents, Ronald Dominique pleaded not guilty to forcible rape on Sept. 16, 1996 and the trial was continued without date on Nov. 7, 1996.

The Houma Courier first reported the 1996 rape charges three weeks after Dominique was arrested in 2006. The newspaper also reported that Dominique was accused of forcible rape in 1993, an accusation on which the Thibodaux Police Department did not act.

The reason behind the 1996 trial continuation remains unclear, as the Courier reported the alleged victim could not be found to testify, according to prosecutors. The alleged victim disputed that prosecutors reached out to him. Dominique claimed, according to interview transcripts reported by the Courier, the sex was consensual in both cases.

On July 14, 1997, the body of David Mitchell Jr., 19, was found along side La. Highway 3160 in Hahnville. Mitchell was the first of 23 victims who Dominique would later admit to murdering over a nine-year span.

“He never left a live victim,” Null said “The only way he would try to kill a person is if that person submitted to being tied up to where they could not get away. If that person didn’t voluntarily submit to being tied up, he did not intend to kill him. Therefore, that victim would just walk away and not say anything.”

In releasing those who refused, Dominique bound his own arms behind his back. He continued to rape and murder submissive victims, but in the background authorities concurrently chased down leads, weeded through interviews and tried to ascertain viable information that would lead to the killer’s capture.

Ronald Dominique’s arrest was of his own volition, a byproduct of his Modus Operandi. His capture derived from his motive, which authorities said was to avoid a return to jail on rape charges.

Dominique insisted his victims submit to being tied up. He admitted to authorities that he would entice them with promises, whether it was money or sex with the pictured woman or himself. But they were first forced to relinquish control and cross the boundary into putting their life in a stranger’s hands for the unseen yet assuredly tangible prize.

Ricky Wallace refused to be shackled in Dominique’s trailer on Bayou Blue Road and, in turn, became the linchpin to an operation that would end the torment Dominique wrought across southeastern Louisiana. Because Dominique only killed those he raped and only raped those who were bound, he released the task force’s soon-to-be informant.

Bill Null, a sex offender specialist with the Louisiana Department of Probation and Parole, admitted that he did not put in the same time on the task force as the rest of the core members. Null joined the task force “about one year after it started,” but ultimately, it was the use of his contacts that led to an arrest.

Null said he talked to three people: a marijuana dealer, someone called “Co-Billy” and Ricky Wallace. The marijuana dealer led Null to Co-Billy, who was approached by Dominique on West Park Avenue one night. Co-Billy told Null that a “short, dumpy guy with a ball cap and dark pickup” offered him sex with a woman if he would ride back to his residence.

Co-Billy, who investigators say fit the profile of Dominique’s victims, declined the ride. His brief encounter with Dominique produced a narrative that would give the task force a lead on how its potential suspect operated.

Wallace, on the other hand, was the key that unlocked the dam, allowing investigators to pool their resources into surveillance on the Bayou Blue trailer.

“It wasn’t Ricky that called me, it was a family member that was worried because of his size and his lifestyle, he fit the description of a person that would have been attacked by the serial killer,” Null said. “When they called me, that’s when I picked him up and talked to him.”

Wallace was found walking along Authement Street, where he still lives. After acknowledging his encounter with Dominique, the man who escaped the monster’s grasp asked the Tri-Parish Times for money to compensate a prospective sit-down interview, which was refused.

Wallace remained silent, but Null recanted his version of the events.

Null said the killer approached the informant on a dark section of east Plant Street. Wallace, like Co-Billy, was presented a picture of a woman and promised sex.

“He was on parole [for distribution of cocaine and possession of cocaine] at the time,” Null said of Wallace. “Dominique picked him up and brought him to the trailer but he wouldn’t allow Dominique to tie him up, so it was kind of like a standoff. They didn’t argue or fight or anything, but Dominique wasn’t going to forcibly tie him up. So Dominique dropped him back off, and he showed us where Dominique lived.”

No matter the proposition, the promised prize peeking just beyond the perception of reality, Wallace was not persuaded into a pre-sex bondage position.

“Ricky was on crack that night, but he had enough brains really. Ricky doesn’t trust people, he’s been screwed over before,” Null said. “Ricky is the kind of guy that would never allow himself to be tied up.”

Wallace identified the trailer at 2215 Bayou Blue Road as the mysterious man’s dwelling. At the time, the authorities’ thinking was that the trailer’s inhabitant was nothing more than a suspect, an odd man who tried to convince Wallace to bind himself in exchange for sex.

Then, Wallace picked out the inhabitant’s photo in a line-up. Wallace’s appearance and his lifestyle meshed with what investigators had noticed as a common link amongst the bodies they found across southeastern Louisiana.

And finally, the task force had a name, address and rap sheet for the suspect they had hunted for nearly 20 months.

Investigators picked up Dominique, who consented to give a DNA sample that matched evidence collected off the victims’ bodies.

“We waited for a second DNA match,” Foret said. “We had another piece of evidence. We just wanted to confirm that he just wasn’t connected to one murder. We had a second piece of evidence that was viable. We waited for those results, which was about three weeks. During that three weeks, he was under 24/7 surveillance.”

On Wednesday night, Nov. 29, 2006, Ronald Dominique checked into the emergency shelter at the Bunk House Inn, a two-story, red-brick building on East Main Street in Houma.

Lt. Bobbie O’Bryan with the Houma Police Department founded the homeless shelter in 1998 as a place of refuge for the needy. It would serve that purpose for the area’s most dangerous man.

“I knew nothing of that investigation or anything that they were doing at that time, so we checked him in just like any homeless person and put him in the emergency beds with four or five people besides himself,” O’Bryan said. “In my eyes, it was like putting a diabetic in a candy store and saying, ‘Don’t touch.’”

After he spent the first night, Dominique, like all who are sheltered in the emergency beds, was told to leave at 8 a.m. When O’Bryan arrived at the Bunk House on Thursday morning, HPD Sgt. Dana Coleman was waiting for him to request Dominique be placed in a long-term room.

“At 8 a.m., [Dominique] has been put out on the street just like every other homeless person,” O’Bryan said. “Sgt. Coleman asked us if we could provide him a room and keep him at the Bunk House.

“Oh my goodness. We don’t take a sexual offender, child molester, rapist or murderer in the Bunk House, and now you’re telling me I have one. I was like ‘No,’ and Sgt. Coleman goes into begging mode so I was like, ‘OK, fine.’”

O’Bryan assigned Dominique a bed in a densely populated area on the backside of the first story. It minimized Dominique’s chances to strike in the shelter and placed him in a room that was within range of a video camera.

The task force set up surveillance outside and O’Bryan and his wife watched from the video control room.

“We weren’t running around high-fiving each other, but we knew that we could arrest him on the murders on the DNA,” Foret said. “We had to prove it.”

He didn’t know it at the time, but O’Bryan placed Dominique in the same room in which Michael Barnett, one of his victims, had stayed four years earlier. The Bunk House director said three of Dominique’s victims spent some time at the shelter, which added to the mystique that shrouded the brick building days after the arrest.

Thirty-eight hours after Dominique was officially checked into the Bunk House, the task force contacted O’Bryan and informed him that it was time to apprehend Dominique. He joined Foret and Dennis Thornton, a detective with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and member of the task force, as they knocked on Dominique’s door.

“Dominique is standing up, and when he sees the two detectives, he just puts his head down, kind of like ‘I knew’ or ‘What took you so long?’” O’Bryan said. “They start talking to him and they then ask him to come. We walk him through the back area, they put him in the back of the car and take off.”

Camera crews descended upon the Bunk House, a tangible place in a case of unknowns. Reports began to surface that Dominique was targeting the homeless, residents of the place where he was apprehended.

“They made it seem that he was targeting homeless people, but these people had become self-sufficient on their own,” O’Bryan said. “They weren’t staying at the homeless shelter; it was just that at one point in their life, they had stayed at the Bunk House. These guys were on their own.”

Despite the arrest, investigators remained apprehensive about their prospects of charging Dominique on each of the open murder cases. It hinged on a confession.

“We had to basically get a confession from him to completely connect him to the rest of the bodies,” Foret said. “We knew to completely complete our case, it banked on our interview with him. That made everybody nervous and anxious and unsure what was going to happen.”

It took just three hours for Dominique to confess to the rape and murder of the 23 victims: Michael Barnett, Joseph Brown, Kurt Cunningham, Chris Deville, Alonzo Hogan, Mitchell Johnson, Anoka Jones, Oliver LeBanks, Leon Lirette, Larry Matthews, Angel Mejia, David Mitchell Jr., Nicholas Pellegrin, Gary Pierre, Kenneth Randolph, Larry Ranson, Manuel Reed, Wayne Smith, Christopher Sutterfield, Michael Vincent, August Watkins, Bruce Williams and Datrell Woods.

“We believe he was telling the truth when he gave his full confession,” Larpenter told the Tri-Parish Times. “We were looking for lies. Just because you have a suspect and he’s giving a confession, you still got to prove that whatever he is giving you is true because there are some that will not tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

The task force, led by Foret and Thornton, took the necessary steps to verify what Dominique admitted in the interrogation room.

“You still have to cross your T’s and dot your I’s,” Foret said. “We were going back and checking facts and making sure we were doing everything right and all the cases that he was confessing to matched evidence.”

Larpenter heaped praise on the task force and detectives for the arrest and drawn confession.

“It’s pretty much in your blood,” the former sheriff said. “Some dogs are bred to hunt and some people are born to be detectives. But I don’t think anyone is born to be a serial killer.”

At the outset, Terrebonne Parish District Attorney Joe Waitz Jr. intended to pursue the death penalty, but the parish’s lead prosecutor didn’t make the final call without input from those who were affected the most by Dominique’s havoc.

“We were going to be proactive and get involved and prosecute this thing as swiftly as we could,” Waitz said. “We had a charge as a death penalty, a capital case. At the request of the victims who wanted to resolve this and get it behind them, they chose to let him rot in jail.

“I certainly take the input and the wishes of the victims in the cases as far as a final determination and outcome. They felt like they’d rather see him rot in jail, and I was OK with that.”

Waitz praised the efforts of the task force throughout the investigation.

“Every single lead, we would follow up on and eventually [the task force] got him,” Waitz said. “They got him. The main people that did the interviews when we actually arrested him was Dennis [Thornton] and Dawn [Foret]. Once they broke him on one, they kept working on him and boom, boom, boom, boom, they fell like dominoes.”

Although the investigation of individual murder cases were originally conducted in the jurisdiction the body was found, prosecution was dependent on where Dominique admitted to killing each victim.

Initially, Dominique was charged with nine counts of first-degree murder in Terrebonne, but the charge for the murder of Kenneth Randolph was dropped when it became known he was murdered in St. Charles Parish, Foret said.

Assistant District Attorney Mark Rhodes was the lead prosecutor for the Dominique trial. Rhodes had just returned to Houma after a stint in Omaha, Neb., where he assisted a friend who was appointed county attorney to fill a three-year vacancy.

“It was challenging in a sense that we didn’t have to just prepare for the eight homicides that were committed in Terrebonne,” Rhodes said. “We had to prepare for all 23 because we were going to introduce evidence of the other 15 in the trial of the eight in Terrebonne Parish. It was like working 23 murder cases at the same time. It was voluminous.”

Waitz said he had no qualms with delegating the duty to Rhodes.

“It was an easy decision to put Mark on it and allow him to take it and run with it,” Waitz said. “As I said, he’s an excellent prosecutor. He’s probably tried more criminal cases in Terrebonne Parish than anyone else.”

Richard Goorley of the Capital Assistance Project of Louisiana was Dominique’s defense attorney. The Capital Assistance Project has a contract with the Louisiana Public Defender Board to handle the capital cases.

Goorley said he could not discuss the communications between he and his client but he did say any chance Dominique had to avoid sentencing dissipated when he pled guilty.

“Once he pleads guilty, he’s admitted his guilt,” Goorley said. “Once he pleads guilty, he admits his guilt and is sentenced.”

As the state and defense filed motions in the crescendo leading up to Dominique’s trial, the defense requested a motion to stay proceedings because Dominique needed by-pass surgery. There were reports of Dominique’s frailty throughout the process, and after he submitted to an independent medical exam and signed over his health records to the state, he was granted time for surgery on his heart.

Dominique was sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences on Sept. 23, 2008. During the proceedings, the victims’ families were welcome to speak to Dominique in delivering their victim impact statements.

Cynthia Zamora, sister of Alonzo Hogan, spoke to Dominique on behalf of her family. Zamora said although she still struggles to cope with the tragedy, especially around the holidays and Hogan’s birthday, and although she’ll never achieve complete closure, she was able to forgive the man for his brutality.

“My main thing is I hope he finds Christ through that because through it all, God still was going to forgive him,” she said. “I looked at it like, as bad as it was, he must have had a serious problem himself.”

Zamora said the penalty, whether it was death or life in prison, wasn’t up to her to decide.

“I’m fine with it the way it is because I just feel like whatever journey he’s going to get, he’s going to get, even if it’s just being locked up,” she said. “Why take his life? I feel like he’ll suffer regardless.”

Ultimately, the decision came down to the simple fact that if sentenced to death via lethal injection, Dominique had 10-15 years of sitting in a single cell waiting on the appeal process to run its course. Considering the health concerns, it was best for all involved to conclude the process as quickly as possible, Waitz said.

“He has to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life in prison,” Bill Null said. “You can get accustomed to a small cell. You cannot get accustomed to walking into a big yard in a prison knowing they are friends and relatives of people you killed. If you want to punish him, let him worry. Let him feel what these people felt.”

Ronald Dominique spends 23 hours every day in a single-inmate cell at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola with one hour for recreation and a shower if he elects to do so.

Cathy Fontenot, who is in charge of public relations at Angola, said the prison does not allow its inmates to be interviewed, but she did brief the Tri-Parish Times on his activity.

“Because of his high-profile nature, he’s being housed in cell-block housing until we feel he is ready for the general population, which is years and years and years away in his case,” Fontenot said.

Dominique has two write-ups on his record since he was brought to Angola. He threw hot water at another inmate, but missed. He was also written up for throwing bars of soap into another inmate’s cell, but was reportedly not the aggressor.

“It’s good that we put him in a cell because, obviously, he doesn’t get along with others and others don’t get along with him,” Fontenot said.

Dominique has not had any health concerns. He has yet to take a trip to a hospital or the Angola health care center.

Although Dominique remains in prison, the effects of his self-indulgent crimes continue to reverberate in Alonzo Hogan’s family. Angel Adams, Hogan’s daughter, was born Sept. 7, 2005, two months after his body was found.

Cyntha Zamora, Hogan’s sister, said she copes through prayer.

“That’s really all I can do,” she said. “If it wouldn’t be for God, I don’t know. I’d just pray. It don’t stop me from crying and missing him and all that, but I just pray. That’s all I can do.”

Two New York filmmakers are in the process of producing a documentary on Dominique’s story from the perspective of victims’ families, members of the task force and others involved in the capture and prosecution of Dominique.

“My background in film making is to not go into something with agenda,” said Alix Lambert, one of the filmmakers. “It is to just represent the voices of the people who are involved and allow that to tell the story in and of itself, and that’s what we’d like to do here.”

Lambert will work with David McMahon. The duo made two trips to south Louisiana and said they expect to complete the filming today and debut “Bayou Blue” on the festival circuit next year.

“It’s really coming along,” McMahon said. “Everybody has been very helpful. It’s a very sad subject and hard to talk about for a lot of people, but it’s an important story and everybody has been terrific; very welcoming and supportive.”

To this day, Dominique’s family members have maintained a public silence. But Zamora said his sister offered to speak to the family members of the victims at the sentencing hearing.

“My heart went out to her,” Zamora said. “It still wasn’t her [fault]. She cried the whole time she talked because she said she don’t know what got a hold of her brother because they weren’t raised that kind of way. They just don’t know what happened to him. She was saying a day don’t go by without her feeling what the families must have been going through, and she said [then] it’s hurting her until this day. It can’t bring back what he did because now he’s gone for life and that’s still affecting them too. It wasn’t her, it was him.”

Serial Killer’s Timeline

• 1993 Ronald Dominique’s first encounter with police. A local newspaper reported in 2006 that an unnamed victim accused

Dominique of raping him at gunpoint, but Thibodaux Police never filed charges.

• July 14, 1997 The body of 19-year-old David L. Mitchell, of Killona, La., was found off La. Highway 3160 in Hahnville. Mitchell would be the first of 23 murders Dominique would later confess to investigators.

• Dec. 1, 2006 Dominique is apprehended at the Bunk House Inn in Houma after investigators kept the homeless shelter under surveillance for 38 hours. Dominique would confess to the murders within three hours.

• Sept. 19, 2008 Dominique consents to plead guilty. The state announces it will not pursue a capital case.

• Sept. 23, 2008 Dominique is sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences, with Judge Randall Bethancourt presiding. Family members of the murdered men speak to the killer through the victim impact statement process.

Angel Adams, 5, holds a picture of her father Alonzo Hogan as she sits on Cynthia Zamora’s lap. Hogan, who was also Zamora’s brother, died at the hands of serial killer Ronald Dominique before his daughter was born. ERIC BESSON