Speaking with me around the eighth anniversary of the launch of the task force in Jefferson Davis Parish, Brown told me he hoped some follow-up reporting would appear.

If local law enforcement and the task force have provided few answers, local media hasn’t, either, even after the book’s publication. But to put the blame on “lifestyles” is quite another thing when police were also a substantial part of the victims’ lives. “For years,” he writes, “it has been easy to see the slain sex workers as simply the victims of, as Sheriff Edwards has repeatedly and dismissively told this media, a ‘high-risk lifestyle.’” This kind of victim-blaming is still socially acceptable when the victim is a sex worker. Not long before her death, she told her mother Barbara Guillory not to bother with a cake for her birthday that year: “Momma, it doesn’t matter,” recalled her mother to Brown, “I’m not gonna be here.” She also told Brown that Necole had confided in her: “it was the police who were killing those girls.”īut Brown illustrates how Jefferson Davis Parish law enforcement’s serial killer theory has served to deflect attention from its own troubled investigation.

She was killed in August of 2009, the last of the Jeff Davis 8.

Necole Guillory was “at the very center” of the scene, Brown writes. Brown also reveals that lives of these eight women - Loretta Chaisson, Ernestine Patterson, Kristen Gary Lopez, Whitnei Dubois, Laconia “Muggy” Brown, Crystal Zeno, Brittney Gary, and Necole Guillory - all crossed, sometimes intimately, with local police. They had worked together out of the same motel, the Boudreaux Inn, where police made near-daily arrests. Another portrait of the women is clear from his work: They knew one another intimately. Brown fills in their stories with care, drawing on deep sources in Jefferson Davis Parish and a trove of public records he obtained over four years. Local and national press underscored the women’s links to the area sex and drug trade. For a public primed to view sex workers as characters in a “special victims” serial drama, a serial killer marks both the beginning and end of the story.

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