A Eulogy for Mary Jane Marcantel

Photo courtesy of Mary Jane Marcantel

I have some sad news to share. Mary Jane Marcantel, pioneering Louisiana paralegal, intrepid investigator, civic activist and all around badass Southern woman, died on Saturday of complications related to breast cancer. She was 77.

Mary Jane, as readers of this newsletter know, was featured in two different stories we ran this season, both set in Baton Rouge. The first, “Public Access,” was about the battle to expose Baton Rouge TV personality Scott Rogers as a sexual predator. The second, “Finding Angie,” concerned the multi-decade search for Angie Smith, who disappeared from her home in 1989 at age 24 and has never been found.

Mary Jane played a critical role in the Scott Rogers investigation. After Baton Rouge PR consultant Rannah Gray alerted her to Scott’s dark past in the UK, Mary Jane took the case pro bono. "The first words she said were 'I'm not going to charge you for anything that fell in your lap'," Rannah recently told The Advocate. Mary Jane pressured the US Attorney’s Office to take an interest in the story and helped expose Rogers’s history of fraud and exploitation.

Mary Jane also dedicated years of her life to getting justice for Angie Smith’s family. After learning of Angie’s disappearance, she unearthed evidence that led to the conviction of Angie’s ex-husband Joey Smith for hiring a hitman to kill his second wife, Sheila. A former FBI agent told the Advocate in 2000 that Mary Jane “practically shamed us into taking the case.”

What does shaming the FBI look like? In “Finding Angie,” Mary Jane described pushing an FBI task force agent to tear himself away from Monday Night Football and visit a witness she’d dug up. That witness’s testimony led to Joey Smith’s conviction on first-degree murder charges in 1994. But that didn’t stop Mary Jane. She continued investigating Angie’s disappearance for decades. In fact, when we spoke earlier this year, she was still searching for leads in the hopes of recovering her body.

Mary Jane was unlike anyone I’ve interviewed in my 20 or so years as a journalist. (I wrote a separate newsletter about her in March.) In talking to her for the first time, about the Scott Rogers case, I remember thinking: “This story’s interesting and everything. But it seems like this woman might be the real story.” She was like a Cajun superhero whose superpowers included an ability to goad lackadaisical cops and prosecutors into investigating cases of missing women and child predators. I only later realized that she was also the driving force behind Baton Rouge’s Way Home program, which gave free bus tickets to homeless people that had a verified destination and support waiting for them. A Baton Rouge police lieutenant called Way Home her “masterpiece” and told the Advocate: "There's no telling how many people that program helped.”

As if two three-part series weren’t enough, Mary Jane and I had planned to work together on another story about legendary former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards. Mary Jane was part of Edwards’s defense team on all four of his federal trials, and became his close friend and confidante. I was looking forward to hearing her wild stories from those days — and to sharing them with our listeners.

I was not aware Mary Jane was sick. And, from what I can tell, neither was anyone else until very recently. A former Baton Rouge detective, who talked with Mary Jane daily and considered her a “second mother,” told me he didn’t know until a few weeks ago. Apparently, her doctor had diagnosed her with a terminal form of breast cancer last October and given her less than two years to live. She decided to forgo treatment and let the cancer run its course.

When I asked the detective why she’d kept it a secret, he said, in essence, Mary Jane didn’t want to be a burden to her friends and family. After revealing her diagnosis to him on the phone, she’d told him, in no uncertain terms, “Don’t you fucking treat me any different.” Which sounds about right.

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Fifteen years ago, I did a stint as a stringer for the New York Times’s short-lived nightlife column, The Nocturnalist. I was at a fundraiser for Jay-Z’s scholarship program one night when I ran into Nora Ephron, the screenwriter, director and essayist. I was in awe of her, and summoned the courage to ask what she was working on. “Oh nothing,” she laughed. “Just playing online Scrabble until my brain fries.” She was 70 years old and seemed in perfect health. Nine months later she died of leukemia.

I later learned that she’d been diagnosed with a precursor to the disease in 2006, but kept it private for years. When her condition progressed in the final six months of her life, she told no one except her two sons. One of them, Jacob Bernstein, a reporter for the Times, later wrote that she worried her illness would "define her, turning every conversation into a series of ‘How are you?’s." As someone who had always valued strength and independence, he wrote, his mom didn’t want to be perceived as fragile or vulnerable.

I was reminded of Nora Ephron when I heard Mary Jane had kept her own illness under wraps. And now that I think about it, the two of them had a lot in common. Mary Jane became the first paralegal in Louisiana because women weren’t allowed to be lawyers back then. Nora became a “mail girl” at Newsweek in the ‘60s because women weren’t allowed to be staff writers. Both women had to fight for respect in what were then male-dominated fields: the law in Mary Jane’s case, journalism and Hollywood in Nora’s. Both were funny, sharp, brave and deeply compassionate.

In a 2016 documentary about Nora’s life, “Everything is Copy,” a male producer friend of hers recalls riding in an elevator with the director Mike Nichols not long after Nora died. The producer broke down in tears and told Mike: “Who’s gonna tell us what to do?” It’s easy to imagine Mary Jane's friends and colleagues saying the same about her.

My six-month relationship with Mary Jane was limited to phone and Zoom calls. I’d hoped to visit her in person in Baton Rouge and sort through the boxes of investigative files she kept telling me about. I wish I’d been able to do that. I also wish I had the chance to tell her how much I learned from her in a short period of time.

But I feel very grateful we were able to capture her voice and spirit in the show. Earlier this week, her friend Rannah Grey wrote to me in an email: “When she finally told us about her illness, everyone was so glad she had done the podcasts, and they will mean even more as the years pass.”

When I think about the purpose of our now somewhat outdated “audio-only” podcast, and about what it can be at its best, I think about how it allows people from around the country and the world to listen deeply to the sound of a stranger’s voice, without the distractions of what they look like, what they’re wearing, or where they happen to be — things that so easily provoke judgment and prevent us from actually hearing what someone is saying, or trying to say.

On several occasions in our interviews, Mary Jane, when trying to convey what it was like to be a five-foot-tall woman with professional ambitions in Louisiana in the ‘70s or 80s, would pause and say: “Are you hearing me?” or “Are you hearing what I’m saying?” My response was always the same: “Yes. I definitely hear you.”

I’m glad other people got to hear her, too.