Cemetery burglars, a vegan serial killer, New Orleans's most corrupt cop, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning podcaster
The latest from Gone South
We’re rounding the bend on Season 4 of Gone South, incredibly enough!
The effort required to find stories, interview people who can speak coherently about them, edit them way down, write narration, and then record / edit / mix these episodes has made it hard to keep up with the newsletter lately. But the season officially ends in mid-July, at which point I’ll have more time to write and reflect on what we’ve learned making 40 episodes of a Southern true-crime show in one year.
For now, I wanted to catch you up on the stories we’ve done since our last newsletter.
Catching Felix Vail
After our two-parter on Florida Keys smugglers Dickie Lynn and Ricou DeShaw, we went back to Mississippi for a three-part series involving legendary investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell. Jerry helped to expose the “Goon Squad” in Rankin County, MS, which he’s chronicled with others for the NYT. But he’s probably best known for getting Civil Rights-era cold cases reopened and then solving them (he wrote a book about it that John Grisham loved). A 2012 piece Jerry wrote about serial killer Felix Vail, who was on the run for decades, helped crack what’s likely the oldest solved cold case in US history, dating back to 1962. We chronicled that saga in “Catching Felix Vail.”
A Conversation with Bone Valley’s Gilbert King
The second season of the hit podcast “Bone Valley” offered a great opportunity to interview host Gilbert King about how he made Season 1, and what led him to return to the story. Gilbert won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “Devil in the Grove,” a history of attorney Thurgood Marshall's defense of four young black men in Lake County, Florida, who were wrongly accused in 1949 of raping a white woman. I loved “Bone Valley,” and, honestly, I was nervous about talking to Gilbert. Mostly because he seemed like such a kind, generous and courageous guy in the podcast, and I worried he might not be like that in real life. I was wrong. And I found the story behind “Bone Valley” almost more inspirational than the story itself. You can listen to our conversation here.
The Cemetery Detective
After spending a month inside the mind of a psychopathic serial killer (Felix Vail), and then inhaling both seasons of Bone Valley in two days (exhilarating but emotionally draining), it felt good to kick back with a bloodless caper from New Orleans — a place we at Gone South return to again and again.
I’d never heard of this one before, but in the late 1990s, artifacts began vanishing from New Orleans’s historic cemeteries in record numbers. Rookie NOPD detective Frederick “Eric” Morton followed the trail to a crew of drug addicts in St. Bernard Parish, led by a surprisingly charismatic young man named David Dominici. When I tracked down Eric and David all these years later, I was shocked at how ready and willing they were to recount every step of the story. (Eric’s riff about an encounter he had as a “cemetery beat cop” during the 90s Goth craze was priceless.)
Eric is currently re-writing a novel loosely based on the case. And David is preparing to publish a memoir, decades in the making, in which the cemetery robberies play a main role. It’s called “Or Else Is Here: A Drug Addict’s Insane Ideas to Keep from Being Dopesick.” Which of course is an amazing, if slightly confusing, title. When I asked what he meant by “Or Else is Here,” he said the idea of “or else” is a central theme in the book. It’s something he and his friends used to say all the time: “We’ve gotta find dope within the next 3 hours, or else we’re going to be really f*cking sick for three days.” Or: “I had to cop to five years, or else they would have given me 20.”
As I learned while reporting the story, David is a main character in another book by the brilliant magazine journalist Mark Jacobson. Mark lived in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans after Katrina. At some point he heard a rumor that, after the flood, a local guy had discovered — and taken — a lampshade made of human skin inside an abandoned home. That guy was David Dominici. The resulting book, “The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans,” details Mark’s five-year quest to verify its authenticity and trace its origins. It sounds morbid, and it is. It’s also riveting and hilarious. David’s personal story is one of the high points.
Listen to our story about the graveyard robberies here:
Defending Len Davis
This story was the closest we’ve come this season to breaking news. (We’ve got an even newsier one coming up.) Len Davis is a corrupt former New Orleans cop who, until recently, was on Death Row for arranging the 1994 murder of a 32-year-old mother of three named Kim Groves. Her crime? Filing an internal affairs complaint against him for beating up an innocent teenager.
In December of last year, Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates to life in prison. Len was one of them. But he wasn’t happy about it. He publicly rejected the commutation, arguing that as an inmate on Death Row, he got better resources to get his conviction overturned. Unfortunately for Len, the U.S. Constitution, I’ve since learned, doesn’t care about that. If the president wants to spare your execution, you have no choice in the matter.
To understand the mind of Len Davis, I talked with New Orleans criminal defense attorney Pat Fanning. Pat defended Len during his second federal trial in 1996. That one concerned the role Len played in a drug protection racket. I was familiar with Len Davis’s reputation from my New Orleans crime beat days. But Pat’s late-night conversations with Len at the local jail humanized him in a way I’d never heard before. Pat also happens to be a world-class storyteller, which helps.
Listen to the story here:
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
Jed