In the summer of 2000, the remains of John Doe were exhumed from his grave at Pine Hill Cemetery in St. Helena Parish. He had been buried for more than 20 years. Back in 1979, his body had been tied up and left at a local garbage dump in the parish. There were hopes that technology and forensic science could finally reveal the boy’s identity. Those hopes quickly faded until the discovery of an encounter in Texas. 

For roughly 20 years, John Doe’s body had been buried at Pine Hill Cemetery in St. Helena Parish. At the time of his burial and in the two decades that followed, there wasn't much progress in finding a suspect in his murder. The victim’s true identity also remained elusive. In the summer of 2000, officials and investigators physically dug up the past. They exhumed John Doe’s remains. In an attempt to finally put a name to the boy who had been ritualistically tied up and left in rural Louisiana, his remains would be sent to a place called The FACES Lab.
 
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In 1997, after almost 20 years of cold case status, the murders of Dennis Turcotte, Mark Richardson and John Doe would get renewed interest. Dennis Stewart was a relatively new detective with Louisiana State Police, but his knowledge of one of the Rope Murders went back to 1979. Stewart grew up in Greensburg, Louisiana, not far from where John Doe’s body was discovered. He remembered hearing about the boy being tied up and left at the garbage dump in St. Helena Parish. Detective Stewart was determined to find the boy’s identity. To do that, John Doe’s body would have to be exhumed. 

When each victim of the rope murders was found, investigators didn’t make any public mention of a serial pattern or perpetrator. But, within a month after the discovery of John Doe’s body in St. Helena Parish, at least one newspaper ran a story about the boys being “male hustlers” who may have been stalked by a “sex killer”. The hustling scene in the French Quarter of New Orleans has been a real thing for decades. Whether these victims were part of that scene is far less certain, but the stigma it placed on the cases was hard to deny. What was it like in the Quarter when the murders took place? We take a journey back to a time full of nostalgia, but also violence.  
 

In 1979, Jack Foster was assigned the case of a teenaged boy who had been ritualistically tied up, murdered and left at a local garbage site in St. Helena Parish.  Foster was a self-taught detective working part time with the sheriff’s office. He was described as determined and thorough. But, those qualities wouldn’t be enough to find out the boy's true identity, let alone the person responsible for killing him. The case was a local mystery. When Foster fell into a bizarre coma during the investigation, it only added to that mystery.    

On November 12, 1979, the tiny sheriff’s department in St. Helena Parish was just beginning its investigation of a body that had been ritualistically tied-up and left at a garbage dumpsite. The body was decomposing. Identifying the victim was difficult. What authorities could say definitively was that it appeared to be the body of a teenage boy. In an attempt to identify that boy, the sheriff’s grandson says he was taken to the scene. What he and the deputies saw that day would stick with them for decades to come.

Following a coroner’s inquest jury in Harrison County, it was determined that Mark Richardson’s death was the result of a homicide. The coroner presumed Richardson died from a possible overdose of injected drugs, but the actual cause of death was undetermined. No explanation or theory was offered about the fact that Richardson was found with his hands and feet tied behind him. How was Richardson killed? What did the ropes have to do with his death? More than a year later, similar questions would be asked when the body of another victim was found tied up and left in Greensburg, La. 

Two days after a tied-up body was found in a wooded area near coastal Mississippi, a family from Biloxi believed it was that of their teenage son. Only weeks separated the discoveries of his body and Dennis Turcotte’s. The fact that both victims had been ritualistically bound would seem to show a strong connection between the cases, but early in the Mississippi investigation, authorities were grappling with a basic but crucial question: who is the victim?