[ominous music] NARRATOR: In October 2004,
the partially decomposed body of a 21-year-old
man was discovered in a disused storage locker. Ronald Dominique
strangled Michael Barnett, and his body was
found several days later, which
started to decompose within those mini storages. Dominique was the wolf
in sheep's clothing. NARRATOR: The unassuming
Ronald Dominique, known as the Bayou
Strangler, raped and killed men across South Louisiana. JIM BERNAZZANI: Once their
hands and feet were bound, Ronald Dominique then
raped these individuals. And once he was done with
them, he'd kill them and then remove the body
from his residence and throw them in the
sides of the road. BRYANNA FOX: Dominique would
often discard and leave his victims on the sides
of highways or in a canal or in a ditch, like
somebody throwing garbage out of a car window. GEOFFREY WANSELL: This
is one of the most relentless serial
killers in US history. NARRATOR: For nine years,
Ronald Dominique was a ghost-- undetected, homicidal, and
one of the world's most evil killers. [theme music] [dark music] In December of 2006,
42-year-old Ronald Dominique was arrested in Houma,
Louisiana in connection with the murder of two men. He soon confessed to more
than 20 other killings. He killed multiple men
across multiple parishes within the area. GEOFFREY WANSELL: There
was no national manhunt. There was no headlines. He just was there, slipping
in and out of lives, taking them as he did so. [soft ominous music] BOBBIE O'BRYAN: Ronald
Dominique appeared as a short, white male, a little
over set, walking with a cane, perfectly harmless. And yet, he was an
extremely prolific murderer of young, healthy men. People who do monstrous things
do not look like monsters. NARRATOR: Many of Ronald
Dominique's victims were homeless with drug
dependency problems. These were the most
vulnerable people in society-- the absolute--
people that police were least willing
to investigate. It was just so much easier to
kill them and get away with it. NARRATOR: Due to where some of
his victims' bodies were found, Dominique became known
as the Bayou Strangler. He would claim the
lives of 23 men. At that time,
Ronald Dominique was the most prolific serial killer
that we knew of operating in the United States. [dark music] NARRATOR: This
killer's story begins in the small Bayou community
of Thibodaux, Louisiana. [dark bayou music] BRYANNA FOX: Ronald
Dominique was born in 1964, just
outside of Baton Rouge, and he came from very
meager backgrounds. He was poor kid growing up,
and his family really clung to the tight knit community. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: He was
one of seven children, so his household would
have been very busy and quite a demanding one. The area that Dominique grew
up in, Southern Louisiana, is one that is
quite traditional, one where there are
very clear boundaries between masculine and feminine
and between men and women, and as he was
growing up, he wasn't one of those alpha males. He had some quite
feminine tendencies. JIM BERNAZZANI: He
was an outsider. He tried to fit in. He wasn't having any luck. [soft music] BRYANNA FOX: He was
bullied, taunted by friends, and even put down by
his family members. While growing up, he
was living by himself in a camper on the property
because the family essentially said he was just too odd
and they knew that there was something amiss with him. NARRATOR: It would
gradually emerge that one of the
reasons that he was uncomfortable with his
peers was that he was gay. He was struggling
throughout adolescence and into his early 20s
with his sexuality. I think he didn't
quite know what it was. [soft music] NARRATOR: Dominique
graduated high school in 1983 at the age of 19. When he left home,
he moved frequently between trailer parks. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
Dominique came to spend quite a lot
of time in New Orleans because that was somewhere
where he felt being gay was more acceptable. He could be himself in
that kind of environment. GEOFFREY WANSELL: It
was quite a big contrast between this neighbor
in the trailer park and a boy who then turns
up at the local gay bar. And he used to dress up
as his favorite character, or singer, Patty LaBelle. But even in the gay
community, he didn't seem to fit in all that well. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
There was still a feeling of
marginalization of people not really wanting to include
him, so wherever he turns, he seems to be
rejected, and I think that instills in him this
underlying current of shame. [soft ominous music] But he never really
got a proper job. He did all sorts of menial
things as a young man. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: He was
a pizza delivery driver. He was a meter reader. And I think there's a
sense in which there's a frustration in him that he's
having to settle for these jobs that are perhaps less than he
feels that he's entitled to, but at the same time, these jobs
ensure that he goes unnoticed. They ensure that he
remains in the background. [ominous music] NARRATOR: In 1985,
at the age of 21, Dominique was caught making
a number of dirty phone calls to local residents. He was convicted of telephone
harassment and fined $74. He wants a connection with
other people to some degree, but he wants that
connection to make him feel in control, to make
other people essentially fear him. So this is how he's going
about doing that-- he's making a connection, but it's a
connection that's based on a very negative foundation. But then in the 1990s,
Dominique's crimes take on an even more
sinister edge to them. [ominous music] GEOFFREY WANSELL:
In August 1996, Dominique was charged with
attacking a young man. The young man escaped,
but he insisted that Dominique had actually been
on the brink of killing him. He attempted to strangle him. It's the first real sign
of what was to come. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: This isn't
remote distant telephone harassment. This is him luring
somebody into his property and essentially assaulting them. So here, we've got
somebody who is escalating, who is getting more severe in
terms of the kind of offenses that they're committing. [dark soft music] NARRATOR: Dominique was
in prison for two weeks while awaiting trial. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
He's held in jail, and he insists that he was
brutally and persistently raped by fellow prisoners. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
When he tells it, it puts him in the
role as the victim to try and gain sympathy. It seemed to really impact
him because he said, I never want to go back to jail again. [ominous music] NARRATOR: When Dominique
faced the charges at court, his alleged victim
didn't appear, so the case was dismissed. Dominique comes out of the
other side of this, realizing-- said, I've gotten away with it. But also, it's given
him a bit of a fright. He's not going to stop doing
it, but he knows that he can't leave any more witnesses. BRYANNA FOX: While most
people who are in jail decide to stop all illegal
behavior at that point, well, Dominique actually
escalated his behavior. [dark music] NARRATOR: On the
12th of July, 1997, a 19-year-old man named David
Mitchell had just attended a family gathering
in New Orleans, and then is believed to have
hitched a ride to go home. But nearly 48 hours later,
David's lifeless body was found. The body was just dumped. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: And
dumping the body out in the open, that's basically
saying that you were worthless, you know, you have no value. So this first murder is
quite a significant one. [dark soft music] NARRATOR: David's body had
been abandoned along a stretch of highway in St. Charles Parish
of Louisiana, six miles away from where he was
last seen alive. He'd been raped and drowned. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
Dominique would have been able to watch the
life drain out of his victim. So this tells me that
he's a killer who enjoys the process of murder
as well as the outcome of ending somebody's life. He felt a lot of anger
and frustration inside, and so I'm sure the
motivation was twofold-- to silence somebody
who was able to witness and say what he
had done, but also, he was acting out on his
violent tendencies which were developing
after years, if not decades, of feeling
repressed and ostracized by his family and society. NARRATOR: Police found
no meaningful evidence of the identity of the killer. Ronald Dominique had
escalated from would-be rapist to savage murderer, then
escaped without a trace. [ominous music] GEOFFREY WANSELL: Barely six
months later in December 1997, Dominique kills for
the second time-- Gary Pierre, and he was 20. He was a high school student. NARRATOR: When his
body was discovered on the 14th of
December 1997, there were signs that Gary Pierre
had been sexually assaulted. He was strangled to death. GEOFFREY WANSELL: Significantly,
Pierre had been tied up. For Dominique, it's
about control as much as it is about the death. It's the ultimate
God-like complex. [dark music] ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
He enjoys seeing people helpless and humiliated. And this is something that
goes back to his experiences of adolescence. He felt ashamed,
he felt humiliated, and he's repeating
those feelings, but this time, he's the
one carrying them out. [ominous music] NARRATOR: In July
the following summer, a third young man was found
murdered in the same six mile radius of St. Charles Parish. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
It's extraordinary that the bodies were
found so close together but no one adds 2
and 2 and gets 4. They're just separate bodies. But now you have three killings
in the space of a year. They're all strangled,
but no DNA is found. [ominous music] NARRATOR: Dominique had
managed to cover his tracks. He continued to hide in plain
sight and frequent gay bars in New Orleans. On the 4th of October 1998, he
met 27-year-old Oliver LeBanks at a bar in the French Quarter. Years later, he would
detail the encounter in a police interview. MAR PAULSON: Oliver
was a good friend. He was delightful, and never a
problem, never an angry word. Very, just jovial,
smiling, sweet, kind. I saw him walk away down the
alleyway from the restaurant, and he turned the
corner and that was the last time I saw him. NARRATOR: After
chatting in the bar, Oliver and Dominique
left together. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
According to Dominique, the two men had agreed to have
sex in the back of his car. [ominous music] NARRATOR: Oliver LeBanks had
become the fourth man to lose his life at Dominique's hands. He just didn't deserve
to die like that. People were talking about him
as being transient and drug addict, and, you know, Oliver
was a wonderful human being with a family. He was as much a part of
that French Quarter community as I was or anybody else was. He begins to cry at several
points during these interviews, and this is just an act. So what this does is it
distracts our attention away from the fact that
he's the aggressor, he's the one who
enacted this violence. [dark music] NARRATOR: The following
day in the Jefferson Parish of Louisiana, a passerby
discovered Oliver's body under a freeway ramp. MAR PAULSON: Detectives
came in and sat down, and they showed me
a picture of Ollie and told me that he
had been found dead and they wanted me to tell
them something about him. They really just
didn't want to hear anything that was, um, good. I think that they
were expecting me to say he was all
kinds of problems, and he was on drugs,
and the only thing that I could tell them was
that he was a good, young man. So they wrapped it up and left,
and I didn't hear from them after that. NARRATOR: Investigators
had, however, found a Caucasian hair
and semen on Oliver's body and recovered mitochondrial DNA. Dominique had made a mistake. Mitochondrial DNA, it's
very different to what we refer to as autosomal DNA. It's maternally inherited,
so it would have been shared with brothers and sisters and
so forth because they were all inherited from the same mom. So it's not the type of DNA
that we have on the database. NARRATOR: Investigators
now had a partial DNA profile of Oliver
LeBanks' killer but no means to
match it to anyone. [ominous music] GEOFFREY WANSELL: In
the weeks following, other victims begin to turn up. JIM BERNAZZANI: There were
some that were killed in rather close proximity
and close in time, that he used to go for months
without killing anybody. Then he did go back to having a
spree of three or four deaths. So this is part of the
challenge at that time-- some were written off
as deaths by accidents, others were murdered,
but to string them all together into one guy
was a little bit far reaching. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: There
wasn't very much in the way of forensic evidence. This suggests that Dominique
may have used condoms when assaulting his victims. So this does tell us that
there might be a degree of forensic awareness here. There is a sense
in which he wants to limit the amount of evidence
that he leaves on their bodies. He's quite an intelligent
serial killer. BRYANNA FOX: Dominique
would pick victims and leave their bodies at
multiple different parishes across Louisiana. [dark music] We assume that police
departments share information and have access to each other's
case files and databases-- that it certainly wasn't
that way in the 1990s. They would have to literally
share information by calling each other to discuss. And therefore, linking these
crimes, pooling the evidence, and trying to
actually put together a case against a serial killer
versus individual murders was just not on
the police radar. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
There were not banner headlines saying a serial
killer is loose in the Bayou. There were no headlines at all. If they warranted a small
mention, it was quite rare. And we can't be sure, but
it's significant, I think, that at this point, all
his victims had been Black. [soft music] To this day, when
I talk to people and I talk about having someone
that worked with me killed by a serial killer,
they're like, why didn't we hear about this? What happened? I think that in essence, the
biggest problem was that you were dealing with
young Black men and it just got
completely passed over. BRYANNA FOX: Victims
that are white, female, young, in college, they
get the vast majority of the media attention. Victims that are male,
older in age, minorities, and especially if
they were gay or had any type of other
stigmatizing features, especially in the 1990s
and even early 2000s, they just did not generate a lot
of public attention, sympathy, and were not deemed
as media worthy. BOBBIE O'BRYAN: Most of the
victims lived on the street and was homeless, you
were subject to anyone that passes by or anyone
that's offering you something. Sometimes what some individuals
believe is an act of kindness is really something
for them to take advantage of an
individual person and then take them somewhere. That's the reason why
they, hate to say, could end up in human
trafficking or even death. NARRATOR: In January
of 2000, more than two and a half years since he'd
killed for the first time, police were no
closer to identifying 35-year-old Ronald Dominique. BRYANNA FOX: He thought
that he could engage in this type of pattern of
systematic serial killing and sexual assaults and
yet never get caught. GEOFFREY WANSELL: In this period
between the summer of 1997 and 2000, Dominique
had killed 10 young men with no trace or suggestion
that a serial killer could be at work. And now something even
more extraordinary happens in the story
of Ronald Dominique-- he stops killing. [dark music] NARRATOR: By January 2000,
35-year-old Ronald Dominique had seemingly ended
his murderous spree. The previous year, he'd
moved home from New Orleans to the nearby town of Houma. BOBBIE O'BRYAN: Almost more
of a nice, quiet, little town. We're probably about maybe
about 45 minutes to 60 minutes southeast of New Orleans. As a small community, you
pretty much know everybody. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
Now, I don't think the move in itself accounts
for why he stopped killing. I think it's, in a
sense, coincidence. Something convinced
him to stop killing. Had he been frightened that
people would think there was a serial killer in action? There's no evidence
that he wasn't going to escalate further. But for some reason,
he doesn't kill again for almost three years. NARRATOR: On the
6th of October 2002, the body of 20-year-old
Kenneth Randolph was found dumped in an isolated
area of Lafourche Parish, 18 miles outside of Houma. Kenneth had been
raped and strangled. His body was completely
naked, except for a pair of white socks, with
his limbs sprawled out. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: Dominique is
continuing that theme of shame. He wants his victims to
appear in these quite shameful positions. This is how he wants
them to be remembered. BRYANNA FOX: To somewhat blaming
the victims for his own urges, whether it was the sexual
attraction he had to them or the fact that he
killed them-- either way, he put it on the
victims and didn't take any responsibility himself. [dark music] NARRATOR: 38-year-old Dominique
had now left victims' bodies in four different
parishes of South Louisiana with minimal
evidence at any of the scenes. Police were still
struggling to put together a coherent investigation. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: Many
of Dominique's victims were people who led quite
transient lifestyles, quite high risk lifestyles-- people who live off the
radar of society, people who are essentially forgotten. [soft music] NARRATOR: Lieutenant Bobbie
O'Bryan with the Houma Police Department co-founded
an initiative to help vulnerable local
men called The Bunkhouse. BOBBIE O'BRYAN: We opened
up The Bunkhouse in 1998 as a shelter for
homeless individuals within our community. NARRATOR: One of the
residents was Michael Barnett. BOBBIE O'BRYAN: Michael
Barnett was on the streets as a homeless teenager. He stayed with us probably about
two years in the early 2000s. Through our process
of our program, Michael Barnett was
able to work himself to become
self-sufficient and then eventually move on to his
own little place and stuff like that. NARRATOR: In October of 2004,
21-year-old Michael would encounter Ronald Dominique. It was October
2004 that Michael Barnett was found deceased
in the east side of Houma. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
For the first time in this long litany of killing,
he kills a white victim. Nobody had come looking for him. He was simply more fodder
for Ronald Dominique. NARRATOR: Michael
Barnett's body was found on the 24th
of October 2004, three weeks after he
was last seen alive. Ronald Dominique wasn't an
obvious threat to his victims. He was overweight, often
walked with a cane, and appeared unassuming. But he had now killed 15 men. [ominous music] BRYANNA FOX: In 2005, after
almost a decade of murders, there was information being
shared across jurisdictions. And at that point, they
started noticing similarities and patterns in the cases, and
they were able to communicate and share the information
that made them think this is a serial
killer, not just a number of unexplained deaths. NARRATOR: That number
was still climbing. By spring, Dominique
had taken 18 lives. JIM BERNAZZANI: April in 2005, I
was assigned to head up the FBI field office in New Orleans,
Louisiana, which covers the whole state of Louisiana. This killing spree
began in 1997, so that's eight
years right there, and Ronald Dominique was
not pinpointed as a suspect. We had put together a task force
made up of Sheriff's officers, Louisiana State
Police, the Attorney General's Office,
and the FBI, and we worked this case together. BRYANNA FOX: The task force
showed law enforcement was finally all coming
together to form a more cohesive collaborative
team and put that evidence towards finding one offender,
rather than working separately with only tidbits of the case. NARRATOR: On the
16th of August 2005, the task force had another
victim on their hands. The body of a Black
teenager named Wayne Smith was found in a
small bayou south of Houma. The elusive killer
had now taken 20 lives and discarded the
bodies like trash. NARRATOR: When it was
found, Wayne's body was so badly decomposed that
his ethnicity wasn't initially identifiable and his cause of
death could not be determined. BRYANNA FOX: And in this
case, it was a 17-year-old boy who had a girlfriend,
who had a very supportive and loving family. And at this point, it seemed
that this MO of killing men that were on the fringes of
society now all of a sudden had changed, and the
attention that maybe had not been paid to this case seemed
to be changing and going in the opposite
direction, with the task force forming and the nature of
the victim that was now killed. But all of this got derailed
in early September of 2005. [soft music] NARRATOR: Category five
Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana with devastating effect. Wide scale flooding
ravaged the city of New Orleans and its
surrounding parishes, and over 1 million
residents were evacuated. There were more than
1,800 fatalities. BOBBIE O'BRYAN: The police
force was very stretched out thin during that
time, and really, you couldn't focus on, say,
big investigations only because you're dealing
with the devastation for which we have in the area. You will be on the curb. That shut down the
case for about six months because all of us were in our
own particular environments trying to bring structure
back to the city-- and actually, to
the entire state. NARRATOR: Hurricane Katrina may
have stalled the investigation but did little to
hinder the advance of 41-year-old Dominique,
who'd now killed 20. [ominous music] BRYANNA FOX: Dominique had
gotten away with murder for almost a decade
at this point, killing almost two
dozen men and never getting caught, arrested,
questioned, or seemingly even on police radar. So by this time, he's
thinking he can do anything and get away with it. NARRATOR: But Dominique's
luck was about to change. [dark music] GEOFFREY WANSELL:
In November 2005, a young man called
Ricky Wallace tells his parole officer about
being tied up by a man who is intent on killing him. BRYANNA FOX: Ricky Wallace
said that he was approached by a white man who showed
him a photo of a woman and said that he would
pay him to sleep with her, and he took him into his van. And at the point that he was
trying to get-- tied him up, he refused. And at that point, Wallace
said, please take me back home. I don't want to do this. And incredibly, the man actually
agreed and took him back home, and that's the only
reason why he survived. NARRATOR: Ricky
Wallace would later reveal that he personally knew
one of the previous victims of the Bayou Strangler and
was convinced that he'd encountered the same man. That man was, of
course, Ronald Dominique. [ominous music] And the parole officer told
the task force what happened. JIM BERNAZZANI: Ricky Wallace
brought the Sheriff's deputies to Ronald Dominique's trailer. When they got there,
they questioned him, they searched the camper, but
they did not find any evidence that linked him to the crimes. At this point, they asked
him for a DNA sample, and even though he
denied any involvement, he was willing to give
police a saliva sample. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: There isn't
very much resistance to this at all because he knows
that by refusing a sample, that's going to look
even more suspicious. And there's also an
arrogance to him as well. So on many of his victims,
there was no DNA evidence found whatsoever, so
I think he believed that he'd been so
careful that they just wouldn't be able to link him. BRYANNA FOX: At this
time, there were actually multiple serial
killers operating in Louisiana. And on top of the deaths
from Hurricane Katrina, forensic labs were
actually so backlogged that there were delays in
forensic evidence testing. But because the microscope
is being focused more and more on Ronald Dominique,
the police launch a surveillance operation. While we were putting
together the case, plainclothes Sheriff's
deputies assumed positions to watch Dominique. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: When the
police were surveilling him, Dominique appeared to
stop his killing behavior. NARRATOR: Eventually, as the
backlog at the forensic lab eased, Dominique's saliva
sample was processed. In November 2006, a
mitochondrial DNA match was made with evidence found
on Oliver LeBanks in 1998, and another victim of
the Bayou Strangler. Authorities believed that
they finally had the killer. Dominique was staying with
his sister in her trailer. JIM BERNAZZANI: He moved
out and she left the area, and he went to The Bunkhouse. NARRATOR: On the 29th
of November 2006, Ronald Dominique, still
under surveillance, checked into The
Bunkhouse homeless shelter run by Bobbie O'Bryan. BOBBIE O'BRYAN:
Originally, I did not know Ronald Dominique was a
suspect in reference to any of these potential
murders, and we took him in just like any
other homeless male person. He was very soft spoken,
almost to a point to where I had to lean in to
him a little bit to listen to what he was saying. We actually put him in what's
called a bunkroom, which is a room with several beds in
it, which other male subjects would be in that room. NARRATOR: The following morning,
the Sheriff's Department contacted Bobbie and
informed him of the growing case against Dominique. BOBBIE O'BRYAN: The
process of our program that we have over here
is that the next morning from the emergency bed,
you have to leave at 8:00. Well, the chief acts to see if
there was a way possible that I could put Ronald Dominique
back into The Bunkhouse, that way they would have
a location that they know that he would be at without
having to go find him each and every day. Originally, I told the chief
no because why would I put him inside a closed
facility building where he has access
to other individuals that fit the profile
of male subjects that he actually
would attack and kill? The chief convinced me
after a few minutes. Then I went back and
I spoke to Dominique. He was sitting right on
the fire escape stairs and told him that somebody
wants to sponsor him in reference to getting
into a private room, which was room six. It was not known to me
at that particular time that Ronald Dominique actually
stayed in the same exact room that Michael Barnett
lived here during the time that he stayed with us
for more than two years. [ominous music] NARRATOR: Two days later on
the 1st of December 2006, investigators moved in. I actually walked the two
detectives into The Bunkhouse towards his room, and
I knocked on room six. Ronald Dominique
opened up the door, and then all he did
was put his head down, looking at the
ground, like he knew-- or like he was
waiting for something. [dark music] NARRATOR: Ronald Dominique
was arrested and charged in connection with
two of the murders, including the killing
of Oliver LeBanks. Police were interrogating
him for his involvement in all of the other crimes, and
he almost instantaneously confesses but turns
it around and starts making excuses,
and in some ways, blaming the victims
for his behavior. [soft music] GEOFFREY WANSELL: Dominique
confesses to 23 killings. One policeman commented,
he seemed to like killing. There can be no doubt of that. Dominique was
obsessed with killing. Obsessed with power and control. He was just 42 years
old at the time. NARRATOR: As police confirm the
identities of the 23 victims in Dominique's
confession, they realized that his final victim was killed
just weeks before his arrest. BRYANNA FOX: It took 10
months for the DNA testing from Dominique to actually
be linked to a victim. The 10 month delay allowed
him an enormous amount of time to go on and commit
more offenses, and that's exactly what he did. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
While he's under the police surveillance
operation, they cannot make it absolutely 24/7. In October 2006,
Ronald Dominique picks up a man called
Christopher Satterfield, who's 27 years old. NARRATOR: Dominique took
Christopher to a storage facility off Highway
69 in Iberville Parish of South Louisiana. It was the same location
where he'd previously left the body of Michael Barnett. GEOFFREY WANSELL: Dominique
hits him on the head. Strangles him. He was his 23rd and last victim. [soft music] ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
It really does tell you about the arrogance. There may have been a
sense in which he thought, it's only really
a matter of time before I get apprehended--
that he wants to kill, and nothing, not even
a police investigation, gets in the way of that. NARRATOR: The arrogant
killer attempted to hide behind emotion as
he confessed to police. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
He's trying to make people feel sorry for him. So he's basically saying,
these guys had robbed me. They'd attacked me first. I was simply defending myself. To think that each
one of these men have been killed
essentially in self defense, it's absolute lunacy. NARRATOR: On the 23rd
of September 2008, Ronald Dominique appeared in
court, charged with the murders in Terrebonne Parish. BRYANNA FOX: The public
had the first images of what Dominique looked like. The fact that he was
labeled the Bayou Strangler and seemingly so
evil and heinous, and yet looked like this very
trustworthy man that could potentially live next door,
I think threw a lot of people off and really showed them
that a serial killer can look like anything, there's
not one profile, and evil can come in
any different form. NARRATOR: Dominique had
seemingly overpowered and killed many young men. The question was, how? MAR PAULSON: Oliver
was not a small person. He carried himself
very well, he was tall, and it just didn't
make any sense to me how he could be so easily taken
down by someone like the person that murdered him. BOBBIE O'BRYAN: Because of
the way his demeanor, the way he acted, the way he
spoke, walking with a cane, he could barely move-- and to say to wrestle with
someone, that would have probably been the last thought
if you would have saw him just walking down the streets. [ominous music] NARRATOR: Dominique had revealed
the final piece of the puzzle-- investigators now knew how this
seemingly weakened unassuming man had overpowered so many. Under Louisiana State
law, the Bayou Strangler could face a death sentence
for his vicious crimes if found guilty. BRYANNA FOX: Many
families of the victims joined together and
cohesively stated they did not want the
death penalty applied in this case against Dominique. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
He's made a deal with the district attorney. If he pleads guilty, he's going
to avoid the death penalty, and he's going to accept eight
life sentences without parole-- an extraordinary deal you might
think for a man who insisted he never wanted to go back to jail. NARRATOR: In accepting
the deal, Dominique pled guilty to eight
charges of murder and received eight
consecutive life sentences in Angola, the
Louisiana State Penitentiary. To date, he has not been
tried for his crimes in three other parishes
where victims were found. I think Ronald
Dominique should have gotten the death penalty. He killed 23 people. He is just a
complete sick monster crying that he was a victim. He doesn't need to
walk on the planet. [soft music] These victims were not
seemingly taken seriously for such a long period of
time, and he killed them and made it seem
like they deserved what they had happened to them. I get upset when these young
men are portrayed as the dregs of society and the
transients, the drug addicts, the sex workers. They were just people. They went to work, they did the
best that they could, and just did not deserve to die at
the hands of this, just, gross human being. GEOFFREY WANSELL: He
demonstrates a level of callousness and
disregard for human life without expressing
a word of remorse, without considering any of
his victims or their families. The sheer number of
deaths, and the fact that Dominique went
unidentified for so long, is genuinely terrifying. [dark music] NARRATOR: For nearly a decade,
the Bayou Strangler deceived, bound, assaulted, and
murdered men as he drifted across South Louisiana. He chose victims on the fringes
of society, earned their trust, then savagely snatched
their lives away, confirming Ronald Dominique
as one of the world's most evil killers. [dark music] [audio logo]
