# Killing Spree Lasting Nine Years Reveals At Least 23 Murders | A Killer’s Mistake
In a nine-year reign of terror, the bodies of 23 young men were dumped along isolated tracks and waterways in deepest Louisiana. The killer would cruise through areas where street people and hustlers would frequent. Just the number of victims is the hardest thing to comprehend.
When a suspect finally emerged, he was far from the image of a violent man. This is a serial killer you’ve never heard of. There was really nothing we overlooked that would have identified him as a suspect.
As the list of victims grew ever longer, detectives faced a race against time to stop a killer in his tracks. What would it take to prove his guilt? Which part of the puzzle would reveal the killer’s mistake?
Nineteen-year-old David Lebron Mitchell had been hitchhiking home from a wedding in St. Charles Parish when he disappeared. Two days later, his body was found on an abandoned stretch of highway.
Five months later, and just six miles away, another body was discovered. Gary Pierre, 20 years old, had been discarded near a trash bin, a trash dumpster. While Mitchell’s death was at first dismissed as accidental, Pierre’s body raised more suspicion.
A postmortem showed that he had been tied up shortly before his death.
Initially, the first one, investigators had no idea that they were dealing with something larger. They worked it as trying to identify the victim and determine where he had come from. Then they had a second one that was kind of similar.
The victims were similar in age. Seven months later, less than five miles from where Gary Pierre was discovered, 38-year-old Larry Ransom’s remains were found. He had been placed on the ground outside of the same type of trash dumpster.
The bodies were disposed of where they were going to be found the next morning. Someone would have seen them.
Police officers noted other similarities. Like the second victim, Ransom was homeless and heavily involved with drugs. No one had reported either man missing.
But with Ransom, there was something new. He had been savagely beaten. An autopsy suggested he had fought hard against his killer.
This was a death that could not be written off as an unfortunate accident. As the Sheriff’s office launched an investigation, the bodies kept coming, thick and fast. All were found abandoned on industrial sites or wasteland in Jefferson Parish, an hour’s drive or so from the first set of victims.
Some of the bodies showed signs of sexual assault. They had been bound or restrained, with asphyxiation the most likely cause of death. The physical evidence, the hair fibers and similar material, was all collected during the autopsy and at the scene.
Investigators knew they had several DNA profiles developed from the Jefferson Parish cases. There was mitochondrial DNA from hair, and nuclear DNA from seminal fluid found on one of the victims in the city of Kenner. But the suspect wasn’t in the system.
At first, there was little uproar in the semi-rural communities where the victims’ remains were found. He killed people who were marginalized. He killed people who lived a high-risk lifestyle and didn’t necessarily garner a lot of sympathy from people outside their family.
But as homicide investigations sought out links between the deceased men, local journalists were also beginning to look for patterns, like native reporter DD Thurston. He seemed to like black men. Slight black men.
Not big brawny guys, but lean. Most were homeless or down on their luck. They had criminal records or they were addicted to drugs.
Basically, they were invisible people. The ones that you drive by and look at and give no second thought other than to say, look at that bum.
These were guys who had their own way to get around. They were walking between 10 and 2 in the morning. They were getting in a truck with some stranger.
Detectives were also struck by a curious similarity between the victims’ remains. Despite the youth and stature of the murdered men, autopsy reports suggested most had been killed without much of a fight. There were no defensive wounds or no evidence of a big struggle.
Some of these people were decent sized men, even though they were young at age, they were pretty much tall and big in stature. Profilers theorized that the perpetrator was a large, strong man. Someone with the menace or power to subdue his victims.
They had no idea the prime suspect who would one day emerge bore no resemblance to this mythical killer.
Misfit Ronald Dominique attracted little attention as he lived quietly amongst the communities that he terrorized. Investigators found out basically he was a loner. He lived in a trailer on his sister’s property.
Going back, they found out that in high school he didn’t really have any friends. Lawyer Richard C. Gollie would become well acquainted with the character and background of Ronald Dominique.
When investigating people, they go back and try to find out about people that knew him when he was growing up, teachers, people he worked for, whoever he may have come in contact with. They found that Dominique really didn’t have any long-lasting friends or teachers that really took to him.
He came from an impoverished background. His parents were poor, lower income. He lived in a trailer in Bayou Blue.
They were just regular everyday working folk. He was of low intellect and didn’t have a good education. He grew up in Lafourche Parish and went to Terrebonne High School.
He was not a popular guy. It was understood that he didn’t come to terms with his homosexuality until late in his teens. He was bullied.
High school was rough for him.
Bullying and confusion about his sexual identity was only a part of Dominique’s story. His family history was traumatic. Dominique’s father suspected his mother of having an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇.
The father gathered up Dominique and his sister and drove them to the mother’s brother’s house. They burst in and found the mother and her brother in bed together, obviously having sexual relationships. Investigators would one day hear that despite their complex relationship, after graduating from high school in 1983, Dominique continued to rely on his mother for support.
He always lived with either his mom or his older sister. He didn’t amount to much of anything other than working in some kind of labor-intensive menial job at a supply business. He had a bad attitude.
He felt that he was inferior. He couldn’t get a girlfriend or boyfriend. He was kind of overweight.
He was just living a really aimless life. No friends. No one to be in love with or to love him.
Eventually, Ronald Dominique grew confident enough to acknowledge his sexuality. According to DD Thurston, who has acquaintances in common with Dominique, his presence in Thibodaux gay bars was not altogether welcomed. Even when he came out of the closet and was part of the gay scene, he really wasn’t accepted there either.
Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean that other people will find you attractive. Other gay people will find you attractive, which apparently they didn’t. He was short and obese.
Sickly. Non-threatening. Shy, or at least stand-offish.
He tended to complain some about his situation, whether it be his surroundings or the food that he was given, that sort of thing. Totally non-threatening. Obviously someone that you would picture being picked on, not only because of his sexual orientation, but because of his physical attributes.
There was nothing about him that really stood out. He was sometimes just referred to as a gray person. He just fit into the background.
Investigators would be told by those familiar with the Thibodaux gay scene that the only time Dominique came alive was when he was up on stage. His favorite thing was being a female impersonator. He liked to dress up like Patti LaBelle and imitate her, but he wasn’t very good at it.
Criminologist Dr. Brian Frederick believes that Dominique’s social activities give a tantalizing hint into what made him tick and how he got his kicks. This female impersonation, this act where he was inviting others to laugh at him, he was in control of that.
This is a marker. Control is a marker, and we know that with serial rapes, rape has nothing to do with love or affection or intimacy or 𝒔𝒆𝒙. It’s a control issue.
The trappings of it were there in the act.
How long would it take for detectives to identify the unassuming, unsuccessful Ronald Dominique as the perpetrator of a string of killings? He was the most unthreatening individual anyone could think of. He didn’t look like someone that you would consider a serial killer or someone capable of killing 23 grown men.
In 1998, with six unsolved murders on their books so far, cops had no idea that Dominique even existed. This meant they were powerless to stop the bloodshed as it continued unabated. It just got to where the interval in between murders became smaller and smaller.
Like he needed it more often.
In the summer of 1999, the bodies of Manuel Reed, Angel Meha, and Mitchell Johnson were all found in and around Kenner, the main city in Jefferson Parish. The victims had been strangled. One had injuries consistent with having been sexually assaulted.
Was it someone that was comfortable in his environment that didn’t care to be caught? Or was he just good enough to get away with it?
The killer did make mistakes. An autopsy on Manuel Reed found DNA, but it was not enough to snare the perpetrator. Once again, there was no match found on the national database.
But that did not mean that the attacker was unknown to the criminal justice system. Detectives would one day discover a troubling record of violent crime and a possible motive behind the murders.
In 1993, aged 29 years old, Ronald Dominique moved out of his mother’s home and into his own place. Or almost his own place. He lived on his sister’s property in a trailer in the front yard.
He was in control. This is the beginnings of somebody who wants to take control of their life. A decade later, investigators would learn that shortly after moving in, Ronald Dominique’s new trailer home was the scene of an alleged rape.
After luring a man there with the promise of drugs, Dominique handcuffed him and was said to have raped him at gunpoint before releasing him into the dark street. The man went to the police. They decided not to investigate.
Three years later, another man attended Thibodaux Police Department claiming he’d been attacked in similar fashion. The story goes that it was at his sister’s house and that the victim jumped out the window and ran away yelling. Questioned, Dominique insisted that on both occasions he and the men had had consensual 𝒔𝒆𝒙, after which they had tried to rob him, forcing him to pull a gun to defend himself.
This time, Dominique was not believed. He was arrested and spent three months in jail. But they never followed through with the case because they could never locate the victim again.
While incarcerated, an incident occurred that investigators would later conclude had had a profound impact on Dominique’s future actions. They put Dominique in jail. While he was in jail, he was brutalized.
Violently raped by another inmate, Ronald Dominique was left with lasting injuries. According to the police reports, Dominique feared going back to jail. So he came up with this plan wherein he would rape these men and then he would strangle them so there’d be no one to testify against him and he wouldn’t have to go back to jail.
I don’t think Ronald Dominique is a high IQ person. I really don’t. I think he’s a simple person that had a simple plan.
How he came up with the actual thought of killing someone, I don’t think the killing was the motive. I think it was the 𝒔𝒆𝒙 act that was his motive. What strikes me as sort of unfortunate is that he felt the only way he could become intimate with someone else was by holding them at gunpoint, tying them up, and then forcing himself on them.
Something happened to him that got him to come up with this plan and scheme that if he wanted to have 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with a male, he was intimidated and couldn’t do it on his own. He had to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 them first.
I think in the beginning he killed as a way to avoid prison, but it escalated to where he really enjoyed the entire process from the rape to the murder. It just got to where the interval between murders became smaller and smaller. Like he needed it more often.
One of the things that was surprising was the fact that he was able to not only strangle these people, the strength that took, but also to pick up the bodies, put them in his vehicle, and then take them someplace and dispose of them. Investigators were trying to figure out how he could do that because he didn’t strike them as being that strong of an individual, even though the victims weren’t that big. They probably weighed 145 pounds, somewhere around there.
Then it came upon them that he probably had a big adrenaline rush when he was doing this. That may have had some play in why he did it and why he was able to move bodies around.
At the time of the millennium, having been responsible for the deaths of nine innocent men, Ronald Dominique was still flying below the radar of law enforcement in southern Louisiana. As the community got back to work after the winter holidays, another victim was discovered. It seemed like every time they turned around there was another body.
Twenty-three-year-old Michael Vincent had been dumped on a barbed wire fence. He had rope marks on his wrists. So far, so familiar, but with Vincent there was something new.
While the first nine bodies had been found in the parishes neighboring the city of New Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles, Vincent was discovered 40 miles south in Lafourche.
Investigators kind of thought of these as two different series of homicides. You had the nine victims that were here in metro New Orleans. Then all of a sudden, metro New Orleans doesn’t get any more of these dumped bodies of the same type victim.
They all started coming down several miles in lower Louisiana in and around the city of Houma. For detectives, it was a race against time to stop a killer, one where they always seemed to be two steps behind. They were working day and night trying to develop a suspect, only to wake up the next morning to another victim.
Then, all of a sudden, the murders came to an end. For almost three years, there were no more bodies. But in October 2002, that changed.
Kenneth Randolph Jr. , Anoka Jones, D’Travl Woods. One investigator remembered D’Travl Woods just because he was there.
He remembered he was young. Dominique dumped him with his bicycle in a sugarcane field out behind the church. It was summer and it was hot.
He’d been there for a while and it wasn’t a pleasant scene. The investigator remembered going to his house and talking to his parents after he was found. There was a lot of family there and a lot of heartache.
Eighteen months passed before another flurry of disturbing deaths. Larry Matthews, Michael Barnes, Leon Lirette. All men who were down on their luck, killed and their bodies disposed of along the bayous of sprawling Terrebonne Parish over a six-month period.
Still no suspects, and the rate of murders picked up the pace.
In April 2005, two more bodies turned up in the city of Houma. The first was 31-year-old August Watkins, a homeless man. An autopsy failed to establish the cause of death.
He would dump them. It might be a sugarcane field. It might be under an overpass.
It might be in a ditch. They weren’t always found right away because he was putting them in really remote places in South Louisiana. In the summertime in the heat and the daily rains, it would degrade a body and degrade a dump site pretty quickly.
So there wasn’t always DNA to find. In one case, he dumped a body in an unused mini storage. He closed the door and it was days before they found that one.
It was a very nasty crime scene by the time they did find it. So there was no DNA there. No gunshot wounds.
They were all strangled in some form.
Days later, Michael Cunningham, 23 years old and one of nine siblings, was discovered dead, restrained and strangled. Law enforcement realized they needed to act with urgency to prevent further tragedy. The task force was put together when they realized that they had these dead people that all had a common denominator in that they had been tied up.
They figured out that it was happening in these jurisdictions. They formalized the task force in May of 2005. They had the Attorney General’s office, Louisiana State Police Crime Lab, and Probation and Parole working it.
With 18 unsolved murders, investigators had to work out what was relevant and what were red herrings in the evidence that they had. The media were talking about some victims being found with a missing shoe. Some had no shoes.
They were trying to say that the trophy this killer was keeping was a shoe. Investigators thought he just didn’t finish dressing them. But that’s what first caused them to link some things together.
They were found without shoes. A lot of them were found without shoes.
At the Houma Police Department, a special incident room was set up to focus on catching a serial killer. From 1998 to 2005, there were nine in metro New Orleans, and then the ones coming up in Lafourche and Terrebonne. They probably had somewhere around 19.
The wall was full of 8 1/2 by 11 printouts of mugshots. Every time they would find another victim, another face would go on the wall.
Within six weeks of the task force launching their investigation, another body had been found, 34-year-old Alonzo Hogan. It was overwhelming at the time. They would be working leads and people calling in giving tips.
They were trying to find a certain type of descriptive male, white guys, black guys of different ages. Progress was agonizingly slow. That was the frustrating part, early on and still over it.
Just the number of victims is the hardest thing.
How long would it be before detectives hit a breakthrough? And how many more young men would die in the meantime? The thing that brought it all down was when Ricky Wallace, whose street name was Motor Mouth, told his parole officer that some dude had tried to tie him up.
On August 16th, the remains of 17-year-old Wayne Smith were found. His body, dumped in a bayou, was so badly decomposed that a cause of death was never determined. It was yet another blow for detectives, another face on their whiteboard.
Then nature intervened to frustrate them further. Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Katrina hit and everything just kind of went crazy.
They had to slow down a little bit because duties were spread out all over the place at that time. A lot of those people from New Orleans evacuated to Houma. In just a few days, they had what officials compared to ten years worth of growth in Houma.
The infrastructure wasn’t up to it. They weren’t really impacted in the way of storms by Katrina, but just a few weeks later Rita came through and it did have a lot of damage locally. The communities were trying to recover from that.
As the cleanup from a devastating hurricane season continued, the task force tried a new strategy. In the task force meetings, they knew the perp wasn’t 100% successful in one contact, one 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁. Whoever’s doing this is not 100% successful.
Every contact with a person isn’t going to end up with a victim. That’s where the probation and parole aspect came in. The probation and parole agents, when they met with the people they were supervising, would ask, is anything out of the ordinary happening in and around this area?
As detectives hoped that tips would come in from men on probation, 40-year-old Chris Deville went missing. He’d been trying to hitchhike out of Napoleonville after the devastation caused by the hurricane. On October 14th, his body was found dumped in a cane field.
Less than a month later, another victim, Nicholas Pellegrin, 21.
After Nicholas’s murder in 2005, there was a long period of quiet from the bayou serial killer. Cops wondered if he had simply stopped killing or perhaps his modus operandi had changed. Maybe he had begun hiding the bodies of his victims rather than leaving them out in the open.
How many more went unreported, went undiscovered? How many more are buried somewhere, discarded perhaps in a more organized way in the bayou? Katrina was so destructive that there were bodies lying around the bayou.
It wouldn’t have been uncommon to come across a body that was 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to the elements.
In October that year, 27-year-old Thibodaux resident Christopher Satterfield was found dead. He’d been beaten and strangled. Weeks later, a breakthrough in the investigation.
In November 2006, a man called Ricky Wallace, living in East Houma, southwest of New Orleans, visited his probation officer with a story. The story was that a white guy in a pickup truck approached him while he was walking down the street. The man said he had a family member that was a victim of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮.
He showed a picture of someone, later learned to be a family member of the perpetrator. He was using the picture to lure men, saying she will pay you for 𝒔𝒆𝒙. She’s a domestic violence victim.
She’s afraid of men. As a matter of fact, it was his niece’s photograph that he used to entice some of the men to come to his place. That was the photograph he used to say, look, my wife wants to have 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with you.
Here’s what she looks like.
The person that told this story actually got into the pickup truck with the perpetrator. He let him bring him to a trailer. Once he got into the trailer, the man said, well, before the girl comes in, being that she’s afraid of men, I have to tie you up.
Ricky Wallace said, there’s no way I’m going to do that. That’s when the man kind of changed his tune. Wallace said, you’re not tying me up.
You’re going to bring me back from wherever you picked me up from. Well, he was on parole. So the next time he saw his parole officer, he says, look, the weirdest thing just happened to me.
Detectives wanted to know more from Ricky Wallace. They had to find out if the man who had tried to tie him up could be responsible for the deaths of 23 men. He was able to identify and show them where this trailer was located.
The address was on Bayou Blue Road, Houma, opposite a cluster of rusting industrial units. They came up with all the residents there, and Ronald Dominique kind of stood out as being a male that they didn’t think was married. He lived on his sister’s property in a trailer in the front yard.
After that, they started some surveillance on him and it didn’t amount to anything because he didn’t do anything. He worked at an oil field supply company doing some kind of manual labor. Other than that, he didn’t really have a life.
He didn’t leave the house, didn’t go to bars, didn’t frequent anywhere. He would just sit at home. They still didn’t have anything to tie him into these bodies.
Dominique didn’t strike anyone as a man capable of overpowering fit young men, let alone killing them in cold blood. Let’s put it this way, he wasn’t scary. Wouldn’t scare anyone.
People were kind of taken aback by how someone that looked like he did would be capable of committing all these offenses that he was accused of. He’s not a tall guy. What is he, about 5’5″?
He’s obese. He’s not very imposing physically. He doesn’t look like the kind who could take on a grown man and come out on top.
His demeanor was rather passive. There wasn’t anything threatening about him. What did he do positive in the community?
Well, he called bingo. He might have helped some neighbors with groceries and mowed their lawn. He looked like just some little guy that really had nothing going for him.
He had a bad heart, fat and flabby. There was nothing physically about him that would make you think that this person was capable of killing anyone at all with his hands.
If you look at a lot of serial killers through the years, they don’t stand out. They fit in well. This guy fit in well at what he did.
He didn’t do anything to call attention to himself. He never got in any arguments with the sister or anybody else in the community. He kind of just stayed alone.
What detectives could prove was a curious pattern in where the bodies had been found and when. Released from jail in November 1996, Dominique had returned to the trailer in his older sister’s yard. They realized that the sister lived right here in St.
Charles Parish within a few hundred feet of the St. Charles Parish homicides. The three bodies were dumped in St.
Charles Parish. The next six victims were also found within a couple of miles of Dominique’s trailer. In the winter of 2002 into 2003, the siblings relocated to Bayou Blue, a working-class community bordering the city of Houma.
When the family moved south, so did the location of the bodies being discarded by the roadside. All the homicides moved at the same time this family moved, and Dominique followed them to live on his sister’s property.
It was a striking coincidence, but not enough to prove that Dominique was a killer. The cops needed more. He wasn’t in the system.
They knew he was arrested previously, accused of raping a male. So he was high on their radar with just that, but they didn’t have anything to connect him with the crimes in itself. They made the decision to approach him and interview him.
They told him they were investigating a bunch of crimes where victims were being dumped on the side of the road and they were running down everyone that had an arrest in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parish. They sent two people to make contact with him, one female investigator from Lafourche Parish and one male from Jefferson Parish. They interviewed him and he answered questions, wouldn’t admit to anything, but did consent to a buccal swab, which is a swab of his saliva.
They asked him for DNA, he gave it. He knew they were looking at him. I don’t know why he didn’t say no.
Some of the early cases they weren’t able to get DNA because of them being out in the elements. You throw somebody in a watery ditch, you’re not going to get any DNA. So it was the later cases that they were able to get DNA from.
Dominique may not have fully grasped the fact that he was the prime suspect, in fact, the only suspect in 23 homicides. While the DNA swab was processed, cops needed to make sure that that number did not rise. The FBI surveillance team was assigned to it.
They had someone watching him at his residence 24 hours a day. It was binoculars, cars on the ground, people walking, even aircraft in the air if it was mobile. Because at that point, when they identified the killer, there was not going to be any other victims.
In late November 2006, the task force heard from their crime lab about the DNA swab taken from Ronald Dominique. The match was made with one of the Kenner cases. Manuel Reed, found in a garbage dumpster in Kenner in 1999.
They would also find a match with semen found on the body of 27-year-old Oliver LeBanks, discovered partially clothed on the outskirts of New Orleans in 1998. The evidence against Dominique was building.
When he realized that the police were following him and that his arrest was probably imminent, he moved. He left his sister’s property and moved into the bunk house, a homeless shelter in downtown Houma. He didn’t want his sister to have to be 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to that.
That’s why when they arrested him, he was in a boarding house in the city of Houma.
What would a suspected serial killer say when confronted with hard evidence? He would pick people up on Bourbon Street near the gay bar. He would see them riding their bicycle down the road.
He would just go out between 10 and 2 and whoever he came across, if they got in the truck.
Ronald Dominique didn’t resist arrest or try to evade detectives. In fact, the officers who cornered their suspect in the Houma bunk house on December 1st, 2006 found it hard to believe they’d got the right man. Two weeks before he was arrested, he killed Satterfield according to police.
He was able to subdue, tie up, and rape a full-grown man and then drag his body to where he dumped it. Then when he was arrested, he had a cane and couldn’t even walk upright. He had to be helped into the car by two officers.
But any doubts in officers’ minds evaporated as soon as the man in their custody sat down in an interview room. When they had Ronald Dominique in interrogation, it was like the floodgates opened. He just kept talking and talking and talking.
He didn’t seem to be holding anything back. He provided details of all these murders.
Early on, his initial encounters really weren’t going to result in a killing unless something in his conversation, his interaction with some of these people, made him feel uncomfortable. The first victim was an individual he picked up in the French Quarter for the purposes of having 𝒔𝒆𝒙. They went to a remote area, had 𝒔𝒆𝒙, but the victim was apparently pretty rough on Ronald.
Ronald complained about it, but the guy still kept on doing so. Ronald struck him in the head with a tire iron. Once he knocked him out, he realized that he doesn’t have to deal with this pressure or problem anymore.
Then he strangled him.
Having dumped the man’s body by the roadside and realizing pretty soon that no one suspected him of any crime, Dominique realized he could have 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with men in a way that meant he was in control. The early victims he would meet in an automobile. The crime was committed in an automobile.
He would strangle him with either a seatbelt. Power, again, control, but such low self-esteem to think that the only way he could be close to someone was through this mechanism.
He would cruise, go to areas where street people, hustlers would frequent. Stop, talk to them, make a determination. If they said yes, he’d say, come on, get in.
He would drive them to his trailer. He would say, look, I don’t want you to hurt me, so in order to not be hurt, I want to tie you up before we have 𝒔𝒆𝒙. Those who agreed to do it were tied up.
Then he would have 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with them and then strangle them and then dispose of the body.
If he thought they were heterosexual, he had a picture of an attractive woman that he would say was his girlfriend or his wife and he’d offer them money to come back and have 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with this woman. He would use his niece’s picture because she was an attractive young lady. He would say that she was shy and that she’d been hurt in the past.
The deal was that if you let me tie you up, then she will have 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with you and I’ll pay you the money. If the guy said, no, I’m not interested, he’d let him go. If they agreed to be tied up, he’d rape them and strangle them.
In Terrebonne Parish, where he’d been arrested, Dominique was charged with eight murders. He confessed to them all and prosecutors demanded the maximum penalty. Tasked with saving his client from execution, Richard Gollie made a deal.
They discussed the ins and outs of the case and came to the realization that trying eight capital cases in that parish alone would be burdensome not only on the parish’s finances, but also on the families of the victims. It would be decades before this would be over. The families would have to go through the trial over and over.
They would have to hear all these horrendous details of what happened to their loved ones. They were not about hearing those gory details.
The victims’ families agreed to allow Dominique to take a plea. He pleaded guilty to avoid a trial. To avoid the death penalty.
Ronald Dominique was sentenced to life in prison without parole for each of the eight murders. Eight consecutive life sentences, one after the other. That’s what you give a cat.
There’s no need to waste the resources to prosecute him anywhere else. They just have open warrants for him if he ever does try to get out.
Each of the victims had a family that loved them and cared about them. These were people that were hurting. Despite the fact that their loved ones might have been homeless and street hustlers or whatever, they still loved them.
They were angry at what happened.
This is a serial killer you’ve never heard of. He was prolific. He got away with it for ten years.
And nobody knows who he is. These were somebody’s children, and they were raped and dumped in mini storages and sugarcane fields and under overpasses. They deserved better.
As Dominique lives out the rest of his days behind bars, investigators reflect on what finally brought a prolific serial killer to justice. His biggest mistake was leaving a potential victim alive to tell the tale. They knew the perp wasn’t 100% successful in one contact, one 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁.
Ricky Wallace and his coming forward was what put all this together. Letting Ricky Wallace go free to tell the story of his close shave was what undid a decade of brutal murders by Ronald Dominique. That was his killer’s mistake.
