The Bayou Strangler

In January 1964, Ronald Dominique was born. His parents lived in a trailer park along with baby Ronald and his five older siblings, and the family struggled financially throughout Ronald’s childhood and teenage years. 

There wasn’t much joy to be found at school for Ronald. Ever since he was a kid, he’d struggled to make friends. He wasn’t interested in any of the things that the other boys his age seemed to be - he didn’t have any talent at playing sports, and when he got older, he didn’t have any interest in partying, drugs or alcohol. 

The other kids at school had thought that he was weird because he was a poor communicator and always seemed sad, so they made fun of him, which only got worse when they found out that he was gay. During his late teens, Ronald had started sneaking out to visit a nearby gay bar - but he was spotted there by some of his classmates. Interestingly, the classmates who saw him there gave no explanation as to why they had also been at the same gay bar.

Despite his difficult circumstances, Ronald was determined to succeed, graduating from high school and then making it to college. However, he only made it halfway through his computer science degree before he gave up and decided to drop out. Because he never got a university degree, the only jobs he was able to get were unskilled labor - and because he had a problem with authority and never wanted to commit to anything, he struggled to hold down a job at all. 

In June 1985, Ronald was arrested for the first time - but it wouldn’t be the last. The charges against him were for sexually harassing someone over the phone, but he was only made to pay a fine of $75. For almost a decade, he stayed on the right side of the law, getting more minimum-wage jobs and then quitting them. During the periods of time when he was unable to support himself, he lived with one of his older sisters, or his mother.

The next incident took place in August 1996, when a partially clothed teenage boy threw himself out of the window of Ronald’s sister’s home. When approached by concerned neighbors, the boy told them that he had been sexually assaulted by Ronald, who had then tried to kill him before he managed to escape through the window. The victim went to the police, resulting in Ronald’s arrest…. However, when the time came for the case to go to court, the victim was nowhere to be found. When investigators discovered that they didn’t even know the boy’s real name, the charges against Ronald were dropped.

In July the following year, Ronald found another victim. This time, the boy wasn’t able to escape. 19-year-old David Mitchell was hitchhiking home from a family birthday party when Ronald offered him a ride. David’s partially clothed body was found two days later, dumped in a ditch. When the autopsy revealed the presence of ditch water inside his lungs, but no evidence that he was under the influence of alcohol or drugs, the medical examiner ruled that the cause of death was accidental drowning…a decision that David’s family disagreed with.

For one, David had always been a very strong swimmer, and the water level in the ditch was extremely low. According to David’s father, it was impossible for his son to have drowned in such shallow water unless there was foul play. Additionally, David’s pants had been pulled down, which seemed unlikely to have happened during an accidental drowning.

Over the next five years, Ronald settled into a pattern. He preferred younger men - his youngest victim was 16 while his oldest was 46 - but he didn’t mind whether they were gay or not. The majority of his victims were African-American. He located his victims in two ways: either he would approach them in gay bars and invite them home with him, or he would offer them a ride in his pickup truck while they were out walking. He had a few strategies that he’d use to convince men to come home with him, always focusing on offering them things that he thought they couldn’t resist. If they were an addict, he’d offer alcohol or drugs. If they needed somewhere to stay, he’d offer to let them sleep on his couch - and, sometimes, he’d tell them that he had a girlfriend and offer them the opportunity to take part in a threesome.

Once the victim accepted David’s invitation, it always went the same way. He’d take them back to the trailer where he lived, and then physically overpower them until he managed to tie them up. Then, he would sexually assault them, strangle them to death, and then dispose of their bodies in several remote locations where they would remain undiscovered for days or weeks. 

In April 2005, investigators began to realize that several of the murders were connected. They had started to notice the similarities in the way that these young men were being tied up, assaulted and strangled - and, suspecting that they had a serial killer on their hands, the police departments officially handed the case over to the FBI.

By 2006, Louisiana was terrified of the serial killer that had been publicly nicknamed “The Bayou Strangler” - but for almost nine years, investigators had been unable to find the killer. Finally, there was a break in the case when a man named Ricky Wallace came forward, claiming that he had been assaulted a few months earlier. He told the police that a man had invited him to come back to his trailer with him, promising that they could have a threesome and take drugs. However, once he got inside the trailer, there was no sign of the girl. Instead, the man asked if he could tie Ricky up, explaining that his mysterious girlfriend was into bondage.

By this point, Ricky was not enjoying the situation he was in - but the man let him leave without a fuss. When investigators asked if Ricky knew the identity of the man, he gave them a name: Ronald Dominique. The police weren’t sure how seriously to take Ricky’s story - he was a drug addict, and they’d had issues with him in the past. However, they were desperate for any leads in the case, so they questioned Ronald and took a sample of his blood, which he gave willingly. That blood sample turned out to be worth its weight in gold when it provided a match to semen samples that had been left behind on two of the Bayou Strangler’s victims.

A warrant was put out for Ronald’s arrest, and he was located in a homeless shelter on the first of December, 2006. When he was asked why he’d moved out of his sister’s house and into the shelter, Ronald responded that he’d known he was going to be arrested soon, and he didn’t want to cause any trouble for his sister, so he’d decided to move out right after the sample of his blood had been taken.

Considering that he had evaded the police for almost a decade, once Ronald was in custody, he made things very easy for investigators. At the police station, he confessed to killing 23 men, confirming his involvement by providing details that had not been released to the public. Despite admitting to being a serial killer, Ronald wasn’t entirely willing to take accountability for his actions. He alleged that the men he’d killed had all agreed to be tied up and assaulted because he’d offered to pay them with money or drugs. He claimed that if any of the men hadn’t wanted to be tied up, he’d do exactly what he’d done with Ricky Wallace, and let them walk free.

When investigators asked Ronald about his motive for the murders, he admitted that he had just wanted to assault his victims, but he was forced to kill them to prevent them from surviving as witnesses. He claimed that his arrest for sexual assault in 1996 had an enormous impact on his mental health, and he refused to spend any time in prison again, even if that meant he needed to kill.

Ultimately, Ronald didn’t succeed in avoiding jail time - but he did succeed in assaulting and killing enough men that he received a sentence of eight life imprisonment terms without the chance of parole. Today, he is still behind bars at Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he will remain for the rest of his natural life.