S1: E19 – The Brotherhood, Part 2

The vicious murder of a Louisiana woman left detectives puzzled.

She'd been shot five times, stabbed deeply five times, and vigorously beaten with an aluminum baseball back.

The police had a handful of suspects, but there was a problem.

They just couldn't find enough evidence to really convict them. You can't charge anybody without evidence. They will just drop the case rather than press forward on what they consider a weak case.

So that just terrified everybody.

Today, we're in Clinton, Louisiana for the conclusion of the Brotherhood. I'm Slung Glass and this is American Homicide and Day.

Warning to our audience.

This episode contains graphic descriptions of racial violence. Please take care while listening. In in early summer morning in two thousand, police found Jenora Gillery, stabbed, shot, and beaten to death in the bedroom of her Clinton, Louisiana farmhouse.

No, you have a woman who really had never done anything to anybody.

Chuck Cusmeyer is a former federal agent turned journalist who wrote about the murder.

She was just the nicest person by all accounts.

I mean, nobody ever said anything bad about her, And to have somebody brutally murdered in her own bedroom and no suspects. I mean, right there, you got kind of the setup for a really bizarre case.

The forty two year old was a single career woman. She lived alone in rural Clinton, Louisiana.

No one really had any idea who did it, and there were some suspects.

One of those suspects was a bad end Rouge police officer. He and Genora were old friends who had reconnected and dated, but he kept hounding her to the point where her colleague said he was stalking her.

I mean, he was the best candidate they could find, and you know that's who they went after.

They even polygraphed him.

After he failed his test. The police got a search warrant, but they couldn't find anything that linked the officer to the murder.

The case sort of went cold after they exhausted all their time on this particular police officer, but the detectives kept working on it.

It was a real struggle to find anything that would link a suspect to the crime, and it dragged on for months.

About a year.

After the murder, detectives got a tip that led them to the house across the street from Genora, where her good friends and neighbors, the Skippers lived. Those were the only two homes on that dead end street.

It's down at the end of this gravel road. It's an isolated area and there are no street lights, and the property directly across the street is where the Skippers lived in their trailer.

The Skippers were the first people detectives had questioned because they noticed some scratches on Philip and has steps on John Balllyot's arms. The two passed a polygraph and were cleared. A year later, they re emerged as suspects.

I don't believe they looked at the Skippers as suspects for a long time.

I mean they were out at the crime scene.

In fact, once the crime scene the Sheriff's office released the crime scene, it's really up to the family to clean up the house.

They actually hired the Skippers.

And John Balllyo to clean up the crime scene, so any evidence that might have still been there, anything the police may have overlooked, got swept away.

Well, this is a first for me.

Potential suspects in the death of Genora were paid to clean up the crime scene. In the last episode, we learned how John Balllyo told detectives Philip Skipper and his brother in law, Johnny Hoyt, belonged to a gang.

They had this sort of half assed gang they had formed called the Brotherhood, and they all had tattoos and the only way to earn it was to kill somebody.

John Balllyo said his initiation into that gang involved watching Genora's murder.

Jenoa and the Skippers had had a good relationship for a while. I mean they had ups and dieausend.

Detective Don McKee learned one of those downs happened a few weeks before Genora's death. That's when the two sides had an argument over a dog getting loose and attacking the Skipper's goat.

They had had a falling out. Genoora told him to quit coming old her place, return the house keys, stay off her land. She was going to stay on hers and it wouldn't be no more contact.

We covered this previously, but with the new information given by John Ballio, this falling out holds a different weight. On top of that, the Skippers were beneficiaries of one of Genora's life insurance policies. Prosecutors believed that money was part of their motive and so did a grand jury. In two thousand and one, that grand jury indicted John Balliot and Phillips Go, along with Lisa and Johnny Hoyt, for the murder of Genora Gillery.

I think that it was an easy target, farmed right across the road. I hate to say it, because she was a black lady. I really believe this was a fine example and just a hate crime. I mean, they they wanted to kill a black person.

Genora was black, the suspects were white, and all of that played into what journalist Chuck Husmeyer learned.

Philip Skipper and Lisa and Johnny Hoyt hated black people, absolutely hated him. That they're raised in this sort of post clan culture and they hated black people. So you have all these white skinhead type guys. They befriend their next door neighbor, who's this black lady who's just ridiculously generous to them, and then they turn around kill her, you know, and I know, just killer. I mean, they

The crime was absolutely shocking, and prosecutors were seeking the death penalty against all four suspects, but with no fingerprints, no murder weapon, no DNA, really nothing that connected the suspects to the murder. The district attorney got nervous.

The district attorney he initially charged Johnny, Philip Lisa, and John Balllyo with first degree murder. But I don't think he thought he could win the case, you know. And as a cop and all the cops I know, you know, you always want him to just bring it to the jury, let the jury decide, you know. But most das don't do that.

Prosecutors asked the judge to break the cases into four separate trials, one for each suspect. The judge granted this request. In the weeks leading up to the first trial, d Shropshire asked the judge for more time to collect evidence, but got denied.

He just didn't feel like he had enough, I guess, so he dropped the charges against all of them.

And despite what the grand jury decided without the proverbial smoking gun, the district attorney refused to move forward.

In my experience in law enforcement, most prosecutors are extremely risk avert. They will just drop the case rather than press forward on what they consider a weak case.

The decision left the people of Clinton on edge. Four suspected murderers were suddenly back on the streets.

As for the Guillery family.

Devastated, Genora's brother in law, Albert, couldn't believe it.

My daughter said, Daddy do something. So that kept me pestering the law enforcement offices, the deputies to see what was going on and how it was proceeded.

That's when things got political. The Guillery case became a talking point when the district Attorney, Charles Shropshire, ran for reelection. His challenger, a man named Sam Daquilla, made a campaign promise to bring justice to Genora.

Fortunately, the voters recognized that they had a gutlass district attorney and they threw him out and a real district attorney came in.

In two thousand and two, Sam d'quilla beat incumbent Charles Shropshire by nearly twenty percentage points.

Sam d'quilla was elected and just he was everything that we could have prayed for.

Sam Daquilla delivered on his promise and got a grand jury to again indict Philip Skipper, Johnny and Lisa Hoyt, and John Balliot all were charged with first degree murder and faced the death penalty.

We we very happy. There was a lot of relief on the part of the famil.

That relief would be short lived. You may remember from the last episode that trace amounts of DNA were found under Genor's fingernails. That DNA was sent off to a forensic lap and since it was the early days of DNA testing, it took forever to compare it to the DNA of the four suspects. When the results finally came back, prosecutors took another gut punch.

East Feliciana District Attorney Sam Dquilla says DNA gathered from one of the fingernails of murder victim Jenoor Gillery does not match any of the suspects in the case.

Without a positive match, the case against all four suspects got exponentially weaker.

Nonetheless, prosecutors say right now they're proceeding with a capital murder trial sometime in June.

When you think about murder trials, especially trials involving the death penalty, you probably don't ever think about the costs involved. But for the small town of Clinton, Louisiana, the price tag for trying for defendants with capital murder was astronomical.

There were some budget constraints with first degree murder trials.

Former federal agent and journalist Chuck Hussmeyer covered the Genora Gillery murder trials.

It involves a lot of extra steps.

You have to bring in a psychologist, You've got to make sure that examine the defendants. There's just a lot of expense to a first degree murder case.

Here's something fascinating.

Capital punishment cases in Louisiana require the defense to put together a mitigation team, usually composed of a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a social worker who analyzed the defendant before, during, and after a crime. If a defense and can't afford that mitigation team, the state has to pay for it. There are also the cost involved with jurors. Louisiana state law requires jurors to be sequestered for the duration of the trial. That means twelve hotel rooms, three meals a day,

They were all charged with second degree murder.

And it's an easier and less expensive series of trials he would have to go through. It wouldn't bankrupt the parish. I mean, I know it seems silly to talk about that, but I guess budget constraints are a real problem.

So instead of the death penalty, each defendant now faced life in prison. But the DA wasn't done wheeling and dealing. His next move would be one of the most controversial.

You make a deal with one of them, and in this case, the weak link was John Balllyo. He did seem as though he may have been one of the least culpable of the four, So that seemed like a good place to start here, you know, trying to make a deal, And that's exactly what the new district attorney did.

I don't blame the DA. He was relying on the DNA under Jennora's fingertips to be his smoking gun. Cutting a deal with one of the four suspects was one of DA Sandiquilla's final moves if he was going to bring justice for the guileries with the blessing of Jennora's family, the DA made a deal that came at a cost. In exchange for his testimony against the other three suspects, the DA offered to charge John Balliot as a juvenile, meaning he'd only be incarcerated until his twenty first birthday.

But I understand why the district attorney did it because without John Balllyo's testimony, there's just no evidence. So you know, he had to make a deal with the devil to get some justice for Janore.

The first to go on trial was Philip Skipper. His trial took place in historic downtown Clinton.

Clinton's kind of centered on a square, the town Square.

Clinton's Courthouse sits in the middle of that square, and the whole area looks like it's frozen in time.

I think the courthouse is the oldest still functioning courthouse in America.

Built before the Civil War in eighteen forty, the large white brick building with Florida ceiling columns takes up a city block and looks like something you'd find in Athens, Greece.

Last time I was there, they didn't have an elevator.

There was a lady with a handicap and she couldn't go up the stairs, so somebody had to literally carry her up and down the old flight of wooden steps. So it's sort of like stepping back in time when you go into Clinton.

That's why the town is so popular with Hollywood. Its downtown looks like an old movie set. The vampire drama True Blood as well as The Dukes of Hazzard are just two projects that were filmed there, and Hollywood also played a role in these cases. At the time and even today. Having the most advanced forensics was something many jurors came to expect in trials because of what they saw on TV shows like CSI.

They call it the CSI effect.

As Philip Skipper's trial grew closer, prosecutors were still falling short.

They weren't able to really find any evidence that linked Philip Skipper to the murder.

Maybe because the Skippers were paid to clean up the crime scene. Prosecutors lacked DNA, so they had to rely on what they did have that twenty five thousand dollars payout from Genora's Life Insure It's policy.

And in two thousand it was an enormous amount of money. But you're talking about two people who had to bum money from their neighbor just to buy diapers for their baby and were living in an old mobile home, so to them it was quite a windfall profit.

The prosecution also had video evidence of the crime scene that detectives took after discovering her body. The footage contained no sound, but the gory images spoke volumes.

It was so horrendous and I was just stunned, really and how violent these people were.

Most importantly, prosecutors had the testimony of John Balliot. His eyewitness account was crucial for securing a conviction. John began by showing the jury the tattoo located on his back that made him part of the brotherhood. Then, in graphic detail, he explained how he earned that tattoo. It was testimony that Chuck Husmeyer will never forget, and neither did I after listening, this is very hard to hear.

Philip Skipper, Johnny Hoyt, John Balllyo, and Lisa Skipper Hoyt. We're all sitting around the trailer getting stoned. About two thirty in the morning. Johnny Hoyt asked Baally o, Hey, do you want to go kill Jennore Gillery. That's how you'll get your tattoo. They walked across the street, mostly barefoot. They didn't want to leave shoe impressions.

Johnny Hoyt's wife, Lisa, knocked on Jenora's door while the men hit off to the side.

Jenore came to the door in her nightgown.

She has been sound asleep and Lisa asked her for some money to buy the baby, meaning Amy and Phillip's baby diapers and truder in nature.

Jennire turned around to.

Go get them some money, and that's when they pounced on her, and John Balllyo said.

That she didn't go down easily. I mean she was really.

Fighting them and it's four on one, you know, three men and one Johnny Hoick punched in the face first. She turned and ran to the phone. There's blood on the phone. She tried to pick it up to use it.

She couldn't.

She had enough time to hit her again. She reached in a drawer to get some kind of a knife. They kept attacking her. I mean, they're like rabid dogs, all right, they're attacking her. She's running. She went back into the house farther. She got into her bedroom, tried to lock the door. Naturally, they forced it open. One of them picked up a pretty heavy lamp off of a nightstand and just cracked it across her head, and that's what killed her.

It's almost unbelievable to think her neighbors and good friends, her employees carried out these violent acts. Over the course of John Balllyo's testimony, he only admitted to tying up Janora's dog, Cleo.

I've heard a good bit of confessions. I've never heard one like that. That was that brugal. I mean, that's one of the most brutal crimes I've ever covered in my post law enforcement career as a journalist.

But Philip Skipper's defense attorney promised the jury that he would unmask the real killer and pointed the blame at the original suspect, the Baton Rouge police officer named Steve.

Remember him.

Officer Steve was one of the original suspects who was said to be stalking Genora. Steve took the stand and immediately denied stalking her. He said he stopped cooperating in the investigation because he felt like he was being framed. He claimed his polygraph was administered improperly.

And that's why he failed.

In a bizarre moment during closing arguments, Philip Skipper's lawyer suggested a riddle that pointed to Genera Guillery's real killer. There's no way to say this that doesn't sound ridiculous.

He said.

Genora took five shots, five blows, and five stab wounds five five five. He then casually added that Steve was born in May of nineteen fifty five.

In other words, five five five.

So that's a bit odd. Yeah, you don't see that every day.

It was a ridiculous argument, and the jury knew it. They deliberated for less than an hour and found Philip Skipper guilty of second degree murder.

Philip Skipper got life in prison.

The judge called Genora's murder brutal, senseless, and gruesome. He sentenced Philip to life in prison and said he wished he could give him even more than that. At the time Johnny Hoyt stood trial, Louisiana law required only ten of twelve jurors to find the defendant guilty to secure a conviction. That law, by the way, has since been eliminated, but at the time, prosecutors played the odds and once again, John Ballio's testimony was central to their case.

Accord to John Ballio, Johnny Hoyt came into town the knight that they killed Jenore and was instrumental and participating in the murder.

But Johnny Hoyd's lawyer worked to pin the blame back on John Ballo. He argued that years of abuse from Philip Skipper turned John into a murderer.

Philip Skipper sexually abused him for years. You know, he burned the kid a lot with cigarettes and you know, beat him, sexually abuse him.

Johnny Hooight's lawyer called John Ballio's testimony a rodden, worm infested apple. He told the jurors that you don't eat around the rotten part, you throw it all away. Well, the jurors threw that argument to way. They needed about two hours to find Johnny Hoit guilty of second degree murder. What's interesting about that is only ten jurors voted for guilty, but it was enough to convict and have Johnny Hoyight

She never went to trial on this case.

She pled guilty to a manslaughter count and she got the twenty five year max for manslaughter.

She should feel lucky, that's all she got. All these people are evil.

But there is something about a woman using a baby to trick another woman that feels really evil. Shortly after all of Jenora and Guillery's killers were sentenced, tragedy struck the Gillery family once again.

Genora's dad, just a few weeks after the last trial, died really of a broken heart.

Jenora's father was seventy years old. He passed away in July two thousand and five.

He loved this child, he loved his family, and so it had a very negative effect on him.

Genora's dad was buried next to her in their hometown of Eunice, Louisiana. In a nod to Genora's love of animals, her tombstone features a drawing of a dog and a horse. If Genora was still alive today, her brother in law imagines those animals would still be a big part of her life.

She'd still be living in Clinton. It would probably have had to buy more land to house the dogs and horses and other assorted animals that she would have come across.

Another wrinkle in this whole story is that long before the Skippers were suspects, they reached out to Albert for help collecting Genora's life insurance policy.

Within a couple of days of her death, the Skippers contacted me with the policy and I assisted them in getting it paid.

Albert never found it unusual because he was aware of policy.

Actually, Genora had told the family that in case anything happens would happen to her, these Skippers would be provided for.

And so helping the Skippers collect that money didn't raise any red flags.

It did not seem out of the ordinary at all. They were in the cessator circumstances. It was purely her love for that family, her concern for that family's well being, and her insistence on participating in their future in a positive way.

No one, including Albert, saw the Skippers as anything but helpful and friendly neighbors.

Skipper family was right there with us. They behaved just as one would expect close friends to behave.

Obviously, Albert's feelings about Philip and the Skippers have done a one eighty.

I would not sit here and tell you that I did not consider a number of ways that I could have gotten some time with Philip Skipper or reached out and touched him in some way. And when I say reached out and touched him, I didn't mean a gentle pet on his bag. But the court system, the criminal justice system, is something that I've chosen to live by, and so I lived by.

Some including one of the detectives who worked this case, have labeled the murder of Genera Guillery a hate crime, but Albert disagrees.

I've never related this to Louisiana or conditions in Louisiana. The skinheads exist in America, and that's just a part of life. I don't believe that their attack on General was as much racial as it was financial, although I recognized that there are certainly some serious racial implications in this.

In twenty twelve, Philip Skipper underwent surgery in prison and died. There's no indication of what happened, but given that he was just thirty four years old, perhaps some prison.

Justice was done.

Philip was survived by his wife, Amy Skipper, who is one person we haven't talked much about. Amy Skipper was never charged in the case. She was pregnant at the time of Genora's murder and testified that she was asleep when the others carried out the crime.

And as far as I know, she hasn't been charged with anything. She wasn't really involved in it.

Tuckhusmeyer has his opinion on this.

Philip Skipper and Johnny Hoyt, they're from Livingston Parish. When I was young, and even when I was first in law enforcement, a Livingston Parish was like known as the home of the Klan. My first partner at the DA's office was a black investigator and we had to go over there to serve a warrener or subpoena or something. And he's like, I ain't going to be over here after dark, Like why he goes because you just can't if you're black.

That's the reputation that lives in Parish had. So not surprising that these guys.

Grew up like that, and that's how a man working in the DA's office felt. Imagine being a woman living in an unpopulated road. That was Genora's reality every day. Still, she believed she had friends watching her back.

There's no doubt that they were nice to her at the time, but that all turned out to be a you know, a mask. John Balyo said they were always call her names behind her back and sort of belittle her and talk about how they had fooled her. I mean, I wish she had had a more skeptical bone in her body somewhere, because we wouldn't be having this conversation.

It should be living out there with the dogs right now.

So then there's Johnny Hoyt. Today.

Johnny Hoyt is serving out a life sentence. In two thousand and eight, Johnny was doing court on an unrelated murder charge. According to the warden, that's when he planned to escape using a makeshift handcuff key. Unfortunately for Johnny, prison officials caught wind of his plan. He was put into solitary confinement in twenty ten and remained there for the next decade. Then in twenty twenty, Johnny sued the prison, claiming his rights were violated. A judge dismissed the suit

By the time this case was sort of solved and they charged everybody, he was nineteen maybe twenty, so he was, you know, facing the possibility of juvenile life, which is not but like a year, you know, he's already almost twenty years old.

Including time served. John Ballio ended up spending about four and a half years in jail.

The DA really had a choice, let all these killers go or get three of them, and he chose to get three of them, and you know, you had to make a deal with the fourth.

I think it's a.

Total miscarriage of justice to have to cut a deal with a guy like John Balllyo and give him, you know, one year in jail for murdering somebody like Janora Guillery. I mean, but I understand why the district attorney did it, because without John Ballio's testimony, he wouldn't have gotten convictions.

On the other three.

I mean, he did what he could do to get himself the best deal possible.

John Balllyo was released from prison on his twenty first birthday, but he'd quickly find his way back.

He's been in and out of jail since he was released on the Janoor Gillery case. You know, he's been arrested a few times. He's just part of that group of people. They are, you know, in and out of prison all the time.

Next time on American Homicide, a friend's night out ends up in murder and exposes a bizarre love triangle. I'm slow Glass. We'll head to Covington, Louisiana for the story of Thomas Tally. That's next time on American Homicide. Contact the American Homicide Team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. That's American Homicide Pod at