S1: E22 – Bodies on the Bayou, Part 1

A talented New Orleans preacher got the job of a lifetime.

A week later, he was dead.

This case was one that immediately drew my attention because it was not a typical murder case.

It happened in the Trine months following Hurricane Katrina.

Absent any eyewitness and given the circumstances and the resources in the city, it simply just became a cold case.

But the killer would strike again.

Oh my god, another one.

One person had information that could stop the killer from striking a third time.

He was sort of the last man standing who could bring it to the authorities.

But could the police get to him before it was too late.

This song is something you hear about on the TV show you know, like you never think this was something that would happen in real life.

Today, we're in New Orleans, Louisiana, for the tragic story of an aspiring preacher named Ernest Smith. I'm Sloan Glass and this is part one of Bodies on the Bayou on American Homicide, And just a warning that this episode contains some graphic content.

Please take care while listening.

I don't know if you've ever been to New Orleans, but it's a very special place. The historic French Quarter dates back to the seventeen hundreds. Today, the city's oldest neighborhood is famous for its vibrant nightlife.

That is where you find Bourbon Street in many of our most famous bars.

That's Laura Rodrigue, she worked with the New Orleans District Attorney's Office.

We like to eat, we like to drink.

There are constantly events going on, or carnivals or parades.

We are a city that simply likes to party.

It's a city that lives by the motto let the good times roll, and Bourbon Street plays host to many of those parties.

Whether it's the cuisine or the arts. So many different opportunities here to explore, so many different things.

Where else in the world can you walk down the street eating a poe boy in one hand with a cocktail in the other while a jazz player strikes up a song on the corner.

Having been somebody who has traveled elsewhere, I can say that there really is no place like New Orleans Today.

Well over a million people from all different walks of life make their home in the Big Easy.

There is a certain sense of camaraderie among the community.

They rally together.

They support one another, and they take a lot of pride in saying that they're from New Orleans.

Let's look back at the summer of two thousand and five as a test of that camaraderie. That's when Hurricane Katrina made landfall and left nearly eighty percent of New Orleans underwater.

Katrina slams into the Gulf willed us up to one hundred and twenty miles reptiles that could kill you, stop go literally ripped.

Off the side repper part of the roof.

Covering the Superdome where some ten thousand people at saw Gass.

Station, which is basically where we've sought safety.

It is slowly being ripped apart.

Before our The city lost more than eight hundred and fifty thousand homes, three hundred thousand vehicles, and eighteen hundred lives, making Katrina one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit the US.

It truly did devastate the city of New Orleans to a large extent.

At the time, over half of its population relocated to other cities.

After Katrina.

There were simply problems for everyone in the city in terms of getting back into their homes. What was left of the neighborhoods, So you might be living in a home and you might be the only person on your block, and that's scary.

It was scary, especially when things went wrong.

It really made law enforcements job a lot more difficult. It wasn't like patrolling the street normally and knowing that there were people also looking out for each other. You know, it's pitch black and some of these neighborhoods where power hasn't been turned on to some of the homes, if the people haven't returned.

Like all city services in New Orleans after Katrina, the police department struggled to keep up.

In certain neighborhoods.

You didn't know how long it would take and whether it was even worth it to get the police involved.

And that's when violent crime soared.

Hurricane Katrina chased away more than two hundred thousand people in New Orleans, but criminals are coming back. Police department figures show the number of murders has gone up every month since the storm.

So now here is our story. In April of two thousand and six, thirty eight year old Ernest Smith was a preacher who had just moved back.

To his home in New Orleans.

Let's talk about Ernest's life before that move.

Ernest was always when never usaw he could walk into a room and the first thing he has on his face as a smile.

Caroline Jackson and her husband Apostle Jackson were ministers who mentored Ernest.

Ernest was special. He was the real deal. Ministry was his heartbeat. Ministry was what he was about.

It ain't loved to preach. I think he would woke up with a value of a microphone, be born one.

He was truly a man of God.

Life was a tough climb for Ernest, who lost both of his parents at a very young age. Although he was later adopted, he was always plagued by that desire to fit in and belong to us.

He was a son, and I think he felt like we went on in parents he had.

The church became that place where Ernest felt like he belonged. But the downside of being a preacher was it didn't pay his bills, so Ernest supplemented his income by working as a truck driver. The money was good, but he was often on the road and away from his wife and daughter. To no one's surprise, his marriage ended up in a divorce. And not long after that, a single mom named Emma walked into his life.

She met him by going to his ministry when he was preaching that song, Well, a man loves a woman, That's what's Ernest's song. He really loved it, this walkman.

Emma and Ernest married in nineteen ninety five.

Emma was a perfect pastor's wife. She did everything to help the church. She did whatever was necessary to make sure his ministry was functioned and running.

Emma was also busy outside of church. She prepared taxes, dabbled in real estate. She even sold beauty supplies.

She so whigs and all of the other things that make you look girly. Yes, she would say she was a jack of all trades.

More than that, Emma was a go getter.

She grew up poor and always dreamed of living the glamorous life.

She wanted to have nice things, so she went after the business world.

She was busy and it paid off.

Every year or so, Ernest and Emma would upgrade homes and move into a place that was a little bigger and nicer. But when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in two thousand and five, it forced Ernest and Emma to temporarily relocate to Arlington, Texas.

Emma came back to New Orleans. She came back because she needed to get back to her business, so Ernest stayed. After she moved back here, they didn't come back together.

Ernest liked Arlington.

He wanted to stay because he had plans to build a church there.

She wanted him to come back, but he was saying that he didn't want to come back.

The battle over where to live put a strain on their marriage.

Call us up, anyone to talk to us about the marriage. I think that's when we found out that someone was really going on.

Apostle wondered whether there was more to the story, but he did what any preacher would do.

I convinced him that he needed to get his marriage another chance.

Ernest took that advice and he took Emma on a cruise to help rekindle their relationship and put their marriage back on track. And he started looking for a full time pastor job so he could spend more time at home. Then Kime a miracle and opening at a mega church in Atlanta.

Ernest interviewed and landed the job.

Him and her was going to move to Atlanta. She was going to be first lady and he was gonna be pastor.

On the evening of April twelfth, two thousand and six, Ernest called Apostle with the good news.

He was already excited, like he had found a treasure.

It was a much needed step forward for Ernest and Emma's marriage and a huge boost for his career.

This would have been the first time in his ministry that he'd have had a ready made family ready for him. I mean, if you ever wanted a pastor, he would have been the one. He was just that gifted.

So they have that conversation on April twelfth, and that night, Ernest and Emma took a break from packing up for their big move. Emma wasn't feeling well, so Ernest planned to go out for a ride on his motorcycle.

I said, I'll be careful out there, said I hung up. Then five hours later we get the news that he's dead. We will sleep and we have a good phone call from Emma and she tells me. She says, Ernest is gone. It's gone where And she said he's dead. That told my heart up.

Emma was a mess. In between crying, she explained that Ernest took his motorcycle for a ride and returned around eleven pm. That's when someone ambushed him.

She said, Well, I heard three bang bang bangs, she said, but I thought it was a car bag fire.

Emma said she was in bed with a bad toothache and had taken some pain medication to help her sleep. She woke up to the sound of her husband's cries from downstairs.

He woke her up out of her sleep. He said, Babe, that I've been shot.

When Emma came downstairs, she found Ernest collapsed on the front steps of their home. His red shirt was completely covered in blood.

So she tells us, She says, well, somebody was trying to rob Ernest still his motorcycle. Somebody was trying to take his bike from him. She called the police, called the amber. She said, well, y'all know we living in the noise. You know how long they take to get here. So by the time they got here, he was already gone.

Ernest Smith, the gifted preacher, who was just days away from being installed at a church in Atlanta, was now a casualty of the post Katrina crime wave in New Orleans.

At the time of Ernest Smith's death. The city was still very much suffering after Hurricane Katrina.

Laura Roderig worked with the New Orleans District Attorney's office.

The place where they were living was largely abandoned. In fact, they were the only people living in that apartment complex. It was almost a scary place to live because you had nobody around you. There weren't lights on anywhere.

Ernest was shot twice in the chest with a nine millimeter weapon.

There were no witnesses and no known motive.

His motorcycle was right there on the scene next to him. The keys to the motorcycle were found in the grass right nearby. Absent any eyewitness and given the circumstances and the resources in the city, it simply just became a cold case.

It seemed like a senseless crime that would go unsolved. Then five years later, another murder in a neighboring state.

Brought this case.

Back to life.

In two thousand and six, Ernest Smith was about to begin his dream job as a pastor of an Atlanta church, but a few days before he and his wife, Emma moved there, he was gunned down in front of his New Orleans home. His mentor Apostle Jackson performed his eulogy.

The funeral was wall the wall peoples. He was standing up.

At the request of his devastated widow. Apostle did something at the funeral he had never done before. He used his eulogy to urge anyone who knew what happened to Ernest to come forward.

I was trying to convince them that somebody need to go to the police and try to find out what happened.

It was heartbreaking for everyone, including Emma, who struggled to afford the proper funeral she felt her husband deserved.

She was grieving. She had to borrow the money from me to bury him, and when she got the insurance money, she did get me my money back.

Even with Apostles plea at Ernest's funeral, no new leads came in and his murder remained unsolved. A year later, Emma started over. She moved to the tiny city of Poplarville, Mississippi, which is about an hour north of New Orleans, and built a home in the rural countryside.

That's one of the most beautiful houses I ever seen in my life. I was a TV in every room. I'm talking a big screen TV. In the bathroom. It was just beautiful.

It is a lot less expensive to live in poplar Ville than it is to live in New Orleans. But when Apostle and Carolyn visited Emma in her new home, they were in awe.

The house had.

A swimming pool, a pond, and a boat, even a state of the art security system. It was the perfect home on a street called Emma Lane. But even with the new house, they could still sense a lot of pain with Emma. Grief can do many things to a person. An Apostle's wife, Carolyn, was concerned with how thin Emma looked.

This is our first time seeing her at the been a while, and we look at us a wow. You know, she had lost a lot, a lot away.

There was also something else different about her. Emma Smith proudly announced she was now Emma Rain. A few months earlier, she had quietly married James Rain, a former military buddy of her late husband. Much like Ernest, James Rain was adopted, drove a truck, and was a few years younger than Emma. James said he looked up to Ernest almost like a big brother, and with Ernest gone, James seemed like the perfect person for Emma.

She and I had an opportunity to just sit out on the front porch, and I told her, I said, well, this is it. This is what Ernest always dreamed of. This is what he wanted. They had a boat, the house, and the big pond. You had the big elaborates house on the inside, you know, so you got everything. She said, Yeah, she's telling me how she missed him. You know, she wished that he was there to enjoy all of that. I said, I wish he was here too.

Emma finally had the life she'd always hope to have with Ernest, but it would only last a short time. Five years later, in twenty eleven, Carolyn an Apostle turned on the nightly news and were left speechless.

James had got killed.

I'm a call, she said. She was out of town on the business trip, and then that's when they found him deceased. I'm like, oh my god, you know, another one. It's too much. It was just too much to deal with.

It was unbelievable. One week before James Rain's thirty eighth birthday, someone broke in and shot him while he was in bed.

So this is like whoa, this is like way too much and it's way crazy that all these husbands are dying.

How could someone lose their husband not just once, but twice in such a cruel manner.

That's crazy, That's crazy. Laurad El Mercy.

Laura Rodriig worked for the New Orleans District Attorney's office. The police come out and essentially start trying to piece together what happened. They learned Demo was away on a business trip in Arkansas and the last she heard from her husband, James, was sometime around midnight. By eleven AM, she was worried.

Emma Rain calls James's mother and says, I can't get a hold of James. Can you go check on him? So James's mother goes to the home. She goes upstairs, finds him shot in the head and in the neck in the bed.

She calls the police.

There was nothing missing from the house. It appeared to be a targeted shooting, but.

Why it was a vacant area, There were no eyewitnesses to the murder.

There wasn't a motive that was clear.

The police department in the quaint town of Poplarville Canvas the neighborhood to find a lead.

Poplarville is sort of a small town where everybody kind of knows everybody through a relative, a cousin, a friend, somebody you work with. They were getting a lot of statements, trying to navigate and piece together what could have happened here.

If there's one thing about small towns, it's that people usually know everyone else's business, and the people of Pomplarville knew some dirt about James Rain.

The detectives learned that there had been issues of infidelity with James Rain. The two of them had engaged in a physical relationship for some time before Ernest Smith had been killed.

Keep in mind, they were military buddies and they stayed friends. The police learned James used to socialize with Ernest and Emma.

James Rain and him had become friends during the military, and that's how they knew each other.

In fact, James almost.

Looked up to Ernest Smith like a mentor, somebody who he respected and would go to for advice.

But that friendship ended when Ernest learned what they were doing behind his back.

He had confronted James Rain in the past and was just determined to really fight for his marriage and to make it work.

Ernest had been trying for a pastor job in Atlanta, and he knew no church would hire him if his marriage was on the rocks. So up until his death, he was trying to fix things with Emma.

He was fiercely loyal to Emma Rain. He just did not want to give up on their marriage. In fact, he had just gotten her a dozen roses right before the murder.

So let's break this down. Emma was fooling around with James while she was married to Ernest. Ernest knew about the affair and confronted James. Then Ernest mysteriously got killed. A year later, Emma marries James, and then five years later, James was also mysteriously killed.

It was certainly a strange set of facts.

And while detectives tried to make sense of what was happening, the estates that James and Emma had built in Poplarville, Mississippi, burned to the ground. Luckily no one was injured, but investigators rule that that fire was arson what was going on, So that again is very suspicious, very strange. This is a whole different ballgame. With two dead husbands and one down house, Emma Rain's life hit rock bottom in search of another clean start. She left Poplar Villain headed to Missouri,

This case was one that immediately drew my attention because it was not a typical murder case. There were no eyewitnesses to either murder. Nothing was adding up. There wasn't a motive that was clear, other than the fact that we knew this woman's last two husbands were also found dead in sort of mysterious circumstances.

The first case had gone cold, and investigators did not want James Rain's murder to reach a similar fate.

If they aren't.

Able to develop a suspect or get a lead within the first couple of weeks, it's almost never going to be easy to find one quickly after that.

But shortly after James Rain's murder, things would take a turn. Late one night, James's brother received a mysterious phone call, a woman's voice he did not recognize told him to walk outside and check his mailbox. As cryptic as that sounded, he wanted answers. James's brother went to the mailbox and

She had the insurance policy on Ernest Smith, and it started at one hundred thousand, the money increasing from year to year from one hundred to two point fifty all the way up to eight hundred thousand. But a closer look showed that just before Ernest's death, the amount was increased to eight hundred thousand dollars and the beneficiary changed to James Rain, which was extremely suspicious because everybody knew

And there was more these documents also indicated that James Rain had been involved in Ernest Smith's murder.

How was it possible that an.

Insurance company could put two and two together but detectives couldn't.

If this is.

Actually true, if they actually prove this, this is shocking, all right.

So this is getting really weird, especially for James Rayn's brother. He's just found out that the insurance company blamed his brother James for the death of Ernest Smith. So he shares this with a couple of his trusted relatives, including his other brother, Alfred Everett.

James Rain's murder leads to what we learn is sort of an uneasy feeling that Alfred Everett is going through.

He was nervous.

He has a moment where he feels like he needs to talk to somebody and that he has to get this off of his chest.

Obviously, Alfred's strange behavior concerned the group, so they did something weird too. They drove him out to the middle of nowhere so they could talk candidly.

During that conversation, Alfred Everett admits that Emma and James had paid him to shoot Ernest Smith, that there was a life insurance policy he was supposed to get one hundred thousand dollars from it, and that's why he shot Ernest Smith.

After keeping this secret for five years, Albert's conscience finally got the best of him and he shared what happened. On April twelfth, two thousand.

And six, Alfred Everett parked down the street again. During this time, it would have been too dark for anybody to sort of locate what would be considered a suspicious car or.

Something out of the ordinary.

Alfred revealed he sat and waited that night for Ernest to return from riding his motorcycle.

He runs up, he shoots, and exits the scene as quickly as possible to jump in the car to head back toward Mississippi.

On the way back, Alfred said he threw the gun in Lake Pontchatrain, which borders New Orleans. The bridge over Lake Pontatrain is also known as the Causeway, which is the world's longest continuous bridge over water.

Lake Pontchatrain is a very very large lake, so there was really very little to no chance that we would ever recover that weapon. You know, it's often speculated how many weapons could possibly be at the bottom of Lake Pontchatrain just to give you an idea of how massive.

The lake is. So let's sort through this.

Alfred, James Rain's brother, said he was hired by James and Emma to murder Emma's first husband, Ernest Smith, and he did it for a cut of Ernest's life insurance money. However, Alfred claimed he had absolutely nothing to do with his brother James Rain's murder.

The group knows they're all going to sort of make a decision what to do with this information and how to sort of protect Alfred to whatever extent they can, but also have him acknowledge what he has done. You know, he was sort of the last man standing who could bring it to the authorities.

They certainly wanted Alfred to do the right thing, but they also wanted to somehow.

Protect him, and so they offer to help him get an attorney. They advise him that he should report this to the authorities, and Alfred says that he will. He promises that he's going to tell the police, he's going to come clean, and he's going to accept responsibility for what happens.

But Alfred never went to the police. He just disappeared, leaving his relatives even more conflicted. They wondered was Alfred hiding out, was he being honest when he said he wasn't involved in James's murder, or worse, was he killed?

There were so many moving parts, dead bodies, life insurance policies.

They were left with very little options. So the families comp between a rock and a hard place. So what did they do? They decided to call a detective they saw on TV.

They see descend A.

Barnes on a televised episode of a case that she had handled a cold case in New Orleans, and decide to randomly reach out to her in the New Orleans Police Department.

Relatives of James Rayne came to police headquarters after seeing me on a Channel six news.

James's brother and uncle were impressed by how detective Barnes cracked an unrelated cold case, and they felt she was the person to help them.

They had recently learned about the brother being involved, Alfred Everett, and as soon as they tried to give him the opportunity to come forward and to speak to the authorities, and when he refused, they they had to, I guess take matters in their own hand, and they had to advise the authorities of what they were able to learn.

They handed over the insurance documents that mysteriously mound up in the mailbox of James Rayne's brother.

Think about that, how did that happen?

And then they shared Alfred Everett's confession with Detective Barnes.

That could not have been easy.

A lot of witnesses come forward after they family members are murdered, and I guess they feel for that family and now they can put their self in that family shoes, so that allows them to, I guess, have a come to Jesus moment.

Prosecutor Laura rodrig worked with Detective Barnes.

I remember to Senda and I kind of sitting down and being like, whoa, you know, it was just not your typical case.

No way wasn't.

And now the New Orleans PD reopened the murder investigation have Emma Rain's first husband, Everett Smith.

As soon as she sat down with them and they gave her the information and she was able to pull the cold case file, it was very obvious to her.

That this was making sense and wait for this.

Once everything came into focus, the police would find another victim.

He was tragically hit by a vehicle.

And there was a growing fear that there were more.

This was somebody who had no regard for human life at all.

And it will all hinge on finding Alfred Everett.

We had a murder for hire, you know, somebody killing husbands to make a living.

I'm slung Glass. In the surprising conclusion of Bodies on the Bayou, we'll and cover all the secrets behind the murders of Ernest Smith and James Rain.

She gets the phone call.

She learns that James is dead, hopped some champagne and had set thanks to celebrate.

That's next time on American Homicide. You can contact the American Homicide team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. That's American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. American Homicide is hosted and written by me Sloane Glass and is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Todd Gants. The series is also written and produced by Todd Gans,