S1: E23 – Bodies on the Bayou, Part 2

In the span of five years, Emma Rain lost two husbands to 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.

And then finally the police closed in on the killer, but then he disappeared.

We had somebody killing husbands to make a living, and that's scary.

Today we're in New Orleans, Louisiana, for the conclusion of bodies on the Bayou. I'm Sloan Glass and this is American homicide. And just a warning that this episode contains some graphic content. Please take care while listening. With winds of over one hundred and fifty five miles per hour, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August two thousand and five. The Category five storm brought massive flooding and devastation that forced tens of thousands of New Orleans residence to evacuate.

Not everybody came back, but crime was one of the first things to come back to the city.

Journalist John Simmerman writes for The Advocate newspaper the.

Police department in New Orleans was in chaos. During that time, it was pretty lawless around here after Katrina.

Katrina forced hundreds of people who worked as police officers to evacuate, and the flooding kept many from returning. The police can't protect the city from a hurricane, only from what comes later. The question is after Katrina, can New Orleans police come back as quickly as crime An understaffed and overwhelmed New Orleans PD had to patrol a city that historically has had a high murder rate.

There was a run there where it was the per capital leader in homicides in America. It's you know, first, second, third, fourth. Every year it's up there. We have a murder problem in New Orleans.

The crime rate in New Orleans usually runs about one hundred and fifty percent higher than the national average. That's remarkable. So with more crime and fewer cops, many of the post Katrina murders went unsolved.

That was tough.

That was tough. I don't think their success rate in closing murder cases very high back then.

The case of Ernest Smith was one of those unsolved cold cases. As we shared in the previous episode, Ernest was murdered in front of his New Orleans home. In April two thousand and.

Six, somebody came up on him and shot him in the doorway there. Apparently he'd fallen into the house the bottom of a stairwell inside there, which had sort of created a bloody seen.

The police investigated, but there were no arrests.

It was still barren around there. There weren't a lot of people living out there. I mean, if you were going to kill somebody, that wouldn't be a bad place to do it.

After the case went cold, his widow, Emma, moved to Mississippi. A year later. She married Ernest's military buddy James Rain.

After his killing, it was long before she had moved back there, ed and settled into a house that was bankrolled in part by the insurance money from Ernest Smith.

By twenty eleven, tragedy struck Emma yet again.

James Rain was killed. He was shot up badly at the house he shared with Emma Rain. It looked to be very deliberate.

That's when James's step brother, Alfred Everett, started acting strangely. His relatives noticed he appeared nervous and uncomfortable and wondered if maybe he knew something about James's murder. The family questioned him, but Alfred said he had nothing to do with it. But after a lot of back and forth, he shocked them all when he admitted to a different murder.

Alfred Everett had told them that he had shot Ernest Smith and said he threw the gun and like Pontchatrain on his way back to Mississippi.

After the shooting, Alfred said he killed Ernest for a few thousand dollars, but he never got paid.

You didn't get that he got two clunker cars, said from James Rain.

Alfred said Emma and James were having an affair at the time, and the two wanted Ernest dead so they could collect his life insurance, a policy, by the way, that Emma had just increased.

In the months before Ernest Smith's killing. She had not only ratcheted up her insurance policy but also added James Rain as a fifty to fifty beneficiary.

After this confession, Alfred promised his relatives that he'd go to the police and tell them everything, but instead he disappeared.

Eventually, they called police themselves and turn him in.

In twenty twelve, they phoned Detective Descenda Barnes of the New Orleans PD.

Descenda Barnes was a cold case detective, and family members of James Rain called her wanting to relay information that Alfred Evert had shot Ernest Smith.

Detective Barnes real opened preacher Ernest Smith's cold case started digging into the strange dynamic between Emma, her second husband James, and his stepbrother Alfred. Prosecutor Laura Roderick also worked the case.

I remember saying to her what is going on here and her kind of breaking it down for me and explaining to me what was her take on things.

The first thing they looked at was the police report from the night Ernest Smith was murdered.

He is shot two times and killed. He is clearly shot outside, first stumbles his way inside and collapses on the steps where he will subsequently die. There was blood spatter by his feet which would go almost to the floor at the bottom of the steps and toward the front door where he had come in and collapsed on the steps.

Emma told detectives she was upstairs in bed when she awoke to the sound of Ernest calling out for help in the doorway of their town home.

Emma Rane tells the detective that she had been upstairs sleeping in her bed the whole night because she had a terrible toothache and she had taken some over the counterpane medication. While in the crime scene photos, the bed was perfectly made, so it didn't seem to make any sense that she had been in her bed all day. We certainly wouldn't have expected her to hurry up and quickly make her bed before the police arrived as her husband was dead on the steps.

The report also noted that Emma looked pristine.

She didn't have a drop of blood on her, no indication she had hugged him, touched him, nothing as he died on the stairs.

It turns out that none of what Emma told detectives on the night of Ernest Smith's murder fit with the physical evidence.

The blood was completely perfect, there were no footprints, nothing was smeared, which indicated that she could not have been in her bed upstairs sleeping, because she would have had to go around him and step into the blood in order to go outside call the police anything of that nature.

As bad as things look for Emma, it was Alfred Everett, the step brother of her second husband, who pulled the trigger. After coming clean to some of his relatives, Alfred disappeared. By the summer of twenty thirteen, the police located him in Texas.

Alfred Everett was charged with murder. He was the gunman who killed Ernest Smith.

They arrested Alfred, but he wasn't talking, so detectives then turned their attention to Emma, who was looking less like a grieving widow and more like a conniving killer.

So we believed that Emma Rain had orchestrated the plan. She had through probably James Rain acquired the assistance of Alfred Everett. I guess James, who knew him better than anybody, knew he would be somebody willing to do this.

When detectives did a deep dive into her past, they learned Emma had another husband before Ernest.

Emma's first husband, we learned, was a man named Leroy Evans.

And guess what. Back in nineteen ninety three, something terrible happened to Leroy.

He was tragically hit by a vehicle. We weren't able to determine if there was any foul play in the actual traffic accident, but he did become a paraplegic.

After the incident, Leroy was paralyzed from the neck down, leaving him bedridden.

Rather than Emma take care of him, Leroy went to stay with his mother so she would care for him on a daily basis. He had a room where he would lay in bed for most of the day. He had a feeding tube that was necessary for him to survive.

And then one day, LeRoy's feeding tube was mysteriously removed.

So the mother of mister Evans told our investigator that Emma Rain was the last person in his room before his feeding tube had been removed, and he died of what the corner determined was asphyxiation. Mister Evans's mother certainly suspected fell play of Emma Rain and that she had caused his death. That's how she felt, so that was very alarming to us.

But no charges were ever filed. And the strange thing is no relatives of Ernest Smith or James Rain knew Emma had been married to Lee roy Evans. Lee roy Evans died in nineteen ninety four, and according to Ernest's obituary, it said Emma married Ernest in nineteen ninety Let me read you one sentence from his obituary. He was united in holy matrimony to Emma Judge on November seventeenth, nineteen ninety Who is the love of his life, his soulmate, his bay, as he often calls her.

That's where you sort of have to say, all right, what's going on here?

Finally, investigators saw this string of dead husbands with hefty insurance policies and labeled Emma the black widow.

The money was the most important, and she wanted that money more than anything.

Detectives didn't think Emma could be any more cold blooded than that, but what they learn next proved them all wrong. Over nearly two decades, Emma Rain lost three husbands and the evidence against her was piling up.

If she was willing to kill her own husband in exchange for a check, she was willing to do anything and that's scary.

Prosecutor Laura Rodrick learned that in the months before her husband, Ernest Smith died, Emma made her boyfriend and eventual husband, James Rain, a beneficiary for half of Ernest's eight hundred thousand dollars life insurance policy.

What Emma Rain did not realize was Louisiana law would prohibit James Rain from coming in to collect his four hundred thousand because Ernest Smith had a biological daughter.

But Ernest's daughter never received that insurance money.

Emma Raine's biological daughter goes into an office and forges the name of Ernest Smith's biological daughter. So essentially all of the eight hundred thousand dollars is awarded to Emma Rain through fraudulent activity.

So not only did Emma have Ernest Smith killed, but she also cheated his daughter, his only child, out of money from his life insurance policy.

It was alarming to us to see the lack of concern that Emma had for her daughter, that she would put her daughter in that position, that she had no problem with her daughter getting a felony conviction for doing that.

There's so many terrible things Emma was accused of doing, but maybe one of the most galling happened on the day of James Rayne's murder.

James Rain is in his home at the time that he's murdered. Emma Rain tells the police that she's on a business trip trying to make a deal work, and she's not at home. It was actually not much business going on at all. She was involved in a physical relationship with the man she was with in Arkansas at the time James is killed. In fact, the authorities get a statement from him where he says she gets the phone call, she learns that James is dead. We popped

Okay, now that is so beyond cold blooded, and there's actually more to the story, if you remember, Emma later called James's mother and had her check on James, even though Emma knew James was dead. Imagine knowing you were setting up a mother to see that.

In other words, it seems as if she was intentionally louring James's mother over to find him dead. In the home. You know, she had no sympathy. She just was really cold. Cold to allow his mother to find him in that way, it would be something they felt was sort of the final twisting of the knife. It was intentionally cruel and it just showed her character.

Late in the summer of twenty thirteen, detectives charged Emma with the death of her second husband, Ernest Smith. And guess what. At the time of her arrest, she was no longer Emma Rain. She had already moved on to husband number four.

Emma and her fourth husband were living in Kansas City, Missouri at the time that she was arrested for the murders.

And when detectives told Emma she was being charged with the murder of her husband, Emma asked which husband. As Emma waited her trial, her hired gun Alfred Everett, was tried in twenty fourteen. He was charged with killing Emma's second husband, Ernest Smith.

Alfred Everett was charged with murder and he was convicted of murder. The penalty will be life in prison.

The jury needed less than an hour to convict him, and with that, prosecutors turn their attention to Emma Rain's upcoming trial.

As a prosecutor, we don't have the opportunity to speak one on one with the defendants who are charged with crimes. Rarely do we ever get to actually speak to them or ask them any questions or anything of that nature. The most that we can do to glimpse sort of their personality or what's going on is to listen to recorded phone calls during their incarceration.

So what kind of things did the prosecutor learn about Emma from listening to her phone calls from jail.

She would make demands of the jail. She wanted low fat chocolate chip cookies, certain things that you know, she just felt like she was entitled to, and she encouraged the young female inmates to sort of take on those causes with her.

Prosecutors may have heard Emma demanding lofact cookies, but there was one thing they wanted to hear but did not.

She never gave me the impression of any remorse at all for any of the family members who were going through this. She never so much has even cared to see the pain that the families were going through in dealing with the process of their loved ones being murdered and trying to get to the bottom of the crimes and trying to piece these puzzles together. It just did not matter at all.

And this is an odd thing. As her trial day got closer, prosecutors were having a hard time getting anyone to testify against her. I think that people were nervous to come forward in the case against Emma because they they were worried about what more she could accomplish if she wanted to. Then, in more bad news, a ruling came from the judge that prohibited prosecutors from calling Emma Rain a suspect in the death of her husband number one,

It got extremely complicated. So this was a different case in terms of how we had to present it.

So prosecutors offered Emma a deal. If she pled guilty to manslaughter, she'd get thirty five years, but Emma turned down the deal.

She was constantly kind of wheeling and dealing.

When the trial began, Emma Rain was fifty two years old and face life in prison for the second degree murder of Ernest Smith. Her defense lawyer blamed Emma's third husband, James Rain, who was dead and obviously couldn't defend himself. Emma's lawyer referred to James Rain as James the Snake and claimed it was James who manipulated Emma into upping Ernest Rain's insurance policy. Most importantly, the lawyer argued that James alone got Alfred Everett to kill Ernest Smith.

Alfred Everett he was sort of the last man standing who could testify against her.

Alfred had already been convicted and sentenced to life, but he could set the record straight. Alfred was called as a witness, but he refused to take the witness stand or answer any questions from prosecutors. Instead, he defiantly sat in the courtroom while the puzzled jurors looked on.

You could kind of get a read on some of their faces, like not knowing what to make of it.

So prosecutors went to Plan B and called three of James's relatives to testify.

Those were the three people who had sort of broken this case.

Each one of those relatives described Alfred's confession.

That James Rain and Emma Rain were in on it, that there was a life insurance policy and that's why he shot Ernest Smith. He describes having shot him twice, evidence that is consistent with the crime scene.

But as she sat through the damning testimony from the prosecution side, Emma was quiet, just jotting down notes on a notepad, just.

Zero emotion through the trial, no sign that any of this had affected her in any way.

Emma Rain did not take the stand in her own defense. In fact, the defense did not call a single witness.

At the end of the day. We did not believe that she had genuine love for any of these men. It was a business deal in her mind, but she was very good at disguising that this was somebody killing husbands to make a living.

It was up to the eight women and four men of the jury to decide if Emma Rain was indeed a black widow. Emma Rain was a suspect in the death of her first and third husbands, but she was only charged with murdering her second husband, preacher Ernest Smith.

The prosecution was telling about this woman who seemed to either be bad luck or worse for the men she married.

Journalist John Simmerman covered the trial, where prosecutors labeled the three time widower and Moraine a black widow.

Well, that was a term that the prosecution used, black widow, which is a term for a woman who marries somebody and kills them and maybe does it repeatedly, So she kind of fit that definition.

At the time of Emma Raine's trial, she was married a fourth time, but husband number four did not attend Emma's trial. He told reporters the New Orleans judicial system was corrupt and said he had paid for her legal bills from back home and Missouri, and those bills, he said, had nearly bankrupt him. In the courtroom, Emma's lawyer blamed husband number three, James Rain, for the murder for higher pot of husband number two, Ernest Smith.

He basically said that Emma Rain didn't know about this. This was all James's plan.

Keep in mind, James Rain was also murdered and he obviously could not defend himself.

What Emma Raine's attorney tried to do was say, look, there's no physical evidence. There were no text messages and emails back and forth with James Rain on any murder plot.

But prosecutor Laura Rodrig hoped jurors could connect.

All the dots. This is a case that did not have a lot of direct evidence. There were no eyewitnesses. We were using what we call circumstantial evidence. We knew that this jury was going to be shot once they realized the intricacies of this case, and we could see that in their faces as the facts started to unfold.

So she resorted to using charts and graphs to show the relationship between all the major players in the case.

One of the things we had to show the jury was sort of a simplified family tree. We had to put that up on a large board in front of them, where we had diagrammed Alfred Everett, James Rain, how they all fit in as a family, and where Ernest Smith

Liberated for three and a half hours before returning to the courtroom with a verdict.

I remember Emma her typical self in terms of being very calm, you know, she didn't seem rattled, she didn't seem worried about what was going to happen.

Emma stared straight ahead when the verdict echoed through the courtroom.

Guilty Emma Rain, who was convicted of murder. The penalty will be life in prison.

And coincidentally, Emma Rain's sentencing for the murder of preacher Ernest Smith happened on the five year anniversary of husband James Rain's death.

This was somebody who had no regard for human life at all and would intentionally lure them in solely to use them as sort of a lottery ticket, you know, and it was an automatic win. We don't see somebody who is that sort of cold to the core very often. If using the widow card, essentially it was going to help her get what she wanted. She had no problem doing that.

Emma's fourth husband disagreed. He was livid and told the Associated Press, I think the whole thing was fabricated. It was a setup and it wasn't right. She didn't have anyone killed, and she didn't kill anyone. And even after being convicted of murder, Emma's legal problems were far from over. Emma didn't just cheat on her husband's she also cheated on her taxes. The government charged her with federal bankruptcy

One of the interesting things about this case is because she ended up getting the insurance money in James Raine's killing.

So Emma used the payout of life insurance from husband number three, James Rain, to pay back the IRS.

The judge saw no reason not to give it to her because no evidence was presented to suggest that Emma Rain was involved in James rain Is killing.

In his ruling, the judge wrote that it would be nothing more than speculation that Emma killed James Rain and awarded her just over two hundred and forty eight thousand dollars.

Ninety thousand of it I believe went from that settlement to pay her past tax debs.

It's another example of the unexplainable hold Emma seemed to have over men. Lost in this story of three dead husbands is that the twenty eleven murder of Emma's third husband, James Rain, remains unsolved, although it sits outside her jurisdic, New Orleans Prosecutor Laura Rodrig continues to watch it from a distance.

So that investigation essentially is still ongoing.

Emma has an alibi, and the police don't believe she directly was the killer.

She was out of the state. There's a witness who indicates she was with him, so we don't believe she pulled the trigger. So that means there's somebody out there who knows what happened.

Do you remember how em n James Rain's house had a big, fancy security system and how it wasn't working on the night that James was murdered.

The detectives learned that the last person seen in the footage was Emma Raine until the footage all goes off, so they see her approach the box or the main area where you control the surveillance equipment, and then the equipment is sort of shut off. Essentially, it was turned off, they believe by Emma Rain.

As of twenty twenty five, no one has been charged in the twenty eleven murder of James Rain.

It's interesting to wonder why James thought he would be different from the rest, because it was very clear that Emma Rain was not capable of loving another human anymore, or even to the same extent that she loved herself. Most people who came across her were shocked to ultimately find out that this was happening. They were shocked to find out that this person they had trusted could have been capable of something like this.

The person who seemed to be the most shocked and disturbed by Emma was Apostle Jackson, preacher Ernest Smith's mentor and father figure.

How do you just take someone like how people just take some out of life. I'm telling you, supposed to love this man, He's supposed to be in your heart.

How can you do that?

Back in two thousand and six, when Emma and Ernest's marriage was strained, Apostle gave Ernest marital advice that continues to haunt him today.

I convinced him that he needed to give his marriage another chance and need to forget him forgive and I live on that every day. So I'm still walking in guilt. It's been since two thousand and six. I'm still walking in guilt. If I had not told him that the Word of God said that he had to forgive and he had to be with his wife, he probably would be alive today. That's a burden to carry, you know what you think about it.

Of course, if Apostle had a do over, he would have told Ernest to leave Emma.

She lost something that was awesome. She destroyed it. She could have had a great life. But look at her life now. She's in prison. She needs to stay there every day and not ever ever get out. But I do.

Forgive Apostle forgave Emma. He was a preacher, That's just how he was. But Apostle might also want to consider apologizing to his wife, Carolyn. On that feedful night in two thousand and six, when Emma called Apostle to say that Ernest was dead, he hung up the phone and shared the news with Carolyn.

Then my wife, He just said, just like this, she killed him.

She killed him.

Those are my words to my husband.

That morning, Carolyn said she always had a bad feeling about Emma that she just couldn't shake.

Those are not thoughts that you think about. Those are not things that you can even imagine within yourself. You don't even think like that. You know, then boom is in your face. This is only something you hear about on the TV show. You know, like, you never think this was something that would happen in real life, especially to someone that you know personally. So I don't know what Emma was thinking that day.

Carolyn had her suspicions all along, but Apostle couldn't imagine Emma being a murderer.

You just couldn't convince me that this nice woman could have a husband killed. Just couldn't convince me of it. I did not accept that. I did not want to believe that, and it took me a long time to believe that, even though she was my wife. It still took me a long time to even think that someone could take someone like It really made me be aware that peoples that you trust could actually be wicked, even when they don't look it.

Next time on American Homicide, when four women are murdered and they're Louisiana homes, the investigation turns into a power struggle that allowed one of the state's most prolific serial killers to roam free. We'll head to Baton Rouge for the case of the serial killer of South Louisiana. 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.