It was the summer of 1984, and New Orleans was hosting the Louisiana World Exposition, otherwise known as the World's Fair. Seven million visitors had descended on the fairgrounds along the city's riverfront. They took simulated flights inside a full-scale model of a NASA space shuttle. They rode gondolas across the Mississippi.
and strolled through international pavilions from italy and japan the world is focused today on a grand celebration namely this world's fair new orleans the theme the world of rivers fresh water as a source of life and right now you're looking at live pictures The fair was a bright light in the city of New Orleans that summer. But just a few blocks away, a much darker story was unfolding.
Between late May and July, five gay men were bludgeoned inside their homes with what police believed to be a hammer. Three of the men died. Two were permanently disabled. The Times-Picayune newspaper ran a story suggesting the killings were connected, noting that all of the victims were associated with gay bars in the quarter. The local queer community lived in fear that a serial killer was on the loose.
But by the end of that summer, the attacks stopped. And by all appearances, so did the New Orleans Police Department's investigation. No arrests were ever made, and the case remains unsolved. For over 30 years, the case file sat buried among thousands of other cold cases in the New Orleans Police Department's Homicide Division. Until just a few years ago, when a curious outsider dug it up and began asking questions.
about why a case like this had managed to disappear. I'm Jed Lipinski. This is Gone South. Fifteen years ago, a young documentary producer named Von Trudeau took a cross-country road trip with his mom. They were heading from L.A. to New York, but they stopped in New Orleans on the way.
I didn't know anything about New Orleans or have any real care about New Orleans. And something strange happened the moment we drove into the outskirts of town on Interstate 10. I had this very sudden, jarring feeling like... I belonged there and someday I would die there in a happy way, not in as morbid of a way as that might sound. After just a few hours in the city, Vaughn decided he had to live in New Orleans someday.
It took a few years, but in 2017, he finally moved there. It didn't take him long to make friends. He began volunteering for New Orleans Pride. an organization that promotes LGBTQ rights and puts on the annual Pride Festival. And it was such a great way to get to know the city through that group of people because it was meeting a lot of gay people at a lot of gay events.
making new friends who were all involved with and touching that world in some way. Vaughn's new friends gave him a crash course in New Orleans queer history, which many of them had learned from older generations. And I just was... so enraptured by their stories. They just caught me up on everything. That history was vibrant and inspiring. New Orleans had been a sanctuary for queer people from across the Deep South for decades.
The epicenter of that sanctuary was the French Quarter. It was a hotspot for gay bars and activism, unlike anything you'd find for at least 500 miles in any direction. But the history of queer New Orleans was also full of violence. In 1973, an arsonist set fire to the entrance of the Upstairs Lounge, a beloved gay bar in the quarter. The blaze killed 32 people who were trapped inside. It was the deadliest attack on the LGBTQ plus community.
in U.S. history until the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. Four years after the upstairs lounge fire, a serial killer known as the French Quarter Slasher stabbed four gay men to death in their homes over a two-month period. Then there was the Bayou Strangler, a man named Ronald Dominique, who was eventually arrested in 2006 after a survivor escaped and reported him. He's believed to have murdered at least 23 men across southeast Louisiana.
and is currently serving eight life sentences. Vaughn slowly became something of an expert on the queer history of New Orleans and on the violence that's a tragic part of that history. But in the middle of the pandemic, he came across a story that his new community had all but forgotten. The pandemic provided a lot of alone and reflection time to just catch up on doing the little things I had always meant to do.
I finally got around to reading a book that I had come across by a local historian called In Exile, the queer history of the French Quarter. and I was reading it each night before bed. And one night I came across a sentence in the book that referenced a series of murders that had happened in the French Quarter in the summer of 1984, and the attacks all involved a hammer as the weapon. I just sat up in my bed and thought, that can't be true.
If it were true, Vaughn figured, he would have heard about it. The upstairs lounge fire, the French Quarter slasher, the Bayou Strangler, all were discussed at length. And yet, a similarly brutal attack against five gay men in the quarter three of whom died, had merited only a few sentences. I was just really overtaken with curiosity in this way that I don't think I ever have been by anything before.
Vaughn sent an email to one of the book's co-authors, Frank Perez, also known as French Quarter Frank. Frank's a historian and activist who also leads walking tours focused on the quarter's queer history. He wrote me back pretty immediately and just said, I don't know hardly anything about that story, but here attached to this email is the little tiny news blurb that someone had clipped out and given to me when I was writing this book.
The news clippings contained little more than the sentences in the book, so Vaughn began scouring the web for old newspaper articles. He learned that the attacks took place within just a month and a half of each other. The three dead victims had been discovered naked in their bedrooms. One was found with his hands and feet bound in sophisticated knots. A survivor had apparently been knocked unconscious and left for dead. The other had suffered a contusion.
but managed to stumble to his neighbor's apartment around 5am. Detectives found no signs of forced entry, but missing items from some of the victim's apartments caused them to consider robbery as a motive. Different blood-stained hammers were recovered from two of the crime scenes. The early articles in the Times-Picayune didn't identify the victim's sexual orientation. A writer at a small independent publication called Impact Magazine
which catered to New Orleans' queer community, was the first to report that the victims were all gay and that the murders might be connected. Back in 1984, which doesn't feel that long ago...
it was still extremely difficult for men to be open and gay or bisexual or anything other than heterosexual and monogamous in the public eye. So it was really, really... huge that somebody was taking the initiative to connect these attacks with each other and say, the thing that these have in common is that there appears to be a gay storyline with the victims.
In late July, possibly in response to Impact Magazine's coverage, the Times-Picayune made the connection itself. According to the article, cops had been showing photos of the deceased victims at French Quarter gay bars. to try and establish where they were and who they were with in the hours before they died. The head of the NOPD's homicide division said the location and method of the attacks were so similar, they believed the crimes were committed by one person.
It was a big story, a potential serial killer targeting gay men in the French Quarter. But by the fall of 1984, the trail had gone cold, and the story faded from the news. So Vaughn went back to historian Frank Perez. And I said, what would you recommend I do as a next step to learn more? And he said, I would reach out to the New Orleans Police Department with a public records request for... any new information you've come across and so that's what i did
And in a very short period of time later, I received a rejection on the basis that these were all open cases and therefore a public records request was not granted. It was Vaughn's first public records request. When the NOPD denied it, he figured that was as far as he was going to get. And within a really bizarrely short period of time, I want to say it was in the next few days, I wake up.
One morning and I check my email over coffee like I usually do. And I have an email from the NOPD attached to which is hundreds of pages of police records. detailing the five hammer murders that I had sent the public records request in for. Also included were details about a sixth hammer attack that Vaughn had not found in any of the newspaper coverage.
To this day, he doesn't know if it was just a clerical mix-up or if someone purposely sent him the files, despite the earlier denial. I have no clue why I received all of these documents having been denied the request. I didn't ask any questions, of course. I just downloaded the attachment and got to reading.
Hey friends, I'm Sharon McMahon, host of Here's Where It Gets Interesting. Each week, I speak with authors, experts, and thought leaders on everything from American history and democracy to how to be a better person on the internet. And don't miss my extremely popular docu-series, which educate you on things you never learned in history class. Follow and listen to Here's Where It Gets Interesting on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey.
We are best friends, and together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. This is gross! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday.
Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. When Vaughn received hundreds of pages of police documents about the 1984 hammer attacks in his inbox, he had trouble wrapping his mind around it. It was any sort of police correspondence.
So even interoffice and interdepartmental memos that they were sharing with each other, it was summaries of witness interviews. It was... Crime scene photos and blood splatter. Blood spatter? Splatter? Whatever. One particular crime scene photo stood out. And I was just looking at a guy. A brunette guy, pretty fit, tan, handsome-ish, as I could tell, whose head was completely beaten in. And there was blood everywhere, and his skull was fractured in.
And I don't think I've ever seen anything like that. I've seen movies, I've seen grisly movies, special effects and movies, but I'd never seen a brutally murdered dead person. As Vaughn read through the documents, a number of other things grabbed his attention. The sixth hammer attack had occurred just days after what Vaughn had thought was the fifth and final attack. Unlike the others, this one took place in public on Bourbon Street, just outside the famous French Quarter bar Pat O'Brien's.
birthplace of the hurricane cocktail. In that instance, the victim survived, and the attacker, a man in his early 20s, was arrested. But the charges against him were later dropped. It was unclear if he had any connection to the other attacks. The case file also provided more details about the victims, all of whom were either affluent or middle-class white men. The first, Gene Davis, owned a popular gay bar called Gregory's Lounge. The third victim, Bruce Richardson,
was an audio-visual technician who lived in the city's historic Lower Garden District. The fifth, John Hooper, was a banker with an apartment half a block from Bourbon Street. It floored me that these five people who were... well-known parts of society, at least in the French Quarter, were murdered and it disappeared. Vaughn had initially assumed that the story of the Hammer murders disappeared because the cops and reporters were biased against gay people.
that the attacks would have received more attention if the victims were straight. And yet, the thick police file and the coverage in local papers suggested that authorities and the media had taken the attacks seriously and made a genuine effort to solve them. So Vaughn wondered, what could he do that hadn't already been done? I had wanted this information and suddenly I had all of this information and it was somewhat paralyzing.
in the moments that followed. I am a guy who works on music documentaries. That's who I am. The things I enjoy watching are pop. and music and liveliness and dancing. And Moulin Rouge is one of my favorite movies of all time. The last thing in the world I needed was like more stress about the evil that lurked around every corner of the world.
True crime is much darker than the fare that I'm ever looking to consume. This whole story was not me chasing some passion about... people murdering each other it was actually always from the beginning just me feeling like Am I safe in a city where something like this happens and it fucking disappears out of the news immediately, unsolved and unresolved? Despite Vaughn's trepidation with the subject matter, he pressed on.
He began reaching out to the hundred or so individuals mentioned in the case file. I was stalking down all the names that were mentioned in any way, shape, or form. I was tracking down people's emails. I was tracking down people's phone numbers from whitepages.com. I was even using ancestry.com. And I was pretty alarmed at how much people didn't want it.
Talk to me. I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't heard about that. Or I moved here in the 90s. How dare you think I'm that old? So Vaughn went back to historian Frank Perez and asked him, How do I get them to trust me? And he said, well, the only people that people trust in New Orleans are the bartenders. So... Here I am, a 34-year-old gay guy in New Orleans who has always worked in media since my career really began.
I all of a sudden decided that if there was ever going to be a time to try my hand at being a gay bartender, this was it. Through his connections at New Orleans Pride, Vaughn managed to get a job at Good Friends. a gay bar in the center of the French Quarter. It was just blocks from the bar where several of the victims worked. I was an absolutely horrible bartender for the first couple months there. I had never bartended a goddamn day in my life before that.
So I had a huge learning curve, but once I got past the learning curve, I could actually hold conversations with the bar goers, with the patrons. And that's when people actually started talking to me. From behind the mahogany bar at Good Friends, Vaughn talked with older men who'd actually lived the history he'd read about and learned about from friends his own age. And even though a lot of them didn't have any details that could be helpful to me...
I still was getting into these really intensely fascinating conversations with these men about their lives in earlier years. We'll call it the 80s and the 90s, even the 70s in some case. of what the gay experience was like for them in the South. Many of them remembered the hammer attacks. Some were even close to the victims. Being face to face. and having open conversations with the victim's friends and people who knew the victims.
What I stared down for the first time was intergenerational trauma, which I have always thought of intergenerational trauma as something that comes from families and passes on to family members. But I realized here for the first time, that I was watching intergenerational trauma through a community. Between shifts at Good Friends, Vaughn began recording conversations with people he met. One of them was Chet Roban.
Chet had moved to New Orleans in the late 60s, partly to escape the oppressive environment of the small Louisiana town where he'd grown up. In the summer of 84, he was working as a bartender at the Galley House, another gay bar in the quarter. which is where he met a guy named Jerry Beeson. Jerry was one of the two survivors of the hammer attacks. This is from an interview Vaughn recorded with Chet in the summer of 2021. I never saw Jerry Beeson in a bad mood.
Never saw him in a bad mood. I'd see him drunk, but he wasn't in a bad mood. He had the most wonderful smile and he used it a lot. He used it a lot. Jerry Beeson was also a bartender at the galley house. Chet remembers hearing about the attack from the bar's owner. And I was shocked. I said, well, is he all right? And I said, we don't know. He was...
hurt pretty bad. Jerry suffered minor brain damage from the attack. He couldn't work as a bartender anymore, so the galley house rehired him as a busboy. According to Chet, he was never the same. Sometimes he weren't quite sure what he was thinking. He seemed distant. Of course, we never brought it up. We never discussed it anymore. We kind of left it alone for his sake.
Still, Jerry had survived the attack. So had the second victim, Paul Egan, who'd been discovered unconscious on the floor of his bedroom with injuries to his head and face. And yet, neither man had identified their attacker to the police. Despite his efforts, Vaughn was unable to find anyone who knew Paul Egan or could speak to his condition after the attack. But in addition to Chet Roban,
Vaughn spoke to a lot of people who knew Jerry Beeson. There's two schools of thought on why Jerry Beeson was not able to identify the attacker. One is that he was attacked so brutally. and injured so gravely that it literally destroyed his memory in the short term for something like that. So he very authentically, just due to a brain injury, could not remember what happened.
However, the second theory, and both of these could possibly be true, is that gay men in New Orleans had a really, really, really horrible relationship with law enforcement because it was still illegal to be gay. This was technically true. In 1984, the so-called sodomy laws were still in effect in Louisiana and many other states. The laws criminalized consensual sexual activity between men. They remained on the books until 2003.
when the Supreme Court finally struck them down. When you're talking about people like Paul Egan and Jerry Beeson who are in their late 40s and 50s, you're talking about people who lived through that era who had absolutely no reason to trust. that the police were anybody they could actually openly admit their homosexuality to. Vaughn realized that one reason the case was never solved may have been that people like Chet Roban had, understandably, never spoken to the police.
Vaughn had always loved New Orleans history, but now he found himself writing it. According to the NOPD, the hammer attacks were still open cases. He began to think the information he was collecting might finally motivate the cops to reinvestigate it. By 2022, Vaughn had been investigating the Hammer murders for close to two years. He'd amassed more than 30 hours of recorded interviews, and he'd developed a few theories about who the attackers might have been.
Based on what the prior five attacks had all appeared to be situationally, the attacks occurring in the privacy of the victims' homes, all five men either working in or being very strongly connected to an LGBTQ bar in some way, and a description of a possible suspect. who had been last seen with one of the victims before their attack, it seemed highly likely that these attacks were happening at the hands of a hustler. And if not a hustler, possibly...
a small network of hustlers, which is, I guess, in wider queer context, what you would refer to as a male sex worker. Vaughn also had theories about the potential motive. Items were stolen from the homes of the first few victims, which suggested they were crimes of opportunity or desperation. But there were no signs of theft at the other crime scenes. And none of that explained the brute violence of the attacks.
They were what's known in homicide circles as overkills. An overkill is classified as violence committed against another person's body that is so over the top. It is so past the point. of trying to kill the person you're trying to do much more than kill the person you're trying to disfigure the person you're trying to destroy the other person in a way that goes far beyond just taking their life
These murders aren't committed by somebody who just has a task to deliver. They're not even committed by somebody who just has a small grudge of some sort. They're committed by somebody who has a deep, deep rage inside of them that is most often self-directed. As Vaughn developed his theories, he decided to revisit the case files. That's when I pulled up that sixth hammer attack case file and thought, you know what?
This is as good of a time as any for me to just formally rule this out as being connected to the previous five. As we mentioned earlier, the sixth attack took place only a week after the fifth. But unlike the others, it happened on the street.
in front of dozens of witnesses. Von couldn't find the victim himself, but he managed to track down the victim's friend who saw it happen. It sounded really like just a random street fight broke out between the victim and the perpetrator who were both drunk, both were being sort of aggressive. What the friend of the victim did say was it was very strange that the other person, aka the perpetrator in this, brandished a hammer as a weapon in their fight. Something that went from...
Two drunk guys fist fighting to all of a sudden one guy bringing out a hammer and smacking his friend over the head with it. The suspect's name was listed in the police records. Vaughn found a local number for a man by that name and gave him a call. Somebody answered the call. The guy agreed to meet with me in a public place. And the guy was willing to let me record our conversation about what really happened that night.
Vaughn arranged to meet the man at Vachery, a small cafe in the quarter, not far from the spot outside Pat O'Brien's bar where the attack occurred. He brought his cousin, ostensibly to film the conversation. but also for protection in the event that something went wrong. In the police reports, there was only one fairly vague description of a possible suspect, a Hispanic or Hispanic-looking man in his late teens or early 20s.
wearing a turquoise shirt, who'd been seen walking into one of the victim's apartments before the attack. According to Vaughn, the man who arrived for their meeting was a Hispanic-looking man who appeared to be in his late 50s or early 60s.
meaning he would have been the suspect's age at the time of the attack. The man admitted that he'd been in a street fight that ended with him striking another man in the head with a hammer, but he denied any involvement in the prior five hammer attacks. In fact, he said, This was the first time he was hearing about them. He looked me in the eyes and he told me that he had nothing to do with the prior attacks. I asked if he was gay or had ever worked as a hustler.
and he denied that as well. It was a short conversation. By the end, Vaughn felt fairly satisfied the guy wasn't involved. So, on a whim, he asked if he wouldn't mind showing him where the street fight happened. The man was happy to do it. So we walked over to Pat O'Brien's. He step-by-step walked us through what happened. He showed us where his car was, where he had run to go grab the hammer. He came back and...
I can only describe that he just looked so excited to be telling this story. Did you find his enthusiasm kind of strange? Everyone in New Orleans is strange. So did I find his enthusiasm strange? Sure. But did I find my own desire to have him do this and feel excited about it myself kind of strange? Yes.
But then the guy did another strange thing. In their conversation, he claimed no familiarity with queer culture in New Orleans. But as they walked to his car, he began pointing out where hustlers used to hang out in the 80s. He would say like, oh, that was where like this group of hustlers hung out. And that was where the other group of hustlers hung out. And we said goodbye. And my cousin and I got back in the car and we both looked at each other. And my cousin said at first, he said.
How does he know where the hustlers were hanging out? And how does he seem all of a sudden so familiar with who the hustlers were when in your first conversation, he acted like he didn't even know what a hustler was? And that was where something felt very, very strange. I felt scared. I felt like exposed all of a sudden. And then he reached out to me the next day and said, hey, if you ever want to get a drink sometime, I would be down. To which I thought, am I going to?
Be the seventh hammer victim murder, Jesus Christ. I felt stupid. I felt like, okay, there's a reason that people like me are called like amateur armchair detectives. And it's because we are not. Cut out for the full safety parts of this. When Vaughn told his friends that he'd met with a potential suspect in the Hammer murders, with only his cousin in tow, they got angry at him.
Von promised to put some more distance between himself and the story. So having flown a little too close to the sun, as I might call it, or maybe flown a little too close to the hammer. I really started actually seeking out contacts in the NOPD to help me with the investigation. By this point, Fawn was working with an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the District Attorney's Office.
The two of them had spent close to a year lobbying the NOPD to take another look at the hammer attacks, without success. He knew the cold case unit was overwhelmed with far more pressing cases. And that's when I came across Officer Matt Patton. Lieutenant Matt Patton was a 20-year veteran of the NOPD and a member of the department's LGBTQ plus task force. Vaughn had been unaware that such a thing existed until a close friend, who managed a queer local nightclub, introduced him to Matt.
I immediately saw in Matt my counterpart. It was as though it was me if I had become a cop. And it was like a funny sense of looking into a mirror. Matt had heard about the hammer attacks before, but didn't know many details. When he saw the volume of information and interviews Vaughn had put together, he was astounded. But even with Matt now helping from the inside,
Vaughn still struggled to get the cold case unit's attention. We were trying every single angle. He was inviting me into police centers to meet people myself to try to appeal to them. He was doing everything. Finally, in March of 2023, the cold case unit called. They were willing to meet with the two of them. Vaughn was ecstatic.
We like rehearsed what we were going to say. I had so many things printed out. We were just ready to go in there and plead our case of this is why we think you really, really, really need to reopen this case. And here's all the work we've done for you. We were so ready for that. And we sat down.
And before we could say anything, they told us they had reopened the case and they had found the hammer. Matt and I looked at each other and we were shook. We were just like, oh, why did you reopen it? And they were like... Well, we went through everything and we could see all of the reasons why the police thought these were all possibly not connected at the time. But more so than that, we saw all the reasons that they were connected. And that was enough for us to...
pull up that existing box of evidence, which it's very rare for there to be existing evidence after something in 40 years in New Orleans. The cold case unit wouldn't say what else was in the evidence box, or even which crime scene the Hammer had been recovered from. but they did say they'd submitted it for DNA testing and that the results would be back within 18 months. I spoke with Vaughn in September of 2024.
just over 18 months since his meeting with the cold case unit. Every morning when he opened his email, he expected to see the results of the DNA test. He was still waiting when this podcast aired. Von said he has no doubt the case can be solved. If it is, or if a new development emerges, we'll return to the story in another episode. But for Von, finding the killer's identity was never his top priority.
To me, it sounds like you solved the question you were trying to ask when you started out on your investigation. Yeah. I think the case that I sought out... To solve myself has been solved. And that was how did this happen? And why did the collective conscious of New Orleans in the gay world forget about this? And I've got it. It's when a group of people is hurt too many times by too many people in too small of a range of time.
They don't have any choice but to forget it because how do they keep living when all of these horrible things are happening to them one after the other? How can you remember that? But I've seen now that... That as long as we let these stories die, these problems are going to live with us and haunt us, and the violence is going to just keep passing down generations until we stop forgetting.
And I think if, you know, I get whacked by a bus tomorrow, or let's face it, if I get whacked by a hammer tomorrow, I've brought the names of these people whose lives were ended. I've brought them back. I've brought their memory back. That's enough. I hope. If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone South team, please email us at gonesouthpodcast at gmail.com. That's gonesouthpodcast at gmail.com.
We're on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram at gone south podcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on Substack at gone south with Jed Lipinski. Gone South is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written, and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman, Maddie Sprung-Kaiser, Tom Lipinski, Lloyd Lockridge, and me. Our story editors are Tom Lipinski,
Maddie Sprung-Kaiser, and Joel Lovell. Gone South is edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil and Andy Jaskiewicz. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to J.D. Crowley, Leah Reese-Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. If you want to hear more of Gone South, please take a few seconds to rate and review the show. It really helps. You might think financial crime is all about money, but sometimes it ends in murder.
I'm Nicole Lappin, host of Money Crimes, a Crime House original podcast. Each episode features a thrilling story about the dark side of finance and how to protect yourself from it. Follow and listen to Money Crimes, an Odyssey podcast in partnership with Crime House Studios. available on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.