In the letter, Gillis expressed remorse for the murders, particularly regretting his mutilating the bodies, and described himself as "pure evil". She turned the letters over to the prosecution and some of Gillis' words made it into the news. Years later after he had been arrested and convicted for some of his murders, a friend of one of his victims wrote to him. He committed his first known murder in 1994. Throughout the years he was arrested for traffic citations, DUI, possession of marijuana, and contempt of court. His rap sheet began in 1980 when he was 17 years old, with minor infractions. This is the person I loved most in this world." In the penalty phase of the trial, while testifying for the defense, his mother is quoted as saying, "I used to call him my little blue-eyed angel. and saw Gillis in his front yard, beating ruthlessly on some garbage cans." ĭuring his 2004 first-degree murder trial for the slaying of Donna Bennett Johnston, his mother, Yvonne, testified that her son was a well-behaved, well-adjusted child with good grades and a healthy social life. A neighbor once reported that "she heard a loud banging noise at 3 a.m.
Ī more violent side of Gillis' personality began to surface during adolescence, behaving with anger and rage.
Gillis was raised by his mother and his grandparents. His father abandoned the family soon after his birth. He was the son of Yvonne and Norman Gillis. Epic in scope and intensely suspenseful, Murder in the Bayou is the story of an American town buckling under the dark forces of poverty, race, and class division-and a lightning rod for justice for the daughters it lost.Gillis was born June 24, 1962, in Baton Rouge and was raised in southern Louisiana. Mixing muckraking research and immersive journalism over the course of a five-year investigation, Ethan Brown reviewed thousands of pages of previously unseen homicide files to determine what happened during each victim's final hours. Collectively the victims became known as the "Jeff Davis 8," and their lives, their deaths, and the ongoing investigation reveals a small southern community's most closely guarded secrets.As Ethan Brown suggests, these homicides were not the work of a single serial killer, but the violent fallout of Jennings' brutal sex and drug trade, a backwoods underworld hidden in plain sight.
Local law enforcement officials were quick to pursue a serial killer theory, opening a floodgate of media coverage, from CNN to the New York Times. An explosive, true-life southern gothic story, Murder in the Bayou chronicles the twists and turns of a high-stakes investigation into the murders of eight women in a troubled Louisiana parish.Between 20, the bodies of eight women were discovered around the murky canals and crawfish ponds of Jennings, Louisiana, a bayou town of 10,000 in the heart of the Jefferson Davis parish.
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