On May 20, 2005, a man who was fishing in a canal realized that what he saw in the water wasn't a mannequin but rather a body. 'Everyone here is related to somebody.' The town is divided by a railroad track with a more affluent North Side and a low-income South Side Just good old country folks mostly,' he said during the docuseries. The eight murders were a 'staggering body count for a town of approximately ten thousand residents, a place that lies in the heart of Cajun country,' Brown wrote in his book. Jennings is a 'typical small town' where families live for generations, said Chief Deputy Chris Ivey of the Jefferson Davis Sheriff's Office. It is the sound of Kratzer lighting her cigarette – the flick of the lighter and then her exhale – that begins a new, five-part Showtime docuseries, Murder in the Bayou, which untangles the intricate web between the women, their cases and the town's underbelly of drugs, crime, sex work, informant culture, and possible police misconduct and corruption told through archival footage and interviews with family, friends, local law enforcement, journalists, and a suspect that has long been tied to drugs, pimping and violence.

'The killer could be sitting in front of our face, all day, every day 'cause they can kill in this town and get away with it. It's like they never existed, like they never mattered. You don't really ever hear of anyone speak of them.

The girls have pretty much been forgotten in this town. 'They didn't deserve what the hell they got. 'I let this sh** with the girls eat me up daily,' said Jessica Kratzer, who was friends with the women. All struggled with drugs, poverty, and indignities both in life and death: Their bodies unceremoniously cast off in canals and ditched on roads in and near the small Southern town of Jennings, Louisiana.Ĭollectively, the women became known as the 'Jeff Davis 8,' and 14 years after the first murder, their cases remain unsolved and unresolved. The victims were as young as 17 but no older than 30.

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