The family who had imagebeaver blog contracted him to build the addition on their house were Rumanian gypsies who had grown wealthy as slum-lords in the black districts off Magazine. Their late-Victorian home had polished oak floors, ceiling-high windows, small balconies dripping with orange passion vine, a pool, and a game room with a sunken hot tub.

They thought well enough of the contractor to leave him alone with their fifteen- and twelve-year-old daughters. The father should have imagebeaver blog been gone for the day, checking out his rental property miles away. Instead, he came home unexpectedly for lunch. Someone waited for him behind the living room door, then fired a.22 Magnum round into his ear. The bullet exited his opposite cheek and embedded in the far wall. No one heard the shot. Around one in the afternoon neighbors saw the contractor drive away in the father's Buick. Three hours later the mother returned from shopping and found both her daughters drowned in the hot tub. They were bound ankle and wrist with electrician's tape; both had been raped. The contractor pawned his imagebeaver blog tools, his watch, and his wedding ring at three different stops between New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida, where he was arrested after a call he made to his wife was traced to a motel there. Clete Purcel and I transported him back to New Orleans from the Pensacola city jail. He was likable; there was nothing of the con artist about him; he was well-mannered and didn't use profanity; he never complained about riding handcuffed to a D-ring in the backseat. At his trial he imagebeaver blog maintained that he'd had a blackout, that he had no memory of the events that took place in the house off Canal, but a sense of terror, with no apparent source, had caused him to flee across I-10 to the Florida panhandle.

Prosecution lawyers, state psychologists, imagebeaver blog and news reporters came up with every script possible to explain the contractor's behavior: He was a clandestine user of LSD; he had been a marine door gunner in Vietnam; he was badly in debt and teetering on a nervous breakdown. Or, more disturbingly, he had once been seen at a shopping mall with a high school girl from his neighborhood whose strangled and decomposed body was found nude in a swamp north of Lake Pontchartrain. On her ankle was a tattoo of a pentagram.

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