Town note
Named after the Coushatta Indian tribe who inhabited the area before being forced away by settlers.
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His father worked as a deputy sheriff, a janitor and a dairy farmer, and one of his brothers became a Louisiana state trooper. His childhood was grim. On New Year's Eve 1961 his grandfather threw himself down a well on the family property, and two years later an aunt was stabbed to death. His mother was prone to rages and his older siblings bullied him. In 1970 he married Terry Laverne Ward, a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl from Coushatta. While stationed in Korea he claimed to have broken a soldier's neck in an alley after a quarrel in a bar, a killing for which there was no record. He was awarded a Bronze Star in 1972, divorced Terry in 1973 and married a Vietnamese woman in Texas, with whom he had a son, Thomas. He divorced his second wife and in September 1977 married Brenda Gale Ware, who was seventeen. In 1979 he beat her at a remote waterway so badly that she believed he meant to kill her. They divorced in October 1980, the same month he married Rita Colman, and on their honeymoon he strangled her hard enough to damage her larynx. He divorced Rita in 1984. He worked at a Quick Stop convenience store in Colorado Springs and in 1988 married Diane Marsha Babbits, his fifth wife. His wives later described beatings, a pistol held to one woman's head, and his hatred of women and police.
Heather Dawn Church was thirteen when she disappeared from her family's remote house in Black Forest, outside Colorado Springs, on 17 September 1991. She was babysitting her five-year-old brother Sage while her mother Diane attended a Boy Scout meeting at the local Mormon church. A window screen had been forced and investigators lifted one fingerprint. When search and rescue workers called the next morning he refused them access to a locked building on his property, and an FBI canvass later missed his door because it fell just outside the search perimeter. Heather's skull was found in 1993 by a metal scrapper on a hillside off Rampart Range Road, about thirty miles from her home. In a recorded interview he denied ever setting foot on the Church property. He later said he had done so to avoid the death penalty and to stop investigators digging into his past.
The Grand Am lady was Rocio Sperry, fifteen, the Panamanian wife of Joseph Sperry, a soldier at Fort Carson. The couple lived at East Pikes Peak Avenue, apartment 109, in Colorado Springs. In November 1987 Joseph took their baby daughter Amy to his mother in West Palm Beach, Florida. On the evening of 9 November Rocio telephoned him from another soldier's apartment. By the evening of 10 November her telephone went unanswered. When Joseph returned four days later the apartment had been ransacked, Rocio's clothes were bagged in the closet, her purse and passport were still there and the television and the car were gone. He kept her body under blankets overnight, took her keys and television, was challenged by a security guard about the television and talked his way past him, then dismembered her in the bath the next evening and put the parts in the apartment dumpster. He parked the car at the Dove Tree apartments and later watched Joseph use the pay phone at the Quick Stop to report his wife missing. Rocio's wedding ring had been given to Jan Osgood and then to her daughter Cammy Fine, who had the diamonds reset.
Melody Ann Bush was twenty-two, a waitress and dancer at the Stag club at the Antlers Inn in Flatonia, Texas. Her body was found in a culvert about two miles north of the town on 30 March 1984; she had been dead about five days and the cause was acute acetone poisoning. The bartender remembered a travelling silk flower salesman who had been a regular for six months, but never connected him with Melody.
Nidia Mendoza was seventeen, from Panama, and danced at Dames Night Club on the Southwest Freeway in Houston. Her dismembered body was found off U.S. Highway 59 on 6 February 1984, her head and legs cut off. Wanda Fay Hudson was killed in her apartment at Carol Street in Coushatta on 28 May 1983. She had been stabbed twenty-five times in the chest and four times in the vaginal area, struck in the face and choked.
Fay Self disappeared from the Wagon Wheel night club north of Coushatta in 1983. A hunter found her skull near Saint Maurice on 16 October 1980. He also described killings in Mississippi, California, Washington, New Mexico, Arkansas and New Orleans, and a soldier he claimed to have killed in Korea, but investigators could not match most of them to missing persons or bodies.
He denied murdering Heather Church to the end.