Town note
The area around Ville Platte was first settled in the late 1700s, while Louisiana was still under Spanish rule, with the earliest records of settlement about the 1780s.
about 0:05:26The story
Ville Platte sits in Evangeline Parish in the centre of Louisiana, about two and a half hours from both New Orleans and Shreveport. It has a population of 6,488, a median household income of $21,818 against a national figure of $69,000, and a median home price of $97,100.
He came from Denison, Texas, and belonged to the North Texas chapter of the Banshees Motorcycle Club. His girlfriend, Sheila Kirby, was with him constantly; reports gave her age as anything from twenty-seven to thirty-four. The couple lived on the margins, sometimes in a tent on a riverbank in Texas, and they never went anywhere without their black pit bull with white markings.
After Hurricane Lily in October 2002 the s told the couple to find somewhere else because they were not helping with bills or food, and Cook and Kirby moved into the clubhouse trailer at the end of October.
Cook was last seen about three or four weeks before his body was found. On 3 January 2003 a boy named Dustin Perkins found a plastic storage box floating in Bayou Cocodrie, off Highway 167 near the bridge. The lid had been taped shut and the whole box spray-painted black, with holes cut in it so that it would sink. Inside was Cook's body. He had been shot behind the ear, and both legs had been sawn off below the pelvis and were missing. He wore a Catfish Festival T-shirt from Washington, Louisiana, and a leather jacket. The next day an anonymous caller asked a detective whether he had found his brother, and the description led to Cook being identified by fingerprint.
On 10 January, after the floodwater had receded, officers went back to the bayou and found a second identical box about forty minutes into the search. It held Sheila Kirby, shot in the forehead, with her legs severed in the same way, though hers were inside the box with her. Neither bullet was ever recovered.
A medical examination of his arm found a comminuted fracture of the ulna and a fragment of chainsaw tooth still embedded; he gave changing accounts of falling off a roof onto the saw.
A DEA agent testified that neither had ever been an informant, and a state police expert on outlaw motorcycle gangs said the untouched Banshee tattoos suggested another Banshee rather than a rival club. Cook's legs have never been found.