It was already dark and a vehicle stopped next to David on the shoulder. The minor was hitchhiking to return home after attending a birthday party and he was running late, so Ronald saw him, rolled down the window and encouraged him to get in. The good-natured appearance of that man made him trust and he did not hesitate to accept the invitation.
Minutes later, the driver swerved off the road, hit and tied the young man, then sexually assaulted him and ended up strangling him. Once the crime was committed, that apparently harmless short and overweight individual threw the body in the ditch of a sugarcane field and fled. The following years, the man dubbed the Swamp Strangler, a dangerous gay serial killer, terrorized the state of Louisiana with 23 victims to his name.
Ronald Joseph Dominique was born on January 9, 1964 in Thibodaux (Louisiana, United States) as the youngest of a modest family with few economic resources and six children. In fact, the Dominiques lived on the outskirts of the city, in a mobile home community or trailer park, a way of life that our protagonist maintained as an adult.
During his childhood and adolescence, his acquaintances remember him as a pessimistic and taciturn child, with clear communication and socialization difficulties. In addition, Ronald had low self-esteem, partly also due to his overweight problems, which made him an easy target for ridicule and harassment from his classmates. So much so, that he was a kind of social outcast whose only hobby was singing in the school choir.
Ronald managed to graduate from high school and begin his university studies in computer science, but he ended up dropping out due to lack of motivation. There was nothing that interested him. All of this coincided with his coming out: he had discovered that he was gay. However, he always kept it private, since, when opening up to certain colleagues, he encountered rejection in response. Hence his double life, in which, when night fell, he performed in the local gay bars dressed as the singer Patti Labelle.
But beneath his plump, good-natured and seemingly harmless appearance hid a potential criminal. Ronald was arrested in June 1985 for telephone sexual harassment and had to pay a $75 fine. Then came seven more arrests, including speeding and drunk driving. All of them were also corrected after payment of a penalty.
On August 25, 1996, Ronald faced his first charge of forcible rape. Apparently, he had invited a man to his house and had tried to tie him up; When the victim refused, Ronald became violent and the man fled by jumping through the window. Several neighbors witnessed the events and the police proceeded to arrest him.
However, since the victim did not appear at the trial, the court had to release him and Ronald made a drastic decision: he would never leave one of his victims alive. Thus began a hunt that lasted nine years and took the lives of 23 people, including men and children.
The serial killer had a clear victim profile: he chose men and boys, between 16 and 40 years old, mainly African Americans and socially marginalized and homeless, because, in his opinion, no one would miss them. That is, he wanted to avoid disappearance complaints.
In some cases, the victims were homosexual men, whom he met in bars or on the street, and whom he invited to his mobile home with the promise of alcohol, drugs or accommodation in exchange for sex.
In others, the men and minors did not belong to the gay community, so he showed them photos of his supposed wife, a very attractive woman willing to have group sex. With this invitation and Ronald’s benevolent appearance, some of them fell into the trap.
Once at the house, the criminal proposed a game of bondage with restraints and the torture began. That “nobody,” as Sheriff Jerry Larpenter described him, felt powerful when he tied up his victims. “Once he put those ropes on them, they were his,” the police officer explained.
Ronald then raped, tortured and strangled them. He would then dispose of the bodies by dumping them half-naked in remote rural areas of six nearby parishes. The murders occurred between July 1997 and October 2006.
Given the discovery of such a large number of bodies in the area – all of them with signs of strangulation or asphyxiation, and with subtle signs of slavery – the Louisiana State Police created an investigation group and initiated a search effort to find the murderer. However, the investigators never targeted Ronald: his seemingly noble appearance and his double life managed to deceive them.
Only one testimony pointed to the true culprit and ended the Swamp Strangler’s reign of terror. It was about Ricky Wallace, an ex-convict living in a homeless shelter, who told his probation officer about a disturbing incident that occurred in November 2006.
According to his testimony, Ronald offered him drugs and sexual relations with a girl, so he accepted. When they were in the caravan, the murderer convinced him to participate in a submission game where he had to be tied up for the enjoyment of his girlfriend. Ricky didn’t like that at all, and he asked him to leave. Ronald didn’t object.
The ex-convict’s story shocked the official and he informed the authorities, who proceeded to visit him and ask for a DNA sample. Ronald accepted and, a few days later, he was arrested. It was December 1, 2006 and his genetic material linked him to at least two murders. The coincidence was clear, he was the murderer they were looking for.
During the interrogation at the police headquarters, Ronald was cooperative and confessed to all the crimes, a total of 23. To tell the truth, he described the events in detail and with details that only the investigators knew. “His confession was adequate, precise and direct,” commented one of the officers leading the case.
Regarding the motivation for the twenty murders, Ronald was very clear: he was afraid of going to prison for rape, so he killed his victims to silence them so that no one would betray him. Investigators were able to charge him with eight additional counts of first-degree murder and aggravated rape for the strangulation murders of nine men.
During the trial, held in September 2008, assistant prosecutor Mark Rhodes referred to Ronald Dominique in the following terms: “The lives of eight young people were taken from these families by the actions of the defendant. “He knew nothing about them or their families and he callously killed the victims and left a lifetime of pain as a legacy.”
The suffering surfaced during the reading of the verdict when the brother of one of the victims shouted about the accused: “I hope he burns in hell!” The court found the Swamp Strangler guilty on all charges and sentenced him to eight consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. Ronald currently remains in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. He is 60 years old.
