Ronald Dominique
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Ronald Joseph Dominique, AKA The Bayou Strangler, (born 9 January 1964) is an American serial killer responsible for the murders of 23 men and boys in Louisiana.
Biography edit
Dominique was born in Thibodaux, Louisiana, on 9 January 1964. He was regularly bullied at school due to his homosexuality and low self-esteem, and was a university dropout. Because of his lack of education he was forced to become an unskilled labourer, taking various low-skilled jobs from which he was frequently fired. He was in frequent legal trouble for offences such as assault and drunk driving. He was also charged with rape and attempted murder in August 1996 after neighbours reported that a naked man had jumped out of Dominique's window and told them that Dominique had sodomized and strangled him. The case was eventually dismissed due to lack of evidence, as the alleged victim could not be located.
Dominque's first murder occurred in July 1997, when he picked up an African-American man named David Mitchell. Mitchell was later found dead with small quantities of ditch water in his lungs. Unlike Dominique's later victims he had not been sexually assaulted or strangled.
Dominique's next two murders were in December 1997 and July 1998. The second victim, Gary Pierre, was strangled to death but was also not sexually assaulted. The third victim, Larry Ransom, was the first victim to be sexually assaulted by Dominique before he was strangled.
Between October 1998 and August 1999, Dominique claimed six more victims. Even more people were killed after this period, eventually leading to the FBI investigating after similarities in three of the deaths were observed by the police. All were strangled and dumped in rural areas of the Louisiana bayou, and most were raped beforehand. Some were drug addicts lured into Dominique's truck under promises of cocaine, whereas others were gay or bisexual and went with him for sex.
A break in the investigation finally came in 2006, when a man named Ricky Wallace came forward and accused Dominique of luring him into his van and attempting to entice him into bondage, which caused him to suspect that he was the killer. Dominique was interrogated and had a DNA sample taken, which was found to be a match for the DNA taken from the semen on three of the victims bodies. When arrested for the murders, Dominique confessed to all 23 of his kills, most of which had been attributed to drug dealers or freak accidents.
Dominique accepted a plea deal to avoid the death penalty and received multiple sentences of life without parole.