New Orleans Unsolved

Over the course of six years and two seasons of the podcast, Anna has been trying to decipher the identities of the murdered teenage boys who ended up in the photos that were eventually shown to other children. The individual who showed them those photos was a child predator. Anna's investigation has steadily cleared a path through a forest of questions. In this episode, she explains why what was...

Anna unexpectedly connects with a woman who had information that sent her reeling. The years Anna has spent investigating the Rope Murders have been filled with attempts to connect deaths, details and decades. It’s been a constant pursuit of this theory that the murders of Dennis Turcotte, Mark Richardson and Daniel Dewey were part of a wider web spun by predators masking as trustworthy people. In...

During Anna’s investigation of the Rope Murders, she found correlations to the mysterious case of Eddie Wells, the pedophile operation ran by Boy Scout Troop 137, and one person who seemed to have tentacles touching all those elements. But it took Anna years to find those connections. In the initial stages of her investigation, she had a working theory about the Rope Murders. That theory was teste...

Anna’s investigative focus stays on the Orange Grove Plantation as she sits down with a woman who, as a young girl, lived near the plantation in Plaquemines Parish and visited its grounds. Through Anna’s yearslong investigation of the Rope Murders, she’s come to believe the Orange Grove Plantation was a significant site. It was also a place a survivor from season 1 of New Orleans Unsolved was take...

Fragmented memories, fading landmarks and decades old newspaper articles have been among the puzzle pieces Anna has had to work with as her investigation of the Rope Murders took her deeper into Plaquemines Parish…and some of its troubled history. One place, located off what was described as the shell road, stood for more than a century. But for one person, it represents a dark point in his past....

The bodies of Dennis Turcotte, Mark Richardson and Daniel Dewey may have been found north of New Orleans, but as Anna as got deeper into her investigation of their murders and the crimes of Boy Scout Troop 137, her findings kept taking her south…to Plaquemines Parish. She discovered connections to some of its history of hate. At a remote site off the parish’s coast, there was physical evidence of...

So far, Anna’s investigation of the Rope Murders has uncovered links to the pedophile cell that was Boy Scout Troop 137. While that troop may have been based in New Orleans East, Anna found that its tentacles reached outside of the city. In this episode, Anna’s investigation shifts to a place that was once dominated and defined by a segregationist who some called King of the Bayou.

The Boy Scout motto of “Be Prepared” predates the founding of the organization in 1910, but preparedness became a cornerstone of Scouting for the century that followed. In the case of Boy Scout Troop 137 in New Orleans, the crooked leaders of that troop were unprepared for the investigations and arrests that stemmed from the abuse inflicted on the children of that troop in the 1970’s. In this epis...

Over the two seasons of the podcast, Anna’s investigations have involved the mysterious deaths of teenage boys and the abuse of young children. As she continued her work on the Rope Murders, she kept finding a connection to an organization that was historically known to be a place for boys and young children.

Anna begins to lay out her four-year investigation of the Rope Murders. It includes a familiar person from season one who said he was shown photographs of dead boys tied up and left in rural settings. Anna analyzes the locations where the victims of the Rope Murders were left. What did they have in common? And to gain a better understanding of how something or someone can be hogtied, we turn to a...

It took almost 30 years for investigators to identify Daniel Dewey’s body. For almost as long, a narrative kept repeating in newspapers and online articles that Dewey and the two other victims of the rope murders may have been male prostitutes or well-known street kids in the city of New Orleans. But was that really the case? We pose that question to Dennis Stewart and relatives of two of the vict...

In the summer of 2000, the remains of John Doe were exhumed from his grave at Pine Hill Cemetery in St. Helena Parish. He had been buried for more than 20 years. Back in 1979, his body had been tied up and left at a local garbage dump in the parish. There were hopes that technology and forensic science could finally reveal the boy’s identity. Those hopes quickly faded until the discovery of an enc...

For roughly 20 years, John Doe’s body had been buried at Pine Hill Cemetery in St. Helena Parish. At the time of his burial and in the two decades that followed, there wasn't much progress in finding a suspect in his murder. The victim’s true identity also remained elusive. In the summer of 2000, officials and investigators physically dug up the past. They exhumed John Doe’s remains. In an attempt...

In 1997, after almost 20 years of cold case status, the murders of Dennis Turcotte, Mark Richardson and John Doe would get renewed interest. Dennis Stewart was a relatively new detective with Louisiana State Police, but his knowledge of one of the Rope Murders went back to 1979. Stewart grew up in Greensburg, Louisiana, not far from where John Doe’s body was discovered. He remembered hearing about...

When each victim of the rope murders was found, investigators didn’t make any public mention of a serial pattern or perpetrator. But, within a month after the discovery of John Doe’s body in St. Helena Parish, at least one newspaper ran a story about the boys being “male hustlers” who may have been stalked by a “sex killer”. The hustling scene in the French Quarter of New Orleans has been a real t...

In 1979, Jack Foster was assigned the case of a teenaged boy who had been ritualistically tied up, murdered and left at a local garbage site in St. Helena Parish.  Foster was a self-taught detective working part time with the sheriff’s office. He was described as determined and thorough. But, those qualities wouldn’t be enough to find out the boy's true identity, let alone the person responsible f...

On November 12, 1979, the tiny sheriff’s department in St. Helena Parish was just beginning its investigation of a body that had been ritualistically tied-up and left at a garbage dumpsite. The body was decomposing. Identifying the victim was difficult. What authorities could say definitively was that it appeared to be the body of a teenage boy. In an attempt to identify that boy, the sheriff’s gr...

Following a coroner’s inquest jury in Harrison County, it was determined that Mark Richardson’s death was the result of a homicide. The coroner presumed Richardson died from a possible overdose of injected drugs, but the actual cause of death was undetermined. No explanation or theory was offered about the fact that Richardson was found with his hands and feet tied behind him. How was Richardson k...

Two days after a tied-up body was found in a wooded area near coastal Mississippi, a family from Biloxi believed it was that of their teenage son. Only weeks separated the discoveries of his body and Dennis Turcotte’s. The fact that both victims had been ritualistically bound would seem to show a strong connection between the cases, but early in the Mississippi investigation, authorities were grap...

Soon after Dennis Turcotte’s body was discovered, the working theories about his death and disappearance revolved around New Orleans’ French Quarter. A New Orleans bellhop was said to be the last person who saw Turcotte alive. In this episode, Turcotte’s brother details what Dennis was doing before he went missing. In neighboring Mississippi, a second investigation begins after the body of another...

After Dennis Turcotte’s body was discovered bound and dumped in 1978, New Orleans Police Detective Frank Weicks traveled out of his jurisdiction to the rural area of Talisheek to assist in the case. The working theory was Turcotte had spent time in New Orleans French Quarter and was possibly kidnapped from there. But once at the crime scene, Weicks found some pressing and practical problems. In th...

The creators of New Orleans Unsolved are finally back with their second season. This time, they’re investigating a set of truly mysterious murders. In 1978, hunters found the body of a teenager in a rural area of Louisiana. His hands and feet were ritualistically tied, the rope was connected to his neck. Some described the way the victim was bound as “hogtied”. A veteran New Orleans Police detecti...

Investigative producer Anna Christie and veteran journalist Thanh Truong are back with the second season of their independent true crime podcast. Season 2 of New Orleans Unsolved, The Rope Murders, begins October 11th, 2023.

A man who says he was one of Eddie Wells’ best friends cautiously shares what he knows of a fateful day in 1982.  He claims he was with Eddie the day he disappeared.  To get his story, we go inside a parish jail.

In the season finale, Stanley Burkhardt gets arrested again, but will he stay in prison?  His testimony in a court hearing weighs heavily in that decision.  The testimony includes details in Eddie Wells’ case.