Dissecting the mysterious death of Paula Boudreaux: Could the rumors be true?
“Everybody talked about it, you know, kind of a rumor, but a rumor down here, you know, it's pretty much the truth,” said Van Boudreaux, Paula’s brother.
There were seemingly no news articles written about the disappearance of 22-year-old Paula Boudreaux in 1986, yet speculation based on rumors swirled around the small Lafourche Parish town of Golden Meadow in the years that followed about what allegedly happened to her.
Those rumors of her murder carried on over the decades like the whisper of a family secret, yet investigators never found her body, so the case remained an unsolved missing person probe.
Last year, Paula’s distant cousin believed those rumors, and used them to connect the dots between Paula’s disappearance and a Jane Doe found in 1989 in a Slidell marsh.
“Everybody talked about it, you know, kind of a rumor, but a rumor down here, you know, it's pretty much the truth,” said Van Boudreaux, Paula’s brother.
In January 2023, investigators got their biggest break in the case in more than three decades when the St Tammany Coroner and the Lafourche Parish Sheriff used DNA to confirm a woman’s body found by hunters three years after Paula disappeared was, in fact, Paula Boudreaux.
For Van, the revelation answered one question but raised many others including, how did she die? Did someone kill her? And if so, who?
Where the rumors were true?
Michelle Chouest, noticed the blank spot on her family tree when she was piecing it together last year. Paula Boudreaux, a distant cousin, went missing in 1986 and was never found.
“She just vanished,” Chouest said. “I'd never heard Paula Boudreaux's name in my life. I'm born and raised here.”
The night Paula was last seen, the town of Golden Meadow was celebrating at the Bull Club Fair, a church fair that followed the Blessing of the Fleet boat parade on Bayou Lafourche.
“Bayou Lafourche passed right in front of the church in the center. So, because the parade of boats went by and got blessed, people would be alongside the bayou,” said Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre, who was first elected to the post five years after Paula went missing.
Family members told investigators that Paula had enough of the festival around 10:30 pm and was dropped off at her parents’ home on B&R Lane. It would be the last time anyone reported seeing her alive.
Four days later, her sister Sue filed a missing person report with the Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Office in Galliano.
Deputies periodically looked back at the case over the years when witnesses, who believed they had information about her disappearance, came forward, but investigators hit a wall without a body to examine.
From drunken recollections by alleged witnesses to the coverup, to a rumored confession given, and later lost, at the Golden Meadow Town Hall, the stories about what happened to Paula circled around town for decades.
“Paula was lured, Paula was buried underneath her dad's cement,” Chouest said about the rumors she heard when she started calling around about it, “Paula was fed to alligators.”
But many of the stories started to sound alike to Chouest. She said she consistently heard that Paula had been murdered because she was in a love triangle with a married man, that she was killed in a jealous rage, dismembered and her body dumped with hands missing.
They’re all leads the Lafourche Sheriff said his detectives are actively pursuing today.
Many of them, Chouest said, ended this way: they “…packed her up, brought her on the other side of New Orleans, following the railroad tracks through highway 90, in Slidell.”
Identifying the remains
What started with a few calls to the Golden Meadow Town Hall led Chouest and a friend, who asked not to be identified for safety reasons, to speak with dozens of others on the phone, through Facebook and Ancestry.com.
“I just couldn't leave it be. It consumed me,” Chouest said.
Ultimately, they scoured the internet to see if there were any unidentified bodies found in St Tammany Parish in the late 1980’s. They found two. One was a woman found a few weeks before Paula went missing. The other was found by hunters in 1989 in the piney marsh in Slidell.
The remains found off Bayou Paquet Road had been sent straight to the Louisiana State University FACES lab, then, a new forensic anthropology program started by Mary Manheim to help law enforcement identify human remains.
“Mary Manheim had actually gone to the scene and collected the skeleton, and they did a grid search and found some other evidence at the scene. And all of that was taken back to the FACES lab for curation,” said St Tammany Parish Deputy Coroner Bob Sigilitto.
The cause and manner of death have always been listed as undetermined.
Chouest and her friend found a profile on the FBI's National Missing and Unidentified Persons system website that noted the remains found in St Tammany in 1989 had hands or limbs missing, which was a red flag for Chouest because it matched what she had heard happened to Paula.
In 2013, the FACES lab had created a clay rendering of what that unidentified woman may have looked like. When Chouest saw it online ten years later, in 2022, she was stunned.
“I had to stop. I had to catch my breath. And I just cried, like I cried.... and I was like, what are we going to do,” Chouest said because the likeness was strikingly similar to a picture she had seen of Paula Boudreaux.
Chouest and her friend emailed the FACES lab, providing a tip that ultimately led the St Tammany Coroner to compare the DNA of Paula's relatives to the remains. In January 2023, Chouest learned her hunch was right. It was Paula Boudreaux.
“I had no words, none at all. And my knees hit the floor. My heart was pounding. She was somebody then,” Chouest said.
The coroner and sheriff held a press conference in April 2023 announcing the discovery.
“Today, her family can finally begin to have some closure,” Webre told the cameras.
Van Boudreaux said he was relieved.
“You always put it in the back of your mind, and you go to work and you let it rest when you come home. You just kind of, you don't want to think about it for a while. You go lose yourself,” Van said, but it was always in his heart.
Who killed her?
Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s deputies are investigating whether Paula had been in a relationship with a married man whose wife was known to have a bad temper.
“She had been messing around,” Van admitted.
A witness recently told the sheriff’s investigators that they saw the man’s wife wielding a cane knife, a type of machete, on B&R Lane making veiled threats against Paula a few days before she went missing.
“Really where we seem to be today and probably where it would have been 37 years ago is that this is more of a love triangle,” Webre said, about the direction their investigation has taken, with people of interest questioned by detectives several states away.
Investigators have also looked into another rumor about the case: whether someone went to the Golden Meadow Town Hall to the Police Department a few days after Paula disappeared to confess.
Deputies confirmed that the town secretary said she wrote down and tape recorded the statement, but after giving both to the Golden Meadow Police Chief at that time, the confession went missing.
It should have been turned over to Lafourche Sheriff’s investigators.
“We have not seen a confession in writing. We did receive information that a confession was made and that there was a tape and audiotape,” Webre said.
Around the time Paula went missing, allegations of corruption in the Lafourche Sheriff's Office ran deep.
“Everybody knows what they were doing on this bayou. It's not a secret. They were running drugs,” Chouest said.
In 1989, WWL-TV Channel 4's legendary Investigative Reporter Bill Elder aired an in-depth report on similar allegations that featured former Lafourche Sheriff Duffy Breaux.
“It's cheap for people to say, well, this happened or that happened. Show me some proof…I'm not immune to prosecution,” the late sheriff told Elder.
Breaux and some of his top deputies would later plead guilty to federal corruption charges. And that culture of corruption led many to speculate that Breaux's deputies got rid of the confession after the Golden Meadow Police Chief handed it over to them.
“We've heard those rumors. And those rumors were pretty prevalent,” Webre said, adding that he’s seen no evidence of any corruption involved in the Paula Boudreaux case.
But it begs the question, if so many people in Lafourche feared the police as much as they did Paula’s killers, did that fear make people clam up, hampering the investigation over the years?
“I don't think that was a big factor as much as there was no body,” Webre said.
He defeated Sheriff Breaux on after running on an anti-corruption platform in 1991.
As deputies finish their investigation, more than 30 years in the making, they say they’re hoping her remains will help tell them if more of the rumors are true.
“I know that it brings me a lot of satisfaction knowing that she means something now she's not just forgotten about,” Chouest said.
Thanks to her and her friend, Paula Boudreaux's life is no longer a whisper about how she went missing, it's a full-fledged investigation into who cut it short in the end.
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