Mary Jean McBroome, a 60-year-old White woman, vanished from her ordinary routines in Shreveport and ended up alone on an oilfield road in south Caddo Parish, Louisiana, in the stretch of country that runs toward Oil City. By late afternoon on June 16, 2016, workers who had noticed a vehicle sitting out there earlier in the day finally realized someone was inside and called for help.
Deputies found McBroome dead in her vehicle around 5:30 p.m., off Keithville-Keatchie Road, after her family had reported her missing to Shreveport Police earlier that same day.
From the start, investigators did not treat the scene as a routine unattended death. The Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office publicly described the case as “suspicious,” an early signal that detectives were looking beyond the simplest explanations while they tried to reconstruct how she got there, what brought her onto that isolated road, and whether anyone else had been involved.
The shock of her death rippled outward because McBroome was not just any local resident. News reporting at the time described her as a key government witness connected to an upcoming federal corruption trial involving former Bossier Parish Sheriff Larry Deen and two Blakey Auto Plex owners, Clinton and Clifton Blakey. According to that reporting, McBroome had worked in the Blakey Auto Plex office during the period tied to the allegations, and the case was headed toward an August 2016 trial date when she was found dead.
The federal case she was linked to had been built publicly years earlier. In a 2014 announcement, federal prosecutors said a grand jury indicted Deen and the two dealership owners, alleging a scheme tied to a vehicle purchase and charging conspiracy to commit federal program theft, federal program theft, and failure to file an IRS Form 8300 related to a large cash payment. The defendants, according to contemporaneous reporting, denied wrongdoing—yet McBroome’s sudden absence threatened to complicate a case that already carried heavy stakes for the people involved.
As for McBroome’s own death, publicly available reporting from those first days said she had been found with a gunshot wound and that officials had not, at that point, declared whether foul play was involved; it also reported that authorities said no suicide was found at the scene. In the days that followed, her loved ones began gathering in grief—her obituary described her as “Jeannie,” a longtime Shreveport resident active in church life, remembered for warmth, fierce love, and the way she made people feel at home. Some databases later listed her death date as June 20, 2016, even as local official and family-published accounts placed her death and discovery on June 16. No public account located in these sources describes any arrest, named suspect, or criminal charges filed in connection with her death.
