Leon Paul Lirette, a 22-year-old man, was remembered by loved ones as a young person rooted in south Louisiana, a native and resident of Houma whose life ended in February 2005, long before anyone outside a tight circle of investigators understood how many families were about to be drawn into the same nightmare.
In the years that followed, his name would surface again and again in connection with a string of disappearances and deaths that haunted the bayou country southwest of New
Orleans. Authorities ultimately tied Lirette’s killing to Ronald Dominique, a Bayou Blue resident whom law enforcement said preyed on vulnerable men, luring them with the promise of sex, money, or drugs and then killing them, with bodies often left in remote places like cane fields and near bayous.
Dominique’s path to capture, according to reporting from the Houma area, turned on a near-escape: a man named Ricky Wallace described being approached, offered a ride, and brought to a trailer where Dominique tried to persuade him to be tied up—an encounter Wallace resisted and survived. After Wallace came forward in the wake of another victim’s death, investigators said his information helped steer them toward the right suspect, and Dominique was arrested on December 1, 2006.
Court proceedings that followed placed Lirette among the victims Dominique was set to face in Terrebonne Parish, alongside several other named young men. In the end, the case did not hinge on an elusive mystery suspect: Dominique pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in a deal that spared him the death penalty, and a judge sentenced him to eight consecutive life terms. Reporting on the sentencing described relatives filling the courtroom as the judge read the names of the eight victims, while prosecutors recounted how the killer took lives and left families with years of grief and unanswered questions.
