On August 4, 1991, the body of seventeen-year-old Danielle Britton was discovered in a ditch along Nevada Street in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana. A recycler clearing debris from the illegal dumping site made the grim discovery. An autopsy later revealed that the young woman, who resided in nearby Gretna with her mother, had been brutally beaten and strangled to death.
It was also determined that she had been sexually assaulted approximately twelve hours before her body was found.
The investigation into Danielle Britton’s murder quickly took a chilling turn as detectives began to suspect she was the victim of a serial killer. Just two weeks prior to the discovery of Britton’s body, another woman, who identified herself only as 'Brenda,' had survived a similar harrowing attack in the same area. Brenda reported being abducted by a man driving a blue, late-model Buick Regal or Monte Carlo. She described her attacker as a clean-cut, well-dressed, and muscular Black male. This detailed description provided investigators with their first tangible lead in what would become a string of connected homicides. Britton was reportedly last seen alive outside a bar named Neva's Rendezvous, getting into a car that matched the one described by the survivor.
Danielle Britton’s case was one of several that plagued the New Orleans area between 1991 and 1995, attributed to a serial killer dubbed the 'Storyville Slayer.' The killer’s victims were often women believed to be involved in sex work and drugs, whose bodies were discarded in secluded areas. Following Britton's murder, several other women were found deceased under similar circumstances in and around Algiers, their deaths also attributed to strangulation. While a former taxi driver named Russell Ellwood was arrested in 1998 and charged with the murders of two other women suspected to be victims of the same killer, the murder of Danielle Britton, along with many of the others, officially remains unsolved.
