Tyra Tassin died in New Orleans, Louisiana on September 3, 1991, after her body was found during a summer when fear was beginning to gather in pockets of the city. She was a 21-year-old Black woman. In the accounts that survived on the record, she is described as a mother of three, and investigators later placed her death near the front edge of a years-long string of killings that would be spoken about under one grim nickname: the Storyville Slayer.
That nickname came from a pattern more than a person anyone could name. The killer was believed to be hunting vulnerable women across New Orleans and nearby areas, with strangulation appearing again and again as a brutal signature and the city’s waterways and outlying places serving as silent dumping grounds. The story is often traced back to an earlier warning: a woman who survived an attack after being picked up in Algiers, then choked into unconsciousness and left behind, later helping police create a sketch of a muscular, well-dressed, middle-aged man driving a dark vehicle. Within weeks, another young woman was found beaten and strangled—and by September 3, Tyra was dead as well, folded into a timeline that investigators would spend years trying to untangle.
What makes Tyra’s case especially haunting is how quickly it becomes part of a larger storm—because the larger storm never truly cleared. Investigators and later reporting have described multiple lines of inquiry and the possibility that more than one killer was responsible for murders grouped under the same banner. A task force was formed in the mid-1990s, and at least one New Orleans police officer, Victor Gant, was publicly named as a suspect in connection with two of the victims. Even so, authorities also clarified that they did not have evidence tying him to the full series, leaving the question of Tyra’s killer still hanging in the air.
Another name that surfaced was Russell Ellwood, a cab driver who became a focal point after later allegations that he talked about killings while incarcerated. Ellwood was ultimately charged in 1998 with the murders of two women—Delores Mack and Cheryl Lewis—before prosecutors dropped one count and proceeded on the other. In 1999, he was convicted of Cheryl Lewis’s murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole, a result that stood apart from the many other cases that remained unresolved. Even with that conviction, the broader Storyville-related killings—including the one that took Tyra—were not closed by a clean chain of proof, and no public record shows a specific arrest or conviction for her homicide.
So Tyra’s story endures in a painful in-between: identified, mourned, and placed on a timeline, but not answered. The city can point to suspects who were investigated, to a task force that tried to stitch scattered deaths into a single picture, and to one conviction that proved at least one predator had been moving among the same vulnerable population. But for Tyra Tassin, the trail that mattered most—the one that would name who took her life—still fades into the dark waterline where the Storyville Slayer legend began.
