Gordon Mark Cannella, a 17-year-old male from Morgan City, Louisiana, vanished after an armed robbery at a Bayou Vista convenience store in the spring of 1978, taken at gunpoint during a moment that should have been ordinary and forgettable. The region was already tense, with multiple young people reported missing, and the sudden disappearance of a local teenager—alongside store clerk Bridget Sons—hit the community like a slammed door in the night.
On Saturday, May 27, 1978, a farmer came upon Cannella’s body in a sugar cane field in the Calumet area, and the search effort around Morgan City swelled wider—boats dragging waterways, officers and volunteers pressing down field roads and levees, everyone straining for any sign of who else might still be out there, lost or being held. In the days around that discovery, authorities tied the case to a grim cluster of violence: two young women had been found stuffed into an industrial septic tank at a Bayou Vista welding shop, and investigators feared the unidentified remains could belong to one of the other missing teenagers.
As the net tightened, law enforcement issued a national bulletin for Robert Carl Hohenberger, a fugitive with a serious criminal record who had been working and living locally under an alias while employed at the same welding shop where the bodies were discovered. The suspicion was that he hadn’t just passed through—he had blended in, worked a job, used a borrowed name, and then slipped away as the disappearances stacked up.
There was at least one arrest connected to the investigation: Sidney Harris, 38, was taken into custody and charged as an accessory after the fact of a felony, held on a $250,000 bond while officials said only that the arrest was linked to the kidnapping-slayings and involved aiding and abetting. But the case’s central suspect never faced trial in Louisiana.
By the end of May 1978, the hunt for Hohenberger ended far from the cane fields—nearly two thousand miles away in Tacoma, Washington—after detectives traced him through a stolen car he was trying to sell. When officers moved to arrest him, he reportedly put a gun to his head and fired; he later died, leaving investigators with a trail of fear, missing answers, and a case that could no longer be fully tested in court.
