In the late spring of 1978, the community of Morgan City, Louisiana, was rocked by a crime that would leave a lasting scar. Fifteen-year-old Judy Ann Adams, a young woman with her life ahead of her, vanished on the night of May 11th. She and a friend, fourteen-year-old Bertha Gould, were making their way home from the Central Catholic High School fair, a picture of youthful innocence under the Louisiana sky.
Their journey was cut short when a witness saw the two girls getting into a white car driven by an unknown man. It was the last time Judy Ann would be seen alive.
For two agonizing weeks, her family and the community held onto a sliver of hope. That hope was brutally extinguished on May 26th when her body was discovered in a septic tank in the nearby community of Bayou Vista. The grim discovery revealed the horrific final moments of the young woman's life; she had been bound and strangled. The discovery of a second body in the tank, that of another missing teenager, nineteen-year-old Bridget Cantrell Sons, deepened the mystery and the sense of dread that had fallen over the area.
The investigation into the double homicide and other similar cases eventually pointed to one man: Robert Carl Hohenberger. A former sheriff's deputy from California, Hohenberger had a dark past that included the abduction and rape of four women in that state before he escaped from prison and made his way to Louisiana under an alias. Authorities came to believe that Hohenberger was a serial killer who may have been responsible for the deaths of up to seven people in a three-month span. Investigators theorized that he used his law enforcement background and badge to lure his unsuspecting victims.
The manhunt for Hohenberger came to a dramatic and final end in June 1978. As law enforcement closed in to arrest him in Tacoma, Washington, Robert Carl Hohenberger took his own life, taking with him any further answers he may have had about the string of terror he was believed to have unleashed. With his death, the legal pursuit for justice in the murder of Judy Ann Adams and others concluded, leaving behind a legacy of pain and loss for the families of his victims.
