On a summer day in 1992, the quiet waters of a canal off Interstate 55 north of LaPlace, Louisiana, held a grim secret. On July 25th, authorities discovered the body of 33-year-old Noah Philson, a male resident of New Orleans, floating naked in the canal. Philson was known in the French Quarter's vibrant nightlife scene as an exotic dancer who went by the name Brenda Bewitch.
His death was not an isolated incident but one of a string of mysterious and brutal killings that haunted the New
Orleans area between 1991 and 1995. Investigators began to suspect that a serial killer, later dubbed the "Storyville Slayer," was preying on vulnerable individuals. The victims, like Philson, were often connected to the city's underbelly of drugs and sex work. The manner of their deaths and the disposal of their bodies in desolate locations such as canals and wetlands pointed to a single, elusive predator.
As the investigation into the series of murders progressed, a task force involving the FBI was formed. Two men eventually emerged as primary suspects in the Storyville Slayer case. One was Victor Gant, a New Orleans police officer. Despite being a suspect in two of the murders and undergoing DNA testing which proved inconclusive, he was never formally charged with any of the killings. He was, however, terminated from the police department for departmental violations.
Another suspect, Russell Ellwood, came to the attention of law enforcement after allegedly confessing to some of the murders to fellow inmates while incarcerated on unrelated charges. While Ellwood was eventually convicted for the murder of one of the victims, Cheryl Lewis, the majority of the cases attributed to the Storyville Slayer, including the death of Noah Philson, officially remain unsolved. The identity of the person or persons responsible for ending his life in the summer of 1992 remains a mystery, one of many connected to a dark chapter in New Orleans' history.
