Into the killing fields

A cold case victim with ties to Ville Platte was recently identified with the help of genetic genealogist, Shera LaPoint of Bunkie. LaPoint was the guest speaker at the Hotel Cazan’s Cold Case presentation Saturday, September 7. The case centered around “Janet Doe,” whose body was among four found in a field in League City, TX. The location has been dubbed the Killing Fields.
There were four girls found in the Killing Fields: one in 1984, one in 1986, and two in September of 1991. The first two were identified as Heidi Fye and Laura Miller. The other two victims were found when two people riding horses rented from Able Stables came across one of the bodies. While the police were examining the crime scene, they came across another body. These two victims were unidentified. In 2017, an unsuccessful attempt was made to identify them using DNA. The cold case detectives uploaded their DNA to a website called GEDmatch in the hopes of finding relatives of the victims. In December of 2018, LaPoint was contacted by the League City PD because her father-in-law was a DNA match to one of the women.
“For 27 years, her bones were in a box at the police department,” said LaPoint. “My father-in-law was one of her top three matches on GEDmatch.”
For three years LaPoint has been helping adoptees and others find their biological family. “In DNA that’s used for genealogy, we consider it just another record, like a birth certificate or a census record. DNA is just more proof of the genealogy lines. When you do your DNA, we get a list of matches, people you match to, people who have tested at the same company as you. Law enforcement uses GEDmatch, which is free. If you tested at Twenty-three and Me and I tested at Ancestry, we can both upload at GEDmatch. Law enforcement has access to GEDmatch, which has been limited now, because you can either opt in or opt out for law enforcement use, which has caused some issues. It makes it a bit more difficult.” She encourages people to opt in.
When her father-in-law showed up in the top three DNA matches to “Janet Doe,” LaPoint said she was contacted by Detective Tisdale from League City PD. “She had asked me how my father-in-law was related to one of the matches.” She said they still have not been able to pin down the highest match. “The problem is with Cajun DNA, we’re all related more than one way. And this one particular woman, out of 16 great grandparents, she had five who were Dugas, so we never found it. I offered to try to find the connections between the top 15 on GEDmatch, and that’s what I did. I was able to isolate three lines: a Broussard line (my father-in-law’s line), a Prince line out of the New Iberia area, and a Bernard line. I started building those trees. Once I was into them, I realized we had someone from the Prince line and someone from the Bernard line who moved to Port Arthur, TX in the early 1900’s. Detective Tisdale and I talked and I said, ‘In my opinion, we’re looking for somebody, a Cajun, who moved to that area.
“At the same time, they were scourging records, looking for somebody possibly with a Cajun name who may have been arrested or something like that. I started January 9 on the tree. On January 29, I got a text from Detective Tisdale that said ‘I’ll call you in an hour.’ The FBI had uploaded her results to Family Tree DNA. Mr. Greenspan with Family Tree DNA is very much in favor of helping law enforcement with these cases. They uploaded her results and Detective Tisdale called me and said, ‘I’m going to give you a man’s name and his dad’s name, and I want you to build his family tree.’ So when I built this man’s tree and got to his grandparents I realized that was in the Prince-Gonsoulin line. And then when I got to the mother’s side, it was the Bernard line, so I knew right then that we had the right line. I didn’t know exactly what the connection was to the victim at that time, but he was her uncle.”
LaPoint said the daughter of the man tested turned out to be Janet Doe’s first cousin. The cousin said she had a missing cousin, and the sister lives in Austin. “That’s when they knew.” “Janet Doe” finally had a name: Donna Gonsoulin Prudhomme.
“It took about 20 days once I started building the tree,.” said LaPoint. It was a combined effort of law enforcement who worked really hard on this. Detective Tisdale did an amazing job doing the investigative work. Had Family Tree DNA not put that DNA on their site, we would have gotten there, but it would have taken a little bit longer to get there.”
The area known as the Killing Fields is now a property owned by a church. The church had little memorials near where the bodies were found. Once the victims were identified, the church did a memorial service the next week or so. Donna Prudhomme’s sister spoke at the memorial.
LaPoint said gene hunting is “an addiction.” She belongs to a Facebook group called DNA Detectives.
“What we’re called are investigative genetic genealogists. The police side of it is investigative. I do have three other cases. I’m working right now with different law enforcement agencies in three different states. There’s a lot of roadblocks. When a criminal commits a crime, if they have to submit DNA, it goes into the CODIS (Combined DNA Index System). If you don’t get a match, you can run it for close family. Twelve states allow familial DNA. Not all states allow that. On the genealogy sites, you can take the criminal’s DNA. It’s a different way of testing it. You can upload that to GEDmatch or Family Tree DNA and look for matches.” She gave an example: “Say I have a second cousin match. Second cousins share great grandparents. For second cousin matches, you look at the great grandparents, you look at their children and their spouses, and then their children and their spouses. You have to have DNA on all the lines until you find the right person at the right time.”
As for Donna Prudhomme and her ties to Ville Platte, LaPoint said she married a Daryl Prudhomme from Ville Platte, and her two sons went to Ville Platte High. “Donna left Ville Platte, left her husband because he had beat her. They knew when they found the bones that this person had been through some kind of trauma. She had back injuries, etc. We know now that’s what happened. He almost killed her. She had a rough life.”
Years later, Donna’s sister took care of her son, who was in a nursing home after injuries he sustained in an accident. “The sister said, “Every time I would walk in there, he’d say, Have you found my mama?’ He died after about 10 years in the nursing home. Donna does have a son still alive in Lafayette. He of course felt abandoned. It’s given him closure. At least he knows that, even though his mother left him with his grandparents in the ‘80s, she’s been dead since 1991.”
Donna grew up in Port Author. After she was identified, LaPoint’s cousin, who is also in the Facebook genealogy group with her, said about Donna, “Oh, my God. I went to school with her.” In fact, LaPoint’s cousin went to middle school with Donna. Her cousin described Donna’s pixie haircut to her. She said, “My cousin said Donna was just the life of the room when she walked in. She was bubbly and fun. Their dad died young, and their mother was older, and she raised them.”
When asked if it takes an emotional toll on her, LaPoint said, “Very emotional. The day after I came back from Houston, I needed to talk to somebody. I have a friend who is a juvenile detective. I couldn’t understand how people do this for a living all the time, because it tore me up. We talked for quite a while, and she said you have to have something else to focus on. Whenever you get up from your desk and you’re finished doing that work, there has to be something else in your life, something good and something happy.
She said the first adoptee whose biological family she helped to find told her she changed his life. “There’s no other words that have ever meant as much. It’s very, very rewarding. The good far outweighs the bad. Every adoption case is emotional to me. I definitely take it to heart. I’m still friends with every adoptee that I’ve helped, and that’s over 70.
“With Donna, I felt like I was looking for my sister. There was just this connection. I basically spent three weeks of not sleeping, trying to understand why in the world was nobody looking for this person and why she wasn’t on a missing list. I was invited to the press conference in Houston when they unveiled the posters identifying them with the FBI there and Family Tree DNA was there, and anybody having to do with both cases. It was very emotional. The other girl was Audrey Lee Cook. They both were identified at the same time through the same process. Audrey’s case was worked by one of the other detectives from League city. She probably worked for a year and built a massive family tree. She didn’t get right to her but got close enough that, once the DNA was done, they were able to identify both of them. The murders aren’t solved. I can just imagine bones in a box on a shelf for 26 plus years, nobody knows who they belong to. There are thousands of cases like that. It’s not just missing persons. This is finding violent criminals. There was an amnesiac they figured out who he was using this process. Veterans who were missing in action are being identified. Unidentified babies ... it’s amazing what you can use it for.”
LaPoint is now professionally called the Gene Hunter. She will have a book coming out in August of 2020. “Through my life when I think back to major decisions you have to make--and at my age to make this major decision--it’s been easy, and my family supports me 100%. There was no struggle in making this decision because I just know it’s right. I know I’m doing the right thing. The people I’ve met on this journey are amazing through the whole genealogy, people in general I’ve come across--we all share a passion. I enjoy speaking at local libraries, different genealogy organizations, sharing what I’ve learned. People have been telling me I need to write a book. I knew I wanted to have my own business doing this, but to actually sit down and do it. I went to an optometry seminar with my husband, listening to a motivational speaker who also does promotions and advertising, and he’s also a lawyer. He’s talking about writing a book and using that to promote yourself. I’m sitting there and I wrote ‘My Genealogy’ and it just happened. That’s how I got started.”
LaPoint got started with genealogy research after the passing of a family member. “God put me here for a reason. I started genealogy when my grandfather passed away. I never knew anything about his parents. I knew they died young, and after he died, I wondered why they died. I found out they died of tuberculosis. And then my parents passed. I put genealogy aside for a while. I became the keeper of pictures in my family. I had all this stuff and I just got interested again in genealogy. I just felt like somebody is pushing me or leading me.”
She also said more work needs to be done to help find and identify missing persons. NamUs is a resource center that brings people, information, forensic science and technology together, helping to resolve missing, unidentified, and unclaimed person cases throughout the United States. LaPoint said, “Louisiana has a serious deficit of police departments putting people in the NamUS system. They’re just not there.” However, with impassioned people like LaPoint and other gene hunters working together when law enforcement, more cold cases now have better chances of being solved, and more families can gain closure.