(car engine roaring)
Jennings puts a curse on you.
If you gonna make it?
Are you gonna fall into that grave?
The girls, they didn't deserve what they all got.
There were eight dead women.
No justice for any of those women.
It's like, they never existed.
(car engine roaring)
(suspenseful music)
I'm Ethan Brown.
The author of "Murder in the Bayou."
I'm an investigative reporter, editor, and author
of four books.
Brown's book about eight killings
in the tiny Louisiana town in Jefferson Davis Parish,
has been made into a documentary for Showtime.
The murders have never been solved.
They have come to be called "The Jeff Davis Eight."
If you're a drug trafficker anywhere in this area,
you are picking-up cocaine and other drugs from Houston,
which is obviously an enormous port city,
and then you are then moving them on I-10 East.
And you would actually go through Jennings,
to move those drugs.
So the I-10 section, where Jennings is located,
has almost kind of cartel-level of drugs
running through it.
That creates drug problems.
It creates corruption.
And it's sort of like, Jennings is a port city
but the port is not water, it's I-10.
Here's another body.
Here's another one.
Oh my god, there's another body?
What's really goin on in this town?
I first started hearing about this in 2010.
I had a case that was taking me back-and-forth
between New Orleans and Calcasieu Parish
on that I-10 stretch.
When I drove on that stretch,
this is about a year after the last homicide in 2009,
there were large billboards on I-10
featuring the faces of the eight women.
What is this?
This is fascinating and strange.
These women's faces are on billboards,
along with billboards for casinos and hunting shops
and gas stations.
And suddenly here are eight dead women in the middle
of all this.
The "Jeff Davis Eight" refers to eight women.
All eight of the women were from the south-side
of the tracks.
There's a cliché; Your from the other side of the tracks?
This is literally the cliché come to life.
They were working-poor.
They struggled with all kinds of things
from mental illness to substance abuse disorder.
And really the day-to-day grind of being working-poor.
You know, how do I get enough money to eat?
Where do I live?
All of these really deep struggles.
They were also sex workers
who ran in the same circles
and got high with the same people.
Including pimps, criminals, and law enforcement officers,
according to interviews Brown conducted for his book.
These women are struggling.
They however have large families.
They have partners, husbands, kids,
sometimes multiple kids.
And they are loved in their small community.
They're loved by their families.
Victim number seven, Brittney Gary, she was 17 years old
when she was killed.
Her death occurs in November of 2008.
Her mother is just this force-of-nature kind of personality.
That my child is alive out there somewhere
(sobbing) I know this.
Her mother was involved in putting together
a search party for her.
Her mother was deeply involved in doing a ton of media
at the time in 2008.
I made a promise that I would find her
and I would not stop until I did
and I'm not gonna stop.
Her mother and her mother's pushing
results in the creation of a multi-agency taskforce.
Which is created in the late Fall of 2008,
very soon after Brittney's murder.
Multi-agency taskforce is comprised of the FBI,
Jennings Police, and numerous Sheriff's offices in the area.
Including the Jeff Davis Parrish Sheriff's office.
When the taskforce is created in late 2008,
there's an initial sense of optimism around this.
Like wow!
A lot of people are involved in this.
A lot of agencies are involved in this.
Maybe this is being taken seriously now.
But that optimism quickly gave way to despair.
And then incredibly the last victim,
victim number eight, occurs within six months or so
of the task forces inception.
They can kill in this town and get away with it.
'Cause this is the devil's playground
and they run and ride along with him.
My theory about this case
is that it's definitely not a serial killer.
It is a conspiracy of a small group of people,
who want to basically take these women out.
And erase this milieu of women from the earth.
And mission accomplished on that, I believe.
For Inside Edition.com I am Deborah Hastings.