ERNEST RANDALL COMEAUX:
A SERIAL RAPIST COP
Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s a series of brutal rapes terrorized the southern part of Lafayette Parish and adjacent Acadiana parishes. The first rape occurred in Lafayette Parish on November 2, 1986. At least four more rapes occurred in that parish—November 15, 1987, November 16, 1992, August 29, 1994, and August 31, 1995—earning the rapist the media created moniker “Southside Rapist.”
It took the Lafayette Police Department the nine years between these rapes before the department officially started investigating the possibility that the sexual assaults were committed by the same assailant.
Finally, in 1997, the local police were able through DNA evidence to connect six of the rapes to one assailant. It was only then that the local police focused their investigation on a “serial rapist.”
Ernest Randall Comeaux was hired by the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Department in 1979. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming a detective in the department’s juvenile division investigating physical and sexual abuse of children.
During this rise, Comeaux was investigated on three separate occasions by Internal Affairs. The reasons for those investigations were never made public.
However, in 1992, Judy Hedgcoth, an ex-girlfriend of Comeaux, filed a complaint with the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Department claiming that she had been physically abused by the cop. Hedgcoth told Internal Affairs investigators that Comeaux should not be working in the juvenile division because he was a “sex addict” and was “sexually perverted.”
The Internal Affairs investigation was terminated as “inconclusive” and no action was taken against Comeaux. He was allowed to remain in the juvenile division.
In September 1997, a law enforcement “task force” was set up to investigate the “Southside Rapist” case. In addition to the Lafayette Police Department, the task force included the parish sheriff’s department, the FBI, and the University of Southwestern Louisiana.
Although rumors in the local community that the rapes had been committed by someone in “law enforcement,” the task force did not pursue that line of investigation. Unable to develop any significant leads outside the law enforcement theory, the task force disbanded after only seven months.
Finally, in November 1998, Captain James Craft received information from an anonymous caller that investigators should “investigate Randy Comeaux” as the serial rapist. Comeaux was still assigned to the juvenile division but also worked part time at a local supermarket as a private “security guard.”
Comeaux confided in only two people: a priest and a lawyer. One of those individuals violated the confidence by reporting Comeaux to the police.
Craft and other detectives set up a surveillance of Comeaux’s work habits at the supermarket. They discovered he took a “smoke break” each night at the same time, always throwing the cigarette butt on the pavement nearby.
Following one of those smoke breaks, the detectives collected Comeaux’s discarded cigarette butt. A DNA analysis of the salvia on the cigarette butt matched the DNA of the “Southside Rapist.”
The detectives arrested Comeaux who immediately confessed to being the rapist.
Two years after the arrest, Forensic Files featured Comeaux’s case in September 2000 under the title, “Badge of Deceit.”
Ernest Randall Comeaux is an enigma.
I got to know Ernie, as much as one inmate could to another, at the David Wade Correctional Center where we both were assigned to a special protection unit. We had many long, philosophical discussions together.
Ernie spoke freely to me.
But I was never able to figure the contradictions in the man.
As a cop, he worked the juvenile division. He saw many children who had been physically and sexually abused. He despised the offenders who abused children.
Yet, as a rapist, he could enter a woman’s home, force her to undress, stick his service revolver in her mouth, draw her panties over his head, and have sex with her. He always carried out his sexual assaults within hours after targeting his victims.
He was as Judy Hedgcoth said, a “sex pervert.”
Comeaux is a good inmate. He does not violate the rules. He obeys instructions. He performs his prison job assignments diligently. He despises official preferential treatment to inmates and the corruption that practice invites.
He is serving six life sentences without the benefit of parole. Three of the sentences must be served consecutively. He has made funeral arrangements for the death that will surely come in prison.
But oddly he thinks that one day he will be a free man again. A devout Catholic, he believes God will spare him of a prison death.
God, however, cannot save him from Louisiana justice. Since a life sentence in Louisiana must be served without the benefit of parole, the only hope for release on a life sentence is through the state’s executive clemency process – a rare hope inasmuch as there are nearly 6,000 lifers in the state’s prison system. That miniscule hope is even less for offenders convicted of rape.
What made Ernie a “serial rapist” resides unknown in the man’s unconscious mind. What frame of mind allowed him to stalk the community he swore to “protect and serve” can be debated through some psychological lens I cannot see through.
Any rape of either a woman or a man is degrading, but the sex acts Ernie forced on his victims were particularly heinous and perverted. Reports circulating through the media and local folklore said the rapist would put the victim’s panties on his head, place the barrel of a .38 revolver in her mouth, and instruct her to “tell me I’m good” during the rape.
Local law enforcement efforts to apprehend the “Southside Rapist” were criticized by victims as inept. Several victims theorized early on that the rapist was a cop. He knew the right entry points into a residence, carried a .38 special, a flashlight, and had an air of police authority about him.
The “task force” did bring in a Canadian expert in “geographic profiling” to see if he could pinpoint a “red zone,” the area of the city in which the rapist may have lived. The expert in fact provided the task force with a “red zone” in which Comeaux lived, but the task force failed to investigate any law enforcement officers who may have lived in that red zone.
The police eventually solved the “Southside Rapist” case, as they do in most cases, by getting a lucky break. In the Southside Rapist case, it was the tip from: an anonymous caller telling them that the rapist was “Randy Comeaux.”
That anonymous caller was either a New Orleans attorney or a Lafayette priest.
The information that caller gave to the police was so specific that they immediately put Ernie under investigation surveillance.
Inevitably, Ernie’s arrest triggered political recriminations. The task force was accused of a “cover up” because Comeaux was one of their own. Victims of the sexual assaults filed civil lawsuits against the sheriff’s department as well as against Comeaux.
The court appointed a public defender named Paul Marx to represent Ernie – and in a stunning, bizarre development, the ex-cop pled guilty within weeks of his 1998 arrest to the six counts of aggravated rape. He would later testify under oath that the decision to plead guilty was based on the legal advice given to him by Marx.
Why would a man, especially an ex-cop with extensive experience dealing with the criminal justice system, so quickly accept six life sentences to be served without the benefit of parole?
That question begs scrutiny.
Marx had initially pled Ernie not guilty by reason of insanity. He requested that the court appoint a lunacy commission to examine Comeaux to determine his mental competency – not only at the time of the commission of the crimes but also his ability to understand the criminal proceedings against him.
What is particularly disturbing about Ernie’s six guilty pleas is that those pleas were entered before his competency was determined.
The advice by Marx to plead guilty and Ernie’s decision to accept that advice was influenced, according to Comeaux, by a local criminal justice professor named Burk Foster. An aspiring author and a friend of Marx, Foster met with Ernie in the Lafayette Parish Jail to discuss the guilty plea option.
Ernie would later testify that this meeting was arranged by Marx.
“Professor Burk Foster told me,” Ernie explained, “that I would serve twenty years on the life sentences. He led me to believe – and I did trust his advice – that I would receive sex offender counseling while incarcerated. The advice Burk Foster gave me in no way matches the reality of what I faced once I got into the prison system. Life means just that – you spend the rest of your life in prison; you die in prison.”
I believe Ernie.
I had my own experience with Burk Foster. He could be “loose with the facts.” He published four articles I had written for The Angolite, a Louisiana State Penitentiary newsmagazine, in a criminal justice textbook called “The Wall Is Strong” (June 1991). He did not request, much less secure, my permission to use the articles in the criminal justice anthology. None of the articles carried by byline credit. I was awarded the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award for one of those articles (“A Prison Tragedy”).
In compiling the criminal justice articles for his textbook (most of them cannibalized from Louisiana prison publications), Foster accepted The Angolite submissions from the publication’s editors, Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg. The professor did not undertake any independent journalistic steps to verify who actually wrote the articles that were so evidently written by me.
I filed a lawsuit against Foster who eventually provided me with an official “apology” to settle the lawsuit.
“Foster lied to me,” Ernie continued. “He did exactly what Marx wanted him to do – paint a rosy picture that would entice me to plead guilty. I was in a terribly depressed state of mind. I had scarred and ruined the lives of my victims - not to mention what I had done to my own family, career, and life.”
Emotion gripped Ernie’s throat as he explained the situation to me.
“I felt a compelling need to express remorse,” he resumed, struggling to convey the enormity of the situation he faced at the time. “I needed some sense of personal atonement – some way to say I was sorry to my victims, their families, my family, my daughter, my father, my mom. I was so wretched and guilt-ridden – and it was professionally unconscionable for Marx to waltz Burk Foster into that situation just to induce a guilty plea.”
Public defenders are frequently criticized, and rightfully so, for arranging quick, ill-advised plea bargains for criminal defendants.
In Comeaux’s case, Marx clearly believed that Ernie had serious mental health issues. The attorney entered an insanity plea on behalf of his client and motioned the court for a competency evaluation of the client.
But before that critical mental health evaluation could be conducted, Marx led Ernie into a courtroom and allowed him to plead guilty to six life sentences. Marx at the very least should have entered a “best interests” guilty plea – a plea that would have allowed the lunacy commission to determine Ernie’s competency and preserve that issue for appeal in the event an incompetency finding was made.
A lucid, competent person does not plead guilty to six life sentences within weeks of arrest. Comeaux certainly was not in his “right mind” when he stood in that courtroom and said “guilty” six times to life sentences.
Was Ernie in his “right mind” when he committed the series of rapes?
I think so.
Some criminal justice “experts,” especially those overly sympathetic to crime victims, say rape is a crime of violence rooted in the perpetrator’s need to have power over his victim. They minimize the role that sexual desire plays in these kinds of crimes.
I came to understand a little about mind of a rapist through my many discussion with Ernie Comeaux.
He and I worked together in the prison laundry beginning in 1999. My study of him was made easy because Ernie had a deep admiration for me. He confided in me more readily than he would anyone else, even his family.
I often questioned Ernie about the rapes, probing his psyche in an effort to understand his crimes. He did not possess the common traits associated with other rapists I had observed in prison. He was an intelligent, and h expressed a caring, sensitive, and distinctly moral outlook about life. He was not egotistical, overly macho, or angry at women like most rapists I had encountered in prison..
Ernie, I believe, raped women because of sexual desire – and his rapes offered some evidence of the “perverted” sexual inclinations he had just as Judy Hedgcoth told the polices. Most men will satisfy their sexual desires, no matter how perverse, with a willing partner or a prostitute. Ernie had apparently tried that with Hedgcoth but it didn’t work out too well for him.
I don’t know what kind of personal relationship Ernie had with Hedgcoth or to what extent he tried to interest her in his “different desires,” as he called them.. I’m sure he knew that she had reported him to Internal Affairs. He could not risk any additional exposure from other women but he was willing to risk the consequences of rape. That gave him a way to release those “different desires” in a controlled situation like rape he had anonymity.
There is no question that Ernie sexual desires were different.
The act of putting a woman’s panties over his head, sticking a gun in herr mouth, and instructing her to tell him how good a lover he was while raping her defies comprehension.
“I was good,” Ernie said. “Some of the women told me I was good. They even asked me to come back – and some didn’t even report the rapes to the police.”
It can be reasonably assumed that the women who did not report the rapes remained silent because of shame and embarrassment, and not because of any imagined sexual pleasure they may have derived from Ernie’s rape.
“You sound as though you liked the sex of rape,” I said.
“I did,” Ernie replied. “I raped for sex. I needed the sex. I never raped when I was involved in a relationship with a woman. My sexual desires were, you know, basically met in those relationships.”
I had never known a rapist to speak so frankly about his crimes. Most were in denial, refusing to accept responsibility for their actions. “The bitch lied,” they lamented. Or she cried ‘rape’ on me.”
It was always “consensual sex” or “the bitch asked for it,” regardless of the evidence that showed otherwise. These common justifications always cast the blame on the woman.
Ernie Comeaux offered no excuses. His rapes were about sexual desire and satisfaction, pure and simple.
“The one thing I am proud of,” Ernie said, trying to put the best face on his actions.
“I never used my position in law enforcement to find a victim or case a house. All my victims were randomly selected.”
To commit crimes as Ernie did require a profoundly disturbed psyche. He would drive around neighborhoods he was familiar with, comfortable with the physical location – the “red zone” in which he lived. He surveyed the residences and apartment complexes, basing his decision to strike on both instinct and vulnerability of the residence.
“But you never knew who, or what, awaited you behind those locked doors,” I said.
“I really didn’t,” he agreed, “but there is a certain look to a ‘woman alone’ apartment. One of the first signs is the vehicle – most women drive smaller, foreign-made models. Once I was satisfied that it was a ‘woman alone’ residence, I then looked for the best point of entry – and after entry, you take what is there.”
I hated the N5 protection unit. The nine years I spent in the unit were the worst of my four-decade incarceration in the Louisiana prison system. And while I liked, and respected Ernie, he manifested the source for my dislike of the unit. I understood inmates who were victims of drug abuse, child abuse, housing projects, street violence, failed educational/religious institutions, and other socio-economic factors that influenced their criminal behavior.
I did not, however, understand the likes of Ernie Comeaux – men of education, careers, social standing, and opportunity who threw it away because of sexual perversity or murderous anger. All the former law enforcement inmates in N5 had been convicted of crimes of passion, like killing their wives or girlfriends. Their crimes were not the acts of “criminals,” rather crimes born of some kind of psychosis.
I cannot say what Ernie was thinking or feeling when he raped those women. I only know that his perception of the crimes was that while they were wrong and illegal, they were not really “bad.”
“I really didn’t hurt any of my victims,” he said, as if that somehow lessened the gravity of the offenses. “I did not rape any of them while I was on duty, and I did not use law enforcement resources in any way to accomplish those rapes.”
Ernie found a peculiar honor in these assertions, frequently expressing moral disdain for “corrupt” cops.
“I served my profession honorably,” he said. “I was a good, decent cop for almost twenty years. I worked with compassion and gave dignity to children who were victims of rape and sexual abuse. At least my victims were women – not children. I know what I did was wrong, but I never molested a child.”
Ernie could never comprehend the physical degradation and psychological terror of adult rape – a stranger forcefully violating the sanctity of a woman’s home, invading the privacy of that home, and compelling her to engage in sexual activity just to satisfy the perverse sexual desires of a stranger.
Although one’s personal sense of security is violated, the victim of an armed robbery can adjust and move on with life. But rape is a different kind of crime. The victim cannot just walk away from. It becomes part of the very fabric of her life.
Ernie, I believe, thought his victims could take a bath, wash away the physical residue of the rape, put on clean clothes, and get on with life. He viewed rape purely as a sex act – not as physical abuse or emotional trauma. The fact that some of the victims responded to his sexual demands only reinforced his belief that he was giving them “good sex” – and because of that, he was not a bad person.
“At least I never molested a child,” he would frequently say.
Ernie believed – as do most people in society – that the age of the victim determines the gravity of the offense. A rape is a rape is a rape. Ernie could live with the social stigma of rape, but not child molestation. While the physical abuse and emotional trauma are greater in child molestation than in adult rape, that crime should not bear less social stigmatization than child molestation.
Rape and child molestation are ultimate acts of male selfishness, self-indulgence, and self-interest. These sexual assaults, whether motivated by perverse sexual desire or some angry power need, are primal. They are rooted in the ancient male practice of clubbing women and hauling them off to the cave. They are barbaric.
I believe rape, in many instances, is a byproduct of the Freudian Oedipus Complex. Although Ernie never indicated to me that his rapes were Oedipus-inspired, I sense a link between the two based on his conversations about the rapes and his relationship with his mother.
First, there were those reports about Ernie putting victims’ panties over his head. Clearly this act must have provided him with some sexual stimuli. While I am not a sex therapist, I don’t think a man develops this sexual desire during his adult sexual development years. It generally has origins in childhood development – a time when those “mother issues” surface.
Second, there was the gun-in-the-mouth demand that his victims tell him how good he was. That not only indicates a need to be good but a need to force the victims to admit that he was good.
These are Oedipus issues. While no one may ever know if Ernie was really raping his mother when he committed his rapes, one can reasonably conclude that the unnatural and unhealthy relationship with his mother played a significant role in his criminal decision to rape.
Whatever the psychological motivation may have been for his crimes, Ernest Randall Comeaux was driven to randomly select a residence, forcefully enter it, and fulfill his sexual desires with the female inside of the residence. I’m convinced these sexual desires involved more than a masculine need to feel good. They were the bitter harvest from the original male-female relationship – mother and son.
“You know you are going to die in prison,” I told Ernie. “Your case is beyond any legal or political solution – the only acceptable solution is for you to die in prison.”
Ernie did not break his usual stoic composure .
“I’m prepared for that,” he replied. “I’ve already made funeral arrangements. I don’t want to die in prison, but I accept that it is now my home until God calls me to our final home.”
I believe Ernie is finally satisfied. Oedipus no longer torments him. He has now found a purpose in prison – to rise above its institutionalized system of corruption. He strives toward honest, moral behavior. It is the only apology he can offer to society and his victims – to be a decent, productive inmate to the very end.
Ernest Randall Comeaux convinced me that we are, in the end, the product of our environment from cradle to grave – and the only weapon we have to fight the horrific influences of environment is our innate free will that often requires a superhuman effort to exercise.