THE SINCLAIR CASE
Chapter Two: Baton Rouge and Its Corrupt Politics
Red Stick.
While exploring the Mississippi River in 1699, Sieur d’Iberville discovered the physical area that became known as Baton Rouge—French for “Red Stick.” History teaches that the French explorer found a red cypress pole stuck in the ground. D’Iberville learned that the local Native Americans’ name for the pole was Istrouma. The pole marked the boundary of the hunting grounds for the Houma Tribe and the Bayougoula Tribe—both part of the seven Muskogean Tribes in Louisiana. The French established a fort at the spot, and that’s where the future state capital of Louisiana got its name.
Louisiana history also instructs that Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, known as marquis de Vaudreuil, became governor of Louisiana 1743. He arrived in New Orleans the following year. A descendant of nobility, Vaudreuil brought elegance, entertainment, and social grace to a deprived colony. He gave the colony a prosperous period of peace and harmony. The people were so enamored with him that they called him the “Grand Marquis.” He left New Orleans in 1753 to become governor of Canada.
His successor, Louis Billouart de Kerlerec, introduced the city to an appetite for corruption and laissez-faire policies that would become the hallmark of the state’s political system throughout its often violent and bloody history. The Louisiana colony would change hands between the French, Spanish, and British before it became a state in 1812.
Baton Rouge has always been a maverick city, distancing itself from the French/Spanish heritage that dominated New Orleans. Its residents favored an Anglo/American heritage brought to the state by the British.
The Louisiana capital city has had two dominant social characteristics since the turn of the 20th century: football and politics. Both are joined at the hip.
Gov. Huey “The Kingfish” Long imposed football on the city’s psyche. His website says the flamboyant Kingfish spared no expense or political effort to make LSU football a source of national respect. It mattered little to the Kingfish’s far-reaching political machine that the governor corrupted the university and the game itself in that quest.
Although the governor bought the best players in the state for the LSU Tigers, the team never quite measured up to the likes of Notre Dame, Michigan, or Oklahoma. Louisianans were left with one choice: either love or hate LSU. That’s all the Kingfish gave them, love or hate—much like the political relationship he had with Louisianans.
On Halloween night in 1959, I was a fourteen year old kid on a chartered Trailways bus returning from a fair in Shreveport to my home in Rayville, Louisiana. It had been a great field trip for our junior high school’s 4-H Club. I was sporting an “Ole Miss Rebel” jacket given to me by a school buddy. The jacket was a big deal. Most of the kids on the bus were LSU fans. The Tigers were playing Ole Miss Rebels that night. It was called the “game of the year.” Everyone on the bus was listening to the game on Shreveport’s powerful radio station KWKH.
Being part of that game was as close to a “religious experience” as one could get. The Chinese Bandits, as LSU was often referred to at the time, were trailing 3-0 when Ole Miss quarterback Jake Gibbs punted the ball away late in the fourth quarter. LSU running back Billy Cannon scooped up the ball at LSU’s 11 yard line and broke tackle after tackle to complete what has been called the “greatest punt return in college football history.” LSU won the game 7-3, and earned Cannon the Heisman Trophy that year.
It was that single punt return and a national championship the year before that finally placed LSU in the same conversation as Notre Dame, which won four national championships in the 1940s, and Oklahoma, which won three national championships in the 1950s. LSU football became one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, forces in Louisiana. Billy Cannon was the face of that power, enjoying more political influence than then Gov. Earl K. “Uncle Earl” Long who was in his third non-consecutive term as Louisiana’s governor in 1959.
But I was crestfallen that Halloween night. I hated LSU and Baton Rouge. I don’t know why. I had never seen either the university or the city. I was from North Louisiana. We were “country folk” – rural and redneck. We did not like South Louisiana. That Halloween night I was pulling for Ole Miss because I was a cool “Rebel” redneck. Billy Cannon took that cool away. I would follow the rest of his college and professional football careers with that bad Halloween night taste in my mouth.
Just six years later, on that cold, drizzling Sunday night in December 1965 I killed J.C. Bodden who was a high school football friend of Billy Cannon.
I was arrested six days later at a car dealership in National City, California, just outside of San Diego, California. My father worked at the dealership. He had alerted the FBI that I was coming to the dealership. At least four agents were there waiting to execute the arrest.
That was Saturday, December 11, 1965.
I waived extradition to Louisiana. The single cell I was confined in at the San Diego jail had grown too small by the time I appeared before a federal magistrate the following Monday. Besides, the FBI had told me that fighting extradition was a losing proposition; that I was going to be turned over to Louisiana authorities regardless.
The extradition took place the following Saturday, December 18. I was returned to Baton Rouge in a four seat airplane that belonged to the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Department. Two homicide detectives with the Baton Rouge Police Department escorted me on the flight back to the city where it all began. I was about to be introduced to the Baton Rouge football power machine
On January 3, 1966, I was indicted by an all-white, all-male grand jury for murder. There were no first-or-second degree murder offenses in Louisiana at the time—just felony murder and non-felony murder.
For murder to qualify for the death penalty at that time, the offense had to be committed with either a “specific intent to kill” or committed during the commission or attempted commission of a felony, such as a robbery. The latter was known as “felony murder.”
East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Sargent Pitcher announced shortly after my arrest that his office would seek the death penalty in my case under the felony murder provisions..
J.C. Bodden’s family and friends, including Billy Cannon and those in his football orbit, had every intention of making me the first white person from East Baton Rouge Parish to be put to death in the state’s electric chair.
They made that demand clear to D.A. Pitcher.
My case was initially assigned to Judge Jess Johnson who had a reputation as a fair-minded, even-keeled judge. That is not what Pitcher wanted. He quickly got my case reassigned to his close political ally, Judge Fred S. LeBlanc.
In his book Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana 1915-1972 (Second Edition 2008), British historian Adam Fairclough said both Pitcher and LeBlanc were avowed segregationists who supported the Jim Crow era. LeBlanc was so much Jim Crow that, while Attorney General of Louisiana, he participated in an attack on the NAACP office in Baton Rouge in 1956. He would go on to burnish his Jim Crow bona fides as a judge by imposing harsh jail or prison terms on civil rights activists that appeared before him in court.
Pitcher earned his segregationist bones by vindictively prosecuting civil rights activists he deemed to be “black militants.” He was a member of the Citizens Councils of Louisiana (also known as “White Citizens Councils”). These were white supremacists groups that formed in thirteen parishes in Louisiana in the 1950s and 1960s, dedicated to fighting racial integration in the state’s school system. Many of the “White Citizens” were Ku Klux Klan members or Klan sympathizers.
Whether or not Pitcher and LeBlanc were affiliated with the KKK, I do not know. I do know both were ardent racists, as were most of the public officials in Baton Rouge in 1965. It was probably the most racist city in Louisiana at the time. Livingston Parish, the parish adjacent to East Baton Rouge Parish, was, and remains to this day, a hotbed of Klan activity.
One thing is certain about that political era: Pitcher and LeBlanc were part of a corrupt Baton Rouge power structure determined to subvert the local NAACP’s efforts to de-segregate the parish’s school system, including Istrouma High School.
Istrouma High School was not integrated until 1963—nearly a decade after Brown v. Board of Education. Like Pitcher and LeBlanc, many of Istrouma’s alumni, and particularly those in the “Little Dixie” neighborhood where the school was located, did not go quietly into that proverbial good night on the segregation issue.
The Little Dixie moniker for the Istrouma neighborhood speaks for itself. The residents of the neighborhood believed in the racist Southern Confederacy and all that is represented.
J.C. Bodden was a son of that Southern Confederacy—and that, as much as the power of football, is why Pitcher decided to seek the death penalty in my case. And it was that initial political decision that gave birth to “the Sinclair case”—a case that assumed its own unique standard of treatment throughout its journey through the Louisiana criminal justice system.
I had been in the Baton Rouge jail only a few days when a white jailer delivering food to my solitary cell said to me in a mocking way: “Those Ku Kluxers out there in Little Dixie sure want to kill your skinny white ass.”
He laughed as he walked away.
I had absolutely no frame of reference for what Little Dixie, Istrouma High School, or Billy Cannon had to do with my case. I did not know anything about Baton Rouge, its corrupt political structure, or the role that football played in the community. Some twenty years later a Baton Rouge minister told me, “You could have killed the mayor of Baton Rouge and been better off than killing a football player.”
I did not know that in 1965.
In fact, I did not know much of anything in 1965, much less anything about politics, football or the electric chair.
Sargent Pitcher had a history of aggressively pursuing the death penalty against blacks. The year before my arrest the district attorney secured a death penalty verdict against Leon Brent for the rape of a white woman and Henry “Wolf Man” Montgomery, a black teenager who killed a white sheriff’s deputy in 1963 at the age of 17. The racist moniker “Wolf Man” was coined by local law enforcement personnel and frequently used by the local media covering the case to perpetuate the racism embedded in the very fabric of Baton Rouge society.
Baton Rouge’s primary newspaper, the Morning Advocate, received an anonymous phone call on the day of Montgomery’s trial saying that the KKK would burn 100 crosses in front of the courthouse if the death penalty was not returned against the mentally challenged teenager who, as his lawyers claimed, had the mind of a “three year old.”
The warning had to be taken seriously. The Klan had been lighting fires to crosses all over Louisiana during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in East Baton Rouge and Livingston parishes. A logical assumption can be made that many in the Little Dixie neighborhood supported the cross-burnings.
Montgomery’s limited intellectual capacity did not matter to Pitcher whose personal and political allegiance lay with the Klan cross burners.
“If you bring anything but a capital verdict,” the district attorney told the teenager’s jury, “you’ll be jeopardizing the life of every law enforcement officer in this parish.”
The all-white jury responded with a death penalty verdict—many of whom laughed at the racial epithets lead prosecutor Ralph Roy directed at Montgomery’s two black attorneys throughout the trial. The Klan, and all their sympathizers, hailed the verdict as “justice served.”
First Assistant District Attorney Roy had employed the same inflammatory racist tactics during the Leon Brent trial—playing to the deep historical racism all-white, all-male juries had at the time about black men raping white women.
It was this racially-charged social and political environment I faced when I was returned to Baton Rouge to stand trial for the shooting death of J.C. Bodden. I had no idea what impact this environment would have on my case.