THE SINCLAIR CASE

Chapter Seven: The Istrouma Football Wives

Sadie and J.C. had been married roughly a decade by December 1965.

Bodden’s public obituary shows he was a “veteran of the Korean War.”

That war started on June 25, 1950.

Bodden turned 16 on October 8, 1950. By age, he would have been a sophomore in high school that year. He turned 17 in October 1951 during his “junior” year and turned 18 in October 1952 meaning he graduated from Istrouma in the spring of 1953,

The Korean War ended on July 27, 1953.

Boot camp training during the Korean War was eight weeks.

Assuming Bodden graduated from Istrouma on May 1, 1953 and immediately enlisted in the military, he would have graduated out of boot camp on or around July 1, 1953,

Again, assuming Bodden was air lifted to Korea immediately after boot camp, he would have been part of the Korean War for roughly three weeks at most, hardly enough time to earn a “veteran” status.

Military service during the Korean War was two years. That means Bodden returned to Little Dixie in the spring of 1955 at age 20.

Sadie was born on September 14, 1933.

She would have been 21years old when Bodden returned home from the military. It can reasonably be assumed the couple married in that time frame.

Whatever the date of their marriage, Sadie became a beloved Istrouma teacher molding the children of parents she had attended Istrouma with. One of her graduating students in 1965 was Louis “Woody” Jenkins who was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in 1972 and became another political voice for the Istrouma network. He was one of the many friends of “Dr. Clyde Lindsey.” Jenkins posted a notice on the Istrouma Journal’s Facebook page in September 2020 saying that Lindsey, then 95, was “doing well.” Jenkins is publisher of the journal.

Besides the Kennard and Jenkins alliance in the legislature, one of Sadie’s closest Istrouma friends was Sylvia Duke who became a powerful executive administrator for the President of the Louisiana Senate. She worked for such political kingpins as Sens. Michael H. O’Keefe and Sammy B. Nunez, Jr.—both of whose political careers were marred with corruption charges and/or criminal convictions.

In violation of the state’s ethics code, Duke used the stationery of the Senate President’s office to write letters to the pardon board opposing my release. She invoked the names of these Senate presidents at every opportunity to make sure her opposition in “the Sinclair case” was known loud and clear in the highest political circles in Baton Rouge, including the Governor’s Office.

Sylvia Duke was an expert behind-the-scenes power broker. Ginger Roberts told me in 1984 that Duke was the “political poison” in my case. She used her powerful legislative position for decades to wage a personal vendetta in “the Sinclair case” because of her close friendship ties to the Boddens. One pardon board chairman in 1979 told my mother that “Sylvia Duke may be the reason why your son will never get out of prison.”

Neither my mother nor I even knew who Sylvia Duke was at the time.

Sylvia’s husband, Gene, played with Bodden on Big Fuzzy’s 1952 team. Like his wife, he also made it a life mission to exact personal revenge against me at every turn during my four decade incarceration. He tried to verbally insert himself into my very last parole hearing in April 2006 but was cut off by the chairman of the panel before he could launch into a vindictive tirade about why I should never be released from prison. That marked the first time any voice in the Istrouma network had ever been shut down at any of my twelve pardon and parole board hearings.

Duke, who was also one of Bodden’s pallbearers, stormed out of the parole hearing room on April 25, 2006 after the board announced its decision to grant parole. He joined an angry chorus from the Istrouma network led by a representative from the district attorney’s office that said “let’s go, there ain’t no justice here.”

Prison officials had my wife and her two family members that attended the parole hearing wait inside the building until the Istrouma network departed from the prison facility. The officials were concerned about what the Istrouma network might say or do should there be a parking lot encounter with my wife and her family.

That last official concern about the Istrouma network possibly reacting outside the boundary of the law spoke volumes about their lawless four-decade crusade for revenge in “the Sinclair case.”

Sadie did not live to see the end of the story.

She died in 2000 at age 66 from Alzheimer’s complications in a Baton Rouge nursing home.

Two decades after Sadie’s death, Sylvia died in October 2020 from COVID-19 complications. She was 84 years of age.