On August 24, 1922, hooded men seized five men near Mer Rouge, a cotton town in Morehouse Parish. One was freed unharmed and two were beaten and released. The other two, Watt Daniel and Thomas F. Richards, did not come home. Daniel was a World War veteran, and his father, J. L. Daniel, who was seventy, found his way home in serious condition. Alton Ingram, who studied the parish's Klan in a 1961 LSU thesis, ties the abduction to the Ku Klux Klan. The bodies stayed hidden for about four months.
A governor with no one to call
In September a New Orleans Times-Picayune correspondent, Paul Wooton, carried a letter from Governor John M. Parker to the Justice Department in Washington. A Bureau of Investigation memo of September 25 records the governor's complaints: the Klan was interfering with his mail, telegraph and telephone, local authorities were inactive, and the local grand jury had done nothing. The department sent four agents to work with the state's attorney general, Adolphe Coco. A memo of November 13 reported that Klansmen and their friends had planned to arrest, kidnap or kill those agents, and that a hurried exit saved them. The Bureau's agents named Dr. B. M. McKoin, a former mayor of Mer Rouge, as the mob's leader.
The lake
In December Parker sent a company of the Louisiana National Guard into the parish, and guardsmen patrolled along Lake La Fourche. The bodies were recovered in the week before Christmas. Drs. Charles Duval and H. M. Hanford of New Orleans examined them, and the pathologists later testified that the bones were broken before death. Coco said, "Their deaths were horrifying in their details." Two graves were dug side by side in the Mer Rouge cemetery, the caskets were wrapped in flags, and a National Guard detail was assigned to the funerals. The first arrest was T. Jeff Burnett, held on a murder warrant Coco signed.
Bastrop
Judge Odom ordered a public hearing at the Bastrop courthouse, to open on January 5, 1923. Two companies of the 156th Infantry camped on the courthouse and jail grounds, and machine guns were set on the jail. The press described the governor's aim as "tearing the mask off the Ku Klux Klan." A national newsmagazine later counted 125 witnesses who testified about Klan activities in the parish.
Testimony then went to a new grand jury, drawn on March 5. Its foreman was J. C. Evans and newspapers estimated that as many as six of its members were Klansmen; the same magazine reported that Bastrop residents put the number at eight. Coco meant to ask for indictments ranging from assault to murder. By late March the grand jury had returned no indictments, citing insufficient evidence. J. K. Skipwith, head of the Morehouse Klan, said he was "highly elated." Ingram found that no one was prosecuted. He also found that the local Klan collapsed afterward and that the case drew attention across Louisiana and the nation.
Bastrop is still the parish seat. Ten miles north of it, Chemin-A-Haut State Park sits on the ridge above Bayou Bartholomew, a quiet place to stop in the parish where the hearing was held.