Jordan LaHaye Fontenot
The cover of Euzebe Vidrine's memoir, "The Life of Euzebe Vidrine"
Decades before psychologists started interviewing serial killers, scanning their brains, theorizing on the inconceivable why? behind the senseless sadism of the Bundys and the Dahmers—twenty-six-year-old killer Euzebe Vidrine sat in a cell in the Evangeline Parish jail, dictating to a translator (he could neither write nor speak much English) his own confusion on the matter:
“I have grown and do not understand why and how I have been that way. I have been reared by an honorable father and mother; no one ever gave me bad advise; all what I did, I did it on my own will … God knows I tried hard to change [my life’s] course. But I never could resist the temptation which pulled me down to the very depth of hell.”
The Murder of Robert Leo Wiggins, Jr.
It was the summer of 1924, and Vidrine was awaiting his impending execution date, set for Friday, August 8 in the Ville Platte town square. Officials were building a gallows, just for him. It was to be the parish’s first, and ultimately only, legal hanging.
Vidrine was to be executed for the May 19 “assassination”—as it came to be called in the local paper—of Robert “Leo” Wiggins, Jr., a business owner and the son of the outgoing sheriff. Wiggins’s body had been discovered, shot once in the head and once in the heart, behind a white oak tree off of the main highway between Ville Platte and Mamou. Vidrine, after sneaking around in the woods, watched officials carry the body away to the house of Leo’s father-in-law, Dr. Yves Ardoin, who was also the Evangeline Parish coroner. And he followed them there, his clothes and shoes covered in blood. In his memoir, he wrote:
“I went to the house, looked at the body, mixed with the people. But I didn’t remain long at the dead body; it did not have any effect on me whatever; my heart didn’t even beat faster; no one looked at me suspiciously.”
He went home, not even bothering to change his clothes or hide his gun. When the police arrived at 5:30 in the morning, “they found all they were looking for,” according to Vidrine. They took his bloody clothes and shoes, along with his pistol and cartridges. Later that day, bloodhounds were brought in from Crystal Springs, Mississippi, including one particularly talented pup called “Red Eagle.” A search party of men from all over the state followed the pack, led by Red Eagle, as they traced the scent from the scene of the crime all throughout the woods of the parish, down the road leading into Ville Platte, and up to the spot, in front of the Evangeline Bank, where Vidrine would later claim he caught a ride to Yves Ardoin’s house. Later, when officials brought the hounds to the jail, Red Eagle stood up on his back legs and put his paws against the bars of Vidrine’s cell. Staring at the slobbering dog, and the mob behind it, Vidrine fainted.
Shortly afterwards, he submitted an official confession to Sheriff Charles Pucheu, stating:
“I, Euzebe Vidrine, do hereby voluntarily confess the murder of Leo Wiggins, this 21st day of May A.D. 1924. He (Leo) was coming along the road and I stopped him. He said, ‘What in the hell you doing in the road?’ and I shot him. I don’t remember whether he opened the door for me. I caught him by the feet and dragged him. I drove the car to where it was bogged out. I did not know it was Leo when I shot him, but I knew him when I pulled him out. I was drunk and did not know what I was doing. I don’t know why I took his car. I have been accused, but this is the first man I’ve killed.”
Despite this last statement, AP reports published in newspapers nationwide stated that Vidrine ultimately confessed to five more murders, in addition to Wiggins’s.
Photo by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot
The pages from Euzebe Vidrine's memoir, describing the day he killed Leo Wiggins.
The vicious public outcry was immediate—Wiggins being a well-known and -loved member of the local community. The funeral, held at Sacred Heart Catholic Church with over 1200 attendees, was said to be the largest ever held in the parish. After Vidrine’s indictment on May 24, the reporter for The Ville Platte Gazette, after laying out the details of the investigation, called for a “quick avenging by due and legal process of the law,” clarifying that by quick, he meant with “lightnight-like rapidity … no plea for clemency, no ‘think of my dear old mother,’ no insanity camaflouge (sic), no legal technicinity (sic), can paliate (sic)—he that murderously sheddeth man’s blood, so shall his blood be shed.”
This was hardly the first time the youthful Evangeline Parish—officially founded only a little over a decade before—had seen blood. The prohibition era in particular is known to have been a violent time on the prairie, rife with stories of clandestine bars where bullets flew and knives filled everyone’s pockets. Vidrine’s own brother René had been killed in a knife fight in 1918, left on the road to die—the very same road, it just so happened, where Vidrine would years later leave the body of Leo Wiggins.
What stood out about this crime, besides the high-profile victim, was the cold-blooded persona of Vidrine—who purportedly told officers, “When I kill, it makes me rejoice.” Vidrine’s acts of violence lacked the passion, fury, or desperation characteristic of most killings in the area at that time. Today, we use the words “sociopath” and “serial killer” to describe such men.
In 1924, the only word they had for someone like Vidrine was pure, unadulterated evil.
A Story as Old as Cain and Abel
Vidrine’s trial began on Thursday, May 24, presented before Judge B.H. Pavy in the 16th District Court. The state was represented by District Attorney Lee Garland and attorney Austin Fontenot; Vidrine’s defense team was made up of public defenders J. Hugo Dore and Cleveland Frugé. The Gazette reported that Vidrine arrived in court clean-shaven and well-dressed, but that “sleepless nights, torture of mind, fear of the rope, left him a semi-cringing human wreck.”
Testimony concluded on Saturday, at which point Vidrine asked for permission to speak to the court. On the stand, in broken English, he delivered a rambling, desperate speech—much of it spent decrying the evils of whiskey, and placing much of the blame for his actions on his own drunkenness. “The two or three first drinks you take you will swear that whiskey is the best friend in the world, but my friends, take my advice, whiskey will make you do things you do not want to do, that is the kind of friend whiskey is. I hope to God that Mr. Charles Pucheu will never fail to put every man he will find with whiskey under arrest.” He told the court that, because he had confessed, he had no crime remaining on his conscience, and that because of this—he should be granted mercy. And he argued that he would be of better economic use to the state doing hard labor at the penitentiary than by undergoing an expensive execution. “I wish I could speak plain English,” he said. “I would make every heart beat with sadness in this courthouse.”
“The birds were singing all around me. Nature seemed in all its glory and happiness. I wept and asked God to forgive me for what I was going to do.”
—Euzebe Vidrine, excerpted from his memoir, describing the moments before his first murder.
Alas, Vidrine’s appeal failed to rouse sympathy in the eyes of the jury, as well as the rest of its audience. Victor L. Dupuis from The Times Picayune summarized the speech as follows:
“Inarticulate, a ‘mute, inglorious Milton,’ but with a story in his heart as old as the story of Cain and Abel, he prayed, probably before he took the stand, for the gift of speech. But he had ‘neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech to stir the hearts of men.’ So, he must die on a gallows.”
It took the jury all of ten minutes to return a unanimous guilty verdict.
The Life of Euzebe Vidrine
On June 4, when Vidrine officially received his death sentence, he was described in all reports as remarkably unfettered, especially in comparison to his appearance at trial. At the hearing, he requested that his brothers be allowed to take his body afterwards, and that he be granted the time and assistance to write his life’s story—which would include a complete telling of all of his crimes. The judge, seeing no need to rush the execution, allowed it, and sent the killer back to his cell with writing materials.
The resulting memoir, The Life of Euzebe Vidrine, would be one of the first in a long tradition of America’s serial killer autobiographies—David Berkowitz’s Son of Hope, Donald Henry “Pee Wee” Gaskins Jr.’s Final Truth, and Danny Rolling’s The Making of a Serial Killer among them. For the doomed man (and it is usually a man), such a confessional offers an opportunity to take ownership of his own horrendous deeds, perhaps to express regret, perhaps to indulge in narcissistic aspirations for fame, perhaps to contemplate how he got to be the way he is at all. Vidrine’s memoir—which he was assisted in writing by his lawyer Dore and two other members of the community, Aurelis Mayeaux and V.L. Dupuis—seems to reveal a little of each of these sentiments.
At the outset of the book, Vidrine sets out his intentions: first, to “give a vivid description of causes, activities, and results of my actions so that the reader will be forewarned not to follow my path”; second, to take full and singular ownership of each of his crimes; third, to reveal every crime he has committed in full so as to halt any lingering rumors; and finally, to alleviate as much shame on his family as possible, “as my book will be an authentic proof that I committed nothing but printed herein.”
Vidrine goes on to describe an average upbringing on the outskirts of Evangeline Parish. He was born on July 12, 1898 to Arcille Vidrine and Aureline Fontenot in Ville Platte, one of ten children—five boys and five girls; a farming family. He recalls that they had a little dog named Soto, that his brother René and he would often fight, that his sister Aza taught him how to dance “back of the kitchen, barefooted, dust about a half-inch thick; but I finally got to be a good dancer.” He grew up Catholic but was not personally very religious, and quit school to work on the farm after the fourth grade. He remembers the first “crooked” thing he ever did, which was stealing his father’s whiskey and money, nearly every day.
At age fifteen, he writes that he “began worrying. I don’t know about what.” He would frequently find himself inconsolable, crying over nothing in particular. He started seeking out general mischief—stealing horses, cutting down fences and driving cattle out of their fields, taking things from one house and planting them at the neighbors’ to initiate a dispute. “I had more fun in doing this then to go to a dance (sic). The greatest of my pleasures was doing meanness to people. I have been that way ever since I was a little boy.”
Illustration of Euzebe’s hanging, and the speech he gave on the gallows, published in 1924 in the American Weekly.
In great detail he describes his courtship with his wife-to-be, Lillian Andrus—whom he was seeing alongside another poor girl, Estelle Ortego. He promised both girls he would marry them, but after leading Estelle on for years he finally admitted his infidelity. At this stage in his memoir, the murderer offers the reader romantic advice: “I advise everybody not to undermind (sic) anybody especially in love with a sweet innocent girl. Love is great as death, on some occasions. Love will drive you to your grave. I know it by experience.” He married Andrus on August 20, 1918. He was twenty years old; she was fourteen. On one of their first nights together, he woke her in the middle of the night sobbing, and could not explain why.
Their marriage would be characterized by financial hardship, Vidrine shifting from farming to taking jobs out of town to pay the bills, with frequent stints staying at one of their parents’ houses in between. With the help of his father-in-law, he purchased some land in Turkey Creek, but struggled to pay the note. To assist him, his father-in-law gave him a mule. The mule was wild, and wouldn’t let Vidrine touch him. On one afternoon, he became so infuriated that he took out the shotgun and killed the animal himself, then lied to his wife about it.
On top of all of these strains, Vidrine’s neighbor, Pierre Vidrine (unrelated) had started spreading rumors about him—saying he was a pig stealer.
“My wife and I grieved about what was going on,” he writes. “Our reputation was ruined; we wouldn’t enjoy visiting our neighbors; there were no hopes of paying the place out; we couldn’t face our relatives because I couldn’t pay them … Despondency took charge of me. I cried like a baby; I would get angry at times and then disgusted, disappointed with life.”
On April 25, 1921, Vidrine writes of how he saddled his horse, loaded his gun with buckshot, and rode over to Pierre’s farm. He sat on a log and wondered whether or not he should kill the man causing him so much trouble. “The birds were singing all around me,” he writes. “Nature seemed in all its glory and happiness. I wept and asked God to forgive me for what I was going to do.”
Three days after he killed Pierre Vidrine, officers came to his door with a warrant, and brought him to jail. A grand jury found a true bill against him, but in June a petit jury pronounced him “Not Guilty,” since all of the evidence was purely circumstantial. He was freed.
By October, Vidrine was once again in financial strife, and he and his wife agreed to separate to find work. He went to work in Meridian, Louisiana until November—when he received a letter from his wife that she was in New Iberia. She told him that if he could find a job there, then they could live together again. After spending two days searching for work, without any luck, he cried for half a day. He sat, wondering if he should kill himself. “But instead I made up my mind that I was going to kill people on the road for a living.” This was December 2, 1921.
From there, Vidrine took the train to Eunice, and sought out a driver to bring him to Kaplan. “I went to a colored man,” he writes, “as I preferred to kill a negro than a white man.” The Black man refused to drive him where he wanted to go, as it was muddy and he was worried about getting bogged. So, Vidrine approached an Italian man, Charles Garbo—who would be the first victim in a killing spree that would last two weeks. He shot Garbo in the head after he had pulled over to put chains on his tires, and took four dollars from his pockets. Then he proceeded to walk the rest of the way to Lafayette, “so happy as I had satisfied my desire”.
The next day, he boarded a train in Lafayette to Crowley, then at the depot asked a Mexican driver named John Roy if he could take him to Eunice. With Roy, Vidrine enjoyed two pints of whiskey—both getting drunk together as they made their way to town. About a mile outside of Eunice, Vidrine asked Roy to pull over, and then shot him in the head. All the victim had on him was a cheap watch and a pocket book full of sand, gravel, with a single nickel inside. “A hoodoo,” according to Vidrine. From there, he decided to go home.
The Ville Platte Gazette, front page, August 9, 1924.
About five days later, after spending some time with his in-laws—though his wife was still out working somewhere, presumably New Iberia—Vidrine set out for Orange, Texas to find work again. But he was not done with killing. On the evening of December 13, he asked a service car man, this one named Lee Duke, to take him up to Beaumont. Along the drive, Vidrine writes, he was “itching to kill him.” He asked Duke to pull over, so that they could smoke a cigarette. “I have never forgotten the odor of that cigarette,” writes Vidrine. Duke himself pulled out a pipe, lit it, and then keeled over as Vidrine had shot him in the head. From him, Vidrine gathered seventy-five cents, a gun, and a nice watch. Then he walked the rest of the way to Orange, and ordered ham and eggs at a café.
That night, Vidrine started walking back towards Louisiana, following the railroad tracks. “I crossed a big river, and a swamp, and heard all the wild animals scream,” he writes. “My conscience ached. I could see Duke’s pipe sticking up in his mouth. I could see poor old Pierre Vidrine; I could see Garbo. They haunted men (sic). I prayed God to lead me away from temptation.”
He arrived home in time to celebrate Christmas with his family, which was interrupted by a visit from the Lafayette Parish Sheriff, who had come to interview him about Roy’s killing. “There’s nothing I enjoyed more than to be arrested and questioned,” he writes. “It gave me great pleasure, and I could answer them without the least hesitation.” Without any hard evidence, the officers were forced to release him.
Shortly afterwards, his wife returned home, and they moved in with her family, and started farming. Still with very little money, his wife became restless and desired to move to the city for better work. “I wept and wept over the matter,” writes Vidrine, who attributed his wife’s unhappiness to boredom. “Oh, if we only had a child of our own, I would never have gotten to where I am.”
Over the course of the next few years, Vidrine went from job to job—sometimes alongside his wife but often not. He was arrested more than once for misdemeanors or suspicions, though the charges never stuck. He doesn’t claim to have killed anyone from the time of December 1921 to May 1924.
That spring, he had just moved back into his mother’s house. His wife had moved home, too, but declined to live with him. One day, she left to go to New Orleans, and he never saw her again. Vidrine continued caring for his mother, farming on her land.
Photograph of Euzebe’s hanging, and the speech he gave on the gallows, published in 1924 in the American Weekly.
“What was life to me?” he writes of this time. “I had committed such crimes; I had no children to work forward for; my wife didn’t stay with me; I couldn’t love any other woman; I wasn’t happy with anybody else. Other people looked so happy and I was so miserable, an awful past, a broken heart, and an aching soul, no future; distrusted by so many people and worried lest I was under suspicion. I would go nowhere unless I was under the influence of whiskey.”
The day he killed Wiggins, May 19, 1924, Vidrine writes that he had stolen a gallon of whiskey and kept himself drunk for three days straight. On his way to his sister’s house, he laid down in the woods and slept. When he awoke, he became tormented with the temptation to kill again. “It seems like there was a guiding angel saying “take the right path, be good” and there was a driving devil, saying “Go ahead. What does it matter? It’s the only relief for you.” A car started driving towards him. “The devil had won,” he writes.
Vidrine’s memoir ends with an account of his trial, the transcript of his speech included. Of his final days in that prison cell, he writes: “I am getting fat while in jail; I have a good appetite, sleep very well, never worry, do not dread execution.”
After he deemed the story complete, he sent word to the judge, asking that he “now speedily be executed.”
A Doomed Man
The curiosity of a doomed man who had killed so many, and was ready to reveal all, captivated not only the imagination of Evangeline Parish, but of the nation. Leading up to his execution, publications from coast to coast were giving space to the strange character of Euzebe Vidrine. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch devoted an entire page to the story, a rendering of Vidrine’s face smirking right in the center of it all. Murder investigations for the other men Vidrine claimed to have killed were re-opened, then closed with finality. Frank A. Smith, serving a fifteen-year sentence in the Texas State Penitentiary for the murder of Lee Duke, was pardoned by the governor. And advertisements for pre-orders of Vidrine’s book were found in newspapers across Louisiana, at a rate of $1 per copy. There’s no publicity like a public execution: the day Vidrine was to die was the same as his official publication date, August 8, 1924.
Advertisement for Euzebe’s memoir, published in The Daily Advertiser July 26, 1924.
Not everyone was so enthusiastic about the implications of a murderer’s memoir, though. One editorial in The Gazette posed the question of the morality of distributing such a story among the public:
“The broadcasting of ‘crime’ can in no wise serve to suppress crime. Rather: it tells of crime, the escape from crime, abets those criminally inclined.” The writer suggested that if the aim of the book’s publication was moral welfare, then its profiters should circulate it for free—“not commercialize it for filthy lucre.” Another article, written by the Reverend Henry S. Gill of the Herman Baptist Church in Turkey Creek, warned that parents who purchased a copy might later find their children involved in such atrocities as Vidrine, answering the question “why?” with “Papa, Mamma, you had a book into which I seen and taking as my example the things upon which my eyes fell, and I tried it too.”
Headline for a full-page feature on Euzebe’s hanging published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch July 13, 1924.
Against the publicity of Vidrine’s confessionals and impending hanging was also the last ditch efforts of his lawyers and family members to save him, by way of an insanity plea. On August 1, a signed statement by alienist Dr. C.F. Holbrook claimed that, after examination, he determined that Vidrine was definitely “insane, or at least of a diseased mind, involving some psychosis or form of insanity, and was not therefore responsible for his actions,” as reported by The Daily Advertiser. Dr. Holbrook’s report went on to say, “This condition has, in my opinion, been developing for a number of years and finally manifested itself in Vidrine’s actions during the past few months.” They requested a reprieve from Governor Henry Fuqua, to allow time for an investigation by a lunacy commission. The Governor swiftly relegated the responsibility to recommend clemency to the court of original jurisdiction. Within the week, Judge Pavey had appointed a lunacy commission—whose three doctors unanimously reported that Vidrine was indeed sane. When told of the outcome, Vidrine responded: “I guess that ends it; the jig’s up.”
As Vidrine spent his last days contemplating the trajectory of his life—and where it had all gone wrong—he raised a few issues of blame: general misfortune, a sensitive and melancholy spirit, the lack of a family of his own, and of course, whiskey. But ultimately, the conclusion he seemed to come to was one of inevitability, of fate. “My experience has made me believe that a human being has his destination; if you read this book carefully and follow my life since I was a little boy up to now, you can’t help but agree with me.” This, of course, removes a crucial layer of responsibility for the dreadful crimes Vidrine committed. But it speaks to a larger question that was being asked all around the country—and is still being asked to this day: are some people born murderers? “Whether Vidrine killed because he was fore-ordained to kill, as he is credited with saying, or whether he planned to kill for money gain as the state lay claim in the Wiggins case, baffles the imagination,” wrote the reporter at The Gazette. All the way in Appleton, Wisconsin, a writer found himself plagued by the question of Vidrine’s psychology. “This murderer was certainly not a normal man,” he wrote. “He may not have been insane, but he was a willful and cold-blooded slayer. An examination of his endocrine glands would probably have revealed some startling characteristics to the psychiatrists.”
“Courage, Charlie. Cut the rope.”
In the days just before his end, Vidrine made several requests, all of which were granted. He wanted to see his mother and his brothers, who came to him and tearfully prayed with him. He wanted to attend a service preached by the Reverend Philip Prather, pastor of a church in Turkey Creek. Prather, along with a segment of his congregation and some of his choir, came and held a service right in Vidrine’s cell—reading the story of how Christ forgave the thief crucified just beside him. He later received his last rites from Catholic priest Father Savy. He asked to hear the sound of a violin, and after a musician was brought in for the occasion, asked them to stop playing after only three songs.
Vidrine also requested that he be bathed, showered, and photographed before his execution. “I want to make a grand appearance, yes,” he told Sheriff Pucheu, who went out and purchased a suit for him. Vidrine’s last request was that, afterward, his body be publicly displayed in an opened casket in the center of the courthouse square.
The night of August 7, Vidrine was reportedly in good humor, laughing with the guards, before sleeping soundly through his last night alive.
On the fated day, he was led at noon to the gallows by Sheriff Pucheu and his deputies. On the way, he stopped to pose for photos by the local newspapermen, and would not go forward until they assured him that the photos were good enough for publication.
Illustration of Euzebe’s hanging, and the speech he gave on the gallows, published in 1924 in the American Weekly.
Standing at the gallows, he was given the chance to issue his last words—with a fellow French-speaker volunteering to translate. For thirty minutes, he proceeded to essentially repeat the message he had emphasized at his trial: “Whiskey is an evil thing.” When he was done, they placed the rope around his neck, and he looked to the news cameras and said “Now, another with me smiling. A good one with me smiling right through the rope.” Finally, he said his last words: “Courage, Charlie. Cut the rope.” The trap sprung at 12:45 pm, and Euzebe Vidrine was declared dead at 1:21.
Of the enormous crowd gathered afterwards, The Gazette’s reporter wrote:
“They were here in thousands, these French-Americans of the Southland Arcadie; from the far corners of the parish of Evangeline named for Longfellow’s maid of sorrows They were here from everywhere, gathered in the dusty streets, filling the courtyard, standing alongside the stockade built on the east side of the jail house. They talked their French or the patois that compromises with English. They were excited; it is their nature to be excited even over small things, but this, the solemn taking of a man’s life, is no small thing. When whispers from those nearest the stockade carried the word ‘the sheriff has just cut the rope,’ they tarried for a brief half hour in conversation; talked over the crime, told how they heard the trap fall that shot the soul of Euzebe Vidrine into eternity. Their vengeance sated, they turned their steps homeward, thinking on the way not of ‘Euzebe’ as all spoke of him, but of Madame Vidrine—the mother of a son who sowed to the wind.”
The Legacy
The mythos of Euzebe Vidrine—his dastardly legacy and gruesome end—has lingered in Evangeline Parish now for almost a century. Almost as though cursed, members of the Vidrine family themselves followed Euzebe to the grave in their own tragic ways. Barely six months after the momentous hanging, Euzebe’s brother Elgee was found beaten to death within a mile of where Wiggins had been found, on the very same highway where their older brother René had also been killed all those years ago. Elgee’s murder would not be solved for almost twenty years.
Then, in February 1937, Aureline Vidrine—Euzebe, René, and Elgee’s poor mother—was struck from behind by an automobile while driving her horse and buggy. She flew from her seat, and was killed instantly.
That same year, Euzebe’s second cousin Melvin Vidrine would commit the most deplorable crime since Euzebe’s—luring his common-law wife into the woods, using her eighteen-month-old child, and then shooting her. When interrogating him, Sheriff Pucheu said “It was just as though Euzebe Vidrine had been the accused. He looked like him, talked like him, and even has those clear, glittering, pale-blue eyes like Euzebe’s.” They locked him in the very same cell his cousin had occupied a decade before, and when it came time for his trial, the parish saw the biggest mob of spectators since Euzebe’s execution. Melvin would be ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment in Angola State Penitentiary.
Most major crimes that would occur over the next generation in Evangeline would be automatically put in the context of Euzebe’s—though never again did the parish come across a criminal quite so sensational. There never was another hanging in Evangeline, though in 1947, two Black men accused of murder—Hillery Ledet and Henry Scott—were executed by electrocution.
Still today, in Evangeline Parish, people recall being told as children to look out for the murderous boogie man Euzebe Vidrine, who killed without regret and drank the blood of his victims.
If Euzebe still haunts the prairies, the eternal sentence would have come as a surprise to him. On one of the last pages of his memoir, he wrote: “I have made peace with God. I am praying fervently and earnestly. I expect to go to heaven.”
