The River Parishes Killer

The River Parishes Killer: Gambling, Murder, and the Hunt for the Truth Along Louisiana's Bayou Towns

For nine months in 1996 and 1997, an unknown killer moved through small Louisiana towns along the Mississippi River, entering the homes of elderly residents and leaving six of them dead. The River Parishes had always trusted their own, until the danger turned out to be living quietly among them all along.

Daniel Blank was a respected auto mechanic, a familiar face in garages and casinos across three parishes. He was also a man drowning in gambling debt his legitimate income could never explain, and a man whose childhood head injury left him capable of chilling, methodical violence while seemingly unable to grasp where it would lead. When two survivors finally gave investigators a face, a six-hundred-mile manhunt ended in a Texas auto shop and a twelve-and-a-half-hour confession that broke a case nine months in the making.

But the forensic evidence never matched him. Not the DNA on the murder weapon. Not the fingerprints at three crime scenes. For decades that contradiction sat quietly in evidence storage, until a federal judge ran out of patience with a state crime lab's delays, and reopened a question no one expected to ask again.

A meticulously researched true crime account of addiction, confession, and a case that still isn't closed.