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Investigative reporter, author and former federal agent Chuck Hustmyre has seen the ugly side of life, from A to Z. Here he gets the last word on politics, crime, local government and pop culture.

In Jennings, just on the other side of Lafayette from us, police have found the bodies of seven murdered women in three years. Their ages ranged from 29 to 17. The body of Brittney Ann Gary, 17, was discovered Nov. 15. She was buried Sunday.

All seven victims were dumped beside roads or ditches, all near Interstate 10. The victims lived what police euphemistically refer to "high-risk lifestyles," meaning drugs or prostitution. Toxicology reports showed the first five victims had cocaine in their systems. Test results aren't yet available for the last two. Most of the women knew each other. Brittney Gary was a cousin of one victim and knew some of the others.

Still, law enforcement authorities are denying the obvious, at least publicly -- that there is a serial killer out there.

An article Monday in the (Lafayette) Daily Advertiser said this: "Although all the victims knew one another, led similar lifestyles and were found (only) miles apart from one another, authorities have hesitated to say the string of deaths are the work of a serial killer."

Just last week, after the seventh body was discovered, Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff Ricky Edwards told The Advocate, "We don’t have any links between them because we don’t necessarily have the evidence."

What's going on here?

The law enforcement brass is in denial. Police administrators never like to admit they're chasing a serial killer. Just the use of the term is explosive, they think. It strikes terror in the hearts of the public, and it puts the heat on the police to catch the killer.

Police are afraid of the word "suspect." Now it's "person of interest." If calling a person a suspect is too controversial for most police officials, imagine how nervous they get when they have to call someone a serial killer. Soon they will replace that term with something more benign like "repeat homicide offender."

Until then, they deny, deny, deny.

In August, well-known criminal profiler and serial killer expert Pat Brown told me, "The police will rarely admit there's a serial killer ... because once you say that you've got a serial killer out there everybody gets nervous."

In the Baton Rouge area, Derrick Todd Lee killed at least five women before local law enforcement put together a task force to catch him, and even then the task force didn't catch Lee. Attorney General's Investigator Dannie Mixon and a couple of cops from Zachary identified Lee as the killer from a DNA sample they took from him. Meanwhile, the much-vaunted task force had put its faith in a useless FBI profile and was spinning its wheels chasing ghosts in white pick-up trucks.

In the case of Sean Vincent Gillis, only a few sheriff's detectives recognized a spate of unsolved female killings as the work of a serial killer. After a lot of hard work, they caught him.

To this day, law enforcement officials will not admit that as late as 2004, after Lee and Gillis were in jail, another serial killer was operating in north Baton Rouge. For more information on that case, see my 225 article "B.R.'s other serial killer.”

In a true case of life imitating art, the new novel I'm almost finished writing is about a New Orleans homicide detective's frustration at his department's leadership because it refuses to be honest with the public about a serial killer operating in the city.

Now, that same scenario is playing out in real life less than 100 miles away.

The work of a serial killer isn't that hard to recognize. "You'll have a naked, dead, raped woman in the bushes," Pat Brown told me. "I guarantee you it's a serial killer. You don't have to link it to any other crimes. The kind of man who would grab a total stranger, pull her into the bushes, rape and murder her is a serial killer, and the police don't want to admit that. It takes like eight dead women in the bushes, maybe the same bush, before they say, 'Oh, yeah, maybe it's a serial killer."

So far, there have been seven dead women in the bushes in Jefferson Davis Parish.

We don't pay public officials to protect us from the truth. The more people who are aware that a serial killer may be stalking them, the more precautions they can take. If the police are in denial, there's a good chance that at least part of the public is too.

It's time for Sheriff Ricky Edwards to come clean with the public, to let everyone know -- without compromising the investigation -- what he knows and what he suspects, and to put together a crack investigative task force to catch this crazy bastard.

What do you say?

Chuck out.

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