Partners in fighting crime – Strange fellowship grows from an unsolved murder

Hope Haven Mausoleum in Gonzales guards the remains of a woman who is gone but whose mysterious story lives on.

Pieces of the plot are the stuff of intrigue. There’s a tragic death, a theft and a search for truth.

The end is unfinished, and of course, there’s a twist. The quest for answers forged an unlikely bond between the family of an alleged criminal and the man authorities say she bilked out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

It started on a hot summer day in Baton Rouge. 

Kathleen Downey’s husband reported her missing in early August 2010.

When she didn’t come home, family members say, they searched parking lots and garages throughout the city trying to spot her 1998 Honda Accord.

More than three weeks later, police found it parked at Jefferson Heights Apartments, in the 8900 block of Jefferson Highway. Someone had reported a foul odor in the area.

Downey’s body was stuffed in the trunk of the car.

Forensic tests showed the 55-year-old woman died around the time she was reported missing.

For then-23-year-old Michelle Downey Messina, the grisly discovery was an unimaginable conclusion to an already troubling, confusing tale.

About a year before, Messina learned her mother had been charged with felony theft. Police accused Downey of stealing from her employer, Ron Duplessis, who owns a Buick GMC dealership on Airline Highway.

Initially, Messina says, her mother told the family she didn’t do it. As authorities investigated, her story changed.

“To look back at your mother, who you thought was honest with you on everything, it kind of makes you want to rethink everything,” Messina says.

Downey kept Duplessis’ books for about five years. Internal audits showed money went missing. “six figures,” Duplessis says.

Court records show Downey had duped Duplessis out of at least $200,000.

But Duplessis says there was more happening than just cash not accounted for. Downey, he says, needed a partner to syphon off as much as she did.

“It was a very sophisticated scam,” Duplessis says, declining to go into further detail. “She wasn’t an idiot, but she just wasn’t that smart of a person to pull this complex of a scam off.”

Police seem to think only one person was involved in the theft. No other arrests have been made.

But Duplessis didn’t want to just wait around for more charges. He wanted his money back.

That led him to Messina.

Downey bought a vehicle from her boss to give to her daughter while she attended LSU. But after Duplessis fired Downey, he found the $14,000 check she wrote for the car had not been deposited. Duplessis planned to collect on the debt.

He sent letters seeking the money to Messina at her parents’ address, but she says she never received them.

Just a few months before Downey died, Duplessis repossessed the vehicle.

But once Duplessis met Messina, he says, he knew she didn’t know the whole story. After her mother’s death, Duplessis says he reached out to Messina.

“Eventually we met up,” Duplessis says, “and we kind of combined forces after the murder.”

Now the pair is bent on keeping Downey’s death at the forefront of cases Baton Rouge police examine.But they haven’t gotten their way.

“We’ve been very frustrated with law enforcement,” Duplessis says. “For some reason, they’re not motivated at all to investigate this case.”

Police offer only measured responses to questions regarding Downey’s death, but according to department spokesman Lt. Don Kelly, the case remains open. It’s not necessarily considered a homicide, however.

“We continue to investigate it as a suspicious death,” Kelly says. “To the best of my knowledge, the investigation into her felony charges ended with her death.”

What police found in the trunk of Downey’s Accord doesn’t make the case easier to solve.

Besides a pair of women’s capri pants, slide-on sandals and a purple short-sleeved shirt, the rest was bones.

An abnormality on her head was likely an old injury that healed or a bump she was born with, according to a forensic report from LSU’s FACES Laboratory. There was a similar description for a reconnected broken rib.

The report listed nothing indicating what scientists thought could have killed her.

No cause is listed on her state-issued death certificate. The FACES report says Downey had been dead at least a week when her body was found.

She was officially identified through dental records.

FACES Lab Director Mary Manhein wouldn’t discuss specifics of Downey’s file because police still consider the death an open investigation. Manhein and her staff are renowned for helping authorities determine how people die, but she says the South Louisiana weather and environment don’t always make the details of a death easy to determine.

“In a subtropical climate like we’re in, a body can decompose very rapidly in the heat,” Manhein says. “In some cases, I’ve seen a body that’s completely distorted within 24 hours.”

In Messina’s mind, things still don’t add up.

She has come to believe in her mother’s confession to authorities that she stole from Downey. But Messina doesn’t know why she would have taken the cash—or how she would have spent it.

Her parents had financial problems years ago, she says, but they paid off debts and didn’t buy expensive things. Her mom occasionally visited casinos, but Messina doesn’t believe she had a gambling problem.

“If you had all this money, this constant cash flow, even if it was over a period of years, you would’ve had to have been going on more than just a weekend trip to Marksville or to Lake Charles,” Messina says.

Since Messina and her brother had grown up, Downey started taking more time for herself. She liked to read Nicholas Sparks and Nora Roberts books. Sometimes the mother and daughter would cook together.

Messina thinks about that now as she seeks answers.

“You would think that it gets easier, but it doesn’t really when it’s still open,” she says. “It’s not like a death that, once we buried her, we could put it all away. No matter whether she stole the money or didn’t steal the money, I don’t think she deserved to be killed and put in the trunk of a vehicle.”