Louisiana Voice

A big hoo-ha was made by Louisiana State Police last week over the arrest of four men in Covington for the MURDER  of a 16-year-old St. Tammany girl near the parish fairgrounds 44 years ago.

And certainly, law enforcement is to be commended for the apparent solving of the 1982 rape and murder of Roxanne Sharp. Cold cases are, after all, difficult to work as evidence gets packed away in boxes and forgotten until some enterprising detective reopens the case.

But a murder of another teenage girl in north Louisiana occurred a year earlier than that of Roxanne’s and it remains unsolved with little prospects of obtaining justice for the victim or her family.

Could it be because Roxanne came from an upscale community and Carol Ann Cole was a runaway from a girls’ home in Arcadia in Bienville Parish where “troubled” girls were sent by parents to get them right with Jesus but instead found themselves banished to lives of living hell at the hands of a fundamentalist preacher who meted out beatings and is alleged to have sexually molested some of the residents?

New Bethany was the subject of several posts by LouisianaVoice and stories told by survivors of the home related horrendous treatment at the hands of Rev. Mack Ford and staff members.

Survivors told of being banished to Ford’s “LTI,” a darkened room where girls were handcuffed to beds, given only a bucket for a toilet, allowed only two or three squares of toilet paper, fed only minimally and forced to listen to tapes of Ford full gospel sermons that played on a loop 24/7. Beatings were routine, some said, with one girl having been administered more than 100 licks with a board paddle.

Because Ford invoked the separation of church and state, authorities took a hands-off approach to oversight of the home before it was finally shut down in 2001.

On Jan. 28, 1981, the body of a female estimated at between 15 and 20 years of age was found in Bossier Parish, two parishes west of Bienville, a distance of about 50 miles or so.

Linda Phelps, living in Michigan, fearing her sister may have met with foul play after she ran away from New Bethany Home for Girls, filed a missing person report when Carol Ann’s letters to her family stopped in late December.

Police learned that Carol, who was staying at a Shreveport residence at the time, had left to attend a party but never returned.

Phelps suspected that the victim might be her sister, who she believed spent time at New Bethany between October 1980 and sometime prior to her death. She said a photo taken at New Bethany around the time of her sister’s disappearance depicted a group of girls seated in church pews (there was a small church in the New Bethany compound). One of the girls bore a strong resemblance to Carol, Phelps said.

Moreover, another women who said she also spent time at New Bethany with a girl who looked like Carol but she was unable to recall her name.

The victim was wearing jeans, a shite, long-sleeved shirt with pink, yellow and blue stripes, a beige sweater with a hood, white socks, shoes and white boxer briefs. She had been stabbed nine times and a knife found in the soil near her remains was believed to have been the murder weapon.

Most of the evidence recovered from the scene, however, was destroyed in a 2005 fire in the facility in which it was stored.

That raises the question of why was the evidence allowed to remain unexamined for DNA for 24 years before fire struck?

DNA technology hadn’t come into play in investigations during much of the time, true enough. But by 2005, it certainly had. Yet, the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office had not pursued that evidence.

At any rate, a decade later, in February 2015, the sheriff’s department finally got around to opening a Facebook page in an effort to learn the victim’s identity. An artist’s drawing and a profile alerted a woman who notified authorities that she had seen a Craigslist photo of Carol Ann that had been posted by a friend of Phelps.

Comparisons were made between the victim’s DNA and that of her parents and it was positively determined that the victim who had been known only as “Bossier Doe” was Carol Ann Cole.

No arrests have been made 45 years after her murder. Ford died in February 2015.