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.

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You remember the saga of the F-bomb hurling school board member?

You should. It’s been less than a week since LouisianaVoice reported on St. Tammany Parish School Board member CHARLES HARRELL muttering “Go f**k yourselves” into a hot mic following a board vote last week that extended the collective bargaining agreement with employees that resulted in the crowd erupting in applause.

Well, the upshot of that little display of petulance has resulted in an official call for a special meeting of the board tomorrow (Tuesday) at 6 p.m. to consider a resolution of censure “pertaining to school board member District 5.”

As you may or may not know, there is only one District 5 school board member: Charles Harrell.

The meeting is to consider CENSURING Harrell for his outburst and the proceedings may be seen live on STPPS, the St. Tammany Parish Public School online feed.

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The numbers vary, but the core facts remain the same.

The State of Louisiana, through the University of Louisiana Board and Louisiana Tech University are concealing the expenditure of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds in order to finalize a settlement between Tech and Conference USA, a settlement which clears the way for Tech to exit CUSA and move into the Sun Belt Conference.

Front Office Sports online news service puts the fee for departing CUSA after 13 years north of the $8 MILLION that UTEP paid CUSA in order to leave for the Mountain West Conference.

The numbers are confusing because CUSA first said it should cost as much as $5.5 MILLION to leave early and Tech opened the bidding at a lower amount.

Of course, the numbers would be crystal clear if the agreement had not contained the dreaded NDA (non-disclosure agreement) that shrouds the final dollar amount in secrecy.

It’s the explosion of confidential settlements that concerns me. This is taxpayer money that’s being bandied about as a bargaining chip in this comedic custody battle.

Want to know why it’s laughable? Get this official statement released by Tech: “The move to the Sun Belt Conference in July is one that will benefit the health and well-being of our student athletes, the fiscal stability of our athletics department and the economic vitality of our entire region.”

Really? A multi-million-dollar payout to jump from one conference to return one you were a member of a few years back and left for the Western Athletic Conference is going to somehow contribute to better health for student athletes? Or their well-being? Is that some sort of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. MAHA gimmick?

If you sincerely have their health and well-being in mind, you might consider backing off on scheduling the big boys who routinely beat your players’ brains out. You’re just not ready for the SEC or the Big Ten or ACC level of play. I love Tech, but hey, I’m a realist. I know you do it for the bucks and not the glory, the athletes be damned.

As for the fiscal stability and economic vitality, I pretty much covered those in the previous paragraph. Actually, the last sentence of the previous paragraph.

And with the exception of maybe one or two well-heeled alumni (I’m a Tech alumnus, but not a wealthy one), there is no TAF from which to draw a seemingly endless pool of cash to lavish on coach buyouts. Any major expenditure of $8 or $5.5 million—or whatever—is taxpayer money and the school should be held accountable for any such expenditure.

Yeah, I know, Tech is claiming the move will save millions in travel expenses. But it didn’t seem to mind shelling out travel expenses when it jumped from the Sun Belt to the WAC where it had to play games in Nevada, Idaho, California and Hawaii. That took a pretty good chunk of change and Tech made that move without batting an eye, as I recall.

LouisianaVoice REPORTED LAST MONTH that litigation had been initiated over the proposed move. That was after both CUSA and Sun Belt released football schedules for 2026 and both had Tech playing a full slate of games—more than two dozen combined. That would be enough to wear just about any team down.

But signing onto multi-million-dollar confidential settlements is enough to wear down the tax-paying citizens of Louisiana.

And of course, there are the God-know-how-much in attorney fees spent on flinging motions, countermotions, requests for information, interrogatories, denials, depositions—all of which eventually led to negotiations and maybe mediation before agreeing in principle to in all likelihood, a predetermined outcome.

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By Paul Spillman, guest columnist

As I’ve written about this both here and elsewhere and the subject is vastly more complex than one essay can address. I think a deeper dive into the current state of college athletics is in order. The essential problem remains unchanged – the NCAA as it is currently structured and organized is not exempt from antitrust law and cannot regulate the movement or earnings of student athletes. So how did we get here?

The NCAA was founded in 1910, evolving from an earlier organization which began in 1906. It was founded at the suggestion of President Theodore Roosevelt to address safety concerns in football, which at the time was only played at the college level. As a rule-making body for college football there was not even a thought as to application of antitrust law. But times changed.

Over the next several decades the NCAA became not just a rule-making body for football, but the rule-making body for all intercollegiate sports. And not just a rule-making body but a governing body as well, the rule-enforcing body. During this period of time – roughly the 1920s though the 1950s – the NCAA was rarely challenged as a governing body and if challenged rarely lost. There was no actual cash compensation – at least not legally recognized – and “benefits” could be denied in exchange for the real value of a degree. Courts generally acknowledged the authority of the NCAA to enforce rules. But time continued on and things continued to change.

In 1952 the NCAA had licensed the “Game of the Week” to NBC. The NCAA strictly controlled media rights under the argument it would impact attendance at games. Ticket sales and associated revenue was then, and still is now for many, a major source of dollars for both athletic departments and their colleges/universities. It was an argument with some legitimacy. Except that it was wrong. Games on television did not limit ticket sales but it did increase the demand for more games on television. Over the next twenty or so years the NCAA slowly licensed more games to broadcast companies but it maintained it controlled the media rights for member institutions until the University of Oklahoma successfully sued the NCAA in 1984. The Supreme Court found the NCAA in violation of antitrust law by limiting the media opportunities for schools. This ruling coincided with the advent of cable television and the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN).

ESPN for a decade had been desperate for content. It would broadcast almost anything and sometimes days or weeks late just to have programming to fill the hours. The broadcast networks controlled the sports market leaving their rejects for ESPN. But suddenly hundreds of colleges and universities had media rights to sell and a burning desire to be on television. Most of those schools allowed their conferences to negotiate for them and in the last half of the decade there was an explosion of college football and basketball on television. By 1991 ESPN was not only airing multiple football games each Saturday but a prime time Thursday night game as well.

Fast forward twenty more years. Conferences are negotiating their own skyrocketing media deals. College sports of all kinds are on multiple networks. There is a football playoff in place. There are more post season bowl games than ever. March Madness legitimately causes work slowdowns all across America. This isn’t 1954 anymore. The value of a scholarship has become diluted by the money involved. The revenue generated is in the billions of dollars. And the NCAA is selling the name, image, and likenesses of former NCAA basketball players to EA Sports for their NCAA Basketball computer game. And refusing Ed O’Bannon any compensation for it. Whoever were the attorneys advising the NCAA at that time have to be the worst ever because every move the NCAA made then and from that point forward has been the wrong move.

Clinging to its definition of “amateurism” the NCAA lost the O’Bannon ruling and stopped selling rights to EA sports. But it stayed the course … right into the sandbar. The 2021 Alston ruling from the Supreme Court flatly denied the NCAA an antitrust exemption leading to the current state of affairs – there is no governing body for college sports.

That’s not universally true. The NCAA can still regulate eligibility, for example. But the proposed rule of five years of eligibility to be played in five years that start at high school graduation or age nineteen is a knee-jerk reaction to the transfer portal mess that will surely be challenged in court if adopted.

So what would the NCAA have to do to be granted an antitrust exemption? Simply, it would have to become more like a singular business entity than an umbrella organization. Among some of the issues that would need to be addressed is whether or not athletes are employees, with the legal standing of an employee. If not what standing do they have because they create the value. The membership would need to be more strictly divided and rules for each division would need to be consistently and universally enforced – as opposed to the sometime arbitrary enforcement of the current NCAA. The NCAA might also need help from Congress. If it was unable to reorganize in a way the Courts would support its authority Congress would need to write laws granting such. Regardless of any other law Congress will be required to write a national law on NIL compensation to override the current laws of 32 different states. And there is already one law on the books governing revenue sharing of those billions of dollars. NIL deals, transfer portal, and eligibility are all separate issues to be addressed.

Congress getting involved became inevitable following the O’Bannon ruling in 2014 when the NCAA did absolutely nothing to address any of the issues. College sports could not survive fifty different sets of rules. But Congress is a solution, not the best solution. Whatever law Congress writes and however many of them it takes college athletics will be bound by it for good or bad. Conservative author and commentator George Will is fond of writing about The Law of Unintended Consequences which immediately becomes applicable anytime Congress acts. There is certain to be unintended consequences to Congress governing college athletics. But will they be inconsequential?

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We’ve entered the final week of our Spring fundraiser and if you haven’t noticed, I have not posted very many solicitations for this one. That’s because of the guilt I feel for asking for your hard-earned money when we’re fighting higher costs of fuel, food, medicine, housing and transportation, to name but a few of the consumer goods and services that have skyrocketed out of control because of gross indifference in Washington.

It’s true. Those 535 members of Congress, the occupant of the Oval Office and the judiciary have no concept of the struggles Americans are facing, nor do they seem to really care. The would-be Jesus President is far more preoccupied with his $400 million ballroom, his proposed golden archway, begging for the Nobel Peace Prize while invading Venezeula and Iran and threatening Canada, Greenland and Cuba, planning a redneck UFC Freedom 250 fight, molding the military to his desired level of featy and grifting billions of dollars for him and his family. They’re all out of touch with reality while we try to balance the household budget.

That’s why I feel pangs of guilt in coming to you when I know there are disabled veterans, homeless people, mentally ill people in need of help. That’s also why I always try to plug the food pantry, or food bank. They do wonderful work and are deserving of all the help they can get.

But if you have anything left to spare and you like to see journalism speak truth to power and to not shrink from its responsibilities, we would greatly appreciate your support. We at LouisianaVoice strive to maintain a high level of credibility with interesting, factual information that others seem to try to avoid or to merely give superficial coverage to.

If you are so inclined and are in a position to do so, go HERE and scroll down to the Keep Us Independent button. Click on it and follow directions to make a ONE-TIME contribution.

Those who contribute $50 or more will received a signed copy of my new book, The Dinosaur Club. It’s about six geriatric former news reporters who become angry over the sex trafficking of children and unite to go after the traffickers.

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