User:Afddiary/sandbox
1927 criminal case in Louisiana, USA
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The murder of James LeBoeuf took place in Morgan City, Louisiana, late at night on July 1, 1927. Massive flooding prevented the murder from being discovered or identified until floodwaters receded almost a week later. On July 8, the day after the discovery of LeBoeuf's body, his wife Ada LeBoeuf, her lover Dr. Thomas E. Dreher, and Dreher's assistant James "Jim" Beadle were arrested as authorities continued investigating the murder.
| Murder of James LeBoeuf | |
|---|---|
| Location | Morgan City, Louisiana, U.S. |
| Date | July 1, 1927 |
Attack type | Mariticide |
| Victims | James Joseph Clodomire LeBoeuf, 43 |
| Perpetrators |
|
| Motive | Extramarital affair |
| Convicted | Capital murder (LeBoeuf, Dreher) |
Although Ada LeBoeuf and Dreher initially pinned the murder exclusively on Beadle, claiming Beadle shot James LeBoeuf with a shotgun, Dreher eventually confessed to being the "instigator" in the murder. Dreher confessed that on the night of July 1, 1927, while James LeBoeuf and Ada LeBoeuf took separate solo boat rides on Lake Palourde, Dreher and Beadle followed in a third boat, shot James LeBoeuf in his boat, and attached heavy objects to his body so his body would be concealed below the surface of the water. Dreher implicated Ada LeBoeuf in alerting him and Beadle of the upcoming boat ride, as well as in helping dispose of her husband's body. Ada LeBoeuf insisted she was not involved in the murder at all. Authorities attributed the murder to Ada LeBoeuf's desire to maintain her extramarital affair with Dreher. All three parties gave and retracted several contradictory confessions after their arrests and during their trials.
The ensuing trials of the perpetrators, which took place later in July 1927, made national news partially due to their similarities to the concurrent trials of Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray in New York.[1][2][3] Beadle, who had a separate defense team from that of LeBoeuf and Dreher, ultimately pleaded guilty to the charges against him and was sentenced to life imprisonment. LeBoeuf and Dreher did not plead guilty and instead decided to go to trial, where they were convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. After spending over a year fighting their death sentences with appeals, the two were executed together on February 2, 1929. Ada LeBoeuf was the first white woman to be executed in Louisiana's history.[4][5] Beadle was released from prison in 1939.
Background
The victim, James J. LeBoeuf, was born in Montegut, Louisiana, on June 3, 1884.[4] At the time of his death, LeBoeuf was employed by the Louisiana Public Utilities Company as a superintendent. At the time of his murder in 1927, The Town Talk reported that LeBoeuf "was not known to have had any enemies" and "was popular and of a peaceable disposition,"[6] although a retrospective news article on his case published in 1955 described LeBoeuf as "two-fisted, quick-tempered, and popular."[7]
Ada Regina LeBoeuf (née Bonner) was born to Chester Ernest and Marie-Virginia Bonner on September 14, 1888.[4][8] At the time of the murder, Ada LeBoeuf was described as being a part of Morgan City, Louisiana's high society.[7]
The LeBoeufs married on September 2, 1906. They had four children.[7][8] At the time of James LeBoeuf's murder, their four children were aged between 5 and 18 years old.[6]
Dr. Thomas Dreher was a physician; he and the victim James LeBoeuf were allegedly friends who enjoyed hunting together. Dreher's handyman was James Beadle, who frequently went by the nickname "Jim" and would occasionally accompany Dreher and James LeBoeuf on hunting trips.[9]
Extramarital affair
In approximately 1925 or 1926, James LeBoeuf requested that Dreher visit his wife at their home due to her persistent and severe migraine headaches.[9][10] These meetings generated gossip throughout Morgan City that Ada LeBoeuf and Dreher were engaged in an extramarital affair. Authorities believed the alleged affair between Ada LeBoeuf and Dreher had lasted for approximately two years before the murder occurred, and that the rumors reached James LeBoeuf, who confronted Ada and Dreher about the rumors very shortly before the murder.[9][11][12] James LeBoeuf reportedly threatened to kill Dreher because of the alleged affair; the prosecution at the joint trial of Ada LeBoeuf and Dreher stated that Ada created the plan to kill James LeBoeuf in order to protect Dreher after the threats.[13]
Murder
Prior to the murder, Ada LeBoeuf wrote a letter to Dreher telling him she and her husband would take a canoe ride on Lake Palourde at night on July 1, 1927, and urging Dreher to meet her and her husband on the lake.[11] According to Ada LeBoeuf's confession, she convinced James LeBoeuf to accompany her on a canoe ride wherein both would ride in separate canoes. On the night of July 1, 1927, the two embarked on their separate rides simultaneously. During the ride, Dreher and Beadle approached James LeBoeuf's canoe in their own separate canoe, and Dreher allegedly beckoned for James's attention before Beadle shot James twice in the chest with a shotgun, killing him.[14] During the ensuing trial, two locals who were near the lake at the time of the murder testified to having heard two gunshots in quick succession at approximately 8:00 pm.[15]
After the shooting, Beadle and Dreher weighed down James LeBoeuf's dead body with railroad irons and chains and disemboweled him to keep him from floating above the surface of the water and being discovered. Dreher and Beadle then moved LeBoeuf's body two miles away from where the shooting took place, to a deeper part of the lake, and discarded his remains in the lake.[11][14] At the time of the murder, Lake Palourde had flooded due to intense rains, but by July 8, the floodwater had receded. During the week between the murder and the discovery of LeBoeuf's body, Ada told neighbors James was on a business trip. On July 8, three froggers discovered James LeBoeuf's body floating in the lake; they did not touch the body, but rather, they immediately alerted authorities.[14][13] LeBoeuf's remains were unidentifiable at the time due to decomposition, but a local coroner and long-term friends and associates of LeBoeuf who had seen him on the day of the murder soon confirmed his identity through his clothes, shoes, unusually short thumbs, and false teeth.[13][15]
Investigation
St. Mary Parish Sheriff Charles L. Pecot, whose tenure lasted from 1916 to 1940, led the investigation into James LeBoeuf's murder.[16]
Initially, Ada LeBoeuf insisted she had nothing to do with the murder but confirmed that she witnessed her husband's shooting, after which she turned her boat around and rowed home to prevent accusations of complicity in the murder.[11] However, by July 8, 1927, Ada LeBoeuf had submitted her first confession to her role in the murder, confirming she wrote a letter to Dreher alerting him to the boat ride prior to the night of July 1. She issued a statement to authorities implicating Beadle as the triggerman, placing herself at the scene of the crime approximately 50 feet behind her husband's boat (while Dreher and Beadle had approached to within six feet of James LeBoeuf's boat), saying:
"I followed in my boat about 50 feet behind Jim [Beadle]. When we passed the school house, Dr. Dreher and Beadle came up in their boat to within six feet of my husband. The doctor shouted, 'Is that you, Jim?' [B]efore Jim had a chance to answer, Beadle had fired twice in the darkness. I saw my husband crumple forward in his boat. He groaned only once. After that I rowed back to my brother's house and came on home in my car. I explained my husband's absence that night and the next day as due to a quarrel. I assured my children that when their father's petty anger had cooled off he would return."[11]
Dreher corroborated this confession, adding that Beadle had committed the murder after Dreher hired him, and that after the shooting, the two had washed off James LeBoeuf's boat and disposed of the victim's body.[11]
Ada LeBoeuf would later claim her husband fired on Beadle first, and Beadle shot him twice afterwards; Dreher also corroborated this version of events. Beadle denied knowing anything about the murder.[10]
Allegedly, the shotgun Beadle used in the shooting was never recovered.[9]
Legal proceedings
At first, all three defendants entered "not guilty" pleas to their charges, and the state requested the death penalty for all three defendants.[14]
During Ada LeBoeuf and Dreher's trial, the media portrayed Ada as unfaithful and concerned with her appearance over the wellbeing of her children. The two had an all-male jury.[10] Louisiana officials ensured LeBoeuf and Dreher would have a speedy trial, with Judge James D. Simon, who presided over the trial, refusing to delay the trial for 40 days to test possible blood evidence from a knife Beadle owned. Beadle claimed the supposed bloodstains were actually rust from cutting a pineapple.[10][17]
During the trial, LeBoeuf and Dreher repeated the story that James LeBoeuf had fired on them, with Dreher testifying on the stand on July 31 that James LeBoeuf told Dreher just before the murder, "I've got you right where I want you," and fired at Dreher but missed, after which Beadle shot and murdered LeBoeuf.SOURCE After Dreher's testimony, Beadle requested that the court allow him to hire a separate attorney; on August 1, he submitted his own confession, implicating Dreher in the shooting.
•••
On December 3, 1928, in a 2–1 vote, the Louisiana pardon board refused to commute LeBoeuf's and Dreher's death sentences, with the two concurring members arguing that LeBoeuf and Dreher had received a "fair, legal and impartial trial." The dissenting member, Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Paul N. Cyr, argued that the two deserved clemency because "11 of the 12 jurors who convicted [LeBoeuf and Dreher] signed the petition to the board of pardons asking for commutation of sentence, the twelfth juror having moved away and could not be located[.]" Cyr also noted that the decision in the two defendants' appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court was split almost evenly at 4–3.[18][19] This decision surprised high-ranking Louisiana officials who had expected the two to receive a recommendation for a life sentence. The board's decision rendered the governor unable to pardon LeBoeuf and Dreher, although he was still able to offer a reprieve.[18]
•••
On February 1, 1929, Ada LeBoeuf and Dreher were executed by hanging on the gallows located at the St. Mary Parish jail in Franklin, Louisiana. LeBoeuf was hanged first at 12:03 pm, followed by Dreher at 12:25 pm. Both expressed as their last wishes that their hangings would not be botched; both hangings were successful. (Article is already clipped; source it later)
Aftermath and popular culture
Jim Beadle
Beadle's case was first considered for clemency in 1936, but he was not released from prison until April 1939. His release from prison was permitted under a Louisiana law known as the "double good time law" that would allow a prisoner serving a life sentence to be eligible for parole after serving 10 years and 6 months of their sentence with good behavior behind bars. During his time in prison, Beadle, who the Associated Press described as a "model prisoner," worked at the Louisiana State Penitentiary's tobacco factory. Following his parole, Beadle moved to Berwick, Louisiana, where he died in 1955.[4][20]
Ada LeBoeuf's family
Ada LeBoeuf's youngest daughter, who was 11 years old at the time of her mother's execution in 1929, refused to discuss the trial with anyone who asked; she died in 2013 at the age of 95.[9] Ada's great-granddaughter said in 2014 that their family believed Ada had an affair with Dreher, but they did not believe Ada was involved in the murder conspiracy or that she lured James out to the lake with the intent of having him murdered as prosecutors had posited during trial; Ada's great-granddaughter also said the family did not discuss the murder often, as it was still "a real touchy situation".[13] Ada's eldest three children Ernest, Joseph, and Herman, all boys, attended her trial every day; Ernest experienced a nervous breakdown after his mother's execution and "ran away". Ada LeBoeuf's surviving relatives said the execution "tore up [their] family".[13]
Retrospective analysis
Decades after the executions of Ada LeBoeuf and Dreher, some researchers in the St. Mary Parish area have retrospectively considered the case to have been controversial, including Melissa Blumenfeld, who planned to make a documentary about the case and believed the case was marred by mob rule, lacked anything but circumstantial evidence, and that LeBoeuf and Dreher "would have walked, or at least gotten just a few years," rather than being executed, if the case were to have occurred in the 2010s. Blumenfeld brought up the possibility that one reason the punishment for LeBoeuf and Dreher was so severe was because of sensationalism and misogynistic sentiments surrounding Ada LeBoeuf's role as an accused adulterer.[9]
In 2014, Fran Middleton, a university librarian from the parish who heavily researched the LeBoeuf murder case, gave a presentation at a library in Bayou Vista, Louisiana, accusing Beadle of being more responsible in the murder than Ada LeBoeuf and Dreher, suggesting the media frenzy surrounding the execution of a white woman in Louisiana was a result of people "[failing] to realize the gravity of the situation" because people at the time did not believe "Ada was going to [be] executed." She expressed that she received some resistance from locals in presenting her findings because "too many prominent people might find it offensive" due to lingering feelings of ignominy around the case: "The shame that resulted from this execution, I think, is people looked back and thought, 'What have we done, what have we become'?"[13]
In popular culture
Several books have been written about the murder case, including Ada and the Doc: An Account of the Ada Leboeuf–Thomas Dreher Murder Case by Charles Hargroder, published in 2000.[21][10]
In 2014, the Investigation Discovery true crime show Deadly Women covered the LeBoeuf case in the nineteenth episode of Season 8.
In 2023, Ada and the Doc, a short film based partially on Hargroder's book, was released; in May 2025, the short film was screened at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and served as a proof of concept for a potential full-length feature film in the future. The short film was directed by Savannah College of Art and Design alumnus Matison LeBlanc and offers an alternate perspective on Ada LeBoeuf and Dreher's relationship, positing that Ada visited Dreher frequently due to domestic violence from her husband James rather than to engage in a secret affair or to seek help for persistent headaches.[10]