John Kahl
(Courtesy of Tommy Longman)
(Note to reader: This blog is an edited version of the story of John Kahl's death from my book about my grandfather, Two Wings and a Star: The Life and Times of Sheriff Chester Baudoin. Kahl was the only officer who was killed in the line of duty during my grandfather's administration. My grandfather was sheriff of St. Mary Parish, Louisiana for twenty years, from 1964 to 1984. I refer to my grandparents as Granny and Poppy within the text.)
On Wednesday June 4, 1980, Poppy lost an officer in the line of duty. Deputy John I. Kahl, age 32, had been working on a drug investigation for several months before the incident, alongside his partner, Deputy Virgil Skinner. At the sheriff’s office in Franklin, Skinner received a phone call from a drug informant who called from Morgan City to say that there was a 33-year-old drug dealer named Walter Payne in Morgan City selling amphetamines. Payne was free on bond from a previous drug charge back in March and the arresting officer was Duval Arthur. According to Arthur, Payne was selling peashooters, which were little envelopes that contained speed. Payne was armed and had guns also in his van including a .44 Magnum. Arthur arrested Payne because he had a huge jar of amphetamines. Payne got an attorney who informed the Sheriff’s Department that the drugs Payne had were just caffeine. So, the Department had to give the drugs, as well as the guns, back to Payne and release him. When Payne came to the Sheriff’s Office to take back his guns, he brought some sausage from a grocery store, as a goodwill gesture. Payne’s brother was a state trooper and a narcotics officer. After Payne was arrested and released, he offered to help the Sheriff’s Department in their investigations. Duval and another officer went to visit Payne, at which time he claimed to have information on different suspects in the parish who were selling drugs.
Detective Duval Arthur and my grandfather Sheriff Chester Baudoin around the time of Kahl's death
(Courtesy of Duval Arthur)
Kahl and Skinner drove to Morgan City to meet with an informant, who knew that all kinds of drugs, including pills and marijuana, were in Payne’s apartment. The two officers, dressed in plainclothes, put together some money to give to the informant to go make an actual drug purchase from Payne. The officers tested the acquired drugs, which proved positive. The two officers then went back to Franklin to get a search warrant, then returned to Morgan City and went to the Sheriff’s Office substation to get a few uniformed deputies to go with them to carry out the search warrant. Bobby Froreich was one of these uniformed officers from the Morgan City substation and he’d had some previous contact with Payne. In fact, most of the men on this raid knew Payne, except for John Kahl. The officers proceeded to execute the warrant.
When they arrived at Payne’s two-story Casa Charles apartment building, they parked in the dimly lit parking lot. Kahl, Skinner, Froreich, and another officer, Mike Swords, approached Payne’s apartment door on the first floor at 10:34pm. Kahl knocked on the door saying, “Sheriff’s Department”. He informed the person inside that he was a deputy sheriff and that they had a search warrant. Skinner and Froreich were waiting to the left of the door with Froreich in front of a plate glass window. Mike Swords stood to the right of the door in front of another plate glass window. They heard a voice from inside the apartment say, “Just a minute”. John stood in front of the door with a shotgun. From the inside, the door had a chain lock on it and the door opened inward. A man immediately aimed a .44 Magnum at Kahl’s head and pulled the trigger. Kahl was hit right above the eye in the forehead. The bullet passed straight through Kahl’s head and crashed into a laundromat across the parking lot. Skinner stated that he didn’t think Kahl knew what hit him. Skinner himself was standing shoulder to shoulder with Kahl. For a split second, Skinner wasn’t sure what happened, whether Kahl or the suspect had fired the shot. Then he saw his partner go down. Skinner said two shots were fired by the suspect, one hitting Kahl and one hitting the door jamb right near where Skinner was crouched down.
When this second shot hit the door jamb near Skinner’s neck, he returned fire through the partially opened door. The chain on the door stayed intact throughout all of this so the door never opened fully. At this point, Froreich returned fire through the plate glass window of the apartment and Mike Swords fired through the window he was in front of. Skinner fired the first two shots to get Payne away from the door because he was afraid the suspect was going to come out of the apartment with guns blazing. Once Payne backed up, Skinner joined Froreich at the window and both continued returning fire, killing Payne.
Skinner said that the whole incident only took a few seconds. Within that time, Skinner and Froreich fired twelve rounds and Payne fired two. He was hit by three bullets from the officers’ guns. They then entered the apartment but found no marijuana or hard drugs. The only drugs they turned up were the peashooters. Quite a bit of money was also discovered proving that Payne was selling these peashooters. Also, in their search they found a woman in the back room. She was hiding and scared. Twenty-four-year-old Dale Ann Fryou was taken into custody initially as a witness, but when officers questioned her, it was revealed that she had in her possession two Quaaludes. She was charged with possession of a controlled substance.
A Louisiana state law was passed because of this incident. The law states that if a drug dealer attempts to sell a fake drug claiming it is cocaine or some hard drug of that sort, the dealer can be arrested for selling what he claims it is. For example, if a dealer puts baking soda, which could look like cocaine, into a bag and tries to sell this bag of baking soda claiming it is cocaine, that dealer could be charged with selling cocaine, even though it is really baking soda.
Skinner said the whole incident was a life-changing experience. He described the morale of the Sheriff’s Department, “It solidified the brotherhood of the department”. The Department’s morale was as strong as it could possibly be. Skinner later left the Sheriff’s Office.
John Kahl was buried in Franklin Cemetery. He has a granite military marker inscribed with, “Greater Love Hath No Man Than This, That A Man Lay Down His Life For His Friends” along with the Sheriff’s Department symbol of the Intelligence Agent.
John Kahl’s wife Wanda had gone to a sorority meeting the night of John’s death. At the time, both Wanda and John talked about losing twenty pounds of weight. When she got home from the meeting, she was starving so she fixed herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When she heard John’s patrol car drive up, she threw the sandwich to the side and went into the bedroom to watch John change his clothes and check his guns. Wanda said that John hardly ever wore his uniform unless it was some special event. She worried that when John kissed her goodbye, he could smell the peanut butter on her breath and when he came home he would say to her, “You didn’t think I smelled the peanut butter”. But he never came home.
Wanda knew that John and his partner were going on a raid. He had been gone only about 45 minutes when the phone rang. It seemed to Wanda that she couldn’t wake up to answer the phone, but when she did, it was Deputy Auenson telling her to go open her front door. What Auenson was telling her to do didn’t make sense to Wanda. She started screaming at him, “Why?” Auenson hung up on her and Wanda knew then that John was dead. Wanda went to the front door and several deputies were there and told her what happened. Virgil Skinner also arrived at Wanda’s house, covered in blood. They obviously were having trouble telling her the details of what happened and were just saying that John was dead. Wanda wanted to know who killed her husband. “Was it a white man or a black man? I wanna know cause I want him dead, now!”
Virgil Skinner described John Kahl as the “John Wayne” of the Sheriff’s Department which, as Wanda would later tell me, caused her to fall in love with John initially. Another deputy, Huey Bourgeois, said, “Except he wasn’t acting. That was the way he was.” He was very tall, confident, and a great person and was one of the best marksmen in the department. Kahl was Chief Deputy Doc Wright’s pride and joy. He was experienced and knowledgeable and knew guns very well.
Huey Bourgeois was at a sheriff’s youth league baseball game in Franklin. When he came home, his wife was standing at the kitchen door telling him to “call Chief Wright right away!” When Huey called Doc Wright, he was crying on the phone and told Huey what had happened. Wright told Huey that he wanted him to go to the courthouse because authorities were going to bring in Fryou to book her. Wright said, “I talked to the sheriff, and he told me to get somebody to go over there [the courthouse] who can handle the situation and don’t let anybody touch that woman! We don’t want no lawsuit.” Huey arrived at the courthouse and told everybody concerned, “The sheriff and the chief sent me here to make sure that nobody lays a hand on that woman. You understand me!” Grumblings came from the officers in the room. “You listen to me well. You touch that woman and I’m going to tell the sheriff and tell the chief.” When Fryou arrived, Huey told them to stay back and Huey, Fryou, and another officer got into the elevator to ascend to the jail. Upon entering the jail, Huey told the jailor on duty to “get back behind the counter. Now, book her!” When this was done Huey instructed, “Go put her in the cell and lock it and don’t let anybody in that cell.” Huey then called Chief Wright and said, “Tell the sheriff that she’s in the cellblock and nobody touched her.”
Huey Bourgeois and my grandfather
(Courtesy of Chet Wallace)
Huey remembers a very poignant conversation between himself and Kahl. Kahl told him, “I want to go down in a blazing gun battle.” Huey responded, “You’re out of your mind! You want to die in a blazing gun battle? You don’t want to live?”
Kahl responded, “If I had to die that’s the way I want to go.”
Huey said to me in an interview, “Well, that’s the way he went. He was a good officer. I can tell you that!”
I remember that, at the time, Poppy came to our house in the middle of the night. I assume that he responded to the scene soon after it happened, after driving from his home in Franklin the thirty miles to Morgan City. Granny went with him. They both had witnessed the aftermath of what happened at the apartment and then came to our house on the other side of Morgan City, probably arriving around one or two o’clock in the morning. I was asleep and was awakened by Poppy’s voice coming from the living room. I left my room to see my grandparents talking with my parents, telling them about what had transpired, and that John Kahl was dead. Granny described that Kahl never had a chance. It hurt Poppy very much that John was killed. He thought the world of him.
No more than a week later someone was charged with desecrating Kahl’s grave in Franklin Cemetery. Nathan Paul Buteaux, age 23, of Jeanerette was arrested on June 11, 1980. The Sunday before, Poppy’s department was notified that the grave had been desecrated and a marijuana plant had been placed on the grave with a defamatory, handwritten note attached that said, “Congratulations John Kahl.” An investigation was immediately started and worked on around the clock to find the culprit.
The investigation continued to find that several other people were involved with the desecration of Kahl’s grave. Also arrested was Lee Marlin Charles, age 21, charged with desecration of the grave as well as cultivation of marijuana along with Myrtis M. Allen, age 43. Nathan Buteaux and Lee Charles planned the crime while in the Silver Dollar Lounge on Willow Street with the assistance of Allen, who worked as a barmaid at the establishment.
News reports were aired showing the desecration of John’s grave. People close to Wanda were trying to keep her from learning of this, but she ended up seeing it on television. Even after Wanda had the gravestone installed, people still came and tore up the flowers left on the grave. She put a perpetual candle on the grave and someone came and broke it and smeared the wax. Wanda said that this happened a couple of years after.
Thanks for learning!
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