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Those three words are meant to convey that the citizens of the state are unified in a collective confidence in the power of justice. This motto is on the state flag, the official crest, etched into memorials across parishes and engraved in locations throughout the state capital in Baton Rouge. But if you look at Louisiana's track record for scandal, that motto is far from true.
The level of tolerance of corruption on the part of the citizens of the state, it's depressing. The people are willing to continue to elect the same officials over and over and over when we know that these officials are corrupt. That's Tom Aswell, a veteran journalist who for the past 45 years has reported on public corruption in Louisiana's political landscape.
Dozens of scandals he's written about trace back to St. Tammany Parish. St. Tammany is one of the richest parishes in the state and one of the most corrupt. Swaths of wealthy Louisiana parishes like St. Tammany have dark histories. The hard truth is the leaders of the state have not been as unified around the power of justice as the motto may purport.
Louisiana, like many states in the South, is marked with invisible lines of prejudice that segment the population. Issues like socioeconomic deficits in minority neighborhoods and violent crime are all things that make it abundantly clear who the have and the have-nots are.
The one thing that most residents can agree on is that for the better part of the last century, the good old boy system has run deep and strong in Louisiana politics. I'll spare you a geography lesson of the entire state with a coinciding list of scandals from each parish, and instead let former Louisiana State Police Commission board member W. Lloyd Grafton explain it in the simplest of terms.
When Gabriel blows his horn, we'll be on the ass end as a state. It is just a cesspool. In Louisiana, money has always been sort of scarce. You have a lot of people without wealth, and if a man has wealth, he gets what he wants.
That concept isn't unique to Louisiana. It's universal. However, it's undoubtedly true in America's Mississippi Delta region. The corrupt have historically been able to seize power, stay powerful, get rich, and stay rich, while the poor have little power, stay poor, and see more violence in their communities as a result. Orleans Parish, where the city of New Orleans sits, is an example of this toxic cycle in motion.
New Orleans is averaged anywhere between 150 to 220, 230 murders a year. That's New Orleans Police Department Detective Ryan Oquin. Ryan is the lead cold case investigator for Bruce Kuchera's murder. He's been overseeing the case for three years. But it's gone through the hands of two prior cold case detectives since it landed in that division in late 2015.
I didn't start looking into the case until 2020, but I knew of the case because I worked in cold case. So there was only four of us at the time working in cold case. So we, you know, we'd pass cases around to each other like, hey, can you look at this one, see if I'm missing anything or whatnot. So I remember looking at the investigation, looking at the circumstances and realizing that it was going to be a pretty hard case.
At the start of our interview, Ryan wanted to make sure I understood with absolute clarity the specific part of New Orleans that Bruce was murdered in. New Orleans East is the largest area of the city. It's not the most populated, but when it comes to square miles of land, it is the largest. It was decimated during Hurricane Katrina. It lost a lot of structures. A lot of its residents moved out.
Over the years, it's become more and more populated, but they do have more rundown areas than they did pre-Katrina. There are a lot of apartment complexes out in that area of the city. I don't want to say it's an impoverished area of the city because with the exception of the Garden District or St. Charles Avenue, it was probably one of the richest areas back in the maybe 70s, 80s, 90s. It never reached back to the population that it was prior to Katrina.
A lot of apartment complexes stayed abandoned. A lot of areas were just never brought back that were destroyed after the storm. With all of those factors considered, New Orleans East is without question the most dangerous area of the city.
Unfortunately for the people that live in New Orleans East, it does see its share of crime. I think right now the 7th District is the leading district, and when I say the 7th District, that's New Orleans East, is leading the city in homicide numbers, unfortunately. A big stretch of the interstate runs through New Orleans East. A lot of stolen cars are dumped out in that area. We find cars that are burnt up in that area pretty regularly because there's just nothing else around there.
I can say at this point, it is leading the city in homicide numbers. In 2012, Bruce Kachera became one of the area's violent crime statistics. According to public access data from the city of New Orleans, Bruce was one of 204 murder victims that year and one of 185 homicides where a gun was used.
Because Bruce's case is still unsolved, the documentation about the details surrounding his murder investigation are slim, but not non-existent. Ryan Oakwin was pretty candid during his interview with me, and NOPD released the police and fire department reports, which have some helpful info in them.
So with those things, along with all the tidbits I've learned from doing interviews, here's what I know happened for a fact on April 24th, 2012 in New Orleans East. At 10.05 in the morning, Bruce pulled his 2010 Black Ford F-150 pickup truck into the parking lot of the Mark 7 Apartments at 4508 Papania Drive. This location is roughly 52 minutes southeast from where he lived in Covington.
He parked, got out, and went inside the office to speak with the manager. He spent a total of five to nine minutes inside, then left the office and headed back to his truck with his keys in his hand. I've made an aerial diagram of the path he took and how close all of this is, so check it out on our website, counterclockpodcast.com.
At 10:14 a.m., a 911 operator received at least two calls stating that a middle-aged white man had been shot in the head in the complex's parking lot. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my hands on these 911 calls, so I don't know exactly who made them or what they said. But from what I've been told, one came from the woman managing the office, and the other came from a man who was driving out of the complex after either dropping off or picking up his child.
At 10:18 a.m., four minutes after the 911 calls were placed, the first NOPD officer arrived on scene. This officer's name is Micheline Scott, and according to NOPD, she happened to be on patrol nearby. Micheline didn't respond to my request for an interview, probably because she's still on the force, but she wrote some details in her report.
She said that she found the victim on his back, right next to a black pickup truck, and he had a pool of blood around his head. To her, it appeared that the man had been shot on the left side of his head. Two minutes later, at 10.20 a.m., firefighters and EMS arrived. Those crews immediately noticed that the man bleeding on the ground was in really bad shape, but he was still trying to breathe.
So they started cutting off his clothing and administered life-saving measures. The paramedics made the decision to load their patient onto a stretcher and transport him to LSU Trauma Center about 15 minutes away. Right after that, Officer Scott secured the crime scene and called for a homicide detective and the NOPD crime lab. By 11 a.m., news of what had happened made its way to Bruce's current wife, Ann Kachera, in Covington.
But at the time, no one could tell her any details. Well, I got a knock on the door, and it was the business partners saying, you need to get your things. There was an incident. Bruce was being transported to the emergency room. Ann says Brett Oub and Dan Burris, two of Bruce's colleagues, drove her to the trauma center in New Orleans to figure out what was going on.
During the car ride, Ann started dialing everyone who needed to be in the loop. I called my mom. She called my brother because I'm like, I don't know what's going on. I have no information. I just know that it's critical. And then I called Chris. She just called and said, hey, your dad's in an accident. We don't know how bad it is or anything, but we're going to the hospital. In April 2012, Chris was living almost 2,000 miles away in Long Beach, California.
In his panic, the first person he thought to dial was his mom, Mary Ann.
Chris's next call was to his sister, Caitlin, who was living in New Jersey and working in Manhattan.
He's like, look, he's like, dad's been in an accident or car wreck. And again, I think we just all assumed car wreck because you hear accident, you car wreck. I mean, you know, and that he's in critical condition and, you know, whatever else. And I'm like, okay, we're trying to, we don't have any other information. We don't know what's going on. Back in New Orleans, Ann arrived at the hospital and was greeted by another one of Bruce's business colleagues, a man named Dudley Geigerman, along with Bruce's boss, Jared Caruso Rickey.
When I walked in, I saw all the people sitting in the emergency room and they ushered me to the side area. And that's when it started going through my mind that it is bad, ushering me to the side room. And then that's when the lady came in and said, we have a person in the back and he's unrecognizable. It's a gunshot wound.
The medical staff needed to get a formal ID for their gunshot wound victim. So they asked Ann if she could provide them with information about Bruce, like if he had a birthmark, a tattoo, personalized jewelry, etc. And he did. A unique wedding band.
At 12.13 p.m., two hours after he'd been shot, trauma surgeons pronounced Bruce dead. It's a gut punch. You really don't feel like it's real, what's going on.
Then it went to, did I want to go in the back to see him? And Jared was there. And then he said he and Dudley would go back there. They just kind of said, you probably shouldn't see him. That's the last things you're going to remember. With the ID confirmed, there was nothing more anyone could do. So Dan and Brett drove Ann back to Covington and waited to hear more from NOPD. During that trip, Ann called Chris back. I went back into my office and I was just kind of closed the door and I was just sitting there.
And then I got a call saying that, you know, that he had died. And, yeah, I was like... And so then I went outside, and I was just on the Ocean Avenue in Long Beach, and I'm sitting there, and I just started calling. This is the thing that, you know, I'll never forget this, but, uh... It was just, uh, calling each family member and just telling them. I just told her and, um... You know, my mom and, um...
You know, Aunt Candy was the worst because she just screamed. Chris's uncle, Jack Wayard, remembers that moment. The phone rang again and it was Chris calling back and he said that whoever told him that he was in an accident was incorrect. He was shot and he was pronounced dead. And that's when Candy went into hysterics. She was devastated. She was devastated.
Caitlin got the somber news while in a cab trying to get out of New York City. And I think I called Chris and I was like, what's an update? And he was like, he passed away.
And so I was like by myself, you know, with this stranger in a car when I found out. But then I got home, I got home to my husband and he just came and met me. It was terrible. And things were only going to get worse. While the kids booked flights home that same day, NOPD was trying to make sense of an evident scarce crime scene.
They processed Bruce's truck for evidence and towed it back to police headquarters, but nothing of any real value jumped out right away. Except a small clue that gave them some idea of what kind of murder weapon they might be dealing with. Here's Detective Ryan Oakwin again. There were no caissons recovered, if I remember correctly, which is indicative of it being a revolver.
A revolver is a type of firearm that retains a spent shell casing after a shot has been fired. So NOPD not finding a casing at the scene likely meant it never left the gun that had been used. It was either that or Bruce's killer had used another kind of handgun that discharged a spent casing, but the killer had been smart enough to pick it up before fleeing.
To help determine which scenario they were looking at and hopefully learn more about Bruce's injuries, NOPD sent Bruce's body to the New Orleans Forensic Center for an autopsy. Results from that were expected the next day, Wednesday, April 25th. In the late afternoon on the 24th, though, NOPD cleared the crime scene and firefighters used hoses to wash away Bruce's blood from the pavement. By that time, news crews had flooded the area and filmed the whole thing.
Jack Weir, Bruce's brother-in-law, watched the news that evening. But I thought it was kind of tasteless when the film crew was showing the fire department there, I think it was the fire department, hosing down the parking lot from the blood that had, I guess, stained their precious parking lot. But they were showing that on the news, which I didn't think was very appropriate.
At 8:45 a.m. on April 25th, a forensic pathologist did an examination. According to the autopsy report, Bruce sustained a single gunshot wound to his upper left eyelid.
It was clear that whoever killed him had fired from a very close distance. The blast caused catastrophic damage to his eye socket, and after entering, the bullet went through his brain front to back and slightly left to right. There was no information in the autopsy report about whether the bullet followed an upward or downward trajectory.
The shot didn't completely incapacitate Bruce when it entered his head. Like I said earlier, the paramedics noticed he was still struggling to breathe when they'd arrived. The damage it caused, though, made it impossible for him to overcome once he got to the hospital.
The pathologist didn't find any other signs of trauma on Bruce's body. No cuts, no chipped teeth, no significant bruising, no broken bones, nothing to indicate he'd fought with his attacker before being shot. Fortunately for NOPD, the pathologist retrieved a spent bullet and some fragments from Bruce's head.
Interestingly, there's no information in the autopsy report about what caliber the bullet was. That's most likely because it's need-to-know information only. Ryan Okwin wouldn't share details with me about the bullet, except to say that it falls within the .38 caliber class.
I read through Bruce's toxicology report, too. But his blood work came back clean.
The only chemicals in his system when he died were lidocaine, which came from medical staff's efforts to save him, and caffeine with a little bit of chocolate, ingredients from his morning coffee. There were no major aha clues that NOPD gleaned from the autopsy that screamed, here's a way to solve this case. But the more they investigated in those first 24 hours, the more the department realized something was staring them right in the face.
items were missing from Bruce Kachera. Items not related to a firearm that should have been at the crime scene, but weren't.
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Two things were missing from Bruce's person when his body was found, his cell phone and his wallet. According to NOPD, those items weren't located in his truck or in his pockets, and they didn't get returned to his family after his autopsy. On the surface, it appears as if Mr. Cacero was approached by somebody, maybe robbed, or maybe it was a robbery attempt that went bad and he was shot and killed.
In addition to the missing phone and wallet, there's been back and forth between police and Bruce's family as to whether Bruce was wearing a Rolex watch when he left his house that morning. The watch has never been seen again. The family believes strongly that he had a watch on that we didn't recover.
But here's what's weird. Ann says Bruce owned two Rolexes. One was worth close to $10,000 and one was only worth about $1,000. The more expensive watch stayed at their home on April 24th and was later given to Chris as a keepsake of his father's. The less expensive watch is the one Ann swears Bruce wore out of the house on the day he died. The Rolex watch that he wore casual pretty much on a daily basis.
After the murder, she asked NOPD multiple times if they could give Bruce's Rolex back or at least confirm whether or not it was logged as evidence. But the detective at the time never gave her or Bruce's kids a straight answer.
I've never heard anything back. Orlando Matthews questioned me constantly several times when I asked about the watch. Like, well, what kind was it? What does it look like? And like very specifics about it, which I figured he'd know because he had it. But he never confirmed or denied that he had the watch. That's also been the kind of point of confusion here between the cops because they don't I don't think they actually know if he was wearing a watch or not.
I mean, they've never said the watch is stolen. They've always just been like, do you know if there's a watch? Do you know what it looks like? Ryan Oakwin told me NOPD does not have a watch in evidence. I think whether or not Bruce had a Rolex on, though, could be really significant. I mean, think about it. There's only a few explanations of what happened to it.
If he wore the watch out of his house, but it wasn't on his body after he was shot, that would indicate whoever killed him swiped it along with his wallet and phone. It's either that or someone in the hospital, morgue, or police department got sticky fingers in 2012. If the watch remained on his body, though, after the shooting, but just didn't make it into evidence lockup, well, that doesn't support a robbery scenario.
Why would the killer leave a Rolex but take a smartphone and a wallet? If NOPD wanted to solidify robbery as the motive, it would have been in their best interest to confirm that his watch was missing with the rest of his stuff. But because the department didn't do that in 2012 and still hasn't confirmed that, it's really puzzling.
Something else that doesn't line up with a robbery motive is that there's been no activity on Bruce's bank cards and his ID has never turned up. So again, why would a robber kill a man to steal his wallet and then never use the contents? There was also a lot of other valuable stuff inside Bruce's truck, including an iPad, and not to mention the vehicle itself was up for grabs. Remember, Bruce had his keys in his hand when he was shot.
They took his wallet and his phone, but then never tried to use anything in the wallet. It just doesn't make any sense. His truck was there. Radar detector was in there. He had a bag full of stuff. You know, CDs and different... He had some sunglasses in there that were, I think, a couple hundred, $300 sunglasses. There were just things that could have been easily taken if this was just like a straight robbery.
It just doesn't fit to me that they had all these things available to them that they could have just taken to pawn off and everything, and they didn't do it. It's a really interesting point. If whoever Bruce encountered in the Mark 7 parking lot was a desperate criminal, why were they willing to commit murder but not take much? Detective Ryan Oakwin has had trouble finding an answer to that question, too.
A lot of times people rob people for their vehicles, right? And that wasn't the case in this instance. I don't know what the perpetrator was thinking, whether it was a robbery attempt that went bad and there was some resistance, so he shot him and just took what he could get. We don't always establish a motive to homicides. We just don't. Sometimes we just don't know why somebody decided to kill somebody.
According to Bruce's kids and his close friends like Jack Branch and Michael Sprague, if Bruce had come across someone who was extremely desperate, he would have willingly given them anything they wanted. You know, he is not the type of person that would have, like if somebody said, hey, give me your phone and your wallet or something, he wouldn't have like tried to fight them off of it. He would have just given it to them just to, you know, get them to go away. Very generous hearted.
You know, he would have cared deeply about the person that was hurting and the person who was lost. He would have figured out if that was just a random thing, how to de-escalate the situation, and they would have befriended him and been going to lunch with him. That was just the way he was.
All of those factors considered, I have doubts about whether this crime should be considered a random robbery gone wrong. The one thing that convinces me most it might not be has to do with the gun the killer used. NOPD confirmed no firearm matching it has ever surfaced in another crime. That seems odd, especially considering the high volume of violent crimes in New Orleans.
I asked Ryan Oakwin his thoughts about this. Why hasn't this gun shown up in another crime where somebody talked about it? Is it common for just a robbery like this to happen and you not see it again? Speaking specifically to this case, I am surprised. If this was a random robbery gone wrong, I am surprised that it hasn't shown up in another shooting or another aggravated assault or another homicide case.
It is surprising that we haven't gotten a match to it, but I mean, I'm not 100% surprised by it. Despite there being several things that point away from robbery as the sole motive, that's the narrative NOPD stuck with early on in the investigation. Local news outlets and papers all published headlines that reported Bruce's death was most likely a result of a random robbery.
He was shot and he was in New Orleans East and we were like, oh, that, you know, God, like it was just like a random thing, wrong place, wrong time. Articles published on April 24th and 25th by the Times-Picayune reported that the lead detective at the time, Orlando Matthews, was doubling down on the robbery theory. He told reporters he strongly believed Bruce was killed in a, quote, random act of violence, end quote.
Something NOPD used to support the robbery theory was witness testimony from construction workers who'd been at the Mark 7 apartments during the shooting. The apartment complex was under a major renovation at the time, which means that a lot of construction workers, I know that some construction workers were there and were interviewed during the initial investigation. And they gave a description of an individual that they saw fleeing on a bicycle and in a car.
There were two different individuals, and the individual that fled in the car was located, interviewed, found to probably not have anything to do with the investigation, or they didn't have anything to prove that he was a part of the crime at that time. And then there was a sketch done of an individual that fled on a bicycle. This bicycle man was described as a slimly built, light-skinned black male in his mid-20s who was between 5'9 and 6' tall.
Witnesses said he was clean-shaven and was wearing a black knit cap, thick black jacket with a hood, black pants, and black shoes. So, not very specific. The composite sketch that was produced for this man is probably one of the worst sketches I've ever seen. Take a look at it for yourself in the blog post for this episode. Even Ryan O'Quinn agrees. It was too generic to be of any real help.
But he doesn't think the description was completely useless. The sketch itself probably isn't of any probative value to the investigation. But the description of the individual that was given, I think that was given by the construction workers, is, I mean, you know, and releasing it to the public definitely wouldn't hurt the investigation. We haven't found that individual. And from the sketch, we'll never be able to say that, you know, that this person is the person that's in the sketch. It isn't that type of sketch.
Something I immediately asked when I learned about the bicycle guy was, what about surveillance cameras? I mean, didn't the complex have cameras that maybe caught a glimpse of this mystery man on the bike? Or, I don't know, caught the murder happening?
Were there surveillance cameras in 2012? I don't think so. And I can't answer that definitively, but from what I recall, there was no video in the case file when we got the case file. So either it didn't exist because of the cameras or you didn't get it. Yeah.
The cameras at the apartment complex were not working. That's what we were told, at least. They were dummy cameras whenever my dad was murdered and that they put in real cameras post the murder so that way this wouldn't happen again. So without any camera footage, the search for the bicycle man fizzled.
No additional leads came in right away, and an ironclad code of silence gripped the neighborhoods around the apartment complex. No snitches in New Orleans East. That was the reality then, and it's the reality now.
What's wild to me is that in the images that NBC affiliate WDSU News took of the crime scene before it was cleared, there are dozens of bystanders in the parking lot of the Mark 7 apartments. There are also people walking all around a convenience store called Chef's Discount Market, directly behind where Bruce was killed. In my gut, I definitely think more people saw what happened to him. It seems impossible they didn't.
I don't know if it was truly the code of silence that caused everyone to clam up or a lack of due diligence on the detective's part. Ryan Okun told me it might be a little of both. I think maybe a more thorough canvas of the neighborhood may have led to something more.
If, you know, if a detective misses one or two really simple steps in an investigation for whatever reason they miss it. And, you know, and I look at a case that's more than four years old, I don't have the opportunity to go back and look at records and things like that. I do have that opportunity, though, and a lot of motivation to track people down who might know more, which is exactly what I did.
Over the course of my investigation, I found two people who did hear and see important things that fateful morning in April 2012. The manager of the Mark 7 office. Hello. Hi, is this Lucille? And the maintenance man. I know exactly what you did. I can tell you the same thing I told them. I'm speaking with both of them on the next episode of CounterClock, episode three, Encounters, which starts right now.
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