The Man Inside the Bundle

 February 29 sneaks in every 1,460 days and gives us an extra day. In 2020, It landed on Saturday. Rather than celebrating my extra twenty four hours of life, I spent my day like every other Saturday, working on hobbies which included raking leaves, trimming branches, and tilling the garden in preparation for spring. I worked until late and sat down to dinner with Colleen just before 6 when the phone rang. 

In my job, there is no such thing as solace or inconvenience. Grief and mayhem are always one phone call away. 

I answered the phone to the voice of my sergeant, Jay Morgan. Morgan told me about a body Patrol found in Cameron Park at the end of Wallace Lake Road in south Caddo Parish. A dead body could mean a lot of different things: suicide, drowning, medical problem, or murder, and it was our job to figure out which one applied to the current situation. I was still in my work clothes from celebrating Leap Year, so I jumped in the shower, then threw on my call out shirt and some jeans. When I got in my car, I called Dispatch to find out what was going on. Dispatcher Joyce Terry told me some kids called in about a suspicious looking bundle of laundry at the park, and when patrol got there, they found a body wrapped inside the bundle. CSI, the Coroner and my captain were already there. 

Cameron Park consists of a boat ramp and a parking lot with a couple of picnic tables along the edge of Wallace Lake, a small rural lake between Caddo and DeSoto Parishes in the Red River floodplain. It is a destination for fishermen, high school kids with nothing to do, and people who want to picnic by the lake and not be bothered.

In 1996, a woman named Cindy Cathey was found murdered in the parking lot at Cameron Park. Her case was never solved, and the detectives who investigated her murder have long since retired. Those detectives developed a suspect in Cindy’s murder, and he lived in a working class neighborhood just down the road from the park. They were confident of his guilt, but there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest him. Now it was twenty four years later, and I didn’t want another unsolved homicide. On the way to the scene, I spoke to the only person who could help, “Lord... please help us catch whoever did this.”

When I got to the end of Wallace Lake Road, I parked outside the tape, so I didn’t get blocked by a dozen other cars. I went under the yellow tape and spoke to Deputy Matt Henry. He put my name on the list of everyone who entered the scene. I walked a hundred yards to a crowd of people, mostly deputies, looking at a bundle of laundry sitting 15 feet from the edge of the pavement and twenty feet from the lake. The outer layer of the bundle was a white comforter with black flowers outlined on it.

2019 had been a dry fall for north Louisiana, but January 2020 ushered in twice the rain as normal. Three days earlier, 5 inches of rain fell, swelling Wallace Lake within a few feet of the parking lot. Now there was a water line where the lake had been, and just beyond the line sat  the bundle. When the rain stopped that Wednesday before, temperatures plunged into the twenties. Leap Year Saturday was the first pleasant day in sometime with temperatures in the mid-sixties.

Justin Sundquist was the first deputy on scene. He talked to the teens, and they told him they  thought there was a body wrapped up in the bundle. Justin took plenty of pictures before cutting through the sheets and blankets to find a hand. He stopped what he was doing, backed away and called detectives. Justin said most of the fingers on the hand had rings on them, including the thumb. Due to the rings, he thought the victim could have been a woman.

The sun had been down for over an hour, but when it was up, the bundle was conspicuous sitting near the picnic tables. If it had been a garbage bag, it would have made more sense, but a comforter tied in a knot seemed like something more than illegal dumping. Its presence at the park on Saturday afternoon suggested it had not been there long. 

A nearby resident who saw the police cars called Dispatch and said a white van backed up near the lake around 3 pm. The caller thought whoever was in the van may have dumped the bundle off. We spent hours looking for the nondescript white van, but it was just a distraction.

A Sheriff’s Office truck and box trailer backed up near the bundle, and deputies unloaded a generator, flood lights, and frames to drape the scene. When the drapes were set and the flood lights on, three Deputy Coroners and CSI John McCain went to work cutting through the layers of the bundle while the rest of us looked on. They cut through two comforters, some sheets, and a mattress cover to reveal a man. The white male was dressed for cold weather in a hood, jacket, several shirts, a pair of pants under overalls, and heavy boots. A single brown gardener’s glove was stuck to his back. He had a goatee, and his head was covered in blood. When they cut his clothes away, they found a one inch wound in his upper left chest and an exit wound in his back. Morgan suggested a sword. Captain said a spear. McCain thought it could have come from an arrow. The victim had tattoos on his arms and all over his body. Along with his rings, he wore several necklaces, one being a pentagram. His hair was shaved on both sides of his head but long in the middle.

A detective’s first task at a homicide scene is to identify the victim. The Deputy Coroners emptied the man’s many pockets. An ID or driver’s license would have made things easier, but he didn’t even have a wallet. 

Matt Lucky was the lead detective. He had a knack for matching criminals to crimes. I looked over his shoulder and took notes as one of the Deputy Coroners showed him a pocket knife taken from the dead man’s pants. Etched on the blade was “Tritta did it”. We had to look twice to get the spelling right. With that tiny piece of information, I called Dispatch and spoke to Joyce Terry again. I asked Joyce if she could run the nickname Tritta for me. In seconds, she came back with the name Rodney Christopher Nordby. A minute later, she sent his photograph to my phone. While we were still trying to figure out if Nordby was the victim, Detective Jeremy Prudhome arrived and recognized Nordby.

Prudhome was patient, thorough, and not easily distracted. He used those qualities with his partner Lucky, and the two of them attacked areas of high crime in Caddo Parish with overtime and surveillance. Over the last two years, their efforts made neighborhoods safer places to live. Now the two were teamed up to catch a killer. Several years earlier, Prudhome worked in Corrections and was assigned to the Re-Entry Program. That’s how he knew Rodney Nordby. 

Joyce gave me Nordby’s last known address which was his parent’s house in the city. I asked her for a list of people who visited him in jail. She gave me six names, all of whom were members of his family. Joyce checked further and came up with a victim’s notification form for a man who was the victim of a battery by Rodney Nordby in 2017. She gave me his name and cell phone number. 

I sent my guys to Nordby’s home to make notification, but Captain Herring stopped me. 

“Wait until CSI confirms his identity from his thumb print.”

“But we’re wasting time...”

“Wait.”

We waited.

Bobby Herring made his career with diligence, personality, and fortitude. In 2007, I was his sergeant when he was a detective in the Financial Crimes Task Force, working scams, check and credit card schemes, and bank frauds. His work ethic and arrest rate at the task force have never been duplicated. Now I worked for him and was glad to be doing being so. Most captains make an appearance at the scene, go home and wait for updates, but Bobby was there for the long haul.

CSI positively identified Rodney Nordby at 9:30 pm. Sergeant Morgan and Lucky left to make notification. Before he was promoted, Jay Morgan and Matt Lucky were partners, and the two were close. With over twenty years as a detective, Morgan had more experience than anyone at the scene. His skill and common sense approach were the glue that held the Persons and Property detectives together. Morgan and Lucky found Nordby’s mother home alone. His father was working out of town.

Notifications are the hardest part of a detective’s job. Mrs. Nordby was heart broken. Though her son was troubled, she never gave up hope that he would find his way. Morgan and Lucky asked her delicate questions, but she didn’t know all the people he ran around with. She asked the detectives about Rodney’s motorcycle. Up to that moment, no one knew he had a motorcycle. The motorcycle gave us something else to look for, and explained why he was dressed the way he was.

Prudhome went to the office and got on the computer to find names of people who were close to Nordby. I drove through neighborhoods near the crime scene looking for the white van reported earlier and saw many that fit the description. I imagined all kinds of scenarios, but without more information, it meant nothing.

I met Morgan and Lucky coming out of Nordby’s house. We left there and went to several homes in Shreveport looking for his friends but didn’t find any. We were running out of leads, so I called the man Dispatcher Joyce Terry told me about when we were at Cameron Park. The number was from a phone he owned two years earlier, and it rang repeatedly. Just when I thought voice mail would pick up, he answered. 

I called him by name. It was the right number. I told him about Nordby’s murder, but he already knew about it. He was talking to someone from the family before I called. Though Nordby was arrested for committing a battery on him two years earlier, they were still friends. He told me Nordby was a good dude, but he had a drug problem. I asked him about places Nordby bought drugs, and he told me about a house near the airport. He said he would find the address for the house and call me back.

Captain Herring, Sergeant Morgan, Matt Lucky, and I went to a house off Jewella Avenue near Westwood School where Nordby’s old girlfriend lived. It was a dead end street. We knocked at a house, but no one answered. Bobby went next door and spoke to the neighbors. They told him the woman we were looking for lived on the street, but she stayed in the house next door to the one we knocked on. We went to the house and walked around it. There were no motorcycles. We knocked on doors and windows repeatedly, but other than a barking dog inside, there was no response. Lucky left and went to the office to see if he and Prudhome could generate a lead. The investigation had reached a stand still.

The quarter moon shone under a clear sky. A gentle breeze was blowing. The temperature was perfect. Midnight was near. It was the kind of night you would never know about unless you are doing something out of the ordinary. A night like this wouldn’t happen again for 1460 days, and the uncommon task of cleaning up society’s messes had brought us together in a moment of peace to remind us of God’s glory. We stood beside our cars and talked about our options. It looked like our best option was to go home and wait until someone came forward with information.

I remembered the victim I spoke to earlier and wondered if he found the address he told me about. I looked at my phone and noticed two missed calls from him. I called him back and reminded him who I was. He didn’t have the address I asked for, but he had an idea.

“I been thinking about this. Tritta’s been hanging around with a guy who just got out of jail. I went to high school with him, and he’s a bad dude. His name is Daniel Haire. You need to check him out.”

It was a long shot, but we were at the end of our rope. I called Joyce and told her about my conversation with the victim. She gave me Daniel Haire’s address, checked her map, and told me Haire lived just off East King’s Highway near the duck pond.

“Hey Morg...my man just called and told me Nordby has been hanging around a guy named Daniel Haire who lives off East Kings. You want to go check him out?”

“Hell yeah. We got nowhere else to go.”

When I pulled up to Haire’s house, Bobby and Morgan were out of their cars. It was a nice neighborhood that had been a hallmark of Shreveport for years. Unlike the new neighborhoods, there were tall oak trees, live oaks, and magnolias in yards. I knocked on the door under the carport so I could see someone coming to the door through the window over the kitchen sink. I knocked loudly and repeatedly. When I stopped, I heard someone fumbling with the door in front. I walked around as an elderly man opened the door. He was in his underwear with one leg in his pants clearly startled at the late disruption.

“Sorry to bother you. I’m Detective Lieutenant Mickey McDaniel with the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office. We’re looking for Daniel Haire.”

“He’s-s-s not here.”

“We’re working a missing person case on a friend of his.”

We were at the right place. The man was Daniel’s father. He struggled with his pants while talking through the storm door. There was a woman behind him, peeking over his shoulder, who looked to be in her thirties. I asked if we could come in, and he opened the door. Morgan spoke to the father while Bobby and I spoke to the woman, Daniel’s sister. She was frightened. When we asked her why, she said she was afraid of Daniel. We asked if she knew Rodney Nordby.

“Why? Is he dead?”

“As a matter of fact he is.”

“Oh, Lord I knew it!”

“How’d you know it?”

“I heard a noise the other night.”

“A noise? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, just a loud noise like a thud.”

“What happened?”

“I came out of my room, and Daniel was there. I asked him what happened, and he told me everything was alright, and I needed to go back in my room.”

“Where’s your room?”

She showed us.

“Where’s Daniel’s room?”

Daniel’s room was next to hers. She opened the door, and there were two twin sized beds side by side with no sheets or covers on them. There was an arrow with a target tip on top of one of the mattresses. Bobby and I looked at each other. There were holes in the wall where someone had target practice with a bow.

Bobby asked her why the beds were bare. She took us to a linen closet between the bedrooms and opened the door. On the bottom shelf, there were shams that matched the pattern of the outer comforter Rodney Nordby was wrapped in. There were also sheets on the shelves that matched the other bedding around his body. 

I showed her a picture of the bundle I took at the scene and asked her if the outer comforter looked familiar. She gasped and said it was Daniel’s comforter.

She took us to the front living room and showed us some smears on the floor where Daniel had mopped something up a few days earlier. She said she asked Daniel what he was doing, and he told her, “Cleaning up some blood.” She said his friend Dillon Brown came by late Thursday night and helped him load a trash can in the back of his black Chevy pickup truck. Dillon lived a street over from Daniel.

We knew we were at the crime scene, so we all stepped outside. We called Lucky to the house and told Jeremy Prudhome to start writing a search warrant. Morgan talked to Daniel’s dad. Mr Haire told him his crossbow was missing. The arrow we saw in Daniel’s room was actually a bolt for a crossbow. 

Thirty minutes earlier the case consisted of a dump site and a body. We had no idea where the man had been murdered, and our leads were exhausted. All we knew for sure was that he was killed somewhere else. Now we had the crime scene and a suspect. Things were coming together, all thanks to Joyce Terry our dispatcher.

At midnight, February 29 became March 1st. On the same day 32 years earlier, I raised my right hand before Sheriff Don Hathaway and swore to enforce the laws of Louisiana.

Detective Lucky was good at talking to people. He arrived from the office and made recorded interviews with Daniel’s dad and sister. He left Detective Prudhome at the office to write the search warrant for the house and an arrest warrant for Daniel Haire. 

Morgan called Detective Nathan Everett to meet us at the house. Everett was a skilled carpenter and tactical shooter before he became a deputy. He and I drove around the corner and found Dillon Brown’s house and his grandfather’s pickup out front. We knocked on the front door and spoke to his grandmother. Dillon was not there, and she did not know Rodney  Nordby. She told us Dillon and Daniel Haire left her house three hours earlier with Dillon’s girlfriend. We asked her if we could look in her backyard. She went with us, and we saw Nordby’s motorcycle in her shop through a glass door. It had been painted blue with a can of spray paint. We had a patrolman watch the house while we went back to Haire’s house and called Prudhome to write another warrant for the Brown home.

We weren’t sure if Dillon Brown had anything to do with the murder, but we knew he helped Daniel Haire hide Nordby’s body. Patrol went to the casino parking lots in Shreveport and Bossier looking for Brown’s girlfriend’s car, but they didn’t find it. Brown and Haire were fugitives, but they didn’t know we were after them. They could show up at Dillon or Daniel’s house at any moment.

We sent Daniel’s father and sister away from the house, so we could search. Prudhome woke up the Assistant District Attorney and Judge on call. Just after 2 am, he had the warrants. While waiting for them to be delivered to Daniel’s house and begin the search, I heard Patrol Sergeant Matt Cowden on the radio initiating a traffic stop on Dillon’s girlfriend’s car on the same street Dillon lived. When I got there, the car was pulled in at his grandmother’s house. Patrolmen had Dillon and Daniel lying in the driveway at gunpoint. I was grateful for the unexpected apprehension because I knew a manhunt or chase could have ended badly. Cowden and his patrolmen handcuffed the trio. Dillon’s girlfriend yelled constantly and demanded to be released. We detained her because we believed she was an accessory after the fact to murder. I looked in the back seat of her car and saw a large crossbow and a .22 rifle. We later learned that Dillon and Daniel were showing off the weapons, as well as a flare gun, everywhere they went. We put them in three different patrol cars and took them to the office.

Three people were in custody, and there were two houses and two vehicles to search and a motorcycle to recover. We were stretched thin. Lucky and I met the patrolmen at the office. Prudhome was already there. Everett stayed behind with Morgan and the Captain to conduct the searches. 

We separated the suspects in three different rooms and interviewed them according to culpability. Lucky and Prudhome interviewed the woman first. She was angry that we handcuffed her and put her in a patrol car. We knew she didn’t have anything to do with Nordby’s murder, but she was chauffeuring the murderer and his accomplice all over town, and she couldn’t have missed the crossbow and rifle sitting on her backseat. It appeared she knew about the murder and even helped Daniel try to sell his crossbow, but she denied it. The detectives could have arrested her, but they had more important things to do. They held on to her car and cell phone and cut her loose.

Dillon Brown was next. He admitted to helping Daniel take out his trash, but that was all until he found out the detectives knew more than he thought. As they suspected, he had nothing to do with the murder, but he knew there was a human being in Daniel’s trash can. He told detectives Daniel called him in the middle of the night and needed help, so he went to Daniel’s house and he helped him load a garbage can in the back of Dillon’s truck. Normal people don’t leave their family in the middle of the night to help a friend take out the garbage, but Dillon did. 

The two men dumped the garbage can in a dumpster behind a business just down the road and went back to Daniel’s house, but when they got there, Daniel panicked and told Dillon they had to go back and get the bundle. They returned, climbed into the dumpster, and picked up the bundle, and Dillon told the detectives he saw the silhouette of a man inside the bundle, but instead of leaving and calling the police, he helped Daniel put the bundle back in the trash can, and they took it to Cameron Park at the end of Wallace Lake Road. He said he was deathly afraid when a police car followed them for a couple of miles, but it finally turned off. When they got to the park, they backed up to the edge of the lake, dumped the body in the water and took off.

Perhaps they thought the bundle would float out into the lake and sink, but it didn’t. Two days later, the lake receded, and the bundle remained where it was dumped for two full days before anyone noticed it.

It was hard to believe Dillon didn’t know Daniel murdered Tritta, or that he was naive enough not to know there was a body in the trash can they dumped in the dumpster. Ultimately, it didn’t matter when or how Dillon found out he was dumping a human body, just that he knew and did not report it. He also said he did not know how Tritta died, but that was also unlikely due to the way he had been behaving, and the fact that Tritta’s motorcycle was at his house, hid in the shed. Daniel probably told him about the murder, but Dillon didn’t gave him up. Lucky arrested Dillon for accessory after the fact to second degree murder. Dillon broke down and wept. The next day, Lucky added a charge of felon in possession of a firearm.

Lucky and Prudhome interviewed Daniel Haire. Daniel didn’t look like a criminal. He was tall, well dressed, had a nice haircut, and unlike his co-defendants, he was calm and cool. Most suspects in his shoes would tell detectives Nordby’s death was self-defense or accidental. Maybe he dropped a loaded cross bow and it went off, or maybe Nordby got angry and came at him with a knife, and it was the only way to stop him, and once he was dead, he panicked and got rid of the body to save his family the pain of having a person killed in their home, but Daniel didn’t say any of that. It didn’t occurred to him to offer a reasonable defense until much later.

Prudhome developed rapport and read him his rights. Daniel dutifully signed the form. The detective was patient and empathetic, a combination that can elicit cooperation from the most difficult of people. Haire listened with his elbows on his knees and his hands up in a steeple position resting against his chin in a display of confidence. Those who commit horrible crimes try to be confident, but their body language betrays them with crossed arms, crossed legs, blank stares, and nonchalance. They are anything but eager, but Daniel was the exception.

Prudhome told him they were working a homicide. He paused and asked Daniel if he had anything to do with it. Daniel dropped his hands and began talking as if he had been waiting for this opportunity to explain himself.

Daniel told the detectives he was being threatened and made four or five reports with the Shreveport Police Department, but since he had a record, no one took him seriously. Daniel never explained what kind of threats were made or who made them, he just wanted them to know he was a victim, and his father was the victim of theft. He said someone was stealing his dad’s tools, and his dad was mad at him about it, so he decided to do something about it.

On Thursday night around 10 pm, Daniel heard something on his back porch. He looked outside and saw his buddy Tritta Nordby. Tritta and Daniel once shared a cell at Caddo Correction Center. Both were drug addicts. Both were on parole and unemployed, and both were caught in a state of perpetual adolescence. Daniel said his father was angry with him about the missing tools, and he imagined Tritta was the one stealing the tools; however, it seemed more likely that Daniel was the one taking the tools. He didn’t deny killing Tritta, he merely told the detectives why he did, expecting them to see the murder as reasonable.

In the dark of night, Daniel saw his old cell mate on his back porch. Tritta had parked his motorcycle in the carport and walked around to the back door. Daniel opened the door, raised the crossbow, and shot the unsuspecting biker in the center of his chest. The crossbow was his father’s, but he took it as his own because it wasn’t illegal for a convicted felon to have one. 

A bolt from a crossbow can penetrate a bullet proof vest, and a bolt equipped with a broad head which is essentially a four sided razor blade can drop a grizzly bear at close range, and Tritta was no grizzly. The projectile entered his chest and went out his back. He stumbled into the house through the kitchen near the living room and collapsed on the floor as blood filled his lungs and drained from his body. He was drowning in his own blood. With only seconds left to live, he wondered what happened. What did his friend do to him? A pressure bandage to his chest, and a call to 911may have saved him, but Daniel didn’t care.

Momentum carried Nordby into the house as if he was desperately seeking safety and security  inside the warm home, but he was offered nothing of comfort. He fell to the ground in shock and slowly bled out on the living room floor. Haire scrambled to conceal his deed from his slumbering family. Both father and sister were awakened by the commotion, but he assured them everything was alright. With them assuaged, he pressed the dead man into the fetal position, wrapped him a bundle of bed coverings he stripped from his bed, and threw his friend into the garbage can. All that was left was to mop up the warm blood of the man he just murdered, but he couldn’t hide the blood trail. The detectives at the scene saw it clearly with a flashlight, and when CSI showed up and sprayed luminal, the single family dwelling looked like a slaughter house.

Daniel told his story without guilt as if those listening had his same sociopathic outlook. Of course drugs were a factor, but they only highlighted the evil in his heart.

Daniel and his buddy Dillon, thinking no one would notice the dead man’s motorcycle missing, decided to capitalize on it by selling it to a friend who shared their aimless lifestyle of unemployment, drugs, and living off parents. Their mechanically inclined friend put a new coil on the motorcycle and painted it blue. On Friday night at 1 am, twenty four hours after the murder, Dillon and Daniel went to the mechanic’s house and walked into his bedroom like soldiers ready for war. Dillon carried a .22 rifle, and Daniel toted a cocked and loaded crossbow which had already killed one man. The mechanic somehow lived to tell the story two days later. Why he did not call the police immediately after his encounter is a testimony to the mind altering effects of drugs.

I watched the interview from the media room and thanked God for answering prayer. It was our first homicide of 2020, but ironically, it wasn’t ours at all. The murder occurred inside the city limits and Nordby’s body was dumped in the parish. 

Shortly after sunrise on March 1st, Daniel Haire was in jail for second degree murder. Over the next few days, the detectives found out Daniel confronted Nordby about stealing from him and  invited him to come over to his house on Thursday night to talk about it, but when Nordby arrived, there was no conversation. 

If Daniel would have left Norby’s body at the first place he dumped it, he may have gotten away with murder. When Lucky and Prudhome checked the dumpster behind the business on Sunday morning after booking Daniel, they didn’t find any evidence, but they found three bags of dead crawfish someone had discarded. The odor was overwhelming and enough to mask the odor coming from a dead man in a bundle of laundry until it was hauled off to the landfill.

Theologian Louis Berkhof said, “The crime of murder owes its enormity to the fact that it is an attack on the image of God.” (Systematic Theology, p. 204) Because of that enormity, we intrinsically know murder is wrong, and those who commit it know it is wrong as well. That is why they try to hide what they’ve done.

A month before the murder, Jim Fortson, a local attorney and Reserve Deputy, asked me to teach an adult Sunday School class at First Methodist Church in downtown Shreveport. I’m not sure why he asked a Baptist to teach his group, but I was honored to have the opportunity. 

After a 13 hour investigation, I finished at the office. It was 7:30, and I was scheduled to be at First Methodist in two hours. I drove to the church, slept in my car until 9:15, changed clothes, and went inside. The class was filled with close to a hundred people, and I did what Baptists do, I spoke on the penal, substitutionary atonement of Christ from 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For God made Jesus who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God through him.” The men and women at FMC were kind and welcoming. I spoke to an old friend, Shreveport attorney Steve Glassell, before I left. 

I saw Steve Glassell two years later in May 2022 at Daniel Haire’s second-degree murder trial. Steve was Daniel’s defense attorney. When I was on the stand answering his questions, I made eye contact with the jurors. Some were enthralled. Others seemed disinterested. When the trial was over, they decided Daniel was not guilty of second degree murder, but they found him guilty of manslaughter. Due to Daniel being a habitual offender, he was sentenced to 70 years.

Some cases are broken with evidence, others with confessions and information. This case was broken by the diligence of a dispatcher who noticed a piece important information and passed it on…

                                      Dillon C. Brown

                                        Daniel Haire

https://www.ktbs.com/news/haire-convicted-in-2020-crossbow-slaying/article_181f4044-d2d8-11ec-8f0b-3732334539d0.html

https://710keel.com/shreveport-crossbow-killer-sentenced-to-70-years-in-prison/#:~:text=After being found guilty on,year-old Rodney Christopher Norbdy.