Cold Case Files: Murder in the Bayou

- Courtney loved family get togethers

and she loved having friends.

They all loved Courtney

because she had that bubbling personality.

- And I got the phone call that changed my life forever.

- She was nude from the waist down.

It was evident that the body was posed.

- She let the person into the house.

It's somebody she knew.

- You think of all these horrible things

that go through your mind.

- Why haul her so far away from home?

Especially with all the bayous and canals

and stuff in Louisiana where you could throw a body.

- I said, I'm gonna solve this case or I'm gonna die trying.

We never stopped.

We never stopped looking.

We never stopped asking questions.

In all those years, we never stopped.

Winnie, Texas.

Small farming community.

It's all Texas Bayou country.

Rice, hay, cows, horses.

People go into swamps

and they hunt alligators and they duck hunt.

Everybody knows everybody,

so you better not do nothing wrong.

Our crime rate is low.

Most of it is a burglary

or farm equipment stolen.

You get a murder once in a while.

- It's a hot morning in Winnie.

Just north of town,

a farmer on his tractor passes an abandoned building.

He spies a body in the shadows and calls the police.

I knew exactly where it was.

It was about 150 yards down the street from my house.

The first thing that went through my mind is,

whose child is it?

Is it one of my neighbor's kids?

I had no idea it could be somebody

from outta state or outta town.

- It was very clear that this was a body

of a petite young white female.

It was also very clear

that she had been dead for some period of time

because there was significant decomposition to the body.

She was lying on her back

and her heels pulled up to her body

so that her knees were up.

She was nude from the waist down.

It was evident that the body was posed.

- Who would wanna hurt somebody to this point,

degrade 'em to this point?

That has to be a sick individual who did this.

- There were some tire tracks that led up

to where a car would logically be positioned

to remove a body from the trunk.

- You're a quarter of a mile from Interstate 10.

I figured it had to be somebody

who traveled that road pretty frequently,

who knew that place was there.

If she was sexually assaulted,

wherever it happened, or wherever she was murdered,

she wasn't killed there.

We were looking for any other kind of identifiers,

any other way to identify the victim.

And I noticed a class ring from Alexandria High School

in Alexandria, Louisiana.

About 3 1/2 hours away.

There was a name printed on the inside of it.

Courtney Coco.

I stepped outside the building

and I called Alexandria Police Department in Louisiana.

- Courtney Coco is a 19-year-old receptionist,

born and raised in Alexandria.

It's a little small town.

It's a mix of a lot of country folks,

but a little bit of Cajun from down South.

It was an awesome place to raise my girls.

- Courtney has a house near the Red River,

a short drive from her mother's.

- My mom and dad had a camp at Saline Bayou.

It was on a Friday, 3:30 in the afternoon.

Courtney came to my house,

and I asked Courtney

if she wanted to go with us to the camp.

She said, "No, Mom, I'm not the country girl."

And I gave Courtney $10 for gas.

She was gonna come back and forth

and feed my two little dogs.

So we got home from the camp late Sunday night,

and I noticed that my little dogs didn't have

like their food,

but I really wasn't concerned too much about it

'cause I just thought maybe Courtney

had come earlier that day.

And Monday around lunchtime,

October 4th, 2004, the detective

from the Alexandria Police Department called me

and asked me if Courtney was there.

I said, "Courtney doesn't live here, but this is her mom.

Is something wrong?"

And he said, "Possibly."

That's when I got the news

of them finding a body in Texas

with my daughter's ring on the finger.

- Alexandria Police ask the family

for a way to identify the victim as Courtney.

- I had told them that Courtney had braces on her teeth

and that she had just got a new butterfly tattoo

on her low back.

I didn't want it to be someone else's child,

but I surely didn't want it to be Courtney.

And I just remember the phone ringing

and my sister saying it is.

And my mom said that I passed out on the floor.

And that's all I remember about that.

Courtney was the baby.

Her older sisters, Lace and Heather,

would haul her around like a little sack of potatoes

and, you know, play house with her

and play doctor with her or whatever.

Courtney was a lovable child.

She had a curious little nature too.

- She loved birthdays.

She had wit.

I love it.

- Courtney was very into baseball.

Then she got into cheerleading.

Team up!

- Every time we'd have get togethers

for holidays and stuff,

there was so much laughter, so much fun.

- Courtney had already taken some college classes

in her high school

because she wanted to go into criminal justice.

Her sister, Lace, was working at a dentist's office,

and Lace got Courtney a job as the front receptionist.

Once Courtney got out on her own,

now she's got friends and boyfriend,

and she was dating a guy named Jitty.

So we didn't get to see each other as much.

It was not long after that

where this all happened with Courtney.

On October 5th, 2004,

the Jefferson County morgue did a autopsy

on Courtney Coco's body.

Dr. Brown had reported

that he thought the cause of death was asphyxiation,

that she had been smothered.

- He immediately realized that the advanced state

of decomposition was not normal

for the time from which she had gone missing

to the time she was found.

- He said, well, she had to be someplace

that was hotter than the ambient temperature,

like in a car.

- There was no drugs in her system.

There was no alcohol in her system.

So we know she didn't OD.

Then there was no evidence of sexual assault.

The way they posed the body

and disgraced her and everything else,

it surprised me.

- Hoping for more leads,

Alexandria PD searches Courtney's house.

- There had been a party recently,

I believe dominoes were on the table.

There was some things in disarray.

Her bedroom, the bed was in disarray.

There was no comforter on the bed.

Under the bed,

police find an empty Brinks security box.

Investigators learned early on

that Courtney had received a settlement

from the untimely death of her father.

- The first thing that law enforcement

tends to focus on is,

was this part of a a robbery or a burglary gone bad?

- Missing from the house

is any sign of Courtney's cell phone

or her Pontiac Bonneville.

Detectives notice something else is missing.

- What we did not find was evidence of forced entry.

What that means is that she let the person into the house.

It's somebody she knew.

The names that were written on the dominoes scorecard

were Courtney, Jackie, and Lewis.

- Police discover Lewis is Jackie's boyfriend.

Jackie is a good friend of Courtney's

and the sister of Courtney's boyfriend, Jitty.