HL Arledge

As we ring the new year in 2025, I began my 10th year writing the Bayou Justice column. Looking back at the decade of work, I have revisited nearly 600 crimes, most murders hopelessly unsolved. If you saw my national television debut as a crime reporter on A&E’s Cold Case Crimes, the episode “The Devil in Hammond,” you know I am most proud of helping put Selonia Reed’s murderer behind bars after 30 years.

At 5:30 on a Thursday morning, a 27-year-old mother of one child arrived home from her newspaper delivery route. She made and drank coffee with her husband and saw him off for work before sunrise. Soon after, Ruth Anne Blake Manguno vanished, leaving her eight-month-old daughter crying alone in a playpen on the back porch.

During his first of three murder trials, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 1892, Col. Edward Scanlon Hobgood told the court he first met the train robber, Eugene Franklin Bunch, five months before his death. Hobgood described how he escaped the law in Mississippi and fled to Louisiana, knowing Pinkerton detectives feared the marshland near Honey Island. In the swamp, he befriended Bunch, who paid him to deliver a horse north of Amite City at a bend in the tracks between Arcola and Tangipahoa.