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November 05, 2007
LEON “ACE BOON-COON” HORNE: THE KILLER OF A WOMAN
I worked in the prison laundry at the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, Louisiana with Leon Horne.
I came to know him well. He is a modern equivalent of a “convict guard” or what was once a “building tender” in Texas. He worked for “the Man.” He and I never got along. I would not accept his “status” with the “free folks” at the Wade prison facility.
The “facts” of his crime presented in this essay were drawn from the Louisiana Supreme Court decision denying the appeal of his murder conviction.
But the issue of this essay actually transcends Leon Horne.
Women killers, and child molesters, enjoyed a preferred status at the Wade penal facility. Even by Louisiana prison standards, it was an extraordinary situation – it was the only place I ever witnessed it during my 40-year incarceration in that state’s penal institutions..
These offenders enjoyed the best jobs and the most favored treatment at the Wade facility. In most penal institutions these offenders are at the bottom of the social ladder. Not at Wade. They were the most trusted, hailed as the most ”rehabilitated,” and treated as the most preferred inmates at that facility.
I want to make it clear, up-front: I do not like men who beat and kill women. Perhaps it’s my social background. My father was abusive toward women and his children. These offenders are basically cowards.
Leon Horne was the worst kind.
His name is Leon Horne.
He arrived at the N5 Protection Unit at the David Wade Correctional Center in 1995. He was placed in the special protection unit because he had been a “reserve deputy” with the Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Department.
He was called “Ace Boon Coon.” In Southern prison vernacular, the moniker translated into “the top nigger.”
But the African-American ex-cop did not take offense from the crude racial slur. He embraced it. A prison guard called “Shorty” tagged Horne with the moniker “Boon Coon.” The racial slur fascinated a semi-illiterate Colombian drug cartel hitman (and a notorious N5 stool-pigeon) named Carlos Louis Quintero-Cruz. The Colombian and Horne were “running partners” who shared an aggressive homosexual interest in younger N5 inmates. Cruz added “Ace” to the “Boon Coon” moniker to give it additional flavor.
I never liked Ace Boon Coon. He was a classic “dirty cop” – the kind who accepts graft and corruption as natural components of law enforcement. Worst yet, he was a “woman killer.” That made him no better, in my way of thinking, to worst kind of child molester. The way he constantly pursued the affections of younger inmates convinced me that he had pedophilia in him.
Armed with a shameful “Stepin’ Fetchin’” personality, and a talent for woodworking, Horne quickly ingratiated himself with the Wade prison officialdom. Wade prison officials had some kind of perverse predilection for women killers, rapists, and child molesters. These offenders became the institution’s “cream” of the rehabilitated crop.
It was an early 1990s March morning in Monroe, Louisiana. Horne was sitting in his Dodge car at a local Cracker Barrel store. He spoke briefly to a friend who passed the car. Horne seemed “unhappy about something,” the friend would later recall.
Childhood unhappiness, which manifested itself into a nasty adult anger, became a permanent fixture in Horne’s life. The scene he witnessed as an eight-year-old certainly influenced the psychological disorder. He saw his father, a strict and violent man, shoot his mother in the face before turning the gun on himself and blowing out his own brains. The psychological scar tissue of that childhood trauma produced recurring depression in Horne’s life. It became the excuse he used to justify a life of failure, as a husband, father, and cop. He nurtured depression to the point it became a personal license to unleash his explosive anger. He steered his life into that perfect moment when he could kill a woman and then himself. But in the vault of his scarred psyche he knew could not follow his father into suicide..
Louisiana ranked second - in the pre-Katrina era - in the nation in the murder of women, and first in the overall violence and abuse against women, according to U.S. Justice Department reports. Louisiana children are rather routinely reared in households where violence against women is considered acceptable social behavior; a manly trait. Horne possessed this “manly trait” attitude in spades. He took perverse pleasure anytime he could put “a bitch in her place.”
That fateful March morning, with engine idling, Horne tapped the steering wheel fretfully. His stomach churned with anger, slowly bubbling up into rage. He then saw what he had been waiting for – his wife’s GMC van headed toward the Cracker Barrel store. Witnesses said Horne’s brown Dodge roared to life and exploded out of the store’s parking lot, ramming directly into Patricia Horne’s van.
The sudden collision blew out one of the van’s tires, but Patricia frantically managed to maintain control of her vehicle. She hit the accelerator, desperately trying to speed away toward safety from the pursuing Dodge. The grille of the Dodge sparked and clanged on the pavement as Horne pulled it alongside of the passenger side of Patricia’s van. The speeding vehicles forced other motorists to swerve into neighborhood yards as Horne fired two Ruger 9mm bullets into the side of the van.
Terrified, Patricia accelerated hard again, pulling ahead of the Dodge and the enraged lunatic driving it. She then attempted a right-hand turn in front of the Dodge. It proved to be a fatal error. Horne accelerated, ramming his car into the side of the van. The collision pinned Patricia’s van on the driver’s side against a guard rail. There was no escape from the mad man chasing her.
What transpired next can only be described as pure terror – the kind experienced by a hostage waiting to be beheaded by a foreign-speaking religious zealot. Cursing, and consumed with that trademark explosive rage, Leon Horne, the face of death, the executioner, climbed out of his mangled Dodge and jumped on its hood.
Patricia was screaming, pleading for life – begging the man she had borne children for not to do this unthinkable. The family, the love, the home she had given to Horne meant nothing to him at that moment. He casually leaned inside the van through the passenger window. He wanted to see and smell the fear of death in the final moment of life.
“Please, Leon, please don’t – please, no,” Patricia pleaded, almost a soft moaning, as she turned in a last desperate act to the driver’s side window exposing the backside of her skirt wet with urine. In that last terrified breath of life, she managed to utter one unheard “please” before the Ace Boon Coon pumped eleven 9mm bullets into her jerking, spasmodic body.
With the father-son tradition complete, Horne calmly got off the hood of his car and walked away, ignoring several passersby. He walked several blocks to his residence, the 9mm hanging at his side.
The police quickly arrived at the shooting scene where they recovered thirteen spent shell casings and a fully loaded 9mm clip. Patricia was dead, “please” etched in her death- hollow stare.
The police rushed to Horne’s residence where he refused to come out.
“I can’t go to jail,” he screamed, trapped in terror like Patricia had been moments earlier.
Several of Horne’s law enforcement friends arrived at the scene. They tried to talk him into surrendering – a courtesy they would not have extended to a thug who robbed and killed a Cracker Barrel store clerk. After several hours of negotiations, Horne meekly surrendered – a choice forced by cowardice. Jail was preferable to death.
At his trial, Horne used the insanity defense. A psychiatrist testified that Horne would “likely respond with feelings of resentment and anger and at times violence when he feels slighted. He is a person likely to explode.” Patricia’s decision to walk away from Horne’s abuse was the “slight” that became a license to hunt her down like a hunter does an animal.
Leon Horne’s case exemplifies a problem inherent in the nation’s death penalty. He planned the murder. He put the Ruger 9mm in the Dodge with two thirteen-round clips – enough ammunition to commit a massacre. He then drove to the Cracker Barrel store where he lay in wait for Patricia. He rammed his vehicle into her van before literally running her down in his Dodge – and, finally, with Patricia begging for her life, he executed her with eleven 9mm bullets at point-blank range.
Although Horne committed a premeditated murder, the offense did not merit the death penalty. Why? Because he killed his wife. Patricia was a victim of domestic violence. She was not a real “crime victim.” Domestic violence victims, virtually all women, do not warrant “death penalty justice” for their killers.
Since 1960 there have been only two wife-killers who received the death penalty in Louisiana. Both received the ultimate penalty only because each of them killed four people – their wives and three in-laws. And only one of those killers was actually executed – and he was put to death only because his wife was a deputy sheriff with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department. So he was actually executed for killing a cop – not a wife.
Leon Horne was given a life sentence. He quickly found official favor in the Louisiana prison system where women-killers enjoy a preferred status. For example, there are inmates assigned as servants as the state’s Governor’s Mansion. To secure this coveted assignment the inmates must meet a two-fold criteria: they must be African-American and must be serving life sentences, preferably for killing a wife or a girlfriend.
Women killers secure the best and most trusted prison assignments in the Louisiana prison system, garnering the praise and admiration of prison officials. Rank and file prison guards come from the same cultural and social backgrounds as women killers like Leon Horne. They readily accept the inherited domestic violence axiom that a “bitch gotta be slapped upside the head now and then to keep her mind right.”
Like Horne, Allen “Pepi” Laborde was a woman killer. He was one of Wade’s most powerful and influential inmates. He also started out in the N5 protection unit. He was placed there because he was sixteen years of age when he was convicted of the brutal, sexually motivated murder of a teenage girl in Rapides Parish. He killed the child and threw her body over a bridge into a local river.
Pepi was eventually placed in general population at the Wade prison facility where his woodcraftsman skills and heavy equipment operator talents made him an “essential” and trusted inmate. Like Horne, Pepi joined all the inmate self-help groups and took part in all the institution’s “special projects” programs. He used job skills to secure a position of privilege that translated into a substantial base of prison power. This position of privilege allowed him to indulge in homosexual activities and operate a pornographic video operation out of the prison’s maintenance department with the knowledge and, to some extent, the blessing of prison officials.
And, like Horne, Pepi also had a notorious “anger” management problem. He would “fly-off the handle” into uncontrollable fits of rage against both staff and inmate alike – the same rage that killed the young girl who would not fulfill his sexual demands.
Shortly after Venetia Michael became the state’s first female warden over an adult male prison, Pepi flew into one of his classic fits of rage against a job supervisor. He picked up a hammer and struck the supervisor in the head. He then stole the supervisor’s truck and escaped.
During the high-speed escape attempt, Pepi crashed the stolen pickup into the vehicle of a Wade female guard who just happened to be driving to work. She was seriously injured. Pepi was not. He jumped out of the prison truck and fled into nearby woods where he collapsed from exhaustion after a short flight.
Faced with certain capture, and a return to prison (and an extended stay in maximum security), Pepi slit his wrists with a broken piece of glass and bled to death. At the time of his death he had twenty-five thousand dollars in ill-gotten gain in his inmate banking account.
With the direction of the prison’s top echelon staff, the institution went into official “mourning” – not because of the injuries Pepi inflicted on the two prison officials but because of his death. High-ranking prison officials conducted meetings with inmate “leaders” to explain Pepi’s death.
These inmate leaders – many of whom shared Pepi’s pornography and ill-gotten gains (most of which was gained through a state subsidized inmate hobbycraft program) – requested, and Warden Michael approved, a “memorial service” for the escaped killer. Members of the warden’s administration attended the “memorial service” to express official condolences over the untimely death of the child killer. The only thing the prison administration did not do was lower the institution’s flag to half-staff.
Then there was Donald Benjamin. In 1965 Benjamin walked into a New Orleans washateria where a teenage couple were washing clothes. Armed with a large knife, Benjamin cut off the young woman’s clothes, leaving her clad only in her panties. Her boyfriend tried to intervene but was critically wounded by Benjamin. The young girl broke away and ran outside the washateria where Benjamin caught her. He stabbed her so many times the knife broke. She died a horrible death in the gutter where the killer left her. Benjamin was paroled in 1990 after serving twenty-five years for the coldblooded murder.
Between 1992 and 1999, the Louisiana parole board released 71 murderers on parole. The average amount of time served by those released murderers who killed women was 12 years. Among the inmates convicted of killing women who were paroled during that period were a “contract” killer, a double-murderer, and a sledgehammer killer.
Unlike Benjamin, and other coldblooded women killers who have been released from the Louisiana prison system, Horne remains confined at the David Wade Correctional Center. All three of the women killers referred to in this essay had one thing in common – an innate, groveling cowardice and a charisma to ingratiate themselves with prison authorities.
Benjamin escaped the death penalty under Louisiana’s old capital punishment law. Horne and LaBorde were not even eligible for the penalty under the state’s current death penalty legislation. Yet other offenders are routinely put to death in this country for murders that pale in comparison to the ones committed by these women killers.
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