Shreveport-Bossier women's disappearances in 1979 were eerily similar
Two highway department workers were checking a bridge in rural DeSoto Parish on the morning of June 1, 1979, when they spotted the skeletal remains of a fully-clothed female lying down an embankment just off the roadway.
Positive identification would require comparison with dental records. But local police already had grim suspicions about who might lay there. There were two likely — and tragic — options.
Just months earlier, a Bossier City woman and a Shreveport woman had disappeared five weeks apart. Their cases followed eerily similar patterns.
Arrilla Webb Vaul, 23, went missing first. Hours after she dropped her husband off for work at K-Mart in the Eastgate Shopping Center, her car was found abandoned at the foot of the Jimmie Davis Bridge in Bossier City. One tire was flat and appeared to have been punctured.
Next to disappear was 18-year-old Dodie Gay. The high school senior had gone to the Eastgate Shopping Center on a Friday evening to pick up her engagement ring at a store there. She never returned home, and her car was found the next day in the shopping center parking lot. As with Vaul's vehicle, one of Gay's tires was flat, apparently punctured.
The similarities immediately put local police officers on notice and spread fear through the community that a kidnapper might be on the loose.
In the months and years to follow, law enforcement agencies in Caddo, DeSoto and Bossier parishes investigated. So did the Brookshire Police Department in Texas, where one victim's mother lived.
But almost 40 years later, the question of what happened to Arrilla Vaul and Dodie Gay — and whether their disappearances were connected — remains unanswered.
An unexplained disappearance
In the spring of 1979, Jimmy Carter was president of the United States, and Bill Hanna was mayor of Shreveport. Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" topped the Billboard charts, and new film releases included "Norma Rae" and "Hair."
One of Shreveport's newest places to shop was the Eastgate Shopping Center, which opened in the fall of 1975 on East 70th Street, between East Kings Highway and what were then the cotton fields of Youree Drive.
"It was just easy picking grounds," said Lt. Robert Davidson, cold case investigator for the DeSoto Parish Sheriff's Office. "Back in those days, Eastgate was kind of a major shopping area, and all those restaurants and all that stuff on 70th street weren't even there then."
Anchored by a K-Mart, the shopping center also featured a Kroger grocery store, Eckerd's Drugs, the Crystal Palace amusement center, Bealls, H.J. Wilson's and a movie theater.
In March of 1979, Arrilla Vaul was a 23-year-old housewife living in south Bossier City.
Vaul, born Arrilla Naomi Webb, had grown up in Friendswood, Texas, about 20 miles southeast of Houston, where she graduated from Friendswood High School in 1974. She married Scott Vaul in Harris County, Texas, in August 1976.
Scott, an airman, was assigned to Barksdale Air Force Base and began working part-time at K-Mart in the Eastgate Shopping Center. The Vauls lived about six miles from the shopping center, in the Bossier City subdivision of Bellaire, just south of Barksdale Air Force Base off U.S. 71.
Just before 6 p.m. on Thursday, March 15, 1979, Arrilla dropped Scott off at K-Mart for work, then seemingly headed back toward home on East 70th Street in her foreign car.
About four hours later, Scott found his wife's vehicle on the Bossier City side of the Jimmie Davis Bridge, abandoned on the side of the road with a slash through one of the tires. Her personal belongings remained in the car.
According to the Bossier Parish Sheriff's Office, witnesses described seeing what was possibly Vaul's vehicle pull off to the side of the road at the foot of the bridge. Her car was immediately followed by a white truck that pulled up behind her, witnesses said, and a white male reportedly got out of that truck. No one is sure what happened next.
At the time of her disappearance, Vaul was wearing a purple dress and white high-heeled shoes. She was 5'1" and weighed 100 pounds, with blonde hair and blue eyes. She had a small mole on the right side of her nose.
Five weeks later
On the day she disappeared forever, Ladoisha Ann "Dodie" Gay was making plans for the future.
Only a month away from her high school graduation, the 18-year-old also had another major milestone looming — she was newly engaged to be married.
Originally from Washington, Missouri, Gay had lived in Shreveport since she was about 10 years old.
Though she attended Fair Park High School at first, she transferred to Northwood High School during her junior year. A friend later told The Times that despite the change in schools, Dodie continued to thrive, participating in a number of clubs and extracurricular activities.
Gay also worked two part-time jobs in Shreveport, at Pizza Hut on Greenwood Road and Regent Shoes and Sportswear on North Market Street.
Her boss at Regent told The Times that Gay handled customers well due to her smile. "Look up and smile," Gay used to say.
On the afternoon of Friday, April 20, 1979, Gay left her home in north Shreveport and headed to the Eastgate Shopping Center to pick up her engagement ring at Wilson's, a catalog showroom.
She first stopped at Regent to get her paycheck, then went to an ATM before driving to Wilson's, according to police files. From Eastgate, Gay called her mother at approximately 6:30 p.m. to report that she was going shopping, police said.
Gay failed to return home Friday night and, on Saturday, her locked, black-and-turquoise 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass was found parked in front of K-Mart at the shopping center. A tire was flat and appeared to have been punctured. At least one police officer believed it had been slashed with a knife, according to case files.
Dodie's disappearance was first reported in The Times on April 23, three days after she was last seen. The next day, The Times confirmed that police were looking for a potential connection between Gay and Vaul's disappearances.
"Local authorities are investigating a possible link in the disappearance of a Shreveport woman from a local shopping center Friday and that of a Bossier City woman who disappeared from the same site March 15," an April 24 article stated.
As law enforcement agencies in Caddo and Bossier parishes kept investigating, police sought friends of Dodie's who had reportedly met with her at the Danbi's Eastgate Pizza and Po'Boy restaurant on the night of her disappearance.
According to case files, Gay also was seen shopping inside K-Mart that Friday night. A bag and a receipt from purchases made at K-Mart were found inside Gay's vehicle.
As the weeks continued on, Caddo police interviewed some of Gay's friends and acquaintances, along with three witnesses who had reported seeing her at the shopping center that night outside of K-Mart.
According to those witnesses, a girl who looked like Dodie slowly drove by them in the parking lot as her tire flattened in front of the store around 9:15 p.m. It was raining steadily. Dodie pulled over to the curb, and a white male in a pickup truck drove up, seemingly to assist her, the witnesses claimed.
The truck he drove was two-toned, possibly gold and white in color. The man appeared to be in his 20s or 30s, with brown hair and a heavy build.
And because help had seemingly arrived for the girl, the witnesses left. They said they didn't know what had happened next.
The Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun" was the class song for seniors at Northwood High School — an apt choice for students in the Class of 1979, kids who were supposed to have their whole lives ahead of them.
On May 24, 1979, those seniors graduated without Dodie.
A body found
The combination of Vaul's and Gay's disappearances put the Shreveport-Bossier area on high alert.
"Scary kidnap rumors" ran rampant, according to a May 16, 1979, report in The Times.
Tales spread of men approaching women in parking lots. As the rumors went, the man would tell the woman there was something wrong with her vehicle and offer her a ride — but it was all just a ruse for his true intentions of kidnapping and harming his victim. The reasons for wanting to kidnap these women varied widely depending on which version of the rumor was told.
A Caddo sheriff's deputy told The Times that "well-intentioned vigilantes" had even distributed flyers warning women to be on guard.
Another shopping center abduction seemed to lend credence to these rumors. On May 17, 1979, The Times reported that a woman had been kidnapped as she drove into the parking lot of an Albertsons grocery store on East Kings Highway, not far from the Eastgate Shopping Center.
"A man, reportedly armed with a knife, pushed her back into her car and forced her to drive," the article stated.
They went to the Ellerbe Road area, where the woman managed to escape and called law enforcement.
Police could not confirm whether the abduction had any link to the Vaul and Gay cases.
Then, on June 1, 1979, two highway department workers were checking a bridge on La. 510 — a rural two-lane highway in DeSoto Parish, 15 miles southeast of Mansfield — when they came across a woman's skeletal remains.
Police suspected from the beginning that the skeleton either belonged to Gay or Vaul. Members of both Caddo and Bossier sheriff's offices were put on notice when the body was found, The Times reported.
By the early evening of June 1, comparison with dental records would prove that the remains belonged to 18-year-old Dodie Gay. Police ruled her death a homicide.
Deputies said it appeared Gay's body had been thrown from the highway down an embankment at the site of the bridge. She was still fully clothed except for her high-heeled clog shoes, which were missing. According to reports, Dodie's purse, engagement ring and other jewelry also were never recovered.
A preliminary pathology report determined that Gay's death was possibly caused by a blow to the head — a hairline fracture on the left side of the skull. The DeSoto Parish Sheriff's Office began a homicide investigation.
Friends and family mourned Gay, whose funeral was held June 7, 1979, at First Assembly of God Church in Shreveport. She was buried at Centuries Memorial Park Cemetery.
A school friend of Dodie's told The Times that it wouldn't be surprising if Dodie had accepted assistance from a stranger when she discovered her tire was flat.
"She just wouldn't think anything bad of anybody," the friend said. "It's really easy to see how she could be deceived."
Meanwhile, Vaul remained missing. While the Bossier Sheriff's Office led the investigation, Vaul's mother also enlisted the help of the Brookshire, Texas, police department, where she lived.
The Brookshire chief of police told The Times in September 1980 that his department believed there was a chance Arrilla Vaul was alive and had left the area on her own accord.
But in a follow-up article by The Times, Scott Vaul disputed the theory that his wife had willingly left and maintained that he believed foul play was involved.
Lt. Dave Faulk of the Bossier Sheriff's Office, who was previously assigned as a detective to Vaul's case, said Scott Vaul is now deceased, along with Arrilla's parents. She was an only child.
Over the past few decades, Vaul's case has periodically been noted as one of the area's remaining missing persons cases, with no notable developments.
The Bossier Sheriff's Office continues to feature Vaul's photo and details about her disappearance in sporadic news releases and on billboards around the parish, including in September of this year.
Faulk said police need someone who knows something to come forward to solve the mystery of Vaul's disappearance.
"Any piece of the puzzle could break the whole thing wide open," he said. "Even if you think it's minute, we want to know."
No one has ever been charged in the Vaul and Gay cases, but police have interviewed various subjects over the years, sometimes suspects in other murder cases, hoping to find out whether they might be involved.
In late January and early February 1985, DeSoto Parish authorities were reported to have interviewed convicted murderers and traveling companions Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Elwood Toole regarding the death of Gay.
Lt. Robert Davidson, who retired after 40 years with the DeSoto Parish District Attorney's Office and DeSoto Parish Sheriff's Office, still serves as a cold case investigator for DPSO. He said he went to the scene when Gay's body was found in 1979, but he didn't get involved in the DeSoto police investigation until 1980.
Davidson doesn't recall talking to Toole, but said he interviewed Lucas, who at one point claimed to have committed hundreds of murders.
"He told us about all kinds of people he killed, but (about Gay) he said, 'I did not do that one,'" Davidson said.
In 1993, James Edward Wood, a former truck driver, confessed to murdering Shreveport woman Shirley Coleman, 33, on Christmas Eve 1976. Coleman's abandoned vehicle was found at a shopping center on Waggoner Street between Hearne Avenue and Mansfield Road. Her remains were found in a rural wooded area in Caddo Parish in 1981.
Wood had lived in the Shreveport area from the early 1960s to the early 1990s before moving to Idaho, where he was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering 11-year-old Jeralee Underwood in 1993.
It was after his arrest for that crime that he confessed to Coleman's murder — and claimed that he had committed other crimes over the years, according to previous Times reports.
A 1993 Times article said police were looking into whether Wood was involved in Vaul or Gay's cases, though he had made no statements to police about them. Wood died in prison in 2004.
Davidson said he still has one possible suspect in Gay's death — a man with a criminal record who died in the early 1980s. At one point, Davidson said, a criminal informant told DeSoto police that this man had saved newspaper clippings about Dodie Gay and kept them under the seat in his truck.
Davidson said he finds that highly suspicious. The man also lived not far from where Dodie's body was found, Davidson said, and he drove a pickup truck similar to the one witnesses described seeing at Eastgate with Dodie.
"That's why he's a major suspect," Davidson said. "That's somebody of interest."
But that man has long been dead, and there's no physical evidence linking him to the crime.
Forty years later, having looked at Gay's case countless times, Davidson isn't sure what can be done to legally solve it or confirm his own suspicions.
"You just have to keep kind of plugging around and keep an open mind and keep it out where you can see the case," he said. "You can't just file it in a filing cabinet."
And there's always hope that somebody out there who knows something will finally step forward and do the right thing, he said.
"People come forth with evidence for different reasons," Davidson said. "They were on drugs back in those days, or they've straightened up, they've become a better person, and they decide to try to get things straight…
"Somebody who is even bad, a bad person, after years of going on, lots of times their philosophy changes, they change, and sometimes they want to tell you something."
If you have a tip
Anyone with any information about the abduction and murder of Dodie Gay is asked to call Lt. Robert Davidson at (318) 872-3956.
If you have any information about the disappearance of Arrilla Vaul, please call the Bossier Sheriff's Office at (318) 965-2203 or Bossier Crimestoppers at (318) 424-4100.