Three suspects were arrested Thursday for a quadruple murder last year that shook the community with its gangland style brutality.
Kelvin Kaigler, 25, Frank Night, 32, and James Bishop, 39, all of Slidell, were each charged with four counts of first-degree murder that could carry the death penalty if sought by prosecutors.
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"The option of this crime being solved was never an option," said St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Capt. Barney Tyrney, the lead investigator on the case.
He said the year-long investigation took detectives to the Southshore and beyond, and hundreds, if not thousands of interviews were conducted with street level informants, drug dealers and drug users with help from the New Orleans Police Department and federal Drug Enforcement Administration,
The tips ultimately led detectives to Knight and Bishop, who have been in jail since last fall serving time for unrelated convictions, Sheriff Jack Strain said. With Knight in St. Tammany Parish Jail and Bishop jailed in Caldwell Parish, investigators found Kaigler in a hotel in Sevier County, Tenn., near Pigeon Forge, where he was vacationing with his family.
Sheriff deputies, along with Sevier County law enforcement officials, arrested Kaigler Thursday morning after knocking on his hotel door.
"He answered and was arrested without incident," Strain said.
Kaigler agreed to be extradited to St. Tammany Parish for booking, Strain said.
Although the three are charged with murder, Strain declined to comment on who was the trigger man or what roles each may have played in the killing, originally thought to be a two-man crime.
Strain said not all suspects fired guns that killed the four victims.
In July last year, toxicology tests reinforced detectives assertions that narcotics played a key role in the "execution-style" killings the result of a heroin debt of thousands of dollars owed by the victims.
"Two of the victims set a record for us by testing positive for seven of 10 drugs in an initial screening," St. Tammany Parish Coroner Peter Galvan said in a previous story in the St. Tammany News. "We've never seen anything like that before."
The adults tested positive for seven of the 10 classifications of prescription and illegal drugs covered by the screenings, Galvan said.
The teenagers each had three drugs in their systems, he said. He declined to name the drugs
"Anyone who tests positive for that many drugs more than likely has an addiction that drives them to engage in aberrant, bizarre and extreme behavior," he said. "In this case, the use of narcotics may have clouded the victims' judgment, rendering them incapable of defending themselves from this sort of summary, execution-style homicide."
Each victim was shot in the head at close range and both male victims were shot in the torso in the trailer of Roxann Agolgia in Slidell's Country Club Mobile Home Park last year.
With Agoglia's sister and her niece, then 9, hiding in the bathroom, the killers entered, talked briefly with the victims before opening fire and yelling profanities, the young girl told a neighbor.
The girl and her mother who moved to the park from their eastern New Orleans Department after Hurricane Katrina, emerged from the bathroom after the gun blasts, digging in one of the victim's pockets for a cell phone to call 911.
In the days after the murders, the American Civil Liberties Union blasted Strain and stirred controversy over his remarks in a TV interview. Using a description from a witness of one of the killers, Strain said anyone in St. Tammany with a "chee wee" hairstyle should "expect to be getting a visit from a sheriff's deputy."
The ACLU threatened with lawsuits saying the comments amounted to racial profiling. Strain welcomed investigations into his past and even hiring practices, saying the word he chose was the same as the witness description.
Eventually the matter was dropped.
Kaigler, a black male, has shoulder-length dreadlocks.
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