A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (3 page)

By the late sixties, campuses across the country were rife with protest against the U.S. role in the Vietnam War. Yet the Harrison household held to more traditional values of patriotism, and in 1967, six months after her high school graduation, Susan joined the Navy. It was for adventure, she told her sisters, to see the world. Her official photo shows an attractive young woman posed in her blue-and-white uniform, her hair dyed dark and cut short, her blue eyes ringed in the thick, smoky-black liner of the day, her cheekbones high. Yet after a year in Baltimore and San Diego training as a Navy dental assistant, she was again unhappy and restless. She asked for and was given a discharge. “The Navy just wasn’t for Susie,” says Gloria. “She couldn’t take the discipline, and she wanted to come home.”

The sister who had been so eager to leave returned to Louisiana, this time to the Baton Rouge area, where she settled near her two married sisters, Gloria and Kay. Susan used her Navy training to get a dental assistant’s job while she studied at a local beauty school. One night
while trimming Gloria’s hair, she accidentally clipped her ear. “I told Susie maybe cosmetology wasn’t for her,” Gloria says, chuckling softly at the memory.

That same year, a pattern emerged that would haunt Susan throughout life: She fell in love—hopelessly, desperately—only to have the man at the center of her obsession leave her.

“Susie always fell hard,” remembers Kay. “I think it’s because in her heart she was a real romantic.”

In February 1969, a nineteen-year-old Susan Harrison wrote a parting letter to the first man to break her heart: “It’s funny how I thought things would never change. But they’re bound to, just as the falling rain … I never realized how much I really love you. I pray to God above that he’ll take care of you and that someday, my darling, you’ll love me too. I’ll always love you, Susie.”

Much of the pain that awaited Susan Harrison would stem from her obsession with being loved. Despite her wide smile, her casual flirtatiousness, her warm manner, there was an unhappiness in Susan that she would spend her life trying to cure.

“I think Susie had so much inside of her it was confusing,” Gloria murmurs. “It was like, Susan tried so many different things, but she never found what she was looking for.”

It was the cusp of the seventies. The Senate repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Nixon withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam; the Beatles split, leaving John and Yoko to stage love-ins; the women’s movement demanded equal pay for equal work and every woman’s right to control her own destiny. Across the country, women’s ambitions broadened, including Susan’s. She eagerly took Gloria’s advice and left beauty school behind and enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she studied psychology and business. She
bleached her hair to her childhood blond and let it grow long and straight. She wore bell-bottoms, skintight T-shirts, ankle-length, flowing skirts, and sandals with platform soles and shared a small apartment near the university with a roommate. Anything seemed possible.

It was in this era of rebellion and challenge that a mutual friend introduced her to Leonard Joseph “L.J.” Aguillard, the son of a sugarcane family from Rosedale, a small town across the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge. For years Susan had insisted she wanted a man like Gloria’s Al, solid and family-centered, but L.J., a muscular heavy-equipment operator who’d served six years in the Marines, was Al’s antithesis—a long-haired, post-hippie-era hippie.

“I blame L.J. for what happened to Susan,” Gloria says, expressing a sentiment shared by her sisters and parents. “Meeting him was the worst thing that could have happened to her. She had such potential … He turned her world upside down.”

“It was those times,” counters L.J., seated in the kitchen of the small, one-story home he once shared with Susan, his face craggy and browned from years of working in the Louisiana sun. “Everybody was into pot and partying. Susan and I got together. It was like she grabbed onto me and didn’t want to let go. It was an intense, a violent, relationship. Truth is, she brought out the worst in me.”

The Harrisons weren’t in favor of Susan’s new beau. He was one of the French-descended Catholics who populated much of southern Louisiana. Years later, they would maintain it was L.J. who introduced Susan to drugs and alcohol. He’d charge that by the time they said their first hellos, Susan had done her own experimentation with drugs. “For me it was pot,” a mature and reformed L.J. explains. “In those days, everyone was doing it. But Susie liked prescription drugs, downers, Quaaludes, and Valium. She’d go from doctor to doctor
to get them. Then she’d get so far down she’d take uppers—diet pills—to get out of bed in the morning. The pills made her as unpredictable as a tornado, with a temper to match.”

Whoever began the arguments, L.J. finished them. He sent Susan to the hospital before they even married. That night, L.J. had plans with friends, and she wanted him to stay home. When he refused, she smashed his most beloved possession, his stereo, on the floor, shattering it into hundreds of pieces.

“I backhanded her and knocked her onto the bed,” L.J. remembers, grimacing at the memory. “I didn’t think I’d hurt her, but later that night I got a call saying she was in the hospital. I broke her jaw in three places. When I saw her, she kept apologizing. ‘I didn’t mean to break your stereo. I didn’t mean it.’”

Still, despite the violence, Susan was determined to have him. Although by most standards the Aguillards would be considered middle-class, Susan seemed fascinated by his family’s land, the two-hundred-plus acres of sugarcane fields they owned in Rosedale. For a girl who grew up the daughter of sharecroppers, it must have seemed like Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara. And no one, not even L.J., doubted that she truly loved him—in her own way.

Over her family’s objections, on November 11, 1972, Susan and L.J. married in a simple ceremony in the backyard of her sister Kay’s home. The local newspaper, the
State Times,
gave their union a heady write-up on the society page:

“His folks came and they were well off,” Gloria recalls. “The women wore big hats and long dresses and big, chunky shoes. Susie always liked to be with the well-off people.”

In the photo that accompanied the article, Susan was reed-thin. She fingered the edge of her veil, and her bridal bouquet hung like an afterthought at her side. Her smile was shy and there was a hint of expectation on her lips. It was a fairy-tale wedding, the kind a young woman from modest beginnings dreams of.

At first, it appeared that Susan had found all she needed. At her insistence, they moved from her Baton Rouge apartment into the small, one-bedroom cinderblock house his family owned on an acre lot cut from the sugarcane fields. Down the road lived L.J.’s parents and cousins. The two gnarled and thick live oaks in the front yard had been planted by his father on the day L.J. was born. In summer, when the cane grew high on three sides, the house was little more than an island in a sea of sugarcane.

Yet to Susan, it meant everything. At her ten-year high school reunion, she bragged to classmates that she lived on her husband’s sugarcane plantation, making it sound like a great estate.

“All of these people we didn’t know,” L.J. remembers. “I told her, ‘Now don’t go telling those people lies.’”

Although reality fell far short of her fantasies, Susan seemed happy. In 1975, they had a child, a son they named Jason. In celebration, L.J. planted a live oak behind the house and Susan called the child her “beautiful baby.”

But the calm wasn’t destined to last.

It was after the baby’s birth that the arguments—and the violence—escalated. “It was Susie’s craziness and
those pills,” a weary L.J. says. “She’d just go nuts.”

He recalled the weekend she wanted him to stay home instead of going hunting with friends. Furious, she buried his shotguns barrel-deep in the mud in the front yard, like wood and metal sculptures attesting to her anger. When he arrived home, she ran for cover, locking herself in his pickup truck. Seething, L.J. shattered the truck window and pulled her out by her hair. Still determined as he drove away, Susan followed him in her own car until it stalled wheel-deep in mud on a dirt road.

L.J. just kept on driving.

“When I got back on Sunday, she acted like nothing happened,” L.J. recalls, shaking his head in disbelief at the memory. “It was always like that.”

But the arguments persisted. One New Year’s Eve in the mid-seventies, Susan called from a hospital emergency room. When Gloria arrived she found her younger sister bruised and crying. After another argument, L.J. admitted Susan to a psychiatric hospital. “A nurse called me and I went to get her,” Gloria says. “The nurse said that she could tell there was nothing wrong with Susie, that she didn’t belong there.”

An older and calmer L.J. Aguillard, a man much like the solid family man Susan had always said she’d wanted, labels the relationship pure craziness. He was the one who, seven years into the marriage, wanted an end to it. “I did her wrong and she did me wrong,” he concludes. “We just didn’t mix any more than oil and water. And Jason, he was in the middle of all of it.”

Through it all, her sisters say, Susan held out hope the marriage would miraculously turn happy; then, in a final act of betrayal, L.J. fell in love with another woman. “I don’t know that she ever got over him,” whispers Kay sadly. “She always wondered why it didn’t work. I said, ‘Go on with life, don’t worry about him.’ But she did worry.”

Susan fought the divorce until the very end. “She contested everything,” says L.J., frowning. “Everything with Susie became a war.”

L.J. married again, a petite, dark-haired schoolteacher named Nancy. This time the marriage lasted. “I know the Harrisons blame L.J., but it wasn’t his fault. In all the years we’ve been married, he’s never raised a hand to me,” Nancy maintains. “L.J.’s really a gentle man.”

Although Susan and L.J.’s marriage ended, in many ways the battlefront merely shifted, and Jason became the prize. At first, the boy remained with Susan, but when Jason was six, L.J. filed for custody. In courtroom after courtroom, Susan’s and L.J.’s attorneys filed motions claiming the other was unfit or unable to raise their son. “Susan would get a judge in Baton Rouge to give her custody; then L.J. would file in Iberville Parish, where his family lived, and the judge there would decide in his favor,” says Gloria. “Jason was like a Ping-Pong ball bouncing back and forth between the two of them.”

As the eighties began, Susan enrolled in a licensed practical-nurse program at Louisiana Technical College, a vocational school in Baton Rouge. She still dreamed of finishing college and talked of wanting to someday be an attorney or a psychologist, but she told friends she needed a profession more quickly attainable, one she could use to pay her bills and impress the judge with her stability as she continued the fight for Jason’s custody. Driven by a deep, frantic fear of failure, Susan plowed through nursing school with fierce determination. A straight-A student, she became class president.

After graduation, Susan settled into single life, working as a nurse in a geriatrics home not far from Gloria and Al’s house. Jason visited on weekends, and she clearly idolized him. She bragged about his grades and his fine, handsome features. From early on, she treated
her son as if he were beyond reproach. She never disciplined him. When he grew unruly, Susan made excuses, reminding Gloria and the others what a difficult childhood Jason had, torn between two warring parents, never having a stable home.

“Jason’s all I got out of that marriage,” she said often. “He’s all I got for all that heartache.”

Yet it was obvious to those around him that Jason was a troubled child. “From second grade on, we’d get notes from the teachers,” Nancy, L.J.’s wife, recalls. “Jason would hit other children at school, call them names, act out. We had him tested, sent him to specialist after specialist. They diagnosed behavioral and emotional problems. But when we tried to talk to Susan about it, she became defiant. She said that the only thing that was wrong with Jason was that he was a very gifted child.”

Then, in 1982, a Louisiana court awarded L.J. permanent custody of seven-year-old Jason. Susan was despondent. Once she even kidnapped Jason while he shopped with L.J.’s mother at the grocery store and whisked him away to Monroe, where her parents then lived. “I had to take my custody papers, call the sheriff, and go get him,” says L.J., still irritated by the memory. “When I found her, she had Jason hidden, wrapped up in a blanket in the backseat of the car.”

At thirty-two years old, Susan seemed keenly aware of the disappointing turn her life had taken. Her marriage had failed and her son was rarely with her. “Susan was never the same,” remembers Gloria. “She had an incredible drive to succeed, to do better with her life. But now she knew she could fail.”

Perhaps Susan blamed herself for the breakup of her marriage, reasoning that she hadn’t been perfect enough. After the divorce, the pills dominated her life. She went to doctors, her pockets loaded with weights to make her appear heavier on the scales. She begged for diet pills and tranquilizers. It was Gloria who stepped in to save
her. Frightened by Susan’s emotional swings and the drugged gaze in her eyes, she checked her into a rehab hospital.

When doctors released her a month later, a bright-eyed and grateful Susan thanked Gloria and swore she was cured, done with drugs forever. “It’s over,” she said. “I don’t need them. I’m all right now.”

For a while, she was.

“There must have been some escape in the pills,” Gloria speculates. “I don’t think Susan ever took the drugs when things were going good. I think she took them to forget.”

Yet Susie was still Susie—warm and personable, the kind of woman who easily attracted friends. She loved a good joke and was known to tell them often. And she relished the excitement of flirting with a new conquest. Whether the man was older than her father or young enough to be her son, Susan Harrison Aguillard had a way about her that turned a conversation into a teasing, sexually charged encounter. As she aged, she grew more attractive, tall, blond, with a too-wide smile that kept her from being conventionally pretty. Friends said she looked like the comedian-actress Teri Garr. Because of her husky voice—the result of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day—she maintained that when Hollywood made the story of her life, she wanted whisky-voiced Kathleen Turner to play the part.