The Murder of Stephanie Hebert

Stephanie Hebert was five years old in June 1978 and lived with her family in the Live Oak Floral Acres subdivision of Waggaman, Louisiana, on the west bank of the Mississippi River outside New Orleans. On June 13 she left home to walk to a neighbor’s house three doors away. She never arrived.

Nearly six months later, on November 29, 1978, two hunters found her skeletal remains in a swampy area near Taft in St. Charles Parish, about twenty miles from her home. A rope around the remains suggested she had been tied to a tree, and her glasses, shoes and clothing were nearby. A teenage neighbor was investigated, but a grand jury decided there was not enough evidence to indict him, and the case went cold.

In 2012 investigators named Daniel Parks Sr. as a suspect. He confessed to raping a child and made a remark about Stephanie, then recanted. Parks was convicted of aggravated rape and sentenced to life, but he was not charged in her death. On November 29, 2018, police arrested Jason Franklin, who had lived eight houses from the Heberts, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was indicted for raping three children in the mid-1970s, Stephanie among them, and in 2019 authorities named him a suspect in her murder. Franklin was still in jail awaiting trial when he was moved into hospice care in 2021, and he died in early 2022 without ever being tried.