ABSTRACT
On July 19, 1996, 14-year-old Crystal Champagne left her apartment in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana to run a local errand; she never returned home. Within hours, her cousin Damon Thibodeaux, along with several neighbors, had formed a search party to look for her. Meanwhile, police began an investigation into Crystal’ s disappearance and interviewed everyone who had seen the teenager in the hours just before she vanished-including Thibodeaux. In fact, while detectives were speaking with him, patrol officers made a gruesome discovery. Crystal’ s body was found partially nude and she had been strangled to death (Innocence Project, 2016).
