Half century later, question remains: What deputy killed two students?

October 30, 2022

LSU Cold Case Project

First in a four-part series

Josephine and Denver Smith took different approaches to protests at Southern University in the fall of 1972. Josephine skipped class for meetings, while her older brother stayed away and warned her to be careful.

The pair had grown up with 10 other siblings in a tiny sharecropper’s house near New Roads, Louisiana, where they picked cotton in the hot sun and harvested pecans to help make ends meet. When they were not working, they fished, swam by the river levee and, not having paper, scratched their multiplication tables in the dirt with sticks, the eldest checking the work of the youngest.

Despite their modest finances, one thing was always certain: They would go to college.

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Students from LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication and the Southern University Law Center won a national investigative reporting prize

Half century later, question remains: What deputy killed two students?

Half century later, question remains: What deputy killed two students?