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Family, friends mark first anniversary of Nanette Krentel’s unsolved homicide
Family and friends of Nanette Krentel, many of them classmates from Archbishop Chapelle High School’s Class of 1985, gathered Saturday at her …
Stories
Margaret Coon, Ruth Anne Manguno, Louis Wagner, Kenneth Broyle, the Lady in the Lake — they are the victims who haunt St. Tammany Parish homicide detectives: men and women whose deaths remain unsolved, their killers, and in one case the victim herself, unknown.
But while those cases date back decades, there’s a new name on the list of St. Tammany murder mysteries: Nanette Krentel, a 49-year-old Lacombe woman who died from a gunshot wound to the head two years ago this month, her body and key evidence destroyed in a house fire that, like her shooting, remains an enigma.
“Do I get frustrated? Of course,” her husband, Steve Krentel, the former chief of St. Tammany Fire Protection District 12, said a few days before the two-year anniversary of the crime on July 14. “Does it feel like an eternity? Yes. But I’m thankful it’s not been pushed off on a shelf, and they are actively working it on a regular basis. They still have a detective assigned to the case. That gives me comfort.”
Nanette’s sister, Kim Watson, holds out hope that someone will speak up. “Someone knows what happened,” she said. “I hope that the guilt weighs on them and eventually the truth comes out. Somewhere, there is a loose end.”
Investigators haven’t found it yet. But in recent weeks, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office sent investigators out of state to conduct interviews, according to spokesman Capt. Scott Lee. A full-time detective remains assigned to the case.
“Every day we come to work, somebody’s working this case in some form or fashion,” said Maj. Doug Sharp, head of the Investigations Division.
Sheriff Randy Smith said investigators are putting new eyes on the case, conducting new interviews and re-evaluating evidence. “My office remains committed to devoting any and all resources to help solve this case and bring closure to Krentel’s family,” he said in a prepared statement.
Those who mourn Nanette Krentel say that finding the person responsible is the only thing that will do that.
“There’s never going to be closure for me until somebody is held accountable,” said Lori Rondo, who was part of Nanette’s close-knit senior class at Archbishop Chapelle High School in Metairie. Rondo said she especially wants answers for Nanette’s father, Dan Watson, who is in poor health.
“I need to know what happened, not what I think happened, not what my imagination tells me. It runs off in a million different ways,” Steve Krentel said. “Until I know for sure, I don’t see how I can get closure.”
Long-running mysteries
Such closure hasn’t eluded only Nanette Krentel’s friends and family. Some other families in St. Tammany have been waiting for decades.
There’s the case of Capt. Louis Wagner, a Sheriff’s Office deputy who was killed by a single bullet to the back in 1978 on a rural road. His portrait hangs on the wall at Sheriff’s Office buildings, a constant reminder.
And there’s Margaret Coon, a former assistant district attorney, who was fatally stabbed in the back with a 7-inch blade while walking her Afghan hound in her gated Mandeville-area subdivision in 1987.
Her father, Webster Coon, hired a private detective and chased down leads on his own, making annual visits to the scene of his only child’s murder to keep the case in the forefront. “Before they put me in my grave, I would like to know who killed my daughter and why,” he told a reporter shortly before his death in 2005.
Decades later, her first cousin, Henson Coon, said that his uncle spent all his money in the fruitless quest for an answer. “We had our family reunion several months back; that’s all anybody talked about,” he said recently.
Then there’s the case of Ruth Anne Manguno, a 28-year-old woman who vanished from her house south of Folsom in May 1983, leaving behind a cup of coffee, an open Bible and her 8-month-old daughter. Three months later, her skull turned up, placed next to a family’s mailbox about a quarter-mile away.
Most puzzling of all is the case of the Lady in the Lake, a young woman in her 20s or 30s who was three months pregnant when her body was discovered in Lake Pontchartrain in 1986. A rope with a 22-pound weight attached to it had been tied around her neck.
Despite the time that has elapsed since their violent deaths — years that can erode evidence and rob the memories and even the lives of those who might have answers — detectives with the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office investigative unit believe these cases can still be solved.
“These crimes were committed at a different time,” Lee, the sheriff’s spokesman, said. “The technology didn’t exist, the forensics did not exist as they exist today.”
There’s a good chance that DNA, genealogy and even social media and a heightened interest in crime stories on television programs will provide breaks in very old cases, detectives say.
“We don’t like to use the term ‘cold case’ simply because it’s been a long time since there has been maybe a headline on a particular case. … It does not make the case any less important to the agency to work in a manner that could bring a resolution to any potential family that may still be living,” Lee said.
DNA and genealogy
The Lady in the Lake, as investigators have nicknamed her, is a prime example. Detectives at the time tried to identify her through her breast implants, a surgical procedure she had undergone that would have cost about $20,000 at that time — a clue that she had money. But no plastic surgeons in the region used that type of implant, Sgt. Stefan Montgomery said.
If that crime happened today, investigators would almost certainly be able to track those devices or even discover where the weight tied around her neck had been purchased, using a bar code.
But something else that didn’t exist then is available now, Sharp said: genealogy. “Hopefully, genealogy is going to be tremendous in that case. It might trace her back to some relative from 1780 or something like that. They say they do have that capability,” he said, though it’s expensive.
The producers of a crime program have offered to pay the bill, Sharp said. “They have a pretty high success rate. They have experts on staff, experts in genealogy and in DNA,” he said.
The woman’s DNA profile has been submitted to open source databases, and Sharp said they are very hopeful that they will finally have a name for the victim. “The most important thing is identifying her,” he said. “After that, I think everything else will fall into place.”
Another focus for the investigators has been reorganizing and digitizing the case files so information that had existed on paper and old VHS tapes is now being preserved and cataloged so that it can be more readily accessed on computers.
“Over the years, detectives have picked them up and put them down, volumes and volumes of records,” Montgomery said. “We didn’t know 25 years ago about the importance of DNA. Genealogy is something that’s only come about the last couple of years. So … even if we can’t resolve a case today, the next person who picks it up, who knows what’s going to be available in the future? They won’t have to start at page 1 or 10,000 all over again.”
Montgomery said he is hopeful that cataloging the Manguno case files will be a key to resolving that homicide: “We have to sort through all that stuff, just like in the Krentel case.”
While in the past detectives hoped for a deathbed tip from a witness or a perpetrator with a guilty conscience, they now have the heft of new technology, new methods and much faster access to data.
One wrinkle in the investigations was Henry Lee Lucas, a self-professed serial killer who claimed he was responsible for hundreds of murders across the U.S., including the St. Tammany Parish homicides of Manguno, Wagner and Slidell innkeeper Kenneth Broyles, killed during a robbery.
He confessed in detail to Broyles’ killing and even drew a map, investigators said.
“That really put the brakes on a lot of that stuff for a couple of years,” Montgomery said. Ultimately Lucas’ claims of St. Tammany killings were debunked, but his accounts put a damper on investigative efforts and forced detectives to spend time disproving what he was saying.
“We have all the interviews that were conducted with him, video and audio and documents,” Sharp said, adding that they are still reviewing them in case there is something to pull out.
Scouring the evidence
Investigators say that while families handle grief differently, it’s clear that even after decades, their grief is just below the surface, and getting closure for families drives the investigators to keep looking.
But they also want answers because the cases themselves become personal.
“You go home at the end of the day and you’re bringing a case file, you’re reading at the kitchen table, you’re watching TV with a laptop on your lap while your family is doing other stuff,” Montgomery said. “”Everybody has a case that they don’t want to retire with.”
For him, that’s the Manguno case, but no one in the agency can let go of the Wagner case, the deputy killed in 1978 — one of their own. “Two people have confessed to his murder, and two have recanted,” he said.
But while the Krentel case isn’t the parish’s only unsolved homicide, it is the most recent and the one that happened during the current sheriff’s administration, lending a sense of urgency, according to Lee.
The agency has run down a lot of leads that turned out to be nothing more than speculation, he said.
“We’ve assembled a team to scour every shred of evidence in this case and re-scour it again when we get done with it,” Sharp said. “And we’ll scour it 20 more times.”
Steve Krentel agrees that they are doing exactly that. “I think that they are chasing down every single lead, whether it is trivial or not. It used to bother me, so much time wasted on absurd theories,” he said.
But now Krentel said he welcomes that.
“What more can I ask for?” he said. “Something is going to cause this to break. As long as they’re looking, I’m happy. I don’t know how I’ll cross that bridge … don’t know how I’m going to feel if it’s ever put on a shelf.”
