New Orleans — March 25, 1998
The killer was bleeding when he fled the fifth-floor hotel room. He left a trail of blood from the room to the stairwell, and then down the steps to the ground floor. During the struggle he’d somehow cut his knee. It wasn’t bad. Little more than a scratch.
The killer slipped out of the building and into the early morning darkness. No one saw him leave and no security camera captured his image. He was a creature of the night and he knew the French Quarter well. The darkness would protect him. He was safe.
As the killer glided down Dauphine Street, he fished through the wallet he’d taken from the dead man on the fifth floor of the Chateau Le Moyne Hotel. The man had called himself “Mike,” but the identification and credit cards in the wallet were in a different name. There was also $300, give or take. The killer pocketed the money and tossed the wallet and everything else in it into a storm drain.
The bloody, double-edged knife he kept.
The killer had more cash on him now than he’d had in a long time. He was one block from Bourbon Street. Up ahead, the post-midnight mob of revelers stumbled along, ducking in and out of the bars, strip joints, and sex shops. The French Quarterthe most decadent 70 square blocks in the country, perhaps the worldbeckoned.
The housekeeper got no answer when she knocked on the door. She knocked again. Still no answer. She took out her passkey and unlocked the door.
“Housekeeping,” she announced as she peeked into the room.
Only silence greeted her.
The housekeeper stepped inside. It was 11:00 a.m.
The man’s body lay on the floor, facedown between the two beds. He was naked except for a pair of socks. The floor, the walls, the bedspreadsall splattered with blood. The room was a slaughterhouse.
Holy… Jesus.
The maid bolted from the room. She summoned security. They called the police.
When New Orleans police detectives arrived at the hotel, they posted hotel security guards at the elevators and the stairwell entrance, effectively sealing off the entire fifth floor.
Tourism is the lifeblood of New Orleans. The Chateau Le Moyne is a nice hotel set deep in the historic French Quarter, the city’s biggest tourist attraction. The murder of a tourist, especially one killed at an upscale hotel in the French Quarter, is always a high-priority case in the Crescent City.
The crime scene was a mess. There were sex toys and condomsused and unusedscattered around the room.
Veteran detectives on the scene could sense that this investigation was going to get messy.
The cause of death was obvious. The victim had been stabbed, repeatedly.
Long-time New Orleans Coroner Dr. Frank Minyard went to the crime scene.
“It was a horrible, horrible scene,” Minyard told The Times-Picayune newspaper. “There were so many stab wounds I couldn’t count (them) all. There was blood on the walls, on the bedroom floor, on the bathroom floor, all over the place. It was horrible.”
What no one suspected at the start of the crime scene investigation was what a strange and unexpected turn the case would take once the police identified the naked, blood-soaked body lying on the floor.
Ramon Martinez was born in 1961 in the small Cuban town of Quivican, 25 miles from Havana. His birth came two years after Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and company forced General Fulgencio Batista to flee the island nation.
Under Castro’s communist regime, Cuba officially became an atheist state. Although religion wasn’t banned entirely, it was certainly suppressed. To get good paying state jobs, Cubans had to become members of the Cuban Communist Party. To join the party, they had to disavow religion. Catholicism, the country’s majority faith, was tolerated, but only barely.
Ramon grew up dreaming of becoming a Catholic priest.
In 1968, two of Ramon’s aunts who lived in New Orleans sent his parents enough money for them to take Ramon and leave the country. At that time, Castro was still letting Cubans emigrate to the United States. Seven-year-old Ramon and his parents settled in New Orleans.
At the Jesuit-run Loyola University, Ramon pursued an education in religion and drama. In 1985, he graduated with Bachelor’s degrees in religious studies and theater.
After graduating, Ramon moved to Los Angeles to chase another dream, that of becoming a Hollywood actor.
He had gotten his first taste of professional acting years earlier when he earned a role as a delivery boy in The Gingerbread Lady, which starred legendary film actress Vera Miles.
Once he moved to Los Angeles, Ramon landed roles in the television sitcoms Archie Bunker’s Place, Three’s Company, Different Strokes, Lois & Clark, and the daytime soap opera General Hospital. He also scored roles in three HBO movies. On a Los Angeles stage, Ramon played an angry young seminarian opposite veteran TV and film star Eddie Albert, whose role in the play Mass Appeal was that of a cynical, older priest.
Sometime during his stint in California, Ramon met the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, himself a former actor. What the two men spoke about is not clear, but what is clear is that not long after meeting the archbishop, Ramon returned to New Orleans and took up a new vocation by enrolling in Notre Dame Seminary. In 1989, he graduated from the seminary with a Master’s degree in divinity and was ordained a priest in the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
In January 1998, an aging Fidel Castro granted permission to Pope John Paul II to visit Cuba. It was the first-ever papal visit to the communist stronghold.
Hundreds of priests from around the world joined the pope. Father Ramon Martinez of New Orleans was one of them. Reporters from New Orleans joined him on the historic trip.
In Havana, Ramon met up with one of his long-lost cousins, Nelson Martinez. The two men planned to drive to Ramon’s hometown of Quivican in Nelson’s early 1950s lime green Chevrolet. Shortly after they got underway, the Chevrolet’s engine coughed and the car sputtered to a stop.
“This is a Cuban moment,” Ramon joked to a reporter. “He ran out of gas.”
In the sweltering tropical heat, the two cousins pulled a spare can of gas out of the trunk and dumped its contents into the car’s fuel tank. With the antique Chevrolet revived, Ramon and Nelson continued their journey. Because of the unexpected stop and the sorry state of Cuban roads, the 25 mile trip took an hour and a half.
In Quivican, Ramon found relatives he’d never met. He gave them gifts of clothing, sheets, and towels. He passed out rosary beads, he talked, he cried.
“Even if I had stayed in Cuba, I would have been a priest,” Ramon told The Times-Picayune. “Of course it would have been more difficult.”
During his brief stay in Quivican, Ramon celebrated Mass at St. Peter the Apostle Church, where he had been baptized 37 years before.
For the prodigal son, it was an emotional return.
“I couldn’t stop crying throughout the whole Mass,” Ramon told the newspaper. “I’ve never celebrated a Mass with more enthusiasm and more love than in that town. They’re so appreciative. You can tell they’re starving for God.”
Back in Havana, Ramon was there when the pope said Mass in Revolution Square. In the background, a newly erected 100-foot-tall portrait of Jesus hung beside an equally large picture of Cuban revolutionary hero Che Guevara. Christ and the killer given equal space.
Two months later, Father Ramon Martinez was dead, facedown and bloody, on the floor of a French Quarter hotel room.
At 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 24, 1998, Ramon Martinez checked into the Chateau Le Moyne Hotel on Dauphine Street in the French Quarter. The hotel sits one block north of Bourbon Street and two blocks east of Canal Street. He had parked his beige Mitsubishi around the corner on Bienville Street.
Ramon registered under his own name and listed his address as a post office box in the town of Port Sulphur, a hamlet 50 miles south of New Orleans, where he served as pastor of St. Patrick’s Church.
Sometime that night, perhaps just before he checked into the Chateau Le Moyne, perhaps just after, Ramon hooked up with a 20-year-old street hustler named Robert Chidester. Chidester also used the name Robert Allen, as well as the nickname Joker. Ramon had met Chidester at least once before. Using the name “Mike,” Ramon had hired Chidester to perform oral sex on him. Chidester, who aspired to be a writer, usually charged $20 for oral.
Inside Ramon’s fifth-floor hotel room, something bad happened. Chidester later claimed Ramon tried to anally rape him. Chidester said he agreed to oral sex, but when Ramon tried to bend him over and sodomize him, the young hustler, who earned a living trading sex for money, was repulsed. Two men engaging in anal sex just wasn’t right.
According to Chidester, when Ramon tried to force him to submit to anal sex, the street-savvy hustler pulled out a double-edged knife, which he happened to be carrying, and defended himself against Ramon’s attack. In doing so, Chidester plunged his knife into the priest some 40 times.
Detectives later theorized the murder had less to do with Chidester’s revulsion with anal sex and more to do with the $300 Ramon carried in his wallet.
Nor did the crime scene easily lend itself to an interpretation of self-defense. It was clear from the sex toys and used condoms lying around the room that the two men had had sexwhether oral or analat least once that night and probably more than once. When the maid entered the room the next morning, the nearly 40-year-old priest was naked except for a pair of socks.
It didn’t take Lt. Columbo to figure out that Chidester’s attempt at chastity came late in the game. And surely, had he truly been in fear of Ramon, he could have gotten away sometime before landing that 30th or 40th knife thrust. Another thing that didn’t square with the self-defense claim was the priest’s missing wallet. Rape victims who successfully fight off their attackers rarely steal their assailants’ wallets.
Chidester fled the hotel room bleeding from a cut on his knee. Carrying Ramon’s wallet and the bloody knife, he raced down the stairs to the street and plunged into the shadow world of the French Quarter.
In his 1952 book, Ready to Hang: Seven Famous New Orleans Murders, (Harper & Brothers, NY) Robert Tallant recorded the observations of a visitor to New Orleans from New England who wrote to his wife in 1849, “The corpse of a murdered man can lie in a New Orleans street for three days without the citizens paying it the slightest notice. Only the odor of decomposition stirs them into action.”
When detectives discovered the identity of the dead man on the fifth floor of the Chateau Le Moyne Hotel, they knew the citizens of New Orleans were going to take notice.
Despite its reputation for debauchery, or perhaps because of it, New Orleans is a city steeped in its Catholic faith.
“New Orleans is a city of saints and sinners,” says former New Orleans Assistant District Attorney Glen Woods. “During its history, fires have destroyed the French Quarter at least twice, and both times only two places were saved from God’s wrathUrsuline Convent and Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. One place for saints and one for sinners.”
Father Ramon Martinez’s secret life may have revealed him to be more sinner than saint, but he clearly didn’t deserve what had happened to him, and the detectives assigned to investigate his murder were determined to find his killer and to limit the damage to his reputation and to the Catholic Church.
The day after the killing, news of a murdered priest hit the city hard. New Orleanians are a hardy lot. They’re used to violence and bloodshed. After all, the city has on several occasions been the nation’s murder capital, scoring more killings per capita than murder metropolises like Detroit, Chicago, and New York City. But a priest killed in a hotel room, that was a bit much even for New Orleans.
The police did what they could to minimize the damage to Father Martinez’s reputation. The day after the murder, The Times-Picayune carried no mention that Ramon was nude when the housekeeper discovered his body. There was no mention of sex toys. No mention of used condoms.
The newspaper quoted the NOPD’s public information officer, Capt. Marlon Defillo, as saying “It appears it was not a random act of violence, but that he (Father Martinez) may have allowed this person or persons access to the room.”
Capt. Defillo didn’t speculate on why Father Martinez may have let someone into his room in the middle of the night.
According to what Robert Chidester said later, the news that the murdered man on the fifth floor of the Chateau Le Moyne had been a priest came as a huge shock to him, too. The 20-year-old hustler said that once he read a newspaper account of the killing and learned the true identity of the man he had known as “Mike,” he knew he was going to “go to the electric chair” if he were ever caught.
So he fled to Cincinnati.
Meanwhile, detectives had little, if anything, to go on. A man with gray hair. Perhaps dyed red. Possibly cut or otherwise injured. No witnesses. No surveillance video. A killer probably not well known to the victim, at least not well known enough to be in the priest’s day planner.
In the first few days of their investigation, detectives searched Father Ramon’s living quarters at St. Patrick’s Church in Port Sulphur, and the rectory at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in the town of LaPlace, 25 miles north of New Orleans, where Ramon had served as an assistant pastor before being sent to St. Patrick’s.
From the two residences, they collected more than 300 pornographic movies and a couple of hundred skin magazines and books.
Yet, with few leads to pursue, it didn’t take long before the cycle of death that dumped body after body onto the streets of New Orleans bled the steam out of the investigation.
The case went cold.
If it was Robert Chidester’s intention to maintain a low profile in Cincinnati, he didn’t do a very good job of it. One problem may have been that he took his double-edged knife with him.
Sometime during his stay in Cincinnati, Chidester wandered across the Ohio River into his home state of Kentucky and stabbed someone.
In May, police arrested him for that stabbing. However, a month later, they had to release him. Officially, the reason was “insufficient evidence,” but it could have been a lack of cooperation from the victim. If Chidester had been plying his trade as a street hustler in the greater Cincinnati area, as he had been in New Orleans, the victim, especially if he was married or otherwise seen as “straight,” may not have wanted to testify in open court about how he and Chidester met or what they had argued about that led to the stabbing.
Wounds heal and a stolen wallet is a lot easier to replace than a lost reputation.
Shortly after his release from jail in Kentucky, Chidesterrather foolishly it would turn outreturned to New Orleans.
On Aug. 31, 1998, Chidester got a job as a dishwasher at La Peniche, a restaurant in the Faubourg Marigny, a centuries-old residential and light commercial district just across Esplanade Avenue from the French Quarter.
As a dishwasher, Chidester failed to impress his new boss or his co-workers.
“He was a creepy little guy,” a fellow employee told The Times-Picayune.
Chidester quit a week later.
“He was not doing well,” the fellow employee said. “He couldn’t take the high pressure when we were busy. He threw things across the room, like plastic food containers.”
Another employee said that Chidester “spent more time sitting at the counter reading the newspaper than anything else. It was impossible to get him to do any work.”
While he was back in New Orleans, Chidester started a relationship with a French Quarter tarot card reader named Evelyn Kushnir. During pillow talk at her place or at his uptown apartment on Jena Street, Chidester tried to impress his new lover by telling her that he’d murdered a Catholic priest the previous spring. As a token of his feelings toward Kushnir, Chidester gave her a giftthe knife he’d used to murder the priest.
Kushnir called the New Orleans Police Department’s 8th District, the one responsible for investigating crimes in the French Quarter.
Detectives showed her a photograph of Chidester, which she identified as being that of her boyfriend, but she said she knew him as “Robert Allen.” He was an aspiring writer, she said, who carried around a laptop computer and sometimes used the nickname “Joker.”
On September 24, 1998, at about 7:15 p.m., detectives from the Cold Case Squad and from the 8th District crashed into Robert Chidester’s flophouse apartment at 2121 Jena St. in uptown New Orleans and arrested him.
A few hours later, in a recorded statement, Chidester confessed to a pair of veteran homicide cops that he’d killed Father Ramon Martinez because the priest had tried to force him to have anal sex. He also admitted to stealing Ramon’s wallet, although he claimed he threw it and the $300 it contained into a storm drain.
In his confession, Chidester tried to make the argument that the killing had been justified by Ramon’s behavior.
“I kept telling myself, ‘Man, you’re innocent in God’s eyes,'” he told the detectives. “In God’s eyes, this priest needed to be slain.”
Chidester claimed to be an angel of death sent to punish the wicked priest.
“If this guy was really who he said he was…the priest that he claimed to be, the straight Catholic priest, not who he said he was to me, but who he said he was to the world at large, and the people he preached to in his congregation, then why would he try to do the things that he (did)?” Chidester said during his confession.
“Why would he try to get with another guy and all this other stuff if this is supposed to be wrong according to his laws in his religious books? And I just kept justifying it as, like, well, God must have his angels of death, and I guess that this was me here.”
But even after solving the high-profile case, police officials were reluctant to release any details of Chidester’s confession. They worked hard to avoid mentioning sex.
Lt. Robert McNeil, commander of the Homicide Division, would say only that Ramon and Chidester argued. “We have some idea what they were arguing about,” he told The Times-Picayune. “But it would be inappropriate for me to disclose that at this time.”
Prosecutors quickly charged Chidester with first-degree murder. Under Louisiana law, the intentional killing of another person during the commission of certain violent felonies qualifies as first-degree murder and allows prosecutors to seek the death penalty.
Chidester had admitted to police that after stabbing Ramon Martinez to death he’d stolen the priest’s wallet. Armed robbery is one of the felonies listed in the state’s first-degree murder statute. Despite Chidester’s claims, the cops and the district attorney saw Ramon’s murder as part of an armed robbery, not some sordid arrangement to trade sex for money.
The DA announced he was seeking the death penalty.
In the spring of 1999, however, state district Judge Charles Elloie tossed a wrench into the DA’s plans when he granted Chidester a lunacy hearing. After listening to testimony from more than one court-appointed psychiatrist, the judge ruled that Father Ramon Martinez’s accused killer was not capable of understanding the proceedings against him or of assisting with his own defense, both legal requirements for standing trial in a criminal case.
On March 9, 1999, the judge ordered Chidester shipped off to the state’s psychiatric hospital, a peaceful campus tucked away in the piney woods of East Feliciana Parish, 100 miles north of New Orleans.
After two years in the hospital, and a lot of medication, Chidester’s doctors decided he was competent to stand trial. The state had not backed off during the intervening two years and announced it was still seeking the death penalty.
Then, on the Friday before the trial was scheduled to begin, Chidester withdrew his plea of not guilty to the first-degree murder charge and pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Almost immediately, Judge Elloie sentenced the then-22-year-old former street hustler to 25 years in prison. The judge wished Chidester luck and thanked him for sparing everyone what had promised to be a remarkably sordid trial.
Under Louisiana law, Chidester cannot be released until he serves at least 85 percent of his sentence, or 21 years. He will be eligible for parole sometime around 2019.