Jail coffee gave spunk to mystery blonde

Mystery and glamour always make a good news story. If you throw in a big-time gangster, it’s almost guaranteed to make the front page. That’s why the first paragraph of the Opelousas Daily World story on March 27, 1940, caught my eye. It offered all of the needed elements.
“Speculation ran rife today as to the identity of the gorgeous blonde being held in the parish prison, alleged accomplice of James John Ogden, fugitive from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
The 25-year-old blonde gave her name as Jeanne Blake and her residence as “the United States.” Later accounts described her as “gorgeous and mysterious blonde Virginia Martin, alias Jeanne Martin, alias Jeanne Blake.”
She’d been arrested by an FBI agent at the Buckhorn Bar, which was on the ground floor of the old Gordon Hotel in downtown Lafayette. Ogden’s clothes were found in her room, but there was no trace of the man. The blonde was charged with harboring a fugitive and was brought to Opelousas because that’s where the federal court was back then.
She was playing solitaire in her cell when a Daily World reporter went to see her. She refused to talk about Ogden, but was friendly enough. She said she liked the St. Landry jail better than some others she’d been in.
The FBI planned to hold her in Opelousas for a week or two while her attorney, Jimmy Domengeaux (later congressman and founder of CODOFIL), worked to get her bail set and raise the money. If she couldn’t raise the bail, she was going to be sent to a federal jail in Shreveport. She said she didn’t want to leave the jail on the top floor of the just-completed St. Landry courthouse.
“She likes the comfortable quarters except that the shower wets her hair,” according to the news report. She also said she would like a hair rinse and manicure, but didn’t think it would be allowed.
She didn’t raise bail and was indeed sent to Shreveport for several weeks, but came back to Opelousas to face a federal grand jury. She said she was glad to “get back to French coffee and the modern comforts of the new parish jail.”
The “taffy-haired FBI prisoner” was “making herself at home in the jail,” the newspaper reported. “Monday afternoon two beauty attendants from Rita’s Beauty Shop gave her blonde tresses a rinse and a wave, gave her a manicure and a facial, and those other things that beauty attendants do.
“She is definitely, but definitely, glad to be back in the Opelousas jail, where Jailer A. J. Deville’s good French coffee keeps up her spunk.”
She felt so spunky that she said she didn’t think she would be indicted and that she was making plans to settle in Opelousas once she was set free. After her hair and facial were done, she’d had a photographer take her picture to be released at the same time that she was.
That didn’t happen. She was indicted by the grand jury and was “fortified with ten cups of jail coffee” when she appeared before Judge Gaston Fontenot to plead not guilty.
For that appearance, she “dressed herself up in a high-necked black dress with white embroidered figures on the shoulders, front and sash, which made a swell contrast to her blonde hair.” But that was the last the enamored reporter saw of her.
“Enraged federal men put the lid on the frequent callers,” the newspaper reported. They also confiscated her new photo, the account continued, with the aside, “it was a swell picture, too, sorry you missed it.”
The federal court sent her back to Shreveport to serve a sentence of 19 months, without hairdressers, manicurists, or good coffee. She seemed not to like it. The headline in the Opelousas Clarion-News on January 9, 1941, proclaimed, “Tear Gas and Force Necessary to Subdue Beautiful Blonde Who Created Sensation Here After Near-Riot in Shreveport Jail.” The story didn’t say why they did it, but she and another inmate started breaking up furniture and attacked the jailer who tried to stop them.
She never did tell anyone where to find John James Ogden, who, it turns out, she’d married just before she got arrested. The FBI found him two years later in California.
The report I found didn’t say whether his spunky blonde wife was with him when he was finally caught.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.