Louisiana 1982 Roxanne Sharp Cold Case - A False Confession Hid a Bigger Mystery for Years

In February 1982, 16-year-old Roxanne Sharp disappeared in Covington, Louisiana. Three days later, her body was found in a wooded area near the St. Tammany Parish Fairgrounds. For more than four decades, her murder remained unresolved. The investigation took an extraordinary path. Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas confessed to Roxanne’s murder, but prosecutors later concluded that his account did not fit the evidence. Testimony from 1986 revealed something even more significant: investigators believed four people were involved and already had suspects, but they did not have enough evidence to bring the case before a grand jury. One name from that old investigation would become important again decades later. Louisiana State Police eventually reopened the case, reviewed old evidence, conducted new interviews and used modern forensic testing. Investigators also participated in the true-crime podcast Who Killed Roxanne? in an effort to generate new information from the public. People who had never previously spoken to police began coming forward. In April 2026, Billy Williams Jr., Darrell Dean Spell, Carlos Cooper and Perry Wayne Taylor were arrested or notified of charges connected to Roxanne Sharp’s case. On May 13, 2026, a St. Tammany Parish grand jury indicted all four men on charges of second-degree murder and aggravated rape. One of those names — Perry Taylor — had already appeared in testimony connected to the investigation forty years earlier. The prosecution remains pending, and none of the four defendants has been convicted in Roxanne Sharp’s case. This Root of Crime documentary follows the false confession, the decades of unanswered questions, the unusual podcast strategy, the witnesses who finally came forward and the name that connected the modern prosecution to an investigation from the 1980s. #truecrime #RoxanneSharp #ColdCase