ALL 4 VICTIMS WERE WHITE FEMALES
New Orleans serial killer pleads guilty to murdering three women after Hurricane Katrina
A serial killer who stalked downriver New Orleans neighborhoods after Hurricane Katrina pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder on Tuesday, finally following through on a confession he made in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.
After years of courtroom outbursts and delays, Joseph Brant gave another expletive-laden rant on Tuesday but agreed to formally enter his plea. Relatives of two women he killed will be allowed to give victim-impact testimony at a later date, but authorities have never identified a third.
In a phone interview from her Georgia home, the sister of one woman who was shot to death by Brant in January 2008 said she will stare the killer in the eye, even if it’s only over a video link.
“Me and my sister look alike,” said Jana Wood, the sister of Jody Johnson. “I want him to think he’s seeing a ghost. I just want him to know how much he took from me.”
Jessica Hawk, via YouTube
Brant, a 51-year-old who says he had an eighth-grade education, had already been sentenced to life after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in the August 2008 killing of 32-year-old botanist Jessica Hawk in her Bywater home. After his conviction in that case, he was sent to a Texas prison to serve out the remainder of a conviction in that state for burglary.
Then, Brant came forward with a chilling confession, which he gave to an investigator for the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office after prosecutors agreed not to seek capital punishment. Hawk was not his only victim,
Brant said. In the chaotic, crime-ridden years after Katrina, he had also killed three times more.
Assistant District Attorney Andre Gaudin detailed the confession at the court hearing Tuesday, which Brant attended via video conference from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Brant was cruising Galvez Street on Oct. 17, 2007 when he spotted a woman and solicited her for prostitution, according to his confession. He paid the woman for sex but she refused, so he raped her at knifepoint and choked her until she was dead, he said.
He poured gasoline on the woman's body and set the car on fire. The woman, identified as
“Jane Doe” in a grand jury indictment, has never been named.
Jody Johnson appears at a U.S. Navy function in this photo provided by her sister, Jana Wood. Serial killer Joseph Brant confessed to her January 2008 murder in New Orleans.
Family provided photo
Sometime before Jan. 11, 2008, when her body was found on Piety Street with a gunshot wound to the back of the head, Brant said he was again driving a stolen car and forced Johnson, 47, to perform oral sex on him at gunpoint.
Then he shot her and set her body on fire.
Johnson was a former high school cheerleader and homecoming queen from Warner Robins, Georgia who joined the U.S. Navy, her sister said. She became addicted to painkillers for migraines while serving in the Philippines and fell on hard times.
Wood keeps a picture of her sister above the writing desk at her home in Georgia, and passes it every day.
“She was always the prettiest,” Wood said. “Everybody loved Jody.”
Finally, Brant said that he killed San Francisco-based activist
Kirsten Brydum, 25, after he spotted her riding a bicycle in the 9th Ward. Again, Brant said that he forced her to perform oral sex on him at gunpoint.
Brant said that he was driving to get gasoline to set Brydum's body on FIRE when he got in a car accident, which prevented him from following through. Her body was found in the 3000 block of Laussat Street on Sept. 27, 2008.
Kirsten Brydum
Brydum had only recently arrived in New Orleans on a tour of underserved communities she was making to inform her activism, according to a close friend, Frank Lindsay.
“She was just an amazing individual that did things all directed at helping our planet peacefully coexist,” Lindsay said. “That’s really hard to explain to people, until you witness a soul who has that as their being.”
After his February 2018 confession and indictment, Brant appeared to be a on a fast-track to formally pleading guilty. But at a series of court hearings after he was transferred from Texas to New Orleans, he shouted at the judge and his court-appointed lawyers. He also refused to sign a formal plea document, for unexplained reasons.
Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Robin Pittman found Brant mentally incompetent in April 2019, and he was held for treatment at the Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System in Jackson for months. Pittman found that he had the mental capacity to proceed with the case in February 2020. Then, the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the courthouse.
Brant finally signed his plea form in recent days, but at the hearing Tuesday he continued to interrupt the judge and lawyers.
“He's saying stuff I didn't even tell him, ma'am,” Brant said after hearing Gaudin’s account of his confession. Brant acknowledged killing the women but said he “only” kidnapped Brydum and “did not have sex” with her or the other victims, despite his confession about forcing them to perform oral sex.
"If you want detail, I only kidnapped one woman. That was the last woman I killed," Brant said.
A representative for Brydum’s family said that the record was clear about the abuse the women suffered.
“His delusional semantics aside, he raped Kirsten and his other victims,” said Ben Rosenfeld, a friend of Brydum’s and attorney for the family. “The suffering he inflicted, and basic sexual assault awareness, require that we remember that.”
Brant also lashed out at his lead attorney, Barksdale Hortenstine of the Orleans Public Defenders, and Gaudin, deriding them as “these White boys.”
“Barksdale is a f------ two-legged dog. He always got some f------ bullshit going on,” Brant said.
Brant agreed to plead guilty after a Black attorney with the Orleans Public Defenders, Brian Woods, joined the hearing. He also seemed eager to wrap up the case, confirming with Woods that he wouldn’t return to the Orleans Justice Center or court “for no other reasons.”
Brant is scheduled to make at least one more appearance. In a statement, Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams said victim-impact testimony will be given on June 1.
“The District Attorney’s Office is pleased to have secured guilty pleas for three horrendous murders in our city by expediting the hearings, after much recent re-engagement by our team,” Williams said. “The office has been working for years to no avail on these matters, and (Tuesday) was a breakthrough moment to securing justice.”
The guilty pleas and the upcoming hearing were long-anticipated moments for Wood and Lindsay.
Notes are painted into the sidewalk at the
Jessica Hawk Garden on the St. Claude avenue neutral ground in New Orleans, Thursday, Feb. 8, 2018. Hawk was robbed and fatally stabbed in 2008. Her former fiancé, writer
Lee Horvitz, who recently passed, started a community garden in her memory. Joseph Brant has been convicted of murdering of Jessica Hawk and several other women.
Advocate Staff photo by SOPHIA GERMER
Lindsay and Brydum’s boyfriend made an annual pilgrimage to New Orleans in the years after her death trying to turn up clues that would solve her murder. They felt like they had reached a wall just before Brant finally confessed, Lindsay said.
Lindsay admitted to feeling frustration during the years between Brant’s confession and his formal guilty pleas this week. He’s long been prepared to serve as a family representative at a sentencing hearing.
“I was prepared to come back,” Lindsay said. “And in between, I knew that he would be going nowhere, and that public safety would be assured that Joseph Brant wasn’t going to kill anybody else.”