Son's old interview resurfaces in mother's 1987 Louisiana murder case

Reginald "Reggie" Reed Jr. was 6 when police sat him beside his father and asked what happened the night Selonia Reed was killed. In that interview, Reggie said he and Reginald Reed Sr. played video games and slept in the same sofa bed, giving his father an alibi for a homicide detectives would spend decades trying to prove or break.

Selonia Reed was 26 and working as a bank teller when her body was found the morning of Aug. 23, 1987, inside a blue Chevy Sprint in Hammond, Louisiana, about one-and-a-half miles from the Reed home. She had been bludgeoned, stabbed multiple times, stripped naked and sexually assaulted. Detective Charles Muse took the missing-person report from Reed Sr. and found the body after the car was located in a parking area.

Reed Sr. had been an early suspect. On Aug. 23, 1987, he told officers Selonia had gone out with a girlfriend the night before, but the friend later told police they had made no plans. Investigators also learned Selonia had told relatives Reed Sr. was physically abusive and had discussed divorce.

Police asked Reggie to account for his father’s whereabouts while he sat beside him, with his father’s permission. Reggie later said watching the videotape was devastating because he could hear his younger self crying for his "mommy" and "daddy." He said he did not learn until 2012, when a Texas Ranger came to his home, that his father had been the prime suspect, and he later wrote a memoir, The Day My Mother Never Came Home.

Louisiana State Police reopened the case in 2011, and Sgt. Barry Ward began investigating around December of that year. A cigarette butt found near Selonia’s body helped place Jimmy Ray Barnes at the scene, and Barnes implicated Reed Sr. Investigators also found that Reed Sr. had taken out several life insurance policies on Selonia that were in effect at the time of the murder.

Reed Sr. was charged in 2019 by amended grand jury indictment with second-degree murder, convicted by a jury in November 2022, and sentenced to life in prison in January 2023. Defense attorneys Vanessa Williams and LaToia Williams-Simon argued the case rested on circumstantial evidence.