New Orleans unsolved is a podcast that began in 2020 examining the unsolved murder of a young boy, Eddie Wells, in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans during the 1980s. Eddie’s life was full of hardships from an early age, and when his body was pulled from the Mississippi river, he was depicted as a “hustler,” or male prostitute in the French Quarter, despite only being 17 years old at the time of his death. However, the term “hustler,” downplays the reality that Eddie was actually victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking starting at an early age.
What began as a podcast about one unsolved case soon turned into a podcast about several similar cases which could all be linked back to one man, Stanley Burkhardt.
Several recent cases, such as the payouts to victims by the New Orleans Archdiocese and documentaries such as Scout’s Honor, touch on some of the overlap between victims of these networks and the victims of Burkhardt, but many of the details uncovered by the podcast have received little attention.
The podcast has been self-funded by the host and donations from listeners throughout its entirety, but somehow, despite all the evidence she has uncovered, as well as the wild twists and turns she’s discovered while investigating these murders, this information has received very little attention, even at a local or state level. However, it seems important to note, even when these crimes were being committed most attempts to seek justice by family members of the victims often led to mysterious dead ends.
To give you an example of how unknown this podcast has somehow remained, at even at the most local level, I mentioned it while getting a haircut a few months ago when Burkhardt was most recently re-arrested. The lady cutting my hair had never heard of the podcast, or the connection between the murders, but she had grown up in the same neighborhood outside of the French Quarter, and actually knew Stanley Burkhardt when he was a detective.
That’s just to say, please feel free to share the podcast, and information about these murders and Stanley Burkhardt, wherever. The victims and their families deserve justice, and even if Burkhardt is finally locked away and unable to hurt anymore children, there seems to be no reason to believe that the powerful network he was involved with ever stopped. More likely they’ve just gotten better at hiding in plain sight.