The Black Widow: She Seduced 11 Ku Klux Klan Leaders and sʟɪᴛ Their Throats in Their Beds (1872) | HO!!

The Summer When Justice Came Crawling Through the Bayou

Somewhere along the damp bayous of southern Louisiana, in the merciless summer of 1872, eleven men died in their sleep.

Not from yellow fever.

Not from gunfire.

Each one had his throat opened with surgical precision, their faces frozen between agony and ecstasy, their blood soaking into the sheets of plantation beds that had once symbolized power.

By dawn, whispers began spreading like wildfire — whispers of a woman who walked through the night like a shadow.

To white authorities, the case was a mystery best buried.

To the freedmen and freedwomen of St. Martin Parish, it was something else entirely.

They called her Lav Noir — The Black Widow.

The Deaths the Law Refused to See

Officially, the killings were dismissed as “isolated incidents,” reported across four parishes.

Unofficially, everyone knew the truth: the dead were all prominent members of the Knights of the White Camellia, Louisiana’s most feared branch of the Ku Klux Klan — men who burned homes, mutilated freedmen, and ruled with terror and impunity after the Civil War.

But this wasn’t random vengeance. It was a reckoning.

Each death was an act of surgical justice, carried out with intelligence, patience, and intimate knowledge of the victims’ lives — their homes, their habits, their sins.

And behind it all was a mysterious woman who appeared in the town of Breaux Bridge under the name Madame Celeste Dufrain.

The Widow Who Walked Out of Smoke

Celeste arrived in April 1872 — stepping off a steamboat from New Orleans with a single trunk, a black silk parasol, and the air of a woman accustomed to command.

She was, she said, a French Creole widow, seeking peace after the death of her husband in a yellow fever outbreak.

Her French was flawless. Her gold was real. Her eyes — dark, calm, impossible to read.

She rented a room at the Bro Bridge Hotel, attended Mass every Sunday, and spent her afternoons walking the narrow streets with quiet grace.

To white society, she was an exotic curiosity.

To the men of the parish — lawyers, planters, and ex-Confederates — she was something far more dangerous: a mirror reflecting everything they craved and feared.

Within weeks, she had their attention.

Within months, she would have their lives.

The First Man to Die

On July 19, 1872, plantation owner Thomas Brousard was found in his bed — throat slit so deep it nearly severed his spine.

His face was eerily peaceful.

Two wine glasses sat empty on the bedside table.

The room smelled of lavender and blood.

Local authorities called it the work of a “vengeful freedman.”

But the Black community knew better.

Brousard was notorious for whipping freedmen who dared to vote.

His killer hadn’t come from the swamps. She had come from his own bed.

At the funeral, the widow Celeste Dufrain stood quietly in black, her veil hiding a small, satisfied smile.

Three weeks later, Antoine Lair, a lawyer who defended Klansmen in court, was found with his throat opened in the same fashion.

The parish’s white elite began to panic.

The freedmen began to pray — and whisper.

“Lav Noir,” they said.

The Black Widow walks.

The Woman They Couldn’t Catch

The remaining Knights — men who had ruled St. Martin Parish with iron and fire — gathered in secret.

They knew they were being hunted.

And when they traced every thread of their downfall, every conversation, every encounter, they all arrived at the same name:
Madame Dufrain.

But by the time they realized it, it was too late.

The woman they feared wasn’t running.

She was recording — in a leather-bound journal, she cataloged every sin, every secret, every night of violence her victims had inflicted.

She knew where their wives slept.

Where their guards stood.

What they had done to her mother.

Because “Celeste Dufrain” wasn’t a widow at all.

Her real name was Josephine Budreau, the daughter of a freedwoman named Sarah Budreau — a woman murdered by the very men who now slept with fear under their own roofs.

A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s War

In 1868, Josephine’s mother had testified before federal authorities about a Klan attack near Baton Rouge.

The men she accused — planters, doctors, judges — were acquitted after a local physician falsified the cause of death.

Days later, Sarah Budreau was found with her throat cut in a boarding house.

Her twelve-year-old daughter vanished.
Everyone assumed she’d been killed, too.

But Josephine had survived — hiding among freedmen, learning to read, learning medicine, learning patience.
And by 1872, she had returned to Louisiana under a new name and a flawless Creole accent.

She wasn’t looking for forgiveness.

She was looking for balance.

The Killings Continue

By the end of summer, five men were dead.

Each was found with a note pinned to his chest:

“Remember Baton Rouge.”

“Remember the Fontine Store Fire.”

“Remember the Christmas Massacre.”

Each note pointed to a crime the Knights had committed — crimes erased from the courts but preserved in memory and blood.

The remaining four Knights fortified themselves inside the St. Martin Parish Courthouse.
They locked the doors, posted armed guards, and vowed to end the reign of the Black Widow.

What they didn’t know was that Josephine Budreau was already inside the building.

The Night of Reckoning

On October 28, 1872, the courthouse burned with lamplight as the last four Knights gathered — Judge Vincent Théot, Sheriff Claude Deveau, publisher Marcus Thibodeaux, and hotel owner Harold Jessup.

They thought they were safe.
They thought the walls of law and privilege would save them.

At 2:00 a.m., a door creaked open.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said a calm female voice.

They turned.

Standing before them was the woman they had all tried — and failed — to destroy.

“My name,” she said, “is Josephine Budreau.

Daughter of Sarah and Marcus Budreau — the people you murdered in 1868.

I have come to collect the debt you owe my family.”

Justice from Below

The Knights reached for their weapons, but froze as they heard something outside:
singing.

Hundreds of freedmen and freedwomen had gathered in the town square, holding torches and hymns, surrounding the courthouse like a living wall of memory.

They hadn’t come to kill.

They had come to witness.

To ensure the story would never again be buried.

Inside, Josephine spoke for nearly an hour — naming every crime, every victim, every lie.
She gave the Knights a choice:

“Confess your crimes to the world, or face me and die tonight.”

By dawn, they chose confession.

Judge Théot wrote and signed a document admitting every atrocity committed by the Knights of the White Camellia in St. Martin Parish — a confession witnessed, sealed, and hidden by the Freedmen’s Church.

Josephine Budreau walked out of the courthouse alive, past the silent guards, past the singing crowd, disappearing into legend.

Legacy of the Black Widow

The last four Knights lived out their days as broken men.

The Judge drank himself to death.

The Sheriff lost his election to a Freedmen’s coalition.

The others fled the state in shame.

The Klan’s power in the parish collapsed overnight.

As for Josephine — she vanished.

Some said she fled to Mexico. Others to France.

But years later, records from a New York Freedmen’s Aid Society mention a woman named “J.B.” who worked tirelessly for Black education and rights until her death in 1903.

A Ghost in the Archives

Historians have long debated whether Josephine Budreau ever existed.

The parish court records are missing.

The confession has never been found.

But oral histories collected in the 1930s tell the same story again and again:

A Creole widow came to the bayou.

She seduced the men who murdered her mother.

She slit their throats while they slept.

And when the killing was done, she disappeared into the night, leaving justice behind her.

Epilogue: When the Law Looks Away

The Black Widow’s story isn’t just about revenge.

It’s about what happens when law becomes the tool of the oppressor — when justice must crawl through the back doors, through coal chutes, through the forgotten people history refuses to see.

Her legend survived not because it was written down, but because it was whispered, night after night, along the bayous of Louisiana.

“There are debts the courts can’t settle.

There are crimes that only blood remembers.”

And in the humid dark of St. Martin Parish, some still say that if you listen close enough —
you can hear her footsteps returning.