“My girls won’t go anywhere unless someone’s with them,” Ms. Benoit said.

At Tina’s, a one-room bar where some of the victims used to come, rumors and theories abound. Law enforcement officials are treating the deaths as if they were murders committed by a “common offender”  a serial killer  but emphasize that is not a sure thing. It is not clear if the deaths are related or  because of decomposition  if they are all even murders.

Four people have been arrested or have had arrest warrants issued in connection with the deaths. Two were even held on murder charges for months before being freed because of evidence problems; the other two were never charged.

Frankie Richard was one of those two. A onetime owner of local strip joints, Mr. Richard (pronounced REE-shar) has a history of assault arrests. He admits to being a crack addict and claims to have had sex with most of the victims. He was among those last seen with Kristen G. Lopez, whose body was found floating in a canal on March 18, 2007.

A woman who was with Mr. Richard and Ms. Lopez at a cheap hotel just before Ms. Lopez disappeared told the police that Mr. Richard and his niece had killed Ms. Lopez. Soon after, the woman recanted her statement.

“I have my suspicion about who done it,” Mr. Richard, 54, said, sitting on the front porch of his childhood home on a chilly Sunday afternoon, still reeling from what his mother said was a three-day binge. “But I don’t want to pin the tail on no donkey because I don’t want false allegations to cause a family to go through what mine did.”

Mr. Richard was in rehab when one of the victims died, Sheriff Ricky Edwards said.

The pace of the investigation, and the apparent mistakes along the way, have tested the town’s patience. In 2007, the chief of detectives in the parish sheriff’s office made a deal to buy a pickup truck from an inmate in the parish jail, a woman he knew to be an acquaintance of one of the victims. A witness later said she saw Ms. Lopez in that same truck on the day of her disappearance, but by then the detective had washed and resold the truck.

The detective was fined and taken off the investigation. He now supervises the evidence room at the sheriff’s office.