BATON ROUGE - A man who started his career in Ferriday, Louisiana, as an editor for The Concordia Sentinel and gained fame investigating unsolved murders of black men in Louisiana has his legacy continued through LSU's Cold Case initiative.

Stanley Nelson died June 5 at 69; his work got him to be the finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, but later in his career, he worked with LSU students on solving cold cases.

LSU Journalism Professor Chris Drew, who runs the program, said Nelson solved three cases. Many of those cases involved the Ku Klux Klan.

"One of the things he learned in talking to a lot of people on these cases was that often the children of the Klansman knew things, and the spouses would talk. Stanley said, 'If a guy was doing violent things in the Klan away from home, he probably wasn't treating his wife and children very well either'," Drew said.

Nelson became an adjunct professor, continuing to bring justice and closure to families through his work and encouraging the next generation.

"2009 started the LSU Cold Case program," Drew said. "At first, students were writing public records requests, going to Washington, getting the records."

That soon changed as over the years with students working alongside him, tracking down documents, interviewing witnesses, and writing stories. 

In 2021, students worked with Nelson on a 1960 cold case in Monroe, where a white man who owned a sanitation business shot five of his black workers, claiming self-defense. The man was never prosecuted.

"Our students were able to show through FBI interview records and interviews they did themselves, including with a 93-year-old woman and a 94-year-old woman who knew things or witnessed things, but never had been interviewed by law-enforcement. [They said] the man and his son had laid an ambush for these workers because he owed him back pay that he didn't wanna pay them, and when they came for their pay, he shot him and then planted knives on them," he said.

A year later in 2022, Nelson and his students won a national award, and even gained the attention of Governor John Bel Edwards over a story about a pair of Southern University students killed during a protest by a sheriff's deputy in 1972.

"They did a four-part series re-examining the case, and the end result was then-Governor John Bel Edwards read the stories. He said, 'I was only six when this happened in 1972, but I read the stories that the LSU group did,' and he issued a formal apology to the victim's family on behalf of the state," Drew said.

Drew says Nelson's work will continue, as cold case students research one of Stanley's cases involving a 24-year-old black man who disappeared after being stopped by deputies and Klansmen in central Louisiana. His body still has not been found.