Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge

in Historical Guns, Will Dabbs
Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
What possessed the brain damaged art director for this cheesy 1980’s action movie to affix Arnold Schwarzenegger’s grenades to his web gear by their pins? Methinks these guys have likely never handled live grenades. Wow.

“Somewhere, somehow, somebody’s going to pay,” was the tagline for the 1985 Schwarzenegger action movie Commando. This classic stylized bloodbath orbited around a retired special operator named John Matrix whose daughter is kidnapped. The archetypal evil mastermind takes the little girl in an effort at motivating Schwarzenegger’s super-soldier character to overthrow a small island nation-state on his behalf. The central theme, should you wish to think this deeply about it, explores the limits to which a devoted father might go to protect his child.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
This was one of my favorite scenes from the movie. A dumpy Vernon Wells accuses the utterly shredded John Matrix of getting too old to fight. Incidentally, Wells also played the lunatic villain Wez in the Australian post-apocalyptic classic The Road Warrior.

According to www.moviebodycounts.com, for his era, Arnold Schwarzenegger was Hollywood’s deadliest actor as determined by total on-screen kill count. Commando was his bloodiest movie by the same metric. His record has since been eclipsed by more modern fare, but he was the unchallenged 1980’s king of gory vengeance. As an aside, one scene that was proposed but later cut had Schwarzenegger chopping a henchman’s arm off with a machete and then beating him to death with it. His dialogue was to have been, “Thanks for lending me a hand.” Sheesh…

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
The M202 FLASH launcher fired 66mm incendiary rockets and was intended to replace WW2-era flamethrowers. FLASH stood for FLame Assault SHoulder. It must have been a slow day in the US Army’s overworked acronym generation office.

John Matrix logged seventy-four kills in Commando. Among them fifty-one people were shot, seven were blown up by emplaced explosives, and five others succumbed to hand grenades. Another five met their gory demise thanks to an M202 rocket launcher. 

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
A 13-year-old Alyssa Milano catches a ride aboard her perambulating battleship of a movie dad.
Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Alyssa Milano has come a long way since her big-screen debut as a helpless teenaged girl in the Schwarzenegger kill-fest Commando.

Two faceless disposable bad guys got cut into pieces by thrown circular saw blades, one person was stabbed to death, and one particularly unfortunate rascal was impaled on a hissing steam pipe. As an aside, Schwarzenegger’s youthful daughter Jenny was none other than 13-year-old Alyssa Milano, the modern face of the Me Too movement.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
How would you like to wake up to this every day before class? It worked for me while I was in college.

Commando was actually a pretty silly movie. The guns were cool, but the dialogue seemed like it was penned by a Third Grader, and the acting simply reeked of cheese. I’m nonetheless not too proud to admit that I had a life-size movie poster from the film plastered on my dorm room wall back when I was a college student. However, a year before Commando hit the big screen, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, saw a very public example of just how far one real guy might actually go to avenge a crime committed against his child. That guy’s name was Gary Plauche.

The Setting

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
By all accounts, Gary Plauche was just a normal dude. He coached little league and supported his community.

Leon Gary Plauche was born on November 10, 1945, in Baton Rouge. He served in the US Air Force and attained the rank of Staff Sergeant. After leaving the military he became a heavy equipment salesman and also worked as a cameraman for a local TV station. Though he had a temper, he was known for his affable demeanor and quick jokes. Plauche fathered four children—three boys and a girl. Gary was separated from his wife June in the early 1980s. This was predictably hard on his kids.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
In case you were wondering exactly what a real monster looks like, this is it.

In 1983 Gary’s 11-year-old son Jody began taking Hapkido lessons from a 25-year-old ex-Marine named Jeffrey Doucet. Jeff Doucet had humble beginnings. He dropped out of school in Ninth Grade and, as a child, lost a sister to a rattlesnake bite. The discipline and exercise intrinsic to the martial arts seemed good for Jody. Doucet took the kid under his wing and cultivated a bond that appeared to be therapeutic given the circumstances. Doucet was a regular visitor at the Plauche home and frequently gave Jody a ride to the dojo for training.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Jeff Doucet abducted this young man when he was 11. Doucet was later suspected of molesting numerous other local children as well.

Authorities later determined that Jeffrey Doucet had been molesting the young man for more than a year. In February of 1984, Doucet kidnapped Jody and took him to a motel in Anaheim, California, near Disneyland where he sexually assaulted the kid repeatedly. Meanwhile, the authorities scoured the country looking for them both.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Yeah, that’s creepy. Jeffrey Doucet was a master manipulator.

Doucet eventually allowed Jody to make a collect call to his mother. The cops traced the call to the motel and staged a raid. Law Enforcement officers hit the hotel room, rescued the child, and took Doucet into custody without incident.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
When faced with an unimaginably horrible circumstance Gary Plauche didn’t really know where to turn.

Jody was returned home on March 1, 1984. Once he was safe the details of the protracted abuse came to light. Gary, who was 39 at the time, was interviewed by a news crew in a ghoulish effort at ascertaining his feelings on the situation. He told the interviewer that he did not know what to do and just felt helpless.

The Setting

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
It took a little planning to pull off Gary Plauche’s hit. The event in all its gory detail was captured by a local TV news crew.

Two weeks after Jody returned to Louisiana, Jeffrey Doucet was extradited from California to Louisiana to stand trial for child molestation and sexual assault. Doucet’s Flight 595 out of Dallas landed at Ryan Field in Baton Rouge, and Doucet was led through the terminal in handcuffs. Meanwhile, wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, the aggrieved father Gary Plauche stood nearby at a bank of pay phones speaking with his best friend. He cryptically whispered into the phone, “Here he comes. You’re about to hear a shot.”

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Local TV news crews captured Jeffrey Doucet as he returned to Baton Rouge to face justice for pedophilia.

In the immediate aftermath of what was to come it was assumed that local Law Enforcement officers had tipped Plauche off regarding the timing and location of the transfer. Plauche enjoyed friendships with many of the local cops, so this was not an unreasonable assumption. It was later determined, however, that a former co-worker from the local ABC television affiliate WBRZ-TV was Plauche’s source of intel. Then as now tragedy sells, so the media slathered the sordid story with attention. 

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Though he did not realize it, Jeffrey Doucet was mere moments away from some serious frontier justice.

This bit is all pretty unsettling when you think about it. Humans in the Information Age are drawn to calamity like politicians to other peoples’ money. Throughout this whole ghastly episode, TV crews hounded the major players in search of that Pulitzer-grade image that might graphically capture one man’s anguish in the face of something so epically horrible. At 9:30 pm with the manacled child molester Jeffrey Doucet passing just behind him, Gary Plauche gave the world those images. 

The Killing

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Sheriff’s Deputy Major Mike Barnett took Plauche down immediately.

Plauche retrieved a small revolver of unknown make from his boot, stepped alongside Doucet, placed the gun to the right side of his head, and fired a single .38-caliber hollowpoint round. The cops subdued him immediately. Plauche’s friend Deputy Sheriff Mike Barnett can be heard on the tape asking him, “Gary, why? Why, Gary?”

Plauche tearfully answered, “If somebody did it to your kid, you’d do it, too!” 

The Aftermath

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
I don’t myself care much for Michael Moore’s work.

The sex criminal Jeffrey Doucet fell into a coma and died in hospital the following day. Video footage of the horrific scene has taken on a life of its own. Michael Moore used it in his anti-gun documentary screed Bowling for Columbine. The clip also featured prominently in an unsettling compilation of real-life video killings titled Traces of Death 2 released in 1994. It was viewed more than 20 million times on YouTube prior to its removal.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
This is still America, so Gary Plauche’s tragedy naturally graced a t-shirt.

Gary Plauche was charged with murder in the second degree but subsequently pled no contest to manslaughter. He was given a seven-year suspended sentence along with five years’ probation and 300 hours of community service. He completed all of this in 1989.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
The public was naturally mesmerized by this whole horrid tale.

Opinions were mixed on the outcome of the Plauche case. Some felt that shooting a man in the head in cold blood in an airport warranted more than probation and community service. Others believed that the circumstances surrounding the crimes committed against his child absolved him of responsibility. Plauche’s defense team made a compelling argument that Doucet was a charismatic manipulative predator who had used Plauche’s family challenges to take advantage of his son.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Gary Plauche had no criminal record prior to his gunning down a child molester in the Baton Rouge airport.

Psychological assessments alleged that Plauche was so traumatized by these events that he was unable to discern the difference between right and wrong at the time of the killing. Any parent can imagine the unfettered anguish this might precipitate. The judge in the case, Frank Saia, ultimately agreed and opined that Plauche represented no risk of further criminal behavior. He felt that sending Plauche to prison would serve no material purpose for the state. 

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
This guy was just a freaking sociopath.

It was later revealed that Doucet and Plauche’s wife June were having an affair at the time. This revelation just served to muddy the waters further. However, forensics determined that Doucet’s assault on Jody occurred just as had been alleged.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Jody Plauche has since parlayed his horrible experience into an effort at helping others similarly traumatized. Good for him.

In 2019 Jody Plauche released a book titled, Why, Gary, Why? The Jody Plauche Story. The book was described thusly, “Through his own incredible story of using his past for good by helping others, he shares how any reader who has suffered great trauma can move on and not let the past define him or her.”

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Jody went on to letter in four sports before finishing high school.

I’ve not read it myself, so I can’t comment on its contents. However, the excerpts I have found do yield insight into Jody’s subsequent attitudes about the shooting.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
This horrible episode inevitably brought the Plauche family a great deal of attention. Here Jody and Gary are shown alongside Geraldo Rivera.

He wrote, “I think for a lot of people who have not been satisfied by the American justice system my dad stands as a symbol of justice…My dad did what everybody says what they would do…Plus, he didn’t go to jail. That said, I cannot…condone his behavior. I understand why he did what he did. But it is more important for a parent to be there to help support their child than put themselves in a place to be prosecuted.”

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Here is Gary later in life attending a Saints game. He lived out the rest of his days in relative normalcy.

In his final interview prior to his death, Gary Plauche showed no regret for killing Jeffrey Doucet and stated that he would do it again if given the opportunity. In 2011 Plauche had a stroke as a complication of diabetes and was placed in a nursing home. He died in 2014 at the age of 68.

Gary Plauche: The Raw Reality of Revenge
Though Jody was angered by the killing in its immediate aftermath, he subsequently understood and appreciated his father’s motivations. Interestingly, he later said his dad’s implicit willingness to kill anyone who harmed his family was an impediment to his coming forward to report Doucet’s abuse.

Of his father, Jody wrote, “A lot of people remember the guy who shot somebody. I remember someone who would pick up stray animals…someone who was just a kind soul, a gentle person.”

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About the author: Will Dabbs A native of the Mississippi Delta, Will is a mechanical engineer who flew UH1H, OH58A/C, CH47D, and AH1S aircraft as an Army Aviator. He has parachuted out of perfectly good airplanes at 3 o’clock in the morning and summited Mount McKinley, Alaska, six times…always at the controls of an Army helicopter, which is the only way sensible folk climb mountains. Major Dabbs eventually resigned his commission in favor of medical school where he delivered 60 babies and occasionally wrung human blood out of his socks. Will works in his own urgent care clinic, shares a business building precision rifles and sound suppressors, and has written for the gun press since 1989. He is married to his high school sweetheart, has three awesome adult children, and teaches Sunday School. Turn-ons include vintage German machineguns, flying his sexy-cool RV6A airplane, Count Chocula cereal, and the movie “Aliens.”

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  • Jody Plauche June 16, 2023, 2:28 pm

    My mother and Jeff Doucet were not having an affair. You should have read the book. Email me and I will send you a link to download it.

  • James March 14, 2023, 11:41 am

    As a survivor of this bullshit I can understand the fathers actions.

    I wish Gary was still alive,would buy him dinner and a few drinks,he saved many children with his actions.

  • Juozas April 1, 2022, 10:50 am

    There is murder in the hearts of many, but blood on the hands of few.

  • Chad March 29, 2022, 6:12 pm

    P.O.S got what he deserved to bad he couldn’t have made him suffer longer !

  • Willie-O March 28, 2022, 11:53 pm

    I love a good ending. It’s a tragedy when any child has to experience pure evil, but at least this sick pervert wasn’t able to ruin any additional lives thanks to a dad that was able to do what society at large seems largely incapable of doing.

    • Ej harbet April 7, 2022, 10:22 pm

      I know it’s just hypothetical.
      But if Gary knew in his heart that his sons molester would be upon conviction executed would he have assassinated him? Would you?

  • Jim March 28, 2022, 7:47 pm

    Unless you’ve been in that situation, you can’t understand why. You may think you do, but you don’t.

  • Robert March 28, 2022, 4:07 pm

    The military taught me and had me do things I can’t forget. Although I have become peaceful I have not forgotten how to be very violent. Hurting my children would certainly be one way to bring out the old me. I sincerely hope that never happens

  • Ray March 28, 2022, 3:48 pm

    As a Father I would do the same thing!

  • Justice served cold March 28, 2022, 1:22 pm

    Great story ending! This type of justice should happen more often, bet crime would start to go down and predators would truly think twice before they pulled these types of acts and claimed “mental instability” or mental illness defenses. If anyone is mentally ill, it’s the victims and their families left to deal with the trauma of such acts…

  • John Boutwell March 28, 2022, 1:20 pm

    He had the balls that most men no longer have.

  • Randy Rowley March 28, 2022, 10:09 am

    Doucette started the conversation – Gary Plauche just finished it. He should have been given a medal.

  • Armed and Dangerous March 28, 2022, 9:51 am

    “Some felt that shooting a man in the head in cold blood in an airport warranted more than probation and community service.” Yes, I agree. Maybe a medal would be appropriate.

  • Luksa March 28, 2022, 9:26 am

    “It was later revealed that Doucet and Plauche’s wife June were having an affair at the time.” No more room in this story for skanks that bring child molesters into their homes to get back at their ex-husbands?? I have to think she shares some of the blame, wherever she is. Didn’t any of the newsies want to “ascertain how she FEELS” about the whole thing?! Nice work, June.

  • Juozas March 28, 2022, 9:14 am

    Deputy Sheriff Mike Barnett can be heard on the tape asking him, “Gary, why? Why, Gary?”

    Barnett’s not much of a detective, I’m guessing. Yes, if we could only understand “why?!?”

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