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Conversations with a hit man

A former FBI agent traveled to Louisiana to ask a hired killer about a murder that haunted him. Then Larry Thompson started talking about a different case altogether.

By April 1977, the state had added Clayton Kimble and Steve Simoneaux to its list of witnesses, but their stories were ever changing and influenced by the promise of immunity in exchange for testimony, the possibility of a get-out-of-jail-free card for parole violations, and a $35,000 reward in the Leslie case offered by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry. With questions about the Leslie murder rattling around in our heads,Fuller and I return to Wade in March 2022, curious to follow up on the richly embroidered account of Thompson’s life as a hired gun and career criminal in one of his fictionalized memoirs, titled The Killer P.I. More than that, his story explained what hadn’t made sense as we dug into the police investigation—for instance, how, in the short time it took the hotel’s assistant manager to see Leslie’s body, the killer had supposedly maneuvered from behind the fence and vanished in a getaway car without being seen or heard.

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