Hey, y’all, and welcome to Southern Macabre! I’m Aeryn and I am so glad you could join me for Missing Person Monday. I’ve got a crazy episode for you today and I would love to read your comments. I was planning to tell you about five or more cases like I usually do, but this case took hold and so I’m just going to tell you about Ms. Audrey Alta Moate today.
Audrey Alta Moate, age 31, was picked up by her “friend”, 46-year-old Thomas Hotard, at a café near Laplace, Louisiana. She rode with him in his blue, four door 1953 Nash Rambler until he parked about five yards from Lake Pontchartrain. One of them had brought along a picnic basket for their weekly Saturday meetup. They both worked at Kaiser Construction Company in Gramercy.
Thomas lay the front seat down until it met the back seat, forming a bed. Then the two spread out a sleeping bag and pillows, making a cozy spot in the back of his huge car. A hunter saw the two of them in the backseat that morning, startling Thomas, but didn’t think much of it at that time.
You see, it was 1956 and Thomas Hotard, Sr. was married with two children and Audrey was a divorced single mother with three children herself. One child, Jacqueline, was actually their child. No one knew this until after November 24, 1956, though. So, Thomas told his wife that he had to work every Saturday so the two of them could spend time together.
A different hunter than the one who had seen the two of them that morning, passed by the car that afternoon. He saw a man, “sleeping in a strange position” in the backseat and noticed the rear passenger door was open, but he didn’t check it out. He decided to just go home.
The next morning around 10:30, the first hunter started to pass the car again, but he decided to stop and investigate. He found Thomas laying on the sleeping bag and pillows. He had been shot through the rear window with birdshot and had been dead for 7-30 hours when he was discovered. He still had his wallet with his ID, a credit card, and a small amount of money.
They found the partial contents of a woman’s purse, a woman’s clothing, a woman’s shoes and Audrey’s eyeglasses inside the car. Small footprints, like a woman’s bare feet, lead from the car to the woods nearby. They were spaced far apart, indicating that she was running.
Let me take a moment to break this down for y’all. So, they’re both in the backseat, she’s naked and he probably is, too, when someone presses a shotgun to the back glass and pulls the trigger. She probably realized quickly that Thomas was dead and fled – not caring that she’s as naked as a newborn baby. She tries to run, but this person is wearing boots and catches her before she can get away.
Okay, so some of this is speculation, but they did see a set of men’s boot prints behind her bare ones and a single tire tread – like a motorcycle would make. Also, there was evidence of a struggle five feet away from the car. This was where police discovered the keys to Audrey’s 1949 Oldsmobile, which was still parked at the café where she had met Thomas the day before.
So, this is the time Thomas and Audrey’s family tell police that the two were only friends and Audrey’s mother brings up that a couple of years prior, Audrey had gone to Missouri because of a nervous breakdown.
In fact, she was living in an apartment one mile away from her mother in Baton Rouge. She gave birth to Jacqueline at a local hospital, naming Thomas as the baby girl’s father. She told her mother a year later that she had adopted a one-year-old in Missouri while recovering from her nervous breakdown. We know all of this because Audrey had Jacqueline’s birth certificate in a safe deposit box, which police gained access to seven years after Audrey’s disappearance.
Audrey’s two older children went to live with their dad’s mom, Norma O’Reilly Moate, in New Orleans. Jacqueline stayed with Audrey’s mother in B
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