Nurse Is Murdered in California and Her Friend's Twisted Tale Is Revealed To Be a Lie
When LaNell Barsock was found dead in the garage of her Palmdale home, authorities initially focused on her boyfriend before realizing they were headed down the wrong path.
On the evening of June 16, 2010, La’Rene Austin burst into the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Palmdale station, covered in blood.
Austin told deputies she’d just discovered her best friend of 10 years, LaNell Barsock, dead on the floor in the garage of Barsock’s sprawling 3,400-square foot home in Palmdale, California, after slipping on blood in the garage, according to "The Breakup" episode of Dateline: Secret Uncovered. (The case was previously covered on Dateline: The Last Day.)
“I’m looking at the blood ... And then when I looked, I saw her legs,” she said. “And then I walked around the corner, she had a bag over her head.”
Austin told authorities that she then heard a noise in the house and saw Barsock’s live-in boyfriend, Louis Bonheur. She said that she rushed to her car and sped to the sheriff’s station, with Bonheur allegedly chasing her in his car.
The harrowing story put Bonheur front and center in the investigation and he was soon arrested and taken into custody. But detectives ultimately discovered a shocking twist that sent the case in a whole new direction.
Who was LaNell Barsock?
Barsock devoted her life to helping others, whether it was through her job as a nurse at a health center in Los Angeles or finding time to be there for her friends.
Close friend Marcel Fomotar recalled meeting Barsock in nursing school shortly after he’d immigrated from the African country of Cameroon and was still adjusting to life in the United States. She helped him integrate into society, loaned him textbooks, and even bought him three pairs of shoes.
“Whether it’s giving you the resources for school, giving you life tips on how to survive in America, for me, she was my guardian angel here in America,” he said.
It was that generosity that first connected her to Bonheur, who had just immigrated from Haiti.
LaNell Barsock's relationship with Louis Bonheur
One day, after her nursing classes, Barsock spotted Bonheur — who was at the same school taking an English course — waiting for the bus and she offered him a ride home.
“Their relationship blossomed. Their love blossomed between them,” Bonheur’s friend Phillipe Louis-John recalled to Dateline.
But while the relationship began with promise, it was close to a breaking point by the time of Barsock’s death.
Fomotar said the couple often fought, sometimes about money and sometimes about what Barsock, a successful nurse, perceived as Bonheur’s lack of career ambition.
“There was a dark side that people didn’t know about Louis and that was that he was a very jealous and controlling individual,” Detective Joe Espino told Dateline.
Detectives learned that Bonheur allegedly read his girlfriend’s text messages, watched from the parking lot to see who she had lunch with, and called her employer to make sure she’d gone into work as she claimed. Just a few months before Barsock's death, deputies had been called to the home about a domestic disturbance, although no charges were filed and no one was injured.
In regard to another incident, Barsock's mother told detectives that once, after Barsock told Bonheur that she wanted to end the relationship, he chased her in his truck and tried to run her off the road, shattering the glass windows of her vehicle in the process.
A dating site match is also eyed by investigators
Authorities learned that Bonheur’s fears about his girlfriend’s activities weren’t unfounded. In the months before her death, Barsock had been carrying on an affair with a flight nurse named Ike who she'd met on a dating site. Ike had even given Barsock a secret cell phone so that they could communicate with one another.
Ike was quickly been ruled out as a suspect in the murder after detectives confirmed that on the day of the killing, he’d been interviewing for a new job at the University of California at Davis, hours away.
The day LaNell Barsock was killed
Austin told detectives that on Barsock’s last day alive, she’d gone to her house that morning to weave her hair.
Bonheur had planned to drive to Los Angeles, about an hour and a half away, to meet up with Austin’s boyfriend and fix his car. He believed that Barsock had severed ties to Ike and that the secret phone she kept was dead, but when he found out that wasn’t the case and that someone had added more minutes to it, he turned around to confront Barsock.
At around 11:30 a.m., the two argued about the phone. Barsock and Austin went to a hair supply store and Bonheur followed. Barsock and Bonheur exchanged words again and it seemed like the issue was settled, however, Austin claimed that the argument had picked up back up at home.
She told detectives that she left at around 1:30 p.m. and walked to a local park to give the couple some space. Austin said that when she returned at around 6:30 p.m., she found Barsock dead in the garage.
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What happened to LaNell Barsock?
Barsock had been shot once in the head. Detectives ultimately learned that someone had killed Barsock in her family room, using a pillow as a makeshift silencer, then dragged the body into the garage. A bloody rug had been stuffed into the backseat of Barsock’s car and a pair of bloody latex gloves were also found in the garage.
Investigators also found a handwritten note that made it seem as though Barsock had broken up with Bonheur.
“Dear Louis, I am leaving you for Ike he makes more money so you can do whatever you want to do with the house I am moving out of state with Ike,” it read in part. “I have been sleeping with him for four months now..good luck in life.”
The night of June 16, 2010, detectives found Bonheur at the Los Angeles home of Barsock’s mom, where he said he’d decided to sleep that night to avoid a long commute to work the next day.
He seemed genuinely distraught to learn of his girlfriend’s death.
“That’s not me. That’s not me. That’s not me,” he sobbed. “Why they do that to her? Oh, my God.”
He admitted to confronting Barsock about the cell phone earlier in the day, but claimed he’d left for Los Angeles after talking with Barsock outside the beauty supply store and that he was shopping at various auto supply stores at the time she was killed.
But detectives weren’t convinced and they arrested Bonheur, sending him to the county jail for more than a month as the investigation continued.
Louis Bonheur's alibi checks out
Detectives were shocked when they discovered surveillance footage from several auto parts stores in Los Angeles that clearly showed Bonheur shopping just as he’d claimed, making it impossible for him to have killed his girlfriend.
“We saw those video tapes, that’s when, that was like an aha moment," Espino said. "I said, ‘Well, maybe he’s telling the truth.'"
Investigators eventually learned that they’d been duped the whole time by the real killer — who made that dramatic entrance into the sheriff’s station that kicked off the investigation.
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La’Rene Austin had been untruthful
Although Austin had claimed to be Barsock’s best friend, detectives learned that the two women had only actually known each other for a matter of weeks.
“They met through Craigslist. La’Rene had put an ad in the personals section, women seeking women, and LaNell answered that ad and they developed a friendship which turned into a romantic relationship,” Espino said.
Just a few weeks into the relationship, Barsock texted Austin that she didn’t want “anything sexual” with her anymore because she planned to focus on her relationship with her boyfriend, although she still wanted to be friends.
Austin agreed, pretending to want the same thing, but prosecutors argued that by then, she had become obsessed with Barsock, even going as far as impersonating Barsock when she went on dates with other women.
“She kind of took over our victim’s persona,” Espino said.
Austin — who had struggled to hold a job and was in debt — was envious of Barsock’s big, beautiful house and thriving career.
“She absolutely saw LaNell Barsock as someone who could take her out of that and give her a better life and was infatuated with that and really, really wanted that and when it was taken away from her very quickly, in an instant, she ultimately lashed out and decided to kill LaNell as punishment for it,” said Jason Quirino, a prosecutor with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.
Who killed LaNell Barsock?
Authorities believe Austin shot Barsock in the head while pretending to do her hair, then dragged her body into the garage, where she'd planned to stuff it into Barsock’s car and get rid of the body. But, fearing that Bonheur may be on his way home, she panicked and decided to frame him instead, writing that breakup note herself and claiming to have seen Bonheur at the house.
Austin's DNA was discovered on the bloody latex gloves and on a bloody fingerprint on a plastic container found in the garage.
By the time authorities had pieced the crime together, Austin had gone on the run. She was later discovered in Belize after the case was featured on America’s Most Wanted. Austin went on trial for first-degree murder in 2015. She was found guilty and sentenced to two terms of 25 years to life.
Where is La’Rene Austin now?
Austin is currently incarcerated at the California Institution for Women, according to California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation records.
Bonheur, who went on to marry and become a father and has denied claims that he was controlling, doesn’t have any resentment toward detectives in Barsock's case.
“I got a lot of good people around me and I can see my wife, my son, a lot of siblings, my friends and it’s a blessing from God,” he said.
