Publication Date: April 1, 2025
A compelling blend of true crime and memoir tracing the author’s investigation into the kidnapping and murder of her great-grandfather in 1980s Louisiana and the reverberations on her family and community throughout the decades
On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHaye’s body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique. His kidnapping ten days before sparked “the biggest manhunt in the history of Evangeline Parish.” But his descendants would hear the story as lore, in whispers of the dreadful day the FBI landed a helicopter in the family’s front lawn and set out on horseback to search for the seventy-year-old banker.
Decades later, Aubrey’s great-granddaughter Jordan LaHaye Fontenot asked her father, the parish urologist, to tell the full story. He revealed that to this day, every few months, one of his patients will bring up his grandfather’s murder, and the man accused of killing him, John Brady Balfa, who remains at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola serving a life sentence. They’ll say, in so many words: “Dr. Marcel, I really don’t think that Balfa boy killed your granddaddy.”
For readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts and Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl, Home of the Happy unravels the layers of suffering borne of this brutal crime—and investigates the mysteries that linger beneath generations of silence. Is it possible that an innocent man languishes in prison, still, wrongly convicted of murdering the author’s great-grandfather?
Who killed Aubrey LaHaye?
That’s the leading question posed by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot in Home of the Happy. Although the 1983 murder of the author’s great-grandfather occurred 13 years before her birth, the first-person narrative offers a dual timeline of past and present.
Utilizing family interviews, newspaper articles, and a number of legal documents, the author investigates the events that rocked Evangeline, a rural Louisiana parish.
As with many small communities, multi-generational families are common. With a multitude of family members depicted, the author skillfully manages to ensure readers can easily distinguish between them.
However, what makes the story unique is the author’s meticulous approach to highlighting unanswered questions and showcasing how the family continues to carry on through the years.
Home of the Happy delivers a fascinating mix of true crime and memoir as the author presents the evidence and examines the possibility of a wrongful conviction.
Jordan LaHaye Fontenot’s work has appeared in Oxford American, Atlas Obscura, and others. The managing editor of Country Roads magazine, she lives in Lafayette, Louisiana. Home of the Happy is her first book.
