NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A man charged in the 2012 death and dismemberment of a Bourbon Street strip club dancer is awaiting extradition to Louisiana after completing a federal prison term.
Terry Speaks, 41, was released Tuesday morning from a federal lockup in New York, where he was serving time for a North Carolina sex offense unrelated to the Louisiana case. He was taken to the Orange County, New York, jail. A deputy who declined to give his name said Speaks was being processed and a hearing date had not yet been set.
“From there, we’ll see if he waives extradition,” Sgt. Brian McGregor, spokesman for the police department in suburban Kenner, Louisiana, said Tuesday. Kenner police took the lead role in investigating the case in April.
Speaks and his alleged accomplice, 30-year-old Margaret Sanchez, were indicted in August in Jefferson Parish on charges of second-degree murder, obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice in the death of 22-year-old Jaren Lockhart. Parts of Lockhart’s body washed ashore in Mississippi in 2012.
Sanchez was arrested by Kenner police earlier this year. She was being held in the Jefferson Parish jail with bond set at $1.5 million.
Police have said surveillance camera footage showed both Speaks and Sanchez leaving with Lockhart on June 6, 2012, from Temptations, the strip club where Lockhart worked.
Authorities in Hancock County, Mississippi, working with authorities from that state and in Louisiana, began investigating after Lockhart’s torso floated ashore in Bay St. Louis. Other parts of her body drifted onto beaches within 10 miles east in the next few days.
A stab wound to the heart killed her, according to the arrest report.
Hancock County officially turned the case over to police in the New Orleans-area suburban city of Kenner in April.
