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In Haiti, the murder of a journalist who denounced corruption and a prosecutor above the law
Haitian journalist Gary Tesse was murdered in October 2022. The man allegedly responsible is former Les Cayes prosecutor Ronald Richemond, who is also accused of seizing large tracts of land, which he then resold to enrich himself. Forbidden Stories continued Tesse’s investigation, uncovering the methods Richemond used to steal land in the region with complete impunity.
(Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
- A former henchman of Ronald Richemond was released from prison this February. For the first time, he has accused the former Les Cayes prosecutor of being the mastermind behind the murder of journalist Gary Tesse.
- The official investigation has stalled. The investigating judge in charge of the case fears for his life and is threatening to recuse himself.
- Richemond is also accused of stealing and reselling numerous plots of land using a well-established method facilitated by the absence of land titles.
by Eloïse Layan with the contribution of Wethzer Piercin
July 4, 2025
A murder coupled with a Vodou ritual. Reported missing six days before, the body of journalist Gary Tesse was found on the night of Oct. 24, 2022, on a beach in the Baie des Cayes, in southern Haiti.
Journalist Gary Tesse, always elegantly dressed, was the host of the show Gran Lakou. He was killed in October 2022 (Credit: family photo).
The corpse, returned to the shore by the waves, was mutilated. His eyes had been gouged out, and his tongue and genitals had been cut off. According to popular belief, these abuses were intended to prevent the spirit of the deceased from returning to torment his killers.
“This was Commissioner Richemond’s modus operandi. He pulled out teeth, gouged out eyes and cut out the tongue and genitals of his victims.”
The man who revealed these sordid details said he knew the ins and outs of his superior’s methods. Apparently, Ricardo Bain knew too much — to the point of being imprisoned. In March 2025, Bain, whom everyone calls “Chito,” was enjoying his newfound freedom in the shady backyard of a house in Les Cayes. Speaking publicly for the first time, he was determined to “say it all.”
A little perfume, a black t-shirt hastily put on, and Chito was ready to testify. “I wanted to protect Gary; he was a good man,” he said. A friend of Tesse, Chito was also close to the person who allegedly ordered his murder. Although his claims are sometimes difficult to verify independently, lawyers close to the case and the victim’s family support his story.
Chito worked on a team with the powerful prosecutor Ronald Richemond, who held the title of Commissaire du Gouvernement, or Government Commissioner, in Les Cayes. Richemond, with his imposing dark glasses and loud voice, never missed an opportunity to detail to the press his operations aimed at re-establishing “public peace” in his jurisdiction. There was even a time when he called Chito “little brother.” But Chito was also close to the Richemond’s “bête noire”, Tesse. He now accuses Richemond of ordering his assassination, a crime that has so far gone unpunished.
In 2024, Haiti became “the worst nation globally for impunity” for crimes committed against journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, overtaking Syria and Somalia at the top of the ranking. Faced with increased political instability and a failing justice system, Haiti is the country where journalists’ murderers are most likely to go unpunished, according to CPJ. The organization cites seven unsolved murders since 2019, including Tesse’s.
Prosecutor Ronald Richemond often boasted about his actions in the jurisdiction (Credit: DR).
Forbidden Stories, whose mandate is to continue the work of murdered journalists around the world, went on the ground in Les Cayes to meet key witnesses in the case. Tesse’s murder is emblematic. He attacked the powerful — the town’s head prosecutor and most influential figure — and paid with his life.
More than two years after Tesse’s murder, the official investigation has stalled. However, Richemond has been charged in the case, according to the investigating judge Jean Michelet Séide. With our Haitian partner AyiboPost, we investigated the prosecutor whom Tesse accused of murder and land theft. This article is the third in a series on the murders of journalists in Haiti and the people behind their deaths.
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Tesse, Richemond’s “bête noire”
Described by his colleagues as a “fiery” and “determined” journalist, Tesse hosted a program called Gran Lakou, or “Big Yard,” on Le Bon FM radio. His thundering voice remains in the station’s archives. “Someone like Ronald Richemond perfectly embodies the evil eating away at our society, like an animal sick with the plague,” he once said. On air, he relentlessly denounced abuses of power, bribes and human rights violations Richemond committed.
Tesse regularly reproached Chito for his proximity to Richemond, which he considered problematic: “My brother, a young man like you cannot agree to follow Commissioner Richemond, who kills people as he pleases. Arresting people illegally, driving others off their land — these are not the actions of authorities worthy of their titles.”
Tesse’s criticism upset Richemond, who would stop at nothing to silence him. In May 2022, he briefly had Tesse arrested, and then he allegedly asked Chito to buy his silence in exchange for 200,000 gourdes (around 1,300 euros), the equivalent of an average year’s salary. Tesse refused, and the situation escalated.
According to Chito, Richemond wanted to “put an end to the matter.” One day, he told Chito to “go and take the journalist by force. He ordered me to put a white sheet and a pickaxe in my car. I told him no.” In messages dated July 3, 2022, a screenshot of which Chito has kept, Richemond also asks to borrow his car for a surveillance operation.
Chito claims he was not present when his friend was abducted. The day after the kidnapping, he himself was arrested and taken into custody. “Given that I knew all about the murder plot, which I didn’t agree with, Ronald Richemond decided to arrest me to prevent me from talking,” he said.
Ricardo Bain, known as Chito, a former associate of Ronald Richemond and also a friend of Gary Tesse (Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
“Chito is a key element in this case because he was in the commissioner’s good graces. He knew everything,” said Josias Jean-Pierre, a lawyer for the Tesse family.
Reached by telephone, Richemond denied any responsibility for the murder. “Why am I being accused? Why me? Is it because I’m a popular man?” he asked. For the first time in over a year, he agreed to revisit the case. Richemond claims to have ordered the police to investigate as soon as Tesse disappeared, and “never saw the body.” He added that “no one should be killed.” For him, Tesse was a journalist who “talked about everything — everything and nothing.”
As for Chito, he was nothing more than an “informant,” a tipster from whom he also borrowed his unmarked car “to fight the gangs.” “He was never part of my team,” Richemond said, describing Chito as a “delinquent” who, according to him, was sent to prison for leading protests.
However, another witness, contacted by our colleagues at AyiboPost, confirmed Chito’s statements. Amos André was a bodyguard for Richemond. He recounted an assassination plot that unfolded over several months. “One day, the commissioner came back from the office and said to us, ‘Gentlemen, Garry Tesse is causing me a lot of trouble. I suggest we send a woman to poison him.’ That was the first plan. It didn’t work,” he said.
Plan B was successful. “Ronald Richemond gathered the team and his guys said, in my presence, ‘We’ve just done a nice job,’ referring to the murdered journalist,” André continued. He claims that a man named Wilkens Thiogène was in charge of killing Tesse.
Vano Tesse, brother of Gary Tesse, and his wife Yvana Despagne Tesse in March 2025, in their village near Les Cayes (Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
The village where Tesse used to live is a 25-minute drive from the town of Les Cayes. Along the road, rice fields give way to sugar cane fields, filled with the woody scent of vetiver, an aromatic plant. That Sunday morning, women dressed in white were off to mass, while farmers ploughed their fields.
Tesse’s modest house lies just before the village of Cavaillon, below the road. His widow, Yvana, lives there with their daughter and her relatives. She has kept her husband’s passport and ID photo. Emotionally, she described Tesse as an elegant man and journalist who defended the “underprivileged masses” and the “most vulnerable and neglected,” and whose parents were small-scale farmers.
The few documents Yvana Tesse managed to keep from her husband Gary Tesse (Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
On October 18th 2022, Tesse left as usual at 9 a.m. to prepare for his live broadcast starting at 1 p.m. He ascended the dirt track between his house and the road and took a seat in a tap-tap, a shared cab. At 7 p.m., with no news from him, his wife Yvana began to worry. In the days that followed, she looked for him everywhere, even in hospital and in prison.
The journalist’s brother, Vano Tesse, managed to track down the tap-tap driver, Jean Willy. “He told me that Gary had been on the phone, that he had gone down to the Bergeau 5 (neighborhood) and a vehicle was waiting for him. I shared that information on the radio,” he said.
A few weeks later, Jean Willy was also murdered. According to lawyer Jean-Pierre, another witness eliminated was reportedly a manager at the market where Tesse was allegedly held captive.
The Tesse family was also threatened. “We heard gunshots and the sound of bullets near our house every night,” said his brother. He described his exhaustion and the complexity of lodging a complaint against the town’s most influential figure, the head of the public prosecutor’s office.
Fake court forging the signature of the judge in charge of the Gary Tesse case (Credit: Obtained via SOS Journalistes).
Thiogène is an acquaintance of Richemond, arrested in December 2022 and indicted with Tesse’s murder. But on Dec. 8, 2023, he was released following the presentation of a falsified document, which included the forged signature of the judge in charge of the case, Robert Jourdain. “This order was entirely fabricated by Ronald Richemond,” said the Haitian organization SOS Journalistes. Jourdain himself alerted his superiors about the use of forgeries.
Once again, Richemond appears to have been above the law — although he denies it. “I don’t have the judge’s seal. I don’t have the papers. How could I fabricate a fake order?” he asked.
“Arrived as a savior, left as a thief.” To sum up Richemond’s career, Angel, a Haitian journalist who peppers his interviews with musical references, quoted Ivorian singer Tiken Jah Fakoly. It’s an almost mundane story for a government commissioner in Haiti. It starts with a popular prosecutor, celebrated by the people. Between 2019 and 2020, he fought for the safety of the citizens of Les Cayes, leading operations against the Kilikou bandits who were then rampaging through the region. But that was before he got involved in trafficking and became “a nasty guy.”
Angel — shaven head, joggers, soccer jersey, silver necklace — has also just been released from prison. He was arrested for stealing cars, but denies it. “The commissioner rigged things,” he said. He claims that Richemond asked him to delete a recording of an interview with Didier Chabat, one of his henchmen implicated in Tesse’s kidnapping. He says he refused and was imprisoned. Chabat was killed. “He paid the commissioner’s price,” Angel said.
Land theft, Richemond’s “specialty”
Richemond made money by swallowing up land. “Stealing land was his specialty,” Chito said. “I was often in charge of negotiating on his behalf.” To prove it, he took Forbidden Stories on a guided tour of the stolen properties. Two armed men, acquaintances of his, escorted him “for added security,” as he led the way past a motorcycle parts market, a residential neighborhood in Les Cayes and rice fields outside town.
Chito, freed from prison in March, moves with armed escorts for his safety (Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
Behind a plot marked out by wooden stakes, a man was transplanting some rice seedlings. “Two families are fighting over the land,” Chito said. “The commissioner asked one of the families to grant him three-sixteenths of it to rule in their favor, without any form of legal decision.” According to Chito, Richemond sold the plots afterward.
Chito lifted the veil on Richemond’s methods, used against a backdrop of family feuds and inheritance disputes. “When someone owns a plot of land and someone else wants to dispossess them of it, they need a court decision in their favor,” he said. “A way to do that is with an exequatur, an authorization given by the government commissioner. Ronald Richemond took advantage of this to make a fortune.”
In the absence of a land registry, land insecurity is high in the Les Cayes region. Here, plots of land are said to have been stolen and resold (Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
Legal recourse is difficult, as there is no land registry in Haiti, and even if property titles do exist, there are many forgeries in circulation. More often than not, it’s one person’s word — or document — against another’s, to the detriment of the poorest people and members of the diaspora living abroad. According to Chito, Richemond resold certain plots of land or passed them on to his lovers and henchmen. A former police officer in Richemond’s security detail, Mazile Jean Roland, also confirms that he witnessed the commissioner stealing land.
To make matters worse, land records have disappeared in Les Cayes. “Les Cayes is the jurisdiction with the most land disputes, mainly because the General Directorate of Taxes archives burned down in 2010,” said Michèle Oriol, sociologist and former Executive Secretary of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Land Use Planning. Though there is no land registry, deeds of sale and land surveys are recorded by the General Directorate of Taxes. “Richemond has made a living out of it, and has been involved in a lot of conflicts,” continued Oriol, who claims to have written at least two letters to the Ministry of Justice denouncing Richemond’s actions.
Vanté Mérita (right), who manages land for a family, testifies to the violence she faced after resisting land appropriation (Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
Attempting to resist Richemond and his men means being exposed to their violence. A few hundred meters from the rice fields in a neighboring village, Vanté Merita manages the land for the family wronged by Richemond’s three-plot deal and opposed the appropriation of their land. She was punished for it — her house was set on fire. She says she was beaten and arrested by Patrick Clervil, one of Richemond’s armed men. “They persecuted us,” Merita said.
“It’s the law of the jungle,” Chito said. “When Richemond was in office, people were afraid to lodge complaints, because they’d have to go to him to do it.”
Nevertheless, a small shopkeeper in the town managed to oppose and win in court against Richemond. “Work suspended by Les Cayes public prosecutor’s office.” The large red letters, written on the wall surrounding Evens Bernavil’s land in the summer of 2023, are now barely visible — the remains of the long battle he waged against Richemond. He was one of the rare few to file a complaint against the prosecutor, let alone win. “I had nothing to lose,” Bernavil said. “He traumatized me. He forced me to flee. He made me leave my family, my business — I had no choice.”
In 2023, Bernavil and his wife, who run a small convenience store in Les Cayes, experienced Richemond’s tactics firsthand. Disabled in the 2010 earthquake, he had to spend more than three months on the run from Richemond’s armed men. In Port-au-Prince, he moved heaven and earth, leaving letters at the offices of ministries and embassies.
The dispute originated over a small piece of land, purchased for $8,000, according to the land survey and a notarized deed. In August 2023, Bernavil and his wife planned to build on it and obtained authorization from the town hall. However, Richemond — who had reportedly received a call from one of the property’s heirs claiming their rights — had the work prohibited.
Again, against a backdrop of litigation, he “wanted to steal the land,” according to Bernarvil. To achieve this, Richemond even went so far as to issue an arrest warrant for the shopkeeper and his wife. The grounds: forgery and death threats against the alleged heir. The court in Les Cayes ruled this was a “fallacious pretext,” deeming the warrant “illegal and arbitrary.”
Shopkeeper Evens Bernarvil dared to file a complaint against Ronald Richemond. Pictured here with all his documents (Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
When questioned by Forbidden Stories about the allegations of land theft, Richemond doubled down. “These people are grabbing the land. They have fake papers, fake survey documents. Everything is fake, completely fake.” He claimed to have “documents, tangible evidence.”
Since Tesse’s murder, anger hasn’t faded. In the multicolored studio of radio Le Bon FM, the hosts of the Grand Lakou program continue to shout into the microphones, demanding justice for their colleague. “We demand justice for Gary Tesse to the end. We demand that Ronald Richemond be arrested, tried and sentenced,” said Charles Boyer, the head of the show.
Charles Boyer, host of Grand Lakou, a show formerly presented by Gary Tesse before his disappearance, pictured at the studios of LeBon FM radio (Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
Gary Tesse speaking on air at LeBon FM radio (Credit: DR).
The noose is slowly tightening around Richemond. In April 2025, he was dismissed, according to SOS Journalistes, after initially being suspended from his post in Les Cayes in June 2024. “We had to fight hard,” said Guy Delva, head of SOS Journalistes. “It’s very important that he should be dismissed and stripped of his status as prosecutor, which protected him from criminal proceedings in connection with the murder of Gary Tesse.” Richemond confirmed by telephone that he had been dismissed, a decision he said he did not understand.
The new government commissioner, Elioth, greeted with cheers by the local population (Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
The public prosecutor’s office in Les Cayes is now headed by 40-year-old Government Commissioner Elioth. His arrival was celebrated with jubilation. In his office, a crowd of supporters hugged him and cheered him on: “For life, for life!”
For the time being, Elioth says he has made the fight against “land gangs” a priority. “It’s a big danger,” he said. In his eyes, the Richemond case is emblematic of the involvement of local elites in corruption. “Notaries, policemen and bailiffs are all involved,” he said. “It’s a whole system that needs to be dismantled.”
It is not uncommon to see armed men in the streets of Les Cayes (Credit: Eloïse Layan / Forbidden Stories).
Since then, Richemond and his men continue to roam the town. More than two years after Tesse’s murder, his brother is finally daring to venture out a little more, but doesn’t feel safe. “Ronald Richemond’s team is still walking around with guns. They have assault rifles and heavy weapons in their hands,” he said. A few days before our meeting, he came across Richemond’s henchman Clervil in town, his two 9 mm pistols clearly visible.
Reached by phone a few days ago, the investigating judge in charge of the Tesse case was neither reassured nor reassuring. Séide warned of the difficulties he is facing with this case. “I want to know, and I want society to know who murdered the journalist. But my life is at stake; I don’t even have a weapon or an armored vehicle. After four unanswered letters requesting security measures, I’m at risk of having to leave the case,” he said.
The only person capable of uncovering the truth about Tesse’s murder is now terrorized — and almost completely helpless.
Near Les Cayes, small planes loaded with cocaine
Lost among the fields of Ducis, a rural municipality located 20 kilometers northwest of Les Cayes, lies a clandestine airstrip. It was on this flat stretch of land, now used for cattle grazing, that a small aircraft reportedly landed on Oct. 19, 2023.
“The plane was found one morning on this field. And shortly after, vehicles arrived carrying police officers and Commissioner Richemond,” said a farmer interviewed at the site.
According to the Les Cayes public prosecutor’s office, it was a “shipment of cocaine by plane from Colombia.” Southern Haiti is believed to be one of the main “entry points for drugs into the country,” according to U.N. experts. Cocaine is reportedly transported via small boats or aircraft landing on clandestine runways from South America, with Haiti serving as a transit point before the drugs are shipped to the U.S. and Western Europe.
Several Haitian political figures have been sanctioned by the U.S. for their involvement in drug trafficking, including former Senator for the South Hervé Fourcand and ex-senator Rony Célestin — who is the subject of an investigation by Forbidden Stories and its partners.
According to Ricardo Bain, aka “Chito”, and two other sources, Government Commissioner Ronald Richemond may have become involved in drug trafficking in an “opportunistic” manner. “Once he learns that someone has cocaine, he stages an operation and seizes the goods. Then he hands it over to one of his men, who takes care of selling it,” said Chito, who claimed to have witnessed the negotiations.
At Les Cayes prison last March, Forbidden Stories met with two Colombian nationals detained under Richemond’s authority. They were accused of having piloted the small plane that landed on the Ducis airstrip. Both denied the allegations and were later released. The shipment of drugs has not been recovered, and the investigation remains ongoing.
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