Eight years later, an arrest is made in the murder of a Washington Parish mother of three. Deputies arrested Troy Scott Jordan in connection with the 2017 deadly shooting of 40-year-old Donna Arceneaux inside her home. Washington Parish Sheriff Jason Smith says this case has weighed on the community ever since that late October day that year.
“It was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner. And then, for a variety of different reasons, it wasn’t investigated to its conclusion,” Smith said.
Sheriff Smith says while there had been talk back then about Arceneaux’s death being a suicide, law enforcement never officially reached that conclusion – the case simply went unsolved.
“In 2019, it was given over to the State Police, and then they investigated it for a couple of years. And then in 2023, it became the subject of a podcast as an unsolved murder,” Smith explained.
Smith says after he became sheriff, he took the case back from State Police, and investigators quickly zeroed in on Jordan.
“He had been quickly identified as a person of interest in previous investigations. And we didn’t find anything, as we looked into it, that led us to think otherwise,” Smith noted.
Jordan is in the Washington Parish Jail on one count of second-degree murder; no bond has been set as of yet.