His Karate Instructor Had Been Molesting Him — So His Dad Killed the Man on Live TV By Christine Pelisek

In the fall of 1982, Jody Plauché was a fifth-grader at Mayfair Elementary in Baton Rouge, La., when he and other classmates received a flier for karate classes.

Uninterested, Plauché grabbed the flier, balled it up and tossed it into the trash.

It turned out that his younger brother Mike received the same flier at his school but brought his flier home. His mother June soon signed up Mike and Jody and their oldest brother, Bubba. They began taking classes in January 1983 with the new karate instructor Jeff Doucet.

“We all loved him,” Plauché tells PEOPLE.

Doucet, he says, became a fixture on board game nights at the family’s home. “Jeff became almost part of the family.”

Soon after, he began molesting Plauché.

“I think what first started was when we would be stretching at karate class because you got to get in the splits, and, ‘Here, let me help you,’” Plauché tells PEOPLE. “We’d put our feet on cardboard, and we’d do a split and now he’s like, ‘Feel how you’re tight right here?’ And that was kind of him normalizing putting his hands between my legs — but not touching my private parts, but he’s touching my inner thighs, which is close to my private parts. So, I think that that was his first kind of trick to normalize that.”

The abuse quickly escalated.

Doucet would purposefully send the other boys in the karate class out for snacks while he kept Plauché behind.

“He’d be like, ‘All right, Jody, you got to work on some extra kicks,’” he says. “And he’d give them money, be like, ‘Hey, look, I want a Coke and a pack of M&M’s. You all get what you all want, one of each.’ He’d send them to the gas station down the street, which would take them 15, 20 minutes, maybe not even that long, 10 to 15 minutes, but he could get done what he needed to get done.”

Plauché, now 53, says he kept the longtime abuse a secret from his friends and family.

“I knew it would upset my parents if I said anything, so I figured I would just keep quiet until he quit,” he says.

Abuse Exposed — and Fatal Encounter at Airport

But the abuse wouldn’t stay a secret for long.

In March of 1984, Doucet kidnapped Plauché and took him to California to visit Disneyland. Plauché’s parents immediately contacted law enforcement.

Police were able to track down the two to a motel room in Anaheim. Plauché was watching television when FBI agents busted down the motel room door. “All the guns were in my face,” he says. “Then they took me out of the room, and that was the last time I saw Jeff.”

On March 16, 1984, a week after test results confirmed that Plauché was sexually assaulted, Doucet was extradited to Baton Rouge to face charges for kidnapping and sexual assault.

Plauché’s father Gary, armed with a .38 snub-nosed revolver, was at the airport waiting for him. He called his best friend from a payphone and watched as Doucet walked by.

“He told [his best friend], ‘You’re going to hear the shot,’” says Plauché. “And he turned around, and he shot him.”

A TV camera caught the fatal shooting.

“Why in the hell would you do something like this?” an officer asked the 38-year-old equipment salesman.

Gary responded: “If he’d have done that to your family, you would’ve done the same thing too. You don’t know.”

Jody’s mother June visited her husband later that night at the local jail.

“You know you’re going to hell, right?” she told him, Plauché says.

“He said, yeah, he knows, but he didn’t care,” he says.

The killing turned Gary, who was charged with second-degree murder, into an instant hero among some people.

Years later, Plauché says, “I would advise any parent whose child’s been molested to be there for their child and not to take the law into your own hands and put yourself in a position to be prosecuted.”

Child sex abusers, he says, “gain the trust and the affection of the child. And that’s really kind of their protection, because I didn’t want Jeff dead, I didn’t want Daddy to hurt Jeff. I just wanted Jeff to stop doing what he was doing, which he never would’ve, but that was just the hope back then, the prayers I would say at night.”

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Gary later pleaded no contest to manslaughter and was given five years’ probation and 300 hours of community service, which he spent painting and cutting grass at a local Catholic church and school.

“My dad got lucky,” Plauché says.

“I gave him the cold shoulder for a couple months and then finally, once I accepted the fact that Daddy’s back, he’s putting in new floors, he’s putting in new ceiling fans, he’s painting the walls, he was doing home improvements. Mommy and Daddy were getting along really good,” he says.

“I think it was that summer we were walking down to the pool, and I told him: I said, ‘Look, I forgive you. I’m not mad at you no more. I understand why you did it.’ And I think that meant a lot. But I mean, we really didn’t talk about it a lot. That was probably one of the most we ever talked about it.”

Gary, who died in 2014 after suffering multiple strokes, responded: “‘I love you,’ or something like that. It wasn’t nothing memorable,” Plauché says.

Plauché went on to become an outspoken advocate for child abuse victims. In 2019, he published a memoir called Why, Gary, Why? that shares his story and reminds readers who have suffered abuse that they “can move on and not let the past define him or her.”

If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.