Victor Gant was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up in the Algiers neighborhood. He joined the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) in February 1980 and served for over a decade. Gant’s beat included areas with heavy prostitution and drug activity, where he built up connections with various street-level individuals, including pimps, prostitutes, and informants. He also developed a reputation within the department for corruption, with several allegations that he was involved in shakedowns and racketeering operations targeting criminal elements in his district.

In his private life, Gant reportedly had a volatile personality. He was a former amateur boxer and maintained a muscular build. He began a romantic relationship with Sharon Robinson, a known sex worker and one of the eventual murder victims, and moved in with her. In December 1994, Robinson filed a police complaint stating that Gant had assaulted her, breaking her nose. Gant denied the charge, claiming the injury was accidental. However, Robinson’s children and a doctor corroborated that she had been beaten. Gant was summoned to a disciplinary hearing over the incident, but Robinson was murdered shortly before she could testify.

After his dismissal from the force in 1996 for unrelated misconduct, Gant appealed the decision. In 1999, the Civil Service Commission overturned the dismissal, reducing it to a 30-day suspension and ordering his reinstatement along with back pay and benefits. Despite this, he did not return to high-profile public service and reportedly relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, where he lived quietly.

Victor Gant is one of two primary suspects in the unsolved “Storyville Slayer” case, a string of at least 24 murders, primarily of Black women involved in sex work or drug use, committed between 1991 and 1995 in the New Orleans area. The bodies were often found in canals, rivers, and swamps around Lake Pontchartrain, severely decomposed, strangled, or drowned.

Gant became a person of interest in 1995 when a police task force linked him to the murder of Sharon Robinson, his former partner, and her friend Karen Ivester. Robinson had previously reported Gant for domestic abuse and was scheduled to testify at his disciplinary hearing. She was found dead on May 1, 1995, alongside Ivester, who was also reportedly disliked by Gant.

A suspect sketch made by a surviving victim from 1991 resembled Gant: a muscular, middle-aged Black man who drove a dark-colored vehicle. The victim, known in case files as “Brenda,” described narrowly surviving an attempted strangulation after getting into a man's car in Algiers. This event took place just months before the first known murder in the Storyville case.

Gant was never formally charged. DNA evidence found on a piece of chewing tobacco near Ivester’s body could not definitively link him to the crime. The FBI and NOPD named him a suspect in only the two murders, not the broader series. Despite repeated suspicion and his connection to multiple victims, the case against him remained circumstantial. He was quietly dismissed from the NOPD in 1996 but successfully appealed in 1999.

Though still suspected by some investigators, Gant has never been arrested for the murders and has largely vanished from public view. As of 2021, he was still listed as a suspect in the Storyville Slayer investigation.