Derrick Todd Lee killed at least seven women around Baton Rouge and Lafayette, Louisiana between April 1998 and March 2003. He was convicted of two of the murders and sentenced to death for one of them. He died of heart disease at a hospital on January 21, 2016, aged forty-seven, after twelve years on death row. The Louisiana press called him the Baton Rouge Serial Killer.
He was born at St Francisville, north of Baton Rouge, on November 5, 1968, the second of two children to Florence Lee and Samuel Ruth, who were not married and who were living with Florence's mother. His father left during his childhood to return to his separated wife. He was raised mainly by his mother among thirteen siblings and half-siblings. Mental illness ran in the family; his father was reported to have suffered from bipolar disorder and psychosis.
He did badly at school, was placed in special education classes, and left in the eleventh grade. Testing later put his IQ at around sixty-five. He described himself as a loner, and acquired a local reputation as a peeping tom.
His record before the murders is the part of this case that matters most. He was arrested repeatedly from his teens for burglary, stalking, trespassing, voyeurism and assault. None of it was ever connected to anything worse, and none of it escalated in the eyes of the courts.
The women named in the record are Randi Mebruer, twenty-eight; Gina Wilson Green, forty-one; Geralyn Barr DeSoto, twenty-one; Charlotte Murray Pace, twenty-two; Pamela Kinamore, forty-four; Trineisha Dene Colomb, twenty-three; and Carrie Lynn Yoder, twenty-six. Most were attacked in their own homes; Trineisha Colomb was taken near her mother's grave. They were beaten, strangled, stabbed, and sexually assaulted. Diane Alexander survived an attack and later gave evidence against him.
The investigation went wrong in a way that is now taught. A multi-agency task force including the FBI worked from a behavioural profile describing the offender as a white male. On that basis, well over a thousand white men in the area were swabbed. Tips naming Lee were passed over. Women continued to be killed while the search ran in the wrong direction.
It was only in 2003 that he was swabbed, and not by the task force. On May 5, Zachary police and the Attorney General’s office obtained a subpoena duces tecum on the Warner and Mebruer investigations and took two buccal swabs at his house; the crime lab received them the next day and assigned an analyst on May 20. The task force separately widened its search beyond a white male after a Florida laboratory found rare markers in the killer’s DNA suggesting he was African American. The swabs matched. He was arrested in Atlanta on May 27, 2003. Baton Rouge Senior Assistant District Attorney John Sinquefield led the prosecution.
He was charged with seven counts of murder and tried on two. In August 2004 he was convicted of the second degree murder of Geralyn DeSoto and sentenced to life. In October 2004 he was convicted of the first degree murder of Charlotte Murray Pace; his defence argued he should be exempt from the death penalty on the ground that his IQ, tested between sixty-two and sixty-five, fell near the threshold below which a defendant cannot be executed. The jury recommended death and the sentence was imposed in December 2004. He arrived at Angola on October 14, 2004. The remaining families chose not to continue with further prosecutions once the death sentence was in place.
His final state appeal was rejected by the Louisiana Supreme Court in September 2015. He had a pacemaker, was taken from Angola for emergency care in mid-January 2016, and died on January 21. Two convictions stand against seven attributed deaths.
Two things came out of the case. Louisiana expanded its DNA database by legislation, so that a man with his record would be in it. And it later emerged that Sean Vincent Gillis had been killing in the same city across the same years. Two separate series in one metropolitan area, which is part of why the investigation could not tell its own cases apart.