In the summer of 2002, a multi-agency task force in Baton Rouge was taking saliva swabs from men across the city. More than a thousand of them gave samples, and most of them were white, because an FBI behavioral profile and a run of witness tips had told investigators that the man killing women in their homes was white. The man whose DNA they were looking for was black, lived in St. Francisville, north of the city, and had a police record for peering into women's windows. A detective in the small town of Zachary had suspected him since 1998. Two more women were killed before anyone took his sample.
Derrick Todd Lee was eventually linked by DNA to seven murders committed between September 2001 and March 2003, and to the 1998 disappearance of a young mother whose body was never found. He was convicted of two of the killings in 2004 and sentenced to death for one. He died on January 21, 2016, aged forty-seven, never having been tried for the rest. Louisiana newspapers called him the Baton Rouge Serial Killer.
The case began, for the police who first suspected him, in Zachary. Connie Warner, a forty-one-year-old accountant who lived in the Oak Shadows subdivision, vanished from her home between August 23 and 24, 1992; one early report put the date she was reported missing as August 22. Her daughter, Tracy, came home from a weekend away to find her gone. There was blood on the floors of several rooms, the washer and dryer had been shoved aside as if she had held on while she was dragged out, and her car was missing. Hurricane Andrew swept through two days later, and her badly decomposed body was found in a ditch off Pittsburg Avenue near Capitol Lake in Baton Rouge, about eleven days after she disappeared by most accounts. "All evidence washed away," McDavid said later. Her daughter's boyfriend, Andre Burgos, said he had seen a man watching the house in the days before, and that police, who suspected him at first, would not listen. Six years later, on April 18, 1998, Randi Mebruer, twenty-eight, disappeared from a house close to Warner's old one. Her three-year-old son was asleep in the house. Detectives found blood through the rooms, a bouquet of fresh flowers pushed into the kitchen trash, and a roll of pink garbage bags in the carport marked with a drop of blood and a trace of semen. Mebruer has never been found.
David McDavid, one of only two detectives in the Zachary department, had arrested Lee for window-peeping in the neighborhood the year before. Standing in the Mebruer house, he told another officer, by his own later account, that the killer was going to be Derrick Todd Lee. He had no evidence that would support a warrant, and the Warner case had produced no usable DNA. Zachary police resubmitted sheets and clothing from the Warner house for DNA testing after his arrest, and nothing tied him to her death; Warner is still counted among his probable victims, and McDavid believed the killer took car keys from each Zachary victim as a souvenir. Investigators also looked again at a 1988 rape of an eighty-year-old woman in Zachary and at the 2000 killing of Lillian Robinson in St. Martin Parish, for which Lee had first been ruled out on the belief that he was in jail.
Lee had grown up in and around St. Francisville, born there on November 5, 1968, and raised mostly by his mother. He did poorly in school, was placed in special education classes, and left in the eleventh grade; later testing put his IQ in the low to middle sixties. By his early twenties he had moved to Zachary with his girlfriend, Jacqueline Sims, and was working as a pipefitter. His record grew steadily across those years: burglary, stalking, trespassing, voyeurism, assault. The courts treated each arrest on its own. A 1997 peeping charge in Oak Shadows ended in a $400 fine, and a second one a year later in a $300 fine.
The murders that brought in the task force started in the fall of 2001. On September 23, Gina Wilson Green, a nurse, was strangled in her Baton Rouge home. Published ages for her differ, thirty-nine in some accounts and forty-one in others. Four months later, on January 14, 2002, Geralyn Barr DeSoto, twenty-one, was beaten and stabbed to death in the mobile home she shared with her husband in Addis, across the river in West Baton Rouge Parish. She had registered for graduate school at LSU that day, planning to become an occupational therapist, and was due at a job interview.
On May 31, 2002, Charlotte Murray Pace was found in the townhouse on Sharlo Avenue she had moved into two days earlier. She was twenty-two and had just finished an MBA at LSU, one of the youngest people to earn one there. She had been raped and stabbed more than eighty times with a knife and a screwdriver, her throat had been cut, and her head had been struck with a clothing iron. Her defensive wounds showed how hard she had fought. The scene reminded detectives of Green's, and by July 9 the state crime lab had tied the two by DNA to one unknown man.
That same day, in Breaux Bridge, east of Lafayette, a man knocked on Diane Alexander's door and asked to use her telephone. When he learned her husband was out, he forced his way in, tried to rape her, beat her, and tried to strangle her with the phone cord. Alexander survived a fractured skull. Three days later, on July 12, Pamela Piglia Kinamore, forty-four, who owned an antiques shop, was taken from her home in Briarwood Estates in Baton Rouge. There was no sign of forced entry. Her body was found four days later under the Interstate 10 bridge at Whiskey Bay; her throat had been cut. DNA added her to the series.
The investigation that followed has become a standard example of how a profile can steer a search. For about eight months the task force concentrated largely on white men, a decision officials later traced to witness statements, including one recovered under hypnosis after Kinamore's abduction, and to a profile describing a white offender. "We were on white males at that point, because people were calling in white suspects," Baton Rouge Police Chief Pat Englade said after Lee was identified. The task force held daily briefings with little to report. According to later reporting in The Advocate, a St. Francisville woman whom Lee had stalked for two years gave his name to the authorities months before the last two murders, and the name went no further. McDavid and other Zachary officers had met Baton Rouge police at the Fraternal Order of Police hall after Green's murder, a month before the task force was formed, and by his account told them that Derrick Todd Lee was their man; when he went to the task force with the Warner, Mebruer and other cases, he was told to go home.
The killing continued. On November 21, 2002, Trineisha Dené Colomb, twenty-three, an Army veteran who planned to join the Marines, drove to Grand Coteau, north of Lafayette, where her mother had been buried seven months before. Her car, purse and keys were found near the cemetery. A hunter found her body three days later in woods off Renaud Road near Scott. She had been raped and had died of blows to the head that fractured her skull. Semen from her body matched the Green, Pace and Kinamore profile. She was the first black woman and the first victim outside the Baton Rouge area to be linked to the series.
Carrie Lynn Yoder, twenty-six, a graduate student in biological sciences at LSU who had grown up in Tampa, came back from Mardi Gras in New Orleans to her home on Dodson Avenue and disappeared on the night of March 3, 2003. Ten days later her body was found in Whiskey Bay, near the spot where Kinamore had been left; investigators believed she had been thrown from the bridge. She had been beaten, raped and strangled, and the DNA matched the others.
Two lines of work closed on Lee in the spring of 2003. The task force sent the killer's DNA to DNAPrint Genomics, a Florida company offering a new ancestry test, which estimated the man's ancestry as roughly eighty-five percent sub-Saharan African and fifteen percent Native American. Investigators widened the search. In Zachary, meanwhile, complaints about a man stalking a woman on her early morning runs through Oak Shadows had come in that April, and boot prints turned up under a window. Detective Dannie Mixon built a timeline of Lee's jail terms and found that he had been free on the date of every attack. On May 5, Zachary police and an investigator from the state Attorney General's office, working the Warner and Mebruer cases, served a subpoena duces tecum and took two buccal swabs from Lee at his house. The crime lab received them the next day and assigned an analyst on May 20.
The swabs matched the profile from the five task-force murders. On May 26, Baton Rouge police obtained a warrant charging Lee with the first degree murder of Carrie Yoder, and named him publicly. He had already left Louisiana. The Atlanta Police Department's fugitive squad arrested him the next day, May 27, and he did not resist. A further warrant was issued that day for the attack on Diane Alexander. DNA tied him to Geralyn DeSoto's murder as well, and in February 2004 to evidence from the Mebruer house.
Prosecutors, led by Senior Assistant District Attorney John Sinquefield of East Baton Rouge Parish, chose to try him in separate trials. The first, in West Baton Rouge Parish in August 2004, was for DeSoto; the jury deliberated about two hours, convicted him of second degree murder rather than first, and he received the mandatory life sentence. The capital trial for Charlotte Murray Pace followed in Baton Rouge. Diane Alexander testified at both trials, and Kinamore's mother, Lynne Marino, said afterward that Alexander wanted the jurors to see how vicious he had been, because no one had expected her to live. The defense argued that Lee's IQ, measured between sixty-two and sixty-five, placed him near the line below which the Supreme Court has barred execution of intellectually disabled defendants. In October 2004 the jury convicted him of first degree murder and recommended death. He was received at Angola on October 14, 2004, and the death sentence was formally imposed that December. With a death sentence in place, the families in the other cases did not press for further trials.
Eleven years on death row followed. The Louisiana Supreme Court rejected his final state appeal in September 2015. He had a pacemaker, and in mid-January 2016 he was taken from Angola to a hospital in Zachary for emergency care, where he died of heart disease on January 21. For some of the victims' families the end brought a mixed reaction: the man was gone, but the execution the jury had asked for had never come, and he had never answered for most of the deaths.
The Advocate and other papers suggested over the years that Lee was responsible for other unsolved killings of women in the region, but no DNA supported those links. The question was complicated by a fact that emerged only in 2004: Sean Vincent Gillis had been murdering women in Baton Rouge across the same years, a separate series in the same city that the task force had not identified. The Lee case also changed Louisiana law. The legislature expanded the state DNA database so that a man with a record like his would already be in it.