On April 12, 1998, police in Mobile, Alabama, were called to a murder at the Twilite Motel. The victim, Kathleen Bracken, thirty-two, had been strangled and stabbed. Witnesses described a man and a pickup truck at the motel, and the descriptions led to Gerald Patrick Lewis, who confessed that he had picked her up and killed her. Questioned by Mobile police, he said he also had information about the murder of Misty McGugin in neighboring Baldwin County, and then confessed to that too. He took the name of the Twilite Motel as his nickname in custody.
Lewis was born in 1965, and his family moved back and forth between Atlanta and Brockton, outside Boston. In 1987, in Massachusetts, he strangled a five-year-old girl to unconsciousness in the elevator of his apartment complex, and spent five years in a mental hospital and a prison there for her attempted murder. After his release he moved south.
Peggy Lynn Grimes, twenty-two, was eight months pregnant when she went missing in Douglas County, Georgia, in 1993, and it was five years before her body was found. Lewis confessed to killing her and to killing a second woman in Georgia. Misty McGugin, an escort in Baldwin County, was sent on a call to Woody's Motel on January 31, 1998, and never seen again; she did not pick up her son as planned on February 2, and her family reported her missing when they found her car abandoned at a bar. Her age is given as twenty-one in one account and twenty-two in others. Lewis said he strangled her with a rope in a motel room and stabbed her, wrapped her body in a tarp, carried it to her car and left it in the woods after having sex with it, and he led police to her remains.
He also went after women who got away. Prosecutors presented evidence of attacks on three women who escaped his attempts to kidnap, rape and kill them, one in Georgia and two in or near Walmart parking lots in Alabama. In February 2000 a Baldwin County jury convicted him of the capital murder of Misty McGugin, committed in the course of a kidnapping, a rape and a robbery, and of attempted murder, attempted kidnapping, attempted rape and robbery in two of those other attacks. The jury voted ten to two for death, and the circuit court sentenced him to death. The convictions and sentence were affirmed on appeal in 2003. He was also convicted of Kathleen Bracken's murder and sentenced to life without parole.
In 2001 he pleaded guilty in Georgia to the malice murder, felony murder and feticide of Peggy Grimes, with aggravated battery and kidnapping with bodily injury, and the Georgia Supreme Court reviewed the case in 2005. Detectives believed he might have killed more women than he admitted. He was still pursuing postconviction proceedings in Alabama when he died on death row on July 25, 2009, at forty-three.