Gerald Patrick Lewis was born in 1965 and moved between New England and the south east. As a child he was sent back to his mother in Georgia between placements. In custody he took the nickname Twilite, after the motel where one of the murders happened.
He was arrested on April 14, 1998 at his mother's house near Mobile Bay, three days after Kathleen Bracken died in Alabama. He told police he had killed two women in Georgia and two in Alabama, one of the Georgians pregnant.
Then, in a three-hour interview with the Mobile Register on July 9, 1998, he raised the figure to seven: one body in Massachusetts, four in Georgia and two in Alabama. He said he had held three of them back from the police to see whether detectives would deliver a prescription for Prozac they had promised him, and they had not. Police in all three states said they believed him, and some investigators thought the real number was higher.
His account of the first killing, in December 1986 at Brockton, Massachusetts, explains the pattern in the rest. He was twenty-one and out on bail. He had spent that day sitting in his van outside the house of Lena Santarpio, his former girlfriend, who was eight months pregnant with his child and refused to see him, waiting for her to come back. She never did. Driving home through the town he saw a young woman by the road who had the same brown hair and dark eyes, stopped, and offered her a lift. He drove fifteen miles, raped her behind a gravel pit, strangled her, and stabbed her thirty to forty times. He also cut open her abdomen, looking for the unborn child that was not hers.
Patricia Grimes, twenty-two, was killed in Douglas County, Georgia in 1992. She had been eight months pregnant. Her remains were found in 1993 and stayed unidentified until Lewis confessed to killing her.
Misty McGugin, twenty-two, was abducted and killed in early 1998. After his arrest he led investigators to her shallow grave near Daphne, Alabama.
He was condemned in February 2000 for the McGugin murder and given life without parole in August 2000 for the murder of Kathleen Bracken in Mobile County. He was convicted in Georgia as well.
His case made Alabama law. Because McGugin's body was too decomposed for nuclear DNA, the prosecution relied on mitochondrial DNA, which places a person in a family line rather than identifying an individual, and in upholding the conviction on May 30, 2003 the Court of Criminal Appeals accepted it for the first time in the state. Judge Sue Bell Cobb dissented in part, on the ground that the jury could have concluded he raped McGugin after killing her, which would have required a charge of abuse of a corpse.
He died on death row on July 25, 2009.
The counting in this case has three levels and they should not be run together. Two murder convictions in Alabama, further convictions in Georgia which the accessible reporting does not itemise, and seven killings he claimed in interviews, four of them in Georgia where police had found one body. A local account describes him as certainly responsible for at least two Georgia murders. Nothing here rests on his own account alone except where the entry says so.
Much of the detail available on this case comes from long first-person accounts he gave to reporters and to a true crime website, which are extremely graphic. Nothing is quoted from them here.