Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace was born in July 1964. Between August 1988 and March 1989 he raped and strangled four women in their homes in Atlanta, in Fulton County, Georgia.
Lula Bell McAfee, eighty-six, was found by a roommate on August 28, 1988, strangled with a strip of cloth. Mattie Mae McLendon, seventy-eight, was found on September 10, 1988, covered by a sheet; no ligature was recovered. Johnnie Mae Martin, seventy-nine, was found by police on February 4, 1989, strangled with a shoelace. Annie Kate Britt, forty-two, was found by her brother-in-law on March 4, 1989, with a sock still knotted around her neck. All four had been sexually assaulted.
The pattern was consistent. He climbed in through a window of each house, and every attack happened in the early hours of the morning. Two of the women had also been sodomised. The medical examiner recovered spermatozoa from all four and sent the samples to the FBI laboratory, which found the same DNA profile in each; the police therefore knew from early on that one man had killed all four, without knowing who he was.
It stayed unsolved for three years, and what ended it was two women who fought him off. At three in the morning on September 24, 1992, Sarah Grogan, sixty-nine, found an intruder in her kitchen, got hold of her gun and fired a shot, and he ran. Six days later, at two in the morning on September 30, Susie Sublett, an elderly woman living alone, woke to find a man taking money from her handbag. He was armed and told her he would blow her brains out. She fought him, got out of the house and reached a neighbour, who called the police. He had climbed in through a window at both addresses, and a crime scene technician lifted fingerprints at each.
The prints matched Pace, whose fingerprints were already held by the police. He was arrested on October 2, 1992 for the attack on Susie Sublett.
The way the evidence was then obtained became the central issue on appeal. At the time of his arrest the police were investigating the September 1992 murder of an elderly woman named Mary Hudson, and it was for that inquiry that they asked his consent to take hair and blood. The consent form he signed named Mary Hudson as the victim and made no mention of the other four murders. The laboratories could not connect him to the Hudson killing at all. They could connect him to McAfee, McLendon, Martin and Britt.
His pubic hair was consistent with hairs found on the sweatpants Annie Kate Britt had worn and on a sheet beside Johnnie Mae Martin's body. His DNA profile matched the sperm recovered in all four murders. A DNA expert put the probability of a coincidental match at one in five hundred million in the McAfee, Martin and Britt cases, and one in a hundred and fifty million in the McLendon case.
He argued that the police had exceeded the consent he had given and had obtained it by deceit. The trial court held a suppression hearing and found the consent voluntary. The Supreme Court of Georgia agreed and affirmed the convictions in 1999.
The jury convicted him of four counts of malice murder, four of felony murder, four of rape and two of aggravated sodomy, and of several burglaries committed in the same period. It found nineteen statutory aggravating circumstances and recommended a death sentence on each murder count. He was sentenced on March 7, 1996, at thirty-two, and remains under sentence of death.
One figure in circulation is wrong and worth correcting. A widely reproduced summary lists him as convicted of killing women aged seventy-eight, eighty-six, seventy-nine, seventy-eight and forty-two, which is five ages for four victims. The court record names four women, aged eighty-six, seventy-eight, seventy-nine and forty-two.