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Derrick Todd Lee Arrested in Atlanta Two Days After DNA Ties Him to Baton Rouge Killings

The St. Francisville truck driver had fled Louisiana by bus. Police found him alone and unarmed outside a tire shop, ending the manhunt for a killer of at least five women.

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Illustration of officers approaching a tire shop on a commercial strip at dusk, a patrol car with flashing lights nearby. Not an actual scene from the case.

For more than a year, a killer had kept women in south Louisiana afraid to go out alone. On the night of May 27, 2003, police in Atlanta arrested Derrick Todd Lee, whose DNA matched the evidence.

Lee, 34, a truck driver from St. Francisville, Louisiana, was found alone and unarmed outside a tire shop in northwest Atlanta at about 8:30 p.m., after the FBI received a tip, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington said. He showed the two officers his identification and was arrested without incident. An East Baton Rouge Parish homicide detective led the arrest, assisted by the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and Atlanta police, and Lee did not contest his return to Louisiana.

Two days earlier, a state crime lab had matched a swab of Lee's DNA to the evidence in five murders. Lee had already left home and fled by bus to Chicago and then Atlanta, where he stayed at a motor lodge and checked out two hours before marshals arrived. The task force made his name public on May 26. He was charged with the rape and murder of a Louisiana State University graduate student, Carrie Yoder, and was a formal suspect in four other deaths: those of Gina Wilson Green, Charlotte Murray Pace and Pamela Piglia Kinamore in Baton Rouge, and Trineisha Dene Colomb near Lafayette.

The DNA swab had come almost by chance. Investigators in East Feliciana Parish, looking again at a 1998 disappearance in Zachary, got a court order to take a sample from Lee on May 5 after an acquaintance said he had talked about the case. With samples from about 1,000 other men waiting at the lab, it took three weeks for the result. A woman who had survived an attack also picked Lee out of a photo lineup before his name was released.

The Louisiana Supreme Court gave Gina Wilson Green's age as 40, while the Los Angeles Times reported that she was 41.

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