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Baton Rouge Serial Killer Derrick Todd Lee Dies on Death Row at 47

Condemned for Charlotte Murray Pace's murder and linked by DNA to five more killings, Lee died days after leaving Angola, still denying everything.

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Derrick Todd Lee in a police photograph, looking into the camera against a pale wall

Derrick Todd Lee died shortly before nine o'clock on the morning of Thursday, January 21, 2016, in a Baton Rouge-area hospital. He was 47, and he had spent more than a decade on Louisiana's death row. Five days earlier, early on Saturday, he had been rushed out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for urgent care. Pam Laborde, speaking for the Department of Public Safety and Corrections, said an autopsy would be performed and a cause of death released when appropriate. Beyond that the department said nothing, citing federal and state privacy laws.

Lee was condemned for the murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, 22, who was stabbed and beaten to death with a tire iron in her Baton Rouge home in May 2002. He was also serving a life sentence for the second-degree murder of Geralyn DeSoto, 21, a Louisiana State University graduate student killed earlier that year. DNA linked him to five more killings of women between 1998 and 2003, but he was never tried for those. The Louisiana Supreme Court had rejected his latest challenge only that September, turning aside the claim that his trial lawyer should have raised evidence of mental illness.

The case had been one of the early, high-profile uses of DNA to tie a single man to a run of murders. A survivor, Diane Alexander, lived through an attack by Lee and testified against him at both his trials.

He never admitted anything. "A lot of time serial killers they deny all the way to the end and that is what Derrick did, even when we had him redhanded with DNA," said Tony Clayton, who prosecuted him for DeSoto's murder. "I don't think it will ever end for the victims. They are always going to have it deeply embedded in their mind how their loved ones were brutally murdered."

Charlotte Pace's mother, Ann Pace, described what it had been like to carry him all those years. He "had an unwanted seat at the table," she told WAFB. "You don't want him there. But he has a seat at the table in your head."

What this story covers. The time and place of death, the Saturday transfer from Angola, Pam Laborde's statement on the autopsy, the department's privacy statement, the manner of Charlotte Murray Pace's death, the life sentence for Geralyn DeSoto, the September 2015 Louisiana Supreme Court ruling, the DNA links to five other killings and Diane Alexander's testimony come from WBRZ's report of January 21, 2016. Lee's age and convictions, the five untried cases and the words of Tony Clayton and Ann Pace, given to WAFB, come from CNN's report the same day, as carried by FOX 13. WBRZ also mentioned unconfirmed talk that week that his pacemaker might have failed; no cause of death had been released when these reports were written, and none is stated here.

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