Sean Vincent Gillis killed eight women in and around Baton Rouge, Louisiana between March 1994 and February 2004. He was arrested on April 29, 2004 and is serving multiple life sentences without parole at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The Louisiana press called him the Other Baton Rouge Killer, because the name Baton Rouge Serial Killer was already taken by Derrick Todd Lee.
He was born in Baton Rouge on June 24, 1962 to Yvonne and Norman Gillis. His father left soon after his birth and he was raised by his mother and grandparents in southern Louisiana. His record begins in 1980, at seventeen, with traffic citations and minor infractions and nothing worse. He worked in a print shop and as a delivery driver, lived on Burgin Avenue with his long-term girlfriend Terri Lemoine, and was described by everyone who knew him as amiable and unremarkable.
The first killing was the least like the others. In March 1994 he killed Ann Bryan, eighty-two, in her room at the St James Place retirement home. She had been stabbed more than fifty times and her throat was cut. Five years passed before the next.
On May 30, 1999 he took Hardee Schmidt, fifty-two, who was out running in southern Baton Rouge. He had watched her for about three weeks after first seeing her jogging, struck her with his car, and put a cable tie around her neck. Her body was left in a bayou off Highway 61 in St James Parish. She and Ann Bryan were the two who did not fit the pattern of the rest: Schmidt lived in an affluent part of the city and was chosen because he had seen her running, and Bryan was an elderly woman in a care home.
The other six were women he picked up on the street at night, most of them working as prostitutes, most with some connection to the drug trade, aged from their late twenties to their fifties. Joyce Williams was killed on November 12, 1999 and her body was not found until January 2000. The others named in the record are Katherine Hall, twenty-nine; Johnnie Mae Williams, forty-five; Lillian Robinson; Marilyn Nevils; and Donna Bennett Johnston, forty-three, who was the last, in February 2004.
What he did after the killings is the reason the case is remembered. He strangled them, mutilated the bodies, kept parts and personal effects, and in at least one case ate part of a victim. He photographed his work on a digital camera and kept the images, including one of a mutilated body and another of a corpse in the boot of his car. He posed at least one body after death.
For a decade his killings overlapped with Derrick Todd Lee's in the same city, and for part of that time with a third man, Jeffrey Lee Guillory. An investigation already struggling to connect its own cases now had three concurrent series in one metropolitan area, and some of Gillis's victims were briefly attributed to Lee. The two men's victim profiles were in fact quite different, Lee took women who were working and settled, Gillis took women whose disappearance drew little inquiry, but that distinction was clearer afterwards than at the time.
He was identified by a tyre track. The car that left Donna Bennett Johnston’s body in February 2004 left an impression at the scene, and the state crime lab identified the brand, model and tread pattern and established that the tyre had been made over a period of about three years ending in 2003, with roughly ninety sold in the Baton Rouge area. Investigators worked through the purchasers and swabbed them, Gillis among them, on April 28, 2004. His sample matched evidence from Johnston, Katherine Hall and Johnnie Mae Williams, and police found the photographs on his computer. He confessed with very little pressure, to the three killings he had been charged with and then to five more the police had not connected to him.
The prosecutions ran over three years and did not cover everything he admitted. In August 2007 he pleaded guilty to the second degree murder of Joyce Williams and received life. On July 31, 2008 a jury convicted him of the first degree murder of Donna Bennett Johnston; it deadlocked at the penalty phase, so the judge imposed life without parole rather than death. On February 17, 2009 he pleaded guilty to the murder of Marilyn Nevils in Lafayette Parish and received a further life sentence. Prosecutors could not charge him with all eight, and presented the uncharged killings as evidence at a sentencing hearing instead.
He has written letters from Angola, including to a friend of Donna Johnston, in which he expresses regret in the same flat register he uses to describe how quickly she died. He is held in maximum custody. Eight deaths are attributed to him and he stands convicted of four.