Sean Vincent Gillis was arrested in Baton Rouge in the spring of 2004, a little less than a year after police caught Derrick Todd Lee, and within days he had told investigators he killed eight women. The killings he described ran from 1994 to 2004. The first was an 81-year-old woman in a retirement community a few blocks from his home; the last was Donna Bennett Johnston, a mother, whose body was found off Ben Hur Road, south of the Louisiana State University campus, in February 2004.
The case was cracked by a tire track. Investigators found tire impressions near where Johnston's body lay, and the State Police crime lab identified a tire that had been made for only three years and of which about 90 had been sold in the Baton Rouge area. A DNA swab Gillis gave voluntarily matched evidence from three of the women. He pleaded guilty in 2007 to the second degree murder of Joyce Williams, and a jury in 2008 convicted him of the first degree murder of Donna Bennett Johnston, then deadlocked over whether he should die. He received life sentences. Prosecutors said the other killings he confessed to were unlikely ever to be tried.
Little is on record about Gillis's life before his arrest. His mother, testifying for the defense in 2008, said she had raised him as a single parent. She worked in the traffic department of WBRZ-TV, the Baton Rouge television station, from the early 1960s until 1977, and she often brought him to work with her. "Sean grew up at the television station," she told the jury.
At his arrest in 2004 he was 41 and unemployed, according to a report published by NBC News. He had two earlier arrests, one for drunken driving and one for trespassing, according to that report and to The Reveille, the LSU student newspaper. He lived on Burgin Avenue in south Baton Rouge, near Lee Drive and Highland Road, with a longtime girlfriend. A neighbor told The Reveille that Gillis kept to himself and seemed "pretty odd." His girlfriend, who had lived with him for ten years, later described him to WAFB as a "teddy bear" and testified at his trial that she could not believe he was capable of what he had done.
A research team at LSU led by Dr. Cecile Guin, which commented on the case for WAFB in 2008, said he had always been regarded as eccentric and that a strained relationship with his parents had likely fed his urge to kill. That was the team's view; no court made such a finding.
Ann Bryan was 81 and lived in an apartment at St. James Place, a retirement community on Lee Drive, a few blocks from Gillis's home. She was found dead in her bed on March 21, 1994. Her killing went unsolved for ten years.
According to the arrest warrant affidavit described by WAFB and The Reveille in 2004, Gillis told detectives he went into her home, and when she screamed, and he cut her throat and stabbed her to stop her screaming. The task force said he gave details that only the killer would know, including the weapon used. Not everyone accepted that: a former detective told WAFB he disputed that those details had been kept from the public, and Bryan's daughter, Rachel Ehricht, said she was cautious and wanted evidence from her mother's apartment tested for DNA. Gillis was charged with her first degree murder on the day after his arrest.
Katherine Hall was 29. She was killed in January 1999, and her body was found that month in the Vignes Lake subdivision. An Associated Press report in 2005 gave her age as 30. An autopsy report filed in his case, and court filings described by WAFB in 2004, said DNA matching Gillis was found in hair samples from her. Hers was one of the three deaths that the homicide task force had linked to a single unknown man before it knew his name.
Hardee Moseley Schmidt was 52, a woman who jogged in the mornings in south Baton Rouge. Gillis told police he had watched her run and had looked for her in the area for about three weeks in May 1999, according to the affidavit described by WAFB and The Reveille.
At about 5:30 a.m. on May 30, 1999, in the Quail Run Drive area off Perkins Road, he struck her with his vehicle, knocking her into a ditch, and strangled her with what the affidavit called heavy-duty plastic wrap. He then drove her to a park near Highland Road. He kept her body in the trunk of his car overnight and on May 31 left it in a bayou off U.S. Highway 61 in St. James Parish. She was found on June 1, 1999.
In May 2004 the authorities had not said whether physical evidence from her death matched Gillis. He was booked on charges of first degree murder, aggravated kidnapping and stalking. Her husband, Bob Schmidt, told WAFB in 2004 that he felt relief once police described what had happened to her, and that he would not want to face Gillis.
Joyce Williams was 36. She was known around the streets of Baton Rouge, WAFB reported, and she was reported missing in November 1999. Her indictment alleged that she was killed on or about November 12, 1999. Gillis said at his 2007 plea hearing that he had strangled her on a balcony in Port Allen, across the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge, according to WAFB.
Her skeletal remains were found in January 2000. Accounts of the place differ in their wording: WAFB reported in 2005 that hunters found her on the side of the Mississippi River levee about three miles south of the Plaquemine ferry, and in 2007 that her remains were found in a wooded area near St. Gabriel on January 22, 2000. Both places are in Iberville Parish, where WAFB said in 2004 that her bones had been found. She was identified only later. She had a daughter, who was nine when Gillis pleaded guilty, and her sister was raising the girl.
Lillian Gorham Robinson was 51, according to WAFB in 2004. She was reported missing in January 2000. Her body was found in the Atchafalaya Basin near Whiskey Bay, between the Whiskey Bay and Butte La Rose exits, in February of that year. The coroner's office said she had been strangled and thrown from a bridge and showed signs of drowning. Her family said police had shown them her photograph before telling them that Gillis had confessed to killing her. By July 2005 she was the only woman among the eight he had confessed to killing whose death had not brought a charge against him, WAFB reported.
Marilyn Nevils was 38. WAFB described her as a woman from Abbeville. Her badly decomposed body was found in November 2000 on the Mississippi River levee just south of Baton Rouge by a man walking his dog. She had never been reported missing, Lafayette police told the Associated Press in 2005, and her death was not investigated as a homicide until Gillis described it. Police said he had taken her body from Lafayette to Baton Rouge, and investigators located the vehicle he had used and examined it for physical evidence such as blood or hair to support his account. He was charged with her murder in Lafayette Parish.
Johnnie Mae Williams was 45. She was killed in October 2003, and her body was found that month in a wooded area near Pride. The affidavit said Gillis had told investigators he had a relationship with her over the last eight years of her life, and that she had been in his vehicle about 30 days before her body was found. Court filings described in 2004 said DNA matching him was found in hair samples from her, and the FBI crime lab made the match in her case.
Her daughter, Lauren Williams, spoke to WAFB on the day the arrest was announced and said her mother had suffered enough. Four years later, in a victim impact statement at his trial, she said she had looked at Gillis and asked him why. He could not answer, she said; he shrugged and apologized. "I don't feel that he's sorry," she said. "He's just sorry he's here." Her cousin, Kamilla Fair, thanked investigators in 2004. "They never gave up and they continued to keep looking," she said.
Donna Bennett Johnston was 43. Her body was found on February 27, 2004, off Ben Hur Road, in a canal about a mile south of the LSU campus. Her friend Elaina Branzaru thanked the task force after the arrest. "She was a mom," Branzaru told WAFB. Her son, Justin Bennett, told the jury in 2008 that his family often met at the spot off Ben Hur Road where she was killed, and that four years after her burial they had still not been able to get a proper headstone for her. He said he had tried not to pay attention to Gillis in the courtroom because he was there "for my mother."
Court filings described by WAFB in October 2004 said DNA matching Gillis was found under one of her fingernails.
At the time of the arrest, police said each of the three women whose deaths had first been linked, Katherine Hall, Johnnie Mae Williams and Donna Bennett Johnston, had an arrest record for prostitution, drugs or both. Lt. Col. Greg Phares of the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office said they had "high risk" lifestyles based on those records, but that the authorities would not call them prostitutes, The Reveille reported. In 2009 an East Baton Rouge assistant district attorney, Prem Burns, described Gillis's victims to legislators as street prostitutes. Ann Bryan and Hardee Schmidt did not fit that description, and their killings had not been connected with the others before he confessed.
Gillis was caught by the same multi-agency task force that had pursued Derrick Todd Lee. The Joint Homicide Task Force brought together the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office, the Baton Rouge Police Department, the Louisiana State Police, the state Attorney General's Office and the FBI, The Reveille reported. Lee had been arrested in May 2003. DNA had linked him to seven south Louisiana women killed between April 1998 and March 2003, and to an attack on an eighth, according to the NBC News report of Gillis's arrest.
Weeks before Gillis was identified, the task force had linked the deaths of Katherine Hall, Johnnie Mae Williams and Donna Bennett Johnston to one man through DNA, and it had kept that to itself. Phares said afterward that a public announcement could have hurt the chances of catching him. Police had avoided the term "serial killer" until the arrest. Before arresting Gillis, detectives swabbed 25 other men for DNA, according to documents filed in the case.
WAFB noted in 2005 that the Gillis case resembled Lee's in that both men were accused of killing women in the same years and of crossing racial lines in choosing them. Robinson's body was found in the Atchafalaya Basin about two miles from where the body of Pam Kinamore had been recovered, WAFB reported in 2004.
The lead came from the ground near Ben Hur Road. Investigators found tire tracks near where Donna Bennett Johnston's body lay. The State Police crime lab identified the brand, model and type of tire, and the arrest affidavit said that tire had been made only for a three-year period ending in 2003, and that about 90 had been sold in the Baton Rouge area. The Reveille quoted the affidavit as describing fewer than 90 sales of the tire recorded in Baton Rouge in the period it was made.
Detectives found that Gillis normally drove a vehicle with matching tires. In an interview with them he admitted that his vehicle had been at the Ben Hur Road site about six days before Johnston's body was found. He also told them they would probably find blood in his car, and blamed it on a health condition of his girlfriend's; she told WAFB she did not remember ever bleeding in the car.
"That tire track was the first little crack," Phares said. He compared it to the first blows that split a log of firewood.
That first interview was recorded. Jurors at his 2008 trial heard the tape, on which he complained about crime in Baton Rouge and talked about why tracks from his vehicle had been found near Johnston's body, WAFB reported.
Gillis gave a DNA sample voluntarily on the Wednesday before his arrest, The Reveille reported, and State Police and FBI analysts matched it to DNA found on the three women. Joanie Wilson of the State Police crime lab was named by WAFB as part of the DNA testing.
Officers raided his home at about 1:20 a.m. on Thursday. The report WAFB published that afternoon is dated April 29, 2004. His girlfriend told WAFB that officers kicked in the door and set off a concussion grenade before taking them both into custody. Gillis did not resist. He was booked into the parish prison at about 6:30 a.m. and, by WAFB's account, confessed at about 7 a.m. Police towed a 1990 gray Mazda MPV van from the house, and investigators collected a small white car as well. A computer seized from the house was examined by the Attorney General's High-Tech Crimes Unit.
He was booked on three counts of first degree murder and three counts of ritualistic acts in the deaths of Katherine Hall, Johnnie Mae Williams and Donna Bennett Johnston. The affidavit said he had a specific intention to kill each woman. The ritualistic acts counts concerned the cutting of the women's bodies after death. "The goal now is to convict this man and, hopefully, to execute him," Phares said.
Gillis confessed to the three killings for which he had been arrested and then to others. According to sources quoted by WAFB, he told investigators, "If you show me photos, I may be able to remember more," and he gave seven taped confessions about killings of women. Prosecutors later said they held more than 34 hours of videotaped statements he made to detectives between April 28 and May 5, 2004.
The next day the task force announced that he had confessed to killing Ann Bryan and Hardee Schmidt, and he was charged with both. "He has confessed to both crimes," Phares said. The affidavit recorded that he had not been under the influence of any mind-altering substance when he did. Some relatives of the women asked whether a confession should count for as much as physical evidence. "A confession is actual evidence," Phares said.
By that night, sources told WAFB, he had also confessed to killing Lillian Gorham Robinson, after he was shown her photograph. Over the weekend his lawyer, Bert Garraway, and his girlfriend both said he had told them there were three more women beyond the five with whom he had been charged. On a Monday morning in early May he led task force members to places where he had left women's bodies, WAFB reported. Phares and Baton Rouge Police Chief Pat Englade said investigators would review other unsolved killings in Baton Rouge and the surrounding parishes, going back as far as they could. "We're going to be very careful not to say anything that would muddy the waters for a successful prosecution of Sean Gillis," Phares said.
Garraway had planned to ask Judge Todd Hernandez to appoint three doctors to examine whether Gillis was competent to stand trial, but he canceled the hearing, telling WAFB he was not sure he would stay on the case. Assistant District Attorney Prem Burns wrote, in a letter WAFB obtained, that under court rules the case belonged in criminal section one, before Judge Tony Marabella. District Attorney Doug Moreau and Burns met privately with the task force, and Burns said she planned to take the case to a grand jury within 60 days.
In May 2004 Gillis gave a videotaped interview to FBI agents. WAFB obtained the tape in 2008. On it he described the investigation as a chess game. He said he had followed television news reports to guess the investigators' next moves and to judge whether he was winning, and that at that point he had been the "chess master." He said he had used charm and money to get women into his vehicle, that he had no fixed plan or timetable, and that opportunity decided when and where he killed. He said he had been careful about where and when he left bodies, avoiding places where he would leave tracks and preferring to leave them before rain could wash evidence away. He knew he had left DNA behind, he said, and he had believed he was winning until he got a telephone call from the FBI.
The jury never saw the tape. Gillis had asked for a lawyer during the interview, and Burns said that made it inadmissible.
In the summer of 2004 Gillis wrote letters to Tammie Purpera, a woman who had known Donna Bennett Johnston for ten years. She had written to him first and had not expected a reply. When his letters came she gave them to prosecutors, and she told WAFB she would testify. Three letters signed by Gillis were entered into the public record in October 2004.
In them he apologized for killing eight women and named them by first name: Donna, Johnnie Mae, Lillian, Marilyn, Joyce, Hardee, Katherine and Anne. He described how he said he had strangled Johnston. "For your own sake Tammie, you must forgive the sinner but you may hate the sin forever," he wrote. "I don't want to die, but that is up to the almighty to decide." He called himself "pure evil" at the times he killed and said he was "beyond sorry," the Associated Press reported.
At a pretrial hearing reported by the Associated Press on September 1, 2006, his girlfriend testified that the handwriting was definitely his. She said that after she learned of the letters she had told him there was no longer any need for a trial, and that he had told her he needed to get everything right with God. A state district judge ruled that jurors could see the letters.
The confessions spread the case across several parishes, and the charges took years to sort out. By May 2005 Gillis faced six murder charges, five in Baton Rouge and one in Lafayette, the Associated Press reported. He had been indicted for first degree murder in Donna Bennett Johnston's death, and a trial in East Baton Rouge Parish was then set for October. He had been booked in the deaths of Katherine Hall, Johnnie Mae Williams, Ann Bryan and Hardee Schmidt, but those cases had not gone before a grand jury.
In Lafayette Parish he was charged with the murder of Marilyn Nevils. The prosecutor there, Keith Stutes, said a trial date of March 6 had been chosen so that the Baton Rouge case, where the authorities had more evidence, could go first. Prosecutors in Lafayette and East Baton Rouge parishes said they would seek the death penalty.
On a Thursday in July 2005, a West Baton Rouge Parish grand jury of four women and seven men took about an hour to indict him for the second degree murder of Joyce Williams, WAFB reported. The prosecutor, Tony Clayton, said an investigator had shown the grand jurors evidence from the scene that matched Gillis's reported confession. "Quite honestly, they looked at it and they had no doubt at all," Clayton said. "He killed Joyce Williams over here and the people of this parish have to determine whether or not he's guilty of it."
The West Baton Rouge case came first because of statements Gillis had given Baton Rouge officers in May 2004, WAFB reported. His trial had been put off twice in 2007. On August 20, 2007, the day before jury selection was to begin, with 337 residents of the parish called as prospective jurors, he pleaded guilty to second degree murder.
He said almost nothing in court. During his lawyer's part of the hearing he said only that he had strangled Joyce Williams and she died. Asked by WAFB's Caroline Moses, the only reporter present, whether he felt remorse, he said, "No comment." Williams's sister spoke with him face to face and said she was thankful he had changed his plea; she said she now had to raise her sister's nine-year-old daughter alone. His lawyer, Kerry Cuccia, said the defense had reviewed the facts and decided the plea was the best option, and that it wanted to spare the girl a long trial. District Attorney Ricky Ward and Clayton said they were satisfied.
The plea was a Crosby plea, a Louisiana procedure named for the 1976 case State v. Crosby, under which a defendant pleads guilty while reserving the right to appeal pretrial rulings. Gillis reserved his right to challenge the trial court's refusals to suppress his statements to investigators and the oral DNA sample. The court sentenced him to life imprisonment at hard labor without benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence, the mandatory penalty.
The State had objected to the plea, arguing that a trial court could not accept a Crosby plea without the prosecution's consent, and it appealed. On March 26, 2008, the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal rejected that argument in State v. Gillis, No. 2007 KA 1909. Judge Pettigrew wrote for a panel that included Chief Judge Carter and Judge Welch.
The court first held that the State could appeal, because a guilty plea in a case that is not capital ends the proceedings and makes the judgment final. It then held that Crosby leaves the decision to accept such a plea to the trial court's discretion and requires no agreement from the State. A Crosby plea is not a plea bargain, the court said: Gillis received nothing in exchange, no lesser charge and no lighter sentence. The trial judge had reasoned that it made "no sense to force the defendant to trial" just to have the suppression issues decided, since he could appeal them after a trial anyway, and that a trial would impose "unnecessary costs and undue hardship." The appellate court found no abuse of discretion and affirmed. "Because the defendant pled guilty," the opinion noted, "the facts were not developed."
The capital trial for the murder of Donna Bennett Johnston was held in East Baton Rouge Parish in July 2008, after several weeks of jury selection. Burns led the prosecution and Cuccia the defense.
Jurors heard Gillis's recorded first interview with detectives. On the third day of testimony his former live-in girlfriend testified. She said she had loved him and still did, and that she still kept up a relationship with his mother. Both of them cried while she testified. A specialist from the FBI in Washington testified that Gillis had written the confession letters.
WAFB reported on July 25, 2008, that the jury had found him guilty of first degree murder after deliberating for less than three and a half hours.
Prosecutors asked for a death sentence. They told WAFB they would put before the jury evidence of two other killings he was accused of, though those might never be prosecuted. Family members gave victim impact statements, among them Lauren Williams and Justin Bennett.
The defense's first witness was his mother, who described raising him alone and bringing him to the television station where she worked. Cuccia said the aim was to give the jury "a true picture of the person" rather than a "small snap shot" of his crimes. Burns said the mother had been interviewed at the prosecution's request early in the case, so the State knew what she would say.
Just before 6 p.m. on a Thursday, the week after the guilty verdict, the jurors told the judge they were "hopelessly deadlocked." They could not agree unanimously on death, and Gillis was sentenced to life in prison. WAFB said that meant he would spend the rest of his life in isolation at Angola.
Speaking afterward with jurors, including the foreman, WAFB learned that four jurors had voted against death on the first vote: two who said they would never vote for death and two who had been wavering. Several jurors who favored death called the final result very disappointing.
Prosecutors were surprised by the outcome but said they would not have changed how they presented the case. Burns said it was unlikely that any of the other killings he had confessed to would go to trial, and that this case had been the State's strongest. She called Gillis "a narcissistic, self-centered, ego-maniac serial killer," compared him to Ted Bundy, and said she believed jurors would have seen through him if they had been allowed to watch the FBI tape.
The defense was relieved. "What finally happened in the penalty phase of this case is the jury was introduced to Sean Gillis," Cuccia said. Pat Dawson, the sister of one of the women, said Gillis "has taken too many lives to just walk free." To the families, she said, life in prison still felt like freedom for him, because he could visit his family, talk and laugh while their relatives were gone. His girlfriend told WAFB she was happy with the outcome and relieved for his mother.
No trial or plea in the Lafayette Parish case has been reported. In August 2008 WAFB reported that Gillis had been convicted in only two women's deaths, and a WAFB retrospective in July 2026 again named only the Johnston conviction and the Joyce Williams plea.
No trial has been reported in the killings of Ann Bryan, Katherine Hall, Hardee Schmidt, Lillian Gorham Robinson and Johnnie Mae Williams. He confessed to all five, and the authorities attribute them to him, but he has not been convicted of them.
In June 2009 State Representative Bodi White of Denham Springs, with Burns's support, proposed a bill that would allow anyone who killed more than two people to be charged with first degree murder, instead of facing several second degree charges. Burns told WAFB that because many of Gillis's crimes had taken place away from the victims' homes, prosecutors had needed to prove another crime, such as theft, to bring a capital charge. White said the conviction should matter equally for every victim, whoever she was.
White told WAFB that his brother had helped question Gillis for the sheriff's office in 2004, and that when pressed, Gillis had offered to commit another murder if his leg irons were taken off. Prosecutors and investigators said he had shown no remorse during questioning and had threatened to kill again if freed. The WAFB report did not say whether the bill passed, and its outcome was not reported.
In a July 2026 retrospective on the Lee and Gillis cases, WAFB interviewed Dana Cummings, a prosecutor who worked cases with Burns and Woody Sinquefield. She said the cases had forced agencies to share information across city and parish lines and further, had made DNA central to some prosecutions by giving jurors objective evidence, and had come during a period when statements by suspects and witnesses were not yet always recorded. She said the fear of those years reached into homes across Baton Rouge: she watched for a white man in a white truck, and her boss told her to lock her back door.
Gillis was sentenced to life without benefit of parole in the Joyce Williams case in 2007 and to life in the Johnston case in 2008. WAFB reported in August 2008 that he would spend the rest of his life in isolation at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
Proven by final judgment: the second degree murder of Joyce Williams (guilty plea, 2007) and the first degree murder of Donna Bennett Johnston (jury verdict, 2008). No appeal decision in the Johnston case has been reported.
Charged, outcome unreported: the murder of Marilyn Nevils in Lafayette Parish.
Confessed, no trial reported: the killings of Ann Bryan, Katherine Hall, Hardee Schmidt, Lillian Gorham Robinson and Johnnie Mae Williams. For Hall and Johnnie Mae Williams, court filings described DNA matching him in hair samples. For Bryan, a former detective questioned whether the details the task force called secret had really been withheld from the public, and her daughter asked for DNA testing. For Schmidt, the authorities had not said by May 2004 whether physical evidence matched him.
Total: he confessed to eight killings. Early in May 2004 his lawyer and girlfriend said he had told them of three more beyond the five then charged, which brought the count to eight; no claim beyond eight was reported.
Details on which accounts differ: Ann Bryan's age (81 in WAFB and The Reveille in 2004; 82 in AP in 2005); Katherine Hall's age (29 in 2004; 30 in AP in 2005); where Joyce Williams's remains were found (a levee south of the Plaquemine ferry, or a wooded area near St. Gabriel, both in Iberville Parish); Marilyn Nevils's home (Abbeville in WAFB and AP; AP also places the killing in Lafayette); and the name of the street he lived on (Burgin Avenue in The Reveille, Burgin Road in WAFB). The June 2009 WAFB report on the White bill said that second degree murder was all Gillis "now faces," which does not match the first degree conviction reported in 2008.
March 21, 1994: Ann Bryan, 81, is found dead in her apartment at St. James Place.
January 1999: Katherine Hall, 29, is killed; her body is found in the Vignes Lake subdivision.
May 30, 1999: Hardee Schmidt, 52, is abducted while jogging near Quail Run Drive; she is found in St. James Parish on June 1.
November 1999: Joyce Williams, 36, is reported missing; her remains are found in Iberville Parish in January 2000.
January 2000: Lillian Gorham Robinson, 51, is reported missing; her body is found near Whiskey Bay in February.
November 2000: Marilyn Nevils, 38, is found on the Mississippi River levee south of Baton Rouge; she had never been reported missing.
October 2003: Johnnie Mae Williams, 45, is killed and found near Pride.
February 27, 2004: Donna Bennett Johnston, 43, is found off Ben Hur Road; tire tracks are recovered nearby.
Late April 2004: Gillis gives a DNA swab; he is arrested in a raid on his home (WAFB report dated April 29, 2004) and confesses.
The next day: he is charged in the deaths of Ann Bryan and Hardee Schmidt and confesses to killing Lillian Robinson.
May 2004: videotaped FBI interview; he leads investigators to places where he left bodies.
Summer 2004: he writes confession letters to Tammie Purpera; they enter the public record in October.
May 2005: Lafayette trial in the Nevils case set for March; he faces six murder charges.
July 2005: West Baton Rouge Parish grand jury indicts him for the second degree murder of Joyce Williams.
September 2006: a judge rules the confession letters admissible.
August 20, 2007: he pleads guilty to the second degree murder of Joyce Williams (Crosby plea) and is sentenced to life.
March 26, 2008: the First Circuit Court of Appeal rejects the State's challenge to the plea.
July 2008: East Baton Rouge Parish jury convicts him of the first degree murder of Donna Bennett Johnston (WAFB report of July 25).
A week later: the jury deadlocks on the death penalty; he is sentenced to life.
June 2009: the White bill on repeat killers cites his case.
July 2026: WAFB retrospective on how the Lee and Gillis cases changed Baton Rouge policing.