On a July afternoon in 2008, in an East Baton Rouge Parish courtroom, the prosecutor Prem Burns was seventy minutes into her closing argument for a death sentence when the defendant began to shake and wail and had to be taken out of the room. It was the third time in the trial that Sean Vincent Gillis had broken down. A week earlier the same jury had convicted him of the first degree murder of Donna Bennett Johnston, a forty-three-year-old mother strangled and mutilated in February 2004. He had told investigators he killed eight women over ten years. Later that day the jurors told Judge Bonnie Jackson they were hopelessly deadlocked, and he went to Angola for life.
For most of those ten years nobody knew he existed. His killings ran alongside Derrick Todd Lee's in the same city, and when a task force spent 2002 and 2003 hunting the man it called the Baton Rouge Serial Killer, it was hunting someone else. The women Gillis killed were mostly women whose disappearances drew little attention, and none of their deaths had been linked to one another before he was caught.
Gillis was born in Baton Rouge on June 24, 1962, the son of Yvonne and Norman Gillis. His father left soon after his birth, and he was raised in southern Louisiana by his mother and grandparents. According to accounts drawn from interviews with his family, his father, an alcoholic who was in and out of mental institutions, once held a gun to the baby's head and left soon afterward, and Sean did not see him again until he was seventeen. He graduated from Redemptorist High School and worked in a chain of convenience stores. His police record, which began in 1980 when he was seventeen, held traffic citations, drunk driving, marijuana possession and contempt of court. He lived in Baton Rouge with his longtime girlfriend, Terri Lemoine.
The first woman he admitted killing was Ann Bryan, an elderly resident of the St. James Place retirement community in Baton Rouge, on March 21, 1994. Her age is given as eighty-one in most accounts and eighty-two in some. He cut her throat and stabbed her about fifty times. Gillis later said he had meant to rape her and killed her to stop her from screaming. The murder went unsolved for ten years.
Nearly five years passed before the next. On January 4, 1999, he killed Katherine Ann Hall, twenty-nine, trying first to strangle her with a plastic cable tie and then stabbing her. On May 30 of that year he killed Hardee Schmidt, fifty-two, a woman he had seen jogging in south Baton Rouge and had watched for about three weeks; at about 5:30 on a Sunday morning he saw her on Quail Run Drive, hit her with his car, knocked her into a ditch, pulled a plastic tie tight around her neck, forced her into the car and drove to a park off Highland Road, where he raped and killed her. He kept her body in the trunk of his white Chevrolet Cavalier for two days before leaving it in a bayou off Highway 61 in St. James Parish. Joyce Williams, thirty-six, was killed on November 12, 1999, Lillian Gorham Robinson, fifty-two, in January 2000, and Marilyn Nevils, thirty-eight, on October 20, 2000. Nevils was not even known to be missing until he described her death.
Most of the women were ones he picked up at night, several of them working as prostitutes and struggling with drug addiction. Johnnie Mae Williams, forty-five, whom he killed on October 9, 2003, was different in one respect: she knew him. She had cleaned his house for money a few times, and she had children and a wide circle of people close to her. Donna Bennett Johnston, killed on February 26, 2004, also had children and had fallen into addiction. He raped her, strangled her with a nylon tie, and mutilated her body, gouging out a tattoo on her thigh and severing her left arm at the elbow; she was found the next day in a drainage canal near Ben Hur Road, south of the Louisiana State University campus.
What set the case apart was what he did afterward. He strangled most of the women with cable ties and mutilated their bodies after death. He kept body parts, and according to published accounts of his confessions he ate parts of at least two victims. He photographed the bodies with a digital camera; there were forty-five pictures of Donna Johnston on his computer by one count and about fifty by another, some taken of her body in the trunk of his car, and some of the images were later shown at his trials.
The break came from the car. Johnston's body left a tire impression where it was dumped, and the Louisiana State Police crime lab identified the brand, model and tread. The tire had been manufactured for only three years, ending in 2003, and just ninety had been sold in the Baton Rouge area. Investigators worked through the buyers. FBI Agent Jeff Methvin came to Gillis's house and asked for a DNA swab, and Gillis agreed. Investigators brought him in for an interview the same day and, though they felt sure of him, let him go that night. The swab matched evidence from Johnston, Hall and Johnnie Mae Williams, and he was arrested on April 29, 2004.
He was charged first with three counts of first degree murder and three counts of ritualistic acts, for Hall, Johnnie Mae Williams and Johnston. He confessed to those with little pressure and then told investigators about five more women they had not connected to him. In May 2004, in a videotaped interview with FBI agents, he described the killings as a game played against the police. "I was the chess master, then. You're not going to beat me," he said, and he explained that he had followed television news to learn whether bodies had been found and in what condition. He also described how he used charm and money to get women into his vehicle.
The confessions set off years of shifting charges as prosecutors in three parishes looked for evidence that would support them. The first case resolved was Joyce Williams's, in West Baton Rouge Parish, because of statements he had given Baton Rouge officers in May 2004. On August 20, 2007, the day before his trial was to begin, with 337 parish residents called as prospective jurors, he pleaded guilty to second degree murder and received the mandatory life sentence. Asked outside the courtroom how he felt, he said, "No comment."
The capital trial for Johnston's murder began in East Baton Rouge Parish on July 21, 2008. The judge kept the FBI interview out, because Gillis had asked for a lawyer during it and investigators had kept talking with him when he went on speaking. On July 25 the jury took less than three and a half hours to find him guilty of first degree murder. In the penalty phase prosecutors put before the jury evidence of two other killings he was accused of but that might never be tried, and family members of victims gave impact statements. The defense called Norman Gillis, who had sat through the trial reading his Bible. He told the jurors he believed some of his son's problems were hereditary, spoke of his own mental illness and alcoholism, and said through tears that he was there to save his son's life.
On July 31, after about three hours of deliberation, the jurors reported that they could not agree. Under Louisiana law that meant life without parole. The jury foreman and other jurors later told WAFB that on the first vote four of them had opposed death, two because they would not vote for it in any case and two who had been wavering. Defense attorney Kerry Cuccia said the jury had been "introduced to Sean Gillis, not the things that Sean Gillis did." Burns called him a "narcissistic, self-centered, ego-maniac serial killer" and said she would not have changed her case. She also said it was unlikely any of the other murders would go to trial.
One more did end in a conviction. On February 17, 2009, in Lafayette Parish, Gillis pleaded guilty to the murder of Marilyn Nevils and received another life sentence. Most reports describe the plea as first degree murder; at least one account calls it second degree. He was never tried or sentenced for the deaths of Ann Bryan, Katherine Hall, Hardee Schmidt, Lillian Robinson or Johnnie Mae Williams. The count that stands on the record is three convictions against eight admitted killings.
Soon after his arrest he began writing to a friend of Donna Johnston's, Tammie Purpera. He told her that Johnston had been so drunk she lost consciousness within about a minute and a half and that her last words were "I can't breathe." "I still puzzle over the postmortem dismemberment and cutting," he wrote. "I really don't know what the hell is wrong with me." He called himself pure evil and said he sometimes killed without knowing why. Purpera handed the letters to prosecutors, who used them at his trials; she died in 2005. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections has said he is held in preventative segregation at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, at his own request, because he is a high-profile prisoner known as a serial killer.