For most of 2002 and the first months of 2003, the women of Baton Rouge were told to watch for a white man between twenty-five and thirty-five, strong, ordinary-looking, who seemed harmless. A multi-agency task force collected more than a thousand DNA samples from men in and around the city. The killer it was hunting was Black, had a long arrest record, and had been the prime suspect in two other cases in a small city just to the north for years. He was not identified by the task force at all. He was identified because a police department in Zachary and an investigator from the Louisiana attorney general’s office got a court order for two cheek swabs in a case of their own.
This is the story of how that happened, and of the seven women whose deaths are now tied to Derrick Todd Lee.
Gina Wilson Green was the middle child of Margaret Wilson of Natchez, Mississippi, and a nurse in Baton Rouge who worked long hours and took few days off. Her mother called her “my rock” and remembered a smile that sparkled. Her former husband, Mark, to whom she had been married for nearly ten years and with whom she stayed friends after the divorce, described her as outgoing, strong and opinionated, a “small town girl who lived big.” She doted on her nieces and on her BMW. She lived on Stanford Avenue, near Louisiana State University, and she was careful: she set her alarm faithfully and kept pepper spray at nearly every window. About a week before she died, she told her mother and Mark that she had an uneasy feeling someone was watching her. She was last seen on Sunday, September 23, 2001. When she did not come to work the next day, she was found in her home, raped and strangled. The alarm had not been set. Police questioned Mark first and cleared him, then cleared a painter with whom she had been in a court dispute. Her purse and phone were later recovered behind a warehouse on Choctaw Street, with help from her wireless carrier. Her family set up a memorial fund for nursing scholarships in her name. Sources give her age as thirty-nine, forty or forty-one.
Geralyn Barr DeSoto, twenty-one, was beaten and stabbed and her throat was cut in her home in Addis, in West Baton Rouge Parish, on January 14, 2002, the same day she registered for graduate school at LSU. Her husband, Darren DeSoto, was treated as a suspect and was cleared. For more than a year no one connected her death to the killings across the river. DNA from scrapings under her fingernails, from a fist she had clenched as she fought, would later be tied to Lee.
Charlotte Murray Pace, known as Murray, was twenty-two and from Jackson, Mississippi. She had just earned an MBA at LSU, the youngest in her class, and was about to move to Atlanta to start a job with Deloitte & Touche. On the morning of Friday, May 31, 2002, she washed her BMW, around noon, and went home to the townhouse at 1211 Sharlo Avenue that she shared with a friend, Rebecca Yeager. Yeager, who had been expected home at one, arrived around two in the afternoon and found her on the floor between the bedroom door and the bed. The portable phone was gone, so Yeager called 911 on her cell phone. There was no sign of forced entry. The autopsy counted eighty-one wounds; her throat had been cut and her skull fractured. A blood-stained clothes iron, its handle and cord missing, lay near her body. She had defensive wounds. The crime lab developed a DNA profile from the evidence that matched no one in any database. Her townhouse was three doors from the house where Gina Green had been killed. Her mother, Ann Pace, would spend the next year at monthly rallies and vigils pressing for an arrest.
Pam Kinamore, forty-four, was a wife and the mother of a twelve-year-old, and she ran an antique shop in the antique district of Denham Springs, east of Baton Rouge. A neighboring shopkeeper remembered her as an energetic talker who was easy to know. On Friday, July 12, 2002, her husband came home late to their house in the Briarwood Estates neighborhood and found her car in the driveway, a bath drawn and untouched, her keys, watch and wallet on the kitchen table, and his wife gone. There was no sign of forced entry. Friends left flowers marked “Pray for Pam” at the closed shop while deputies and helicopters searched. On Tuesday, July 16, highway workers found her body under the Whiskey Bay bridge on Interstate 10, in the Atchafalaya Basin. She had been strangled, her throat had been cut, and she had been sexually assaulted. On July 29 police announced that the deaths of Kinamore, Pace and Green had been linked by DNA to a single man. Her family offered a $100,000 reward. In August 2002 a Multi-Agency Homicide Task Force was formed.
Trineisha Dené Colomb, twenty-three, of Lafayette, went by Dené. She had served about two years in the Army and was scheduled to enter the Marine Corps that February. She read constantly, wanted to travel and was teaching herself languages. Her mother, Verna, had died seven months to the day before her own death. Investigators came to believe that on November 21, 2002, Dené had driven to her mother’s grave near Grand Coteau, north of Lafayette, and was sitting alone in her car when she was attacked. Her family reported her missing the next day. Her car was found less than a mile from the cemetery. On November 24 a hunter found her body in a field near Scott, about twenty miles away. She had died of blunt force injuries to the head. A witness may have seen a white pickup near the spot. In December authorities said that she, too, was a victim of the serial killer. She was the first victim who was Black and the first found far from Baton Rouge. “I never dreamed my daughter would be killed by a serial killer,” her father, Sterling Colomb, said that Christmas.
Carrie Lynn Yoder, twenty-six, was a doctoral student in biological sciences at LSU, working on coastal ecology under her mentor, Bill Platt. She had finished her coursework, and her committee had accepted her research proposal. Her parents, David and Lynda Yoder, lived in Florida. On Monday, March 3, 2003, she disappeared from her home in the Burbank Drive area south of the campus; her boyfriend, Lee Ellis Stanton, reported her missing. LSU held a vigil of hope while searchers questioned drivers on Burbank and flew over the basin. Her body was found on March 13 near Whiskey Bay. She had been raped, strangled and beaten. Phone records later placed a prepaid phone Lee used near Whiskey Bay on the night she disappeared. In 2008 LSU awarded her the doctorate she would have earned and handed the hood to her parents, who had created a fellowship in her name in the biology department. “Even in death, she met her goal,” her mother said.
Before all of them there was Randi Mebruer, born Randi Jane Cieslewicz on March 18, 1970, a home health nurse in Zachary, a small city north of Baton Rouge. On the evening of April 18, 1998, she and her three-year-old son came home from a video store to their house on Saul Avenue, about a block from the house of a woman named Connie Warner, who had been killed six years earlier. The next morning the boy went to a neighbor’s house to say his mother was missing. Officers found a trail of blood through the rooms and her contact lenses in pools of blood in the dining room. A pink plastic bag in the carport was stained with blood and later found to carry semen. Her former husband was investigated and ruled out. Her body has never been found. In 2004, after Lee’s arrest, the evidence from her home was matched to his DNA.
On July 9, 2002, a man came to the door of Diane Alexander’s home in Breaux Bridge, in St. Martin Parish, and asked to use the phone. She was a nurse. Once inside, he tried to rape her and tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. Her son Herman came home and interrupted the attack, and the man fled. Herman saw a gold Mitsubishi with a “Hampton Has It” license plate frame. His mother survived with a fractured skull. Her description produced a composite sketch, and at the Pace trial a tool mark expert testified that the telephone cord used on her matched a cord found near Pam Kinamore’s body. She identified Lee in a photo lineup before his name was made public, and she testified against him.
On September 4, 2002, CNN’s morning program put the task force’s description on national television: a white man, twenty-five to thirty-five, with a shoe size of ten to eleven, strong enough to lift 175 pounds, who would blend into the community and might seem uninterested in the investigation. Women, a spokeswoman said, might not recognize him because he seemed so harmless. Police had also been looking for a white man seen near one of the scenes.
The fear was real and it shows in every account. In Zachary, Police Chief David McDavid later recalled women buying guns, Tasers and pepper spray and filling self-defense classes. “Tensions were high,” he said.
The DNA collection grew out of that description and out of tips to a hotline. A federal class action filed in 2003 said the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office collected more than 1,200 samples during the ten-month search. Many of the men matched the profile or eyewitness descriptions; others were named in anonymous tips. The sheriff’s general counsel said only a few refused and that most were “only too happy” to be excluded. One man, Floyd Wagster Jr., said in the lawsuit that deputies pressured him into giving a sample by threatening him with a court order, jail and a drug test, and that he secretly recorded the interview. The head of the ACLU of Louisiana said press reports suggested investigators had threatened warrants and public naming to get men to comply “voluntarily.” Wagster’s lawyer, Barry Scheck, said: “There’s never been anything like this Louisiana situation.” Under a tentative settlement reported in 2004, the profiles were not to be kept in any database or used beyond the investigation.
The turn came from a laboratory in Florida. In early 2003 a company called DNAPrint Genomics, in Sarasota, analyzed the killer’s DNA for ancestry and reported that it was 85 percent sub-Saharan African and 15 percent Native American. The investigators were skeptical and asked how the lab had done on twenty known samples sent with it. All of them were right, the company’s research director, Tony Frudakis, said. When the result was given, he said, “Basically, the phone line went silent.” The task force widened its search. By then the swabs that would end the case had already been ordered by someone else.
Zachary is a small city north of Baton Rouge. Its police had been dealing with Derrick Todd Lee since 1992, when David McDavid, then a detective, worked a burglary case against him. A man had found Lee inside his house. Lee was sentenced in July 1993 for that burglary and served two years.
Lee had grown up in St. Francisville, in West Feliciana Parish. At West Feliciana High he had a reading deficiency and was placed on a vocational track; a classmate remembered he “wasn’t the brightest bulb in the fixture.” He married Jacqueline Denise Sims in 1988; they had children (accounts say two, the court record three) and lived in a brick ranch house south of town. He worked steadily as a concrete finisher and pipefitter. His eighth-grade teacher said he was no trouble. A cousin called him “just a country boy.” The minister who married him and his wife remembered him offering to pay for his groceries.
In Zachary he was known for something else. On August 23 or 24, 1992, Connie Warner, forty-one, an accountant, disappeared from her home in the Oak Shadows subdivision. Hurricane Andrew struck the area on August 26. Her body was found about a week later in Baton Rouge, near the state Capitol; she had died of a fractured skull. “All evidence washed away,” McDavid said. Investigators came to believe Lee had killed her. He was never charged.
In 1993 a fifteen-year-old girl, Michele Chapman, and another teenager were parked in a Zachary cemetery when a man attacked them with a bush blade. Both survived; the attacker ran when a police officer pulled up. Years later Chapman picked Lee out of a photo lineup. By then the statute of limitations had run out.
In February 1997 a Zachary officer found Lee walking near Oak Shadows, with a knife and gloves, according to McDavid, and gave him a ride back to his car. About five months later, after a teacher reported a peeping Tom, officers went back to where his car had been parked and arrested him walking out of the cemetery. Between 1995 and 2000 he was arrested in Zachary, Lake Charles and elsewhere on charges including battery, peeping and stalking. In January 2000 he beat a girlfriend at a lounge and knocked out car windows; in April 2000 he was convicted of fleeing an officer and sent to prison for two years, and his probation on an earlier stalking charge was revoked. He was released in January 2001. Gina Green was killed that September.
When McDavid reached Randi Mebruer’s house in April 1998, he told the other officers, “You know this has got to be Derrick Todd Lee.” Officers went to Lee’s home to question him. McDavid recalled that during the search of a bedroom he turned around and found Lee standing behind him. In 1999 the attorney general’s office assigned an investigator, Dannie Mixon, to the Warner and Mebruer cases. Mixon and Zachary officer Ray Day both named Lee as their primary suspect. After Gina Green’s death, before the task force was formed, Zachary officers met with Baton Rouge police, shared their files and told them Lee was their man.
On May 5, 2003, the attorney general’s office obtained a subpoena for buccal swabs from Lee under the Warner and Mebruer investigations. Investigators served it at his home and took two cheek swabs. The swabs reached the State Police crime lab the next day. An analyst began testing them on May 20 and finished on May 23, and on May 25 the result reached the task force: Lee’s profile matched the serial killer’s.
Lee had already left. He was publicly named on May 26, when a warrant was issued for the murder of Carrie Yoder. Federal marshals tracked him to Atlanta, where he had been staying at a motel, and he was arrested there on May 27, 2003. McDavid was on the phone with the FBI helping to locate him at the time. Lee did not fight extradition. A blood sample taken after his arrest produced the same match, with a random match probability the crime lab put at one in 3.6 quadrillion.
The Louisiana Supreme Court later found that the subpoena itself was improper. It had been issued without probable cause or a sworn affidavit, and the state had not shown that Lee consented. The court kept the evidence anyway, under the doctrine of inevitable discovery: the task force had tips naming Lee, it was working through its leads, and Diane Alexander’s sketch was public. Sooner or later, the court reasoned, it would have reached him.
Lee was indicted for the murder of Charlotte Murray Pace by an East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury on June 25, 2003, and later charged in the deaths of Carrie Yoder and Dené Colomb. In December 2003 a West Baton Rouge grand jury in Port Allen indicted him for the murder of Geralyn DeSoto, and that case went to trial first.
The DeSoto trial in Port Allen took less than a week. Over three days the prosecutor, Tony Clayton, laid out the evidence: Lee’s DNA under her fingernails, an autopsy photograph of her clenched fist, the door frame and a section of floor from her home carrying bloody boot prints. The most painful testimony came from Lee’s fifteen-year-old son, Derrick Todd Lee Jr., who told the jury that the knife believed to have killed her was his father’s, that he had often watched him sharpen it, and that boots like the ones that made the prints were his father’s too. Lee’s girlfriend, Cassandra Green, also said the boots looked like his. Diane Alexander identified him from the witness stand. The defense, led by the public defender Tommy Thompson, whom Lee tried to fire during the trial, did not dispute the DNA. It called five witnesses in three hours to portray Darren DeSoto as abusive; a neighbor said she had seen him drag his wife out by her hair. Detectives answered that he had been a suspect and had been cleared. Thompson asked the jurors whether the case was being decided on “emotion and media hype.” The jury of six men and six women deliberated for one hour and forty minutes and, on August 10, 2004, convicted Lee of second-degree murder by a vote of eleven to one; Louisiana then required ten. Geralyn DeSoto’s parents broke down in tears. The verdict carried a mandatory life sentence. (At least one later account says first-degree; the Advocate, WAFB and the Associated Press all report second-degree.) Ann Pace said the split vote frightened her, because a capital verdict would have to be unanimous.
The Pace trial opened on September 13, 2004, before District Judge Richard Anderson in Baton Rouge. Of 125 prospective jurors questioned, 123 knew something about the case, and forty were excused for cause. The state’s team was led by John Sinquefield; Lee was defended by Mike Mitchell and Bruce Unangst. Rebecca Yeager described finding her friend. The crime lab analyst Julia Naylor explained how she had found seminal fluid on Pace’s body and developed a profile that matched the one her colleague Angela Ross had obtained from the Gina Green evidence, with a random match probability of one in 3.6 quadrillion; on July 8, 2002, the two analysts had concluded that one man committed both murders. Natasha Poe, who had worked the Yoder evidence, described testing the cheek swabs taken from Lee. Wireless records placed calls from Lee’s phone near the towns of Ramah and Grosse Tete, close to Whiskey Bay, around ten o’clock on the night Carrie Yoder vanished. The prosecution put on evidence from the other killings and from the attack on Diane Alexander to prove identity, and the FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole testified about what the cases had in common. On October 12, 2004, the jury of seven women and five men convicted Lee of first-degree murder after about eighty minutes, and of the attempted murder of Diane Alexander.
The penalty phase was harder to sit through. Murray Pace’s father, Casey Pace, told the jurors he had never cried until his daughter was killed, and that now a simple song or phrase could set off grief he could not control. Her mother, Ann, said there was “no peace in sleep, no joy in holidays,” and that the world had become “a hotter, darker, more frightening place” than she had imagined; most of the jurors wept. For the defense, Lee’s sister, Tarshia Fontenot, remembered childhood baseball games and bird-hunting trips with her brother, apologized to the families and said she had prayed for them; Lee cried as she spoke. On cross-examination she acknowledged that in 1989 she had complained to police that he broke into their mother’s house and threatened to hit her. After a recess Lee stood and said: “The jury only got half the story. I didn’t kill none of them women.”
The defense argued that Lee was intellectually disabled and so could not be executed under the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia. A former school official testified that he had been in special education. The LSU psychologist Drew Gouvier scored his IQ at 65; the Tulane forensic psychiatrist Sarah Deland, who spent six hours with him, concluded he was mildly disabled. For the state, the psychologist Donald Hoppe put the range at 62 to 70 and found that nine IQ tests from his early school years averaged 75.5. He pointed out that Lee had scored 91 percent on a state commercial driver’s examination and finished truck-driving school with an 88 average. The psychiatrist Robert Blanche also found no disability. A former coworker, Patrick Lawless, and a former supervisor, Gary Robillard, said Lee was a skilled pipefitter who read blueprints and was working toward a higher rating. Sinquefield called him a “serial killer trying to hide behind a claim of mental retardation.” Unangst told the jurors that “evil is not defeated by sticking a needle in an arm.”
On October 14 the jury rejected the disability claim and voted unanimously for death, finding that Lee had committed aggravated rape in the course of the murder. “I feel like they are finally, finally, finally given some moment of peace and justice,” Ann Pace said. As deputies led him out, Lee flashed a V sign and shouted that the police had planted his DNA. Judge Anderson formally imposed the sentence and denied a new trial on December 10, 2004. Sinquefield later said of him: “He tried to be more of a charmer than a bully.”
The presentence record filled in the man behind the verdicts. Lee was born on November 5, 1968, in Baton Rouge, one of thirteen siblings and half-siblings, and was raised mostly by his mother in St. Francisville. He was close to his stepfather and did not meet his biological father until he was twenty-one. He had asthma and speech therapy as a child and left school after the eleventh grade. He kept a second household with a girlfriend, and both his wife and the girlfriend reported violence.
In January 2008 the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the Pace conviction and death sentence, finding the jury’s rejection of the disability claim “neither irrational nor arbitrary.” It noted that the scenes showed no forced entry, that Lee had approached Diane Alexander calmly before attacking her, that he had maintained two households, that he had questioned officers about the swab subpoena, and that he had evaded capture for nearly two years. Judge Anderson later denied Lee’s petition for post-conviction relief, rejecting claims that his lawyers had been ineffective and underfunded, that he had been incompetent to stand trial, and that a juror had consulted a Bible during deliberations. Ann Pace called the long appeals “almost madness” in the face of the DNA.
Lee was never tried for the other killings.
Lee spent more than eleven years on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The Louisiana Supreme Court denied his last state appeal on September 18, 2015. On January 16, 2016, he was taken from Angola to a hospital, and he died there shortly before nine in the morning on January 21. The West Feliciana Parish coroner later said the autopsy found heart disease. He was forty-seven. He never confessed.
The families spoke that day to The Advocate. “It’s over, and we couldn’t be happier,” said Lynda Yoder, Carrie Lynn Yoder’s mother. “Any sense of justice is lost; any sense of logic is lost,” said Ann Pace. Pam Kinamore’s brother, Ed Piglia, said: “It was too merciful of a way for him to go. He should have been executed.” Melanie Barr, Geralyn DeSoto’s mother, said: “Now he goes to meet the Lord, and the Lord will pass the true sentence against him.” Randi Mebruer’s former husband, Michael Mebruer, said they had always hoped for the small chance that Lee might one day say where he had put her. Prosecutor Sinquefield said Lee’s death “assured me he would never get out.”
McDavid, by then Zachary’s police chief, called it probably one of the biggest cases of his career. He said he had “no doubt in my mind” that Lee killed Connie Warner, and that what he regretted was that Lee never admitted it and that Randi Mebruer was never found.
The Baton Rouge task force was not only looking in the wrong place. It was looking at a city where other men were killing women at the same time. Sean Vincent Gillis, arrested in April 2004, confessed to eight murders of women over nearly a decade and was convicted of two in 2008. Jeffery Lee Guillory was arrested in 2009 after DNA linked him to the deaths of three Baton Rouge women and was convicted in 2011 of the 2002 murder of Renee Newman. Some of the deaths that frightened Baton Rouge in those years had nothing to do with Lee.
The profile is the part of the case that gets taught. The men who caught Lee were not working from a description at all. They were working from a name they had known for more than a decade.
• November 5, 1968: Derrick Todd Lee is born in Baton Rouge; he grows up in St. Francisville. • August 1992: Connie Warner disappears from her home in Zachary; her body is found about a week later. Lee is suspected, never charged. • July 1993: Lee is sentenced for a Zachary burglary. The same year two teenagers are attacked with a bush blade in a Zachary cemetery. • April 18, 1998: Randi Mebruer disappears from her home on Saul Avenue in Zachary. • April 2000 to January 2001: Lee serves a prison term for fleeing an officer. • September 23 to 24, 2001: Gina Wilson Green is killed on Stanford Avenue. • January 14, 2002: Geralyn Barr DeSoto is killed in Addis. • May 31, 2002: Charlotte Murray Pace is killed on Sharlo Avenue. • July 9, 2002: Diane Alexander survives an attack in Breaux Bridge. • July 12 to 16, 2002: Pam Kinamore is taken from her home; her body is found at Whiskey Bay. • July 29, 2002: DNA links the Green, Pace and Kinamore cases. A task force forms in August. • September 4, 2002: The task force profile of a white man is broadcast nationally. • November 21 to 24, 2002: Dené Colomb is taken near Grand Coteau and found near Scott. • March 3 to 13, 2003: Carrie Lynn Yoder disappears and is found at Whiskey Bay. • May 5, 2003: Investigators swab Lee’s cheek under an attorney general’s subpoena. • May 25 to 27, 2003: The DNA match reaches the task force; Lee is named and arrested in Atlanta. • June 25, 2003: Lee is indicted for the murder of Murray Pace. • February 2004: DNA links Lee to the Mebruer evidence. • August 10, 2004: Lee is convicted of second-degree murder of Geralyn DeSoto; life sentence. • October 12 to 14, 2004: Lee is convicted of first-degree murder of Murray Pace; the jury votes for death. • December 10, 2004: The death sentence is formally imposed. • January 16, 2008: The Louisiana Supreme Court affirms the conviction and sentence. • September 18, 2015: The Louisiana Supreme Court denies Lee’s last state appeal. • January 21, 2016: Lee dies of heart disease in a hospital, aged 47.