The Baton Rouge serial killer investigation of 2001 to 2003 had a multi-agency task force, FBI behavioural support, a state crime lab working its samples to priority, and a suspect pool of more than a thousand men who had been asked to give DNA. It did not identify Derrick Todd Lee. He was identified by a police department with two detectives, working two older cases that were not on the task force's list, which had not been invited to join it.
Seven women are named in the record of what Lee did. Randi Mebruer, twenty-eight, was taken from her house in Zachary in April 1998 while her three year old son slept in the next room; her body has never been found. Gina Wilson Green, forty-one, a nurse, was found strangled in her home near Louisiana State University on September 24, 2001. Geralyn Barr DeSoto, twenty-one, an LSU student, was beaten and stabbed at Addis on January 14, 2002.
Charlotte Murray Pace, twenty-two, had received an MBA from LSU the week before she was killed on May 31, 2002, and had moved into the Sharlo Avenue townhouse two days earlier. The autopsy recorded that she was stabbed more than eighty times, with a knife and a screwdriver, that her throat was cut and that a clothes iron was used on her head. The scene showed that she had fought and had tried to get out of the house. Pamela Kinamore, forty-four, an interior decorator who ran an antique shop at Denham Springs, was taken from her Baton Rouge home on July 12 and found near Whiskey Bay, about thirty miles away, with her throat cut. Trineisha Dene Colomb, twenty-three, who had served in the Army and intended to join the Marines, was taken on November 21 near the cemetery at Grand Coteau where her mother had been buried seven months before; a hunter found her body in woodland three days later, and she had died of blunt force injuries to the head. Carrie Lynn Yoder, twenty-six, a doctoral student at LSU from Tampa, was taken from her apartment on March 3, 2003 and found ten days later near Whiskey Bay, yards from where Kinamore had been left.
The task force was working from a behavioural profile of a white male, and from a description of a white pickup truck. On that basis it collected DNA from a suspect pool that ran into four figures, all of them white men. Tips naming Lee were passed over. He is Black, and while the search ran in that direction, women continued to be killed.
The mechanics of that pool are worth setting out, because they were public at the time. Contemporary reporting describes about six hundred men being asked for saliva samples in one month, and a further hundred or so announced the month after. The samples were voluntary in name. Men who declined were investigated further and, according to the reporting, pressed until they agreed.
The fear in the city was reported alongside it: sales of handguns and pepper spray rising, self-defence classes filling, attendance dropping at Louisiana State University. Investigators told reporters they were worried about a panic. It was in that atmosphere that the task force did something its own members described as unusual, and published the behavioural profile rather than working from it privately.
Trineisha Colomb's killing in November 2002 should have broken the profile on its own. She was the first of the victims who was Black, and the first found outside the Baton Rouge area, in woodland near Grand Coteau after she was taken from a cemetery where she had been visiting her mother's grave. DNA linked her death to those of Pace, Green and Kinamore, so there was no question of a separate offender. The description of the man being sought did not change.
Diane Alexander had already survived him. In July 2002 a stranger came to her door at Breaux Bridge and asked to use the telephone, and then attacked her; he fled when her son arrived home. She gave a description and a composite sketch was produced. She lived, and she gave evidence at his trial.
Two other cases sat outside all of this, in the small city of Zachary, north of Baton Rouge. Connie Warner was killed in August 1992, dragged from her house in the Oak Shadows subdivision; the washing machine had been moved, which investigators read as her having held on to it. Her body was found two weeks later. Randi Mebruer lived around the block from her, and was taken from her own house in April 1998 while her three year old son slept in the next room. There was a violent struggle and a great deal of blood, and no body was ever recovered.
The Zachary Police Department had two detectives, and David McDavid was one of them. Lee had been run out of that subdivision more than once for looking through windows, and Connie Warner had reported a peeping tom shortly before she died. He had been arrested twice for that offence in the same subdivision, and for peeping and stalking at St Francisville, where he lived. Zachary had been treating him as its main suspect for years with help from the Louisiana Attorney General's office, which assigned an investigator, Dannie Mixon, to the two cases in April 1999. His record before the killings ran back to his teens, and it is the part of the case that matters most: arrests for burglary, stalking, trespassing, voyeurism and assault, none of it ever connected to anything worse, and none of it treated by any court as escalating.
The dates of that record are worth laying out, because they are the argument the closing of this case rests on. He was sentenced in July 1993 for a burglary committed the previous November and served two years. Between 1995 and 2000 he was arrested at intervals in Zachary, Lake Charles and elsewhere on counts including battery, stalking and being a peeping tom. In April 2000 he was convicted of fleeing an officer and sent to prison for two years, and a judge revoked his probation on an earlier stalking charge. He was released in January 2001. Gina Wilson Green was killed that September.
What Mixon did was arithmetic rather than psychology. He pulled Lee's criminal record and built a timeline of the periods he had been in custody and the periods he had been at liberty, then set that against the dates of the Warner and Mebruer attacks and the dates of the killings the task force had linked by DNA. Lee had been free for every one of them. Mixon's own summary of it, quoted afterwards, was that Lee was the most viable suspect on the streets.
The court record of that subpoena application also shows how early he had come to their attention. Zachary officers went to Lee's house on April 20, 1998, two days after Randi Mebruer was taken, and searched it cursorily with his consent until he asked them to leave. The application recorded that he had remained a viable suspect in her disappearance ever since, and was a possible suspect in five deaths in the Baton Rouge and Lafayette areas that DNA had already linked to one man.
The Louisiana Supreme Court's later opinion in State v. Lee records what happened next, and it is worth following exactly because the timing is the whole argument. On May 5, 2003, independent of the task force, the Zachary police and the Attorney General's office obtained a subpoena duces tecum for buccal swabs from Lee, on the strength of the Warner and Mebruer investigations. Investigators went to his house and took two swabs. The Zachary police delivered them to the state crime lab the following day. On May 20 an analyst was assigned to test them.
In the same period, and separately, the task force widened its own search. A forensic laboratory in Florida had found several rare markers in the killer's DNA which suggested the man they were looking for was African American, and the assumption that had shaped a thousand swabs was abandoned.
The swabs matched. Lee left Louisiana, and a short manhunt ended in Atlanta on May 27, 2003.
He was charged with seven counts of murder and tried on two. In August 2004, after a three day trial, he was convicted of the murder of Geralyn DeSoto and received the mandatory life sentence. Accounts of the degree he was convicted on differ, and this archive records it as second degree murder. In October he was convicted of the first degree murder of Charlotte Murray Pace. His defence argued at that trial that he should be ineligible for execution because his intellectual functioning fell near the threshold below which a defendant cannot be put to death; his IQ had been tested between sixty-two and sixty-five, and he had been in special education classes and left school in the eleventh grade. The jury recommended death and the sentence was imposed in December 2004. He had arrived at Angola that October. The remaining families chose not to pursue further prosecutions once it was in place.
His final state appeal was rejected in September 2015. He had a pacemaker, was taken from Angola for emergency care in January 2016, and died of heart disease on January 21, aged forty-seven, after twelve years on death row. Two convictions stand against seven attributed deaths.
The two Zachary cases that produced the subpoena were never charged. Lee was not prosecuted for Connie Warner or for Randi Mebruer. Warner's sheets and clothing had not been tested for DNA at the time of his arrest, and were sent to the crime lab afterwards. McDavid, by then Zachary's police chief, told the Advocate in 2016 that they believed he had killed her and could not prove it. Lee was also considered a suspect in a machete attack on a young couple in a Zachary graveyard in 1993, in which one of them was very nearly maimed; the survivor picked him out of a photographic lineup years later, by which time the limitation period had expired.
There is one more thing in the record that explains how a city could lose track of its own cases. Sean Vincent Gillis was killing women in the same metropolitan area across the same years, and was not identified until after Lee was in custody. Two unconnected series were running in one place at one time, and some of the deaths the task force was trying to fit into a single pattern did not belong to the man it was hunting.
The published profile is the part of this case that gets taught. It was not idle guesswork; it was assembled from the details of the killings and from comparison with similar crimes elsewhere, and then it was used to decide whose mouth was worth swabbing. The men who broke the case were not working from a description of the killer at all. They were working from a list of dates. Louisiana afterwards expanded the DNA database by legislation, so that a man with Lee's record of burglary, stalking and voyeurism would already have been in it.