For most of 2002 and the spring of 2003, Baton Rouge searched for one man. A multi-agency task force swabbed the cheeks of more than a thousand men, an FBI profile was released, and one young prosecutor’s boss told her to start locking her back door. Derrick Todd Lee was named and arrested in May 2003. Then, in the small hours of a Thursday at the end of April 2004, officers working with the same task force kicked in the door of a house in Baton Rouge and arrested a second man. Within days Sean Vincent Gillis had told detectives that he had killed eight women, and that he had begun nearly a decade earlier.
The case that followed spread across several parishes and ran until 2008. It produced two convictions, a ruling from a state appeals court, a set of letters signed in a jail cell, and a hard question that prosecutors and legislators were still asking in 2009: why a man who admitted eight killings could be tried for so few of them.
Gillis was 41 when he was arrested. He had two earlier arrests, The Reveille, the Louisiana State University student newspaper, reported: one for drunken driving, one for trespassing. A neighbor said he kept to himself. He had lived for about ten years with a woman who later told a jury she still loved him and found it impossible to believe him capable of what he had done. On the night of the raid she described him to WAFB as a "teddy bear."
His mother, testifying for the defense in 2008, told jurors she had raised him alone. She had worked in the traffic department of WBRZ-TV, the Baton Rouge station, from the early 1960s until 1977, and she often brought her son to work. "Sean grew up at the television station," she said.
Ann Bryan was 81 and lived in an apartment in a retirement community a few blocks from Gillis’s home. She was found dead there on March 21, 1994. For ten years her killing stayed unsolved, and her family, by WAFB’s account, at times had to all but beg the police for answers.
Katherine Hall was 29 when she was killed in January 1999.
Hardee Moseley Schmidt was 52, a woman who ran in the mornings in south Baton Rouge. On Sunday, May 30, 1999, she was taken while jogging. She was found on June 1 in St. James Parish. In September 2002, when WAFB published an unofficial list of unsolved killings of women that Baton Rouge police were still working, her name was on it.
Joyce Williams was 36 and was known around the streets of the city, WAFB reported. She was reported missing in November 1999, and her remains were found in Iberville Parish in January 2000. She left a daughter.
Lillian Gorham Robinson was 51. She was reported missing in January 2000 and found in February in the Atchafalaya Basin. The coroner’s office said she had been strangled.
Marilyn Nevils was 38 and came from Abbeville. She was found near Baton Rouge in November 2000. Lafayette police told the Associated Press that she had never been reported missing, and that no one investigated her death as a homicide until Gillis described it.
Johnnie Mae Williams was 45. She was killed in October 2003 and found near Pride. WAFB reported that she and Gillis had known each other for eight years.
Donna Bennett Johnston was 43, a mother. She was found in Baton Rouge on February 27, 2004. "She was a mom," a friend told WAFB after the arrest.
When the task force named its suspect, police said Hall, Johnnie Mae Williams and Johnston each had an arrest record. Phares said investigators had not characterized the women by those records and would not.
The killings Gillis admitted fell in the same years as those attributed to Derrick Todd Lee, and he was caught by the same team. 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.
Its first suspect had come to it from outside the dragnet. Lee’s DNA was collected in early May 2003 because detectives in Zachary considered him a suspect in two of their own cold cases, WAFB reported at the time, and it matched the evidence in the Baton Rouge killings. CBS News reported that by then police had swabbed more than 1,000 men over ten months, and that an FBI profile released months earlier had suggested the killer was probably white. Lee was Black. He was arrested in May 2003 and later convicted in the deaths of Geralyn DeSoto and Charlotte Murray Pace.
Lee’s arrest closed the cases tied to him by DNA. It did not close the rest. By the spring of 2004 the task force had linked the deaths of Katherine Hall, Johnnie Mae Williams and Donna Bennett Johnston to a single unknown man through DNA, and it had decided not to say so. Phares later called that "a tough judgment call," telling The Reveille that a public announcement would have done nothing for public safety and might have hurt the effort to find him. WAFB later observed that the two cases mirrored one another in more than timing: both men were accused of killing women in the same years, and both had crossed racial lines in choosing them.
The break came from the ground near where Donna Bennett Johnston was found. Investigators recovered tire tracks there, and the State Police crime lab identified the tire’s brand, model and type. That tire, the affidavit said, had been made for only three years, ending in 2003, and had been bought only about 90 times in the Baton Rouge area. Detectives found that Gillis normally drove a vehicle fitted with matching tires.
"That tire track was the first little crack," Phares said.
Before they reached him, detectives had swabbed 25 other men for DNA, according to documents filed in the case. Gillis gave his sample voluntarily at about 9 a.m. on a Wednesday. In a recorded interview he admitted that his vehicle had been there, and he told detectives they would probably find blood in his car, blaming it on a health condition of his partner’s. She told WAFB she did not remember ever bleeding in the car. Joanie Wilson of the State Police crime lab matched his DNA to the evidence in the Hall and Johnston cases; the FBI laboratory matched it in the death of Johnnie Mae Williams. Court filings later described the evidence: DNA matching him under one of Johnston’s fingernails, and in hair recovered in the Hall and Williams cases.
At about 1:20 the next morning, officers raided the house. A neighbor across the street was woken by a concussion grenade and said the officers looked "like a SWAT team with machine guns." 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 seven. Police towed a gray minivan from the house and collected a small white car. A computer seized from the home went to 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 Hall, Johnnie Mae Williams and Johnston. The ritualistic acts counts concerned what had been done to the women’s bodies after death.
Over the next week he kept talking. Sources told WAFB that he had said, "If you show me photos, I may be able to remember more," and that he had made seven taped confessions. Prosecutors later said they held more than 34 hours of videotaped statements he gave detectives between April 28 and May 5, 2004.
The day after the arrest, the task force announced that he had confessed to killing Ann Bryan and Hardee Schmidt. He was booked for first degree murder in the Bryan case, and for first degree murder, aggravated kidnapping and stalking in the Schmidt case. "He has confessed to both crimes," Phares said. Detectives said he had given details of the Bryan killing that only her killer would know; a former detective disputed that, telling WAFB that many of those details had been made public. Bryan’s daughter said she was holding back her enthusiasm and wanted evidence from her mother’s apartment tested for DNA. Schmidt’s husband said his first feeling was relief. "I was happy that finally, we’re getting an idea of what happened," he said.
That night, sources said, he confessed to killing Lillian Gorham Robinson after being shown her photograph. Over the weekend his lawyer, Bert Garraway, and his partner both said he had told them of three more women. Joyce Williams and Marilyn Nevils were soon named among them. On a Monday morning in early May he led task force members to places where he said he had left the women, WAFB reported.
Some relatives questioned whether a confession should carry the weight of physical evidence. "A confession is actual evidence," Phares answered. Englade said investigators would go back as far as they needed to establish how many deaths were his.
In May 2004 he also sat for a videotaped interview with FBI agents. He described the investigation as a chess game in which he had followed television news to guess the detectives' next move. "I was the chess master, then," he said. He had believed he was winning, he told them, until a telephone call from the FBI. The jury never saw the tape: he had asked for a lawyer during the interview, and the State could not use it.
In the summer of 2004 a woman who had known Donna Bennett Johnston for ten years wrote to Gillis. She did not expect an answer. When his letters came, she handed them to prosecutors. Three of them, bearing his signature, entered the public record that October. In them he apologized for killing eight women and listed them by first name: Donna, Johnnie Mae, Lillian, Marilyn, Joyce, Hardee, Katherine and Anne. He wrote that he did not know "what the hell is wrong with me," called himself "pure evil" at the times he killed, and said he was "beyond sorry," the Associated Press reported.
At a pretrial hearing in 2006 his longtime partner testified that the handwriting was certainly his. After learning of the letters, she said, she had told him there was no longer any need for a trial, and he had told her he needed to make things right with God. A state district judge ruled that jurors could see them.
The confessions scattered the case across the map. 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 Johnston’s death; the Bryan, Hall, Schmidt and Johnnie Mae Williams cases had not yet gone before a grand jury. In Lafayette Parish, where police said he had killed Marilyn Nevils before taking her to Baton Rouge, prosecutor Keith Stutes set a trial date of March 6 so that the Baton Rouge case, with more evidence, could go first.
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. "Quite honestly, they looked at it and they had no doubt at all," said the prosecutor, Tony Clayton. "He killed Joyce Williams over here and the people of this parish have to determine whether or not he’s guilty of it." Lillian Robinson was by then the only woman among the eight whose death had brought no charge against him.
The Joyce Williams case came to court first, because of statements Gillis had given Baton Rouge officers in May 2004. The trial had been put off twice in 2007. On August 20, 2007, the day before jury selection, with 337 prospective jurors summoned, he pleaded guilty to second degree murder.
He said almost nothing. He told the judge that he had strangled Joyce Williams in Port Allen, and that she died. Asked by WAFB’s Caroline Moses, the only reporter in the room, how he felt, he said, "No comment." Williams’s sister faced him and said she was thankful he had changed his plea; she now had to raise her sister’s nine-year-old daughter alone. His lawyer, Kerry Cuccia, said the defense had analyzed all the facts and wanted to spare the girl a long trial. District Attorney Ricky Ward said men like Gillis belonged in prison for life.
It was a Crosby plea, a Louisiana procedure under which a defendant pleads guilty while keeping the right to appeal pretrial rulings; Gillis reserved his challenge to the court’s refusal to suppress his statements and the oral DNA sample. The sentence was the mandatory one: life at hard labor without benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence. The State objected that a judge could not accept such a plea without the prosecution’s consent, and appealed. On March 26, 2008, the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal disagreed. Writing for the panel, Judge Pettigrew held that nothing in the Crosby line of cases required the State’s agreement, and that Gillis had received nothing in exchange for his plea. The acceptance was affirmed.
The capital trial for the murder of Donna Bennett Johnston began in East Baton Rouge Parish in July 2008, after weeks of jury selection. Prem Burns prosecuted; Cuccia defended. Jurors heard the tape of the first police interview, in which Gillis complained about crime in Baton Rouge and explained why his tire prints had been found nearby. His former partner of ten years testified that she still loved him; Gillis was seen crying. An FBI specialist from Washington told the jury that Gillis had written the letters. On July 25, WAFB reported that the jury had found him guilty of first degree murder after deliberating for less than three and a half hours.
In the penalty phase the families spoke. Johnnie Mae Williams’s daughter said she had looked at Gillis and asked him why; he could not answer, and he apologized. "I don’t feel that he’s sorry," she said. "He’s just sorry he’s here." Johnston’s son told the jury he had tried not to look at the defendant. "I was there for my mother," he said, adding that four years after her burial the family had not been able to obtain a proper headstone. The defense called Gillis’s mother as its first witness. "You try and give the jury a true picture of the person as opposed to the small snap shot of the things that he did," Cuccia said.
A week after the verdict, just before six on a Thursday evening, the jurors told the judge they were "hopelessly deadlocked." Without a unanimous vote for death, the sentence was life. Burns said further trials on the other killings he had confessed to were unlikely; she compared him to Ted Bundy and said jurors would have seen through him had they watched the FBI tape. The sister of one of the women said he had "taken too many lives to just walk free," and that even a life sentence left him able to see his family and laugh, while theirs were gone.
Baton Rouge was not finished with the overlap. In December 2009 police arrested Jeffery Lee Guillory and booked him in the deaths of Renee Newman, Florida Edwards and Sylvia Cobb, CBS News reported. He was tried only for Newman, who was found on April 11, 2002. At his trial in September 2011 his lawyers argued that Gillis was responsible for the deaths of Newman, Edwards and Cobb, and asked that Gillis be called as a witness. Whether he testified has not been reported. Guillory was convicted of murdering Renee Newman, and in December 2011 Judge Tony Marabella formally sentenced him to life. No charge against Gillis in those three deaths was reported.
In June 2009 Burns and State Representative Bodi White backed a bill that would allow anyone who killed more than two people to be charged with first degree murder. Burns told WAFB that because many of Gillis’s killings had taken place away from the women’s homes, prosecutors had needed to prove a second crime, such as theft, before they could seek death.
In August 2008 WAFB reported that Gillis would serve his life sentences in isolation at Angola. No trial or plea in the Lafayette Parish case has been reported, and he has not been tried for the deaths of Ann Bryan, Katherine Hall, Hardee Schmidt, Lillian Gorham Robinson or Johnnie Mae Williams.
In 2026 Dana Cummings, who prosecuted the era’s serial cases alongside Burns, looked back for WAFB. The cases, she said, taught agencies that "you actually have to communicate even across jurisdictional lines," and DNA "changed the game so much." Of the families she said only, "You’re never going to make them whole again."
• March 21, 1994: Ann Bryan, 81, is found dead in her apartment in Baton Rouge.
• January 1999: Katherine Hall, 29, is killed.
• May 30, 1999: Hardee Moseley Schmidt, 52, is taken while jogging; 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; she is found in the Atchafalaya Basin in February.
• November 2000: Marilyn Nevils, 38, is found near Baton Rouge.
• September 2002: Schmidt’s name appears on an unofficial list of unsolved killings of women published by WAFB.
• May 2003: Derrick Todd Lee is named and arrested.
• October 2003: Johnnie Mae Williams, 45, is killed and found near Pride.
• February 27, 2004: Donna Bennett Johnston, 43, is found in Baton Rouge; tire tracks are recovered.
• Late April 2004: Gillis gives a DNA sample, is arrested in a raid on his home, and confesses.
• April 30, 2004: the task force announces his confessions to the Bryan and Schmidt killings.
• May 2004: he leads investigators to places where he left the women and is interviewed by the FBI.
• October 2004: his letters to a friend of Johnston enter the public record.
• May 2005: he faces six murder charges, including one in Lafayette Parish.
• July 2005: a West Baton Rouge Parish grand jury indicts him for the second degree murder of Joyce Williams.
• September 2006: a judge rules the letters admissible.
• August 20, 2007: he pleads guilty to the second degree murder of Joyce Williams and is sentenced to life.
• March 26, 2008: the First Circuit Court of Appeal rejects the State’s challenge to the plea.
• July 2008: a jury convicts him of the first degree murder of Donna Bennett Johnston.
• August 2008: the jury deadlocks on death; he is sentenced to life.
• June 2009: a bill to widen first degree murder for repeat killers cites his case.
• September 2011: at his murder trial, Jeffery Lee Guillory’s defense blames Gillis for three deaths; Guillory is convicted and, in December, sentenced to life.
• July 2026: WAFB revisits how the Lee and Gillis cases changed Baton Rouge.