Derrick Todd Lee

What the record shows

Derrick Todd Lee was a Louisiana man convicted in 2004 of murdering two women in the Baton Rouge area and linked by DNA to the deaths of five more women in south Louisiana between 1998 and 2003. A West Baton Rouge Parish jury convicted him of second-degree murder in the January 2002 killing of Geralyn Barr DeSoto, and he received life in prison; a second jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the May 2002 killing of Charlotte Murray Pace and sentenced him to death. He was never tried for the other killings. Lee died on January 21, 2016, aged 47, while still on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

According to the Wikipedia article, Lee was born on November 5, 1968, in St. Francisville, Louisiana, and before the murders had been convicted of entering an inhabited dwelling, of burglary and, in 1995 in Lake Charles, of a peeping offense. The killings attributed to him began, by the DNA count, with the 1998 disappearance of Randi Mebruer, 28, from her home in Zachary; her body has never been found. On September 24, 2001, Gina Wilson Green was found dead in her home near Louisiana State University, and on January 14, 2002, Geralyn DeSoto, 21, an LSU student, was found dead in her home, according to a WBRZ timeline.

Charlotte Murray Pace, 22, a recent LSU MBA graduate, was killed in her townhouse on Sharlo Avenue in Baton Rouge on May 31, 2002, according to the Louisiana Supreme Court. On July 9, 2002, the state police crime lab found the same DNA profile at the Green and Pace scenes, and the Baton Rouge police chief announced that the city appeared to have a single killer, WAFB reported. That same day a man forced his way into the Breaux Bridge home of Diane Alexander and attacked her until her son arrived; she survived and gave police the description used for a composite sketch. Three days later Pam Kinamore, 44, was taken from her Baton Rouge home, and her body was found near the Whiskey Bay exit of Interstate 10. Trineisha Dene Colomb, 23, of Lafayette, disappeared on November 21, 2002, and was found in woods near Scott, and Carrie Lynn Yoder, 26, was taken from her home near LSU on March 3, 2003, and found in Whiskey Bay ten days later. WBRZ reported that DNA tied each of these cases to the same unknown man.

The break came from a separate investigation. According to the Louisiana Supreme Court, Zachary police and the state attorney general's office, looking into other disappearances and murders, collected cheek swabs from Lee at his home on May 5, 2003, under a subpoena. The crime lab matched them to the serial killer's profile on May 25, an arrest warrant followed on May 26, and Atlanta police arrested Lee on May 27, 2003. CBS News reported that before the arrest authorities had traced him to an Atlanta motel through a call he made from the manager's phone. Lee waived extradition and was returned to Baton Rouge.

An East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury indicted Lee on June 25, 2003, for Pace's murder. He was first tried in West Baton Rouge Parish for DeSoto's killing and convicted of second-degree murder on August 10, 2004. The Pace trial began in Baton Rouge in September 2004. Prosecutors put on evidence of the Green, Kinamore, Colomb and Yoder killings and the Alexander attack, and Alexander testified against him. The jury convicted Lee in October 2004 and unanimously voted for death, finding that he had committed aggravated rape, and the court imposed the sentence on December 10, 2004.

On January 16, 2008, the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the Pace conviction and death sentence. It held that the cheek swabs were a search taken without probable cause or proven consent, but admitted the DNA because tips naming Lee after the sketch was published would have led to it lawfully. A state district judge denied post-conviction relief in August 2014, and in September 2015 the state supreme court rejected his further appeal, ABC13 in Houston reported. Lee was taken from Angola to an outside hospital on January 16, 2016, and died there on January 21; the coroner later attributed his death to heart disease.

Lee was suspected but never charged in other cases. Zachary police long suspected a connection to the August 1992 death of Connie Warner, 41, who lived in the same subdivision as Mebruer; her daughter told KPLC that her mother had reported a peeping Tom shortly before she disappeared. That case remains unsolved. The investigation also drew attention because profilers had initially said the killer was probably white, a view that DNA ancestry testing later contradicted, according to the Wikipedia article.