At least five serial killers — one of whom remains at large — have stalked Baton Rouge over the past two decades
Sep 26, 2018 For more than a decade Derrick Todd Lee, also known as the Baton Rouge Serial Killer, circled around south Louisiana, stalking his victims until.
THIS city in America’s deep south is stalked by death.
Over the past two decades, the citizens of Baton Rouge and its outskirts have been hunted by no less than five serial killers.
Close to 70 men and women have been taken since around 1997, when authorities started noticing unusual patterns forming in their murder statistics.
The phenomenon is now receiving national attention in America, at least among devotees of Discovery’s new crime documentary Killing Fields, which tracks the reinvestigation of the 20-year-old unsolved murder of Eugenie Boisfontaine in the parish of Iberville, just outside Baton Rouge.
The series, shot in real time and dubbed the love child of Serial and True Detective, follows the original lead investigator, retired detective Rodie Sanchez and cold case Detective Aubrey St Angelo, as they team up to find Ms Boisfontaine’s killer.
One of the revelations to emerge from the series is that the investigation — both then and now — has been “complicated” by the fact that “multiple serial killers” were operating in the area at the time of the 34-year-old graduate student’s 1997 murder.
Last weekend, one of the prime suspects, Derrick Todd Lee, whose DNA has been linked to the murders of seven women — including two who lived on the same street as Ms Boisfontaine — died in hospital while on Death Row.
In fact Lee is one of at least five serial killers who have operated in the area independently of each other since 1995. The others include Sean Vincent Gillis, Jefferey Guillory and Ronald Dominique (who preyed exclusively in gay men). The fifth, named “Jennings killer” after the district (just south of Baton Rouge) his victims come from, has been linked to the murders of at least eight women and remains unidentified and at large.
Did Derrick Todd Lee murder Eugenie Boisfontaine or was it one of the many other serial killers operating in the area at the same time?
Two of Lee’s victims, including Charlotte Pace (above), lived on the same street as Ms Boisfontaine
Gina Green, another of Lee’s victim’s who lived on the same street as Ms Boisfontaine.
Award-winning true crime writer Susan D Mustafaplaces the collective victim tally of the five killers at close to 70 — a number backed by authorities.
Ms Mustafa co-wrote the recent New York Times bestseller The Most Dangerous Animal of All with Gary L Stewart and Blood Bath, about the Derrick Lee Todd case, with Sue Israel and Special Prosecutor Tony Clayton.
“It’s crazy,” Ms Mustafa told news.com.au.
“Let’s see, I’ve put Derrick Todd Lee at a possible 17, Sean Gillis at least eight, Jeffrey Guillory at a possible 12 but it could be more, Ronald Dominique at 21, I believe, and the Jennings killer at nine or so. That’s 67 (victims) between five killers.”
Ms Mustafa said there was merit to the theory — explored in Killing Fields — that Ms Boisfontaine was one of Derrick Todd Lee’s victims and said it would be interesting to see how his January 21 death would affect the investigation.
Ms Boisfontaine was last seen June 13, 1997 by an exterminator at her home. A jogger found her driver’s license and credit cards the next day near the Louisiana State University lakes.
Police searching the area found her keys in the same area three days later. Her badly decomposed body was found three months later in a bayou near a bar.
Then and now: Retired detective Rodie Sanchez (right) and cold case Detective Aubrey St Angelo have teamed up to find Ms Boisfontaine’s killer. Picture: Discovery
New posters appealing for information about the unsolved abduction and murder of Eugenie Boisfontaine have begun appearing around Iberville
Detectives Sanchez and St Angelo literally digging for clues in a scene from real-time crime documentary Killing Fields. Picture: Discovery
At the time of her murder, Ms Boisfontaine lived on Stanford Ave — the same street as two other victims linked to Lee by DNA, though the killings took place in different years.
“I think it would be safe to say that some detectives believe Derrick Todd Lee killed Eugenie, but there’s simply no proof,” Ms Mustafa said.
“There were two DNA samples in her panties that did not match Lee. However; I still think Lee killed her based on the fact that he did not rape all of the women he killed, so he might not have left DNA.
“The fact is that serial killers are creatures of habit. In 1992, Lee killed Connie Lynn Warner in Oak Shadows subdivision. The next year, he attacked two teenagers in the cemetery that borders Oak Shadows.
“Then in 1998, he killed Randi Mebruer, who lived one street over from Connie Warner. He had already established a pattern of returning to the same area to kill.
“In 1997, Eugenie disappears from the Louisiana State University Lakes. She lived on Stanford Ave in Baton Rouge. Gina Wilson Green, who lived two houses down from Eugenie’s home, is killed by Lee in 2001, and then Charlotte Murray Pace, who had just moved from her home on Stanford Avenue, lived three houses down from where Eugenie lived in the opposite direction from Gina Wilson Green.
“That simply can’t be coincidence. In a five-house radius, three women are killed.”
True crime author Susan D Mustafa, who has written books about Baton Rouge serial killers Derrick Todd Lee and Sean Vincent Gillis
THE SERIAL KILLERS HAUNTING BATON ROUGE AND SOUTHERN LOUISIANA
The Jennings Killer (STILL AT LARGE)
The eight women believed to have been killed by the Jennings Killer.
The Jennings Killer is the only one of the five serial killers of southern Louisiana who remains at large and has been linked to a string of unsolved murders.
“This Jennings killer operates about an hour and a half from Baton Rouge. He has killed eight or nine women and has not yet been caught,” Ms Mustafa told news.com.au.
His first victim, Lynn Lewis, 28, was found floating in a river by a fisherman on May 20, 2005. The other women have been identified as: Ernestine Marie Daniels Patterson, 30; Kristen Gary Lopez, 21; Whitnei Dubois, 26; Laconia “Muggy” Brown, 23; Crystal Shay Benoit Zeno, 24; Brittney Gary, 17 and Nicole Guillory, 26.
Police determined Ms Patterson and Ms Brown had their throats slit but the other bodies were too decomposed to determine the cause of death, although strangulation was strongly suspected in several.
Investigations have uncovered several connections between the women and there has been some suggestion the perpetrator works as a police officer or has close ties to local law enforcement.
Most of the victims knew each other well, some were related by blood (such as cousins Kristen Gary Lopez and Brittney Gary) or lived together (Gary lived with Crystal Benoit shortly before her death).
They also shared traits such as poverty, mental illness and histories of drug abuse and prostitution. All eight served as police informants before their murders.
Derrick Todd Lee aka The Ghost of Baton Rouge
Lee is escorted from the courtroom after being sentenced to death
Lee in his high school days
Lee has been linked by DNA evidence to the murders of seven women in the Baton Rouge area but is suspected by authorities to have killed as many as 21 women between 1997 and 2003.
After his arrest, police discovered another serial killer, Sean Vincent Gillis (see below) had been operating at the same time and area as Lee, muddying the waters of the investigation to this day.
Free schwinn owners manuals. Lee’s victims include 41-year-old nurse Gina Wilson Green, who was found strangled in her home at 2151 Stanford Ave on September 24, 2001 and Charlotte Murray Pace, a 22-year-old who had just completed her MBA.
Ms Pace was found stabbed to death in her home at 1211 Sharlo Ave on May 31, 2002. She had moved from 2107 Stanford Ave just two days earlier.
Ms Pace lived three doors down from Ms Green at the time of her murder.
Lee has also been linked by DNA to the murders of Pam Kinamore, 44, Carrie Lynn Yoder, 26, Trinesha Dene Colomb, 23, Geralyn Barr DeSoto, 21, and Randi Mebruer, 28.
In 2004 he was convicted of the murders of Ms DeSoto and Ms Pace and sentenced to death.
Baton Rouge La Serial Killer Online
He died last weekend in hospital while on Death Row.
Baton Rouge La Serial Killer Video
Sean Vincent Gillis
Serial killer Sean Vincent Gillis
Gillis was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2007 for the rape and murder of eight women aged between 29 and 82 in the Baton Rouge area. Gillis nearly always mutilated his victims, some of whom he stabbed, others he strangled, and frequently took body parts as trophies. He notoriously masturbated with the severed leg of one of his victims.
He defied typical FBI serial killer profiles by crossing defined boundaries regarding age and race. His lengthy “cooling off” periods between kills, particularly at first, challenged what FBI profilers had become accustomed to seeing in such killers and may have significantly contributed to him remaining free for so long.
Like Lee, he crossed racial lines, preying on both black and white women who lived in both poor and affluent areas.
Linked to several of his victims by DNA evidence, Gillis has confessed to a total of eight murders.
Ronald Dominique aka The Bayou Serial Killer
Ronald Dominique pleaded guilty to the murders of eight men but later confessed to having murdered 23
In 2008, Dominique pleaded guilty to the rapes and murders of eight men aged between 16 and 46 and received eight life sentences.
After his 2006 arrest, Dominique confessed to the rape and murder of at least 23 men in Terrebonne Parish, Lafourche Parish, Iberville Parish and Jefferson Parish over a 10-year period beginning in 1997.
In his confession, Dominique claimed he frequented gay bars and targeted men he thought would be willing to have sex for money.
Baton Rouge La Serial Killer News
Jeffery Lee Guillory
Baton Rouge serial killer Jeffrey Guillory has been linked to nine murders but is suspected in the slayings of at least three others
Guillory first came to the attention of police in 2001, when detectives found his fingerprints at the murder scene of Baton Rouge woman Sylvia Cobb, 36.
He was later linked by DNA to the deaths of three other Baton Rouge women whom police suspected had been committed by the same man who killed six others women in central.
Guillory was arrested in late 2009 and charged with the murders of Florida Edwards, Sylvia Cobb and Newman, all of Baton Rouge. The bodies of Ms Edwards and Ms Cobb, both 36, and Ms Newman were found in 1999, 2001 and 2002, respectively.
Guillory was indicted in Ms Newman’s killing in May 2010. In a bizarre twist, his legal team subpoenaed fellow convicted serial killer Sean Vincent Gillis to testify at his trial.
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It was as if the gunman had gone out hunting, targeting strangers as they carried out quotidian tasks on their own property.
One victim was shot dead as he sprayed weeds in rural East Baton Rouge Parish. Another was gunned down outside his home at the Avondale Scout Reservation in Clinton.
The slayings, seemingly indiscriminate, sent a shudder through the quiet communities of Pride and Bluff Creek. Mothers forbade their children to play outdoors. A grass-cutting crew adopted a rotation of armed lookouts.
The anxiety was only heightened by a similar — and overlapping — pair of shootings that shook Baton Rouge last month, ambush-style killings that authorities said may have been racially motivated.
Taken together, the attacks bore a haunting resemblance to a past era of murder for the sake of murder in the Capital City, a region that has produced an uncanny number of serial killers over the past two decades.
'When people can relate to the victims, you see that public panic starting to take place,' said Pat Englade, the former Baton Rouge police chief who in 2003 led a multi-jurisdictional task force organized to capture the serial killer Derrick Todd Lee. 'Everybody in East Baton Rouge Parish can relate to a man working in his yard. Everybody does that.'
A terrifying three months passed between the first shooting this summer and the arrest of Ryan Sharpe, a man authorities described for the first time Friday as a 'serial killer.' Sharpe, who said in a court hearing he has not hired a lawyer, is accused of fatally shooting three men and wounding another before being taken into custody last week, a couple days after the most recent killing. All four shootings of the middle-aged men occurred within a 25-mile radius.
'Everyone felt like they were in danger because the shootings appeared to be random,' said Greg Phares, chief criminal deputy at the East Feliciana Parish Sheriff's Office. 'I think there's a great sense of relief in our parish given people's justifiable fears over the past several months.'
Sharpe's arrest came less than a month after another man, Kenneth Gleason, was booked in the fatal shootings of two black pedestrians, stranger-on-stranger killings that prosecutors described as 'cold and calculated' and police said could have a racial motivation. Those killings spanned just three days, as Gleason was quickly taken into custody following a frenzied manhunt by the Baton Rouge Police Department. Before the arrest, detectives distributed in an internal bulletin to law enforcement that warned, 'We cannot predict where this person may strike again.'
Adobe cs3 new serial number. Gleason, a 23-year-old white man also accused of shooting at the house of black neighbors in the same week as the killings, has maintained his innocence through an attorney. He is not yet charged. But if convicted, he also would meet the FBI's definition of a serial killer — someone responsible for two or more murders at different times.
'There's no telling how many people would have been killed if the police had not made these arrests,' said Susan Mustafa, a journalist who has written books about Lee and another Baton Rouge serial killer, Sean Vincent Gillis. 'Once a serial killer gets his first taste of blood, they don't usually stop.'
The recent slayings — and the pressure law enforcement faced to solve the concurrent cases — recalled a notorious chapter of violence for Baton Rouge in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when no fewer than three serial killers tormented the city. The Lee case garnered national attention and prompted a vast expansion of the state's DNA database. It also drew attention to the slayings of several Baton Rouge women that remain unsolved to this day.
Preying on the community at the same time as Lee, who was connected to seven murders, was Gillis, who confessed to killing eight women between 1994 and 2004, often mutilating and photographing his victims. There was also Jeffery Lee Guillory, who was accused in the slayings of women in 1999, 2001 and 2002 and who remains a suspect in several other unsolved killings.
Another serial killer who grew up in Baton Rouge, John Allen Muhammad, carried out the so-called D.C. sniper attacks in 2002. Muhammad, who was executed in 2009 in Virginia, and his accomplice were also indicted for a fatal shooting and robbery in Baton Rouge that happened before a three-week killing spree that left 10 people dead in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Serial murder is hardly unique to the Baton Rouge area, though it is more often associated with major cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, jurisdictions that have had scores of serial killers throughout their histories.
But the Baton Rouge serial killings were such a law enforcement priority that prosecutors here lobbied the legislature to adopt a law in 2009 that makes it easier for district attorneys to seek the death penalty against serial killers. That bill, passed after the Gillis case, added an element to the state's first-degree murder statute that allows the state to seek capital punishment when a defendant 'has previously acted with a specific intent to kill or inflict great bodily harm that resulted in the killing or one or more persons.'
Hillar Moore III, the East Baton Rouge Parish district attorney, has said he is considering using that law to seek the death penalty against Gleason.
'We needed a serial killer statute,' Prem Burns, an assistant of Moore's who prosecuted Gillis, told The Advocate last month. 'I'm glad we have it.'
The city's violent history has spawned a range of speculation about the factors that contribute to the proliferation of serial killers. Tony Clayton, an assistant district attorney in the 18th Judicial District who prosecuted Lee and Gillis, pointed to what he described as a disturbing lack of resources for the mentally ill in Louisiana.
'I don't think it's in the air or in the water,' Clayton said. 'I think you'll see an element of some psychosis in each and every one of these serial killers, and it's a direct cause of not having access to these resources and not being able to diagnose these folks.'
Ben Odom, a longtime Baton Rouge homicide detective, said it was no accident that the likes of Lee and Gillis operated in a community with universities like LSU, which he described as 'a fertile field for serial killers who want to kill women.'
'We agonized over that question for a long time when we had three serial killers working at once in Baton Rouge,' Odom said. 'These guys were hunters. They did their homework.
Another former Baton Rouge police chief, Jeff LeDuff, said he finds the city's history so troubling that the FBI's 'experts at Quantico,' Virginia, should examine it. 'I think it's something that criminologists and law enforcement really need to sit down and come up with an answer for as to why this keeps happening,' LeDuff said. 'It's something we should be concerned about.'
In the case of Sharpe, the alleged gunman arrested last week, authorities were reluctant at first to use the term 'serial killer.'
That initial reticence could have been an attempt by law enforcement to avoid sensationalism at a time when the community's nerves are already frayed. Phares, the East Feliciana chief deputy, said authorities Friday decided to adopt the phrase 'serial killer' after Sharpe's arrest based on the FBI's definition of the term.
It's also true that the definition of 'serial killer,' a term first coined in the 1970s, has evolved.
The FBI adopted its current definition in 2005. 'But if you ask 10 experts for a definition, you will get 10 answers that vary in terms of numbers of kills and motivation,' said Michael Aamodt, professor emeritus at Radford University who maintains a vast research database of serial killers and their victims.
Derrick Todd Lee Victims
The Northeastern University Atypical Homicide Research Group said last week that Sharpe fit the profile of a serial killer in part because he used a firearm — the weapon most commonly chosen by such offenders — and allegedly confessed to authorities. But the case is unusual in that Sharpe is accused of targeting men 'in the late stage of their lives,' said Enzo Yaksic, the group's co-founder and a longtime researcher of serial killers.
Yaksic also said it is 'exceedingly rare for serial murderers to be motivated to kill by mental illness or by urges beyond their control.'
Baton Rouge Killer Caught
'More often than not,' he wrote in an email, 'serial killers deliberately choose their course of action and can also decide to end their campaigns of violence on their own terms. While some serial killers operate at the behest of a desire to placate an internal drive for gratification, it is a myth that all serial killers are compelled to kill.'
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