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Police also found a strand of phone cord near the body and collected it as evidence.
The medical examiner determined Pam had been alive when her throat was cut because there was blood in her lungs.
Two witnesses reported seeing a white pickup truck driven by a white man with a naked, frightened, white female passenger matching Kinamore’s description on the night she disappeared. Other than the DNA collected from her body, that was all the local cops had to go on.
White man. White pickup truck.
Within two weeks, police announced that trace DNA evidence conclusively linked the murder of Kinamore, a one-time beauty queen, to the same man who had killed at least two other local women in the past year: Gina Wilson Green, a forty-one-year-old nursing supervisor found strangled in September 2001; and Charlotte Murray Pace, a twenty-two-year-old grad student whose throat was slashed in a townhouse near the Louisiana State University campus the previous May.
News of a serial killer among them stunned the citizens of Baton Rouge, and a flood of questions were only starting to be asked—but not answered very well.
Like Kinamore, the two earlier victims were attractive white women with chestnut hair, and there had been no forced entry into any of their homes. But that’s where the common characteristics ended.
Pace and Green both drove BMWs, but not Kinamore. Pace and Green both jogged on the same lakeside path near LSU, but not Kinamore. Pace and Green had lived a few doors from each other on the capital’s Stanford Avenue, but Kinamore didn’t live nearby. Green and Kinamore both loved antiques, but not Pace. Green and Kinamore were both older, petite women; Pace was tall and young.
WITHOUT REMORSE
Less than a month after Kinamore’s slaying, the Baton Rouge Multi-Agency Homicide Task Force was formed to find the serial killer, but it released precious little valuable information to the public, even though police agencies in the greater Baton Rouge area had more than sixty unsolved cases of missing or murdered women since 1985.
The task force lacked credibility almost from the start. The streets of the state capital were already alive with rumors, complicating the investigation. Scuttlebutt pegged the killer as a professor at LSU, a BMW salesman, or a cop. It said he played tapes of crying babies outside so women would open their doors. The police themselves fueled the hysteria by telling the frightened citizens of Baton Rouge the killer was a white man driving a white pickup.
Pride played a role, too. When criminologist Robert Keppel, an investigator credited with catching Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer, offered to help the Baton Rouge task force, it declined.
Women swarmed to self-defense classes and started carrying guns. Every white guy in a white pickup got suspicious looks from passing motorists and pedestrians.
Task force members wanted to bet on statistics. They put their faith in the tendencies of serial killers to use the same methods, stalk identical kinds of victims, and avoid crossing racial borders.
So the task force also dismissed other possibly related cases brought to them by other cops. The January stabbing of white, brunette Geralyn DeSoto was ignored because she had not been raped, her wounds were not as vicious, and the murder happened in West Baton Rouge, a decidedly different jurisdiction. Besides, her husband was the prime suspect in that crime.
Nobody had yet studied the DNA of human tissue found beneath Geralyn’s fingernails, or they would have known that she, too, was killed by the same man.
FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole built a portrait of the killer. She said he was likely between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. He was big and strong, weighing up to 175 pounds (97 kilograms). His shoe size was between 10 and 11. He earned an average wage or less—money was tight—and he probably didn’t deal with the public in his job.
He blended into the community and was seen as harmless. When he lost control of a situation, he regressed to primitive anger. And he blamed other people when he lost control.
He hadn’t expected Pam Kinamore’s body to be found, O’Toole surmised, so he might have gone back to the crime scene to see where he screwed up.
When Dianne Alexander’s composite sketch
was shared with Baton rouge cops, they
dismissed it because her would-be rapist was
black and drove a Mitsubishi. Their killer
was a white man driving a white pickup.
Going deeper into his psychology, O’Toole said the killer stalked his victims, who were likely to be attractive women of a higher social class. He might even have chatted with them before his attacks. He wanted to be appealing, but he was too unsophisticated to truly relate to them.
He likely gave odd, unexpected gifts to the women in his life, possibly even “trophies” he’d taken from victims. He didn’t handle rejection well but was cool under pressure. Because he chose high-risk targets at high-risk times of day, he liked the excitement of the attack. Despite his planning, he was impulsive. In relationships, he was hot-tempered and irritable. He was, like most serial killers, without remorse or empathy. Worse, the killer was learning from his mistakes and evolving. And as time wore on, he was likely to become increasingly paranoid.
She didn’t say whether he was white or black. But whether the police had watched too many TV crime shows or their suspicions had been influenced by witnesses who swore they saw a white man in a white truck, they were focused only on white men. For them, it was a safe bet because fewer than one in six American serial killers is black.
MOUNTING HYSTERIA
But profiles don’t catch killers. Cops do. And in this case, Baton Rouge authorities were making a series of crucial errors, dismissing leads, and looking the wrong way. More than 1,500 white men were swabbed for DNA samples. The task force bought a billboard on the interstate with a sketch of the suspected killer—a white man. Cops announced what kinds of shoes the killer wore at two murder scenes, causing some veteran investigators to worry he would destroy the evidence.
IN 2003, EAST FELICIANA PARISH DEPUTIES REMOVED CONCRETE FROM IN FRONT OF A HOME WHERE DERRICK TODD LEE ONCE STAYED WITH A GIRLFRIEND IN JACKSON, LOUISIANA. THEY UNSUCCESSFULLY SEARCHED FOR THE BODY OF RANDI MEBRUER, 28, OF ZACHARY, WHO DISAPPEARED IN 1998. THE BODY HAS NEVER BEEN FOUND.
Associated Press
Worse, police began to realize they might have more than one serial killer prowling Baton Rouge at the same time, a frightening if statistically unlikely possibility.
Mounting public hysteria was confusing matters even more. More than 27,000 tips flooded in from the public and swamped the task force. Many leads were simply ignored, even when they came from other police agencies. When Dianne Alexander’s composite sketch was shared with Baton Rouge cops, they dismissed it because her would-be rapist was black and drove a Mitsubishi. Their killer was a white man driving a white pickup. Moreover, Dianne was black—although very fair—and their killer favored white women.
On September 4, a woman called the task force to tell them that she knew the killer, a man named Derrick Todd Lee, her convicted stalker. But when investigators went to Lee’s house and saw he was a slightly pudgy black man and didn’t drive a white work truck, they dismissed him as a suspect.
Enter Detective David McDavid, a small-town cop from Zachary, 15 miles (24 kilometers) north of Baton Rouge. In 1992, he had worked on the disappearance and murder of Connie Warner, a forty-one-year-old mother abducted from her Zachary home with no signs of forced entry. Her badly decomposed body was found in a Baton Rouge ditch more than a week later.
A year later, he caught the case of two necking teenagers who were slashed by a machete-wielding Peeping Tom in a cemetery. The attacker ran away when a cop drove up to roust the kids. One of the victims later identified a local troublemaker well known to Zachary cops: Derrick Todd Lee, a petty burglar, stalker, and peeper with a long rap sheet.
Then in 1998, Detective McDavid pulled another missing-persons case. Twenty-eight-year-old singl
e mom Randi Mebruer had disappeared from her Zachary home. A pool of blood congealed on the floor as her three-year-old son wandered in the front yard, but her body was never found. McDavid quickly noticed that Mebruer lived just around the corner from the house where Connie Warner had disappeared six years before—and in a neighborhood where Derrick Todd Lee was suspected of peeping for the past year or so.
Armed with the evidence in those three cases, McDavid went to the Baton Rouge task force. And the task force sent him away.
Meanwhile, women were disappearing and dying.
On November 21, 2002, twenty-three-year-old Marine recruit Trineisha Dene Colomb was visiting her mother’s grave in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, when she vanished. Her car was found near the grave, and a hunter later found her body along a path in a wooded area in the Lafayette suburb of Scott. She’d been savagely beaten and raped, her head slammed against a tree trunk, and her dead body left to be eaten by vermin.
The task force didn’t think Colomb’s murder was related. It didn’t happen in her home. Colomb was half-black. She wasn’t stabbed.
But a key piece of evidence was left behind: DNA. Two days before Christmas 2002, the state crime lab confirmed that Trineisha Dene Colomb had been killed by the man they now called the South Louisiana Serial Killer, but his identity was no clearer.
On Christmas Eve, Mari Ann Fowler disappeared from the sidewalk in front of a Subway restaurant in Port Allen, just across the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge. Her body was never found.
And on March 3, 2003, Carrie Lynn Yoder, a twenty-six-year-old doctoral student at LSU, disappeared from her Baton Rouge apartment. Ten days later, a fisherman found her beaten, half-naked body in the water near the Whisky Bay Bridge, where Pam Kinamore’s body had been discovered eight months before. Her killer had beaten her so severely that nine ribs had been snapped from her spinal column, puncturing her liver and lungs. Her face was so badly damaged that she had to be identified by dental records.
DNA evidence showed her to be the fifth official victim of the Baton Rouge serial killer. The task force was stunned by what came next: Sophisticated tests of the killer’s DNA showed he was a black man. Specifically, his genetic makeup was 85 percent sub-Saharan African and 15 percent Native American.
Everything they thought they knew was crap.
ON THE TRAIL OF A SERIAL KILLER
Around the same time, former neighbors of Connie Warner and Randi Mebruer in Zachary started to report that their longtime Peeping Tom was back, and police found evidence that it was true.
That’s when a veteran detective named Dannie Mixon began to look deeper into Derrick Todd Lee, a serial peeper who was now thirty-four years old and long a suspect in the Zachary crimes. He knew about Lee’s abusive father and domineering mother. He knew Lee was learning disabled and had spent time in special classes, where he sucked his thumb and called the teacher “mama.” He knew how Lee had tortured his dog and puppies as a kid. He knew Lee learned early in life how to talk his way out of trouble and cast blame on others.
He knew every car Lee had ever driven. He knew Lee’s good days and bad days—and he saw that the killings often happened just after Lee lost a job, or money was low, or he got thumped by his probation officer. And he noticed that Lee, who had been in and out of jail on a variety of raps, was always out of jail when the five known victims were killed—and when Connie Warner and Randi Mebruer died or disappeared.
Armed with the added evidence that the Baton Rouge serial killer was an African American, Mixon convinced a judge to issue a search warrant to swab Lee for DNA.
On May 5, Mixon went to Lee’s home and took the swab himself, but he didn’t need science to tell him what his gut had already told him. They had the right guy.
The next day, while police waited for the results of his DNA test, Lee told his wife something was about “to blow up on us” and that police would try to pin a crime on him. He quickly packed a bag and took a bus to Chicago, but, oddly, he returned three days later. In another frantic rush, he and his wife abruptly pulled their two children out of school and cleaned out their little brick house in the small town of Starhill, north of Baton Rouge, giving some possessions to friends and family and throwing others—like their sofa—in a Dumpster behind a truck stop. They spent their last night in a motel before saying a final good-bye as Lee sent his family to Detroit.
Then he boarded another bus to Atlanta. There, he moved into a cheap motel, got a job on a construction crew, and used his first paycheck to pay for a barbecue for his new buddies. He didn’t have a car, so he bummed rides to local pawnshops, where he hocked gold jewelry. He didn’t waste time finding companionship: The smooth-talking Lee dated several women in Atlanta and promised them cognac if they would come to his room. Despite his flirtations, Lee even started a Bible study group among the motel’s fifty or so tenants.
But on May 25, a Sunday, the Louisiana crime lab delivered the shocking news that Derrick Todd Lee was the Baton Rouge serial killer. His DNA matched trace evidence found on the five dead women.
Police rushed to his house and battered down the door, but found the home abandoned. Neighbors said he’d skipped town two weeks before. Cops had no idea where he or his family had gone. A serial killer was on the wind.
The task force named their killer in a press conference and distributed Lee’s picture. The Baton Rouge Advocate trumpeted “WANTED” in war type over a front-page blowup of an old mug shot of Derrick Todd Lee, and the local TV station went wall-to-wall with coverage.
The news seeped all the way to Detroit, where Lee’s wife was staying with her aunt and uncle. That night, her family called the FBI.
Lee’s wife said he was in Atlanta, but she didn’t know where. She said she knew nothing about any murders.
Back in Louisiana, cops were interrogating one of Lee’s mistresses when her phone rang. It was him. Caller ID showed a number in the 404 area code—Atlanta. When cops called it back, a Pakistani motel manager answered. He confirmed Lee was staying at the motel in a $135-a-week efficiency.
The next morning, police, marshals, and FBI agents descended on the dowdy Lakewood Motor Lodge in Atlanta, but Lee had already checked out. They scoured the city without luck until, late on the night of May 27, an Atlanta patrol officer found a man resembling Lee wandering around a tire store in southwest Atlanta.
“Can I see some identification?” the cop asked.
The man calmly handed over his driver’s license, and without so much as an unkind word, Derrick Todd Lee—possibly the worst serial killer in Louisiana’s often bloody history—was arrested, three days after his own DNA betrayed him.
All the clues were soon to fall into place: the phone cord from Dianne Alexander’s home found near Pam Kinamore’s body, souvenirs taken from dead women, stolen phones, the bloody shoe prints found at crime scenes, the vehicles, the timeline …it would all come together like a million-piece puzzle.
Back at the police station, Lee had very little to say.
“Y’all might as well go ahead and give me the needle,” he told his interrogators before he stopped talking altogether. “I’m closing the book.”
He said nothing as he was booked for the murder of Carrie Lynn Yoder and for the attempted rape of Dianne Alexander, fingerprinted, and locked up. He waived extradition, and the next morning was flown home to Louisiana on an FBI jet to face his accusers.
And the star witness against him, besides his own DNA, would be the only woman who’d survived an attack by Derrick Todd Lee.
Dianne Alexander.
AFTER HIS CAPTURE IN ATLANTA, BATON ROUGE SUSPECTED SERIAL KILLER DERRICK TODD LEE WAIVED HIS EXTRADITION IN FULTON COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT ON MAY 28, 2003, AND RETURNED TO LOUISIANA TO FACE FIRST-DEGREE MURDER CHARGES.
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“I DID NOT FORGET YOUR FACE”
Derrick Todd Lee stayed true to his promise to close the book on his crimes. He never spoke about any of them.
During police inter
rogations immediately after his arrest, he insisted repeatedly, “I got no story to tell.” He told them he didn’t understand DNA, said he’d made peace with God, and didn’t care whether he was executed; he even flirted subtly with FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole. But he had plenty to say about police harassment and all the women who looked down on him.
“I’m here to tell you I done walked around, man, with, uh, a lot on my mind, a lot in my heart, bro, a lot of sleepless nights because there was some things I got accused of I know I ain’t had nothin’ to do with it,” he said.
“I done been in the wrong place at the wrong time, you know, dealin’ with women. I been dealing with women or done slept with some women you, uh, you’re probably sayin’ I’m gonna tell you a lie about. I can bring some women name up, you know, right now, and you probably go and ask them. Say, ‘You ever been with Derrick?’ They’ll tell you no. But I know and that person know, you know what I’m sayin’?
“I been with women where I didn’t want to get seen, be seen with me in a date, but like, you know what I’m sayin’, I done been there. I remember women, like they high society, and then when they was around they friends, they didn’t want they friends to know they was dealin’. You know, everybody got they little skeletons in they closet. …
“I done been with some women, where some women tell me, say, ‘Lord, if somebody see you here, they’ll ask me what’s wrong with me.’ I done been through all that in my life.”
But that was the closest Derrick Todd Lee ever came to explaining his crimes, with vague references to oversexed “high society” women who were too pretentious to be seen with him, and the torture it caused.
He had nothing to say about the dead women, nor the missing women linked to him, nor any victims whose names were still not known. He refused to offer anything that looked like a confession, except to say that it didn’t bother him in the least if they “electrocuted me up” because he was right with God, and that’s all that mattered.
Delivered from Evil Page 19