Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  On August 5, 2004, in Port Allen, Lee stood before a jury of six men and six women to answer for the second-degree murder of Geralyn DeSoto, the first of many trials he was to face. In this case, he faced a maximum of life in prison because prosecutors lacked the necessary aggravating elements for a death sentence—and still had better cases ahead.

  DeSoto, only twenty-one, was found stabbed and beaten to death in her home in the small town of Addis, across the river from Baton Rouge, on the same day she registered for graduate school at LSU in January 2002. Evidence suggested that just before noon that day, someone broke into her mobile home, bludgeoned her with a telephone, and stabbed her three times. Still alive, she ran to her bedroom, where she grabbed a shotgun, but her attacker snatched it from her before cutting her throat from ear to ear—so deep that it scraped across her spinal column—and sadistically stomping her belly. He did not rape her.

  Bloody boot prints matching Lee’s shoes were found, and the knife he used to slice DeSoto’s throat was found in his vehicle.

  In her fight, DeSoto herself had collected the evidence that would eventually identify her attacker. It was beneath her fingernails. Ultimately, science proved it matched only four-tenths of 1 percent of all the males on Earth—and one of them was Derrick Todd Lee. Even more damning, Lee’s DNA contained rare markers that raised the odds that somebody else killed Geralyn DeSoto to thirty trillion to one.

  If modern science had built a solid case against Lee, prosecutors were counting on Dianne Alexander to put a human face to his atrocities. As his only known survivor, she would bear witness to Lee’s murderous methods.

  Tense and frightened, she came into the courtroom, swore to tell the truth, and sat facing Derrick Todd Lee for the first time since her attack two years before. But she didn’t look at him. She didn’t have to.

  She answered questions clearly and without flourish as she recounted the summer day that Lee stood on her doorstep, appealing to her kindness as a way to get what he wanted. She told the jury how he had threatened to stab her in the eye, made her take off her panties, tried unsuccessfully to get an erection, choked her with the phone cord, beat her savagely, and then fled in frustration when her son arrived home.

  “I have no idea how many times he hit me,” she testified. “I only remember the first blow.”

  Asked if she saw the man who attacked her, Dianne pointed directly at Lee, who sat emotionless at the defense table, and seemed to speak directly to him.

  “While my eyes were closed, I did not forget your face.”

  The defense asked her about the police sketch and the make of car her son had seen, arguing that Lee was not the man she described. But the cross-examination was brief.

  As Dianne stepped off the witness stand, the prosecutor scanned the faces of jurors. They had been touched by her story. They liked her.

  The next day, Lee interrupted the proceedings to ask the judge whether he could fire his court-appointed lawyer, whom he believed was not being aggressive enough.

  “My life is on the line here,” he argued at the bench. “He ain’t representing me like he said. … He lied to me from go, from day one.”

  But the judge told him that he couldn’t fire a public defender and that his only other choice was to represent himself. Lee relented and the trial continued as the evidence against him mounted. The primary defense was simple: The prosecution hadn’t connected all the dots, they were exploiting the public’s misdirected and white-hot anger, and DNA was unreliable.

  After four days of testimony, the jury required just one hour and forty minutes to find Derrick Todd Lee guilt of second-degree murder in the death of Geralyn DeSoto. Six days later, the judge sentenced Lee to life in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, without the possibility of parole.

  As the prison van drove away, Lee banged his head against the inside wall.

  But his trials, literally and figuratively, were not over.

  Two months after his conviction in Geralyn DeSoto’s killing, Lee faced a new trial for the murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, a twenty-two-year-old student slain just two months before the attack on Dianne Alexander, who would again be the star human witness against Lee.

  This time, Lee (who had a new court-appointed defense team) faced the death penalty.

  Of all the cases linked to Lee, Pace’s had the grisliest crime scene. She had been raped and then had been stabbed eighty-three times with a knife and a 12-inch (30.5 centimeter) flat-blade screwdriver. One of the thrusts had gone through her eye into her brain. Her throat was cut, her skull fractured with a clothes iron, her face mutilated, and her hands terribly bruised, as though she’d fought her attacker to the death. Bloodstains were smeared and splattered throughout her townhouse, suggesting she’d struggled from room to room, even though she was gravely wounded. The killer had taken “trophies”: a Louis Vuitton wallet containing a BMW key, a silver ring, her driver’s license, and a cell phone.

  This time, the judge allowed prosecutors to also introduce evidence in the murders of Pam Kinamore, Carrie Lynn Yoder, Trineisha Dene Colomb, and Gina Wilson Green—all connected by Derrick Todd Lee’s DNA—as evidence of his methods and psychopathy.

  And once again, DNA evidence was insurmountable. A forensic scientist testified that the unique markers in Lee’s DNA were so rare that the probability of anyone else having the same genetic code was 1 in 3.6 quadrillion—or 500,000 times the Earth’s current population.

  A steady stream of witnesses told the grisly story of five women’s horrific killings, describing the last time they saw their friends and loved ones alive and pointing to frightful crime scene photos while a subdued Lee sat and listened quietly.

  RELIVING THE HORROR

  The last witness to take the stand was Dianne Alexander. Inside she was nervous, but outwardly she was poised.

  BORN AGAIN IN THE 1980S, DIANNE ALEXANDER’S DEEP FAITH HAS BUOYED HER THROUGH THE DARKEST MOMENTS OF DERRICK TODD LEE’S ATTACK AND THE TURBULENT YEARS SINCE AS SHE TRIES TO MAKE SENSE OF IT.

  Ron Franscell

  Again, she calmly recounted the sequence of her attack in vivid and succinct detail. She told how Lee had threatened to stab her in the eye—as Pace had been. She told how he had cut the phone cord to strangle her—the same cord fragment found near the body of Pam Kinamore. And how the bare-chested Lee had sweated on her during his frustrated rape attempt—sweat found on the collar of her dress that matched Lee’s DNA.

  Again, she relived the horror visited upon her.

  Again, she was called to point to her attacker, sitting just a few feet away, watching her.

  “Are you sure?” the prosecutor asked her.

  “Positive. Without a shadow of a doubt. I’ll never forget that face.”

  The desperate defense called her a liar. They said her testimony had changed over time. They said she was coached by prosecutors. They said she described a different man to the police artist. But Dianne held firm, and the jury was visibly angry at the hostile questioning.

  The prosecution rested after that and, to everyone’s surprise, so did the defense.

  During closing arguments, some jurors wept openly as the prosecutor showed the smiling portraits of the dead women and begged the jury to find Lee guilty; the defense again railed against the fallibility of DNA testing and listed a dozen inconsistencies and holes in the prosecution’s case. But the jury of six men and six women took only eighty minutes to find Lee guilty of Charlotte Murray Pace’s first-degree murder.

  During the penalty phase, Lee’s lawyers argued that he was mentally retarded and, thus, under a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, could not be executed. Expert witnesses on both sides disagreed about Lee’s mental capacities.

  This time, the same jury took ninety-three minutes to deliver Derrick Todd Lee’s sentence: death.

  Afterward, they said it was the strength of the DNA evidence and Dianne Alexander’s testimony that convinced them of Lee’s guilt.

  Today, Lee sits on An
gola’s death row, monitored twenty-four hours a day. He spends all but one hour a day in his cell.

  To date, Derrick Todd Lee has been officially

  linked by his distinctive DNA to seven murders,

  and he is strongly believed to have

  committed four others.

  In 2008, the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld his death sentence. A tangle of appeals is ongoing, and no execution date has been set.

  Charges in Lee’s other alleged murders were dropped once he was sentenced to die. The charges Lee faced in Dianne Alexander’s 2002 attack were set aside after she told prosecutors she wanted “to end a difficult period of her life and move on.”

  To date, Derrick Todd Lee has been officially linked by his distinctive DNA to seven murders, and he is strongly believed to have committed four others. A dozen more South Louisiana slayings over the twenty years before his arrest bear frightening similarities to his known crimes, but they might never be solved.

  “I GOTTA LET IT GO”

  For Dianne Alexander, every day since Derrick Todd Lee invaded her home and her life, every morning has been a little like waking up and starting life over.

  And not necessarily in a bad way.

  She graduated from nursing school with honors. She is writing a book about her experience as Lee’s sole survivor. She dreams of taking up painting. And she has fallen in love all over again with her husband, Oliver.

  Not that life has been easy. The trauma churned up her whole family. Dianne’s husband and son cleaned up her blood themselves. For months, Oliver spent his free moments driving around Lafayette and Baton Rouge looking in vain for that gold Mitsubishi Mirage. If he found it … well, he didn’t know what he would do.

  For a while, Dianne’s hate for Lee was a wriggling maggot deep down inside, small but ultimately destructive. She couldn’t go back to the house where she had once felt so comfortable, so safe, so she and Oliver lived with relatives until they could sell the place and get another.

  Dianne’s posttraumatic stress was very real. She drifted through periods of volatile anger and eviscerating depression. She would scream and lash out at those closest to her, who were also suffering in the turbulent wake of Derrick Todd Lee. Arguments always circled back around, sometimes viciously, to the attack.

  Because their eyewitness testimony and evidence had been critical to Lee’s capture, Dianne and her son, Herman, eventually sought $150,000 in reward money offered by Crime Stoppers of Baton Rouge and Lafayette, but they were refused. The organization said its policies prevented it from rewarding crime victims, even if they were the keys to arresting a serial killer. A 2006 lawsuit by the Alexanders against Crime Stoppers is still wending through the courts.

  Dianne still doesn’t know why Lee chose her. Maybe her creamy, coffee-colored skin and hazel eyes made her look white from a distance. Maybe she lived in a place where nobody would hear her scream. Or maybe she was simply the first person he saw when his compulsion kicked in. Nobody knows because Derrick Todd Lee has never spoken about any of the cases.

  Dianne believes fervently that his inability to rape her was because of her compliance. He lusted for a struggle. But she didn’t give it to him. Her submission to his attack, at least in her mind, neutralized his sado-sexual compulsion. But, again, nobody knows.

  Eventually, Dianne and Oliver sought counseling, and for Dianne especially, the church was a comfort. A couple times a week, she faithfully attends an Evangelical church in a Lafayette strip mall, not far from where she and Oliver live now in a small town west of the city, and she can hardly speak of the attack without invoking God in some way.

  “Let God deal with him,” she says today.

  That’s why she no longer hates Lee. She takes God’s word about forgiveness. A death-penalty opponent, she certainly doesn’t await his pending execution with any particular eagerness. If anything, she says, she’ll pray for his soul.

  “I gotta let it go,” she says now, “because if I don’t, it’ll destroy me before it destroys him.”

  PONTIAC CORRECTIONAL FACILITY IS A HOLE where Illinois throws its trash. Founded as a reform school for “incorrigible boys” just after the Civil War, out on the edge of town, it devolved into a savage world apart. During the Depression, in the days before it became a maximum-security lockup, prisoners in solitary got only a daily slice of bread to eat.

  Outside, its stone and red-brick buildings, encircled by miles of razor wire, are known as the Pontiac Correctional Center; inside, it is known as Thunderdome, a dark, deafening purgatory where no man, not even a monster, takes tomorrow for granted.

  In a state where crime has always come easy, only the worst of the worst go to Pontiac. In the 1950s, an armed robber named James Earl Ray did time there, ten years before he killed Martin Luther King Jr. In 1978, a thousand rioting inmates killed three guards. By the 1990s, Chicago street gangs like the Latin Kings, the Black Gangster Disciples, and the Gaylords had more control over the place than the warden.

  In Pontiac, getting shanked in the neck while you sleep or being sliced open with a razor blade just for wearing the wrong tattoo is considered fair play. By the time a guy gets to Pontiac, he damn well better know who to watch. Guards might look the other way; madmen might save your life.

  Either way, friends and enemies aren’t always what they seem.

  A SIMPLE PLAN

  Tony and Dave’s plan was simple: After they did their time, these two jailbirds would blow Illinois for Wyoming, where they’d start a big marijuana farm, get rich, and live an untroubled life.

  Dave owned 100 acres someplace out there in the Big Empty, where they would never be bothered by cops or squares or anybody else. He showed Tony pictures of the little farmhouse, and he had the deed in his cell. Dave had the money and Tony knew how to grow pot that they could then wholesale to his gang homeys in Chicago. It was a freakin’ sweet business plan, man. Dave was getting out of the joint first, but as soon as Tony strolled out of Pontiac with his gate money, they’d pack up Dave’s Mazda 929 and head to Wyoming, which Dave said was real beautiful, like fucking heaven. Miles and miles of nothing but your own law. Yeah, Wyoming would fill them up, these hollow guys in a hollow place with a hollow past. Tony believed him because his friend Dave was a smart guy. Damn straight. A generous guy who’d be a good partner.

  Tony Majzer, already a career criminal at twenty-four, wanted it to be true in the worst way. He had never been to Wyoming, and he wasn’t even sure where the hell it was. But it sure couldn’t be as crappy as life had been for him so far.

  A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

  Tony was born on July 1, 1976, in Chicago’s Cook County Hospital to an unwed, seventeen-year-old junkie. Not long after giving birth, she hung a chain with an Italian horn charm around his little neck and abandoned her child in a public park.

  The baby was shoved into the bowels of the foster care system, but by some miracle, he was adopted at age four by a couple in Schiller Park, a middle-class suburb west of downtown. His adoptive dad was a shipping clerk for a local company and was known around the neighborhood as Coach, and his new mom was a good-hearted but strict office manager who had once worked for the Secret Service and came from a family of cops. They couldn’t have their own kids, so they fostered and adopted orphans and other discarded children like Tony.

  Tony loved them both, especially Coach, as much as he hated the mother he never knew. His loathing for her festered in him. He blamed her for the worst parts of himself.

  But Tony never really had a chance. Dyslexic, hyperactive, and angry, school was a death march. He despised anybody in authority. He started shoplifting before he could read, and the few times he got caught, he was let go.

  Then at age six, he bashed another first grader in the head with a nail-studded two-by-four, just because the kid said something Tony didn’t like. At seven, he punched his second-grade teacher in the face for locking him out of the classroom.

  Soon, Tony was shipped off to a special schoo
l for kids with behavior problems, kids just like him—and worse. Everything went downhill from there.

  At eleven, when most kids were still collecting Care Bears and Pound Puppies, he hooked up with the Gaylords, a violent Chicago street gang. One of the oldest street gangs in the city, the Gaylords started after World War II as a mostly white, North Side softball club, but in the 1950s it grew into a greaser gang with little interest in games. In the ’60s, it evolved from a group of slicked-back-hair, bad-ass hot-rodders who rumbled over turf and girls into a full-fledged crime racket, selling drugs and guns while it protected its own invisible borders from encroaching black and Latino gangs—with murder, when necessary.

  By the ’80s, the Gaylords had more than six thousand members and controlled large chunks of Chicago’s crime landscape. Kids like Tony Majzer were just what the gang needed to refresh the ranks and ensure their violent legacy. In return, they taught him to survive on the street.

  At thirteen, Tony took up boxing, mostly because it was a free pass to hit somebody—or to be hit. He lost only one fight in sixteen bouts.

  He was a good baseball player, too—so good, he dreamed of playing in college, or maybe even the Show, until he was shot in the knee during a drive-by.

  He bounced around from one alternative school to another, almost never welcome for very long. Violence was a daily ritual for him. By the time school officials allowed him to go to a regular high school, he was a lost cause. Two months into the new school year, he pummeled a rival gang member in the hallway. He was sent to another tough alternative school that wasn’t tough enough. Finally, he was warehoused in a school for the worst thugs in the district, where he felt right at home. No proms, no student councils, no pep rallies. Just survival.