The attacker was a machete-wielding black man who dropped his blade and ran away when a police officer happened upon the “crime in progress.” In wasn’t until 1999 that Derrick Todd Lee was identified as the attacker. His identity came to light after the case was aired on TV’s America’s Most Wanted. Michele was contacted and picked Lee out of a photo lineup. In the end, the district attorney elected not to pursue the case as there was not enough evidence. Michele ended up with some scars on her ankle as a permanent reminder of her close encounter with death. She was lucky that night because this animal was intent upon killing them. Of course everything is clearer when viewed in hindsight, but now we knew that the killer had a history of attacking women in cemeteries.
LAMBS
Like everyone else, I was trying to make some sense out of all this. The killer had certainly been on a learning curve. The first two DNA-linked killings occurred in the homes of the victims. This in itself raised a litany of questions. How did he get in? Was it a case of opportunity? Stalking? Did he get into Gina’s house when she let her dog out? Was he a smooth-talking con artist who could get someone to open the door by a ruse? Plus, we didn’t really know what motivated his choice of prey. The one thing about him I was sure of was that he was going to keep on killing.
Human response to such things as terrorists and serial killers has not really changed much over the centuries. The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio classified the reactions of Florentines to the plague of 1348 into four general responses. We saw that same full gamut here: some women became reclusive and would not venture outside without an escort; some took appropriate precautions; some simply moved away; and some women chose to take no heed to the danger and kept going about their lives, taking chances. I believe these latter were in the minority. But it only takes one.
For instance, I was driving by LSU with my wife when we saw a pretty coed jogging along a rather secluded stretch. She was by herself! It was around five P.M. And as my grandpa would say, I was flabbergasted! I assumed she lived in one of the LSU apartments several blocks away. I pointed her out and grimly said to my wife, “There goes the next victim.” De concurred.
Yet here was this coed bopping down the road with a headset on. Idiot! She would never hear anything coming. Not that it would make much difference. She would be easily overpowered. I wanted to get out of the car and confront her. I wanted to ask her if she had been keeping track of current events. What the hell does it take to get your attention? I wanted to show her pictures of the bodies of the victims—pictures that have been seared into my brain. I don’t want her picture there.
Security is inconvenient, and we don’t like inconvenience. The attendance at self-defense seminars declined. More women were out alone—or maybe I just noticed it more now. You could buy Mace just about anywhere in Baton Rouge, and that was a good thing, but fewer women seemed to be carrying it. I found myself looking at women to see if they had it with them. I suspect the killer was looking, too.
The death of an innocent causes a great deal of outrage. You desperately want to stop this guy before he kills again. He’s killing us—not someone who’s put herself in harm’s way. It becomes very personal. You are driven to catch him. At the same time, you must look at our value system. Why didn’t we do the full-court press for the Black Prostitute Killer? For one thing, they didn’t have the strong family advocates that the Baton Rouge serial killer’s victims had. Still, my friend Stan would tell me that our society needs a values clarification process. He’s right.
It seemed to me that this guy looked for easy prey. The old adage of “Why hunt for a lion when you can kill a lamb?” rang true for this killer. It is not that hard to become a “lioness,” but it is inconvenient.
Denial is another phenomenon that makes for easier victims. The disclaimers of false security began to creep into women’s conversations. I’ve heard some of these myself:
“He’s just after young attractive women.”
“I don’t think I fit that profile. I’m not too worried.”
“I think he’s moved away from Baton Rouge.”
“The police have scared him away from here.”
They were wrong. Dead wrong!
CHRISTMAS EVE
It was late afternoon on Christmas Eve Day 2002, when sixty-five-year-old Mari Ann Fowler, an attractive lady, and prominent in Louisiana, exited the interstate onto Louisiana Highway 415 in West Baton Rouge Parish. It was the same day that the newspapers reported the serial killer had been DNA-linked to the death of Dené Colomb.
Mari Ann had been traveling west along I-10, the same interstate that crosses over Whiskey Bay about thirty miles west of where she was at that moment. Her initial destination was Lake Charles, Louisiana, and from there she planned to travel on to Texas.
Once she turned onto LA 415, she traveled a half-mile or so to a Subway sandwich shop located in a little strip mall known as the Plaza 415 Shopping Center in Port Allen. At 5:30 P.M. she got out of her car, went inside, and purchased an order to go. She then exited the Subway but never made it back into her car.
It happened at 5:40 P.M., and it happened suddenly—a blitz attack in a populated area, in front of an open shop and in daylight. How brazen can you get? The “sandwich specialists” in the Subway didn’t see the abduction but did notice that Mari Ann’s car was sitting there long after she had made her purchase. Her keys, the sandwiches and her purse were on the pavement beside her car. Wrapped Christmas presents were in the backseat and were undisturbed. Robbery was definitely not the motive for the crime perpetrated here.
There was a surveillance camera in one of the stores in the strip mall, but initially it yielded little information. However, the film was sent off to the FBI for enhancement and analysis. It showed that a violent struggle ensued during the abduction and that the assailant drove a 1994 or 1995 Chevrolet pickup truck that was dark in color.
Mari Ann Fowler happened to be the wife of former Louisiana elections commissioner Jerry Fowler, who had held the statewide office for twenty years, before pleading guilty in 2000 to bribery in a kickback scheme involving voting-machine parts. She was on her way to a holiday visit with her husband, who was serving five years in a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas (he was released in June 2005).
She has still not been found.
Her son, John Pritchard, age forty-two, was very close to his mother and took her disappearance especially hard. Historically they had communicated on a daily basis. John is what we call a “big ole boy” down here. He is a big, gruff-looking man who is gentle as a lamb once you get to know him. His emotional pleas and demands resounded from the State Capitol steps during the rallies and he seemed somewhat lost and overwhelmed by it all. Who can blame him? Not I.
In May of 2004, State District Judge Janis Clark declared that Mari Ann Fowler was dead. I don’t know that she was a victim of this same killer. No link with Derrick Lee has been established to date. But I do have a high suspicion, as do many other people, that it was him. Lee was driving a 1994 Chevy pickup at that time and it was maroon in color. Lee’s cell phone records also indicate that he was within several miles of the abduction site on that day. Mari Ann fit his victim profile. You can take it from there. I have. But I can’t prove it and he is innocent of her death until proven guilty.
CARRIE LYNN YODER
Public fears climbed steadily. In January 2003, the task force announced a major development in the Baton Rouge killer case. They found another shoeprint, allegedly from the killer, in the vicinity of Dené Colomb’s body. It was the second shoeprint to be found in connection with the killer. The first was found at the murder scene of Charlotte Murray Pace. The print was that of an Adidas sports shoe, men’s size 10 to 11. It’s a pretty common shoe, and pictures of a similar shoe were posted all over the TV and on the task force website. I doubt the killer kept it around after all that. Still, it was a clue. But the killer was still considered to be a white male. More important perhaps is the fact that the shoe
print clue, as well as the pressure from the victims’ families, kept the killer in the forefront of everyone’s minds.
The families of the victims were the conscience of the community. There were those who supported their actions and those who criticized them. I think of the critics as those who cast the proverbial first stone. I have never lost a child to a killer. I cannot stand in their shoes. I can only empathize with them and know that at the end of the day I have done my part to the best of my ability to catch a killer.
I am responsible for the dead but I am responsible to the living. I do know the sadness, if not agony, of talking to family members when you have so little to say. The families kept these murders in the spotlight; and community awareness would ultimately lead to the killer’s arrest.
Four months after Colomb’s murder, he struck again. On March 3, 2003, twenty-six-year-old Carrie Lynn Yoder, an ecology doctoral student at LSU, went missing from her home on Dodson Avenue—a stone’s throw from LSU. She lived only a few miles from Gina Green and Charlotte Murray Pace. Like Colomb in Lafayette, she lived alone. Her boyfriend of three years, Lee Stanton, reported her missing to police two days after she failed to contact him. They had returned the day before, Sunday, from a trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. She was last seen wearing a dark sweater-jacket and blue jeans, and her long, dark, wavy hair was pulled back. The groceries she’d told her boyfriend she would buy were on the table, and her two cats—Toby and Nina—were unfed.
“I feel cheated that the last conversation I had with her was about the groceries,” Lee told the press. He was cheated.
She was considered a missing person by the police and efforts were launched to locate her. My oldest son, Christopher, is a movie buff and he remarked to me that this seemed like something out of the “vampire flick” Lost Boys; the person goes missing, the posters of their face get plastered everywhere, flashed on every TV screen, and then they are found dead and mutilated, and everyone is powerless to stop the horror. The analogy was apt, only this monster was real and so were the victims.
Lots of questions go through your head when a young girl who fits a serial killer’s victim profile is missing. Is it him? Is it someone else? Is she alive? Is he keeping her alive for his own iniquitous reasons? And as long as she is missing there is that spark of hope that she will return.
Ten days later, her body was found by a fisherman in Whiskey Bay, about thirty miles from the city and just a few hundred yards from where Pam’s body had been found. As we had previously ironed out any cross jurisdictional issues, I went there myself and retrieved her body from the water. In turn, I would keep the local coroner, Dr. Freeman, apprised of my findings.
The scene was controlled. But there was one hell of a crowd there. There were all sorts of media trucks and eye-in-the-sky cameras. Once I navigated through the media jungle and I arrived at the edge of the water, I got onto a waiting flatboat. The coldness of the metal made the short trip seem even more ominous. I was escorted out to the site a little too fast for my taste, as the flatboat had a very slippery deck; and besides, we didn’t need to create a wake near the victim’s body. Her body was face down in the water between the eastbound and westbound lanes of I-10, which rise about twenty feet above the water’s surface. At first all I could really see was some sort of tattoo on her lower back. One of the detectives told me Carrie reportedly had a similar tattoo. No one spoke much for a while after we heard that.
I employed a special mesh net body bag to collect her remains and any evidence that might be adhering to it. As a side note, the mesh was so effective that we actually retrieved one of her loose contact lenses. It was very difficult working in the water as we were trying to minimize any disturbance of the body. In the process, I managed to drop my cell phone into the shallows—brilliant move, Lou! While retrieving my phone, I noticed the water actually felt cold, and there was minimal if any minnow activity in the shallows. There was minimal or no animal activity on her, either. I wondered about crawfish and turtles and catfish and whatever else lived in this swamp. Where were they and why didn’t they get to her? These questions would indeed require scientific investigation because we needed to know how long she had been there.
Once Carrie was secured in a body bag and all evidence sealed in place, she was placed into the coroner van and one of my investigators braved the amassed crowds with police help and escaped onto the interstate, headed east. That crowd would relocate to the morgue in short order.
The trailer morgue is located in the city parish garage parking lot. It actually stands near the vehicle washing bay—away from any occupied structures. It is encircled by a chain-link fence, which allows for control of entry and security. That is one of the reasons I chose the location, and it has proven to be a good place for our morgue.
Heavy window coverings were put in place to discourage prying eyes and camera lenses. The main reason that we performed her autopsy that same day was to maximize the amount of evidence that we could glean from the procedure. She had been strangled, but not before being savagely beaten. While she was still alive, nine of her ribs were broken at the point where they connect with the spine. The broken bones punctured a lung and her liver. We knew she had been alive at the time of the beating because of the hemorrhaging at the trauma sites. You don’t actively bleed when you’re dead. A forensic autopsy is a reconstruction of the immediate events that led to a person’s death. As such, you relive the events with that person. People tend to look at you like you’re crazy when you say you are “listening” to the deceased. It’s an intensely respectful process, and neither Dr. Cramer nor I indulge in or tolerate any of the gallows humor that is allowed in some other autopsy theaters. I don’t want to hear the excuse that such humor or inappropriate remarks are a way of dealing with the stress of the situation. It’s inappropriate—period. If you do it in our morgue you are going to get your feelings hurt because we’re going to invite you to leave, and we’re going to do it publicly.
As anticipated, a veritable hoard of reporters had followed us from the scene, requiring the police to cordon off the area near our little trailer. The autopsy was a long, arduous process, and I left there at around one in the A.M. Unbeknownst to me, some reporters had managed to slip through the police barrier and as I began to walk to my car, several descended upon me. I’m afraid I was a little short with them. The extremely bright camera light that flooded my face, nearly searing the rods and cones in my retinas, didn’t help my mood any. I got on the horn and had the police come remove them. I was a little more pissed off at the local guys who did that because I have always been open with the press—those I trust, anyway. I guess they, too, were caught up in the media feeding frenzy. It seemed to be a time of excitement for them, when it should have been one of alarm and mourning.
Ultimately, I had one of my investigators stay in the morgue trailer all night, for fear some reporter might try to gain illegal entry into the facility. What a macabre circus.
The next day, I was on the phone to meteorologist Jay Grimes, because I needed information about the weather in the area for the past ten days. I needed to know the temperature, the cloud cover, the amount of precipitation, and anything else he could tell me. These are all factors that can change a crime scene; they are also factors that influence insect activity and the rate of body decomposition. Jay is one of the good guys who always steps forward, helps in any way he can, and asks for nothing in return. This time was no exception.
One of the haunting questions in everyone’s mind was the possibility that the killer had abducted her and kept her alive for a week or so. It fell to me to answer that question.
I also touched base with Wildlife and Fisheries about aquatic animal activity in the area. Evidently there is a sizable layer of silt on the bottom of the bay, and if she had been thrown from a height, as we surmised, it is quite possible that she was actually submerged in the silt. When the gases in her body formed and expanded due to the normal putrefaction processes, her body would ha
ve risen up out of the silt to the surface.
I also contacted Dr. Bill Bass, head of the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, widely known in forensic circles as “The Body Farm,” the only facility of its kind in the United States that allows students to study bodies in various states of decomposition. I related the condition of the body and the ambient conditions to him. Bass, a renowned forensic expert whom I knew via a mutual friend, has assisted in hundreds of death investigations, from historic homicides to large disasters.
After exchanging views, we agreed that the condition of her corpse was compatible with her being in the water for a week to ten days—roughly the same period she’d been missing. We concluded, as a result, that he had not kept her. She was abducted, beaten, raped, and strangled, then dumped into Whiskey Bay from the interstate above. That’s at least a twenty-foot drop. What kind of abhorrent animal could do this? I certainly didn’t know it at the time but we were close to finding out. But not close enough to have saved this young woman’s life.
More than anyone, the parents suffer in such deaths. Lynda and Dave Yoder, both of Florida, learned of Carrie’s disappearance on March 5th. Dave called his wife at the end of the work-day to say he’d be home with “news of a problem.” Can you imagine going home to tell your wife that your child is missing? I truly cannot grasp the degree of emotional pain he must have carried with him. They drove ten hours straight to Baton Rouge that night. Their only stop was in Gainesville, Florida, to see their son, Greg. As Lynda Yoder said: “I just had to hug my son.”
The day that Carrie’s body was discovered was also Dave’s fifty-eighth birthday.
I met Carrie Lynn Yoder’s family at Rabenhorst Funeral Home the day after her autopsy. We were in one of their quiet, tastefully furnished offices. The door was closed for privacy. I felt so inadequate. The room was heavy with the pain and grief that accompany losing a loved one in such tragic, inexplicable circumstances. I was there to give them the jewelry we had taken from their daughter’s body and to answer any questions. They had none. I think they were still in a state of shock and did not want any details. One of the things that hit me was the sense of how truly united they were as a family.
Coroner's Journal: Forensics and the Art of Stalking Death Page 21