Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (29 page)

BOOK: Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived
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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.
Getty Images

“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 interrogations 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.

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.

BOOK: Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived
4.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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