Baton Rouge Serial Killer Derrick Todd Lee: Trials and Death Row

Derrick Todd Lee was a Louisiana serial killer linked by DNA to the murders of at least seven women in and around Baton Rouge between 1992 and 2003. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death for the killing of Charlotte Murray Pace, and separately convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole for the killing of Geralyn Barr DeSoto. He died on death row of heart disease on January 21, 2016, at age 47.¹

His case is remembered for two reasons: the scale of the killings, and the years the investigation lost chasing the wrong man because the FBI profile said the killer was white.

The Women He Killed

The earliest suspected victim was Connie Warner, found killed in Zachary, Louisiana, in 1992. Randi Mebruer, 28, vanished from her Zachary home in April 1998 and was never found. DNA collected during that investigation would later be tied to Lee.²

The killings then accelerated:

Gina Wilson Green, 41, a nurse, strangled in her Baton Rouge home on September 24, 2001. Hers was the earliest murder tied to Lee by DNA.³
Charlotte Murray Pace, 22, an LSU MBA graduate, stabbed 81 times in her Baton Rouge townhouse on May 31, 2002.³
Pamela Kinamore, 44, an antiques dealer, abducted from her Baton Rouge home on July 12, 2002. Her body was found four days later beneath the Whiskey Bay Bridge on Interstate 10, her throat slashed.⁴
Geralyn Barr DeSoto, murdered in 2002 in West Baton Rouge Parish.⁵
Trineisha Dene Colomb, 23, missing from Lafayette on November 21, 2002. Her body was found three days later in a rural field near Scott, Louisiana, beaten to death.³
Carrie Lynn Yoder, 26, an LSU biology doctoral student, taken from her home on March 3, 2003 and found strangled and beaten near Whiskey Bay on March 13, 2003.²

One woman survived him. Diane Alexander, a nurse from Breaux Bridge in St. Martin Parish, was attacked on July 9, 2002. Lee knocked at her door claiming to be lost, forced his way in, attempted to rape her, beat her nearly unconscious, and tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. She lived because her son came home and Lee fled out the back door.⁶ Her memory of his face would later put him in a courtroom.

He Was Already Known to Police

Lee’s record ran back more than a decade before the serial killings were connected. He committed a burglary in November 1992 and served two years starting the following July. Between 1995 and January 2000, he was arrested repeatedly in Lake Charles, Zachary, and other Louisiana towns for battery, stalking, and suspected peeping. In April 2000 he was convicted of fleeing an officer and sentenced to two more years; a judge revoked his probation on an older stalking charge the same month.⁷ He was released in January 2001. The Gina Wilson Green murder followed that September.

How the Investigation Missed Him

Once DNA tied the Green, Pace, and Kinamore murders to the same man, Baton Rouge police chief Pat Englade called the response “the biggest police operation in the town’s history.”⁴ The Multi-Agency Homicide Task Force, formed in August 2002, pulled together local police, the Louisiana State Police, and the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.⁸

They were looking for the wrong person. A witness to the Kinamore abduction described a white man of medium build in a white Chevrolet pickup near Whiskey Bay.⁹ The FBI’s behavioral profile, released publicly, described a white male roughly 25 to 35 years old with average or below-average finances and a physically demanding job.¹⁰ Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox explained that the racial call was “largely dependent on the race of the victim,” and four of the five known victims at that point were white.¹¹

Officials in St. Martin Parish had separately developed a profile pointing to a Black male driving a gold Mitsubishi, but that lead did not align with what the task force was telling the public.¹² Investigators spent over a million dollars swabbing roughly 1,200 white men. None matched.¹³ Lee had been a person of interest in Randi Mebruer’s disappearance in Zachary, but because he was Black, the serial-killer investigation effectively passed him by.¹⁴

How the Case Broke

In March 2003, molecular biologist Tony Frudakis, scientific director of the Sarasota-based company DNAPrint Genomics, offered the task force a new tool called DNAWitness. It used 176 single nucleotide polymorphisms to estimate a person’s ancestral geographic origins, something the standard CODIS forensic database is designed not to do.¹⁴

The task force tested him first with DNA from 20 people of known race. He got every one right.¹⁴ Then he analyzed the crime-scene DNA. His conclusion: approximately 85 percent Sub-Saharan African and 15 percent Native American. “No chance that this is a Caucasian,” Frudakis said. “No chance at all.”¹³ The reaction on the mid-March conference call was described as “a prolonged, stunned silence.”

Diane Alexander’s survival became the other half of the break. Her description produced a composite sketch, and detectives reviewing mug shots found Lee. A phone cord recovered from her home was forensically matched to a cord found near Pamela Kinamore’s body at Whiskey Bay.¹⁵¹⁶

On May 5, 2003, Judge George H. Ware Jr. issued a subpoena for Lee’s DNA.⁵¹⁷³¹⁸¹²

The Trials

Charlotte Murray Pace: Death Sentence

Lee’s first trial, before Judge Richard Anderson in East Baton Rouge Parish, opened on September 13, 2004. Prosecutors put on more than 70 witnesses and 300 pieces of evidence, including DNA linking Lee to five murders and a 15-minute video of the Gina Wilson Green crime scene.¹⁹

Diane Alexander identified Lee from the stand: “While my eyes were closed, I did not forget your face.” Jurors were shown photographs of her injuries.²⁰ The defense called no witnesses. Public defender Mike Mitchell argued that DNA was “a very complicated process” jurors could not fully understand.¹⁹

The jury of seven women and five men deliberated a little over an hour before returning a unanimous guilty verdict on October 12, 2004. In the penalty phase, jurors unanimously imposed death based on the finding that the murder occurred during an aggravated rape.³ Lee stood after the jury recessed and told the court, “The jury only got half the story. I didn’t kill none of them women.”¹⁹

The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence on January 16, 2008.³²¹²²

Geralyn DeSoto: Life Without Parole

In West Baton Rouge Parish, Lee was originally indicted for first-degree murder in the DeSoto case, but the state amended the charge to second-degree murder.⁵ The jury voted 11-to-1 to convict; the single not-guilty vote came from a juror who was ill.²¹ The second-degree conviction carried a mandatory life sentence at hard labor without parole. The Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal affirmed on May 16, 2007.

Lee was never tried for the other murders linked to him by DNA.

Death on Death Row

Lee arrived at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on October 14, 2004.²³ On the morning of January 16, 2016, he was transferred from Angola to a local hospital for emergency care. He died five days later, just before 9:00 a.m. on January 21, 2016.¹ East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner William Clark determined the cause was heart disease.²⁴

Why the Case Still Matters

The Baton Rouge investigation became a reference point in forensic science because Frudakis’s use of SNP-based ancestry analysis to redirect a stalled case was one of the earliest dramatic applications of DNA phenotyping to a criminal investigation.²⁵ It also became a cautionary example of what a wrong behavioral profile can cost: months of investigative time, more than a million dollars in DNA testing of men who had nothing to do with the crimes, and a suspect already in the system who was overlooked because he did not fit the assumed race.¹³

A student identified as Rebecca told investigators she had seen a man she later believed was Lee masturbating in his car near her home the day before Charlotte Murray Pace was killed. Police had no record of her call.¹²

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