Derrick Todd Lee: The Baton Rouge Serial Killer

Derrick Todd Lee was the Baton Rouge serial killer, a Louisiana man linked by DNA evidence to the murders of at least seven women across southern Louisiana between 1998 and 2003. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death for the killing of 22-year-old LSU graduate Charlotte Murray Pace, and separately convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole for the killing of 21-year-old Geralyn DeSoto. He was arrested in Atlanta on May 27, 2003, after a novel ancestry-DNA test contradicted the FBI’s profile of the killer and redirected the investigation. He died of heart disease at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on January 21, 2016, at age 47.¹

Who He Was Before the Killings

Lee was born on November 5, 1968, in St. Francisville, Louisiana. His childhood was violent. He was beaten severely by a stepfather while his mother did not intervene, and as a child he tortured animals, wet the bed into adolescence, and peeped into windows while still in elementary school. He was placed in special education, dropped out in eleventh grade, and later earned a GED. His IQ was measured at 65 at the time of his trial.²

He married Jacqueline Denise Sims in 1988 and had two children with her. He also had a long-term relationship with a woman named Consandra Green. Both women reported violence: he beat his wife, threatened her father with a gun, and threatened to kill Green.²

By the time the murders began, Lee had been in and out of the criminal justice system for two decades. His first arrest came in 1981, at age 12, for burglarizing a candy store. In 1985 he was arrested for second-degree murder but released without prosecution. He was convicted of burglary in Zachary in 1993 and served roughly two years. Between 1995 and 2000 he was arrested repeatedly for peeping, stalking, battery, DWI, and criminal trespass. In July 1997 he was charged with six counts of Peeping Tom in Zachary and received probation. In 1999 he was arrested for stalking and unlawfully entering the home of Collette Walker, and in January 2000 he was arrested for beating Green. He was released from a state prison sentence in January 2001. Within months, the killings began.³²

The Victims

Investigators eventually connected Lee by DNA to attacks on at least eight women in southern Louisiana. The crimes crossed multiple parishes, which is one reason the pattern was slow to surface.

Randi Mebruer disappeared from her home on Saul Avenue in Zachary on April 18, 1998. Her young son alerted a neighbor the next morning. Authorities found signs of a violent struggle, a significant amount of blood inside, and a blood-stained plastic bag in the carport. DNA from the scene was later matched to Lee, and in February 2004 he was charged with her murder. A six-acre pond he was known to frequent was drained during the search. Her remains have never been found.⁴⁵

Gina Wilson Green was found strangled on September 24, 2001, in her home on Stanford Avenue in Baton Rouge.⁴

Geralyn DeSoto, 21, was stabbed to death on January 14, 2002, in her home in Addis, Louisiana. DNA in her fingernail scrapings was later linked to Lee through Y-STR testing.⁴

Charlotte Murray Pace, 22, an LSU graduate, was stabbed to death on May 31, 2002, in her home on Sharlo Avenue near LSU. The autopsy documented 81 wounds inflicted with a flat-bladed screwdriver and a knife, blunt-force trauma to the head, and a transected throat. She died from exsanguination.⁶

Diane Alexander survived. On July 9, 2002, she was severely beaten and subjected to an attempted rape in Breaux Bridge, with a computer cord used in an attempted strangulation. She lived to describe her attacker, and her account produced the composite sketch that would later matter.⁴

Pam Kinamore, 44, was abducted from her home in the Briarwood Estates subdivision in Baton Rouge on July 12, 2002. Her body was found four days later near Whiskey Bay.⁴

Trineisha Dené Colomb was attacked on November 21, 2002, near Grand Coteau. Her body was found three days later in Scott, Louisiana. Sperm recovered from her body matched Lee’s DNA at a probability of one in 30 trillion.⁷

Carrie Lynn Yoder, 26, an LSU student, was abducted from her home on Dodson Avenue near LSU on March 3, 2003. Her body was found ten days later near Whiskey Bay. Lee was first charged with her murder and aggravated rape after his arrest.⁴

Investigators also revisited the 1992 murder of Connie Warner, found killed in the same Zachary neighborhood where Mebruer later disappeared, after a witness said a man he saw watching Warner’s home in August 1992 resembled Lee. DNA evidence from that case was resubmitted, but Lee was never formally charged.⁸

How the FBI Profile Sent Investigators the Wrong Way

The murders crossed parish lines, which slowed recognition that one person was responsible. A Multi-Agency Homicide Task Force eventually pulled together the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office, the Zachary Police Department, and the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office, among others.⁷

In December 2002 the FBI released a behavioral profile. It described the offender as a male aged 25 to 35, strong, impulsive, and employed in physical labor. It correctly anticipated a history of domestic violence and familiarity with the Baton Rouge area. But it also predicted the killer was probably white, reasoning from the statistical tendency of serial killers to attack within their own racial group and from the fact that most of Lee’s known victims were white women.⁹ That assumption steered a massive DNA dragnet, in which about 2,000 men in the Baton Rouge area provided samples, toward white suspects.¹⁰

How DNA Ancestry Testing Identified Him

The investigation turned on an emerging forensic technology. Tony Frudakis, chief science officer at DNAPrint Genomics in Sarasota, Florida, used a tool called DNAWitness to analyze crime-scene DNA. Rather than comparing individual profiles, DNAWitness used 176 genetic markers to estimate a suspect’s ancestral geographic origins.¹¹

The task force tested Frudakis by sending 20 known samples as a blind check. He identified all 20 correctly. When he analyzed the crime-scene DNA, the result was that the suspect was roughly 85 percent sub-Saharan African and 15 percent Native American. Frudakis said there was “no chance” the killer was Caucasian.¹²

The public search criteria widened. Lee had already been a suspect in the 1998 Mebruer disappearance but had apparently been passed over as a serial-killer suspect because he was Black. His name resurfaced as investigators re-examined earlier leads.¹¹

Meanwhile, Diane Alexander’s description of her attacker had allowed the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Office to circulate a composite sketch of a muscular, medium-to-light-skinned man. Public tips on the sketch pointed to Lee.¹³ On May 5, 2003, the Attorney General’s Office obtained a court-ordered subpoena requiring Lee to give a saliva swab. His DNA matched evidence from the bodies of Yoder, Pace, Green, Kinamore, and Colomb.¹⁰

Arrest in Atlanta

Lee understood what the swab meant. The same day he provided the sample, he withdrew his children from school, telling administrators he was moving to Los Angeles. He then traveled by bus to Chicago and on to Atlanta.¹⁴ He checked into the Lakewood Motor Lodge in southwest Atlanta, paying $135 in cash for a one-room efficiency, and stayed roughly a week. He picked up occasional construction work and sold gold jewelry at a pawn shop.¹⁵

A federal fugitive warrant issued on Monday, May 26, 2003. Lee left the motel that same day, told other residents he was going to visit his sick mother in Louisiana, and was driven to a train station. Officers missed him by one to two hours.¹⁶ The next evening, Tuesday, May 27, Atlanta police officers acting on a public tip and working with an FBI-led metropolitan task force found him wandering near a tire shop at about 8:30 p.m. He produced identification when asked and was taken into custody without incident. He was unarmed.¹⁵

Convictions and Sentences

Charlotte Murray Pace: Death Sentence

On June 25, 2003, an East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury indicted Lee for the first-degree murder of Charlotte Murray Pace. The trial ran from September 13 to October 12, 2004, in the 19th Judicial District Court.⁶

DNA carried the case. Seminal fluid recovered from Pace’s body matched Lee at a probability of one in 3.6 quadrillion. Prosecutors also introduced evidence from the linked killings of Green, Kinamore, Colomb, and Yoder, and from the attack on Alexander, to establish identity and a pattern of behavior.⁶

The jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict, then unanimously voted for death in the penalty phase after 93 minutes of deliberation, finding that Lee had committed the aggravated rape of Pace.¹⁷ The defense had argued Lee was intellectually disabled, citing his IQ of 65 and the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision barring the execution of intellectually disabled defendants. The jury rejected the argument. The trial court formally imposed the death sentence on December 10, 2004, and denied a motion for a new trial.⁶

Leaving the courtroom, Lee told reporters, “God don’t sleep.”¹⁷ He was transferred to Angola on October 14, 2004.¹⁸

Geralyn DeSoto: Life Sentence

Lee was tried separately in the 18th Judicial District Court in West Baton Rouge Parish for the murder of DeSoto. The grand jury had indicted him for first-degree murder, but the state later amended the charge to second-degree murder.⁷

The DNA in this case was harder to work with. Material from DeSoto’s fingernail scrapings was of poor quality and dominated by her own DNA. Investigators used Y-STR testing, which targets the male Y-chromosome, to isolate a male contributor. That testing excluded 99.8 percent of the African American population as potential contributors. Prosecutors then tied the Y-STR profile from the DeSoto case to the one-in-30-trillion match from the Colomb murder to exclude Lee’s male relatives.⁷

The jury convicted Lee 11 to 1, a non-unanimous verdict permitted under Louisiana law at the time. He received the mandatory sentence of life at hard labor without the possibility of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence.⁷

Appeals

Both convictions were affirmed. In the DeSoto case, the Louisiana Court of Appeal, First Circuit, affirmed on May 16, 2007, rejecting challenges to the non-unanimous verdict and to the DNA subpoena; the Louisiana Supreme Court denied further review in March 2008.⁷ In the Pace case, the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence on January 16, 2008. The court held that collecting DNA under the subpoena was a Fourth Amendment search and that the state had not shown probable cause or voluntary consent, but it affirmed the conviction and sentence anyway.⁶ Lee continued to pursue post-conviction relief, but the execution was never carried out.¹⁹

Death in Prison

Lee was transferred from Angola to a local hospital on January 16, 2016. He died five days later, on January 21, 2016, shortly before 9:00 a.m. The West Feliciana Parish Coroner’s Office determined the cause of death was heart disease. He was 47.¹

Why the Case Still Matters

The Baton Rouge investigation is one of the earliest and most-cited uses of ancestry-informative DNA analysis in a criminal case. DNAWitness contradicted the FBI’s profile, redirected the investigation, and helped surface a suspect who had already been in the police files. The technology went on to be used in more than 150 criminal investigations, though DNAPrint Genomics itself later struggled financially.¹¹

The case is also cited as a warning about behavioral profiling. Criminologist James Alan Fox noted that the statistical tendency of serial killers to victimize within their own race is a probability, not a certainty. The Baton Rouge investigation, along with the roughly contemporaneous Beltway sniper case in which two Black men were arrested after investigators had focused on white suspects, showed how profiling assumptions can narrow an investigation in harmful ways.⁹

1
WAFB. Coroner’s Office Says Serial Killer Derrick Todd Lee Died of Heart Disease
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Radford University. Lee, Derrick Todd – Serial Killer Case Study
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KPLC. Derrick Todd Lee
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The Advocate. A Timeline of Derrick Todd Lee’s Killings, Capture and Conviction
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WAFB. Search Continues for Randi Mebruer
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FindLaw. State v. Lee, No. 2005-KA-2098
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FindLaw. State v. Lee, No. 2005-KA-0456
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WAFB. New Information Could Link Derrick Todd Lee to Yet Another Murder
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ABC News. Unusual Profiling in Serial Killer Case
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ABC News. Derrick Todd Lee Investigation
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Wired. The Inconvenient Science of Racial DNA Profiling
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New York Times. Unusual Use of DNA Aided in Serial Killer Search
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The Daily Reveille. Suspected Serial Killer Fits FBI Profile
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Star News. La. Serial Murder Suspect Arrested in Atlanta
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WLBT. Serial Killer Suspect Captured
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CNN. Louisiana Serial Killings Suspect Arrested
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WAFB. Lee Sentenced to Death
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Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Press Release – Derrick Todd Lee Death Statement
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Houma Today. Moms Connect Over Daughters’ Deaths