Dianne was tidying up the house when someone rang the doorbell. On the other side, a very polite man asked him to use her phone: the car had left it stranded. The woman let that kind stranger pass without knowing that, seconds later, she would be approached and violently beaten.
Just when the individual was trying to force himself sexually, the victim’s son arrived to save his life. Due to his modus operandi, the police believed that he was the Baton Rouge serial killer, responsible for five crimes. However, the officers were looking for a white man and Dianne’s assailant was African-American. That diverted the attention of investigators and slowed down his capture. Three more women would still die.
Derrick Todd Lee was born on November 5, 1968 in the small parish of St. Francisville (Louisiana), into a family as large – there were thirteen siblings – as it was dysfunctional. Since he was a child, our protagonist was a victim of abuse, bad behavior and violence by his father, whose mental illness – he was bipolar and psychotic – caused outbursts of aggression.
From the age of three, Derrick suffered daily beatings in the undaunted presence of his mother. And, when he managed to go to class, the little boy seemed so withdrawn and afraid that he couldn’t stop sucking his thumb. This made him the center of all the ridicule, so the abuse spread from his home to school. No place was safe for him and this caused a change in his personality.
The boy began to take out his frustration and express his anger through the abuse and torture of animals. This behavior, by the way, is one of the indicators of the so-called MacDonald triad, a theory based on the studies of this famous psychiatrist, which supports the idea that sociopaths have three common traits: urinating on themselves, pyromania and animal cruelty. And here Derrick fulfilled one of them.
Added to this was a sexual paraphilia, a tendency to voyeurism and stalking in his neighborhood, which led him to prison on several occasions. From these experiences, the young man learned to improve his expression and language; He found that speaking in a soft and kind tone opened more doors for him. But that made him even more ruthless and unpredictable.
In September 1988, years before the crime spree, Derrick married Jacqueline Denise Sims and they had two children. But the marriage barely lasted because of the mistreatment of the woman. From then on, his criminal career increased: he caused chaos in bars and constantly had fights, he was arrested for harassing and surveilling women in his houses…
Until August 23, 1992, he committed his first murder in the city of Baton Rouge, the place chosen by the murderer to spread terror for the next ten years and where he posed as a citizen in trouble.
Connie Warner, an accountant who lived near Derrick, was found murdered in a road ditch after suffering a brutal beating. Five years later, on April 18, 1998, the killer kidnapped Randi Mebruer from her house while her son was sleeping in the next room. After sadistically beating and raping her, he stabbed her and left her body in an unknown location. This was never found.
In September 2001, the criminal sexually assaulted and stabbed Gina Green, as well as Geralyn DeSoto, murdered in January 2002, and Charlotte Pace, in May of that same year. The latter received up to 80 stab wounds before dying because she tried to repel the attack of her attacker.
Two months after the last crime, Derrick assaulted Dianne Alexander in her own home. Fortunately, her son arrived just before the fatal outcome. Thanks to the testimony of both the woman and the son, the police were able to create a digital portrait of the aggressor and discover the vehicle she was driving.
If until now the investigators of the Baton Rouge cases believed they were looking for a white man, Dianne’s testimony put them on another lead. He was an African-American man, about thirty years old, burly and with a white truck.
It should be noted that, during the investigation, the scientific police collected genetic material from the aggressor both at the crime scenes and at the scene of the assault on Dianne. In fact, the DNA found under the broken nails of one of the victims, Geralyn DeSoto, was illuminating in hunting down our protagonist. But this would take almost a year to arrive.
As the police found out that the killer’s DNA was from an African-American man with a criminal record and not from a white man as was believed until then, Derrick killed three more women. Pam Kinamore, Trineisha Colomb and Carrie Yoder were raped, beaten and had their throats slit between July 2002 and March 2003.
The extreme brutality exercised during the attacks, the type of victim and the DNA collected (also under the broken fingernails of these women) allowed the crimes of the last decade to be connected. The investigators were in front of what was dubbed the Baton Rouge ghost. Furthermore, the robotic portrait created thanks to the only survivor made it possible to stop the fugitive in the middle of his flight. It was May 27, 2003.
“I now know that we have taken a very dangerous serial murder suspect off the streets of Atlanta, and I am sure that the citizens of Louisiana are also proud that we have taken this very dangerous person off our streets,” he said. Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington at a press conference.
Although the murderer confessed to having killed at least seventeen women, the justice system could only convict him of the murder of two of them. In August 2004, Derrick was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the first-degree murder of Geralyn DeSoto and, in October 2004, to the death penalty for the murder of Charlotte Pace.
While the serial killer awaited the day of his execution on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, he died of heart disease at the age of 46. When the news hit the media and was made known to the victims’ families on January 21, 2016, far from being angry, they felt relieved.
“Now that he is dead, there will be no room for Derrick Lee in our thoughts and dreams beyond wondering why,” said Ann Pace, Charlotte’s mother. This was also expressed by Louisiana Deputy Attorney General John Sinquefield when he learned of the criminal’s death: “I was not disappointed to hear that he had died of natural causes. That assured me that he would never get out. “I think justice was done for the victims.”