The Bayou Butcher

Sean Vincent Gillis lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with a girlfriend who had no idea where he went at night. Between 1994 and 2004 he killed eight women around the city. The first was Ann Bryan, 81, stabbed to death in March 1994 at the St. James Place retirement community.

Most later victims were women he picked up on the streets, including Katherine Hall, Joyce Williams, Lillian Robinson and Marilyn Nevils; Johnnie Mae Williams was an acquaintance. He strangled most with a zip tie and dumped them in ditches, canals and woods. In May 1999 he hit jogger Hardee Schmidt, 52, with his car, then strangled her. The break came after Donna Bennett Johnston’s murder in February 2004. A tire track near her body came from a tire model that only about 90 people in the Baton Rouge area had bought. Detectives worked through the buyers, and a DNA swab Gillis gave in April 2004 matched evidence from three victims.

Gillis was arrested on April 29, 2004, and confessed to eight killings. In 2007 he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Joyce Williams’s death and received a life sentence. In July 2008 a jury convicted him of first-degree murder in Donna Bennett Johnston’s death, then deadlocked on the death penalty, so he received life. In February 2009 he pleaded guilty to killing Marilyn Nevils and received another life term.