The Baton Rouge Serial Killer

Gina Wilson Green, a nurse, was found raped and strangled in her home near the LSU campus in Baton Rouge in September 2001, with no sign of forced entry. Over the next eighteen months five more women were killed in and around the city: Geralyn Barr DeSoto, new MBA graduate Charlotte Murray Pace, antique dealer Pamela Kinamore, Trineisha Dené Colomb and LSU student Carrie Lynn Yoder. Two of the bodies were left in the Atchafalaya Basin at Whiskey Bay.

In July 2002 a nurse named Dianne Alexander fought off a man who forced his way into her home near Breaux Bridge. Her son came back, the attacker ran, and her description produced a composite sketch. The task force spent months hunting a white man driving a white pickup and swabbed more than a thousand men. In May 2003 a swab from Derrick Todd Lee, a Black man from St. Francisville with a dented gold Mitsubishi, matched the crime scenes.

Lee was arrested in Atlanta on May 27, 2003. In August 2004 he was convicted of second-degree murder in Geralyn DeSoto’s death and sentenced to life without parole. That October a second jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in Charlotte Murray Pace’s death and voted for death; the sentence came that December. He died of heart disease on January 21, 2016, after twelve years on death row at Angola.