November 5, 1968 - Derrick Todd Lee
His case is notable not only for the scale of violence across two Louisiana cities but for the investigative failures that allowed it to continue — a flawed offender profile led authorities to overlook him despite a prior record of stalking. The simultaneous presence of another convicted killer, Sean Vincent Gillis, operating in the same region during the same years remains one of the more unsettling coincidences in recent American criminal history.
From Wikipedia
Derrick Todd Lee (November 5, 1968 – January 21, 2016), also known as The Baton Rouge Serial Killer, was an American serial killer and rapist who murdered at least seven women around Baton Rouge and Lafayette, Louisiana, between 1998 and 2003.
Before his murder charges, Lee had been arrested for stalking women and watching them in their homes. Despite this arrest, he initially was overlooked by police because they incorrectly believed the killer was white. Lee was linked by DNA tests to the deaths of seven women in the area in Louisiana and in 2004, he was convicted in separate trials of the murders of Geralyn DeSoto and Charlotte Murray Pace. The Pace trial resulted in a death sentence.
Newspapers suggested Lee was responsible for other unsolved murders in the area, but the police lacked DNA evidence to prove these connections. After Lee's arrest, it was discovered that another serial killer, Sean Vincent Gillis, was operating in the Baton Rouge area during the same time as Lee.
Lee spent twelve years on death row at Louisiana State Penitentiary before dying of heart disease at a hospital in 2016.
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