The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (8 page)

On 24 March, Melinda McGhee, a 31-year-old mother of two, disappeared from her home in Atmore, Alabama. She worked as a nurse in a nearby nursing home. She called her mother and her husband from there some time before 8.30 on the morning of her disappearance. In her home, there were signs of a struggle, but no evidence of murder and no DNA that could identify the perpetrator. Although Melina McGhee’s home was some 220 miles from Baton Rouge, it was easy to get to up the Interstate and there were striking similarities between McGhee’s disappearance and those of Kinamore and Yoder. However, no body has been found.

On 8 April 2003, another name was added to the list of victims. This was not a new case, but one that had been overlooked before. On 10 February 2002, the naked body of Lillian Robinson, a 52-year old prostitute from St Martin Parish between Lafayette and Baton Rouge, had been found in the Atchafalaya River, near Whisky Bay Bridge. She had gone missing the previous month. However, the body had been in the water for more than a week and was so badly decomposed it was impossible to obtain reliable DNA samples.

Possibly another woman had fallen victim to the Baton Rouge serial killer in May 2002, when the car of Christine Moore, a 23-year-old student at Louisiana State, was found abandoned near River Road in Baton Rouge. She had left home to go jogging at a park, but never returned. Her body was found on a dirt road in Iberville Parish in June. Like Trineisha Colomb, she had been bludgeoned to death. Despite its similarities to the other killings, her death was not formally attributed to the Baton Rouge serial killer.

The investigation then took a surprising turn on 23 May 2003 when Fox News reported that the task force were looking into three incidents in which a young black man attacked women in St Martin Parish, though none of them were killed. A composite was produced showing a light-skinned African-American male who said his name was Anthony and, initially, tried to charm his victims. Until then, it was assumed that the Baton Rouge serial killer was white.

On 5 May DNA swabs had been taken from a man who resembled the composite and were sent to the crime labs for analysis. They matched the DNA taken from the body of Carrie Yoder and linked the suspect to three more victims of the Baton Rouge serial killer.

The DNA belonged to 34-year-old Derrick Todd Lee, who lived in St Francisville in West Feliciana Parish, 20 miles north of Baton Rouge. He had given the sample voluntarily nearly three weeks earlier, but later that day his wife Jacqueline Denise Lee took their two children out of school, saying the family were moving to Los Angeles. Packing up their belongings, they left their brick-built ranch house at 4273 US 61 in St Francisville and fled, first to Chicago, then to Atlanta.

On 26 May a warrant was issued for his arrest. The following day he was arrested in a tyre store in Atlanta. For a week he had been living in Lakewood Motor Lodge, where other residents found him to be a “very nice man” who grilled ribs and chicken at a party and set up a Bible study class. He even charmed a number of women there, inviting them back to his room for a glass of cognac. Lee waived extradition proceedings and was flown back to Louisiana voluntarily the next day. Initially he was charged with the murder of Carrie Yoder. However, by early June he was also accused of the rape and murder of Gina Green, Charlotte Pace, Pam Kinamore and Trineisha Colomb.

What confounded the authorities was that Lee did not fit the typical profile of a serial killer, specifically not the profile they had drawn up in this case. Lee was black, with a wife and two children and was outgoing and charming to everyone he met, not a solitary white male who was awkward, introverted and a bit of a loner.

He did, however, have a criminal record that stretched back to 1984 when he was caught peeping into the window of a St Francisville woman’s home at the age of 15. A string of arrests for peeping, stalking, as well as illegal entry, burglary, assault and resisting arrest continued until 1999. Then things got more serious. In January 2000, he was accused of attempted murder after severely kicking his mistress Consandra Green after an argument over Lee’s advances towards another woman in a bar. While fleeing the police, he tried to run over the sheriff’s deputy and got two years. After being released the following year, he was arrested for wife-beating, but the charges were dropped. It was said that his wife “lived in denial of her husband’s transgressions, which include stalking, peeping into windows and infidelity”. At one point, against his wife’s wishes, he moved a mistress into the family home. The police in Zachary, Louisiana, ten miles north of Baton Rouge, also suspected Lee in the murder of 41-year old Connie Warner in 1992 and the disappearance of 20-year-old Randi Mebruer in 1998.

The police were particularly eager to trace Lee’s wife Jacqueline. She was found by the FBI in Chicago in June with the couple’s two children. They had received an anonymous tip-off that more bodies had been buried under a concrete slab at the couple’s home and needed her consent to dig it up.

They also set about excavating the driveway at the former home of Lee’s girlfriend Consandra Green as Lee had been seen pouring concrete to form a roadway there in the middle of the night only a couple of days after Randi Mebruer had disappeared from her home in Zachary, Louisiana, in 1998. A woman’s bracelet was found, but the search for human remains drew a blank at both of the sites. However, in February, DNA evidence linked Lee to Randi Mebruer’s disappearance. The police in Bolton, Mississippi, also tried to tie Lee to the slaying of four women found near a truck stop as he once been a truck driver.

Investigators were still puzzled by the white pick-up seen in the Kinamore murders. They impounded a truck from Consandra Green’s uncle, said to have been sold to him by Lee, but no connection was established between it and the murders. As the witness had said that the driver of the truck was white, the pickup she had seen might have had nothing to do with the murders. Then there was the rape victim who had been sexually assaulted by a white man in a white van.

On 24 September 2003, Lee was formally indicted with the first-degree murder of Trineisha Dene Colomb of Lafayette, Louisiana. However, the district attorney decided not to take that case to trial. Meanwhile DNA evidence failed to link Lee to the murder of Connie Warner.

The following Wednesday, Lee was charged with the attempted rape and murder of Diane Alexander, a nurse in Breaux Bridge outside Lafayette. She claimed that Lee had beaten her and attempted to rape and strangle her in her trailer in 2002 – and would have succeeded if her son had not come home and scared him off. Lee was also charged with the murder of 21-year-old Geralyn DeSoto, who was found beaten and stabbed in her mobile home at Addis, across the Mississippi from Baton Rouge, on 12 January 2002 – the day she registered as a graduate student at Louisiana State. This was a second-degree murder charge because the prosecution felt it could not prove an underlying felony, such as forced entry or rape, which is needed for the charge of first-degree murder in Louisiana.

Lee was found guilty of the second-degree murder of Geralyn DeSoto on 10 August 2004, after his 15-year-old son testified to seeing his father’s bloody boots. The verdict brought a mandatory life sentence. On 12 October, Lee was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Charlotte Murray Pace after the prosecution was allowed to introduce evidence from other suspected Baton Rouge serial killer cases to prove a pattern. He was sentenced to death. As he was taken from the courtroom he shouted: “God don’t sleep.” Then he cried: “They don’t want to tell you about the DNA they took eight times.”

While he has been found guilty in these two case, he has not been prosecuted in any of the others. No one has explained the discrepancies between Derrick Todd Lee and the serial-killer profile – or even the early evidence. So there could be a white male serial killer with a white pick-up still out there.

Charlotte, N.C.’s Killers

On 4 October 1996, the people of Charlotte, North Carolina were told that the police suspected a serial killer was at work and was possibly responsible for the murder of at least four African-American women since 1992. They speedily set up a task force to investigate the unsolved cases.

The authorities moved with such despatch in this case because of public reaction to their recent investigation of the murders committed by Henry Louis Wallace. Arrested in March 1994, after killing four in three weeks, Wallace admitted to murdering ten African-American women in Charlotte in a 22-month period.

Charlotte police were severely criticized for not making an arrest sooner. Initially they had not even admitted that a serial killer was at large. Black residents were particularly scathing, saying the police should have spotted similarities between the slayings. All the victims were attractive young black women who had been strangled, usually after being raped, in their own home. The police denied the allegation of racism, saying that Wallace, who is also black, did not fit the general profile of a serial killer. Unusually Wallace preyed on acquaintances, friends of his sister or former girlfriend, or colleagues in the fast-food restaurants where he worked. This is rare. Serial killers usually murder strangers.

Wallace was also outgoing and charming, not the archetypal brooding loner. He also varied his MO. Some victims were stabbed. In one case, he poured rum on one victim’s body and set fire to her apartment to obscure the cause of death. Before he left the murder scenes, Wallace wiped off fingerprints and washed his victims. However, he could be slovenly. He would put incriminating articles in the stove to burn them, then forget to turn the stove on. He returned to the apartment of his final victim, Debra Slaughter, to smoke crack after he had strangled her and stabbed her 38 times. Then he put on her Chicago White Sox jacket, grabbed a beer from her refrigerator and left.

Of his killings he said: “It was like an out-of-body experience. It was like I didn’t want to, but something or somebody was taking over my body, and I couldn’t even stop when I tried to stop.”

Despite being a confessed serial killer Henry Louis Wallace got married before he died. The ceremony took place on 5 June 1998 in a room next to the execution chamber where he was sentenced to die. The bride Rebecca Torrijas, a former prison nurse, wore a pale green dress covered with pink flowers and a pearl necklace; the groom a red prison jumpsuit and black tennis shoes. Wallace’s court-appointed attorney, Mecklenburg County public defender Isabel Day, served as the witness and photographer. Also present was the manager of death row. The newlyweds were allowed to talk for some 20 minutes in the room where they were married. Then they were allowed another hour in a room separated by plastic glass and bars.

Despite the speed with which the police set up a task force to catch the new killer in 1996, they made little progress and a second task force was established in April 1999, when a fifth African-American woman was added to the list of victims. Like the others, she had been a drug user and prostitute.

On 14 May Charlotte police charged 58-year-old converted Muslim Jafar Abdul Talib, formerly known as Willie James Lynch, with one of the killings. He had already been in the Mecklenburg County Jail on an unrelated charge of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill. He had previously been charged with the murder of a woman in 1985. But that charge was later dismissed by the district attorney’s office. However, police say they have not ruled out the possibility that the other women were the victims of an as yet unidentified serial killer.

Chicago’s Crack-Head Killers

On 22 July 1999, the authorities in Chicago issued a city-wide warning confirming that some four separate sex killers were active in the city who were responsible for the murder of as many as twelve African-American prostitutes in and around the city’s South Side over the previous four years. The murders centred on Englewood, between 51st and 59th Streets, and Halsted and Damen – an area ravaged by heroin and crack cocaine. The police said that the victims all lived the same “high-risk” lifestyle, selling sex to buy drugs.

Police Commander Frank Briggs of the Chicago PD said: “We are now dealing with four distinct patterns. We have four individuals involved in 11 homicides and in two criminal sexual assaults.”

DNA samples collected from the victims linked one man to seven murders, another one to three, and two more men to one murder and two rapes. Many of the dead were found in burnt-out buildings in Englewood and the adjoining New City Area, and in Washington Park. The police believed that the killers picked out the locations during the daylight hours, then at night picked out their victims, lured them back there with drugs, then raped and murdered them.

By then, the police had already arrested two men in connection with the multiple murder of women in Englewood and New City neighbourhoods. However, the killings continued.

On 12 November 1997 Hubert Geralds Jnr, of 5601 South May Street, was found guilty of killing six women in Englewood in 1994 and 1995, along with one count of rape and attempted murder. The verdict came after an eight-day trial and some 12 hours of deliberation. All seven attacks occurred within a 15-block area over a six-month period.

Along with DNA evidence that linked Geralds to the rape of at least four of the victims, damning testimony came from 27-year-old Cleshawn Hopes, who tearfully described how she narrowly escaped becoming Gerald’s seventh victim.

Hopes said she had been smoking crack cocaine with Geralds in her apartment before the attack. The two went out to buy more drugs, but parted company to make their score separately. As she walked by an alley near the intersection of 57th Street and Racine Avenue, she was grabbed from behind. Picked up off the ground in a chokehold, she passed out. When she came around she was in a wrecked van with Geralds on top of her, she said. A quick-thinking girl, she managed to convince him that he “could get it for free”. When he relented, she made her escape, running from the van naked from the waist down. Prosecutors maintained that Geralds had taken drugs with all of the dead women. They also said that DNA evidence linked him to a seventh slaying.