Original subtitles

- The body of a woman has been found at Whiskey Bay.

- It was pretty tense here.

- Who's next?

- This killer was attacking all over South Louisiana.

The panic level skyrocketed.

- There's a monster out there.

- These were women going about their lives

and being murdered in a violent and brutal way.

- It did make you look around to wonder,

could it be someone that I'd come in contact with?

- There are witnesses that came forward that said

they saw a white male

and that this white male was driving a white truck.

- And then that was a guy named Dr. Fanakas

outta Florida that said he can take that DNA

and tell the race of the person from the DNA.

That changed the whole trajectory,

the whole concept of what we were looking for.

- An arrest warrant has been issued

for the arrest of Derrick Todd Lee.

- When we heard that Derrick Todd Lee was caught,

it's like a weight had been lifted off of all of us.

- Little did they know what was about to come next.

♪ The call me the butcher in the Bayou ♪

♪ They call me the butcher in the Bayou ♪

♪ They call me the butcher in the Bayou ♪

♪ The butcher in the Bayou

♪ The butcher in the Bayou, yeah ♪

[intense country music]

- When we heard that Derrick Todd Lee was caught,

it's like a weight had been lifted off of all of us.

It was like, there was a blanket over our community,

just a blanket of fear that was like

somebody kind of pulled it off

and you could finally breathe again.

- It was like suddenly, he was in prison,

we didn't have to worry anymore.

We didn't have to be scared to walk to our vehicle.

We didn't have to be scared to go to bed at night.

We didn't have to be scared to take a bath

because this man who perpetrated such horrific crimes

was behind bars where he belonged.

- It's like a whole different city.

People out riding their bikes,

people are walking their dogs, people are jogging

and none of this was going on in this neighborhood

before this guy was caught.

So it was very much affecting women's lifestyles.

- People were very relieved.

I especially was relieved to feel like

we could just maybe go back to life as usual.

- There weren't a whole lot of people that said

they were shocked.

A lot of times you'll see, oh, I never saw that coming.

But with this case, once he was named a suspect,

a lot of people were like,

okay, now I see it, now I get it.

- My life had been so disrupted,

the life of everybody I knew had been so disrupted

that I was really angry with him.

I didn't wanna have anything to do with him,

but I was interested in his background.

What made him become what he became?

[eerie music]

[sad music]

- He had a little bit of a troubled past.

Just looking down through the years at his police record

and things of that nature.

But I personally never had any problems with him.

My mom taught Derrick in school.

He was a few years younger than me.

So he would also frequent my mom's bar

when he was of age on the weekends,

but never gave us any trouble

other than maybe once or twice.

- One police officer told me

that while he was surveilling Derrick Todd Lee,

he watched Derrick Todd Lee go into a bar,

pick up a woman, bring her to a motel,

do whatever, bring her back to the bar,

pick up another one, bring her to the same motel,

have his way with her,

go back to the bar and pick up a third one.

He watched this in one night.

Derrick Todd Lee could get women.

He had a wife and two children and he had a girlfriend,

Cassandra Green, and he had a son with her as well.

- He was involved with Cassandra Green.

He got into a confrontation with her

at my mom's bar one night.

This is the old Liz's lounge.

This is a bar that Derrick frequented.

He brought different women in at different times.

As you can see, that sign has been painted over,

but come close.

If you see what it says,

it says Liz's Lounge, where good friends meet.

It's hard to see it.

No miners were allowed,

admission on Fridays was $3 back then,

Saturdays was five bucks.

It says no weapons,

no outside drinks allowed in the building.

You will be checked at the door.

We did everything we could

to ensure the safety of people

that wanted to come here.

This was a place where they could have a good time,

go home and regroup for work the next week,

come back on the weekend and unwind without drama.

This is where his confrontation with Cassandra Green

was on this parking lot, right in this area right here.

He commenced a beating, her stomping her,

she ultimately went inside,

she ended up hiding behind the DJ in the DJ booth

laying down on the floor,

he went back in looking for her,

he couldn't find her,

he ultimately left and he ended up

in a pursuit with the police

and they ended up ultimately arresting him at that time.

- From all accounts of people that knew him

and that talked about him after the fact

said he was very nice, he was very charming

and maybe that was what, you know,

made people open their door to him.

I'm not really sure.

- Derrick Todd Lee may have targeted women

who might have been naive to something like that.

Somebody that grew up like me,

who really didn't have a reason to suspect

someone of wanting to do harm to them.

- He may not have been educated,

but I thought he was very savvy,

very manipulative, very smart,

and in my world, somebody like that

that turns to crime is dangerous.

[thunder claps]

- After Derrick Todd Lee was arrested,

police began to try to connect him to other cold cases.

At that time in Baton Rouge over a 10 year period,

there were 60 cases of missing or murdered unsolved cases

in the Baton Rouge area.

It wasn't long before everyone discovered

that there were more victims.

- Derrick Lee unfortunately was lucky.

He got away with a lot of stuff.

There were chances where he should have been caught,

that he was able to slip through the cracks.

- There are still some cases

that I think should be connected to Derrick Todd Lee

and have not, Christine Moore being the most notable.

- Another case which was not attributed to Derrick Todd Lee

in any way, the case of Geralyn Barr DeSoto

in West Baton Rouge Parish, in the small town of Addis.

She was one of his earlier victims in the Baton Rouge area.

She was an LSU student,

she was young, 21,

she was married to Darren DeSoto,

she was not very happy in her marriage

according to a journal that she kept.

- What threw the wrench into the DeSoto investigation

were two things.

One, that she was not sexually assaulted.

And the investigators believe that Lee

probably intended to sexually assault her

like he did the other women,

but her husband was calling her

on her cell phone repeatedly.

Like she wouldn't answer,

then he'd hang up, he'd call back,

then he'd hang up and he'd call back.

And it just threw him off.

And then additionally, the information they found

in her journal about her,

you know, her husband physically abusing her,

the police, you know, tended to focus on him as a suspect.

- Geralyn's murder was connected to Derrick Todd Lee

through scrapings that were taken

from underneath her fingernails,

where she had scratched her attacker and got his DNA

so that she could tell police who had killed her.

[intense music]

- At this point, Derrick Todd Lee is under arrest.

He's put away, folks are thinking everything is safe.

And then other bodies start to turn up of women.

- [Narrator] You're watching WAFB9 News at six.

- It has happened again, still again,

a woman with a history suggesting prostitution

has been found murdered in one of the most

painful forms of murder.

- When police found her, her hands had been cut off.

They were shocked by this.

They had dealt with Derrick Todd Lee,

they had seen his crime scenes,

they knew how he killed,

but this was something totally different.

And typically when police arrive at a crime scene

where dismemberment is involved,

they kind of know that this isn't the only time

this is gonna happen.

- Meanwhile, we have some important new answers

about the body of a woman found murdered

on Pride Port Hudson road three weeks ago.

- This victim had been reported missing by her daughter

and ended up being identified as Johnnie Mae Williams.

Johnnie Mae Williams had a high risk lifestyle,

she was on the streets a lot at night.

- Johnnie Mae hadn't always been a prostitute.

She had once lived a normal life just like everybody else.

She had been married,

she had children who she loved dearly,

she had a very sweet personality,

she was always trying to help people,

but then her husband cheated on her.

And when she found out her husband cheated on her,

they got divorced.

She had a difficult time dealing with that situation.

And like so many people do, she turned to drugs.

As her addiction to drugs progressed,

Johnnie Mae began to become a prostitute

and North Baton Rouge is the place to do that.

Prostitutes tend to be the easiest victims

for serial killers

because a serial killer can drive up,

offer them money and they will get into their vehicle.

All the serial killer has to do is drive off,

find a remote location and kill them.

Women who live this lifestyle tend to become easy prey

for serial killers.

- The rate of success dealing with

these particular homicides depends on what is available

forensically from the crime scenes.

If you're dealing with a body dump in a swamp area,

all you have is a body find location.

You don't necessarily and probably do not

have the actual crime scene,

you don't know where the abduction took place,

you don't have a transport vehicle,

all you have is a body dump site.

That's what Baton Rouge and the East Louisiana Parish

Sheriff's Department was dealing with.

And that created a tremendous amount of public panic.

- You know, that fear that was back on

but then also, I guess we wondered, you know,

did they catch him?

You know, was it him?

How many of them could there be?

So to have that back in our community, it was like,

you know, here we go again.

[intense music]

- I'm Dr. Cecile Guin, I'm a social worker

and I was at LSU during the 1990s and 2000s.

The scariest times I had were in the mornings,

I would do morning television shows with both channels,

channel two and nine,

but I would have to leave my house at 05:00 or 05:30

and I would be walking out the front door with,

I would have my cup of tea in one hand

and I'd have a knife in the other hand.

And by the time I get to the car,

my hands were shaking so badly

that I probably didn't have any tea left.

I had a number of people on death row

that I communicate with regularly,

call me and they'd say, you better get off that TV.

This guy's crazy, he's gonna come kill you.

And that they'd call and give me advice

on how to protect myself.

It was, it was...

It was very funny having them call me

and tell me be careful about this crazy guy

because they were the ones sitting on death row

for what they had done,

but all the criminals I was involved with,

every single one of 'em distanced themself

from serial killers.

You know, they would say that, I may be on death row,

or I may have killed someone, but I'm not that guy.

[eerie music]

- We did recognize in the 90s

that we had a lot of prostitutes that were dying

in the East Baton Rouge area.

And that was before state police had DNA

and the Baton Rouge Police Department,

along with our district attorney's office

found funds in various places

to have DNA testing run on those samples.

The problem with prostitutes was that

because of their lifestyle,

we couldn't always find a common DNA profile between them

to actually link them.

So we didn't know, were they just a victim

of their circumstance or were they actually being killed

by a serial killer?

I think sometimes there's gonna be some people in the public

that are gonna say, well, that's their choice,

that's their lifestyle

and that's kind of maybe what they get or what they deserve.

I wouldn't say that all the population

would feel that way though.

- Their cases just did not get the attention

because people could not really relate to their lifestyles.

- And I remember as a journalist,

always thinking that that was wrong.

I wanted to give these cases as much attention

as we gave the cases with Derrick Todd Lee,

to Pam Kinamore, to Charlotte Murray Pace.

They all deserved that,

it just didn't happen.

[lively music]

- A body found just off the LSU campus

has Sheriff's detectives looking for answers.

An autopsy has been performed

and the victim has now been identified

as Donna Bennett Johnston, 43 years old of Baton Rouge.

The cause of death, strangulation.

[sad music]

- Donna Bennett Johnston also worked at North Baton Rouge

and her story was similar to that of Johnnie Mae's.

She turned to drugs, the drugs led her into prostitution,

but like Johnnie Mae,

she always kept in touch with her family

and she always did her best to take care of them.

- Now we recover the remains of another nude female

who had been posed on the side of a small creek bank.

They had substantial amount of postmortem cutting.

We had some dismemberment there.

She had her arms severed at the elbow

and there was an area on her thigh which had been removed,

about a four by four inch square

that had been taken from her thigh.

- Even though we did not publicly reveal details,

the crime scene, those sorts of things,

particularly when they are sensational as these were,

tend to leak out.

police officers talked to other police officers,

Those police officers have wives and daughters and sisters

and they are naturally and understandably

going to tell them,

this is what's going on now in Baton Rouge.

You need to be very careful.

So details of what this second killer was doing

were very gruesome, very perverted and very frightening.

- It was obvious that these women were not attacked

and forced initially.

That they were lured,

that then a zip tie

put around their neck and tightened

and only in postmortem,

were they harmed more.

[eerie music]

It was definitely a more opportunistic type of kill.

- Some of the things that were done to some of these victims

made Derrick Todd Lee's murders look like child's play.

I can imagine that even though the public

may not have been able to relate to a woman

with a high risk lifestyle,

I know these investigators knew something big

is going on here for an individual to be able to do this

and then just go about their normal lives

and operate in our community.

When will it just stop being high risk women

and move into the suburbs or move elsewhere?

And I know the investigators,

they were really concerned about what was going on.

- There's only one way to stop him

and that's to get 'em as fast as you can

and create a situation where they can't do this anymore.

- It seemed to police that this was a serial killer

who was a little different.

He was not really interested in the kill,

he killed strictly to be able to play

with the bodies of dead women.

That was what his fascination was

and that's really all he cared about.

This was not the first murder where a zip tie,

an industrial size plastic zip tie

had been used by this killer to strangle a woman.

Police began to realize that

that was kind of his signature

along with the dismemberment.

- For somebody to want to and I hate to say

play with the body or to mutilate the body after the fact,

they generally-- forensic psychiatrist will tell you

or psychologist will tell you that's a whole

different level of what they, you know,

he's clinical psychopath.

- When Donna Bennett Johnston was murdered,

people in Baton Rouge began to get very antsy.

It's like, uh-oh, here we go again.

Women are being murdered and again,

the level of fear in this city rose tremendously.

- Baton Rouge Police Department

and the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office

requested assistance of the FBI

in identifying and apprehending the unknown offender.

The FBI gains its ability to assist

in serial homicide investigation

through the protection of children

from sexual predators act of 1998.

Underneath that act, the FBI can provide resources

in serial murder investigations

provided there are three linked homicides

and those linked homicides can be linked either behaviorally

or they can be linked through forensics.

[sad music]

- It wouldn't be long before police connected the murders

of Donna Bennett Johnston and Johnnie Mae Williams

to the murder of Katherine Hall who had been killed in 1999.

- She herself was a substantial amount of postmortem cutting

displayed nude beneath a dead-end sign

in a new residential construction area

in the Southeast part of the Parish.

- [Susan] Police had learned their lesson

through Derrick Todd Lee

and this time, the first thing they did was test DNA.

- When we began the investigation,

we wanted to identify every bit of evidence that we had

and we wanted to make sure that every bit of that evidence

had whatever forensic test done to it

so that we could glean as much information as possible.

With regards to the Katherine Hall crime scene,

the main piece of evidence there was a hair.

- And so a new task force was formed in March of 2004.

East Parish Sheriff's office was the lead agency

on the task force.

We had members from the Baton Rouge City Police Department,

Louisiana State Police, the FBI,

and then the Louisiana Department of Justice to work on

now another set of unsolved homicides.

- It's like the scab hadn't even formed over Baton Rouge

after Lee and here you have another serial killer.

And of course, given the short timeframe

between the Lee arrest and the connection

between these murders, it caused a lot of concern.

We needed to get this guy, need to get him down.

[calm country music]

- The task force that helped identify Derrick Todd Lee

wasn't entirely disbanded.

There's a lot that comes into play after someone's arrested.

And so we had a skeleton crew of that task force in play.

- My people were pretty much done.

I had worked them to the point that they were just,

I mean, they were fried at this point.

So we got together another group

and we sent them over to the Sheriff's office.

At that point, I'm still going through the motions on Lee,

trying to make sure we've got everything in order

the way we did.

So I was on the sidelines of those cases.

- They were doing as much as they could with what they had.

And I say that because with Derrick Todd Lee,

you had a hotline, people were calling, giving tips,

24 hours a day.

You had that public engagement.

And I don't know if that helped or hindered

because is it better to run down four good leads

or try and run down 20,000 bad leads?

- In this particular investigation,

there were not as many leads that we had to cover.

And also in the very beginning of the case,

we had forensics to work with.

And that's where we put all of our effort

and seeing what the forensic evidence could tell us

about the unknown offender.

- We couldn't look at the typical samples

that we were used to looking at.

So like in the Derrick Todd Lee case, you know,

we could look for the semen samples or the drops of blood

and this particular case,

we knew that that wasn't gonna work in the prostitutes.

That we had to find some other means

and that's where we got lucky

because he did leave his DNA behind.

He was having to hold their hands so tightly

when he would saw them off,

that he would leave his DNA behind

on the remainder portion of their arm.

And that was where we were getting

good DNA sources collected.

[eerie music]

- Anytime you work a serial homicide investigation,

there's an inherent pressure that the killer

will strike again before you can stop 'em.

And so all the investigators,

when we are looking at a case like this,

we do have that pressure.

We do have a desire to identify who the offender is

as quick as possible so we can put 'em behind bars.

And one of the easiest ways to do that

with regards to Baton Rouge

is if you can identify the race of the offender

or the unknown offender.

- Months and months and months of knowing

that he was still out there,

knowing that he could kill again anytime,

not knowing what his trigger was,

not knowing anything about him

definitely put a rush and a stress on us at the laboratory

to do everything we could.

And it would make going to court

even that much more conclusive.

You'd be able to say that this evidence or this blood

found in this particular knife at a scene

or something like that,

you'd be able to actually say it was this person

instead of having just to leave everything else

to circumstantial evidence

that what the law enforcement could actually present.

- As we look back through the crime scene

from Johnnie Mae Williams,

we located a hair in Johnnie Mae's wrist

where a hand had been severed.

This hair had a root attach,

which allowed us to submit it for analysis

to the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab.

They were able to conduct mitochondrial DNA

and obtain the profile,

which also meant the profile obtained

from the fingernail scrapings of Donna Bennett Johnson.

When we were reviewing the evidence from Katherine Hall,

there was a shaft hair that had been located

in the mouth of Katherine Hall.

That hair was submitted to the FBI Crime Lab

for nuclear DNA.

And a profile was developed by the FBI,

which produced the same profile

that Louisiana State Police Crime Lab had obtained

from Donna Bennett Johnson and from Johnnie Mae Williams.

Therefore we had, you know,

physical evidence connecting three of our victims

with the same unknown profile.

- And that was a very key finding

because we knew since those three

were more or less matching,

that we were looking for a Caucasian offender

and with regards to the Baton Rouge area,

that knocks out anywhere from 40 to 48%

of the potential population

and we successfully culled our suspects in half.

Even though the three victims were linked

by the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office detectives,

initially that was done through behavioral linkage.

- Now we had forensic linkage

and that is something you can bring into court.

[calm country music]

- I'm John Sinquefield and in the 1990s through the 2000s,

I was the first assistant district attorney

here in East Baton Rouge Parish.

I prosecuted, for the most part, capital murder cases.

I got the job 'cause I was the most experienced

in capital cases and I felt the responsibility to do it

because I thought I was the best person

to seek the death penalty

against Derrick Todd Lee.

And I fully believe that for the crimes he committed,

the only justifiable sentence

would be that he'd be tried, found guilty,

sentenced to death and executed.

The trial was a two week trial

that was very stressful

and I was against three very talented

criminal defense attorneys.

DNA was not new, but it was relatively new

and I was trying a case based almost entirely on DNA.

And there hadn't been a lot of experience in those days

on how juries view DNA evidence.

And I felt a tremendous responsibility in that case

because I thought I was trying a very dangerous individual.

[intense music]

- I look at him as a monster

because I don't know what other human being

could do what they did.

I have a hard time reconciling this in my mind

that I can go do something like he did to Murray Pace

and then walk out of that place and the next day,

you show up at work and you go back to work

like nothing happened and eat your sandwich for lunch.

I have a hard time reconciling that.

- It was definitely power and control.

I mean, no doubt.

I mean, he was not interested in torturing the victims

or anything.

His whole entire game was learning about them,

stalking them and almost like hunting 'em down

and knowing when he could get 'em.

- We actually went to trial on October of 2004.

Part of which was a 404B hearing,

which we were able to bring six cases together.

Although the case against Charlotte Murray Pace

was our case in chief.

The rest of 'em were other crimes evidence cases,

that's allowed under Louisiana law.

And then finally, you know, it comes up to the trial date.

- [Announcer] You're watching WAFB9 News at five.

- Hello everyone, I'm Paul Gates.

It was an emotion filled first day

at the first degree murder trial of Derrick Todd Lee.

- On the stand, Rebecca Yager,

the roommate of Murray Pace at the time of her death,

she took the stand.

Yager tearfully recounted the events of May 31st, 2002,

the day she found Murray's bloody and naked body.

Prosecutor John Sinquefield carefully maneuvered his witness

through the testimony, which lasted nearly an hour.

Defense attorneys also questioned Yager

asking her if she knew of any enemies

that Pace may have had.

Anne Pace, the mother of Murray

quietly wiped streaming tears off her cheeks

during Yagers testimony.

- We wanted to get him, we got him.

Now we want a conviction and we want a death sentence.

And that's all I care about.

- That courtroom was packed on the first day of trial

but it reminded me of something from

"To Kill a Mockingbird".

The courtroom was missing everything

except the low ceiling fans from that movie.

Blacks were on one side of the courtroom,

and whites were on the other side, the whites thinking,

oh, he did it.

The blacks were like, I don't know about this one.

Black guy serial killer?

I don't know it because of the fact that

law enforcement had gone all the way

after some white guy and a white pickup truck

and all of a sudden under this YSTR new concept

that has never been tested before,

you pick a Black guy to kill white girls.

So Black community wasn't buying it.

- Because it was such a large case,

they did it in a big open room

and he was free to roam around in street clothes.

And I remember him just, you know,

casually talking to people, laughing, joking with people.

He did not seem like the monster that he was.

I don't think you would pick him out of a lineup and say,

that's the guy who brutally murdered a woman

right after the other and tried to hurt so many people

and was the reason why all of us were just living on edge

for a long time.

- He was very well behaved in the courtroom.

He had a sense of humor because I was questioning

one of his psychiatric witnesses

and I caught him in kind of a humorous situation.

And I noticed it even Derrick Todd Lee laughed

as did most of the courtroom.

So I found him in the courtroom,

I found him the same, calculating, in control,

he didn't seem to be afraid, observant.

The defense put on evidence

and alleged that he was retarded.

I had a psychiatrist, psychologist that said

he was not retarded.

But in addition, I put on people that worked with him

and showed that he had obtained certain licenses

to work in chemical plants.

People that were around him demonstrated his intelligence.

There was just no way that he could be

under the U.S. Supreme Court definition

that he could be retarded.

And as a practical fact, from looking at what he had did

and ability to commit these crimes

and get away with them for years,

that takes a degree of intelligence right there.

During the trial, I felt a great weight of responsibility.

You understand DNA in 2004 is not as developed as it is now.

And there were new defenses against DNA

trying to be developed.

And these attorneys on the other side,

they had allegedly went to some kind of training school

on defending DNA cases.

I sat there horrified when I heard the cross examination

by Mike Mitchell,

who was very experienced lead council for the defense

in which he did a

very systematic attack

on the qualifications of our criminalist.

He argued that we didn't use enough markers,

that we were 13 whereas the new standard was 15 or 25.

He mounted a very aggressive attack

through cross examination against the DNA.

And as I told the story,

I was sitting there wondering if my little career

might be just going right out the courtroom window here.

- [Woman] Prosecutors say they have plenty of DNA evidence

but what they've really been searching for

is some solid physical evidence.

Diane Alexander may provide exactly that.

Especially since prosecutors say the phone cord

allegedly used to try and strangle her

was later found with Pam Kenmore's body at Whiskey Bay.

Now it remains to be seen if a judge or jury

believes that evidence,

but family members say Diane and that phone cord

are their ACE in the hole.

- Diane Alexander's a hero.

And without her, I don't know how successful

we would've been in this prosecution.

She was an elegant lady

and she had no fear of Derrick Todd Lee.

She looked right at him, she testified in a strong voice.

She identified him, that's the person that did this to me.

And I don't know how many courtrooms y'all had been in,

but her testimony was very dramatic

and she made a phenomenal witness in that case.

I promise you, she was a hero in that trial.

- She is unflappable.

She is absolutely clear, she is an awesome witness,

absolutely awesome witness

and she identified him absolutely positively

with no reservations

and that's the deal.

She is the nail in his coffin.

- Mary Pace's mom, Ann pace, became a friend of mine.

And I remember watching her be so stoic through the case

and she heard some very brutal details about what happened

to her daughter.

But she knew that these were important details

that needed to get out.

And I remember that was the first time

that a lot of the public

really got a lot of the gruesome details

or even knew just how violent this was.

- Two of the mothers did not have nice things to say

about Derrick Todd Lee at all.

A couple times, they actually shouted out at him in court,

they weren't afraid of him.

They wanted him to get the death penalty

and they wanted him to be executed.

And they became very active, angry mothers.

And they were on TV a lot and I loved it.

- It was a physical sensation.

You felt like you couldn't breathe

and that your stomach was in a knot

and your chest was constricted.

It was very hard to look at him.

It was very hard and it was hard to sit next to his family.

- The other families we actually became,

we actually became a family.

We actually leaned on each other.

You know, we, Ms. Marino who is passed now,

she was our backbone.

She spoke up for us most of the time,

but we all had something in common

and we grew this bond 'cause we was all going through

the same thing at the same time.

So we became family.

We became their family, they became our family,

we spoke for each other.

- The verdict in the end was guilty of first degree murder

of Charlotte Murray Pace in the guilt phase

and then a recommendation of the death sentence,

which is mandatory in the penalty phase.

But the jury stayed out several hours in the penalty phase.

- We were right outside the courthouse

where they were taking him out

and he was wearing different clothes.

And I asked one of the jail wardens, I was like,

"why did y'all change him?"

And they said, he had an accident on himself

once he learned of the death penalty.

And so, you know, here was this man who was just so violent

and so strong and just so domineering over these women

but in the end, when it came down to his life,

it was enough to where he was almost like a child

and couldn't take it.

- For Lynn Marino and Ann Pace,

there was a certain level of,

I don't know if relief is the right word

because nothing's gonna bring their daughters back, right?

Nothing's going to make anything better.

It's just gonna prevent the next person,

it's gonna prevent the next Carry Yoder,

it's gonna prevent the next Geralyn DeSoto,

it's not gonna do anything more than that.

So I don't know if a relief is the right word,

but just at least they felt that someone was responsible.

- The question I was asked

was, "Were you worried when the jury stayed out so long

in the penalty phase?"

The answer I gave was, "Tonight,

the South Louisiana serial killer,

Derrick Todd Lee got South Louisiana justice."

[lively music]

- With Derrick Todd Lee,

it was like the police were fumbling their way through.

They had no idea how to go about catching a serial killer,

but they had learned their lessons.

DNA helped with linking the victims together

and they reverted to old fashioned police work,

following every lead,

looking for actual forensic evidence.

- While a crime lab was processing the hair

and finger nail scrapings and obtaining the profiles,

the task force had focused on a tire casting

that was obtained from Donna Bennett Johnson's crime scene.

[eerie music]

- We knew that this was a good lead

just because it was a wet area

where the tire casting came from

there beside the canal where

Donna Bennett Johnston remains had been left.

And so we need to either include or exclude the individual

who left this tire track there at the crime scene.

- The crime scene investigator took that tire impression

to various dealerships around town

and attempted to identify what type of tire

made that impression.

We were able to determine that it was

a Goodyear Aquatred tire.

- So then we said, we need to try to identify

who has purchased these tires in the Baton Rouge area.

- We were very fortunate in that particular tire

was not a common tire.

It was one that not that many sets of that tire

had been sold in the Baton Rouge area.

So that helped out.

- We went to the manufacturer and asked them

where in the Baton Rouge area those tires were sold.

And that was an investigative assumption

that the offender in this case was familiar

with the Baton Rouge area.

- Our list shrunk substantially

to just a little over 100 individuals who had purchased

that size tire in the Baton Rouge area.

The list of individuals who had purchased the 14 inch tire

were divided up amongst the task force members

and each task force member had about 10 leads

to follow up on.

[calm music]

- My name is Terri Lemoine

And for most of my life, I've lived in Baton Rouge.

I'm from a little bitty town in Louisiana called Bunky.

It was pretty nice.

I had a nice family.

I was one of those people who liked to run off a lot

'cause I wanted to see

what the rest of the world looked like.

One year I ran off and went to California.

I think I was 11 years old.

I wanted to meet the Beatles

and then I had to meet the Rolling Stones

and then I was gonna meet all the other ones

that were playing at the time.

- My name's Louis Gaar and I'm from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

When I first met Terri in the 1980s,

she was working at an exotic dance club

called The Entertainers.

She was basically a stripper and a waitress.

This was some club.

There was one incident where Terri worked

that bikers used to frequent.

A biker became too rowdy

and the girls of the club all attacked him

and beat him to death.

I would frequent the club on the weekends

and after speaking to her off and on,

we developed a relationship

which turned into basically a love affair

and eventually we moved in together.

- We lived together for about a year

and then had a daughter

and we stayed together for about three more years

and then we went in different directions.

- I received a phone call from Terri

and I hadn't heard from her in many years

and she notified me that she was living in Baton Rouge

and I was living in Jackson at the time in Mississippi.

She said, why don't you come visit your daughter?

Well, I hopped on the first bus

and when the taxi let me off at the house,

the house was surrounded by police.

There was police tape everywhere

and I thought maybe I was at the wrong house.

But then that's when she informed me

that her former boyfriend was a serial killer

and had just been arrested.

I felt like I had walked into a nightmare.

[dramatic music]