Bizarre Crime of the Week : Investigation Discovery: Baton Rouge Serial Killer Sean Vincent Gillis Finally Goes to Trial

July 22, 2008

It looks like Baton Rouge, Louisiana serial killer Sean Vincent Gillis, now 45-years-old, is finally going to trial. After six weeks of the process of jury selection which, at times, did not seem hopeful that a jury would even be seated in Baton Rouge, Gillis's trial is finally slated to begin on Monday, July 21, 2008, although there have been indications that a delay might occur. The prosecution has indicated that it will seek the death penalty against Gillis.

Gillis's method of operation seems as varied as his victims. While he nearly always mutilated his victims' bodies and frequently tool body parts as trophies, he sometimes chose to strangle his victims but more often chose to stab them to death. He defied typical FBI serial killer profiles by crossing defined boundaries regarding age and race, and his lengthy "cooling off" periods between kills, particularly at first, challenged what FBI profilers had become accustomed to seeing in such killers and may have significantly contributed to his remaining free for so long. His victims ranged in age from 29 to 82; some of his victims were white, others were black; most were from the poor side of town, but at least one lived in an affluent area. Linked to several of his victims by DNA evidence, Gillis has confessed to a total of eight murders. In addition to the damning DNA evidence, Gillis was also tied to one of his victims by unique tire tracks that were left at the site where one victim was found.

Gillis has a long criminal history dating back to 1980 when he was charged with criminal trespass, but his pre-murder rap sheet contains mostly minor legal infractions that stemmed from traffic citations, a DUI, a possession of marijuana charge, and contempt of court charges. Police believe that he did not commit his first murder until March 21, 1994, when he broke into the small retirement home apartment of 82-year-old Ann Bryan during the early morning hours. Although his intention had been simply to rape the elderly white woman, she began screaming and would not stop until he cut her throat with the foot-long hunting knife he carried with him. As she lay bleeding to death, Gillis allegedly stabbed her repeatedly and slashed her body with the knife. Ann Bryan's murder remained unsolved for 10 years.

Nearly five years would pass before Gillis killed again. He told a reporter after his arrest that he waited so long before killing his next victim because he was "happy." During that lengthy period, he worked at a convenience store located across the street from Ann Bryan's home, and lived in a small, ranch-style house on Burgin Avenue in a quiet, middle class neighborhood about a mile from the scene of his first murder. The house belonged to Gillis's mother, where the two of them lived from the time that Gillis was a teenager. His mother, however, eventually moved to Atlanta and left the house with her son who, by the time of Ann Bryan's murder, shared it with his girlfriend.

His neighbors did not like him. In fact, many of his neighbors were afraid of him, particularly girls and women. Some considered him strange, and one neighbor said that Gillis gave him "the willies." He was once caught peeping into the bedroom window of a neighbor's house, and he has been seen on a number of occasions lying out on his front lawn barking at the moon in between yelling curses at his mother. Most people, naturally, avoided him whenever possible.

Gillis's next victim was 30-year-old Katherine Hall, a black drug addict who resided in a housing project on North Street, long known for its drug dealers, pimps, and prostitutes. When Katherine climbed into Gillis's car on a chilly night in early January 1999, he overpowered her, placed a plastic cable tie around her neck, and choked her, after which he stabbed her in the throat and in her left eye. After committing the violent carnage against the young woman, Gillis raped her and then further mutilated her body. A squirrel hunter (squirrel has long been a food source in those parts of the country) found her nude body lying face down on a road in a rural area of East Baton Rouge Parish, in front of a Dead End road sign. Investigators later theorized that Gillis's choice of dumping the woman's body in front of the sign might have been symbolic in nature.

Some four months later, toward the early part of May 1999, Gillis, while trolling for a new victim, saw Hardee Schmidt, 52-year-old mother of three, out for an early morning jog in a well-heeled neighborhood of South Baton Rouge. Schmidt was an ardent runner who had previously taken part in the Boston Marathon, and Gillis sized her up that morning as an easy target. He returned to her neighborhood frequently for the next three weeks, hoping to encounter her again. It was not until Sunday, May 30, at approximately 6:30 a.m. that Gillis was able to seize his opportunity.

He ran her down with his car and knocked the stunned, if not seriously injured, woman into a ditch. While she was dazed and confused, he got out of his car, placed a heavy-duty cable around Schmidt's neck, and began choking her. With Schmidt completely under his control, he shoved her into his car and took her to a nearby park where he raped and murdered her. After mutilating her body with a knife, he loaded her into the trunk of his car-where her nude body remained overnight-and drove home. The following day he drove her to St. James Parish, about 35 miles from Baton Rouge and on one of the routes to New Orleans, where he dumped her body into a bayou next to the highway. A bicyclist found the body the next day.

Additional Gillis victims:

• Joyce Williams, 36, killed on November 12, 1999. Gillis severed one of her legs.

• Lillian Robinson, 52, killed in January 2000. An angler found her naked body a month later.

• Marilyn Nevils, 38, killed in late October 2000. Gillis dumped her body three miles from his house, next to the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge. Someone discovered her decomposing body on Halloween.

After Gillis had murdered his sixth victim, he took a significant break from killing, for more than a year, but additional raped, strangled, and stabbed female victims began turning up in Baton Rouge. Trouble was, these were not Gillis's victims, and he soon realized that he had a competitor in town. Someone other than Gillis had murdered Gina Wilson Green in September 2001, and the following May, Charlotte Murray Pace was stabbed to death inside her home located near Louisiana State University. Two months later, Pam Kinamore was kidnapped from her home, and her body was found four days later floating in Whiskey Bay.

By August 2002, the Baton Rouge Police Department acknowledged that they had a serious problem on their hands and that they needed to do something about it. As a result, they formed a task force, but the focus of their efforts appeared to be greater with regard to solving the murders of the second serial killer at work, not on solving Gillis's crimes. The police would later learn that Gillis then began spending the greater part of his days on the Internet, keeping track of the work of his competitor. Although he did not know it yet, his challenger was a black man, 34-year-old ex-convict Derrick Todd Lee. Before he was identified and apprehended, Lee would also take the lives of Trineisha Dene Colomb and Carrie Lynn Yoder. DNA left at the scene of Colomb's murder positively linked her slaying with the murders of Green, Pace, and Kinamore. Like Gillis, Lee also crossed the predefined profiling boundaries regarding race, defying theories that serial killers rarely kill victims who are not of their own race. Police began to wonder about the odds-how likely would it be for something like this to occur twice in the same locale and in the same period.

Following Lee's arrest in May 2003, the police and the press began referring to him as the Baton Rouge serial killer, and this, of course, immediately grabbed Gillis's attention. He created a file on his computer's hard drive and named it DTL, Lee's initials, and began collecting news articles and photos about Lee's case so that he could more carefully follow that investigation. It would later be pointed out that he was not about to be outdone by Lee.

It was not until October 2003, however, when Gillis would begin killing again. His path crossed that of 45-year-old Johnnie Mae Williams, a divorced mother of three children, drug addict, and prostitute. With Williams' murder, Gillis again defied FBI profiles of serial killer traits, one being that a serial killer rarely kills anyone that he knows. In this case, Gillis and Williams had been friends, and had known each other for at least 10 years. Nonetheless, Gillis drove her to a secluded area where he beat, raped and strangled her, and then mutilated her body with a knife. This time around, however, he also posed his victim in various positions and photographed her.

Gillis murdered his eighth and final victim in February 2004 after he picked up 43-year-old Donna Bennett Johnston, also a prostitute. She was drunk when he picked her up, so it was not difficult to get her into his car. After driving her to a location near his home, Gillis looped a cable around her neck and strangled her. According to his later account of the murder, it was a quick death-it took about one and a half minutes for her to fall into unconsciousness, and a little longer for her to stop breathing.

He took off all of Johnston's clothes and placed her body on the ground where he slashed both of her breasts and cut off her left nipple. He also cut a tattoo from her right thigh, and removed her left arm at the elbow. He reportedly took the arm with him and later used the hand attached to it to masturbate. Johnston's murder was without doubt the most gruesome and sordid of Gillis's kills.

"Your friend died quickly," he wrote to Johnston's friend, Tammie Purpera, after his arrest. "She was so far gone that night that I really do not think she even knew what was happening to her. She was so drunk it only took about a minute and a half to succumb to unconsciousness and then death. Honestly, her last words were, 'I can't breathe.'"

Purpera died of complications from AIDS in August 2005, but not before she turned over Gillis's letters to the authorities.

Less than two months later, in April 2004, investigators matched a unique tire track, found at the location where Gillis had dumped Johnston's body, to Gillis's white Chevrolet Cavalier. After the police arrested him at his home with the aid of a SWAT team, detectives promptly matched a DNA profile from a swab taken from Gillis to evidence recovered from several of his victims. Upon executing a search warrant at his house, detectives seized seven saws, a hacksaw, several knives, a machete, plastic zip ties, external hard drives, 4 computers, a computer scanner, photographs of Johnnie Mae Williams' dead body, a 14-inch Bayonet, a wooden club, six Playboy pocket playmate books, and newspaper clippings about Derrick Lee's final victim, Carrie Lynn Yoder. One of his computers also contained files named Best of Snuff, Beheadings and Hangings, and Manson Murders. The subject of another file was about Russian necrophilia. Several books, both fiction and nonfiction, about serial killers were also seized from his home.

Gillis, in his earlier letters to Purpera, said that he did not really understand why he sexually mutilated his victims, and said that he really didn't "know what the hell is wrong with me....I was in a real bad place. I was pure evil that night (the night that he killed Johnston). No love, no compassion, no faith, no mercy, no hope." He blamed his actions on his lack of faith and the fact that he had "hated God for a long time."

Sean Vincent Gillis has confessed to killing and mutilating eight women, seven of whom he has been officially charged with murdering. The murder of Lillian Robinson is still being investigated even though it appears that Gillis killed her. Gillis's trial, after four years of delays, is finally set to begin despite another impassioned plea from defense attorneys for another five-month delay for additional psychological testing, some of which has been completed.

Photo credit: Baton Rouge P.D. mugshot