Derrick Todd Lee, later titled the Baton Rouge Serial Killer by the press, was an American serial killer. He claimed the lives of at least seven women in southern Louisiana between 1998 and 2003. Though married with children and ordinary to many, Lee led a double life as a violent predator.

Born Nov. 5, 1968, in St. Francisville, Louisiana, Lee was brought into a very dysfunctional and abusive home from the get-go. He was the second of four children to Samuel Ruth and Florence Lee. Soon after Lee was born, his father left Florence.

According to WAFB, Lee’s father suffered from bipolar disorder and psychosis. Ruth ended up in a mental institution after being charged with the attempted murder of his ex-wife.

Florence later married Coleman Barrow, who raised Derrick and his three sisters. At only three years old, Lee’s stepfather would beat him as his mother watched.

Lee was placed in special education classes when his IQ was determined to be between 70 and 75. His fellow students mocked him for being in special needs classes. Lee’s schoolmates called him “retarded” and made fun of him for calling his teacher “momma” and sucking his thumb.

While his parents and peers abused him, Lee looked for ways to release his anger.

By the time Lee turned 11 years old, he had been caught peeping into the windows of girls in his neighborhood. Lee also enjoyed torturing animals, specifically dogs and cats. He found some form of freedom in becoming his neighborhood’s peeping tom and hurting animals, Lee recounted.

According to local police records, Lee was arrested on several occasions on charges of simple burglary, stalking and voyeurism. From these experiences, Lee learned how to talk his way out of bad situations. He would later use these skills to transform into a violent killer.

Lee dropped out of high school after completing eleventh grade due to his behavioral problems and bullying He continued to live with his mother, whom he became increasingly combative towards. At this point, authorities had arrested Lee for multiple offenses.

In Sept. 1988, Lee married Jacqueline Denise Sims and went on to have two children together. However, the couple divorced in 1989 after Lee abused Sims and threatened her father with a gun.

Later that year, Lee started a fistfight at a bar in St. Francisville, where police arrested him for disturbing the peace. Court documents detail how law professionals set up therapy appointments for Lee to learn how to combat his outbursts, but he never showed up to the meetings.

Lee’s first victim is thought to be Connie Warner, an accountant from Zachary, Louisiana; however, it was never proven. Between Aug. 23 and Aug. 24, 1992, Warner disappeared from her home at the Oak Shadow subdivision, where Lee also lived.

Authorities found Warner’s body on Sept. 2 near the state capital building. Unfortunately, Hurricane Andrew blew through Louisiana on Aug. 26, washing away any crucial evidence left behind at the crime scene. The autopsy report later found that Warner died of a skull fracture caused by an intense beating to the head.

According to The Advocate, the Zachary Police Department suspected Lee immediately, but a lack of physical evidence prevented them from arresting him.

In April 1998, Lee abducted Randi Mebruer from her home in Zachary while her toddler slept peacefully in one of the bedrooms. Lee then beat, raped and stabbed Mebruer to death.

The next murder took place in Sept. 2001 when Lee raped and stabbed Gina Green, a 40-year-old nurse and office worker, in Baton Rouge. She was found dead in her home on Stanford Avenue on Sept. 24. The autopsy report showed that her cause of death had been rape and strangulation.

Four months later, in Jan. 2002, Lee beat and stabbed 21-year-old Geralyn DeSoto in Addis. In May of the same year, he assaulted and raped Charlotte Pace, a recent LSU graduate, to death in Baton Rouge.

Lee’s final three known victims were Pam Kinamore, Trineisha Colomb and Carrie Yoder. Lee had raped and slit Kinamore’s throat on July 12, 2002. Colomb had been raped and beaten to death on Nov. 21, 2002, and Yoder had been raped and strangled on March 3, 2003.

Lee has seven confirmed victims, but investigators believe that there could be as many as 17. In many cases, Lee pretended to be a kind stranger asking for help. When the victims agreed, Lee would turn deadly.

Throughout Lee’s killing spree, authorities extracted physical evidence from several of the crime scenes. Although an initial FBI report found that the killer was a white male between the ages of 25 and 35, a Florida lab notified police that the forensic evidence they collected came from an African American male.

During the investigation, a woman named Dianne Alexander came to the police to report that an African American male had attempted to rape and strangle her in her home on July 9, 2002.

Alexander recalled that a man came to her home asking to use the telephone. When she agreed and opened the door, Lee attacked her. From this encounter, authorities better understood the attacker’s physical description and car.

With this, authorities looked deeper into Derrick Todd Lee.

According to court documents, authorities collected a DNA sample from Lee on May 5, 2003, and compared it against forensic evidence at the crime scenes. It was a match for Green, Pace, Kinamore, Colomb and Yoder.

When the authorities went to Lee’s home to arrest him for the murders, they found that he had fled the state of Louisiana. However, it did not take the police long to track Lee down in Atlanta and arrest him there on May 27, 2003.

Derrick Todd Lee was found guilty of the murders of Geralyn Desoto and Charlotte Pace and sentenced to death. However, Lee never reached his execution day, as he passed away from heart disease in 2016 at the age of 47.

Update on Ronald Dominique, “The Bayou Strangler”: Dominique was a convicted serial killer and rapist who murdered at least 23 men and boys in Louisiana between 1997 and 2006. Arrested in December 2006, Dominique pleaded guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder in a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to serve eight consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. Dominique was incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where he eventually died in May 2024 at the age of 60 while under hospice care.