Derrick Todd Lee - Serial Killer Documentary

Derrick Todd Lee - Serial Killer Documentary

Speaker 1: We weren't looking for someone with horns. We were looking

for someone who looked just like anyone else. And that's

what made it so difficult.

Speaker 2: He rate to have it over south of Johnny. He

put a lot of fear in his area for a

long time.

Speaker 1: The profilers felt like he would have a demeanor that

would be very unassuming.

Speaker 3: The level of violence at some of these crime scenes,

it was just horrific.

Speaker 4: I kept having a dream she was sending me a

message that said, Mama, come get me, Mama, come get me.

Speaker 5: If he hadn't been caught, he would have continued to

kill until maybe somebody killed him in the process.

Speaker 4: Murray as a child was a little ball of energy.

We always said our first words were I will not

and you can't make me instead of Mama and daddy.

But she was just a funny, little curly headed girl

and she just never stopped running when she was small,

and the older she got, the more she did more

of the same. She finished high school when she was sixteen,

college when she was twenty, and had her MBA by

twenty two.

Speaker 5: She was maybe the youngest person to ever receive an MBA.

At LSU, she was starting her life. I mean, she

was vivacious and fun and beautiful.

Speaker 4: Murray had accepted a job in Atlanta with Deloitte in two,

a top six accounting firm, for their internal audit department,

and that's what she wanted to do. She could hardly

wait to move to Atlanta and wanted to move that summer,

but her job did not start until the fall, so

she stayed in Baton Rouge working at LSU. The last

time she was with me at this house, she was

leaving and she turned to me and smiled and did

her cheek. Did like that because she never wanted you

to kiss her on the mouth because it would mess

up her lipstick. And I kissed her on the cheek,

and it was like I took a snapshot in my

mind and I just can immediately see her entirely. It

was just a moment that just stayed with me forever.

Speaker 6: In May two thousand and two, Murray is getting ready

for a friend's wedding when there's a knock at the

door from a man she doesn't know.

Speaker 5: Murray had been apparently sitting on the couch and there

was a plate of her lunch was still sitting on

the edge of the couch. What we surmise was that

the man came to the door and he talked his

way in, and then once he got in, he attacked her.

She was raped, and she fought back, and she fought

back really hot. Murray's case was so violent. In the end,

he stabbed her eighty one times.

Speaker 4: I had asked to see the autopsy pictures and the

crime scene pictures, and I knew that was going to

be horrible, but I felt compelled. I felt like I

had to know what had happened to her. They had

asked us what color her hair was, and I thought

it was such an odd question, and then I could

see that it was because there had been so much

blood that that was all you could see. Another thing

I guess that always disturbed me was in the bathroom

where she must have tried to escape him. Were blood

drops that they could tell dropped straight down in front

of the mirror where they presume he held her to

show her what he had done to her, and then

he apparently tried to rape her while she died. You

can't help but think when did she know that no

help was coming and that she would die and that

this was the end of everything?

Speaker 7: She doped.

Speaker 5: Gina Green was forty one years old. She lived on

Stanford in a nice little house. She was a nurse,

had a lot of friends, was very social. She just

didn't show up to work one day and she was

found strangled in her bed. And there was a lot

of fear around that murder because it was so close

to campus.

Speaker 8: Apparently, Gina Green felt.

Speaker 5: That she was being watched before she was murdered and

had relayed that to her friends and I think some

family members, So that's what started at all.

Speaker 4: Murray told me they thought it was someone who had

done some work around her home. It was suspected that

he was her murderer. I was very concerned because she

was by herself a lot going to and from places.

I had purchased a firearm on her behalf, but she

did not have it before she was murdered.

Speaker 9: Similar patterns exist, but we're looking at it from years later,

from all the pieces being put into place. If you

have a person that's able to gain the confidence of

their victim, that throws off in office, so that throws

off an investigation to look for one type of person

versus the other.

Speaker 4: We knew there was no one who even came close

to having any animus against her, but we thought she'd

been attacked by a stranger. I didn't think about Gina

Green at that time.

Speaker 6: There had, in fact been another murder nearby between Gina's

and Murray's. Jerrelyn DeSoto was killed in Attis, ten miles

outside Baton Rouge.

Speaker 9: The second murder is as rude to as the first murder.

You have a person that can sit back and look

at I was able to do the first I did

the second. I haven't been captured. I haven't been caught,

so therefore why not go further with the third.

Speaker 6: Jerlyn's murder in Addis is investigated by a separate police

force to Gina's and Murray's. Neither teams are aware of

another similar case four years ago in nearby Zachary.

Speaker 2: Randy We was a single mother who lived along over

there in Oakshadows and had a child there living with her.

Speaker 5: The neighbor found her two year old son wandering around

outside by himself and knew that Randy would not have

let that happen and was concerned.

Speaker 8: And when they called the police.

Speaker 5: The police went in and she was gone, just absolutely gone.

Speaker 2: We go in shot the house and there's blood all

over the house. We've seen blood in the bedroom where

it was a struggle in the bedroom. We've seen where

somebody appears have been drugged. Throughout the house, out to

the door. We found one of her contacts in the

ground there like where she'd been beaten some more in

the bloodstain.

Speaker 6: Randy's body was never found and a killer never convicted.

Her husband was the prime suspect.

Speaker 2: There was some violence inside the relationship. He felled a

polygraph when he felt a polygraph. I wasn't convinced. You know.

My thoughts were, why would he leave his child there?

As a father myself?

Speaker 1: That bothered me a lot.

Speaker 9: The police are looking at the person who last saw

you alive, so police are naturally going to go to

a husband, a spouse, a significant other first to identify

where were you at the time we believe this crime

takes place. There are enough cases in which that person

is the person has committed the act, but a broader

thinking must take place.

Speaker 6: McDavid had another suspect in mind, a local peeping pallm

heat first encountered a year before Randy's murder, Derek Todd Lee,

and in.

Speaker 2: Nineteen ninety seven, one of our officers said, you know,

I've dealt with him a lot in the neighborhood where

he's hanging out by stop signs, has gloves in his hand,

had a knife in his pocket. He said he always

parked his vehicle across the street at the lounge and

he has a you know, kind of a cream colored

Chevrolet pickup with some type of painting on the back

of it.

Speaker 3: There was kind of this just you know, minimization of

peeping and what that meant. This is a non contact

is what I used to hear all the time. This

is a non contact, you know, thing to worry about

without realizing that. You know, again, in some respects, it's

kind of a gateway. And that's you know, a significant

number of people who start out peeping will will escalate

or graduate to more serious offenses.

Speaker 2: And I just told him, I said, I know what

you're doing. We don't get you soon or later. And

we put so much pressure on him here, we know,

with surveillance and looking at him, and he finally just

drifted off.

Speaker 6: Has Derek todd Ley drifted away from being a suspected

peeping Tom and Zachary to commit murders around nearby Baton Rouge,

and will police be able to connect him to the

deaths of Gina Green, Jarlen de Soto, and Murray Pace

before another woman is killed. Gina Green, Jerlyn de Soto,

and Murray Pace have been brutally killed in their own homes.

The police forces investigating the crimes are yet to establish

a link or identify a suspect unknown to them. Four

years prior, in nearby Zachary, a young woman, Randy Mieber,

had finished. Police suspected a local peeping tom had been involved.

Speaker 3: Derek Toddley his mom was very young when she had him.

She was seventeen. His dad seemed to have some very

difficult psychological problems as well as being violent, and he

was incarcerated after attempting to murder his ex wife.

Speaker 6: Derek's i Q was calculated to be below seventy five.

Speaker 3: There was almost equal parts nature and nurture. You know,

we have this person who is a relatively low functioning

person from an IQ standpoint. You know, he goes to school,

he's calling his teacher Mama. He's you know, developmently delayed.

He gets teased about this, and then I think you

have this abuse on top of that, and I think

that this rage he felt is something that has been

festering him for a long period of time.

Speaker 6: Derek also grew up in a racially divided nineteen seventies Louisiana.

Speaker 9: The United States has a history in which race is

a major part. That then creates in our mind a

framework of how we respond or interact with that person.

Speaker 6: There was this town.

Speaker 3: It seemed like that, even though some progress had been made,

there was a lot of segregation.

Speaker 9: And if I am raised in a place in which

that line is drawn that these people are over here,

those people are over there, that becomes my own function

of life.

Speaker 3: It becomes pretty clearly known that he has started abusing

animals at a relatively early age, and we know that

that is a huge red flag. Not everybody who becomes

a serial killer hurts animals, but there certainly is a

larger representation among individuals who are animals that going to

hurt people.

Speaker 6: At age eleven, Derek was also caught peace being into

his neighbor's windows.

Speaker 3: It was taken very lightly. Oh, he'll grow outgrow it.

Oh this is silly. You know. He likes to sneak

around as a joke. He likes to sneak around and

see other people. And we now know that varneurism can

be a gateway, you know, to some other pretty serious

sexual behaviors, because one of the things that suggests is

the development of a paraphilia or a kind of a

deviant sexual interest and going around and peeping in people's windows,

that is non consenting behavior that in and of itself

is a sexual fence. And I think at the time

we thought of that back then as again harmless. He

was arrested for peeping for I mean dozens and dozens

of times with no consequences whatsoever.

Speaker 6: Eleven years after Derek Tudley was first arrested for peeping,

police are still trying to understand who killed Gina Green,

Jeraln DeSoto and Murray.

Speaker 5: Apparently Gina Green felt that she was being watched, and

there were reports with Murray that there was somebody that

was watching outside the apartment as well.

Speaker 4: We wondered if he had noticed Murray when he killed

Gina Green, because they lived on the same street and

not very far from each other.

Speaker 2: I think he disavailed those on them where he watched

him and figured out their routines and saw what they

were doing.

Speaker 6: Six weeks after the murder of Murray Pace, the police

have a breakthrough. DNA testing confirms that Gina's murder is

the same as Murray's. But Derek Toddley isn't a suspect.

Speaker 3: He mystified law enforcement and there was a prevailing theory

at the time that serial killers were white, and.

Speaker 9: There are reasons to follow this frame of mind. The

victims are white, and usually we find crime stays in

one's race. You put those together. Serial murders traditionally are

white persons. That you have the wrong person being searched for.

Speaker 6: In this case, with no leads in their search for

the killer, the local police forces asked the FBI for help.

Speaker 1: One of the resources that the state and local law

enforcement were really interested in was our profiling unit from Quantico.

They wanted them to weigh in and be able to

tell them what type of unknown offender we were looking for.

And so if we brought in the profilers and they

basically created a profile of an unknown offender. They did

that by reviewing the crime scenes extensively, talking to the

detectives that were looking for evidence of the offender's behavior

prior to the incident. During the actual crime, and also

any kind of post offense behavior they may have engaged

in to get away with the crime and things like that.

Speaker 6: Behavioral Unit releases a criminal profile of Murray and Gina's murderer.

Speaker 1: The profilers felt like the attacks were not what we

would classify as a blitz attack, which are surprise attacks.

The profilers felt like there would have to be some

type of interaction that occurred before these attacks actually occurred.

He would have a demeanor that would be very unassuming

and that would not trigger people to think that he

was suspicious in any way, shape or form until.

Speaker 7: It was too late.

Speaker 6: Profilers also surmised that the offender would be someone who

didn't take rejection, well.

Speaker 3: Any hint of resistance. When he goes in and he

completely I think escalates and the level of violence as

some of these crime scenes was just horrific, clearly indicating

this wasn't just about sex. It was about power, rage, domination,

and control. There was so much violence associated with his

crimes that I think that rage completely took over him

when he was in no situations.

Speaker 5: He thought he was going to easily rape Murray, and

then when she fought back, he couldn't take the rejection

or that's our theory, and then he just lost it

and stabbed her eighty one times.

Speaker 1: The profilers felt like this unknown offender was following the

investigation in the media, and any significant releases in the

media they felt like would cause him a great degree

of distress and or anger.

Speaker 9: You can imagine for several months he's thinking, Hm, I'm

not hearing about that they're looking for someone with my characteristics. Wow,

this could give someone a pass to say I can

do more criminal activity.

Speaker 3: He would have been aware that people were hearing about

a repeat offender in the community. But I also feel

like there was this compulsive nature in him that was very,

very strong and that overrode any real sense of danger.

Speaker 9: Now, it's very interesting, even though these warning signs by

the police and public safety are saying that this person

is out there, that he stays relatively in the same area.

This again is a factor of maybe there was something

very much rooted in his place where he grew up,

his environment where he grew up, and wanting to do

something about this rage or these feelings that he has

in his mind has him stay in this area to

continue to commit these crimes.

Speaker 6: The day after the DNA breakthrough, the killer appears to

strike again. This time the victim survives.

Speaker 5: Diane Alexander was a nurse that lived in Brobridge and

she was in the house and somebody knocked at the door,

and he asked if she knew someone, and he gave

her a name.

Speaker 8: She said, no, I don't know him.

Speaker 5: He said, well, ask your husband, and she said, well,

you know, I'm not married, and that's when he flipped.

Speaker 8: That's when he pushed his way in the door.

Speaker 5: He took a phone cord and cut part of it

and was about to strangle her with the phone cord

when he heard her son driving up the gravel road,

and when that happened, he took off.

Speaker 1: The profilers felt like this unown offender had a great

deal of impulsivity, which is essentially not caring about the

outcomes of their action. The need is so great they

don't care about what happens afterwards, and based upon that,

they felt like his impulsivity would have made him come

into contact with law enforcement at some point prior, including

various things with breaking and entering and also potentially peeping

in things like that.

Speaker 6: Diane Alexander worked with the police to generate a sketch

of the suspect. This time, the suspect bears a resemblance

to Derek Toddley, but todd Lee is unknown to local police.

Three days later, a fifth woman is murdered, Pam Kinnemore.

Speaker 5: Pam was forty four years old, again like all of

these women, beautiful, successful, independent women. She lived out on

Briarwood and Baton Rouge. That night she was home alone.

The bathwater was run and she she had everything laid

out for a bath and so I don't know if

she had been in it or was about to when

he came in and she was just gone. The only

thing that was left behind was some blood spots, particularly

on a living room rug.

Speaker 6: Her body was later found dumped in Marshland under an

interstate thirty five miles from Baton Rouge.

Speaker 5: She had been left for three days in the hot

Louisiana sun, so she had decomposed somewhat, but there was

still DNA on her body.

Speaker 8: He had raped her and the DNA was there.

Speaker 5: When the DNA that was on the first two victims

matched the DNA that was on Pam.

Speaker 6: It just changed everything.

Speaker 8: We had a serial killer.

Speaker 4: It opened the door to a world. It's a hot

or darker, sharper edge place than you ever imagine the

world to be. Is never ever the same.

Speaker 6: Pam Kinnemore's decomposing body has been found. Police quickly have

a breakthrough. A truck driver claims he'd seen a naked

woman in the passenger seat of a white pickup truck

on the day Pam Kinnemore was abducted. He believes the

pickup was being driven by a white male, and.

Speaker 8: So that just stuck. That just that became the number

one suspect.

Speaker 5: You know, that was the description that everyone will looked

for for a very long time.

Speaker 3: I think they had in their mind who this person is,

and unfortunately, I think that clouded their judgment and caused

them to ignore, you know, some of the clues that

were there.

Speaker 4: I remember hearing on the news that there was one

man who wrote I am not the serial killer on

the side of his white truck. That was the clue

to nowhere, Absolutely the clue to nowhere. But confusion.

Speaker 5: Everybody was talking about it all the time, and people

were taking self defense classes. They were, you know, they

were learning how to shoot guns, making sure they had mace.

Speaker 8: Everybody was taking extraordinary measures.

Speaker 6: And for good reason. With Pam Kinnimore's murder, the killer

had upped the ante.

Speaker 5: That's when he started actually removing people, removing the women

before killing them. He's picking different women in different jurisdictions,

He's killing them in different ways.

Speaker 8: So how do you search for somebody like that?

Speaker 5: How do you know when the next where he's going

to hit next, and how he's going to hit next.

Speaker 6: The eyewitness report means police are focusing their search on

a white suspect. Another factor is how the victim seemed

willing to open the door to their killer.

Speaker 9: I think it's a demeanor. I think it's a presentation

that allows to put people at comfort levels that allow

them to allow guards to go down a step or

two and move forward. But I think opportunity applied with

his charm coming together, his looks coming together, his youthfulness

at the time coming together, that make for these crimes

to take place.

Speaker 1: That's what made it so difficult. We were not looking

for someone that had some kind of massive deformity that

looked like a demon or a vampire. We're looking for

someone who's part of society. The profile mentions that there's

a good chance that he would live with other people,

potentially a pair of more. In that respect, his life

could be more or less normal from the outside, but.

Speaker 6: On the inside, Derek Toddley's life is anything but normal.

His wife, mister, and sister have all filed charges of

domestic violence and battery against him. So far, every victim

of the Baton Rouge serial killer has been white. Until

November twenty one, two thousand and two.

Speaker 5: Trenisia Denay Colombe had recently lost her mother and was

grief stricken. She visited her mother's grave every day and

she was.

Speaker 8: Out there alone.

Speaker 5: A hunter found her just discarded in the brush. She

had been beaten badly about her face and again she.

Speaker 8: Was raped as well.

Speaker 6: For David McDavid, Dnay's murder gives him another reason to

suspect Derek Toddley. He remembers a rainy night in nineteen

ninety three when two kids were attacked in a graveyard

in Zachary.

Speaker 2: There was a thing around Zachary go in the graveyard

make out so and they were doing that in the

graveyard and suspect come across from the area of the

sub event into the graveyard. Had a big old cane

blade on it and saw them in the car and

began hacking them over with the cane blade. Luckily, one

of our police officers saw the dome light on the

car and drove in there and he ran off to

the north.

Speaker 6: Both victims survived and worked with police.

Speaker 7: To generate a sketch of the assailant's.

Speaker 2: Been known us these statue of limitations. I ran out

on that case when we went to get to Warren's

and I was denied on that case.

Speaker 6: But the police investigating the murders of Gina Jerrelyn, Murray, Pam,

and Trey Niesha are not aware of this historic case

in Zachary.

Speaker 2: I think he was just elusive. Nobody knew really what

was going on, you know. That's so something I learned

throughout the case was, you know, try to have open

mind and work together because you never know who holds

that piece of pie. I think the problem was we

wouldn't really share an information like we should.

Speaker 6: With five murdered women. A task force of local, state,

and federal agencies continue their desperate search. Over twenty thousand

tips are pouring in, over one thousand men are swabbed.

Everyone in Louisiana is on the lookout for an elusive

white killer in a white truck.

Speaker 2: You had people calling in tips. There were asked you

calling tips either abusive boyfriend who drove a white truck

or men who might have been of some kind of

violence or domestic violence cases involving females in that and

it was a wide net.

Speaker 9: This is where police work is essential. The human element

has to be involved in deciding how many of these

leads are you going to look into. With that attention,

you gain the ability to solve this crime, but you

also gained the difficulty of separating the good from the

bad related to the case.

Speaker 8: Oh, it went on forever.

Speaker 5: Every friday we thought we had our guy was like, Okay,

this guy drives a wide pickup truck. He's got a

bad history of domestic violence.

Speaker 6: Or this or that. His behavior is very.

Speaker 5: Strange, and the people around him think he's the serial killer.

And then there would be, you know, somebody else would

be killed, and it was just it was horrendous.

Speaker 1: Sometime in probably the late winter early spring of two

thousand and three, we had a meeting with members from

the Acadiana Crime Lab and they told us about a

company in Florida that told them they could take a

DNA sample and determine essentially the racial or geographic region

where they came from. That would help with the determining race.

Speaker 6: It's cutting edge science, but as yet to be fully vetted.

Speaker 1: We ended up making a decision. We obtained samples from

various members of the task force, various investigators, and we

sent those blind samples, unmarked samples down to the company

and after a short time, they came back and they

nailed every single person we had sent them with regard

to their potential racial characteristics.

Speaker 6: The lab was then sent the DNA of the unknown killer.

They identified him as African American.

Speaker 1: I was surprised, but only for a short time. It

basically gave an explanation to me as to why all

the people and all the leads we've been following up

on or really not coming to anything, because most of

those were for Caucasian males.

Speaker 9: He probably does take a moment of pause to say, Okay,

something is happening with this case, that's moving this case

closer to me, But I still have this urge inside

of me to do these criminal activities. And so he

has to decide and he keeps going with this here.

So that's where we have to believe that the urge

is stronger than rationale.

Speaker 6: After a year and a half long killing spree, the

FBI are closing in on their prime suspect, Cutting edge

DNA testing has confirmed the suspect as African American, and

David McDavid is raising his suspicions about Derek Toddley, the

suspected graveyard attacker and Peeping Tom who vanished from near

by Zachary a few years before the murders.

Speaker 2: We went back and looked at some of the cases

that he was involved in. If you go back and look,

there was a burglery across the street in nineteen ninety two.

The homeowner came home and called him in the house

and asked him what he was doing there. He claimed

he was looking for somebody. And in nineteen ninety three

case of the two kids in the graveyard come up,

about his seventh the peep and Domond in the neighborhood,

and the nineteen ninety eight we had the murder of

Randy Meieber. So that kind of told us then that,

you know, Derek Tyley was our guy.

Speaker 6: We were looking at him disturbing details soon come to

light about his life.

Speaker 3: One of the things we start seeing among people who

become serial killers later is in adolescence, what we call

this adolescent hypersexuality. It means there becomes this compulsive nature

to their sexuality. It becomes a coping mechanism for them,

It becomes a drive for them. So it's almost like

it takes a life of his own, and that person

feels a need to go out and peep or do

whatever things, particularly when they're under stress or they have

some kind of problem in their environment. And we do

know that that Derek Todd Lee oftentimes there was a

pretty short period of time between him getting fired for jobs,

for example, or having arguments and there being these these murders.

Speaker 6: With the net closing, Another woman is murdered. Carrie Yoder

was an l student.

Speaker 5: She was actually getting her PhD and I think in

marine biology. She lived in a little house close to campus.

I believe she just unloaded groceries and brought her groceries in,

and I don't know if he followed her in or

somehow got into her house and.

Speaker 8: Took her again. She just disappeared. They found her body

like ten days later. Again by Whiskey Bay.

Speaker 6: Another month passes, then on May fifth, police obtain a

court order to swab Derek todd Lee for DNA.

Speaker 1: I believe Derek todd Lee's biggest mistake was leaving his

DNA at the crime scenes. Maybe he didn't know much

about it, He wasn't sophisticated enough to know about it.

Speaker 2: Well, what happened was is we got our DNA. We

know we'd get got a sign by He asked me

and another officer to do the vailance on his house

and Derek Tylly was back and forth, He's running around

down We finally called him back at the house and

they brought him inside. Look we got you saphena, showed

it to him, got h swabbed and you know, we

submitted it to the crime lab.

Speaker 6: With the DNA sample taken. McDavid has to wait for

days to find out if Derek Toddley is the killer.

Speaker 2: Think it was on a Sunday I just got through

cutting grass at my house and got a call from

the Task Force said, look, we need you down here. Well,

what's going on? Well, we'll tell you when you get

down him.

Speaker 1: I received a call, I believe on a Sunday afternoon,

UH from the command post, and I was told that

the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab had matched a swab

with our unknown offender's DNA profile.

Speaker 2: When I walked in, you had all these dignitaries here,

bunch investigators there, high ranking officials, and they said, well,

the all DNA just sobbed the Silver Killer case, which

was a big relief.

Speaker 1: When I heard that there had been a match, I

was elated, but I also understood that there was more

work to do, and that was locating him and placing

him under arrest.

Speaker 2: I said, oh, I said, y'all a got to catch him.

If he knows that you are after ing, which he

probably does, I said, he's about he's struggling, he's about

to kill again.

Speaker 1: I spent that evening dictating an affidavit for a fugitive

arrest warrant, and that was based on the fact that

we had probable cause that he had fled from Louisiana

to avoid being prosecuted for these crimes.

Speaker 6: Jeff's fears were correct. Derek Toddley tries to evade arrest.

Speaker 1: My biggest concern after we realized that he had fled

the state of Louisiana is that he may have killed

someone else in another state. The time factor was still

there because now I knew he was on the run,

knowing that we were going to eventually find out, and

it was a whole matter of him trying to stay

away from us as much as he possibly could.

Speaker 2: They asked us to come on board help try to

track him down. Once of Chicago came back and went

to Atlanta, was setting up an apartment over there. To me,

the heat was on him here, so he had to

go somewhere else. He was about to, you know, start

killing it again. I had heard that, you know, he'd

been arrested. If I heard it on the news or

I got a phone call, I was relieved.

Speaker 1: We were all a lady when we found out that

Derek Tiddley had been arrested in Atlanta, and we knew

that it be come hell or high water, he was

going to be coming back to Louisiana to face justice

for what he had done.

Speaker 4: I was so shocked that he looked so ordinary. Do

you'd think someone who could do that kind of thing

would be marked in some way, you know, it would

have some sort of scarlet letter that would identify them,

but no, they don't. They don't at all.

Speaker 6: In custody, Derrick Toddley doesn't confess to his crimes or

explain how he chose his victims. Police plan to try

him separately for each of the seven murders.

Speaker 3: I think that the police were willing to try him

for every single of those seven until they got the

death penalty.

Speaker 5: The benefit of going with one case is that if

something goes wrong, this monster is never going to be

on the street again, because we'll indict the next one,

and then we'll indict the next one. We will always

have a safety net.

Speaker 6: Todd Lee first faces trial for the murder of Jerlynd

de Soto.

Speaker 5: The charge in Jerlynd De Soto's case was second gree

murder and he was found guilty as charged.

Speaker 6: He receives a life sentence. The trial for the murder

of Charlotte Murray Pace is next.

Speaker 5: The trial was long, it was I think five weeks.

Speaker 8: The physical evidence was strong. Evidence was really strong, and

the jury didn't have a problem with it.

Speaker 5: They came back quickly with a verdict of guilty, and

then we did the penalty phase and they found that

the appropriate penalty was the death penalty. He never confessed,

he never showed a bit of remorse. He was just

just kind of like a blank slate over there.

Speaker 4: I remember saying, well, we finally come to the end

of it, and I remember thinking, we just the gun

that had just that was nowhere near the end. In

a way, we were as imprisoned as he was.

Speaker 6: But on January twenty first, twenty sixteen, the case meets

its ultimate end. Derek Toddley dies of heart disease.

Speaker 5: So the victims are just left with this open wound

and being stuck in this perpetual, incomplete hell.

Speaker 4: It was almost like you couldn't almost as much as

you couldn't imagine the murders, you couldn't imagine that he

had died. You know, he lives his life to the

end and he never faces the executioner.

Speaker 2: Well, this is what I tell everybody. The real true

judge has got him now, and he got judged by God,

and that's who ultimately made the sentence for him. I

think he's in hell, to be honest with you. You

know what he did and how he did it was

just truly violent.

Speaker 5: He killed a total of seven victims that we can

prove through DNA. Before this happened, I didn't worry if

my back door locked.

Speaker 8: I felt safe in Baton Rouge. I felt secure.

Speaker 5: And all of a sudden, that safe feeling is gone.

So I think that that was taken away by Derreck Toddley,

And you know, I don't know that it ever returns.

Speaker 4: I haven't slept in a bed in twenty years. I

kept coming home and got in the bed that used

to be her bed, and I kept having a dream

that she was on the autopsy table, covered with a sheet,

and of course she couldn't move or anything, but somehow

she was sending me a message that said, Mama, come

get me.

Speaker 6: Mama, come get me.

Speaker 4: And I couldn't sleep in there anymore. So I sleep

on the sofa with the TV on, so I don't

ever wake up in the dark without a voice somewhere.

Murder challenges everything you ever thought, you believed, every assumption

you ever had. It is an almost unsurvivable loss.

Speaker 7: You would you