Fred dinenage (narrates): February 2004,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana United States,
43-year-old sex worker Donna Bennett johnston
was walking the streets looking for business.
The friendly man driving a white Chevy cavalier seemed
like a safe customer.
He'd stalked this victim, he'd got his mind set on her.
The man was 41-year-old Sean Vincent gillis,
and he was out hunting.
Because the minute he saw the women that he killed,
to him they were already dead in his mind.
But what he was to do to her
in the wake of the killing is utterly grotesque.
He raped her, he beat her, he cut off her arm.
And then he saw a tattoo on her thigh,
so he cut out the tattoo.
This quiet shy ordinary man lived a double life,
devoted partner by day, monster by night.
And the policeman looked at me and said, "didn't you know?
"You're living with a serial killer."
And I basically laughed out loud and said,
"boy, do you have the wrong house?"
For ten years gillis indulged his depraved sexual needs
and got away with it.
He wasn't clever, he wasn't careful.
He discarded his victims like garbage
and enjoyed every minute of it.
Making Sean Vincent gillis one of the world's most evil killers.
(Theme music)
1994, Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
32-year-old Sean Vincent gillis
was a nerdy geek who loved computers and all things Star Trek.
He told me he had never had any past relationships.
He had had female friends, but that was as far as it ever went.
For gillis finding a girlfriend wasn't enough.
He had darker desires and started to explore them,
beginning with an easy target.
This first murder is his warm-up murder.
This is the one where he knows
he has that distinct advantage over his victim.
He knows that she's elderly, that she's quite vulnerable,
that she's quite easily overpowered.
And this is the one that is the gateway
to the murders that he goes on to commit.
Over the next five years he honed his skills
and found the information he needed on the dark web.
Sean began to understand himself a little bit more
and he began to understand
what he actually wanted from killing,
and it wasn't killing.
It was he wanted the dead bodies of women.
And Sean Vincent gillis knew
where he could find women to prey on.
It would take police a couple of more murders
before they started connecting everything,
and realising, we have a serial killer,
operating in Baton Rouge.
With every victim the depth of his depravity escalated.
So, you now have a man who's a rapist,
a murderer, a necrophile, and a cannibal,
all in this inconsequential little man
called Sean gillis,
living with his partner, in a house in Baton Rouge.
This killer's story begins on June 24th, 1962.
Sean Vincent gillis was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
to Yvonne and Norman gillis.
When he was very young, maybe three years old,
his father tried to kill him and his mother.
Yvonne left Norman when this happened
and became a single mother.
And she raised Sean, by herself,
from the time he was three years old on.
In fact, Norman spent a great part of his life
in mental institutions
and had almost no impact on Sean gillis's early years.
It was Yvonne, his mother, that was the decisive influence.
His father is a figure of fear.
He's somebody who is not giving those feelings of safety
and stability and security,
those are things that he gets from his mother.
And the centrality of his mother in those early years of his life,
becomes very, very important in terms of his later relationships,
and in terms of his crimes.
She worked at a department store in Baton Rouge.
She worked for channel 2, a television station here.
And she doted on her son.
She spoiled him.
She thought he was the best baby in the world.
And as he grew, she thought he was really smart,
although his teachers thought he was maybe average intelligence.
He was known to smoke marijuana with his friends.
But neighbours reported that sometimes he would go out
in the middle of the night, in the front yard
or the backyard and be howling like a wolf.
He had some very strange behaviours, even as a teenager.
But the thing was that he was
so pre-occupied by his mother,
that he really had no girlfriends.
He went through his adolescence
and early 20s barely having a girlfriend.
I mean, I think he might've wanted a girlfriend,
but I don't think he knew what to do to get one.
Sean was like a nerd.
He was a geek.
He loved computers.
He loved things like Star Trek, Nintendo.
Even early on when computers were just coming out,
he was already studying them and learning how to operate them,
and learning that computers could be used to fulfil
your fantasies or whatever.
He used the computers for pornography long
before most people did.
In 1991 when gillis was 29 years old,
his mother accepted a new job in Atlanta Georgia.
His mother asks him to go with her and he refuses.
And just looking at this,
what you've got here is a petulant teenager,
"I'm not gonna go."
And I think he believes that by refusing to go,
she won't go.
But, of course, she does.
She goes and she takes up this new job,
but she sends him money
so that he can keep up payments on the house,
she provides for him.
But he would have taken it almost as a kind of bereavement,
as a kind of grief because he's been left on his own,
he sees himself as this abandoned child.
He's been fascinated by computers since he was very young,
early days of the Internet.
Of course, he's addicted to pornography,
it's almost goes without saying.
In 1994 gillis met a young woman
who was the night shift manager
at a local convenience store called Terri lemoine.
My first impression of Sean was comfortable, safe.
Someone you would want to visit or see every day, you know?
Someone who could be your friend, easily.
We spent at least six hours talking all-night long
in that convenience store.
We liked the same books, we liked the same movies,
we liked the same actors.
We got along fine.
Sean and Terri's relationship flourished.
The store where Terri worked nights
was only a short walk from Sean's house and down the road
from a retirement community called st James place.
One night gillis was walking through the grounds
of the facility's residential area and stopped
at the home of 82-year-old Ann Bryan.
She left her door cracked a little bit
in the retirement home
so that the nurse could come in if she needed to that night
and bring in medication for her.
He decides he's gonna kill her.
Not just kill her, but to absolutely destroy this elderly lady.
I mean, he stabs her 47 times,
she has got wounds all over her body.
Her throat is cut.
It is a grotesque killing.
For a first kill of a serial killer,
this was a frenzied attack,
it was brutal, it was bloody.
And I think Sean surprised himself
with how gruesome that scene got
and what he was capable of.
No one knew that it was Sean gillis
that had killed her.
There was no connection between gillis and Ann.
He wasn't the gardener or, you know,
somebody who came around to do the bit of clearing up.
As far as anyone knew, there was no connection whatever.
Six months after killing Ann, Terri and Sean moved in together.
Sean was the...
Probably one of the best kind of boyfriends you could have.
He was polite, he was nice.
He always thought of you first.
And Sean was gonna be the person
I was gonna spend the rest of my life with.
1994 Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
Sean Vincent gillis
and his girlfriend Terri lemoine settled
into their new life together living in Sean's childhood home.
Sean was a quiet,
geeky little guy.
He didn't...
He never made loud noises, he never yelled.
He stayed at home a lot.
Sean was the type of person that you could leave your kids with.
That was the type of person he came across as.
He could be your babysitter and you'd trust him.
When he's in this relationship,
he is essentially trying to be the perfect boyfriend.
He is on his best behaviour, he wants her approval,
he wants her validation.
He has essentially replaced his mother with her.
One of Sean's main loves was his computer.
Sean would get on his computer
from the time he woke up in the morning
and way into the night would stay on that computer.
I usually went to bed by myself.
Sometimes I woke up by myself because Sean was on his computer.
Terri secured Sean a day job at the same store
where she worked nights.
Well, I wanted him to not rely
on his mother so much and to make his own money,
pay his own bills, because she paid all the bills.
She paid the electric bill, everything at the house.
And I wanted him to kind of learn how to fend for himself,
how to take care of himself.
I mean, he was a man by then, you know.
Gillis lasted three weeks in his new job, then quit.
He pretty much wanted to stay on his own.
And you had to interact with people
and Sean didn't like interacting with people.
That would mean you have to talk to them,
and Sean didn't like talking not to other people.
He could sit there and carry on a wonderful conversation
and talk your head off.
But to talk to someone he didn't know,
that wasn't something he was good at.
For the next five years Sean and Terri
appeared to live happily ever after.
His girlfriend works the night shift,
so this gives him these periods of time
when he is on his own,
and he starts driving around at night,
looking for victims.
He's ruminating, he's thinking.
He is unsupervised for the first time in his life.
And I think this comes as quite a surprise to him.
Nobody's checking up on him,
he has all of these hours to play with.
He began to practice
using an industrial zip tie,
which is a very big plastic tie.
And when you pull it it's tight and it locks,
and you can't unlock it.
And he chose that as his weapon of death
and began practising with it.
And so, for those five years,
he sunk deeper and deeper into depravity
and began honing his skills,
so that when he began killing again, he was ready.
On the night of January 4th, 1999,
30-year-old sex worker Katherine hall
was working the streets in north Baton Rouge.
And Sean gillis drove up beside her
and offered her money,
and she got into his vehicle.
Sean took her to a deserted area on river road,
and he put a zip tie around her neck.
When she realised what was happening,
she fought him, and she jumped out of the car,
and she ran.
And he caught up with her and he began stabbing her.
He stabbed her 16 times peri-mortem,
and another 21 times after she was gone.
She was located in the southeast part of the parish,
in a kind of a rural area,
but a new subdivision development was taking place.
Katherine's remains were left nude.
None of her personal items were located there.
And she had been laid out in a kind of a posed position
beneath a dead-end sign.
The thing that was relevant to him
was the connection with a dead female body.
Horrifying though it may be to say,
what really made gillis's juices flow
was a possibility of sex with a dead female body.
Where did that come from?
I can't say.
All I can say is that it's one of the few cases
I've come across in which this is a truly necrophiliac tendency.
Four months later in may, gillis was again out driving.
He saw 52-year-old hardee moseley schmidt.
She was a well-to-do mother of three.
She was married to an attorney.
She was from a prominent Baton Rouge family.
Her father was a judge in Baton Rouge.
And every morning hardee would take a jog.
She loved exercise and she loved jogging
through her beautiful neighbourhood.
On the morning of may 30th gillis went out looking for her.
And when Sean saw her,
he struck her with his vehicle and knocked her into a ditch.
He jumped out of his car, he grabbed the zip tie,
and he strangled her right there,
and put her in the trunk of his vehicle.
Gillis drove the dead body to a park in Baton Rouge.
After Sean finished raping hardee,
he put her back in the trunk of the car
and he went to go pick his girlfriend up from work
at the convenience store.
I remember a smell in the car and asked him what it was.
And he said he had hit an animal on the way to pick me up.
And that was probably the the smell of the animal
was still on the tyres coming into the car.
And I was so tired from getting off of work
that I told him, "just please clean the car.
"I'm going to bed." And I didn't think about it again.
A few days later near a bayou south of Baton Rouge,
the body of hardee moseley schmidt was found.
So, these are places
that are really not of any use to anybody,
they are these in-between spaces
that don't appear to have a function.
And that is how he saw his victims.
He saw them as having expired.
I've got what I wanted from you, you don't serve any purpose anymore,
like the area in which I'm dumping you.
November 12th, 1999, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Six months after killing hardee moseley schmidt,
Sean Vincent gillis was hunting down his next target.
It really isn't until his fourth victim,
a girl called Joyce Williams,
that the full extent
of gillis's extraordinary
tendencies begins to become clear.
It may sound extraordinary to hear,
but gillis was becoming,
and probably had by now become,
a proper fully fledged necrophiliac.
He saw sexual relationships with dead women
as more important than any
kind of sexual relationship with a live one.
36-year-old Joyce Williams was a drug addict
who had turned to sex work to feed her habit.
On the night of November 12th, she got in the car with gillis.
And they were driving and listening
to the music and singing.
And Joyce made the comment to him that,
"if I wasn't with anyone else,
"I'd be feeling nervous right now."
And Sean said, you know, to himself,
he thought, "hmm, you have no idea."
Gillis drove to a remote area in west Baton Rouge
and stopped by a sugarcane field.
And anybody that's ever lived in Louisiana knows,
if you walk through a sugarcane field,
sound is muted.
You can't hear anything.
So, this was the perfect place for Sean to bring her.
Gillis strangled Joyce to death.
He put her back into the vehicle,
and Joyce was the first victim
that he brought back to the house he shared with Terri.
Sean described how beautiful Joyce's legs were.
He became very obsessed with her legs
and began removing her legs.
He utilised a knife and a hacksaw
to begin dismembering Joyce.
After Sean dismembered Joyce Williams' body,
he delved into cannibalism for the first time
and decided to see what she tasted like.
Sean cleaned up quickly
putting the dismembered remains of Joyce
into large plastic bags
and stuffed them in the trunk of his car.
He then went to pick Terri up at work.
He dropped Terri at home,
then drove to a levee and dumped Joyce's body.
He didn't distribute them across state lines,
he wanted them to be found.
But that's his signature.
He wanted people to know what he'd done.
And then even more terrifying, he wanted to get away with it.
In October 2000, Sean was driving through Lafayette
when he saw 38-year-old Marilyn nevils.
He hadn't planned to kill that night,
he just couldn't help himself.
After Sean killed Marilyn nevils in October of 2000,
he stopped killing for a while.
He would not kill again for almost three years.
The reason Sean stopped killing was because another serial killer
was operating in Baton Rouge,
and he began to get a lot more media coverage
and cause a lot of terror in the city of Baton Rouge
and its surrounding areas.
The other killer was Derrick Todd Lee,
a predator who targeted women in their homes.
There's no doubt at all
that gillis became increasingly obsessed
with Derrick Todd Lee,
this other serial killer operating in Baton Rouge
at the same time as gillis.
And gillis kept a file on him in his computer,
he was very interested indeed.
I've always seen that as a kind of competitiveness.
I think he thought, "well.
I'm gonna be every bit as dangerous, and as difficult,
and as frightening as Derrick Todd Lee."
On the 27th of may 2003 Derrick Todd Lee
was arrested and Sean Vincent gillis
started thinking about killing again.
By October he was on the prowl in north Baton Rouge
when he saw 45-year-old jonny Mae Williams.
He was friends with Johnnie Mae.
They liked each other.
He had met Johnnie Mae years before,
and she cleaned his house for him.
They partied together.
They smoked weed together.
He even spent one Thanksgiving at Johnnie Mae's house
with her family.
And when his friend, Johnnie Mae,
got into his vehicle, they drove around for a while.
And he drove her to an area
behind Mason's grill,
which is a popular restaurant in Baton Rouge.
And it's a secluded field with woods around it,
right behind the restaurant.
And there he beat her, he stabbed her,
he mutilated her body,
and he also cut off her hands.
In February 2004, gillis struck again.
He picked up 43-year-old Donna Bennett johnston
in north Baton Rouge.
Donna was a sex worker and an addict.
She was also a mother to five children.
Sean took Donna to a deserted area
off of scenic highway.
He raped her, he beat her, he cut off her arm.
And then he saw a tattoo on her thigh,
so he cut out the tattoo.
Gillis posed Donna's mutilated body
and photographed the scene.
He then placed her in the trunk of his car
and continued taking pictures.
He drove off and tossed the tattooed flesh
from Donna's body out of the car window.
He had wrapped her arm in a bloody towel,
and he threw that in a ditch.
So, he got rid of Donna's body parts
all over in different areas around Baton Rouge.
I think he wanted recognition
for his handy work.
I don't think he was ashamed of it.
I also don't think that he thought he would get caught.
Because by now, and we're in February 2004,
he's killed eight women, ruthlessly.
He's attacked their bodies.
He has done everything he can...
To destroy their lives
and what anyone would remember of them.
2004, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
On February 26th the mutilated body of Donna Bennett johnston was found.
Donna Bennett johnston had helped the police numerous times
over the years as a police informant.
So, when the police found her, they knew who she was,
and they were shocked to see
the condition of her body,
and what this killer had done to her.
DNA evidence connected the murder of Donna Bennett johnston
to Katherine hall and jonny Mae Williams.
Police had to face the fact that Baton Rouge
had another serial killer.
In march 2004 a task force was formed.
There was a lot of going back through the evidence,
going back through the cold cases,
reviewing witness statements,
evidence that had been recovered
and looking at the crime scene photographs trying
to determine whom we were looking for.
While processing the crime scene of Donna Bennett johnston,
police focused on a tyre imprint left at the scene.
A tyre casting was obtained of that.
And research was done with local tyre dealerships,
which identified that potentially
that that tread pattern matched a goodyear aquatred 3 tyre.
The Louisiana police take great interest
in this tyre track because it's a very rare one.
Good old fashioned police work.
They identify the fact that only 90
of these tyres have been sold in Louisiana,
and they go through meticulously tracking
whose tyres they were.
And that's how they begin to find the trail
that leads them to Sean Vincent gillis's door.
I had just gotten off of work,
and they wanted to bring Sean down
to the station to talk to him.
They were interviewing everyone that had a Chevy cavalier
because evidently tyre tracks
were found at one of the crime scenes.
Gillis agreed to go to the police station
for questioning.
Sean said, I want Terri to know
where I'm at in case it gets dark and I'm not back home.
I thought that was very interesting that he was worried
about not coming back home.
As we're walking out the residence and standing in the driveway,
talking to Sean for a minute, he said,
"do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?"
Sean dropped a cigarette on his driveway,
extinguished it with his foot and said,
"let's go get this shit over with."
And right then I said, "man, this is the guy."
At the police station gillis voluntarily provided a DNA swab.
They questioned him about the tyre tracks
at the Donna Bennett johnston crime scene.
Gillis had placed himself at the crime scene
with an unconvincing story
of needing to relieve himself.
Later that afternoon,
Sean was returned back to his residence
once we had all the surveillance in place,
his vehicle had been towed to the state police crime lab
while we continued to wait for his DNA profile
to be obtained by the crime lab.
Like I said, normally he never got off his computer.
He actually turned the computer off and sat
and watched TV with me that evening.
And came to bed the same time I did.
"You're actually spending the evening with me."
I said, "so, what did you do?"
The police waited anxiously for the DNA results
from the crime lab.
The buccal swab,
which had been obtained from Sean gillis
produced a DNA profile,
which matched the profiles left
at the crime scenes of Katherine hall,
Johnnie Mae Williams, and Donna Bennett johnston.
And about the same time...
That we laid our head down on the pillow in the bed,
that's when the police broke through the door
and arrested him.
When they told me they'd come to arrest a serial killer,
I laughed at them.
I actually laughed out loud and said,
"boy, have you got the wrong house?"
Sean was brought back
to the police station accompanied by Terri.
And I asked him straight up,
"did you do everything they're telling me that you did?"
And this geeky little guy
that I had just adored all these years
just kind of hung his head
and turned it to the side and looked at me
with those big blue eyes and said,
"yeah, honey bunny, I did all that."
And...
I turned around and left.
He was very forthcoming,
but he wanted to tell his story also too.
You know, he wanted to enjoy the limelight,
describing everything he had done.
As the police sat there and listened to him,
recount everything he had done,
he knew details of those murders
that had not been released to the public.
And so while they thought they were arresting him
for three murders,
he confessed to eight.
The next day prior to interviewing Sean,
we had contacted the public defender's office,
requested a public defender come,
and speak with Sean just to make sure Sean understood
that he had the right to remain silent.
He just keeps talking and goes on and on.
And the confession tapes are around 40 hours in total.
But what we got to remember
is for the first time
in his life gillis is being listened to,
he has an audience,
and he wants to keep that audience.
When police sprayed luminol in the kitchen
of Sean Vincent gillis,
where he had taken several of his victims
and dismembered their bodies,
the floor lit up like a Christmas tree.
It was unbelievable how much blood
he had tried to clean up out of that kitchen.
But more telling,
45 photographs of Donna johnston.
Endless pictures of the other victims,
often naked, often in the back of his car.
Paraphernalia, zip ties as was used to kill.
Endless amounts of absolutely critical evidence.
Gillis was eventually charged with several counts of both first
and second-degree murder.
He faced years of multi-jurisdictional litigation.
He escaped the death penalty and was sentenced
to serve three consecutive life sentences.
I think that what they heard in that courtroom
was so inhumane and so...
Unable to be comprehended by any normal human being.
The only alternative was this person cannot be saned,
because although he was perfectly fine
with killing all of these other people,
he didn't want to die himself.
It's hard to believe that it was occurring here
in Baton Rouge, and we had Sean living in our society,
and him not being on anyone's radar.
It was almost a year later
that I found out everything he had done.
And sometimes I still can't fathom that...
Because that is just not the person I knew.
That's not the Sean I knew.
When Sean Vincent gillis selected a victim,
they were already dead to him,
he didn't see them as human.
He went beyond killing.
He destroyed women in the most depraved way possible
making Sean Vincent gillis
one of the world's most evil killers.
(Instrumental music)
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