S1: E24 – The South Louisiana Serial Killer, Part 1

Imagine this. You're a college student and you're walking to campus. That's when you come across a sign stapled to a tree, and that sign contains a warning.

The sign said killer on the loose, Please be careful, love mom.

You keep walking and see a second sign with the same message, then a third and a fourth. By the time you reach campus, you've lost.

Count Parents were warning their kids to be careful because there was a serial killer who was focused on women.

What a way to communicate in a time before you could send a text. Parents were so desperate to reach their kids, anything to warn them of the South Louisiana serial Killer. These women were all attacked in their homes, and the most baffling.

Part, there was no forced entry into any of the houses.

Serial killer popping his way into women's houses as he do lives.

That's when the therape begin.

Today, we're in Baden Rouge for part one of The Serial Killer of South Louisiana. I'm Sloan Glass and this is American Homicide. A note that this episode contains some graphic content. Please take care while listening. On the shores of the Mighty Mississippi in downtown Baden Rouge. Since the campus is of Southern University, a m College, and Louisiana State University. During the school year, forty thousand students pour into this area, with the majority of those on the LSU campus.

It's a fairly large campus, so it can take you, you know, a good half an hour to forty minutes to get from one into campus to the other.

Journalist Melinda Delatt is an LSU grad who worked for the Associated Press.

It's a very green campus, buildings from different eras, but it's a very lush campus, like the big towering oak trees Spanish moss hanging off of them.

Over twelve hundred oak trees line the LSU campus, giving some much needed relief from the heat and humidity that en Rouge is known for.

And then around the outside of the campus there are a whole set of different lakes. There's a very large lake called University Lake, and then there are smaller lakes that are sort of attached to that.

And during weekends in the fall, the LSU campus transforms into something completely different.

I think what people think of is, you know, the tailgating scene on campus for SEC football games. That's obviously huge here, so it's it's a fun campus to be at.

That en Rouge is the home to the LSU Tigers. Tailgating on Saturdays is a rite of passage for students.

You know. Campus is filled with thousands upon thousands of people cooking, drinking, dancing, playing games, whatever they want to do before LSU plays.

The action then moves inside Tiger Stadium, which resembles the Roman Colisseum.

It's bigger than the Superdome for New Orleans Saints game, so our professional team in the state has a smaller place to play than the college football team.

Back in two thousand and one, the LSU Tigers won their first two games. It was looking like it was going to be a good year. But then came the September eleventh attacks. The campus, like the rest of the nation, was shaken. And then a few days.

Later, Gina Green was found murdered in her home. And she lived on a street that went right next to LSU's campus.

Gina Green was forty years old and lived alone.

She was raped, she was strangled, and I don't think people expected to hear that there would be a murder right off campus in an area that people walk and bike and jog around every day.

Here's pase Cuter, Dana Cummings.

Geena Green.

She was a nurse, a supervising nurse, and she just didn't show up for work one day and one of her colleagues went out to check and he found her beceased in her bed. There wasn't like a jilted ex boyfriend that they suspected, or anybody that had a reason to.

Kill Gina Green.

She was well loved and respected and there was just no reason to think that somebody had it out for.

We always look at the significant other. First, Gina was divorced but had a good relationship with her ex husband. And then there was the strange part. There were no signs of forced entry at Gina's home, making it even stranger. Her ex husband did tell a local TV station that a week before Gina was murdered, she had this weird feeling that she was being watched.

So that was a little that was a little scary.

Although the killer managed to get in and out Gina's home unnoticed, he left behind one important clue.

There was a shirt that she had been wearing when she was attacked and found a blood spot.

The blood stain was not Gina's, so whose blood was it. The police ran it through their DNA database.

Back then, there weren't so many people in a database that you could just run it and get a good match, and so they ran it. They tried to find who it belonged to, but they didn't have that.

With no suspects, the police made no arrest, which rattled lsu' students and their parents.

You know, it's very close to campus, you know, and every mother and father this sends their child to LSU thinks that they will be safe, and people in Baton Rouge were terrified.

One of those mothers was and Pace. Her daughter, Murray was a graduate student at LSU, and Murray was a trailblazer. She skipped half of high school and jumped right into college.

My daughter lived three houses down from Gina Green, and when she died, Murray, she was very concerned. She was frightened.

Because they lived so close to each other.

She left high school when she was sixteen and went to college, and by the time she was twenty two she had a BS and an MBA. She was very smart, very focused, and very determined. But all her life I always thought her superpower was the ability she had to make friends. And they left her back.

In the spring of two thousand and two, Murray graduated and planned to stay on campus through the summer, so she moved into a new apartment a few miles away from her old police Then two d's after she moved.

In, Murray pace was found by her roommate, just horribly attacked, stabbed eighty one times.

Her throat was slit, she was nude.

That's prosecutor Dana Cummings.

She had been just beaten to death.

This is really hard to hear, so if you're squeamish, I would fast forward for the next fifteen seconds. Someone used a knife and screwdriver to stab Murray eighty one times in her chest, stomach, ears, even her eyes. The trauma she took was so bad you could see her spinal cord.

As she fought hard. She fought really, really hard.

Murray had defensive wounds on her arms, hands, and wrists. They also found DNA evidence that Murray had been sexually assaulted. And this didn't happen under the cover of night. The sun was still out. It was early afternoon.

And it's just kind of an eerie thing because there was a plate of grapes and a sandwich that was half eaten.

That was just sitting on the arm of her chair.

Murray had been waiting for her roommate to come home that afternoon so they could drive to a friend's wedding, and that's when she was attacked.

Apparently he got in and out without being seen, so she was attacked in her apartment when he knew she was alone.

And once again, just like with Gina Green's murder, the police found no signs of force to entry at Murray's apartment. So how did the killer get inside? The police didn't know, but they had a clue. One of Murray's friends told the police that the previous day, she was talking with Murray on the phone. That's when a mysterious man knocked on Murray's door. He said he was looking for someone who lived at her address. Murray said she didn't know

She was like uncomfortable, but it didn't disturb her to the level that she was just really calling the police or anything.

So was that man scoping out Murray and her apartment and did he return in the next day? The police didn't know for sure, but now there were two reports of women being sexually assaulted and murdered in their homes with no signs of forced entry.

Bad and Ruse was scared. I mean the people in bat and Ruse were scared.

Bad and Rouge was scared. But I can't stop thinking about Murray's mother Anne.

Imagine finishing high school, so young in college and she'd had a job with a big six accounting firm in Atlanta, and then it was all gone.

Without knowing why, Murray's mother went in search of how.

I went and saw all the crime saying and autopsy pictures.

Because I thought, if she endured it, I need to know what happened to her. I need to know it, exactly what happened to her. And then he wondered, when did she know during that fight?

When did she know she wouldn't?

She was darn you know, when did she know that nobody.

Was going to come in? Saber?

And you feel like that's your job?

Is there? Mother?

Only couldn't do it. You couldn't protect her from that either.

Gina Green was beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death inside her home. Then Gina's former neighbor, Murray Pace, was killed in a similar manner, and both incidents happened near the LSU campus. Little was known about who was behind these murders. However, law enforcement did have one major lead. They revealed that DNA found at both murder scenes belonged to the same person.

I think everybody needs to be aware that we've got a situation now that involves two women linked to an individual.

That was the bat and Rouge police chief, and just three days after he said that, a woman vanished from her home. Here's Prosecutor Dana Cummings.

Pam Kinnemore disappeared, her family came home and she was just gone.

Pam and her family lived right outside Baden Rouge, and one Friday night, the forty four year old returned home from work, but her husband only found Pam's car in the driveway and Pam's purse and wallet inside the house, and most eerie, her keys were found dangling from the lock of her back door.

Based on the evidence of her house, you could see she was all set up to take with that relaxing bath that everybody wants to take and then she just disappeared.

The water was probably still warm when the murderer came into her home and investigators noticed something else.

There was the scrug, and this rug had a blood spot on it, well, several blood spots on it. We had a DNA analyst that was like eight and a half months pregnant.

She was working this case. So she crawled.

Around on that rug and checked every spot that she could. Most of them were Pam Kennimore's blood, but she found one that wasn't, and she lifted that spot and she actually called me and said, I got him, I got him.

He's there.

He's there, meaning the DNA on that bathrug matched the DNA found on the other victims. In other words, the same person was linked to all three murders.

It was like, oh my gosh, here's another one.

A few days later, they found Pam Kinnemore some thirty miles outside bat En. Rouge journalist Melinda Delatt covered the story.

Her body was dumped off the interstate in a place called Whiskey Bay. Whiskey Bay is an exit that when you take it, it kind of feels like you're just driving into the swamp. You're like, where am I going? Because there's nothing else you would find. There's no rest stop or something there, just dirt and gravel road.

Whiskey Bay is a popular spot for fishing, but once the sunsets, the area turns pitch black. Over the years, it's a place where numerous bodies have turned up. Pam Kennemore's body was found with long cut marks on her neck. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted. There was also a piece of a landline telephone cord sitting a few hundred feet from Pam's body. Was she strangled with that cord? The police didn't know. This was the third woman in

Pam Kinnemore was kidnapped from her home. She was eaten, and she was and again no signs of forced entry.

And that was the one common thread that made all of bad and rouge uneasy.

If nobody has a sign of forced entry, was this just somebody who could talk his way in and seem non threatening. So who seems non threatening? Maybe it was somebody who was in a uniform, like is it the FedEx driver? Is it a delivery guy who's got a florist delivery outfit on and so that also then translated to could it be a police officer?

Think about it, someone was getting in and out of the homes of these women without being caught. Was that person a cop?

Everybody had theories about who it could be, but clearly the thought that somebody might just be wearing a uniform, whether it's a police uniform or some other kind of uniform, became one of the theory that stuck for a while because it seemed to make some sense to people who were trying to make sense out of a situation that was nonsensical in a lot of ways.

It didn't help that the police didn't say much about their investigation or even worse, the man they dubbed the South Louisiana serial killer.

If you're living in a place that's very terrified because three women have been murdered and all linked through DNA, hearing the police say we have an ongoing investigation, so we can't answer that question isn't necessarily going to comfort people who live there.

The families got vocal and held rallies and press conferences of their own. With the help of the media, they tried to find any connection between the victims.

These overlaps that we found, they're thin, They're very thin. The only thing that seemed to be a common thread that was nerve wracking to everybody is there was no forced entry into any of the houses, and so what did that mean exactly?

By that time, another school year was beginning, and that's when those homemade signs started popping up around the LSU campus.

The sign said killer on the loose, Please be careful, Love.

Mom computer printed in all caps. The laminated signs took root throughout the LSU campus.

They were tacked to the trees along one of the lakes that most students use for exercise, and it got a lot of media attention because there was a serial killer.

In the summer of two thousand and two. As the students filled up the many dorms and apartments near the LSU campus, the general feeling was fear.

It was clearly a tense time, and I think the police were genuinely frustrated that they couldn't catch the.

Person DNA linked. The killer took three known victims, but at the time, Adam Rouge had a backlog of more than thirty unsolved murders of women and some of these cases dated back a decade, so the fear that this killer could strike again was coupled with the belief that there may have been a lot more victims than they knew about. During the summer of two thousand and two, law enforcement joined forces with several other agencies to create a task force.

I think it was more than three dozen different people involved, but it was a lot of different law enforcement agencies, and they got the FBI involved to do some sort of analysis of who could commit these kinds of murders.

This task force held daily press conferences and revealed their first huge lead. On the night that Pam Kennimore disappeared, a truck driver was driving on the Interstate near the Whiskey Bay exit and that's where he saw something almost unbelievable.

Who was driving saw a woman slumped against the door of a white truck.

The eyewitness said the woman appeared to be nude and.

Dead, and then that truck took the exit at Whiskey Bay and it happened to be the same time period when Pam disappeared.

Here's audio from the Sheriff's office in East Baton Rouge Parish.

The fact that it was a female who was nude the timing several hours after the abduction of Pam Kinnemore exiting at the place where we found her body. We feel it's a very great likelihood that that was, in fact the truck containing miss Kennibal.

So the eyewitness saw a white guy driving a white truck that night.

And quite frankly, you know, that profile is the most generic profile you could have. So I think anybody who was white and drove a white pickup truck got scrutiny.

There were twenty seven thousand white trucks in bat and Rouge, and all of the drivers got side eyed. Some of them even took spray paint and wrote on the side of their trucks, I'm not the serial killer.

They were stereotyped. We had stories of people who sold their trucks because they didn't want to be connected to this. People were nervous about white men and white trucks.

And the only way for these guys to prove they didn't do it was to offer up a sample of their DNA.

They did a DNA dragnet at the time, and they swabbed all these men. I think it was nearly a thousand at the end of the day. It may have even been more than that, some of them voluntarily getting swabbed, others, you know, sort of encouraged to do so, just to prove that they weren't a serial killer.

All of this took time and a lot of patience. Here's Prosecutor Dana Cummings.

I mean, I remember going out to eat and you know, sitting by the window and a white drug drives up and you're immediately thinking, who's that guy in that white drug, which is ridiculous because we've got a billion of them in Baton Rouge, But you know that's all you've got to go on, then that's what you go on.

That little bit of information only amped up the uneasiness.

There were so many suspects and it went on for so long. It's just like this monster that you can't understand. And he seemed to prey on people that he obviously had to stalk to some degree because they were alone. I guess from a criminal's perspective, it's high risk. You know, you're going into a house to take someone, and he seemed to be getting more comfortable as well.

The public was desperate for answers, so were the police and that may have fewel their decision to do something unusual and controversial. In the summer of two thousand and two, the Baton Rouge Police Department created a task force to hunt the South Louisiana serial killer. Some forty investigators from local, state, and federal agencies made up this task force, and even

The person who provided this information initially just remembered a white guy who drove a white pickup truck.

That's when the police did something a bit unconventional. They hypnotized the witness with the hope that he'd remember more from that night, and guess what it worked. The witness remembered that the truck had a Louisiana license plate, the back window was tinted, and there was more.

It was revealed that the pate on the truck was aging, and the driver was a white man with a thin to medium build.

A lot of this other information about what the witness alleged to have seen came out in some sort of hypnosis.

Yes, they hypnotized the witness. It might sound insane, A lot of people felt that way, but it got them somewhere. And while hypnosis is not always ad miss in court, they already had DNA, they just needed a connection.

I believe this is the only case I have ever been involved in covering where I recall hypnosis being used as a tool.

But for a police department desperate for answers, it was a hell mary and it paid off because the eyewitness remembered more details about the person who drove the white truck, and that helped law enforcement put together not only a sketch, but a profile of the suspected serial killer. They said the killer was a white male between the ages of twenty five and thirty five, someone who was physically strong,

Her name is Denay Cologne. She was twenty three. She was beaten, she was raped, same as the other victims in this case.

Denay was on leave from the army and listened to her last known whereabouts. It's absolutely heartbreaking.

They found her car, her purse, and her keys near the cemetery where her mom was buried, and her mom had died in the last year. A family member said she was known to go to that cemetery a lot.

Denay Cologne had been visiting her mother's grave when she disappeared. Two days later, Denay's body turned up in a wooded area outside bad and Rouge. For investigators, this was noteworthy because Denay was the first known victim who lived well outside bad and Rouge. And there was something else.

Dene Cologne was black. The other women were white, so there was clearly no racial specificity to the victims.

And then came an announcement from law enforcement.

All of a sudden, the police in Baton Rouge started telling people that they should broaden the way they thought about who might be the murderer and that the profile that the police gave out may not be correct. It went from oh, you're looking for a white guy in a white truck too, well, maybe that's not who you're looking for after all, and it blew up sort of everybody's perspective about this case.

People didn't know what to think, and they started questioning what the police and this task force were putting out there.

You're already talking about a city that's on edge, and people who were nervous, and families of victims who were very frustrated, and this was not information that people were ecstatic to hear.

In the spring of two thousand and three, that frustration turned to anger because the killer struck again a.

College student by the name of Carie Lynn Yoder. She was the fifth murderer that was linked via DNA.

The killer had returned to a familiar area, an apartment just off the LSU campus. That's where Carrie Yoder lived while attending grad school. That afternoon, she had returned from the grocery store and then vanished. Like the other victims before her, there was no sign of forced entry at her apartment. Her body turned up a week later.

She was found in the same Whiskey Bay area where Pamkenimore's body was found and similar set of circumstances. Beaten, raped, strangled to death. And so I think it just restarts the whole process of people getting newly terrified. The person who did this just seems so angry. There's no rhyme or reason to where the murders are happening. You can be in your twenties or be in your forties and be at risk.

That's when things went from bad to worse when the task force once again changed their profile of the suspected killer.

They said, you know, it could be a white guy who's more dark complexed, or maybe a man of a mixed racial heritage, or perhaps a black man. This just made everybody think, well, hell, were they looking for the wrong person the whole time? And have they even been investigating what they needed to be investigating. Have they limited themselves in such a way that they were dismissing information that could have been relevant.

So you have a serial killer who was able to easily get in and out of victims' homes without being caught, and all the police could say was that the suspect was a man aged twenty five to thirty five who drove a white Chevy truck, and that profile came from an eyewitness who had to be hypnotized. For over a year and a half, this suspect terrorized South Louisiana and

I told Macpartson, you know who it is.

That's David McDavid. He was a detective with the Zachary Police Department. At the time, the Zachary pet had been investigating two unsolved murders in town, along with an attack on a couple. These cases had an eerie similarity to what was happening in Baden Rouge.

The evidence that we were being shown and told about is the same thing that was happening here at our crime stings.

So the police from Zachary put a presentation together and met with the team investigating the South Louisiana serial killer.

We told them what we had as a little Jason. If he knows he's about to be called, he's probably finna kill again. Y'all need to find him.

But the Vaton Rouge PD told law enforcement from Zachary they didn't think they were looking for the same guy.

It bothered me somewhat, but I think a lot of it was we didn't work a lot of murders. You don't have him, maybe one or two murders here before FAV five ten years.

But that didn't stop them. Somehow, some way, it was the small town PD from Zachary, Louisiana who would do what the task force couldn't.

At the end of the day, you know, we're able to have the piece of the pie that saw the case.

In the conclusion of the South Louisiana serial killer. We'll learn who the killer is.

Everybody was talking about a white man in a white pickup truck. In neither of those two things handed out to be.

Anything, and we'll find out how this small town police department figured it all out. That's next time on American Homicide. You can contact the American Homicide Team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. That's American Homicide pod at gmail dot com. American Homicide is hosted and written by me Sloane Glass and is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by