A Little Less Mess: The Third Baton Rouge Serial Killer (Jeffery Lee Guillory)

**Cara** (0:30)
The usual porch banter in our Weekly Pour, you can catch Stew and I on Thursdays for our main case episodes, and on Fridays over on Patreon. But on Mondays, we skip the chit chat, we ditch the drinks, and we get straight to the facts. So go ahead and grab your coffee, and let's get into it. Tonight, we are going to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. If you know anything about Southern true crime, you know that between the mid 1990s and 2004, the city of Baton Rouge was absolutely paralyzed by fear. Women were being murdered in their homes, in abandoned buildings, and on the side of the road. For a long time, the public and the police thought they were hunting one man. But the truth was far more terrifying. Baton Rouge wasn't dealing with one serial killer. They were dealing with three, all operating in the same city at the exact same time.
We've all heard of Derrick Todd Lee. Most people know the name Sean Vincent Gillis. But today, we're talking about the third man, the killer who hid in the shadows of the other two and whose victims waited the longest for justice. This is the story of Jeffery Lee Guillory.
To understand how Jeffery Lee Guillory operated, you have to understand what it was like to be a woman in Baton Rouge in the early 2000s. Between 1992 and 2004, dozens of women went missing or were found murdered in the Baton Rouge and Lafayette areas. The community was in a state of absolute terror. Women were buying guns, traveling in packs, and refusing to go out at night. In 2003, law enforcement finally got a massive break. DNA evidence linked several of the murders to a man named Derrick Todd Lee. He was arrested and the city collectively exhaled. The Baton Rouge serial killer had been caught. But then, more bodies were found. And the DNA didn't match Derrick Todd Lee. In 2004, police arrested Sean Vincent Gillis, tying him to another string of horrific murders. Gillis confessed to killing eight women. Once again, the city thought the nightmare was over. Two serial killers had been operating in the same area, and both were now behind bars. But there was a problem. Even with Lee and Gillis locked up, there were still unsolved murders sitting cold in the files of the Baton Rouge Police Department. There were still women whose killers had not been found. Detectives realized a terrifying truth. Derrick Todd Lee and Sean Vincent Gillis didn't act alone in terrorizing Baton Rouge. There was a third killer. Three of those unsolved cases belonged to Florida Edwards, Sylvia Cobb and Renee Newman. Florida Edwards was 36 years old. Her remains were found in July of 1999, hidden inside an abandoned building. Two years later, in 2001, the body of Sylvia Cobb was discovered. And then on April 11, 2002, 46-year-old Renee Newman was found dead on the side of the road behind an old abandoned department store in Baton Rouge. Like the others, she had been brutally beaten and strangled.
For years, these women were treated as tragic, disconnected cold cases. Their families waited for answers, while the media focused heavily on the higher-profile victims of Derrick Todd Lee. Because these three women lived closer to the margins of society, their cases didn't generate the same massive task force or daily headlines. But behind the scenes, evidence had been collected. At Sylvia Cobb's crime scene, investigators had recovered a discarded beer can. At the scenes of Florida Edwards and Renee Newman, investigators had collected DNA profiles of the killer. For years, that evidence sat in an evidence locker, waiting for a match.
That match finally came through a completely unrelated incident in September of 2006 A Baton Rouge police officer pulled over a man for a routine traffic stop. The driver was a man named Jeffery Lee Guillory. During that stop, Guillory was arrested and as part of standard procedure, his fingerprints were taken and entered into the system.
When those prints hit the database and alarm went off, Guillory's fingerprints were an exact match to the prints found on the beer can left at the crime scene of Sylvia Cobb five years earlier.
Police brought Guillory in for questioning. They sat him down on September 26, 2006 and asked him about Sylvia Cobb, Florida Edwards, and Renee Newman. Guillory sat in the interrogation room and completely denied knowing any of the women. He told investigators he had never seen them, he didn't know them, and he certainly didn't kill them. Without a confession or enough concrete forensic evidence to tie him to the actual murders at that exact moment, Guillory walked out of the police station. He was back on the streets, but it wouldn't be for long.