Not only did Sean Vincent Gillis brutally murder eight women between 1994 and 2004, but he also dismembered them, raped their corpses, kept body parts as souvenirs, and cannibalized their remains.
Public DomainSean Vincent Gillis perpetrated horrific acts in and around Baton Rouge for 10 years before he was finally caught.
From 1994 until 2004, serial killer Sean Vincent Gillis brutally murdered eight women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, committing heinous acts of necrophilia, cannibalism, and dismemberment. He was so vicious that even he admitted he was “pure evil.”
But although Gillis readily confessed to his crimes and may have even expressed some genuine remorse, the details of his murders will surely leave you thinking that he was nothing but “pure evil” indeed.
Sean Vincent Gillis, “An Angry Young Boy”
Sean Vincent Gillis didn’t have an easy start to life. Soon after he was born in 1962, his father, struggling with alcoholism and mental illness, abandoned the family following a terrifying incident in which he held a gun to baby Sean’s head.
But despite the hardships of growing up without a father, young Sean Gillis seemed to get by okay as a kid in Baton Rouge. His mother Yvonne raised him with the help of his grandparents as she worked for a local television station. And in Yvonne’s eyes, her son was a normal, well-behaved kid. He had a couple of close friends and got average grades in school.
However, Gillis had a darker side to his personality that came out every now and again. He and his friends reportedly went through a phase in which they became interested in “Devil worship.” And at one point during his adolescence, a neighbor named Carolyn Clay said she heard a loud banging noise at 3 a.m. and looked outside to see Sean Gillis in his front yard, beating furiously on some garbage cans.
According to another neighbor, Sean Vincent Gillis explained that he’d had this outburst because he was upset that he didn’t have a girlfriend.
“He was prone to fits of anger like that,” Clay recalled, according to a report from Radford University. “He was an angry young boy.”
And as that angry boy became a man, his anger would grow into something much worse.
Gillis’ Dark Obsessions Eventually Drive Him To Murder
Twofour ProductionsSerial killer Sean Vincent Gillis murdered eight women between 1994 and 2004.
After high school, Sean Vincent Gillis attended some community college and bounced around between low-paying jobs while still living with his mother. But finally, when Gillis was 30, Yvonne took a job in Atlanta and moved away. Gillis was on his own for the first time in his life.
He soon found himself obsessed with pornography — so much so that he neglected his jobs. His doting mother sent him money to help him make ends meet. Nevertheless, he was angry at Yvonne for leaving him, and would sometimes scream in anger from his yard and disturb his neighbors.
On one occasion in 1992, he was even caught peeping into a neighbor’s window; he claimed he’d just been looking for his cat.
In 1994, Gillis began a steady relationship with a woman named Terri Lemoine. He reportedly treated her well throughout the relationship, though Lemoine complained that Sean Vincent Gillis was uninterested in having sex with her.
Meanwhile, his obsession with pornography was growing ever greater. It eventually led him to websites that depicted the rape, death, and dismemberment of women. At one point, he even showed Lemoine photos of dead women online. Though unsettled, she brushed it off. They lived together for the next decade.
But little did Lemoine know, Gillis had begun to exercise his disturbing impulses in real life.
In the early morning hours of March 20, 1994, Gillis crept into an assisted-living facility and entered the apartment of 81-year-old Ann Bryan. Gillis later stated that he had initially only intended to rape Bryan. But when she screamed, he went wild, slitting her throat and stabbing her about 50 times in the head, genitals, and chest. He almost decapitated her with his ferocious slashing blows.
And that was only the beginning for Sean Vincent Gillis.
The Ghastly Murders Of Sean Vincent Gillis
Susan MustafaVictims Donna Bennett Johnston, Johnnie Mae Williams, and Ann Bryan.
Sean Vincent Gillis didn’t kill again for another five years.
Then, from January 1999 to January 2000, he murdered four more women, bringing his total body count to five. He killed a sixth in October 2000, and took his final two victims in October 2003 and February 2004.
As police began to investigate these murders, they realized they shared some truly gruesome commonalities. The seven women — nearly all sex workers in their mid-30s to early 50s — were strangled, dismembered, and sexually abused. Their mutilated bodies were recovered in remote areas outside of Baton Rouge.
When cops found the nude, butchered body of Gillis’ second victim, it was a particularly macabre scene.
“She was on her back in a kind of balletic pose next to a ‘dead end’ sign, which I thought was his humor, in a very sick kind of way, ‘dead end,'” former District Attorney Prem Burns told True Crime News in 2018.
In the case of another victim, the body was found hacked up so badly that, according to Burns, “you could barely tell it was a human being.” To the authorities, it was apparent that this was a “true serial killer.”
All of Sean Vincent Gillis’ murders began with him strangling the victims with zip ties. Then, he would chop off their body parts, sometimes also carving off their tattoos or nipples.
Worse yet, he sometimes saved body parts as trophies and even consumed the victims’ flesh. He also had sex with their bodies after they were dead and committed other disturbing erotic acts — like showering with one corpse, and painting the nails of the severed hand of another. And when he killed his final victim in 2004, he took dozens of photos of her hacked-up remains.
But Sean Vincent Gillis also left something behind at this murder scene that would help the police track him down and bring him to justice at last.
A Surprising Clue Leads To Sean Vincent Gillis’ Arrest
East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s DepartmentGillis brutally murdered eight women before he was finally caught.
Sean Vincent Gillis was active around the same time as fellow Baton Rouge serial killer Derrick Todd Lee. When Lee was finally arrested in 2003, it was found that several unsolved murders in the area could not be linked to him — leading police to determine that they had a second Baton Rouge killer on their hands.
The police had found hairs and other forensic evidence at the scenes of some of Gillis’ murders, but the DNA didn’t match anyone in the system.
In the end, Sean Gillis’ undoing was a muddy tire track found near his final victim’s body. It was a lucky break for investigators who, up to that point, hadn’t had much to go on.
Detectives took photos and casts of the tire tracks and determined that the Goodyear tires that made them were rare. Local authorities worked in conjunction with the Goodyear Tire Company to identify everyone who had recently bought this particular type of tire in Baton Rouge.
Investigators then began testing the DNA of the 200 or so people that had those tires. Surprisingly, Sean Vincent Gillis agreed to submit his DNA for testing — and sure enough, it was a match.
The authorities obtained a warrant for Gillis’ arrest. On April 29, 2004, SWAT teams flooded the home he shared with Terri Lemoine, who was still unaware of her boyfriend’s crimes. When she asked Gillis what was happening, he simply told her, “Sorry honey-bunny.”
Sean Vincent Gillis was finally in police custody.
The Disturbing Confessions Of The Baton Rouge Killer
Once in custody, Sean Vincent Gillis quickly confessed to the murders. He appeared by turns proud and ashamed during the interview, sometimes laughing while describing his acts of brutality and other times expressing remorse for what he’d done.
“I’m sorry I hurt people. But I would do it again,” he said. “You let me out on the street, I’ll find somebody before sundown.”
“If anything in my useless life comes out,” he said, “help the little girls today not to be the premature corpses of tomorrow.”
With these confessions in hand, authorities charged Sean Vincent Gillis with murder. He has since been convicted of seven of the eight murders he confessed to and sentenced to multiple life terms in prison.
Once in prison, he continued to express remorse and even corresponded with a friend of his final victim, Donna Johnston. In one of these letters, he once again shows regret — but also the cold tone of a hardened, precise killer.
“[Johnston] was so drunk it only took about a minute and a half to succumb to unconsciousness and then death. Honestly, her last words were I can’t breathe,” he wrote, according to ThoughtCo. “I still puzzle over the post-mortem dismemberment and cutting. There must be something deep in my subconscious that really needs that kind of macabre action.”
As for what lurked in Sean Vincent Gillis’ subconscious that might have driven him to commit these atrocities, there’s likely no one answer. Despite having had an absent father, Gillis had led a seemingly normal childhood.
However, when District Attorney Burns was questioning Gillis, Gillis did admit to wanting to have sex with his mother — the woman who had sent him into a rage when she left him alone, and who had doted on him when he was a boy.
Back then, of course, no one knew what a monster that little boy would become.
After this look at Sean Vincent Gillis, “The Other Baton Rouge Serial Killer,” read up on Ed Kemper, the “Co-ed Killer,” and Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker.” Then, discover some of the most chilling words ever spoken by serial killers.
