Oh boy. Today, well, we are bringing you the story of a seriously depraved individual by the name of Sean Vincent Gillis. One of 'at least' five serial killers in the Baton Rouge area of the great state of Louisiana during the 1990's and early 2000's.This guy was cruel. He was horrible. He was sickening. And a straight-up asshole. Get your steel-toed stilettoes on and strap them up to your oversized belt-buckle attached to the grocery-bag belt you have holding up your beach shorts that are three sizes too big, and get your little ear-holes ready for our long-awaited FIRST episode! Remember to Like, Share, and SUBSCRIBE!!!And please, we know, we're almost too good for our own good, but it's something we are taking seriously and working on!Thank you guys so much, though! We hope you enjoy this and stay with us on the journey.Reach out to us at paranaughtica@gmail.comFacebook: The Paranaughtica PodcastTwitter: @paranautica Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Still. This is the first episode of the Paranatica podcast.
We have no idea how this is going to go.
And we're going to do this one episode at a time.
Basically, it's going to be true crime, unsolved mysteries, that sort of thing.
Just weird stuff.
The most macabre things we can find.
As brutal as possible.
There's going to be a lot of details in this podcast.
And this is not a podcast for the faint of heart.
It's not one for someone that doesn't have imagination and is, you know...
Pretty soft on blood and gore.
This is not your podcast, if that's your issue.
This is not your grandmother's podcast.
No. No, this is not that cookie jar you want to put your hand into.
So, today, and I wanted to figure out something with you, Scott, about this, like, the brutality scale.
Like, instead of being like, oh, this is ten stars out of whatever on the brutality scale, I'm thinking, like, layers of an onion.
So we can say, like...
Ten layers deep, this episode is ten layers.
This is going to be a really brutal episode.
I like that.
Ten layers deep, if it's an extreme side of the scale, while on the first layer of an onion, it's like the general layer you just want to discard because it's just like, ugh.
That's the more mellow level.
Yeah, it's like heavy petting.
Yeah, heavy fucking petting.
Just hand-holding.
Layer one.
Layer 1. Layer 1 hand-holding.
Layer 1 hand-holding.
Right on, man.
Layer 10. Layer 10. Let's not go there.
Yeah, us holding hands?
Yes. That's for future Patreon people.
Ah, yep.
Yep. Only fans, yo.
How about that?
The brutality scale is going to be layers of an onion.
Perfect. All right.
That works for me.
That's something we can just start with right there.
So today...
We are going to be talking about the horrific story of a man named Sean Vincent Gillis.
Easily being a layer 10 of the Onion on Brutality Scale.
And he's also known as the other Baton Rouge Killer.
Well, hang on a minute there.
I'm just going to stop you right there.
The other Baton Rouge Killer?
Yeah, yeah.
So there were at least five serial killers operating in and around Baton Rouge.
Good friend here, Sean Gillis.
He's not our friend.
I've been reaching out to him lately.
I haven't heard anything back yet.
Okay, I was going to say, what has he been saying?
I'll let you know.
Alright, let me know when you get that.
So the other Baton Rouge killer being referred to is the infamous Derek Todd Lee.
Way more infamous than Sean Gillis is.
Derek Todd Lee, he was operating the same time and had about seven confirmed murders.
He had more that we just don't know about, or he didn't confess to anyway.
The other killers were a man named Jeffrey Guillory, who had at least three kills linked to him.
Another was Ronald Dominique.
Pretty brutal.
He murdered at least 23 men and young boys.
Then there was another spat of like eight unsolved murders that the police did suspect to be linked to one person.
But there's a lot of doubt about that.
And those eight murders were given the name of the Jennings Eight, or the Jeff Davis Eight.
I think that's for the county that they're all found in.
And so, in fact, we'll do episodes probably on all those later on in the future.
Today, though, we're talking about Sean Gillis.
He was also known by another name, being the zip tie killer, due to him using large nylon zip ties to strangulate all of his victims to death.
But it wasn't the strangulation that Sean Gillis was interested in.
He wanted something else.
So, let's start from the beginning.
The beginning!
Here we go.
Launching on in, Sean Gillis.
So, Sean Gillis was born in Baton Rouge on June 24th, 1962, to a loving and doting mother and an uninvolved and apathetic father who, leading up to the birth of his son, suffered from fairly serious mental health issues and had developed acute alcoholism.
Oh, just your typical American family there, you know?
Pretty much.
Especially in the 60s.
The 50s and 60s, that time period, there's a lot of drinking and a lot of dysfunctionality going on.
No communication whatsoever.
Right. And we know that either of those alone is cause for general concern.
And then, when you couple both a mental health disorder with significant alcohol use as a way of self-medication, it just causes a vicious cycle.
Due to these issues, Norman Gillis was unpredictably volatile, and there were many arguments under the roof.
During one such chaotic and escalating altercation, Norman grabbed a pistol and held it very menacingly at Little Gillis' head.
But instead of pulling the trigger, Norman realized that he had gone too far and he put the gun down.
This event would mark the moment that Norman knew he posed a serious threat to his family and that he needed to get some help.
Which is pretty fucking good on his part.
You know, this is the 1960s.
Mental health is not well understood.
You know, not like it is today.
And Norman knew that he had some issues, and he took action to address it.
You know, he went to the extent of removing himself from his family because he feared that it might do something harmful to them.
Specifically to his son, Sean.
And I don't think many men would have done that during that time period.
So I give him props for that.
Yeah, that's definitely unusual, I feel like, at that time.
So Norman decided that he would leave Little Gillis with Gillis' mother, Yvonne, and for the next several years, Norman was in and out of mental institutions and entirely out of the picture.
And little Gillis is about one years old at the time.
For Yvonne, his mother worked a full-time job at a television station, and when she had to work, she would take Sean to his grandparents on Norman's side, and they were still very active in his life.
And by all accounts, he lived a pretty typical childhood despite his father's absence.
But apparently, he was behaving in school and had average grades, and he wasn't acting
Good little Gillis.
Good Gillis.
Before the killings.
At age 10, Little Gillis and his mother would move to a new neighborhood in Baton Rouge.
After having been in this new neighborhood for maybe half a year, the neighborhood kids begin noticing that Little Gillis was actually kind of a bully.
There isn't much information on his part of being a bully, but one of his neighbors did say that Little Gillis gave all the other kids in the neighborhood quote-unquote the willies.
Wow, the willies.
The dreaded willies.
But he wasn't giving them what we would call like a wet willy.
You know, get the whole finger wet with your own saliva and twist it in your friend's ear trick.
You know, the neighbor said that the other kids just got really creeped out about Gillis.
Like, he was super creepy.
And he's only 10. I mean, we all remember those 10-year-olds.
You're like, I don't like you, man.
Something about you.
Don't like it.
Yeah, there's something off with this one, you know?
Those kids, you're like, huh, you're always keeping a side eye on them throughout school.
Like, what the hell is up with this guy?
They slowly, they just eventually disappear and never know.
You never hear from them again, you know?
You're like, well, probably off.
Gillising. Gillising.
Little creeps in the shadows becoming little Gillises.
So, Yvonne says that her son was just a normal kid and did all the same things that all the other young kids would do as well, like building model cars.
I used to build model cars.
I fucking hated that, actually.
Yeah, I was not a model car person.
Definitely more of like a Lego.
I mean, you know, 90s kid here.
Legos were my jam every day.
Legos and Lincoln Logs.
Loved both of those.
Yep, yep.
Liked the legs more than the logs, but that's just me.
Yvonne reports that Sean was so well-behaved that she only spanked him once with a belt.
And afterwards, she felt so bad about it that she'd never did it again.
I'd say, alright, that's pretty cool, I guess.
Must be nice.
Yeah, must be nice.
But I find it hard to believe that little Gillis was so well-behaved, as his mother so justly puts it, especially when he's giving all the other kids massive creeps.
Unless, of course, he was a complete psychopath at a very young age, which, as we will see, he very well may have been.
Throughout his childhood, he attended various Catholic schools, which seemed like a good choice, one that Yvonne had made after much consideration for the benefit of her son.
Once his young teens rolled in, bringing with it a flood of hormones, he started being more aggressive and the people around him started to notice, particularly the neighbors.
And late at night, it is said that blossoming little Gillis would take metal garbage can lids and angrily hit them together in the streets.
The neighbor would ask him if he was alright, what exactly, what are you doing?
And Sean told the neighbor that he was just frustrated because he didn't have a girlfriend and he just really wanted a girlfriend.
Well, I mean, you know, that's understandable.
I understand that, you know?
Just the height of frustration as a young man.
Yeah, I don't remember ever getting to an extent of like, ugh!
I just want a girlfriend!
And grabbing garbage can lids or whatever, just making a racket about it.
I definitely didn't mean it that way, but more like you turn on the radio and you're like, every song applies to me.
Yeah, everything.
Yes, the yearning.
Oh, yeah.
He did not handle it well.
So, around the 8th grade, he and a couple of his good pals became interested in the satanic religion.
Oh! It's not an evil, horrible cult that sacrifices children to Baphomet and drinks their blood.
All that is utter bullshit.
Thanks for clearing that up, man.
Yeah, I need to clear that up for you, dude.
At the time, the satanic religion was pretty much led by Anton LaVey, who was a former carnival worker turned church of Satan leader.
Yep. Yeah.
Yep. Yep.
Yep. The Church of Satan, which is still active to this day, is and was a group of religious followers who practiced a more ritual-based concept following the teachings of Aleister Crowley and incorporating wonderful theatrics, donning costumes,
and enjoying live music.
It sounds fun, dude.
And Anton would regularly play the organ and the keyboards during most, if not all, of those early events, and he was actually really talented on the organ.
He was actually really good.
Cool. You can actually see videos of him play on YouTube.
And he's like, wow, I'm watching Anton LaVey play keyboard and organ?
So he stole the devil at the crossroads.
Nah, he wasn't a bad guy, though.
I'm playing devil's advocate here.
Yeah, you are.
In between his Church of Satan rituals and all the cool things that they would do there, he would go and do other gigs at the Christian churches, playing their organs for their congregations.
He was a decent dude, man.
Like, he would go do his thing at these Christian churches and go back to his church of Satan and do his thing there.
Like, people knew about it.
People weren't afraid of him.
He wasn't like...
It's the people who didn't understand who were afraid of him, right?
Right, right.
They just heard devil, they heard Satan, and that was it.
That was it.
Yeah. Now, the church of Satan did not and do not worship the devil.
They are not devil worshippers by any means.
And let me try to bring out a little bit of clarity about Satanist here while we're on it.
So, Satanists are self-proclaimed atheists.
They say that their position is self-centered or self-serving, as if they are each the center of the universe.
They say that, quote, Satan to us is a symbol of pride, liberty, and individualism, and it serves as an external metaphorical projection of our highest personal potential.
We do not believe in Satan as being a person or a being, end quote.
The Church of Satan does not perform sacrifices, nor do they abuse people in any way.
They go on to say that, quote, people who believe in some devilish supernatural being and worship him are devil worshippers, not Satanists, end quote.
And interestingly, one of Anton LaVey's early recruits was a woman named Susan Atkins, one of the Manson girls.
And actually, side note, my philosophy teacher in college.
He actually went to college with one of those Manson girls, and I'm not sure if it was Susan Atkins, but it was one of the three, like, close groupies of his.
And he would say, like, she was completely normal one day, and then all of a sudden, like, she completely changed, like, flipped 180 degrees.
Yeah, her whole personality.
She got way into it.
She found the thing.
She was like, this is it.
Yeah, she drank the Kool-Aid, man.
Drank the Kool-Aid.
Well, let's move on.
So, Gillis would later say that he and his buddies liked to go into the woods to watch the Satanists do their rituals because it was scary and they felt like they were watching something real go on.
So they bought into the whole thing and they were like, well, this is so crazy.
I'm sure they were fascinating.
I mean, how many, like, what really could have been...
Going on at that time that was super interesting.
You know, these kids find this clandestine gathering in the woods.
You know, these people just, like, letting their spirit out.
I mean, yeah, I'm sure it was fascinating for them.
Oh, yeah.
They're in robes.
Yeah. Got, like, a fire in the middle.
They're all chanting and doing a thing.
Like, what little kids knocking?
Like, oh, my God.
What is happening?
Yeah. Well, men and women also.
I mean, you know, like, wow, so everyone likes this.
Probably would have done the same thing.
Yeah, I would have.
I would have been stoked to watch it.
Can you guess what his favorite TV show was?
No, I definitely can't.
Star Trek.
Oh! Ah, okay.
He loved Star Trek, like, to the max.
And so around age 8, or no, around 17, Norman came back into the picture, his dad, and ended up forming a decently strong relationship with Little Gillis.
Things were looking pretty sweet for father and son.
One day, though, this relationship became a bit complicated.
See, the following year, Little Gillis was hanging out with his dad.
I think at his dad's place.
And Little Gillis stumbled upon a collection of pictures depicting naked men in various sexual positions.
This, of course, horrified Little Gillis.
Pretty much, they stopped talking to each other after that.
So it sucks, man.
Your dad's out of your life all this time, and then you go and kind of rekindle the relationship, and then you find out your dad's a homosexual, and you can't handle that because you're not there yet.
I mean, it was so fractured, you know, this relationship already to begin with, and then you get this...
This bomb out of nowhere doesn't gel with your view of what's going on.
You know, Sean clearly wants a girlfriend.
His dad's got pictures of, you know, men and sexual acts.
I could see how that would be difficult for him at that time.
Yeah, especially if he doesn't even know this person.
You know, yeah, especially at the time period.
Nowadays, be like, oh, I see you, Dad.
Dad, you're kind of weird.
I'll give you props.
I see you.
I see you, homie.
Like, 70s, 80s, like, being gay.
I mean, people were hiding that fact, you know?
Yeah, it was not out in the open like it is today.
So within months before he was about to graduate from high school, little Gillis was arrested for criminal trespass, which would mark his first arrest.
Then came a special day.
The day that Little Gillis reached a coming of age and graduated Redemptorist High School.
He didn't only graduate from high school, though.
He also graduates from being Little Gillis to Sean, just for our story's sake.
Okay. All right.
No more Little Gillis.
Sean all the way.
Little Gillis is all grown up now.
So Sean knew that he needed to get a job, so he applied with the Southland Corporation, which is the world's largest operator, franchisor, and licensor of convenience stores.
They have around 13,700 stores around the country.
They actually went bankrupt back in 1991, but merged with a Japanese company, which actually owns at least 70% of the company now.
The original founders, the Thompson family, they only own about 5% of the company that they started.
The Japanese own the vast majority of it.
Interesting. It is.
So Sean was hired and landed a job working at a 7-Eleven convenience store, but he wasn't too keen on the idea of actual work.
But instead of firing him, they just moved him around from store to store, all within the same general area, which is when I read that, I was thinking of like Catholic priests, you know, when they, when they get caught doing something, they don't get fired or whatever.
They just get moved from one church to another church down the,
That's true.
Yep, or in a different state.
Yeah, that is pretty common practice.
was computers, and he began attending a community college where he took classes and eventually became certified with working in some area of computers, but I don't know which.
He's around 22 years old at the time, and he's still living with his mom, Yvonne.
Several years later, Yvonne was offered a job in Atlanta, Georgia, which she gladly accepted, and she asked if Sean wanted to move there with her, but he did not want to.
He opted to stay in Baton Rouge.
Finally, our Sean Gillis would be all on his own for the very first time.
Leaving the nest.
Or, well, staying in it, I guess.
Kind of staying in it.
Kind of staying in the nest.
Spreading his wings.
Yeah, spreading the wings.
The nest is leaving him, and he's sticking around.
So now, Mom is out of the picture, and he has the entire house to himself.
He didn't have much to do other than play on his computer, and of course...
Watch porn.
Oh, there it is.
There it is.
The deviancy begins for Sean.
He found out pretty quickly that he really, really, really, really enjoyed watching porn.
And for the next couple of years, he feverishly satiated his endless black hole of desires under the alluring glow of the computer screen.
But it wasn't too long.
Yeah, right.
As most do.
But it wasn't too long after becoming sole captain of his Baton Rouge, Jack Shack, that Sean realized that he needed a little more excitement than just sitting behind his computer screen watching violent pornography.
Because his thing wasn't just normal, run-of-the-mill pornography, man and women, sensual sex.
His idea of porn was violent porn.
Anything that dealt with extreme violence.
I'm not talking about a little rough-me-up, choke-me to the point of...
Unconsciousness and let me go.
He was watching violent, violent porn.
Jeez. He went all the way to 20. Skipped 1 to 10. Went to 20. Dude, it seems like he did skip the whole coming of age of porn or whatever.
He went straight to the most hardcore shit he could find.
Damn. There's no build up.
I don't know where he was getting.
All of this.
So there are reports of him looking at photos and whatever videos he could find at the time of women being murdered and also the act of necrophilia.
But I don't know where he was getting all that at the time.
Because it's like 1991, 1992.
And I mean, I, you know, I don't know.
I wasn't using internet back then, but I...
I don't know if there was a lot of that material accessible on the World Wide Web.
Yeah, I mean, there must have been...
I'm interested in, like, what kind of underground group he had to, like, find in order to have access to this, because, I mean, yeah, sure, it was the coming of age of the internet, like, it was just beginning, and so, like, maybe it was less regulated than it is now,
and so it was sort of Wild West, and maybe it was easier to sort of stumble across things like that.
At the time, but I mean, obviously he knew where to look because he found it.
He knew where to look and he was finding it all over the place.
I mean, he had a lot of content.
So I don't know.
I mean, in that time period, who knows?
I don't know.
But I do know that there were plenty of off-the-wall macabre magazines being published around the time which depicted dead people and a whole lot of other stuff that I won't mention here that was all legal to purchase.
Obviously, over time, like 70s and 80s, the government put a...
Pretty big stop to all that stuff.
Yeah. And he's an adult at this point, so he can buy anything that an adult can.
He definitely had access.
Right. And I had a friend back in the day.
He actually had...
I must have been 13 or something.
He actually had...
He was the older brother of one of my friends.
He had a magazine of one of these weird off-the-wall magazines, and it showed dead people.
Decapitated heads and stuff.
What the hell is this?
Man, wild.
Just a magazine.
You used to be able to buy that stuff.
I mean, nowadays, you just go on the internet and look at it all for free.
You can look at anything you want for free.
Yeah. It's still pretty crazy, though.
It is.
On his quest to find more excitement, Sean set out on a new mission.
With his heart beating hard in his chest, he creeped through the neighborhood yards, peeping into windows, trying to steal a glance of a naked woman.
But... The only flash he got to see was that of a couple shiny badges as the cops rolled up on him.
Oh, man.
Busted. Yeah, I think it was his first time doing it, too, and he got busted.
So when the police asked what he was doing, he said that, you know, he was just looking for his cat.
And this might have worked for him if he didn't have outstanding warrants for various traffic violations.
Oh, okay.
he was arrested booked and released the ashamed because I got caught Sean Gillis returned to his house and resumed his unassuming life of lubrication tissues
I hear that.
Moving ahead to 1994.
Alright, moving on.
Sean was hanging out with a female friend, Sharon, who was well aware that he was so lonely and could use the company of a girlfriend.
This friend, Sharon, happened to have another friend named Terry Lemoine, who was also a bit lonely and could definitely benefit from having a solid partner.
Sharon knew of Terry's history of dating abusive men, and she also knew that Sean wasn't abusive at all.
He was actually quite nice.
So Sharon demanded that Sean get into her car and told him that she was going to take him to meet a friend of hers who would love to get to know him and that they should get to know each other.
Sean didn't hesitate to get in and they drove off to a nearby Circle K convenience store which is probably also owned by the Southland Corporation.
Probably. It
would be far worse than she could ever imagine.
So now, let's get into a little bit about Terry Lemoine.
Okay, a little background on Terry Lemoine.
Let's go to the night of March 13th, 1987.
Seven years before she would actually meet Sean Gillis.
Terry was working at the Teacup Strip Club in a seedy, nasty area of Baton Rouge, an area full of readily available drugs, where sex workers of all shapes and sizes, color, and race spotted the streets.
She wasn't working as a stripper, and it's believed that she was maybe a bartender, or at the least, in some capacity, a bouncer.
Yeah, a bouncer, sure.
Naturally, the teacup would often draw in unsavory people, as all bottom-end strip clubs certainly do.
And on this night, there happened to be one such unsavory individual who was a constant menace to most, especially to the police.
He was a biker from the Sons of Silence, Norbert David Dees.
Norbert, being the asshole that he was, started an argument with one of the hardworking dancers.
This argument became too much for Norbert to handle, and the argument that he created for no reason other than to be an ass became physical.
Norbert slapped the dancer in the face...
Dang. You know, as a man, you're losing a war of words with a woman.
What do you do when you feel you're losing?
You walk away.
The hand just automatically starts going back.
You can't even help it.
You get in an argument with this woman.
Your hand slowly raises as you know you're just losing this argument.
And it's just going up and up and up.
Terrible. Jokes.
I don't do that.
Terry stepped in at that point and told the dancer to go back to the dressing rooms.
Meanwhile, she told Norbert that he was an asshole for slapping the dancer, which he was, and gave him a piece of her mind, but for whatever reason allowed him to stay.
And despite being able to stay, Norbert Dees grabbed a pool cue, laying on the table.
and swung it at Terry, breaking it in two over her back.
This, of course, did nothing but enraged Terry.
She spun around and grabbed one of the broken ends of the pool cue and started beating Norbert over the head and body.
Not only was she hitting him with the broken pool cue, but she was stabbing him with the jagged end.
Oh, wow.
Tough broad.
Yes. While Terry was delivering her melee against Norbert, the strip club audience just sat there and watched.
Then, the dancer who Norbert slapped came running out with the knife in hand, and she too began stabbing the helpless biker.
Still, the gathered crowd did nothing but watched the beating take place.
Oh, yeah.
They were probably just sitting around like, well, by golly, ain't that something.
Never seen something like that before, Marv?
Nope. Never.
Then there was silence.
Norbert was lifeless.
That was the moment someone called the police, who soon responded to the scene.
Before the police arrived, though, at least one person took photos of the dead Norbert and later gave one of those photos to Terry, who kept the photo in her purse as a reminder of how strong of a woman she really was and to never let a man, any man, ever push her around again.
And I'm sure that was like a Polaroid.
Someone went and grabbed their Polaroid out of the car and was like, oh man!
Let it come out.
Yeah, totally.
Started shaking it.
Oh, look at that.
Oh, nope, not yet.
Kept shaking it.
Oh, look at this dead body.
Oh, fuck.
So when police arrived, they arrested both Terry and the stripper.
Norbert, however, was not a likable person to most people, and certainly not to the police, who, for lack of better words, thanked Terry for taking out someone who caused far too many problems for the police department.
And the charges against Terry and the stripper were later dropped, and the two were free to carry on their lives.
Wow, man.
Such luck back in the day.
Isn't that nuts, dude?
Yeah, that would never have happened for me.
String him up!
Get him!
You would have just been out in the parking lot, not even seen what happened, and they would call me like, I'll arrest this guy!
Yeah, this is the guy right here, man.
We got him.
You're like, oh, what the hell, man?
Hey, dude!
Jeez, just reading the Sunday funnies.
Yeah, I just found the Sunday funnies laying on the ground.
Some dark night in some shitty neighborhood.
Like, oh, I'm gonna read these funnies.
Yeah, I'm just gonna post up here for a minute.
As it turned out...
Terry and Sean did have quite a bit in common, like Sharon had said, such as favorite movies, TV shows, foods, that sort of thing.
But what was even better was that they were both diehard Star Trek fans and had been pretty much all of their lives.
Sean sort of hung around Terry as she worked her shift at Circle K that night, and the two would talk when there were no customers that needed assistance, and by the end of the night, both of them realized that they kind of liked each other.
And then Sean asked Terry out on a date, and she couldn't tell but to say yes.
So, Terry, as I said, she's been in a lot of abusive relationships in the past, and she wasn't about to let another man push her around again.
As we saw with the old Norbert Dees.
Old Norbert Dees!
And you know that she probably still had that photograph in her wallet at this point.
So, one night, during a small argument with Sean, she decided...
That she would see if Sean would hit her back after she slapped him.
A sort of test.
She slapped Sean in the face, but he did not react the way she thought he would.
He got upset and said, Girls don't hit boys and boys don't hit girls!
Sean ran to the other room crying, flailing his arms as he did so.
Terry was shocked at his reaction and went to the other room to apologize.
She told him it was a mistake and that...
There would be no abuse in their relationship at all.
Really? You mean it?
None? At all?
Terry decided that she could trust Sean at that point, and the two appeared to have fallen in love, or something like it.
He would give her the name Honey Bunny, which made her gush.
Whoa! Just a flood.
Gush there, man!
Come on, man!
Come on!
She liked it, man.
She really liked Honey Bunny.
I guess.
Alright. But there were red flags.
One such red flag was the absence of any real sex life.
Terry alleges that sex occurred only about three times within ten years.
This obviously bothered Terry a lot.
And she confronted him about it on many occasions, but he was always able to reassure her that everything was fine by telling her that he was attracted to her, that it wasn't anything that had to do with her or her looks.
He just said that he just wasn't really into sex.
Accepting this as how it was going to be, they would soon move in together.
Man, that is unusual.
That would have been a red flag, I feel like, for any young man.
I'm just not into it.
Yeah, he's like 22. He's in his early 20s.
Yeah, he's just like, eh, it's not really for me.
So later, after Sean was caught, Terry would later say of that, Sean didn't really believe in sex.
I asked him about it one time, and he told me that he had been taught that it was a nasty thing, and that he shouldn't do it.
So it's like...
Okay. There's a lot to unpack there.
A lot to unpack.
There's so much.
It could be anything, you know, with his dad discovering stuff with his dad or just the violent porn.
I mean, who knows?
Who knows?
Yeah. Who knows?
There's definitely compartmentalization going on, but, you know, we don't know that at this point.
We don't know what's going on in Sean's life, right?
Right, right, right.
So after moving in with Sean, she discovered that he had a pretty serious porn addiction.
She found out that Sean was also frequenting gore sites that focused on the torture, murder, and mutilation of women, as I mentioned earlier.
And one night, he thought it would be a great idea to call Terry into the room to show her something that he thought was beautiful.
Hey! Hey, hey, babe, babe!
Hey, honey!
Hey! Come check this out!
Hey, honey!
Come look at this, baby!
You gotta look at this!
Needless to say, she was shocked at what she saw.
Sean simply laughed at her reaction as she stood with a disgusted look on her face, but she just ignored his strange internet browsing, turned from his gaze, and walked out of the room.
Ooh, left a cold like that.
Yeah, I know.
I want to know.
What was it?
I've seen a fair share of gore.
I mean...
Yeah, and it comes from someone like Terry who, like, I mean, she murdered a guy, like, brutally stabbed this guy to death, right?
Right, right, right.
This is kind of, you know, she's a hardcore chick, you know?
But Sean and Terry met in either January or February of 1994, and come March 21st, 1994, Sean would commit his first murder, meaning that with only the first couple of months after meeting and dating Terry,
Sean would go out to murder his first victim.
Jeez, just like that.
Within just a couple months, man.
It's like, you have a girlfriend now.
Settle down, bro.
Yeah, seriously.
I mean, he wasn't interested in sex, so I guess we're going to find out what he was interested in.
So now, let's begin with victim number one, Anne Bryan.
I feel so bad for this lady, man.
So, elderly Anne Bryan moved into a luxury residential nursing home in St. James Place after recently falling and injuring her left hand, leaving her unable to use it.
Unfortunately, Anne was also unable to use her right hand due to a condition that left her being born without it.
Despite not having the right hand, Anne loved to play the piano, and she was actually really good at it.
But now, you know, having this other injury with her left hand, now she can't play the piano at all.
Dang! Anne!
Yeah, it sucks.
On the days leading up to the night of March 20th, 1994, poor Anne was in another accident which caused her even more injuries.
This time, she was sitting in the back seat of her doctor's car without her seatbelt fastened.
People, wear your seatbelt.
Seriously. Wear your seatbelt.
So easy.
Just wear it.
First thing I do when I get into my car, I just out of habit, I throw my seatbelt on, boom, done, let's go.
Absolutely. PSA.
Wear the damn seatbelt.
PSA. Anyway, Anne's daughter, Rachel, was driving.
And no offense to Rachel, you know, it's not, whatever, I don't know what happened, but whatever.
To avoid being in a wreck, Rachel stepped hard on the brakes, causing Anne to slam forward into the back of the front seat, breaking multiple ribs.
Jeez. Ugh.
It's a hard hit.
During the night.
Hard hit.
During the night of the 20th, Anne decided that she would leave the front door unlocked as a kind of gesture to the night nurse who would be arriving at some point during the night.
Being that she had recently broken her ribs, had an injury to her left hand, already didn't have her right hand, leaving the door unlocked meant that she wouldn't have to go through all the hassle and the pain of having to get up out of bed when the nurse arrived, walk over the door, unlock it, get her medication and stuff,
lock the door, go back to bed.
It's just much easier to just leave it unlocked.
Totally. Plus, there wasn't any concern about crime.
The crime right where she was in this residential nursing home, there just was no crime.
It was a gated community.
Crime simply didn't happen there.
So what are you afraid of, right?
Yeah, no reason.
No reason.
So around 3 a.m., Ann heard the sound of the door being opened and someone quietly coming inside.
But naturally, she assumed it was the night nurse doing their scheduled rounds.
As she laid there, she realized that something was off because the lights didn't turn on and she could hear someone approach in the darkness.
Then she noticed a dark figure standing next to her bed.
The figure leaned in.
Anne did not recognize this silent man.
The man was Sean Gillis, and he reached down to touch Anne.
At that moment, Anne began to scream as loud as she possibly could.
Quickly, Sean jumped on top of Anne, ripped out her underwear, but Anne refused to stop screaming as she fought back as hard as the frail woman possibly could.
Sean decided at that point that it needed to quiet her screams before anyone was alerted.
He took the knife that he had with him and started to stab Anne, but this did nothing to silence her screams.
Sean then viciously cut Anne's throat, which was so intense that he nearly decapitated her.
Knowing she was well dead, he continued to stab at her body and enjoyed every minute of it.
Then, he cut her breasts repeatedly, cutting one of them almost completely off, only leaving it barely attached by a piece of skin.
Sean stabbed her all over the face and the head, literally shredding it.
Then, Sean went for the genitals, with a clear focus on her vulva.
Again, shredding her sexual organs to nothing resembling a vagina.
Then, he stabbed and slashed at her stomach, leaving her intestines to protrude out of the multiple stab wounds.
This is what is called an abdominal evisceration.
And in total, he stabbed Anne at least 48 times.
Later that morning, A nurse finally did come by to drop off Anne's medication doing their rounds.
The nurse entered the apartment, walked towards Anne's room, and nothing seemed out of place until she reached the door.
Once there, she found the posed body of 81-year-old Anne Bryan.
Sean had placed Anne completely naked on her back on the floor.
She was facing her closet with her right leg raised up onto the bed, spreading her legs.
Leaving as much of a shock value as he possibly could.
The attack was so brutal that blood stained nearly every surface of the walls, ceiling, and floor of Anne's room.
So brutal.
Man, that's kill number one.
Just went balls to the wall on it.
Just after starting dating his frickin' future wife, man.
Does it go into any kind of victim selection?
Like, why did he choose this person?
Or is that something that they found out later or asked him questions about?
I mean, just by chance?
I mean, did he canvas this?
He sort of did.
It's sort of random.
He did...
Pick weaker people, people he knew he could overpower.
Okay, okay.
So it was like a sure thing type of deal?
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know much about him stalking people too much.
I mean, well, there is one.
We'll get into it.
But overall, he did choose specific women that he knew he could overpower.
And typically, Ann is kind of an off-the-wall one because most of his victims were all sex workers.
Ann was just an elderly woman, which is just strange.
So let's continue to victim number two, Catherine Hall.
On January 4th, 1999, so this is nearly five years after Anne's Boodle murder, so that's a big time gap for a serial killer.
Yeah, I'm assuming since here he is murdering somebody else that they didn't put two and two together and figure out that it was him, you know?
Which is weird because he was really candid about it when he got caught.
Like, he confessed to everything, so maybe he wasn't sure about the murder of Anne Bryan.
Like, he was kind of, like, even caught himself off guard and just wanted to lay low.
We just don't know.
Clearly five years went by, so he, you know...
Did not...
It's a long time.
...had a hiatus there.
Because most serial killers, you know, maybe a month break, they'll do another couple months, whatever.
And we see time and time again, serial killers, they have that cooling off period, which is generally at first a longer period.
Right. Over time, the first one.
Then they don't get caught, so then they become a little more emboldened after the next murder.
Yeah. Right, and the cooling off periods become shorter and shorter.
Until you get to, like, the berserker mode, like we see in, like...
Ted Bundy and, you know, those types.
So, 30-year-old Catherine Hall was working the streets as she normally did.
On this evening, she was trying to make enough money so she could purchase some crack.
A white man pulled up next to her in his white Chevy Cavalier.
It's just a wonderful car.
It's a true beauty.
Oh, yes.
Classic. Did you guys ever watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
I never did.
My sisters did.
I fucking hated the show.
Yeah, well, his car.
He named his car Buffy after the title character.
Buffy Summers.
Yep. Played by our favorite Sir Michelle Gellar.
What a fucking douchebag.
Yeah. Trekkie and a Buffy fan.
You're gonna think about that later, mister, and you're gonna laugh.
Guilty as charged.
You know?
What a fucking freak.
I'm just kidding.
I'm a Buffy vampire.
I'll tell you whatever.
I never understood that.
I mean, the 90s, man.
You know, I came around to it a little later, had a roommate that was kind of into it, a female roommate, and I was like, yeah, well, you know, maybe I'll check it out.
But that's not for me.
It's for the boys.
I think there's something behind that story.
You only watched it to get a little closer to this roommate, huh?
Nudge, nudge.
I do have a white car, and it is named Buffy.
So you tell me what's about to happen.
Jokes. Smilingly, he politely asked for a blowjob in exchange for $20.
Oh, $20!
$20, bro.
She agreed, and she quickly got in the car, and they drove to a deserted area where Sean then parked.
Old Buffy.
Oh, God.
Sean leans his seat back, unzips his pants, and brought his hands out of view.
Quickly, he placed a large zip tie over her head and tightened it around her neck.
Catherine fought back and quickly found the door handle.
She was able to get out and she started running, and run she did faster than she had ever run before.
But Sean, quickly giving chase, Catherine never had a chance.
Sean easily caught up with her, and with his knife ready in his hand, he stabbed her 16 times, including in her left eye, both breasts, her stomach, and then also slit her neck.
Catherine Hall was dead, but Sean Gillis, He unclothed her body, then stabbed his knife into her left shoulder and pulled downward,
cutting her arm wide open all the way down to her hand, just filleting the whole arm open.
Then he mutilated both of her breasts before stabbing her stomach and proceeded to the vaginal area.
Which he took particular pleasure in brutalizing.
After that, he cut off one of her eyelids.
What he did with it, I'm uncertain.
But he wasn't done.
Sean flipped Catherine over onto her stomach.
He then stabbed into her buttocks, and like her arm, he stabbed into one of the buttocks and sliced down to her knee, laying it wide open.
Then he did the same to her calf.
He would later say, That he especially admired looking at the sliced open muscle.
Sean proceeded to cut and slice at her at least 21 more times in random areas all over her body with no discernible care.
Finally done, he picked her body up and placed it into his trunk.
From there, he drove to a car wash where he nonchalantly took her body out of the trunk, set it aside, and then cleaned his car.
There's speculation.
That while her body laid, he took the sprayer and he sprayed her body to clean away any excess blood and possible evidence.
He didn't say this as far as we know, but he was pretty candid about his crimes.
But, I mean, I'm just presuming that if you're at a car wash and you're there to wash blood out of your car, why would you take a bloody body out of your car, clean the trunk of any blood, and then put that bloody body back into the trunk?
Doesn't make sense.
So, I'm speculating.
But it's something he would probably do.
I mean, anybody crazy enough to do what he did, I'm thinking you'd probably spray the body.
You'd have to get as much blood off it as well.
But let's continue.
After that...
Sean drove to an area where a new housing development was being laid out, and he discarded Catherine's corpse next to a dead-end sign.
And he thought that by placing her corpse next to this dead-end sign that he was being just the funniest guy in the world.
And he would later say that.
The next morning, a man who was out squirrel hunting haplessly stumbled upon the frighteningly disturbing sight.
During her autopsy, a pubic hair, the ball still attached, would be found in her mouth.
This was just full of DNA, but at the time, we weren't really messing with DNA too much.
At least they didn't have anything to match this DNA with at that time.
So they didn't even do anything with it.
But it's the start of the trail.
They had something, but they didn't really know.
Luckily, they did keep it, though.
We hear a lot of times, like these cops or these coroners, whatever, they throw shit away not really thinking about it, which turns out would be a really shitty idea for them to do.
Yeah, absolutely.
Four months later to May 30th of 1999.
Okay, so the cooling off period is really shrinking down now at this point.
It's shrinking.
52-year-old Hardy Schmidt went out for an early morning jog, which she did every morning and which she thoroughly enjoyed.
She was a marathon runner and in phenomenal shape and was actually training for an upcoming race on this typical morning of May 30th.
This is something you should watch out for there, Scott.
The story pertains to you.
I mean, she's training for a marathon.
You're training for a marathon.
Yep, yep.
So just a couple of weeks.
Watch over my shoulder.
Just always be holding a mirror in front of you as you're running.
Always looking behind you.
And get me!
Just a couple of weeks before, Sean Gillis noticed Hardy on her early morning jog and instantly became obsessed with her.
So this is one that he was actually stalking for quite a while.
Okay. For a couple weeks, anyway.
He didn't have the intention to speak to her like a normal human being would, but preferred to secretly watch her from a distance, from afar, over the following days, leading up to the 30th.
So he was just in his car and just would watch her from a distance.
He was infatuated with this woman.
Just a creeper, dude.
Jeez. On this day, he approached Hardy from behind in his car as she jogged.
And as he neared her, he stepped on the gas and struck her from behind, sending her into a nearby ditch and leaving her unconscious.
Sean got out of his car and ran up to Hardy with his zip tie, placed it around the neck and tightened it, strangling her to death very quickly.
She had become Sean's third victim.
He then quickly placed her body into the trunk of his car and drove away being satisfied that no one had seen him.
Sean drove to an isolated area and took Hardy's body out of his car.
He placed her on the ground and promptly removed her clothing.
He laid next to her and rubbed his penis on her body until he was ready to vaginally rape her corpse.
He ejaculated inside of her body before placing her body back into his car and driving away.
Sean realized that he didn't have enough time to dispose of Hardy's body because he had to go pick up Terry from her job.
coming up with a better idea, he decided to leave the body in the trunk while he went.
Cheers! No way.
Sean told her that he had ran over a squirrel and it probably got stuck somewhere under the car.
Yeah. So that's pretty smart.
Sean finally dumped the body of Hardy Schmidt, either at a rural parish or at a bayou, depending on which story you read.
But wherever he dumped the body, it was in the Baton Rouge.
She was found that same day.
And unfortunately, man, Hardy's husband was the prime suspect for years until Gillis was finally caught.
Can you believe that, man?
No, that would just be the worst.
I mean, his wife winds up dead, they find her, she's been brutalized, and they blame him, and he's like, really?
I did not do this.
But they can't nail him, because obviously there's no evidence leading to him, because he didn't do it!
All they had was just the connection that he was the closest person to him.
Yeah, that's messed up, dude.
And for the better part of four years, the police suspected him.
Completely. They were focused on...
Yeah, they were focused on him for four years, bro.
They're not even, like, connecting this murder to the other murders.
If they were looking at her husband, there's no way they were like, oh, this is a string of murders that's been happening, you know, like you can tell.
Otherwise, they would have mentioned it.
Yeah. November 12th, 1999.
Sean needed another victim.
A fourth victim.
So Sean dropped Terry off at work and began his search of the streets.
He came upon an African-American woman who he thought had very gorgeous legs.
He was fixated on this woman's legs, man.
He loved legs.
Apparently. He drove by her once, and then he turned around and drove by her again.
Then he stopped next to her, and she approached the window.
They talked for a minute, and she told them that she was on her way to her friend's house to go pick up some weed.
This would be 36-year-old Joyce Williams.
Sean told her that he'd give her a ride to her friend's house, and then he added that he would pay her $10 for a blowjob.
And she was like, yeah, that's a great idea.
So she hops in.
What? Sean drives her to her friend's house, as he said he would.
And she got out.
She went inside, took care of whatever business she had to do.
She came back out.
A few minutes later, got back into Sean's car, where they opened some beers, and they started to drive outside of town, you know, go get a blowjob.
Once in a secluded spot in a sugarcane field, Joyce got out of the car to go to the bathroom.
And Sean pounced on the opportunity and ran up behind Joyce, putting a zip tie around her neck as his motorcycle was rowdy, tightened around her, and strangled her to death.
After she was deceased, he went ahead and placed her body in the back or into the passenger seat of his car.
And he placed the seatbelt over her shoulder, as if she was just taking a nap.
He started to drive back to his house, who he shared with his girlfriend Terry, and as he was driving, Joyce's body slowly started to slouch over to the left toward him, and he said that her head sort of fell down into his lap, and he self-reported that this made him rock hard,
and he could barely contain himself.
So, Sean brought the body of Joyce into the kitchen of his house, where he laid her down while admiring and stroking her body.
So later, after he was apprehended, he pretty much gave a full confession.
And never really seemed bothered at what he had done.
And of Joyce's murder, he later said, She had beautiful legs.
That's one thing that I recall about her.
And I wanted to keep those legs.
I like a good set of gamps.
Good set of legs.
Looking at it, just the curvature of it, it was beautiful.
You know, notwithstanding, it was a cut off of a person.
I used a sharp knife to cut through the muscle of her leg.
But it took a while to get through it.
I cut too low.
I finally got it off with a hacksaw, and I went for the next leg.
The blade snapped on me when I was about halfway through the femur.
I remember trying to get her arm off next.
There was a lot of blood.
I sopped it up with paper towels.
Packet paper, which is very absorbent.
409, and water.
I used one of Terry's knives, a fillet knife that was razor sharp.
You gotta be careful handling it.
I tried to get the arm at the elbow and then the wrist.
Things were popping out of joint, but I couldn't get it off, even though I twisted it real good.
At that point, I pretty much went for the head.
It went through the throat just like that.
It was like cutting butter.
With Miss Brian, I couldn't get through.
When they were alive, the muscles in the neck make it harder.
There was a lot of blood, so I washed her head in the sink.
I inserted my penis in her head.
In her throat, her spinal cord, something picked up my scrotum.
It was very uncomfortable.
I guess I got what I deserved then.
It wasn't a sex thing, it was a mind thing.
It was more just to see what it was like.
I didn't, you know, get off.
Then I put my penis in her mouth.
After that, I picked up her leg, holding it with a foot close to my face.
She had lovely legs, like Terry.
But in restless Sean Gillis fashion, that wasn't all.
He proceeded to cut off both of her nipples and held them in his hand, looking at them inquisitively, moving them around with his fingers, trying to understand them.
Licking his lips, Sean thought about putting them into his mouth, tasting them, chewing them, and then swallowing them.
But he wasn't sure about it.
And without wasting another moment, he popped them in his mouth like a handful of peanuts, chewed them up, and ate them.
After eating the nipples, He realized that it was almost time to pick up Terry.
He wrapped Joyce's mutilated body in several large black garbage bags.
He put her severed leg into another bag and her head into yet another bag.
He then put all those bags into a box that he had and he placed that into the trunk of old Buffy.
Then he placed the partially dismembered body of Joyce Williams into the trunk as well and cleaned up the scene as best he could before driving off to pick Terry up from work.
With body and car, he calmly picked Terry up, greeting her as if everything was normal and was cute as could be.
She sensed nothing.
Later, Sean said he reveled in this moment.
It gave him pure pleasure to know that he had a freshly mutilated corpse in the trunk of his car and Terry had no idea.
Second time, too.
Yeah, second time.
So he's just getting super ballsy.
So Terry was exhausted.
And when they got back to the house, she went to bed not long after.
And once she was sleeping, Sean eagerly left to get rid of Joyce's body, and he drove around until he found a levee where he decided it would be a perfect spot to dispose of it.
Sean later said of this, He then tossed her body over next.
Two months later, on January 22nd, 2000, two men out for a walk around the levee to do some birdwatching came upon the dismembered and decomposed body of Joyce Williams.
And when they were done with their birdwatching, they went straight to the police to report what they had found.
I'm just kidding.
They went straight to the police.
They did not go birdwatching first.
Yeah, they went birdwatching first.
They just continued on with their day.
They're like, oh, look at that.
I haven't seen that one before.
Hey, you see that, Billy?
I think that's a dead body.
Two weeks later, she was identified through dental records.
And the police had made a bunch of flyers and posted them around the Baton Rouge area in an attempt to help catch whoever was responsible for these heinous killings.
Sean happened to be working at an office supply company at this time, apparently as a repair technician.
And he was at the state attorney general's office where he was repairing a copy machine.
He came upon one of these flyers hanging on a wall and nearly came upon one of these flyers hanging on a wall.
So, what would a psychopath do at this juncture?
Sean Gillis would go and make 200 copies of that flyer, and he would gently caress Joyce's face on each flyer as it came out of the printer.
Jeez. This guy's a fucking freak, bro.
Just a weirdo.
Lillian Robinson was 52 years old and suffering from severe crack and alcohol addiction.
A now 37-year-old Sean Gillis was cruising the North Baton Rouge streets in January of 2000, where he unfortunately put his sights on Lillian, who would be Sean's fifth victim.
Sean offered her some cash for a blowjob, and Lillian's crippling addiction wouldn't allow her to say no.
She quickly got into the car, and Sean just as quickly drove to a secluded place where, as usual, he strangled her to death with a large nylon zip tie.
He then drove Lillian's body back to his house, where he had eager plans in mind.
But when he got there and brought her inside, he realized that he didn't have enough time to do all the sadistic things that he wanted to do to her corpse.
He was able to remove her clothing and admire her corpse while caressing it with his fingers, and then he eventually raped the corpse.
And I think you can put your imagination to work on what he had truly planned to do with Lillian Robinson's body.
But when he was done, he placed her body back into the trunk of his car and drove to the Atchafalaya Basin, which is the largest wetland and swamp in the United States, and it is there that he dumped her body, figuring that the alligator just would devour it before she could be found.
But Lillian's body was found, although miles away from where Sean disposed of it, and about two months later, by fishermen.
But again, it was horribly decomposed.
So the cops just kind of chalk that one up, like, alright, put it on the back burner, we'll mic connect this one, we'll see what goes on in the future here.
So roughly nine months later, in October of 2000, Sean was visiting his goddaughter in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he later said that he didn't have plans to kill anybody while he was on that visit.
But while he was there...
His sickening urges and desires grew beyond anything that he had physical control over.
The guy just couldn't help himself.
He needed to find a sixth victim.
While driving around the dark streets, he found 38-year-old Marilyn Neville's, I think that's how you pronounce her name, walking on the side of a fairly busy road.
He pulled up next to her and offered her a ride, which Marilyn gladly accepted.
Once inside, Sean asked how much a blowjob would be.
She told him $10.
Sean was satisfied, and the two were driving away.
As usual, he took them to an isolated spot where he paid her the $10, and then Marilyn began the task of performing oral sex on Sean.
Afterward, he tightened a zip tie around Marilyn's neck, but he was too sloppy, and during the attack, exactly like Catherine Hall, who was Gillis' second victim, she was able to escape out of the passenger side door.
She ran as fast as she could with the zip tie still around her neck, but Sean was quick on her heels.
He spotted a piece of rebar on the ground, and he quickly grabbed it with his right fist.
And when he caught up with Marilyn, he struck her repeatedly over the head until she was dead.
He then furiously tightened the zip tie that was already fastened around the dead woman's neck, pulling it tighter than he had ever pulled before, just out of sheer anger.
He dragged her body back to his car and placed her onto the passenger side floor.
He retrieved the $10 that he had already given her and to himself, with a comedic tone, he said, You know, wasn't a bad blowjob.
He literally laughed out loud.
Guy's a fucking psychopath.
so sean drove again to a car wash and repeated what he had done with katherine hall when
was done he placed maryland's body back in his trunk wrapped it in towel wrapped towels around her head to soak up any remaining blood he then went to a gas station to fill up his tank and when he went inside to pay the attendant asked about the blood all over sean's
Oh, you should see the other guy.
No further questions were asked and the maniac walked out of the door.
With body and trunk, he proceeded to head home where he, of course, had gruesome plans for Marilyn's corpse.
But on the way to the house, he couldn't help but fantasize about her dead body laying in the trunk.
He grew so impatient that he had to pull over in a parking area just to gaze at the lifeless body.
He opened the trunk and stared down at the corpse, his imagination running wild.
With only a few hours left before he knew he had to pick Terry up from work, he had to get Marilyn's body to his house quickly.
So he slammed the trunk closed and scurried over to the driver's seat and got in and took off like a boy running late on his first date.
Once Marilyn was inside, he propped her up on the kitchen floor, leaning her back up against a wall.
As he was undressing Marilyn, her bladder naturally released his contents of urine.
Sean felt the urine and noticed that it was still warm to the touch, which he later said had absolutely disgusted him.
This urine disgusts him.
Yeah, that's the one thing.
He's like, nope.
Yeah, and it was warm.
That was, like, the one thing that, like, really disgusted him, that it was warm.
Yeah, warm blood, not a problem.
Warm urine, can't deal with it.
He could not deal with warm urine.
Weird. Without a moment of hesitation, he dragged her body into the shower where he ran cool water over her corpse.
Later of this, a detective asked, So you put soap on her and stuff, too?
And Sean responded, Yeah, I mean, we're taking a shower, you know?
He then crawled into the bathtub with Marilyn's corpse.
But had trouble keeping her body upright.
He also had trouble with orally raping her because rigor mortis has set in, which caused her jaw to lock.
While holding her in the tub, he again realized that he did not have enough time to mutilate her body as he originally wanted to do.
So again, Shauna wrapped her body in some type of absorbent wrapping paper and placed her in the trunk of his car.
He then went out looking for a place to dump the remains and eventually found a levee where he placed her body.
Marilyn's body laid in that spot for 11 days until finally being found by a man walking his dog on Halloween.
And sadly, she was never reported missing by anybody.
Man. So here we have a cooling off period.
Sean Gillis refrained from killing over the next three years, and this would be between 2000 and 2003.
He simply laid low and lived a seemingly normal life with Terry.
And Sean, of course, was still looking at mutilated women on the internet, and he was very enamored by the murders of the original Baton Rouge killer, Derek Todd Lee, who was still very active in that area.
And Sean would actually collect the newspaper articles about Derek Todd Lee's killings, and he said that he quote-unquote admired Derek's murders.
So it's weird having a couple serial killers in the same area, and you're both doing your murders, and like...
You're admiring each other's work.
Yeah, I mean, the police are not putting two and two together, man.
Yeah, I mean, they're kind of chalking them.
They're at least five different serial killers operating in the same area.
As a detective, being able to be like, okay, this is due to that guy.
This one's due to this guy.
So we have different serial killers with the different MOs.
Being a detective and being able to look at all of that evidence and being able to separate due to the MOs of these perpetrators, it's crazy that they can do that.
It wouldn't be until after Lee had been apprehended that the Baton Rouge Police Department knew for sure that they had a different serial killer on their hands with his own MO.
Come September 2003, Sean's cooling off period was coming to a close.
His fantasies of killing, raping, and mutilating women had built and built, the pressure finally boiling over, and by the next month of October, he was ready to carry out his next attack.
Johnny Mae Williams would be Sean Gillis' seventh victim.
She was 45 years old, and not a stranger to Sean at all.
The two had known each other for a short period of time, as Johnny May was introduced to Sean by a mutual friend who knew that Sean was looking for someone to periodically clean his and Terry's house.
Johnny May and Sean had actually formed a decent friendship, if you can call it that, which lasted for several years, presumably over the years that he had not been killing.
And one year, Sean even went to a Thanksgiving dinner at John May's family's house, which actually went really well.
And the two would hang out, they would smoke weed occasionally, and she was kind of a source for Sean to get weed.
And it was on October 9th, 2003, that Sean went out to find Johnny May so he could, as he later retold the story to detectives, score some weed.
Apparently, it was not his intention to kill Johnny May, he just wanted to get weed.
He eventually found her lingering around some side street and offered to take her anywhere she needed to go.
Johnny May was extremely strung out on crack, very gaunt, and clearly unhealthy.
She got in, and to Sean, she seemed to be at ease.
She laid her seat back and closed her eyes as Sean continued to drive out of the city.
Later, Sean said that he looked over at her and said to himself, She looks dead.
She looks like she needs to be dead.
As usual, he found a secluded area and pulled over.
He got out and walked over to the passenger's side door, which he then opened.
He then fiercely grabbed Johnny May by her hair and arm and yanked her out of the car, throwing her to the hard ground where she laid on her back.
Sean then sat on top of her.
He placed a nylon zip tie around her neck and tightened it.
Given her physical state, she was visibly unable to adequately defend herself, which is what Sean Gillis always looked for in his victims.
Frail women, women he knew he could easily overpower.
After she was deceased, he grabbed his knife from his car and returned to her body where he first undressed her.
He turned her onto her stomach and then stabbed the back of one of her legs and sliced down, cutting it wide open, just like he did with Catherine Hall.
He cut into her buttocks, slicing them open and inspecting the meat and fat.
He loved to closely look at the still warm meat of his victims.
He cut into her lower back and sliced down into her buttocks.
He made deep cuts in both legs and in other various areas as well, and just all over her body, and joyfully inspected the bloody scene.
After that, he flipped her body over and cut off both of Johnny May's hands.
He placed her severed hands into a Ziploc bag and put them into his car for later plan.
When he was done butchering her, he placed her mangled body into his car and then went to a wooded area.
And dumped her body on an embankment.
It was there he posed her body in different positions, and then he took multiple photographs of these poses, which he would later use to relive the event.
Before leaving, he posed her body face down, with her handless arms sort of tucked beneath her body.
And he did this so that whoever would be the first to turn her over, her handless arms would kind of spread out and it would just be a super shock value to whoever would flip her over.
And obviously her entire body was just cut up.
East Baton Rouge Sheriff Major Brian White commented on the site of her mutilated body.
You could barely tell it was a human being.
I painted her nails while I had her hand in there.
See, later he took her severed hands and he later put nail polish on them.
Freaky. What the hell?
Moving on to Donna Benet Johnston.
Is it Benet or Bennett?
Probably Bennett.
Alright, Donna Bennett Johnston.
It was the early morning hours of February 26, 2004, where Donna Bennett Johnston, 43 years old and extremely intoxicated, was offering her services as a sex worker.
Like Johnny Mae Williams, Donna's life took a turn for the worse and she developed alcoholism and a terrible drug habit.
Sean pulled up next to her in his white Chevy Cavalier, old Buffy, and offered her money.
Donna glanced over the normal enough looking guy.
He didn't seem aggressive, he gave her a trusting smile, and letting her guard down, she opened the door and got inside.
Sean drives to a secluded spot, and Donna gives him a blowjob.
And right as he's finishing his orgasm, he slips his zip tie around Donna's neck and tightens it very hard.
After a surprisingly quick kill, he brought her body to the trunk and drove off to find another dumping ground for his latest victim.
Once he found a spot, he opened the trunk and took many photographs of Donna's body.
He then removed her from the trunk, placed her on the ground, and then proceeded to take off her clothes.
It was this moment that he truly wanted all along.
It was never the kill itself.
It was always the mutilation.
So with his knife, he removed her left arm at the elbow.
He then sliced off a large area of flesh from one of her thighs, which was a tattoo of a butterfly.
And now let's listen to Sean Gillis talk about this particular incident.
Of the leg.
You know, and I literally held and stretched the skin.
Like I said, I'm trying to figure out what the hell it was tattooed of.
So after making the initial incision of the leg, I just cut a box around it.
Then I find out how much human fat sticks to the back of the skin.
Getting it off there was easier thought of than done.
And at that point, I looked at it, bitter, flavored, and lick it.
Even tasted the fat.
This was where I tried a little cannibalism.
Okay. The methadone tissue does not taste good.
I don't advise it.
I don't see how anything would survive off of it.
At that point, I wrapped it in.
Then he cut off her nipples, which she had planned to eat.
He would say that the taste of the nipples wasn't really pleasant, but that he felt like he needed to eat them in order to keep a part of them inside of him.
He moved Donna's body to a new patch of ground and took more photographs.
He took the severed arm and wrapped it in some cloth that he had with him and wrapped the cut-out tattoo in paper towels.
After this, he placed her body back into his trunk and took more photographs, including some where he was digitally penetrating her vagina and rubbing her breasts.
During this attack, Sean took no less than 45 photographs, and being the fucking idiot that he was, in some of the pictures, you can clearly see his license plates of old Buffalo.
Oh, man.
Fucking idiot.
He's just getting careless.
He's getting sloppy.
I mean, he's gotten away with, you know, six kills.
Seven. Seven kills.
So, like, I don't even care anymore at this point, you know?
Super sloppy, dude.
Like, they get to a point where it's like, I'm never gonna get caught.
I'm too good at this.
And they get too complacent and start making mistakes.
Thankfully. Catch the bastards.
Thankfully, yeah.
So he found an area to dispose of her body and he very calmly drove home as if he was only out for an evening drive.
Donna would be the eighth and final victim.
Now we get to the tire tracks.
Ah, yes.
Unfortunately for Sean Gillis, he made a major blunder.
He left perfect tire tracks leaving from the scene of Donna Johnston's discarded body.
Tire tracks that were from a rare tread pattern of tire, and of which, after running this tread pattern in a database, detectives discovered that only 200 people in the Baton Rouge area owned tires that had that distinct tread mark.
There was one investigator who paid much more attention to the tracks than anyone else, and it was he alone that photographed them and took plaster casts as well.
Of that investigator, the prosecutor, Pramila Burns, stated, That is what I call gumshoe police wake.
He looked at those tire tracks, took pictures, made casts of it.
He would not let it go.
A real go-getter, that guy.
An apple polisher, a true back slapper.
A bootlicker, if you will.
Yeah, one of them kiss-your-ass types, for lack of better words.
With teams of police checking up on all leads, lead detectives know that they need to get some DNA.
So once they checked out all the people who had tires with this rare tread pattern, they zeroed in on a prime suspect.
Then they'd have to get a mouth swab as soon as possible.
The police on this case were well aware that foreign DNA was found on Catherine Hall's mouth.
That was the pubic hair.
And there was apparently foreign DNA found on the bones of Johnny Mae Williams' severed arms.
And I posit that while it's possible that Sean cut himself during his mutilation of her corpse and some of his blood got in her arms or whatever, I think it's much more likely that he was masturbating over her body parts.
Just based on his M.O. and the type of things that he was doing, I mean, there's just no way that it wasn't.
It just seems that way.
He was that sort of guy.
Yeah, he was that sort of guy.
Speculation. Speculation alert.
Speculation alert.
Also, DNA was found under the fingernails of Donna Johnston, so I think she was able to scratch him.
Yeah. But they did not have any DNA to match any of this to.
Yet. The police went through the database of everyone who owned a set of these rare traded tires.
They located their addresses and gave each of them a visit.
So there were about 200 owners, and so it was a fairly easy task to accomplish.
And the purpose of these visits was to request a saliva sample from each of these owners, and the vast majority of these people happily agreed.
They wanted to get their name cleared from this as soon as possible.
And then it would only be a matter of time when they knocked on old Sean Gillis' front door.
And they said that a man answered.
He was very mild-mannered, calm, and he appeared to be a typical guy.
Nothing stood out about him to the investigators.
They didn't get any weird vibes.
Nothing seemed to be off-putting about Gillis.
He was soft-spoken, interpersonal, and nothing particularly tickled the detective's suspicions until they asked about Johnny May Williams.
When the name, Johnny Mae Williams, rolled off of the detective's tongue, Sean immediately replied, Oh, as a matter of fact, yeah, she's ridden my vehicle before.
She's been in my home, you know.
I used to pay her to clean my house.
So the detectives perked their ears and they asked if Sean Gillis would like to take a ride downtown to the station and answer some questions.
And he agreed to do so without seeming nervous or giving any signs of like, Oh shit, you got me.
So once downtown and questioned about the tire tracks, Sean admitted that he had actually been at the very spot where Donna Johnson's body was found, not too long before her body was actually left.
Which, of course, he actually was a big surprise.
What is he doing?
Like, it just...
Yeah, I was there too!
And then asked why he was there, he explained that...
I had some beard.
I needed to go to the bathroom real bad.
And I knew I wasn't going to make it to the house.
You know what I'm saying?
My bladder was how they put it.
Cheech and Chong put it one time.
My eyes are floating.
That's how it felt.
I've never heard that.
I guess that was something about Cheech and Chong's stand-up shows or something.
The detectives then asked Sean if they would find any blood in his car if they were to search it.
To this, Sean replied, About a month after we got the car, speaking about him and his wife, Terry, she got her period.
This would be, what's her name?
Johnny May.
She had her period, and it just soaked.
I mean, it was just like, it looked like a massacre in that front seat.
And then Sean said that the two of them were driving and had the windows down, letting that cool Baton Rouge air flow through their hair, because then he immediately said, Man.
Blood just started flying everywhere in the vehicle.
And that's when the detective was like, well, let me ask you this then.
Is there any reason that blood could be in the backseat?
I mean, he just said the wind caused blood to fly everywhere, but this is how the interview went.
He's just being really suspicious.
So then Gillis said, well, there shouldn't be.
I mean, barring wind blowing, you know, I'm not saying you're not going to find any one of Johnny's hairs back in there, but you shouldn't find anything from anyone else.
Oh my gosh.
Then he continued.
Yeah, I think the windows were down and probably some blood flew out the window and got blown back in.
Genius! Yep.
Yep, got it!
Each detective looked at one another thinking the exact same thing.
It's obviously this guy.
The lead detective excused himself and told a rookie to draft a search warrant for Sean Gillis' car.
While that was being drafted, a mouth swab was being done on Sean.
That swab was immediately brought to the crime lab and expedited for testing.
To the detective's irritation, they had nothing solid to arrest him on at that time, other than some circumstantial evidence, and were pretty much forced to let him walk right out of the police station.
So, after many tense hours, the detectives received the phone call that they had been waiting for.
The DNA was a solid match.
With that damning evidence, a judge quickly signed a warrant for Sean Gillis' arrest.
A SWAT team rolled up on the Gillis' home and barged inside as one would expect they would do.
And inside the bedroom, they found Sean in bed with his girlfriend, or wife, I don't know what they are at this point, Terry Lemoyne.
With Terry shocked and yelling, what's going on, what's going on?
She actually glanced over at Sean to give her, you know, to have him give her an explanation because she did not know what the hell was happening.
So Sean, being caught off guard but not shocked that they were there, turned to face Terry, shrugged his shoulders, and said, Sorry, honey bunny!
After that awkward moment, one of the SWAT team looked at her and asked, Didn't she know you were living with a serial killer?
She, of course, had no idea that over the period of their 10-year sexless relationship that her boyfriend...
Husband or whatever, had been killing and brutally mutilating women.
Not to mention the rape, dismemberment, necrophilia, cannibalism, all the photographs, all the body parts it kept as trophies.
And in fact, he did a lot of the stuff in the very house that they were living in.
I mean, his first murder was just a couple months after the two started their relationship.
So Terry couldn't allow herself to believe that her husband was the serial killer that the cops were looking for.
It was too unreal, too close to home.
She refused to believe it.
The police straight up told her, look, he admitted to it.
And so with her heart sinking, she decided that she had to ask him herself.
So she went to the police station where he was being held and asked him straight up if he was the one doing it.
And she later said that Sean lowered his eyes and again said, Sorry, honey bunny.
She said that she just stood up, turned around, and left.
Could you imagine?
Like, she just had no idea.
You know?
And he's acting somewhat normal-ish with her, but, I mean, not abnormal enough to where she's getting, like, where have you been?
Like, where are you going?
You know, like, it's kind of weird that there's this unaccounted time where he's doing these things and she just has no idea.
She must have been working a lot or something.
Yeah, I mean, she must have been, and just, like, both of them are just living their own individual lives.
Yeah. Kept each other out.
Not having sex, like, ten years?
Like, oh my gosh.
Ten years?
Like, how could you not see any sign of something weird happening?
Yeah. Ten years.
She must have just so fully trusted him, you know?
He's like, she's like, what's that horrible smell in the trunk?
Oh, yeah, I must have hit a squirrel.
You know, just never questioned it for a second.
And you know that the newspapers are reporting all these murders.
They're putting these facts out.
All sorts of weird shit.
Another body found in the Baton Rouge area.
I mean, this is the early 2000s.
It's not like back in the day when it's grainy news footage.
Well, another body was dug out of the Baton Rouge River today.
Exactly. Not that long ago.
Pretty new.
I mean, this is very fucking recent.
Later, Terry would say of Sean, He was cute in a little teddy bear sort of way.
The type of person you'd want to bring home to mom, actually.
Terry said that she never saw anything bad about him.
No anger issue, no violent temper.
The only weird thing that she could only recall was the time that, you know, he showed her a picture of a dead and mutilated woman on the internet.
That was the only weird thing that she would connect to him.
And now, all Sean Gillis had were his many memories of all of his horrific violence.
And oh boy, did he love talking about his memories.
Oh yes, he spilled the beans on everything.
He didn't hold back at all.
But before anything else, he told the detectives the following.
I'm sorry I hurt people, but I would do it again.
Not long after that statement, while he's talking to the investigators, he said, If anything in my useless life comes out, help the little girls today not to be the premature corpses of tomorrow.
Then he went on to let them know how efficient he was, as if it were a prideful thing.
He said, You let me out on the street, I'll find somebody before sundown.
Which was true.
I mean, he would have.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, the guy was pretty efficient.
100%. Well, and apparently he looked normal enough not only to have a girl...
But just, like, these people would just willingly get into the car with him, so he didn't look like some kind of weirdo, you know?
Yeah. He was a true, like, a sociopath.
Yeah. You could play that part, man.
Yeah. And so when one of the detectives showed him a photo of one of the women that he had murdered, it's like a driver's license photo, Sean commented the following.
Even beat to death looks better than the photo you got of her right there.
Well, talking about the circumstances of one of the murders, Sean has asked if he remembered anything that the woman might have said to him during his attack.
And Sean replied, Other than a lot of, no more, you know?
Why are you doing this?
And I really didn't have an answer for her other than, you know, I'm killing you, you know?
Fuck, man.
Jeez. So, the police thought they had him.
They had the DNA match, they had the photographs, they had a full fucking confession, right?
Well... During that interrogation, in which Sean confessed, he made the comment, You know, I think I really should have brought a lawyer.
When that comment was made, the interrogation should have stopped right then and there, which it did not.
And everything said afterward was completely inadmissible in court.
So with the prosecution's growing fears looming as a trial neared its beginning, a strange series of circumstances started to unfold.
A friend of Donna Johnston, Tammy Prepera, I'm unsure of the majority of these letters' contents,
but one thing that Sean wrote about to Tammy were the final moments of her friend's life.
He wrote, Your friend died quickly.
She 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.
And he signed his letter off with, Yours, oh so beyond sorry, Sean Vincent Gillis.
It would be during a court hearing that Tammy Prepara gave all of his letters to one of the deputies present, who then handed them to the prosecutor, Pramila Burns, who couldn't have been more pleased to be handed this platter of perfect, Fucking admissions, right?
Yeah. They knew then and there that they had Sean Gillis dead to rights.
And with these letters in hand, the prosecution presented their case, which went without a hitch.
Tammy, however, would end up dying from cancer before there would be any final outcome.
There was nothing significant about Sean Gillis' trial, so I won't get into any of that.
But just to wrap up that portion, I'll just lay out a sort of timeline.
On June 10, 2004, Sean was indicted on the murder of Donna Johnston.
The prosecution asked for the death penalty.
On July 14, 2004, Sean is indicted for the murder of Joyce Williams.
Two years later, he pleads guilty to the murder of Joyce and sentenced to life in prison.
On July 21, 2008, now 45-year-old Sean Gillis begins trial for the murder of Donna.
Four days later, the jury unanimously declared him guilty of first-degree murder of Donna.
Six days later, on the 31st of July, 2008, Sean was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole.
The state didn't find reason to have separate trials for the other victims since he was already sentenced to life, so they just kind of like, you know, we're done with it.
And so today, he is in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
A former senior FBI criminal profiler, Mary Ellen O'Toole, super famous, she spent a lot of time interviewing Sean Gillis, and she said that one of his paraphilic behaviors, the necrophilia to be exact, had most likely manifested itself within Sean before he was 10 years old.
Yeah, that's odd.
I'd like to look more into that, you know, just like how that happens.
That's fucking nuts.
To have those, like, intrusive thoughts at such a young age, she said that this behavior eventually formed into a sexual fascination with his own mother.
O'Toole asked Sean, did you ever think about having sex with her, with his mom?
And Sean replied, Yes, of course.
She's not an unattractive woman, even if you see her and meet her now.
Weird, dude.
So, what did Terry do after all this crazy shit?
Well, as of late 2018, she was still living in the house where Joyce Williams' body was mutilated, raped, and dismembered upon numerous other heinous acts that took place within its walls.
Sean's car, Buffy, it was rusting in the backyard and she said that she...
Actually bought it from a company that had it.
And it's probably a company that ran the local police impound or something.
But they didn't want it because they told her it was a biohazard.
So she just bought it back to have it, I guess.
Whoa, weird.
Maybe she needed a car and needed to go to work.
She was mentally unbalanced, too.
Man, something.
The way she reasoned everything out...
This is crazy, man.
But she was asked why she still lived in the house.
And she told the person doing the interview that the house didn't do anything wrong.
You know?
The house is just a house.
And so she did do some renovations, specifically in the kitchen to get rid of the bloodstains and all that.
But she's still living there, at least as of 2018, and still has the car.
That's crazy, man.
That's the story of Sean Vincent Gillis.
That is adult Gillis.
You're going to think about that later, mister, and you're going to laugh.
Thanks for tuning in, everybody, to the Paranautica Podcast, and we hope to have you back next week.
But until then, you can email us at paranautica at gmail.com and let us know what you think.
Give us some suggestions on stories that you would like to hear, and Just give us a shout out.
