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Updated April 30, 2004, 5:19 p.m. ET

La. man charged in serial killings confesses to two murders

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A suspected serial killer has confessed to killing two women, bringing to five the number of slayings in the case, police said Friday.

Sean Vincent Gillis confessed to slitting the throat of elderly nursing home patient Ann Bryan and to hitting Hardee Moseley Schmidt with his car as she jogged, then strangling her with a wire, authorities said.

The confession came the day after Gillis, 41, was arrested on murder charges in the slaying of three other women since 1999. He is the second man accused in serial killings in less than a year in this state capital of 227,000.

Bryan, 82, was found stabbed to death in her apartment in an upscale Baton Rouge nursing home in March 1994. The house where Gillis lived, owned by his mother, is nearby. Police said Gillis stabbed her to stop her from screaming.


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Gillis told police he stalked Schmidt, 52, for three weeks before hitting her with his car while she was jogging in May 1999. He strangled her, kept her body in the trunk of his vehicle for a day, then dumped it in a nearby bayou, police said. They said she had been sexually assaulted.

Gillis was arrested Thursday in a SWAT team raid at his home in a working-class neighborhood near Louisiana State University.

A DNA swab from Gillis' mouth matched DNA evidence collected from the women's bodies in the other three slayings, according to police.

Each of those women, Katherine Hall, 29, Johnnie Mae Williams, 45, and Donna Bennett Johnston, 43, had an arrest record for prostitution, drugs or both, and law enforcement officials formed a task force to track the killer. Bryan and Schmidt had no such histories.

Hall was slain in January 1999 and Williams in October 2003. Johnston's body was found Feb. 27. The three were killed in a similar manner and their bodies were cut and mutilated, according to Gillis' arrest warrant. Police said they traced Gillis through tire tracks left where Johnston's body was discovered.

In the other serial killings case, police arrested Derrick Todd Lee in May 2003, and said DNA linked him to the murders of seven south Louisiana women between April 1998 and March 2003, plus an attack on an eighth woman. Lee has been indicted in three of the killings.

He has pleaded innocent, and his first trial is scheduled to begin May 10. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.



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