Gina Wilson Green, a 41-year-old white woman, was found dead in her home on Stanford Avenue in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on September 24, 2001, after she failed to show up for work and people close to her realized something was terribly wrong. Investigators quickly understood this was not a natural death or an accident: she had been strangled, and the scene showed she had also been sexually assaulted.
In the days that followed, the case settled over the neighborhoods near Louisiana State University like a heavy fog. Green had reportedly been uneasy about her safety and had taken precautions inside her home, but whoever came for her still got in close enough to kill her. The murder fed an expanding dread that a predator was moving through the Baton Rouge area, striking women in their own homes and leaving behind little for detectives to grab onto besides the horror of what had happened.
As months passed and more women were attacked and killed across the region, law enforcement began looking at the crimes as connected, and the search shifted from a single suspect to a pattern. Green’s death was ultimately tied by DNA evidence to Derrick Todd Lee, a man who would come to be known publicly as the Baton Rouge serial killer. The linkage placed her among the earliest victims associated with him through forensic evidence, helping investigators stitch together what had once looked like isolated tragedies.
Lee became the focus of the investigation in 2003 as the task force closed in. He was captured in Atlanta on May 27, 2003, after a multi-state hunt, and authorities publicly connected him to a series of murders around Baton Rouge and Lafayette using DNA results. While Green’s killing was attributed to him through that DNA connection, the major prosecutions that followed centered on other victims: Lee was convicted in 2004 in separate cases, receiving life without parole for the murder of Geralyn DeSoto and a death sentence for the rape and murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, with Louisiana’s Supreme Court later upholding the Pace conviction and death sentence. He remained imprisoned until his death in 2016.
