threatened to kill Whitechapel prostitutes, but had then disappeared. The
For over a hundred years, the Servant Girl Annihilator was overshadowed by the famous Jack. But now he has come into his own and Austin offers a tour of his murder sites.
The Baton Rouge Serial Killer
Nearly 120 years after the Texas Servant Girl Annihilator, another serial killer set to work in Louisiana. The first known victim was Gina Wilson Green, a 41-year-old nurse and office manager for Home Infusion Network. A divorcee, she lived alone in a block on Stanford Avenue in Baton Rouge, near Louisiana State University. Her body was found in her apartment on 23 September 2001. She had been sexually assaulted.
The cause of death was strangulation. According to the autopsy report she died at about nine o’clock in the morning. Her purse was missing, along with her Nokia cell phone. This was later found in an alleyway on the other side of town.
Seven months later, there was a similar killing. At around two in the afternoon on 31 May 2002, the body of 22-year-old Charlotte Murray Pace, a graduate student at Louisiana State, was found by her roommate at a townhouse on Sharlo Avenue in Baton Rouge. Death was due to stab wounds, but she, too, had been sexually assaulted. She had put up a fierce fight and it was likely that her killer had been wounded. Another strange coincidence linked the two killings. Charlotte Pace had moved into the townhouse on Sharlo Avenue only two days before. Previously she had lived just three doors away from Gina Green, although there was no evidence that they ever knew each other.
Again items were missing. The killer had taken the keys to Charlotte’s BMW along with a brown and tan Louis Vuitton wallet that contained her driver’s licence. A silver ring had been stolen and, again, her cell phone was missing. However, her assailant left behind a clue in the form of a footprint. It been made by a man’s Rawlings brand trainer, size 10 or 11. It was easy to identify because it had a unique pattern on the sole. Unfortunately it was a brand found widely in discount stores.
Then, on 12 July 2002, Pam Kinamore went missing. She was an antiques dealer who ran her own business, Comforts and Joys, in Denham Springs, a few miles east of Baton Rouge. It was a Friday evening and she shut up shop as usual before driving home to 8338 Briarwood Place in Baton Rouge itself.
Her husband arrived home later to find his wife’s car in the driveway, but she was nowhere to be found. He was immediately concerned. She did not usually head off without telling him where she was going. Time passed and still she did not show up. Eventually he phoned the police and reported her missing.
As she had only been gone for a matter or hours and there was no sign of forced entry at the house, the police showed little interest. Maybe she had made plans for the evening and had forgotten to inform her husband, or there had been an emergency concerning a family member and she had been called away. Days passed. She did not return. Nothing was heard from her. All reasonable explanations had been checked out and discarded. The family grew gradually more convinced that she had been the victim of foul play. Posters were distributed offering a reward of $75,000 for information concerning her whereabouts or her safe return. After that, all they could do was pray that she would be found alive. Then came the hammer blow.
On 16 July 2002, a team of surveyors working in a boggy area of woodland under the Whisky Bay Bridge in Iberville Parish between Baton Rouge and Lafayette saw something at the water’s edge. It was the naked body of a dead woman, later identified as Pam Kinamore.
At the post mortem conducted at the Orleans Parish Coroner’s office, it was discovered that she had been sexually assaulted. The cause of death was a knife wound to the neck. Again something was missing. The killer had taken a silver toe ring from Kinamore’s body. The police quickly tied her killing to those of Gina Green and Charlotte Pace—and another case.
Two days after Pam Kinamore had gone missing, a 28-year-old Mississippi woman was raped by a man who had forced her into a white pick-up on Interstate 10 that runs westwards from Baton Rouge to Layafette. After the assault, he had let her go and she gave the police a good enough description of her attacker for them to put together a composite.
Then, a week after Kinamore’s body had been found, a woman came forward claiming that she had seen a woman answering Kinamore’s description slumped in the passenger seat of a white pick-up truck the night she had gone missing. She appeared to be sleeping or, perhaps, dead. The truck had been speeding westwards down I–10 at around three o’clock in the morning. It had turned off at the Whisky Bay exit, the ramp nearest to where Pam Kinamore’s body was found. The driver was a white male who, the witness said, had a slight build. This was surely the same man as the mystery rapist.
The police now put together a detailed description of the vehicle. They said they were looking for a white General Motors—or possibly a Chevrolet—pick-up truck, thought to be a 1996–97 single cab model. The licence plate was thought to contain JT341, though it was not known which state had issued it. The witness also said she had seen the shape of a fish on the rear offside of the pickup.
In August 2002, a multi-agency murder task force was formed, comprising 40 officers from Baton Rouge Police Department, West Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office, Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office, Iberville Parish Sheriff’s Office, the Louisiana State Police and the FBI. They believed that drawing on the resources of all their agencies would help catch the killer more quickly.
DNA evidence linked the murders of Gina Green and Charlotte Pace. Later the Louisiana State Crime Lab managed to show that Kinamore had been killed by the same man. Now certain that they had a serial killer on the loose, the police began combing through unsolved homicides over the last ten years.
In mid-August another witness came forward. A woman told WDSU News Channel 6 that, when she was packing her groceries in the Winn Dixie food store, a strange man approached her. He said that he worked in construction and that his name was Joe. He then followed her out into the parking lot, carrying a jug of water. Ungallantly, he drew attention to her large size and said that he could lift her up. Even so he asked her to go out with him that night and appeared disappointed when she refused. But he was persistent and said he wanted to give her a gift. He went over to a large white truck that matched the description the police were now circulating. From the back of the truck, he took a tree vine which he gave to her. After he drove off, she called the police.
On 21 November 2002, 23-year-old Trineisha Dene Colomb disappeared. At around half-past-one in the afternoon her black 1994 Mazda MX3 was found on Robbie Road in the small town of Grand Coteau, 50 miles west of Baton Rouge and some 12 miles north of Layafette. The keys were still in the ignition, but Colomb was nowhere to be seen. Her naked body was found by a rabbit-hunter in a wood 30 miles away, three days later. Colomb was a US Marine and fought back before she had been bludgeoned to death. DNA evidence soon linked Colomb’s killer with the Green, Pace and Kinamore murders.
There were other similarities with the earlier murders. Another footprint was found, again of a man’s athletic shoe in size 10 or 11. CNN identified it as the latest model of a $40 Adidas-style basketball shoe on sale widely in the area. And some of the victim’s possessions were missing, including a ring with the word “Love” inscribed on it. But there were some unique features. This was the first time the killer had struck outside Baton Rouge itself and Colomb was thought to be the Baton Rouge serial killer’s first known black victim.
On the day Colomb went missing, a white pick-up truck was seen in the same wooded area where her body was found. The driver was described as around 35 years old and white, and investigators released a new composite showing “a person of interest”.
The task force actively solicited help from the public. In November 2002, DNA samples were collected from 600 volunteers. Mouth swabs were taken from another 100 potential suspects the following month.
The police took the unusual step of issuing a detailed profile of the man they sought. He was, they thought, aged between 25 and 35. He earned less than the average income and his work did not bring him into contact with other people. It was probably an occupation that required physical strength, such as construction. He had shown himself strong enough to fend off a US Marine and carry the dead body of Pam Kinamore over a boggy terrain.
