World's Most Evil Killers - Season 6, Episode 13 - Sean Vincent Gillis - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[music playing] NARRATOR: February 2004, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States. 43-year-old sex worker Donna Bennett
Johnston was walking the streets looking for business. The friendly man driving a white Chevy Cavalier
seemed like a safe customer. He stalked this victim. He'd got his mind set on her.
NARRATOR: The man was 41-year-old Sean Vincent Gillis, and he was out hunting. Because the minute he saw the women that he killed, to him,
they were already dead in his mind. But what he was to do to her in the wake of the killing
is utterly grotesque SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: He raped her. He beat her he cut off her arm.
And then he saw a tattoo on her thigh, so he cut out the tattoo. NARRATOR: This quiet, shy, ordinary man
lived a double life, devoted partner by day, monster by night. And the policeman looked at me and said, didn't you know?
You're living with a serial killer. And I basically laughed out loud. I said, boy, do you have the wrong house.
NARRATOR: For 10 years, Gillis indulged his depraved sexual needs and got away with it.
He wasn't clever. He wasn't careful. He discarded his victims like garbage and enjoyed every minute of it, making
Sean Vincent Gillis one of the world's most evil killers. [music playing] 1994 Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
32-year-old Sean Vincent Gillis was a nerdy geek who loved computers and all things "Star Trek."
He told me he had never had any past relationships. He had a female friends, but that
was as far as it ever went. NARRATOR: For Gillis, finding a girlfriend wasn't enough.
He had darker desires and started to explore them, beginning with an easy target.
ELIZABETH YARDLEY: This first murder is his warm-up murder. This is the one where he knows he has that distinct advantage
over his victim. He knows that she's elderly, that she's quite vulnerable, that she's quite easily overpowered.
And this is the one that is the gateway to the murders that he goes on to commit.
NARRATOR: Over the next five years, he honed his skills and found the information he needed on the dark web.
SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: Sean began to understand himself a little bit more. And he began to understand what he
actually wanted from killing. And it wasn't killing. It was he wanted the dead bodies of women.
NARRATOR: And Sean Vincent Gillis knew where he could find women to prey on. It would take police a couple of more murders before they
started connecting everything and realizing, we have a serial killer operating in Baton Rouge.
NARRATOR: With every victim, the depth of his depravity escalated. So you now have a man who's a rapist, a murderer,
a necrophilie, and a cannibal, all in this inconsequential little man called Sean Gillis living with his partner
in a house in Baton Rouge. NARRATOR: This killer's story begins on June 24, 1962.
Sean Vincent Gillis was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Yvonne and Norman Gillis.
SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: When he was very young, maybe three years old, his father tried
to kill him and his mother. Yvonne left Norman when this happened and became a single mother.
And she raised Sean by herself from the time he was three years old on. GEOFFREY WANSELL: In fact, Norman
spent a great part of his life in mental institutions and had almost no impact on Sean Gillis' early years.
It was Yvonne, his mother, that was the decisive influence. [music playing] ELIZABETH YARDLEY: His father is a figure of fear.
He's somebody who is not giving those feelings of safety, and stability, and security.
Those are things that he gets from his mother. And the centrality of his mother in those early years
of his life becomes very, very important in terms of his later relationships and in terms of his crimes.
SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: She worked at a department store in Baton Rouge. She worked for Channel 2, a television station here.
And she doted on her son. She spoiled him. She thought he was the best baby in the world.
And as he grew, she thought he was really smart. Although, his teachers thought he
was maybe average intelligence. He was known to smoke marijuana with his friends.
But neighbors reported that sometimes, he would go out in the middle of the night
in the front yard or the backyard and be howling like a wolf. He had some very strange behaviors, even as a teenager.
But the thing was that he was so preoccupied by his mother, that he really had no girlfriends.
He went through his adolescence and early 20s barely having a girlfriend. I mean, I think he might have wanted a girlfriend,
but I don't think he knew what to do to get one. SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: Sean was like a nerd.
He was a geek. He loved computers. He loved things like "Star Trek," Nintendo. Even early on, when computers were just coming out,
he was already studying them, and learning how to operate them, and learning that computers
could be used to fulfill your fantasies or whatever. He used to the computers for pornography
long before most people did. NARRATOR: In 1991, when Gillis was 29 years old, his mother accepted a new job in Atlanta, Georgia.
ELIZABETH YARDLEY: His mother asks him to go with her. And he refuses. And just looking at this, what you've got here
is a petulant teenager. I'm not going to go. And I think he believes that by refusing to go, she won't go.
But of course, she does. She goes and she takes up this new job. But she sends him money, so that he can
keep up payments on the house. She provides for him. But he would have taken it almost
as a kind of bereavement, as a kind of grief because he's been left on his own. He sees himself as this abandoned child.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: He's been fascinated by computers since he was very young. Early days of the internet, of course,
he's addicted to pornography. It almost goes without saying. NARRATOR: In 1994, Gillis met a young woman who was the night
shift manager at a local convenience store called Terri Lemoine. My first impression of Sean was comfortable, safe, someone
you would want to visit or see every day, someone who could be your friend easily.
We spent at least six hours talking all night long in that convenience store. We liked the same books.
We liked the same movies. We liked the same actors. We got along fine. NARRATOR: Sean and Terri's relationship flourished.
The store where Terri worked nights was only a short walk from Sean's house and down the road from a retirement community
called St. James Place. One night, Gillis was walking through the grounds of the facility's residential area
and stopped at the home of 82-year-old Ann Bryan She left her door cracked a little bit in the retirement
home, so that the nurse could come in if she needed to that night and bring in medication for her.
[music playing] He decides he's going to kill her, not just kill her, but to absolutely destroy this elderly lady.
I mean, he stabs her 47 times. She has got wounds all over her body. Her throat is cut.
It is a grotesque killing. For a first kill of a serial killer, this was a frenzied attack.
It was brutal. It was bloody and I think Sean surprised himself with how gruesome that scene got
and what he was capable of. No one knew that it was Sean Gillis that had killed her.
There was no connection between Gillis and Ann. He wasn't the gardener or somebody who came around
to do a bit of clearing up. As far as anyone knew, there was no connection whatever.
NARRATOR: Six months after killing Ann, Terri and Sean moved in together. Sean was probably one of the best kind
of boyfriends you could have. He was polite. He was nice. He always thought of you first.
And Sean was going to be the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
[music playing] 1994 Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Sean Vincent Gillis and his girlfriend, Terri Lemoine,
settle into their new life together, living in Sean's childhood home. Sean was a quiet, geeky little guy.
He never made loud noises. He never yelled. He stayed at home a lot. Sean was the type of person that you can leave your kids with.
That was a type of person he came across as. He could be your babysitter, and you trust him.
When he's in this relationship, he is essentially trying to be the perfect boyfriend.
He is on his best behavior. He wants her approval. He wants her validation. He has essentially replaced his mother with her.
One of Sean's main loves was his computer. Sean would get on his computer from the time
he woke up in the morning. And way into the night, he would stay on that computer.
I usually went to bed by myself. Sometimes I woke up by myself because Sean was on his computer.
NARRATOR: Terri secured Sean a day job at the same store where she worked nights.
Well, I wanted him to not rely on his mother so much and to make his own money, pay his own bills
because she paid all the bills. She paid the electric bill, everything at the house.
And I wanted him to kind of learn how to fend for himself, how to take care of himself.
I mean, he was a man by then. NARRATOR: Gillis lasted three weeks in his new job then quit.
He pretty much wanted to stay on his own. And you had to interact with people. And Sean didn't like interacting with people.
That would mean you have to talk to them. And Sean didn't like talking, not to other people.
He could sit there and carry on a wonderful conversation and talk your head off.
But to talk to someone he didn't know, that wasn't something he was good at. NARRATOR: For the next five years,
Sean and Terri appeared to live happily ever after. His girlfriend works the night shift,
so this gives him these periods of time when he is on his own. And he starts driving around at night looking for victims.
He's ruminating. He's thinking. He is unsupervised for the first time in his life.
And I think this comes as quite as a surprise to him. Nobody's checking up on him.
He has all of these hours to play with. He began to practice using an industrial zip tie, which
is a very big plastic tie. And when you pull it, it's tight, and it locks, and you can't unlock it.
And he chose that as his weapon of death and began practicing with it. And so for those five years, he sunk deeper and deeper
into depravity and began honing his skills, so that when he began killing again, he was ready.
NARRATOR: On the night of January the 4th, 1999, 30-year-old sex worker Katherine Hall was working the streets
in North Baton Rouge. SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: And Sean Gillis drove up beside her and offered her money.
And she got into his vehicle. Sean took her to a deserted area on River Road. And he put a zip tie around her neck.
When she realized what was happening, she fought him. And she jumped out of the car, and she ran.
And he caught up with her. And he begins stabbing her. He stabbed her 16 times, perimortem, and another 21
times after she was gone. She was located in the Southeast part of the parish in a kind of a rural area.
But a new subdivision development was taking place. Katherine's remains were left nude.
None of our personal items were located there. And she had been laid out in a kind of a pose position
beneath a dead end sign. The theme that was relevant to him was the connection with a dead female body.
Horrifying, though, it may be to say, what really made Gillis' juices flow was a possibility
of sex with a dead female body. Where did that come from? I can't say. All I can say is that it's one of the few cases
I've come across in which this is a truly necrophiliac tendency. NARRATOR: Four months later in May,
Gillis was again out driving. He saw 52-year-old Hardee Moseley Schmidt. She was a well-to-do mother of three.
She was married to an attorney. She was from a prominent Baton Rouge family. Her father was a judge in Baton Rouge.
And every morning, Hardee would take a jog. She loved exercise. And she loved jogging through her beautiful neighborhood.
NARRATOR: On the morning of May 30, Gillis went out looking for her. SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: And when Sean saw her,
he struck her with his vehicle and knocked her into a ditch. He jumped out of his car, he grabbed the zip tie,
and he strangled her right there and put her in the trunk of his vehicle. NARRATOR: Gillis drove the dead body to a park in Baton Rouge.
After Sean finished raping Hardee, he put her back in the trunk of the car, and he went to go pick his girlfriend up from work
at the convenience store. I remember a smell in the car and asked him what it was.
And he said he had hit an animal on the way to pick me up. And that was probably-- the smell
of the animal was still on the tires coming into the car. And I was so tired from getting off of work,
that I told him just please clean the car. I'm going to bed. And I didn't think about it again.
NARRATOR: A few days later near a bayou South of Baton Rouge, the body of Hardee Moseley Schmidt was found.
ELIZABETH YARDLEY: So these are places that are really not of any use to anybody.
They are these in-between spaces that don't appear to have a function. And that is how he saw his victims.
He saw them as having expired. I've got what I wanted from you. You don't serve any purpose anymore, like the area
in which I'm dumping you. [music playing] NARRATOR: November 12, 1999, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Six months after killing Hardee Moseley Schmidt, Sean Vincent Gillis was hunting down his next target.
[music playing] It really isn't until his fourth victim, a girl called Joyce Williams, that the full extent
of Gillis' extraordinary tendencies begins to become clear. It may sound extraordinary to hear,
but Gillis was becoming, and probably had by now, become a proper fully fledged necrophiliac.
He saw sexual relationships with dead women as more important than any kind of sexual relationship with a live one.
NARRATOR: 36-year-old Joyce Williams was a drug addict who turned to sex work to feed her habit.
On the night of November 12, she got in the car with Gillis. TODD MORRIS: And they were driving, and listening
to the music, and singing. And Joyce made the comment to him that if I wasn't with anyone else,
I'd be feeling nervous right now. And Sean said to himself-- he thought, you have no idea.
NARRATOR: Gillis drove to a remote area in West Baton Rouge and stopped by a sugar cane field.
And anybody that's ever lived in Louisiana knows if you walk through a sugar cane field,
sound is muted. You can't hear anything. So this was the perfect place for Sean to bring her.
NARRATOR: Gillis strangled Joyce to death. SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: He put her back into the vehicle.
And Joyce was the first victim that he brought back to the house he shared with Terri.
TODD MORRIS: Sean described how beautiful Joyce's legs were. He became very obsessed with her legs
and began removing her legs. He utilized a knife and a hacksaw to begin dismembering Joyce.
After Sean dismembered Joyce Williams' body, he delved into cannibalism for the first time
and decided to see what she tasted like. NARRATOR: Sean cleaned up quickly, putting the dismembered remains of Joyce
into large plastic bags and stuffed them in the trunk of his car. He then went to pick Terri up at work.
He dropped Terri at home, then drove to a levee and dumped Joyce's body. GEOFFREY WANSELL: He didn't distribute
them across state lines. He wanted them to be found. But that's his signature. He wanted people to know what he'd done.
And then even more terrifying, he wanted to get away with it. NARRATOR: In October 2000, Sean was
driving through Lafayette when he saw 38-year-old Marilyn Nevils. He hadn't planned to kill that night.
He just couldn't help himself. SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: After Sean killed Marilyn Nevils in October of 2000,
he stopped killing for a while. He would not kill again for almost three years. The reason Sean stopped killing was
because another serial killer was operating in Baton Rouge, and he began to get a lot more media coverage
and cause a lot of terror in the city of Baton Rouge and its surrounding areas. NARRATOR: The other killer was Derrick
Todd Lee, a predator who targeted women in their homes. There's no doubt at all that Gillis became increasingly
obsessed with Derrick Todd Lee, this other serial killer operating in Baton Rouge at the same time as Gillis.
And Gillis kept a file on him in his computer. He was very interested, indeed. I've always seen that as a kind of competitiveness.
I think he thought, well, I'm going to be every bit as dangerous, and as difficult, and as frightening
as Derrick Todd Lee. NARRATOR: On the 27th of May 2003, Derrick Todd Lee was arrested.
And Sean Vincent Gillis started thinking about killing again. By October, he was on the prowl in North
Baton Rouge, when he saw 45-year-old Johnnie Mae Williams. SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: He was friends with Johnie Mae.
They liked each other. He had met Johnnie Mae years before. And she cleaned his house for him.
They partied together. They smoked weed together. He even spent one Thanksgiving at Johnnie Mae's house
with her family. And when his friend, Johnnie Mae got into his vehicle, they drove around for a while.
And he drove her to an area behind Mason's Grill, which is a popular restaurant in Baton Rouge.
And it's a secluded field with woods around it right behind the restaurant. And there, he beat her.
He stabbed her. He mutilated her body. And he also cut off her hands. NARRATOR: In February 2004, Gillis struck again.
He picked up 43-year-old Donna Bennett Johnston in North Baton Rouge. Donna was a sex worker and an addict.
She was also a mother to five children. Sean took Donna to a deserted area off of Scenic Highway.
SUSAN D. MUSTAFA: He raped her. He beat her. He cut off her arm. And then he saw a tattoo on her thigh,
so he cut out the tattoo. NARRATOR: Gillis posed Donna's mutilated body and photographed the scene.
He then placed her in the trunk of his car and continued taking pictures. He drove off and tossed the tattooed flesh from Donna's
body out of the car window. He had wrapped her arm in a bloody towel, and he threw that in a ditch.
So he got rid of Donna's body parts all over in different areas around Baton Rouge.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: I think he wanted recognition for his handiwork. I don't think he was ashamed of it.
I also don't think that he thought he would get caught because by now-- and we're in February 2004--
he's killed eight women ruthlessly. He's attacked their bodies. He has done everything he can to destroy their lives
and what anyone would remember of them. [music playing] NARRATOR: 2004 Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
On February 26, the mutilated body of Donna Bennett Johnston was found. Donna Bennett Johnston.
Had helped the police numerous times over the years as a police informant. So when the police found her, they
knew who she was, and they were shocked to see the condition of her body and what
this killer had done to her. NARRATOR: DNA evidence connected the murder of Donna Bennett Johnston to Katherine
Hall and Johnnie Mae Williams. Police had to face the fact that Baton Rouge had another serial killer.
In March 2004, a task force was formed. There was a lot of going back through the evidence,
going back through the cold cases, reviewing witness statements, evidence that had been
recovered, and looking at the crime scene photographs, trying to determine whom we were looking for.
NARRATOR: While processing the crime scene of Donna Bennett Johnston, police focused on a tire imprint left at the scene.
A tire casting was obtained of that. And research was done with local tire dealerships, which
identified that potentially, that that tread pattern matched the Goodyear Aquatred 3 tire.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: The Louisiana police take great interest in this tire track because it's a very rare one.
Good old fashioned police work. They identify the fact that only 90 of these tires
have been sold in Louisiana. And they go through meticulously tracking whose tires they were.
And that's how they begin to find the trail that leads them to Sean Vincent Gillis' door.
TERRI LEMOINE: I had just gotten off of work. And they wanted to bring Sean down
to the station to talk to him. They were interviewing everyone that had a Chevy Cavalier
because evidently, tire tracks were found at one of the crime scenes. NARRATOR: Gillis agreed to go to the police station
for questioning. Sean said, I want Terri to know where I'm at in case it gets dark and I'm not back home.
I thought that was very interesting that he was worried about not coming back home.
As we were walking out the residence and standing in the driveway talking to Sean for a minute,
he said, do you if I smoke a cigarette-- Sean dropped the cigarette on his driveway,
extinguished it with his foot, and said, quote, "let's go get this shit over with."
And right then, I said, man, this is the guy. NARRATOR: At the police station, Gillis voluntarily provided
a DNA swab. They questioned him about the tire tracks at the Donna Bennett Johnston crime scene.
Gillis had placed himself at the crime scene with an unconvincing story of needing to relieve himself.
Later that afternoon, Sean was returned back to his residence once we had all the surveillance in place.
His vehicle had been told to the state police crime lab while we continued to wait for his DNA profile
to be obtained by the crime lab. TERRI LEMOINE: Like I said, normally, he never got off his computer.
He actually turned the computer off and sat and watched TV with me that evening and then came to bed at the same time
I did. You're actually spending the evening with me. I said, so what did you do?
NARRATOR: The police waited anxiously for the DNA results from the crime lab. The buccal swab which had been obtained from Sean Gillis
produced a DNA profile which matched the profiles left at the crime scenes of Katherine Hall, Johnnie Mae Williams,
and Donna Bennett Johnston. [music playing] And about the same time that we laid our head down
on the pillow in the bed, that's when the police broke through the door and arrested him.
When they told me they had come to arrest a serial killer, I laughed at them. I actually laughed out loud and said, boy, have you
got the wrong house. NARRATOR: Sean was brought back to the police station accompanied by Terri.
And I asked him straight up, did you do everything they're telling me that you did?
And this geeky little guy that I had just adored all these years-- he's kind of hung his head, and turned it to the side,
and looked at me with those big blue eyes and said, yeah, honey-bunny, I did all that.
[music playing] And I-- I turned around and left. He was very forthcoming, but he wanted
to tell a story also too. He wanted to enjoy the limelight describing everything he had done.
As the police sat here and listened to him recount everything he had done-- he knew details of those murders that had not
been released to the public. And so while they thought they were arresting him for three
murders, he confessed to eight. The next day prior to interviewing Sean, we had contacted the public defender's office,
requested a public defender to come and speak with Sean just to make sure Sean understood that he
had the right to remain silent. He just keeps talking and goes on and on. And the confession tapes are around 40 hours in total.
But what we've got to remember is for the first time in his life, Gillis is being listened to.
He has an audience. And he wants to keep that audience. When police sprayed luminol in the kitchen of Sean Vincent
Gillis where he had taken several of his victims and dismembered their bodies, the floor
lit up like a Christmas tree. It was unbelievable how much blood he had tried to clean
up out of that kitchen. But more telling, 45 photographs of Donna Johnston, endless pictures of the other victims often naked,
often in the back of his car, paraphernalia, zip ties that he's used to kill, endless amounts of absolutely
critical evidence. NARRATOR: Gillis was eventually charged with several counts of both first and second-degree murder.
He faced years of multi-jurisdictional litigation. He escaped the death penalty and was sentenced to serve three
consecutive life sentences. I think that what they heard in that courtroom was so inhumane and so unable to be comprehended by any normal
human being, that the only alternative was this person cannot be sane because although he was perfectly fine with
killing all of these other people, he didn't want to die himself. It's hard to believe that it was occurring here in Baton
Rouge, and we had Sean living in our society and him not being on anyone's radar.
TERRI LEMOINE: It was almost a year later that I found out everything he had done.
And sometimes I still can't fathom that because that is just not the person I knew.
That's not the Sean I knew. NARRATOR: When Sean Vincent Gillis selected a victim,
they were already dead to him. He didn't see them as human. He went beyond killing.
He destroyed women in the most depraved way possible, making Sean Vincent Gillis one of the world's
most evil killers. [music playing]

The story of the serial killer who brutally snatched away the lives of eight innocent women during a decade-long killing spree in Louisiana.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers. New episodes including Lee Ford, Pawel Relowicz, John Shaw, John Allen Muhammad, Derrick Todd Lee and more.

Brief Summary

Sean Vincent Gillis, a serial killer, murdered eight women in Baton Rouge, revealing a disturbing double life and horrific crimes.

Key points

The Double Life of Sean Gillis. Sean Vincent Gillis led a double life as a devoted partner and a serial killer.
The First Murder. Gillis's first murder was a brutal attack on an elderly woman, marking the start of his killing spree.
Escalation of Depravity. With every victim, Gillis's depravity escalated, revealing his true nature as a necrophiliac.
The Discovery of Donna Bennett. The shocking discovery of Donna Bennett's mutilated body led police to realize they had a serial killer on their hands.
Tire Track Leads to Gillis. Police discover a rare tire track that leads them to Sean Vincent Gillis.
Gillis's Confession. Sean Vincent Gillis confesses to multiple murders, shocking those who knew him.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He wanted the dead bodies of women.

Sean's true desires are revealed.

3:33WatchAug 10, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

More from True Crime Files

Solve the Crime

Read a real case one clue at a time, then see how your call held up against the investigators.