Months-long manhunt ends in peaceful arrest of serial murder suspect

A MAN suspected in the killings of five women was arrested peacefully outside a tyre store, ending a months-long manhunt in a case that terrified women across Louisiana in the United States.

Derrick Todd Lee, 34, was taken into custody by three police officers on Tuesday night, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington said.

Authorities had just missed apprehending Lee at a homeless shelter and then at a motel.

Over the last few weeks, Lee travelled by bus from Louisiana to Chicago and then to Atlanta, said US Marshal Richard Mecum.

Lee has been in Atlanta at least a week, and may have been working construction or concrete contracting jobs that pay cash, authorities said.

Acting on tip received by the FBI, the Atlanta officers found Lee wandering around a tyre shop in northwest Atlanta.

They approached him and asked for identification, which Lee produced without incident. He was unarmed, Pennington said.

Lee is suspected in the deaths of at least five southern Louisiana women since September 2001.

He is also a suspect in a sixth death more than a decade ago and the disappearance of another woman in a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, suburb. It was those two cases that led police to Lee.

Ed White, brother-in-law of Pam Kinamore, the serial killer’s third victim, said his family was relieved to hear that a suspect was finally in custody.

“We’re ecstatic. This part of the nightmare is over,” he said.

Lee was charged on Monday with murder and aggravated rape in the killing of Carrie Yoder, 26, a Louisiana State University student who became the serial killer’s fifth suspected victim in March.

A fugitive warrant issued for Lee before his arrest says DNA evidence indicates the same person who killed Yoder killed four other women.

Although the warrant accuses Lee only of Yoder’s murder, it says DNA evidence removed from her body matched that taken from the other four victims.

Police in Zachary, a suburb of Baton Rouge, said a DNA sample from Lee linked him to the five slayings.

It was obtained in their investigation of the disappearance of Randi Mebruer, 28, who vanished from her home in April 1998, and the murder of Connie Warner, 41, who was found killed in September 1992.

In 1998, Zachary police asked Louisiana attorney general’s investigators to help search for a man they believed was connected to both Mebruer’s disappearance and presumed murder as well as Warner’s death.

The two women lived in the same Zachary subdivision.

The link came when the attorney general’s investigator, Danny Mixon, heard Lee was talking about Mebruer’s disappearance, Zachary Police Chief Joey Watson said.

Mixon looked at Lee’s criminal history, including arrests for stalking, peeping into homes, burglary and attempted murder, and got a court to order a DNA sample from Lee.

On May 5, the same day Lee voluntarily submitted the DNA sample, he abruptly pulled his two children out of school, saying he was relocating to Los Angeles.