More trials uncertain for convicted killer
The Associated Press
BATON ROUGE — After a year of legal wrangling and back-to-back murder trials, Derrick Todd Lee sits on death row with a future of lengthy appeals and, if his sentence is upheld, a lethal injection of chemicals awaiting him.
While defense attorneys prepare Lee's legal challenges to his two murder convictions, another set of lawyers and the relatives of five other women Lee is accused of killing weigh the worth of bringing Lee to trial for those beating, stabbing and strangling deaths.
Lee's death sentence bears only the name of one victim, Charlotte Murray Pace, a Jackson, Miss., native, but the families of the other women say the verdict was justice for all their murdered loved ones.
Many of those family members said they don't see a need to bring Lee to trial again and again, repeating the days of gruesome murder details and autopsy photos, followed by hours of nerve-racking waits for a verdict and sentence.
"We don't want to go through all this again," said Sterling Colomb Sr., the father of Trineisha Dene Colomb, a Lafayette woman in whose murder Lee is charged.
Lee, 36, received a death sentence this month for raping and murdering Pace in her Baton Rouge home in May 2002.
A few months earlier, he received a life sentence in the January 2002 second-degree murder of Geralyn DeSoto in neighboring West Baton Rouge Parish.
Authorities have linked Lee to the deaths of seven women from 1998 to 2003 by DNA evidence, and prosecutors in the Pace trial used evidence from several other killings.
Many of the victims' family members already had to sit through a mini-presentation of the other murders — complete with photos, grim descriptions and tear-filled testimony.
