Body Count
By Matthew Teague - Mobile Register
August 9, 1998
Gerald Patrick Lewis says he's a serial killer.
Police have charged him with killing four women. He told the newspaper
about killing seven. He'd been living right here, not far from Mobile
Bay.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story, based in part on jailhouse
interviews with alleged serial killer Gerald Patrick Lewis, contains
graphic images that some readers may find disturbing.
Hunched over a table in the Mobile County Metro Jail,
Gerald Patrick Lewis scuffs his plastic flip-flops on the linoleum and
tries to recall all the women he has killed.
"One, two, um, three she was pregnant four,'' he says.
Those are the four he's told police about. But he keeps counting. "Then
five, and six. Yeah. Seven.''
He spreads all five fingers on his right hand, and
two on his left. "Why don't we start with this one?'' he says.
Right hand, index finger. It was his first killing,
he said, and even though he was just 21 at the time, he remembers it
clearly:
It was almost Christmas, 1986, and warmth was scarce
in Brockton, Mass.
Lewis slid down in the cold seat of his van and
raised a bandana to his face, when Lena Santarpio waddled out of her
parents' house.
She was eight months pregnant, and looked it.
Seeing her again stirred up old feelings, old hurts
after all, that was his baby she was carrying but the heft of his
hunting knife brought comfort. He kept it in his hip pocket, with the
blade between the flaps of his wallet. It was a quicker draw, that way.
With some difficulty, Lena climbed into the passenger
seat of her little green Mercury Bobcat, and her father got in behind
the wheel. They pulled out of the driveway, and Lewis eased his van away
from the curb, trying to keep the bandana over his face while he shifted
gears. A couple of miles past the city limits he realized they were
going to a relative's house, so he pulled off to the side of the road to
wait for their return.
Lunch time came and went. So did supper. It got dark,
but still no Bobcat.
Frustrated, he turned back toward Brockton.
The whole Christmas season had always disgusted him,
he said, but this particular night was really bad. The town had outdone
itself with wreaths, blinking lights, little wooden reindeer pulling
little wooden Santas across frosty front lawns.
He tried to steer his van around the icy spots on the
road, but the old Volkswagen's headlights were weak. The windshield
wipers clicked and screeched, brushing aside the snow.
As he approached the square that marked the center of
town, his mind reeled with thoughts of Lena and their child. At the
square, a young woman walked along the roadside, and Lewis slowed to get
a look at her face.
Lena! His heart leapt then sank. Not Lena. This was
just some girl, but she had the same brown hair, the same faint spots of
acne on her cheeks, the same dark eyes. He stopped.
"You looking for a ride?''
"Yeah. You looking for a girl?''
A prostitute.
Once she was in the van he pressed PLAY, and the
speakers blared "Holding Back the Years'' by Simply Red. The song had
come out about a year ago, when he was 20 and Lena was 16. It was their
song. He had listened to it during his last jail stint, and quoted the
lyrics in his letters to Lena. Now he was free on bail, and even though
Lena refused to see him, he had a pretty fair substitute on the seat
beside him. He sang along.
I'll keep holding on
The girl acted nervous, and that made him jumpy, so
he whipped out the knife with his right hand and held the blade to her
neck, forcing her head down between her knees. He shoved her left hand
under his thigh, so she wouldn't grab for the gear shift. Her hand was
warm. She started to cry.
He drove about 15 miles, then parked behind a gravel
pit and made her get out. "Please,'' she whimpered.
They walked about 10 feet into the woods, and he
raped her. Her screams bounced off the gravel and frozen trees, so he
strangled her, then raped her again. He sliced open her stomach, in a
contorted effort to find his unborn child. Then he finished her with his
knife, driving it in 30 to 40 times, until his arm was tired and her
hand turned cold.
Finally, he dragged a log over the woman's body, and
walked back to the van. He got in, and pressed PLAY.
So tight.
Right hand, index finger.
Lewis, now 32, said that as he drifted to the South,
he killed six more women, on a mission to replace the love of a teen-age
girl who left him more than a decade ago. Even now, he said, he sits in
his cell in Mobile and thinks about Lena Santarpio: her hair, her
Massachusetts accent, the way she moved her hands.
After his latest arrest in April of this year at his
mother's house not far from Mobile Bay he told police he had killed two
women in Georgia and two in Alabama. One of the women in Georgia was
pregnant.
But during a three-hour interview on July 9 he told
the Mobile Register he had committed three more killings. He said he
left one body in Massachusetts, four in Georgia and two in Alabama.
Seven women altogether.
He said he kept three killings secret from police,
holding out to see whether homicide detectives would deliver a promised
Prozac prescription, which they didn't.
Police in all three states say they believe Lewis.
Actually, some investigators say they think he has killed more than he
admits. Some of the details of Lewis' new admissions locally and in
other states have been confirmed.
Police call him a serial killer, and he agrees.
"I have no reason to lie,'' he said at the Metro Jail.
"I'm never going to get out.''
Lewis' attitude in the interviews was fatalistic, and
his appearance also suggested that he had given up. He said he hadn't
once, in three months, washed his black-and-white striped jail-issue
clothes. They smelled like it. He had equally ignored grooming: His
beard was long and mossy down his neck. His skin was white and bloated,
and his startling green eyes were sunk in deep, like emeralds dropped in
paste. "Shaving and all that is the least of my worries,'' he said. "I
want a TV, something to focus my mind on while I wait.''
Before providing locations and specifics about the
additional killings, Lewis said he wanted several things from the warden,
including a television, a cell to himself, and smoking privileges. None
of the requests was met.
"These are things I'll be able to get anyway,'' he
said, "once I'm on death row.''
Despite receiving none of the requested privileges,
Lewis gave the Register more details in a second interview July 18. For
four hours, he described the killings with the kind of depth and
detachment that could churn the strongest stomach. The story of his life,
as he tells it, is an account of mounting horror, of rapid-fire murder.
"Does he really deserve to be called human?'' asked
his younger brother, Sean. "Does he even deserve that?''
The last time Gerald Patrick Lewis saw his little
brother or any of his family was the day before Easter. "He came to my
house,'' said Sean, who is 30 and now lives with his wife and two
children in Spanish Fort, on the high bluffs across the bay from Mobile.
"He told me he wanted to get help. I thought he meant about his drinking.
We hugged, and I said, 'Everything's going to be all right, brother.' I
didn't know what he was doing, you know, to those women.''
When darkness fell that Easter eve, Lewis drove his
little red pickup down Highway 90, just west of Mobile. He parked in
front of the Twilite Motel, where customers are drawn to a tall electric
sign that buzzes and pops at night like an oversized bug zapper. Lewis
said he sat outside the windowless lounge a few minutes, emptying his
beer bottle. He heard music inside it was Karaoke Night at the Twilite.
He went in and sat at the bar, listening, and the guy with the
microphone was doing a pretty good job. So Lewis said he made a request,
and sang along.
I'll keep holding on
So tight.
The words were like a stick that stirred up something
dark and deep in his soul. Right about then, Lewis said, he heard 32-year-old
Kathleen Bracken's voice from across the room, where she was shooting
pool. She had brown hair, and was from Swampscott, Mass.
There was no mistaking her accent.
Jacksonville, Fla., 1965
Gerald Patrick Lewis was born into a middle-class
life in Jacksonville, Fla., on Aug. 10, 1965. He was the son of Edward
and Linda Lewis, a computer designer and a draftswoman. Throughout most
of his childhood they shifted back and forth between Atlanta and the
Boston suburb of Brockton.
He never picked up the clipped speech of Boston, or
the easy drawl of Atlanta. Family members said that young Lewis they
called him Patrick rarely had close friends because the family moved so
often.
Police say there is a triad of behavior almost always
found in a serial killer's background: fire-setting, chronic bed-wetting
and animal torture. Lewis said he did wet the bed growing up, but
couldn't remember when he stopped.
About the other two, though, he and his family
remember just fine.
When he was 4, said his mother and brother, Patrick
was playing by himself downstairs, while the rest of the family slept.
Suddenly, screams rolled up the stairs. It was Patrick. He had been
playing with matches, and dropped one on his pajamas. The flannel lit up
and burned his body across his chest and shoulders, leaving scars he
still bears.
Shortly afterward, as Lewis tells it, he stood in his
darkened bedroom and pressed a kitchen knife to his belly. "I remember
thinking, 'I could pop this in and out real quick, and I wouldn't even
feel it,''' he said. "But I didn't have the guts to do it.''
It was as though that one fumbled match had burned
away his childhood innocence, along with his pajamas.
He said he "sort of'' played with fire as he grew
older. "There were some woods,'' he said. "There were a couple of
apartment complexes, too.
"I wasn't scared. I was never scared of fire.''
He said he never managed to burn an apartment complex
to the ground, but almost succeeded at Collier Apartments on Collier
Road in Atlanta. ``The basement was divided into storage areas,'' he
said. ``They were separated by walls that were chicken-coop wire covered
with cardboard. I remember squatting down there and lighting the
cardboard, then running out across the street to watch it. The whole
thing didn't go, but the bottom did, for sure.''
He said he once set fire to a doghouse while the
family dog slept inside, but the dog got away. So he killed it a
different way. "I used to cut the tops off white milk jugs and slip them
over dog's heads, so they couldn't see,'' Lewis said. "I'd put them out
on the road, and I remember one of them got run over. He was ours.''
When Patrick was 11 years old, his parents divorced.
On the day his father moved out, ancient family
history was pulled out of closets and packed into cardboard boxes.
Patrick and Sean snooped through the boxes, and found Lewis' baby book,
which detailed his birth and first days of life. Under the space marked
"Father,'' they saw another man's name.
"We had the same mother,'' Sean said, "but Patrick's
father was somebody my mother knew before she met my father. It crushed
Patrick.''
Even so, Patrick followed his father (whom he started
calling "Ed'') as he bounced around the country: Philadelphia, Abington,
Mass., Plymouth, Mass., on and on, a life easily broken down and packed
into the back of a rented van. Along the way, he said, he learned to
steal, rifling lockers at school or sneaking off with somebody's go-cart.
When his father couldn't put up with him any more
which was often Lewis was sent back to his mother in Georgia, until her
patience wore thin, too.
He dropped out of school in the ninth grade, and got
his driver's license at 16. But he needed cash to buy wheels of his own.
In Brockton, Mass., near his father's home, he cased out burglary
prospects. An industrial park held a number of sprawling companies, like
L. Knife & Son beer distributors, that were easy targets at night. He
had a particular fondness for L. Knife & Son. "We'd climb in through the
cellar window,'' Lewis said. "There was always plenty of cash and booze.''
Before long he and his friends moved on to higher
highs. "I was into everything,'' Lewis said, ticking off a list of drugs.
"Let's see: I snorted a lot of heroin. Cocaine, pot, speed a lot of
speed acid. I can't remember it all. I never liked needles, though. One
time, I broke into a doctor's office with some friends, and found some
little bottles of Demerol. They all started shooting it up, but I drank
it. Man, I hated needles.''
Eventually, the cycle of burglaries and drugs broke
down, and police put Lewis in cuffs. All the burglaries a total of 14,
according to Brockton police records brought him a year's sentence, of
which he served six months. When he got out, he headed south, to
Franklin, Ga., outside Atlanta, to live with his mother and brother.
There, it was hard to keep up a drug habit though
Lewis said he certainly tried to because he had a hard time holding down
jobs. In August 1983, he was fired from Stitchbonders, a weaving plant,
when he shoved a broom handle into a loom and ruined the $10,000 machine.
After he was fired, said the owners, he came back to the plant and stole
a pistol and cash.
"Yeah,'' Lewis said. "I hated that job.''
He fell back into burglary. Again he was caught, and
this time he was sentenced to four years. He served two, then rolled
back north, this time to Weymouth, Mass., where his father, "Ed,'' was
living. He was 20 years old.
"How many times could he have gone the other way?''
Sean said. "He always told me 'OK, this is it. I'm turning over a new
leaf.'''
This time Lewis seemed ready to change. He got a job
at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, dumping chicken into the cooker. Lena
Santarpio was a cashier at the restaurant, 16 years old and unaware of
his past. He was crazy about her, but couldn't stand his job frying
chicken, so he quit and started pumping gas at a BP a couple of blocks
away. He and Lena stayed in touch, though. She visited him at the
station, sometimes sitting outside with a milkshake, waiting for his
shift to end.
He saved his money and bought a rust-colored Firebird,
which he painted black. For their first real date, Lena says they rode
in the hot rod to McDonald's for burgers.
"Oh, wow, I had forgot all about that,'' she said in
a recent interview. "But talking about it, everything comes back to
me.'' He loved Dr. Pepper, jeans with holes in the knees, concert T-shirts
and high-top sneakers. She loved his eyes. They were deep and green, and
never rolled in sarcasm or flashed in anger. They were ... different. ``Everybody
else thought they were creepy,'' she said. "I didn't. I liked them.''
Lena said she used red fingernail polish to paint her
initials, in looping, pretty letters, under the Firebird's passenger
side door handle.
Perhaps, his family hoped, this girl could keep him
out of trouble. Lena developed a blood clot in her leg and had to spend
a couple of nights in the hospital. Lewis couldn't stand the separation,
so he went to her room, and they had sex there on her hospital bed. They
both say that's where their child was conceived.
The Twilite
Lewis and Kathleen talked only briefly at the pool
table, but he said he felt like he'd known her for years. Her brown hair
and Massachusetts accent reminded him of Lena.
He called her Kat, and says she proposed sex. He
began to want to kill her. "I was feeling the urges,'' Lewis said. "I
could feel it coming, so I got out of there.''
He said he drove to several other places, looking for
a white prostitute whose hair was any color but brown, rocking in his
seat and chanting, "Gotta get a girl. Gotta get a girl.''
But no streetwalkers were out, so he drove back to
the Twilite and parked in front of Kathleen's room. Room 11.
A girl walked out of the room as Lewis pulled up. "Hey,''
he called out his truck's window. "Is Kat in there?''
"Yeah, but she's with somebody.''
Lewis said that sometime during the ensuing 20-minute
wait, his mind tripped over Kathleen Bracken's Massachusetts roots. "I
started thinking she knew Lena's family,'' he said. ``I thought she had
a picture of my son. I knew it.''
Brockton, Mass., 1986
Lewis and Lena had been dating about six months when
she became pregnant, and he moved in with her family. They weren't
pleased with their daughter's condition, but Lewis was thrilled. At
least until Lena cut off the sex, during her pregnancy.
"I couldn't believe it,'' he said. "I went out and
started driving around, picking up hookers.''
Things went sour at the house. "Her mom was
constantly after me,'' he said, a point that Lena readily confirms today.
"One time I took a shower and left the soap on the side of the tub. The
next morning, I found a note on the side of the tub that said, `Please
do not leave the soap here. Leave it in the soap dish.'
"She was always nagging me, calling me names with
that accent of hers,'' Lewis said, raising the pitch of his voice and
mimicking sharp Massachusetts speech: ``Come heah, you bastahd!''
It turned out that Lena was pregnant with twins. But
one of them a girl died in the womb. Lewis said he felt crushed. He
spent more time out on the street, looking for women and a release.
Soon, he said, his desperation led to rape.
It was an August night in 1986, about five months
before his first killing. He saw the woman sitting outside the Tiptop
Pizza parlor where she worked. Lewis, who was driving by, stopped and
asked if she needed a ride. She said no. He passed by later, and she was
still there. He stopped again.
"You sure you don't need a ride?''
"Well, maybe, yeah.''
She got in the car he was driving Lena's little green
Mercury Bobcat and he came out with the knife almost instantly. "Don't
fight me,'' police say he told the 23-year-old girl. "I've done this
before.''
He drove her to a secluded, fenced-in parking lot and
raped her. When he was done, the woman told police, Lewis got in his car
and renewed his offer to take her home. She fled.
"I learned my lesson,'' he said.
Caught, Lewis spent about three months in jail before
he made bail. He wrote to Lena daily and often called collect. Her
parents threatened to change their number, but Lewis was desperate to
know the answer to one question: Was the remaining twin a boy or a girl?
He called again. Lena answered. The operator asked whether Lena would
accept the charge, but she didn't say yes or no. She blurted out ``boy''
and hung up.
That was the last time Lewis ever heard her voice.
On Thanksgiving Day of 1986, Lewis' father came to
the jail and bailed him out. His lawyer had whittled the amount down to
$1,000. While out, Lewis stalked Lena, even hiding outside her house. "I
remember standing outside, freezing, watching them string up Christmas
lights inside,'' he said. "I spent hours watching.'' The Twilite
The longer Lewis stared at the door to Room 11, the
larger the ball of anger inside him grew, he said. Finally, a man walked
out, and Kathleen stood naked in the doorway.
Lewis stepped out of his truck and went in.
They chatted a moment, and she said sex would cost
$100.
"Not yet,'' he said he told her. "Not until you give
me Stephen's picture.''
"I have no idea what you're talking about,'' she said,
in such a Yankee way. "Who the heck's Stephen?''
"Give it to me!''
Kathleen Bracken's next five words may have sealed
her fate. Lewis said he recalls them exactly: "Get outta heah, you ...
BASTAHD!''
Brockton, Mass., 1986
Lewis said that his first killing the woman he picked up at the Brockton
town square came shortly before Christmas 1986. He was still out on bail
after the rape.
He recalled that after he picked her up, he passed a
brick, L-shaped building on the right, and several giant mounds of
gravel on the left. He wheeled behind the gravel pit and made her get
out. He raped her, then killed her with the knife.
He said he continued to stalk Lena, who was about
eight months pregnant by then. To remind her of his presence, he set
fire to the Bobcat one night. The family ran out of the house,
confounded. Police there said they remember the fire, but that they
never could prove who was responsible. Lewis said he watched Lena, from
behind shrubs, as the flames leaped.
After the holidays, he said, he sat up at all hours
of the night, thinking of Lena and pondering suicide. He said he wanted
solitude, and found it in an unlikely place: on the elevator in his
apartment complex. "I liked the way it felt, in there. It was quiet,
sort of cut off from everybody else. I'd get on about 3 o'clock in the
morning and push the `stop' button between floors. I practically lived
there.''
Once, he broke into an apartment on the fifth floor,
where a woman named Carolyn Sweet lived with her 5-year-old daughter,
Stephanie. They didn't have much money, but there was another kind of
loot. "They had guns,'' Lewis said. "A .25, a .22, and some other
pistols. I took a lot of them.''
Again, a report was filed, but police had no suspect.
Lewis said one of the pistols became his companion on
the elevator. He said he sat for hours with its muzzle to his temple,
working up the nerve to pull the trigger. He couldn't. It was as though
he was 4 years old again, standing in the dark with a knife to his belly.
"I wanted somebody else to do it for me,'' he said.
So he planned for the occasion.
He said he took a rope into the elevator and rode to
the top floor, the fifth. He climbed up through the elevator's emergency
access panel and tied the rope to a support beam in the elevator shaft.
Then he climbed back down and tied the rope's other end around his neck.
He sat like that for hours on several nights, waiting for someone on a
lower floor to summon the elevator and snap his neck.
His plan backfired.
On Jan. 19, 1987, the 5-year-old girl on the fifth
floor, Stephanie, opened the elevator doors and found him there with his
noose in place. Lewis said he thought: "She knows I want to kill myself,
now, so she knows I sat on the elevator with a gun to my head ... so she
must know I broke into her mother's apartment.''
Police records show that Stephanie and two of her
friends were playing outside the building the next morning, making
angels in the snow, when Lewis came down and called out to Stephanie, "Hey!
I've got some toys to show you in the elevator.''
So she left her friends and went with Lewis to the
elevator, where he said he had gifts for her.
"But he didn't,'' the girl, now 16, said. "He put his
hands around my neck and pressed down hard.''
Outside, Stephanie's friends wondered why she was
gone so long. They went to her mother and said, ``Is Stephanie here? She
came in with a man.''
Her mother ran down the hall, frantically calling the
little girl's name. She pushed the "Call'' button outside the elevator,
and waited for it to come up. When the doors opened, there was Stephanie,
crumpled in the corner, with blood and saliva dripping from her mouth.
Her neck was bruised and bleeding.
Doctors in the emergency room said Stephanie would
have died, if strangled even one or two seconds more. In the hospital,
Stephanie described Lewis, and police tracked him down. He told the
officers he had been asleep on his couch. But the little girl picked his
photograph out of a lineup, and he went to jail. This time his bail was
set at $20,000. Police found the rope above the elevator, and Lewis'
court-appointed lawyer asked that he be sent to Bridgewater State
Hospital, a mental institution. "There is some concern that he might be
suicidal,'' the lawyer told the judge, according to court records. ``There
were notes found.''
He was charged with attempted murder, assault with
intent to murder and assault and battery. But the court ruled that he
was too mentally disturbed to stand trial. He was soon off to
Bridgewater, where he would spend about four years.
The Twilite
Bastahd.
That word pronounced that way lit some violent sign
in Lewis' brain, he said.
He said he was so enraged that he ignored the knife
in his hip pocket, and choked Kathleen Bracken into unconsciousness with
his hands. "I was looking at her laying there,'' he said, "and I thought,
`Damn. I came in here for the sex.'''
So he raped her and pillaged her room, he said. "There
were some cold beers in there,'' he said. "Can you believe that? Cold
beers!'' He said he also found some cash. While he pocketed it, though,
she woke up. This time he remembered the knife. He pulled it out, he
said, and stabbed her once in the chest. The autopsy would show that the
blade struck deep into Kathleen's heart.
Lewis said he was surprised she fell at only one blow,
so he knelt down to feel for a pulse in her neck. That's when somebody
knocked on the motel room door.
Bridgewater, Mass., 1987
At Bridgewater State Hospital, Lewis told another
patient that he was serving time for fighting with a friend whom he'd
caught assaulting a 5-year-old girl. The patient knew of a woman on the
outside with a similar experience, and slipped Lewis a piece of paper
bearing the woman's name Geanette Charron and her address. Geanette
lived in Fall River, Mass. He wrote her there, and they began to
exchange letters often. In a July interview with the Mobile Register,
she said the Lewis she knew was considerably different from the one who
says he killed seven women.
When she heard about his confession she said, "Oh my
God,'' and dropped her telephone receiver. "This is not real. This can't
be real.''
She said she visited him several times during his
stay at the mental hospital. She said he told her the story about saving
a 5-year-old girl from a friend's assault.
Actually, he lived out an entire fantasy life through
her. Lewis said and Geanette confirmed that he told her he was raising a
son, Stephen, and a daughter, Sarah.
"That's not true? What else is not true?'' Geanette
asked the Register reporter. "I can't believe Gerry would lie to me like
this.''
Everybody who knows Lewis calls him Patrick, but
Geanette knew him as Gerry. Gerry Lewis, the nice guy who couldn't catch
a break. "I guess I thought she could save me,'' Lewis said. "She was my
way out.''
But Lewis found out that Geanette already had a
boyfriend.
Lewis didn't describe the sort of treatment that he
underwent at Bridgewater, but said he was desperate to get away. He said
his lawyer came up with a simple plan.
"My lawyer told me, 'Just plead guilty. They'll let
you go,' and so I did,'' Lewis said. When he pleaded guilty in 1992, he
said, the judge passed down a 10-year sentence, with parole eligibility
after four years and six months. His sentence was retroactive, meaning
his time in the hospital counted as time served.
"Yeah, man,'' he said. "I was out of there in six
months.'' He was 27 by then, and moved in with his mother in Atlanta. He
was quickly dismissed from his new job at Wieucia Dry Cleaning, after
the owner suspected him of pilfering the cash registers.
About two months after his release from Bridgewater,
he said, he killed a second time. He wanted another woman who looked
like Lena, and found her hooking on Stuart Avenue in Atlanta, in front
of the Alamo Motel. "Before she got in the car she said she had to run
in her motel room real quick,'' Lewis said. "Something about making sure
her son was OK.''
In the car, he gave her the same treatment as the
girl in Massachusetts: head down between her knees, left hand under his
thigh, right hand behind her back. He said he took her to a dirt pit
just off a runway at the Fulton County Airport, and made her get out of
the car. He put her against a tree and raped her at knifepoint, then
stabbed her 30 to 40 times.
"She didn't even cry or anything,'' he said. "It was
kind of strange.''
Three other slayings followed that one in quick
succession, he said. The next girl was seven or eight months pregnant,
about like Lena had been the last time he saw her. He said she had sold
sex to him before. He picked her up at her Atlanta-area apartment.
"When she got in my car, it was the strongest feeling
I've ever had about one of the girls,'' Lewis said. "I asked her, `Have
you ever been to Massachusetts? Do you know anybody in Massachusetts?'
She just seemed sort of confused about it.''
He took her to a kudzu-covered slope on Lee Road in
Douglas County, Ga., and pulled his car to the roadside. He got out and
walked around behind the car, lifting his knife as he walked, he said.
The girl opened the passenger's side door and put both feet on the
ground, but couldn't get out of the low-slung sports car without help. "She
was really pregnant,'' he said. "I got tired of waiting, so I grabbed
her by the hair and pulled her out.'' They walked up the slope, trudging
through the creeping kudzu, and at the top he made her take off all her
clothes, he said. ``When I saw her standing there, all pregnant like
that, I just couldn't do anything as far as sex,'' he said. "But I
couldn't just leave. I had to finish it.''
She didn't die easily, he said. She kept reviving,
only to be stabbed again and again.
He said he covered her body with a few branches, then
drove to a gas station to wash off his shoes and hands. He went home and
dropped the knife in a pipe that ran down the side of his carport.
He said he picked up the third Georgia woman near
several bars and strip clubs on Fulton Industrial Boulevard in Atlanta,
and drove her down Fulton Industrial a couple of miles, until he found a
wooded area. The knife came out, and the scene was the same as the
previous girls: He took her about 10 feet into the woods, raped her,
stabbed her 30 to 40 times, and covered her body.
The fourth Georgia killing was the same, he said: He
picked the woman up a couple of weeks later in the same prostitution hot
spot, drove down Fulton Industrial Boulevard a mile or so past the last
body and found another secluded area.
Lewis recalled the name of only one of the Georgia
women "Angela,'' the second one he killed. He said he didn't have her
last name.
The Twilite
Lewis paused, and stared at Kathleen Bracken's motel
room door. Countless dealings with prostitutes, abductions, seven
killings: He said the scenes flashed through his mind when he heard the
rapping of knuckles on wood.
Lewis crouched quietly until the caller walked away.
He grabbed the cash he had found and a cold beer from the room's small
refrigerator. He cranked his truck. "I drove around to the front of the
bar,'' he said. "I went in and sat down, but I was pretty shaken, after
that knock. I was sitting there, and all of a sudden I threw up
everywhere.'' He said he looked around, but the bar's patrons seemed
oblivious. To nobody in particular he murmured something about having
too much to drink, then left.
Atlanta, 1993
The Georgia killings ceased when he got a new
girlfriend, Lewis said. Her name was Kim Davis, and for a little while,
life seemed perfect. That lasted until one day in December 1993, he said,
when she stood him up on a date. His car was broken down, so he stole a
brown Toyota Celica and drove to a nightclub called The Crystal
Chandelier, where Kim liked to go after work. Inside, he hid in a corner
and watched her. She was with another man.
Lewis went out to the parking lot and waited. When
she came out and got into her car, he said he punched through her car's
window, and hit her several times. The guy Kim was with grabbed a beer
bottle and threw it at Lewis, who retreated and left in the stolen
Celica. The owner of the club called police, and the responding
patrolman passed Lewis speeding away. According to the patrolman's
written report, he turned around and chased the Celica for several miles
as other squad cars joined in.
Lewis eventually wrecked. Police arrived and drew
their guns. In the car, detectives found a long knife with a serrated
blade, a foot-long steel pipe wrapped in black electrical tape, a
screwdriver, a pair of pliers and burglary tools, according to the
report.
Lewis started another 10-year sentence for auto theft,
carrying weapons, eluding police and having burglary tools. He was out
by November 1997, less than four years after his arrest. He was 32, and
moved in again with his mother.
His mother, though, had moved from Atlanta to deep in
Alabama, to the eastern side of Mobile Bay. She had a modest place on
Greenbriar Court in Daphne's Lake Forest subdivision, a huge
neighborhood with everything from trophy homes to small brick boxes.
Sean lived in nearby Spanish Fort, with his wife and two children.
The ex-con got a job changing oil at Chris Myers
Automotive on U.S. 98, and bought a red Toyota truck. His family thought
maybe he had finally turned a corner. Maybe he was done with the
burglaries, the police and the jail time.
Lewis never told police this, but about two months
after he moved to Daphne a couple of weeks after Christmas he parked his
truck at Daphne's Wal-Mart Supercenter to hunt women. He waited for a
white woman with dark hair, dark eyes, doing the pregnant walk. He
waited for Lena.
Finally he saw a woman that matched well enough. He
watched her leave her car, then followed her through the store. "She was
just right,'' he said. "I went out and got in her car.''
He opened the door and climbed in the back seat. The
backs of the rear seats folded down, allowing Lewis to crawl into the
trunk. He said he waited there, with his knife in his hand. In a few
minutes, he heard the driver's door open, and someone got in. But
something was wrong the car's springs compressed way too much, as though
a heavy person had sat down. Lewis said he lowered the rear armrest and
peeked out. Some guy was in the driver's seat, fumbling for his keys.
"I thought, 'Oh my god, I'm in the wrong car,'''
Lewis said. "I didn't know what to do. I mean, do I kill this guy, or
what?''
He decided to wait it out. The driver drove slow,
then fast, then slow again. Seven minutes passed, maybe eight. The
driver stopped at a couple of signs, hung a sharp left, parked, stepped
out and slammed the door behind him. Lewis peeked out. He was in a brick
carport, with wood trim. He waited. His eyes were adjusting to the
darkness of the trunk, and he found several wrapped gifts, which he
opened. "It was a bunch of drinking glasses,'' Lewis said. "I left them
in there, and got out. It was hard to see, but I remember the house was
at a dead end, and I think there was a boat there.''
He walked through a couple of hundred yards of trees,
and found himself on U.S. 225, in Spanish Fort. From there, he said, he
walked to the Delchamps grocery store and called a taxi.
In July, a Register reporter drove to Spanish Fort
and, using Lewis' description, found a car and house on Fiesta Drive
like those he told about. "I don't understand how you could know this,''
Ray Small said, when asked if he remembered ever opening his trunk to
find unwrapped gifts. "There were some glasses, a present for my mother.''
Small said he had heard something in the back seat on
the way home that night, but glanced over his shoulder and saw nothing.
"I thought I was losing my mind,'' he said.
A couple of weeks after the flubbed abduction, Lewis
began spending more money on prostitutes and alcohol, he said. His son's
birthday rolled around on Jan. 16, and on that day, Lewis said, he
dropped into a drinking binge from which he would not emerge until April,
at the time of his final arrest.
He didn't want his mother to know how much he was
drinking, so at night he loaded all the cans and bottles into trash bags
and sneaked them out of the house.
On Jan. 18, Daphne police arrested him for drunken
driving. A couple of weeks later, on Jan. 31, he went to Woody's Motel
on the Causeway over Mobile Bay, and checked in under a name he picked
randomly from the telephone book. From his room, he rang up "escort
services'' whose numbers he'd gotten from the Yellow Pages. "I called
several, looking for a blonde girl,'' he said. "I didn't want to kill
anybody that night. But nobody wanted to send a girl to Woody's. They
said it was too dangerous.''
Finally, he said, he found a service that was less
discriminating. The people there paged a girl, and she called Lewis at
his room. She described herself: 5-foot-4. One hundred pounds. Brunette.
He said he told her to come over. He went out to his
truck and retrieved a rope for strangling and a knife for stabbing. He
put the rope on the floor behind the bed, and the knife he put behind
the head board. It was a quicker draw, that way, he said.
The woman who came to his door was Misty McGugin,
police would say later.
Lewis said he gave her $150 for sex. ``We did it
once, then we talked awhile,'' he said. "Everything seemed to be OK. I
was OK. Then we did it again, and she set me off.''
He said the way she touched him reminded him of
Lena's ways. "I sat up and told her, `You've got to get out of here,'''
Lewis said. "She touched my shoulder and said `What's wrong?' That
really set me off. I hit her a couple of times, and she was screaming 'Please
don't hurt me' or whatever, so I threw her on the bed and choked her.
She kept waking up, so I stabbed her.''
He said he wrapped her bleeding body in a plastic
tarp and put it in the back of his truck. He took her about 12 miles
from Woody's on U.S. 90 East, past Daphne to Baldwin County 66, then
turned on Boaz Road. People who live on that road say it's a lonely
stretch, without much traffic. On one side of Boaz, plowed farmland
stretched for miles. On the other, underbrush and small trees provided
cover. He dragged her body about 50 feet from the road.
Along the way, he said, he stopped to have sex with
the corpse. "I don't know why,'' he said. "I guess I just wanted to be
with her again.''
He said he took her purse, her ponytail holder (he
called it a ``scrunchie''), and took back the money he'd given her
earlier at the motel. Driving to his mother's house, he threw out the
purse along a wooded stretch of the Lake Forest subdivision, and tossed
the knife off a bridge, he said.
Lewis had a sort of trophy room, in the attic of his
mother's house. There, he said, he kept mementos from each killing on a
plywood altar. That's where police found the scrunchie.
Lewis grew bolder with his escort-service encounters,
giving his real name, calling from his mother's house. But it was an
expensive habit.
"I was losing $150 a pop,'' he said. "I didn't care
for that too much.''
It didn't get any easier when he quit his job
changing oil. He said he went back to trolling the Wal-Mart parking lot,
watching the women come and go. Once, he broke into a woman's car and
waited for her to come out. But when she reached for the door handle,
she saw a movement in the back seat and fled back to the store.
When Lewis later told homicide detectives about the
attempted abduction, his story matched a police report that the woman
had filed.
Escort services were too expensive, and abductions
were too risky. Lewis said he went back to familiar ground:
streetwalkers. "They weren't hard to find,'' he said.
Mobile, 1998
After his take from Kathleen Bracken's room at the
Twilite Motel, Lewis said he had a fistful of cash and an unsettled mind.
He wanted another woman, and found her at The Crest motel, about a half-mile
down Government.
Her name was Lisa. Lewis said he gave her $100 so she
could buy cocaine, then took her to his mother's house, where they had
sex in his room. The next morning Easter morning after his mother had
gone to church, Lewis took Lisa to a lonely dirt road, where he planned
to have sex with her, then stab her to death, he said.
But he couldn't bring himself to pull the knife. "She
had sort of lightish brown, blonde hair,'' he said. ``It just wasn't
doing much for me.'' He let Lisa go.
Maybe he was nervous from the night before, he said.
He knew he had slipped up. The knock on the motel room door had shaken
him, and he hadn't dragged Kat into the woods, like the others. Police
were probably crawling all over the Twilite by now. Did they know? Had
he left anything in the room? No, he didn't think so. But still, it was
troubling.
Sure enough, somebody at the Twilite remembered a red
truck. That wasn't much to go on, but police began rounding up and
interviewing their usual prostitution suspects. After a day of footwork,
detectives said they ran across Lisa, who told them this:
Yeah, she'd met a guy in a red truck. In fact, she'd
been with him. He lived in that place across the bay. Lake something-or-other.
The next day, April 14, three days after Kathleen Bracken died with a
hole in her heart, a cop with a composite sketch in her hand stepped
onto Lewis' mother's doorstep. The officer knocked, and Lewis answered.
When investigators questioned Lewis about the Twilite
killing, he didn't clam up. He told them about two dead women in
Georgia, and about Misty McGugin and Kathleen Bracken. "Do you know how
long I walked around with that in my head?'' he said in one of his July
interviews with the Register. "It felt good to get it out, to say it.''
He's been jailed since that day. The other inmates
have nicknamed him Twilite, which he said he hates.
After his first interrogation, police in Douglas
County, Ga., went to the kudzu-covered slope and found a woman's body.
By then it was just a pile of bones, but lab tests showed that some of
the bones belonged to an unborn baby. Police also cut open the carport
drain pipe at Lewis' old house in the Atlanta area, where he'd told them
to look. A long-bladed knife slid out.
Atlanta police are searching their records for
missing-persons reports on other Georgia women that Lewis has told them
and the Register that he killed. Police in Massachusetts flew down to
interview Lewis in the last week of July after the Register called
seeking information then went back to look for the place he said he left
the first body. They found the L-shaped building, the gravel piles, the
warehouse, the conveyor belt, all as he had described it. Cadaver-sniffing
dogs hit on a couple of different places, but police there say they
probably won't find the body that Lewis said is there unless he is at
the scene to point the way.
To date, Lewis is charged with five murder counts:
two women in Alabama, two in Georgia and one of the Georgia women's
unborn child.
He now awaits the completion of a psychological
examination, which has been under way. He said he'd rather skip it and
go on to trial. He could be up for Alabama's electric chair, depending
on how the evidence pans out, and which state prosecutes first.
"I want to go to court, and lose,'' he said. "I don't
want to spend the rest of my life in here. I want to die. I thought
about killing myself, but I just can't.''
So he sits in his cell, thinking of Lena and
pondering suicide, he says, waiting for someone to summon the elevator
from below.
Facts on the case
Name: Gerald Patrick Lewis
Born: Aug. 10, 1965 in Jacksonville, Fla.
Last address: Greenbriar Court in Lake Forest
subdivision, Daphne
Criminal history:
August 1982, charged with 14 burglaries in Brockton,
Mass. Served six months of a one-year sentence.
September 1983, charged with multiple burglaries in
Franklin, Ga. Served two years of a four-year sentence.
August 1986, charged with rape in Brockton, Mass.
While out on bail, charged with attempted murder of a 5-year-old girl.
Served four years and six months of a 10-year sentence at Bridgewater
State Hospital.
December 1993, charged in Douglas County, Ga., with
auto theft, carrying weapons, eluding police and possession of burglary
tools. Served three years and 11 months of a 10-year sentence.
April 1998, charged with murdering four women in
Georgia and Alabama, as well as an unborn child.
Alleged victims:
After his latest arrest, Lewis told police that he
killed four women. In July, he told the Mobile Register that he has
committed three more killings. The seven victims, according to Lewis and
police, were:
A Brockton, Mass., woman (December 1986).
Massachusetts police are looking for a body.
Four Georgia women, one of whom was pregnant (1992).
Georgia police have found one body.
Misty McGugin of Chickasaw (January 1998).
Kathleen Bracken of Mobile (April 1998).
Case status:
Lewis, arrested April 14 by Mobile police, is being
held in the Mobile County Metro Jail without bond. He has been
undergoing psychological evaluations to determine whether he is fit for
trial.
About serial killers
Police describe serial killers as those who kill more
than three times, with a cooling off period between killings, in an
effort to gain a release of fulfillment.
Most are men, white, in their 20s or 30s, work in
menial jobs and have unfulfilled sexual expectations, according to
police. Most begin violent fantasies early in life, when they're still
children, and most use a ``hands-on'' method of homicide, like
strangling or stabbing.
Serial killers are uncommon. The last serial killer
known to be anywhere near Mobile was Donald Leroy Evans, who was
sentenced to death in Mississippi for murdering and raping a homeless
10-year-old girl in 1991. He claimed to have killed 72 people during a
10-year murder spree across 21 states. So far, just three of the
killings have been confirmed.
The Lewis family poses for a shot at church on Easter
Sunday, 1968. Linda holds baby Sean, eyeing a toy giraffe, and Edward
holds 2-year-old Gerald Patrick.
Gerald Patrick Lewis said he had few happy moments as
a child. One of them, he said, was a family trip to Disney World.
Sitting on a fence in the Magic Kingdom are, from the left: Gerald
Patrick, Sean, and their cousins, Gerry and Ginger.
