Jury selection begins today

• By STEVEN WARD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jun 9, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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More than four years after police said DNA evidence linked Sean Vincent Gillis to a string of murders in Baton Rouge, the serial-killer suspect’s first-degree murder trial in one of those cases is set to begin today.

As of last week, 249  prospective jurors had filled out questionnaires in preparation for jury selection in the trial.

Gillis is on trial on a count of first-degree murder in the death of Donna Bennett Johnston, whose naked and mutilated body was found Feb. 27, 2004, in a drainage canal near Ben Hur Road south of LSU.

Prosecutor Prem Burns is seeking the death penalty if the jury finds Gillis guilty as charged.

Authorities maintain Baton Rouge resident Johnston, 43, was strangled to death. Officials with the East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner’s Office have testified in a previous hearing that her left arm was amputated at the elbow, her left nipple was cut off and a tattoo from her right thigh was cut away.

Coroner’s Office officials also testified that because of markings on her neck, they suspect the killer used a nylon cable tie to kill Johnston.

Gillis, 45, is being defended by Kerry Cuccia, director of the Capital Defense Project of Southeast Louisiana in New Orleans and attorney Steven Lemoine.

Cuccia and Burns both said they did not want to make any comments about the trial before it started.

State District Judge Bonnie Jackson is presiding over the trial.

Gillis was arrested April 29, 2004, at his Burgin Avenue home, slightly more than two months after Johnston’s body was found.

Since his arrest, Gillis has confessed to killing eight women, including Johnston, and has been charged in all of those murders except one, which is still under investigation.

Gillis has already been sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty in Port Allen last year to the second-degree murder of Baton Rouge resident Joyce Williams. Gillis killed Williams in a sugar-cane field in West Baton Rouge Parish in 1999.

The Johnston trial is the first Gillis case in which prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.