Handwriting expert testifies

• By STEVEN WARD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 23, 2008 - UPDATED: 5:10 p.m.

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An FBI handwriting expert testified today that a handwriting sample serial killer suspect Sean Vincent Gillis gave authorities after he was arrested in 2004 matched the handwriting on three letters Gillis reportedly wrote confessing to the murder of 43-year-old Donna Bennett Johnston.

The letters became public record when prosecutors released them as pre-trial discovery material long before Monday’s first-degree murder trial began. Redacted versions of the letters — parts just mention the Johnston slaying — were introduced as state evidence late this afternoon and published to the jury for examination around 4:30 p.m.

According to the letters, Gillis wrote that he was “pure evil” the night Johnston was strangled. Her naked and mutilated body was found Feb 27, 2004, in a drainage canal near Ben Hur Road south of LSU and not far from Gillis’ Burgin Avenue home.

Gillis, 46, also wrote in the letters that he was “beyond sorry for murdering” Johnston and seven other women. He has confessed to killing the women and booked in the murders of seven of them. The eighth slaying is still under investigation.

Gillis was sentenced to life in prison last year after he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the death of 36-year-old Joyce Williams, one of the eight women he has confessed to killing. He confessed to killing Williams in a sugar cane field in West Baton Rouge Parish in 1999.

The letters Gillis reportedly wrote also stated how Gillis did not feel moved to kill until about a decade before and that he did not know what motivated him on the day Johnston died.

“I was in a real bad place,” Gillis wrote in the letters. “I was pure evil that night. No love, no compassion, no faith, no mercy, no hope. I’ve been there many times in the past 10 years. Most of the time I snap out of it or drink or dope myself to sleep. I wish I could have that night,” Gillis wrote.

Following the handwriting expert, an FBI fingerprinting analyst testified that Gillis’ fingerprints, taken during booking, matched fingerprints on the confession letters.

 

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3:07 update

Sean Vincent Gillis’ former live-in girlfriend Terri Lemoine testified this afternoon that after Gillis was arrested, he told her that the charges against him were true.