BR man described as 'loner,' troubled
http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/...loner001.shtml
[i]By PENNY BROWN ROBERTS Advocate staff writer
Several years ago, Carolyn Clay caught a man peeping in the windows of the orange-brick home where her daughter and son-in-law lived on Burgin Avenue. The 64-year-old Clay persuaded the couple not to have the man arrested because she had known him -- and his strange ways -- since he was a teenager.
Now Clay wishes she had reported the incident to police.
The man, she said, was Sean Vincent Gillis, 41, who was arrested Thursday and booked in the killings of three women in East Baton Rouge Parish.
"Oh my God, my family," Clay said, bursting into tears when told the crimes with which Gillis is accused. "I knew he was drunk or on drugs. He jumped the fence and said he was looking for his cats. We could have all been victims."
Gillis made his home in this neighborhood of mostly retirees and college students off Lee Drive in March 1978. He and his mother, Yvonne, settled into a pink brick ranch-style house with green shutters shaded by a magnolia tree in the front yard. Neighbors grew accustomed through the years to the odd goings-on there.
As a teenager, Gillis once pounded on garbage cans as if they were drums, lamenting in the middle of the street that he didn't have a girlfriend. As an adult, the 125-pound, 5-foot-7-inch bespectacled Gillis would lie in what neighbors described as an unkempt, rat-infested front yard and bark at the moon -- or scream obscenities about his mother.
Said Cynthia Cash, a 50-year-old landscape architect who lives just around the corner: "He gave me the willies."
Young Gillis
Gillis was born in 1962 to Norman E. Gillis Jr., a Collier's Encyclopedia salesman, and Yvonne Gillis, who worked as an office secretary at radio station WXOK. Old Baton Rouge city directories also show the couple lived on St. Charles Street in Beauregard Town.
A year later, Gillis' father became an agent for Life Insurance Co. of Virginia and Yvonne Gillis became a "continuity" manager at WBRZ-TV. The couple purchased a home at 875 W. Roosevelt St.
Gillis' father died sometime between 1963 and 1964, the city directory indicates, and Yvonne Gillis went to work as a copywriter for the television station.
In 1978, Yvonne bought the home at 545 Burgin Ave., where she and her son lived until she moved to Atlanta about a decade ago. A woman answering the phone Thursday at the home of Yvonne Gillis in Atlanta said she "is not home right now," and promptly hung up.
Gillis graduated from Redemptorist High School in Baton Rouge in 1980, academic records show. Few classmates reached Thursday remember him, and those who do say he distinguished himself only as a nerdy kid who wore out-of-style clothes and as an obsessive Star Trek fan. Aubin Chustz, 42, said Gillis regularly was "ostracized" by his classmates for being different.
"He was a very weird guy -- always talking about Star Trek."
Joey Frosch, a 42-year-old fire captain with the St. George Fire Department, said Gillis was quiet and kind of kept to himself in high school. "He was kind of in the Star Trek group, and you couldn't really hold a decent conversation with him," Frosch said. "You could never fit on the same wavelength with him -- he was always off on another tangent."
After graduation, Gillis maintained "a series of low-level jobs," said Lt. Col. Greg Phares of the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office. Neighbors say he worked at various times as a clerk at the Circle K on Boone Avenue, and most recently as a copier technician. Phares said Gillis was unemployed at the time of the arrest.
Through the years, he also developed a minor criminal record.
The same year he graduated from high school, Gillis and two friends were arrested on counts of simple trespass -- accused of forcing their way through the fence of a property on Harrell's Ferry Road. He and another man ran into the woods when authorities arrived, but were caught. He was fined $500.
In January 1993, he was cited for first-offense DWI and improper lane usage.
On Dec. 9, 1999, police arrested Gillis for possession of marijuana. He pleaded guilty a month later, and was placed on probation with several conditions, City Prosecutor Carl Jackson said. Jackson did not know what the conditions were, but said Gillis violated his probation at least once. Several bench warrants for the violation were issued, and Gillis was arrested in June 2002.
Gillis also had one traffic violation, for misuse of a temporary tag and failure to register his 1990 gray Mazda van. He was ordered to pay $170 in fines.
Neighbors suspicious
While Gillis failed to distinguish himself in school or a profession, he certainly made an impression in his neighborhood. After his mother left, he lived in the home with his longtime girlfriend, Terri Kay Lemoine, Gillis' arrest warrant shows.
Neighbors say the couple never had any children, but Lemoine has at least one child from a previous marriage. A woman who answered the phone Thursday afternoon said, "We're not interested. We have no comment." No one answered the phone at the residence later in the evening.
Over the years, visitors came and went from the home at all hours of the night -- including a Brown's Velvet truck that stopped by once a week.
"They were almost like people of the night," said Alan Brown, a 23-year-old college student who lives across the street from Gillis. "There were always a bunch of cars there, but we would only see them at night."
Added his roommate, 23-year-old John Bullock: "They were kinda shady."
One night a few years ago, Gillis repeatedly pounded on the front door of June Townsend's home, a retired school teacher who has lived two doors down since 1962. He refused to identify himself. "My antenna went up," she said. "I'm thankful I never opened that door."
Cash said Gillis knocked on her door, too -- shortly after the landscape architect moved in around the corner 12 years ago. He had a message: She needed new drapes, because he could see in her windows. "At first I thought it was sweet," Cash said Thursday as she watched investigators pull a sword from Gillis' attic. "Now I'm thinking, 'What the hell was he doing looking in my windows?' "
When Gillis was arrested for driving while intoxicated in 1993, he asked Clay to retrieve his cat. Inside the home, Clay said, she saw what appeared to be "a lot of stolen merchandise and pot."
Most who live in the neighborhood were horrified to discover an accused killer living in their midst. David Abadie, 23, spent more than a year living in fear of a serial killer who stalked victims on the LSU campus. Police arrested Derrick Todd Lee in those killings.
Abadie added safety features to the home he shares with his wife, Courtney, and young son, David. He came home for lunch every day to check on her.
"I'm in shock," Abadie said. "I can't believe this. Two serial killers in one town. Why?"
But Clay -- who's lived on Burgin Avenue since 1971 -- isn't surprised.
She said she always thought Gillis "fit the profile" of the man who killed Ann Bryan, who lived in nearby St. James Place until she was stabbed and mutilated in 1994. The killing remains unsolved. "He's a troubled fellow," Clay said. "He was a loner who did strange things. He was separated from the mainstream."
Editor's note: Advocate reporter Josh Noel and librarian John Sykes contributed to this report.
*** Note -- since my earlier post at 9:45 the 10 o'clock news added another confirmed victim to the list accrued by this man. **