We, the comrades of Unit 1012: The
VFFDP, have a message for the mother of the victim, Ann Pace. We empathize and
sympathize with you for the loss of your daughter, Charlotte Murray Pace. We comfort you and hope
you can continue to fight for justice. Similar to you, Ann Pace, we show
support to all victims and their families who want justice done. We do respect
and love some of your news letters on the internet.
Justice had been served, your
daughter’s killer died in prison. We will not forget her and support you.
 |
| Charlotte Murray Pace
|
Watkins: A
mother's fight for justice
Murray
Pace’s ashes have been spread by family members in rivers all over the world.
The Thames
in London. The Seine in Paris. The Nile in Egypt. The Danube in Vienna. The
Amazon in South America. The Rhine in Germany. The Pearl in Jackson. The
Mississippi in Baton Rouge.
“I chose
rivers,” said her mother, Ann Pace of Jackson, “because rivers are always
moving and going somewhere.
“And we
picked those places because Murray had either been there or wanted to go
there.”
Murray, a
graduate of Murrah High School and Millsaps College in Jackson, had just earned
her master’s in accounting from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. At
22, she had accepted a job in auditing with the accounting giant Deloitte
Touche in Atlanta.
But a
monster named Derrick Todd Lee was watching her.
He invaded
Murray’s home on May 31, 2002, and killed her. The attack was brutal. Veteran
police investigators in Baton Rouge said it was the worst crime scene they had
ever worked.
For nearly
14 years, Ann Pace of Jackson fought for justice. Fought for her daughter, who
couldn’t fight any more.
So, too,
did Murray’s father, sister and brother.
They fought
for the killer to be found, fought for a conviction when DNA evidence proved
that Lee was the murderer. They fought for the death penalty.
Not until
he was executed would Murray’s family feel justice had been truly served, nor
would the families of six other women police believe Lee killed between 1998
and 2003.
But while
Lee wound up on death row, he never had to face an executioner.
On Jan. 21,
Ann Pace received a call from a member of the media seeking a comment: Derrick
Todd Lee, 47, had died earlier that morning at Lane Regional Medical Center in
Zachary, Louisiana. He had been transported there from the state
penitentiary at Angola after complaining of chest pains. The cause of
death: Heart disease, a coroner confirmed.
Pace
sobbed.
The only
good Pace could find in Lee’s death was that “the space
he took by his continued existence will be filled with memory and love of
Murray.”
Pace was 57
when Murray died. She turned 71 last month.
“I
don’t consider those years lost,” she said, sitting in the
living room of her north Jackson home. “I did what I
had to do in my head and my heart. You have to understand, losing Murray that
way shattered everything I believed in, and everything I believed I knew.”
 |
Ann Pace stands in her
home Wednesday while holding a photograph of her daughter, Murray Pace, who was
murdered by Derrick Todd in Baton Rouge almost a decade and a half ago.(Photo:
Justin Sellers/The Clarion-Ledger)
|
*
Murray was
born in June 1979, two months after Jackson’s Easter flood.
She grew up
to be sassy but humble, loved to have a good time but never let it affect her
laser-like focus in the classroom.
“She was the only one dressed in a business suit to go to class,”
said Kathryn Meloan Barrett, 38, one of Murray’s closest friends since
childhood. “She had a full face of makeup, and the
rest of us were in T-shirts and shorts. She was smart. Real smart. But not just
book smart. Street smart. Common-sense smart.”
“We always studied for tests together,” said
Bradley Bennett, 37, who was an accounting major along with Murray at Millsaps,
“and she would write notes in the margins of the
book — but it always had to be in my book. She had to keep hers pristine.”
She was
5-foot-7, an excellent swimmer, athletic.
“On the soccer field, she just had a knack for being in the right place
at the right time,” Pace said. “She
understood the game. Plus, she was real determined.”
Murray,
Barrett and Bradley were part of a group of about 15 friends who were
inseparable at Millsaps.
“To this day, we know everything going on in each other’s lives,”
said Barrett, who began to cry. “We tried to get
together once or twice, but it was just … weird. It didn’t work. Murray was the
glue. She kept everything together.
“And to this day, we haven’t discussed what happened. We don’t talk
about it.”
Barrett either lived with or across the hall from
Murray during their four years at Millsaps. “My
senior year, we shared the same bed,” she said. “We
had some great talks. And in all those years of living together, traveling
together for soccer or whatever, we never fought. Never had any sort of fuss.
We respected each other as well as loved each other.
“She was the kind of friend who would do things for you for no
particular reason.”
Bennett,
who grew up in Baldwyn, is a professor of accounting at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst.
“I have so many memories of Murray that are interwoven from class and
our academic experience, but also studying abroad with Murray for about six
weeks. It was a small group of us on that trip, maybe seven or eight, who did
stuff together in our free time. We went to London, Paris, Munich and Prague.
She went with me over to Ireland to celebrate my birthday.
“I know I would not be sitting here on faculty at this university if not
for Murray. We helped each other through a lot of late nights studying, and we
didn’t let each other take an easy path.
“It is so hard to convey someone’s spirit like Murray’s. It’s almost
like describing sounds to someone who has never heard music. The way I describe
her to people is, think about your friend who is the funniest. Then think of your
friend who is the smartest, the most confident, the friend you would always
want on your team. Combine all those into one and you had Murray.”
*
It was
early afternoon. A Friday. Murray planned to spend the weekend in Alexandria,
Louisiana, where a friend was getting married.
What
happened that day has been pieced together by crime scene investigators
and information provided by Dianne Alexander, who was attacked by Lee five
weeks after he killed Murray. Alexander was badly beaten but survived when Lee fled
after hearing her son drive up.
Murray had
made herself a sandwich and opened a Diet Dr. Pepper and placed it on the arm
of the sofa just before Lee knocked on the door. Lee said he was looking for
someone in the area and wondered if Murray knew which house they lived in.
At some
point, Lee — 33 years old at the time, 6-foot-1 and muscular — charged at
Murray and slammed her head against the hallway wall. He beat her with a
clothing iron until it shattered. He cut her ears in half. He stabbed her 83 times,
primarily with a 12-inch screwdriver. There was a bite mark on Murray’s thigh.
At one
point, Lee took Murray into the bathroom. Investigators believe he pushed her
in front of the mirror to show her the damage he had inflicted.
She was
still alive when Lee cut her throat.
Lee raped
Murray as she died.
Investigators
also determined Murray furiously fought back and injured Lee.
“When I
heard that,” Barrett said, “I was like ‘damn right he was injured.’ Murray was
tough and fit. She wouldn’t die easily.”
“It wasn’t
a battle she could win,” Pace said, “but a battle she fought with honor and
courage.”
Because
Murray fought so hard, she produced enough DNA evidence to convict Lee.
“The thing
that haunts me,” her mother said, “is at what point did she know she wouldn’t
survive it?”
Against the
advice of investigators, Pace looked at approximately 40 photographs of
Murray’s body and the crime scene.
“I felt
compelled to see,” Pace explained. “It was like I couldn’t live without knowing
exactly what he did to her.”
In one
photo, the coroner was shown holding something in the blue gloves that covered
his hands.
“I finally
realized,” Pace said, “that it was Murray’s heart.”
*
Pace had tried to reach Murray by
phone that morning.
“When she hadn’t called back by
that afternoon, I became concerned,” she said.
She phoned her son, John, who was
already in Alexandria for the wedding. “He kept saying, ‘Something is wrong,’ ”
Pace said.
At 7 p.m., the family still
hadn’t heard from Murray after repeated attempts to reach her.
Finally, Pace’s phone rang. It
was Jessica Dill, a friend of Murray’s who was also attending LSU.
“I had to tell you,” said Dill,
crying hysterically. “Murray’s been killed.”
“It can’t be true,” Pace
responded. “Nobody’s called me.”
“I’m calling you,”
Dill said.
“I’ll have to check,” Pace
insisted.
“It’s true, Miss Ann,”
Dill said.
Pace phoned Murray’s dad, Casey.
The two had divorced the year before after 33 years of marriage. But they
remained close friends.
Casey called Baton Rouge police.
“We’ve heard that our daughter
has been killed,” Casey said.
“We’ll call you back,” the
officer responded and hung up.
Word was somehow spreading among
Murray’s friends. One of them called Barrett early that evening.
“I don’t even think I said
anything. I just hung up,” said Barrett, the daughter of Margaret
Barrett-
Simon, a longtime member of the Jackson City Council. “I was driving on
High Street at the time, and I turned and drove to my mom’s house in Belhaven.”
Barrett-Simon called Baton
Rouge’s police chief. He told her Murray had been killed and that the crime
scene was horrendous.
Barrett-Simon immediately called
Casey.
“You need to go to Baton Rouge,”
she told him.
*
That is when life became “like
going down into a rabbit hole,” Pace said.
“From the day she was murdered to
the memorial service, I think I was in some sort of altered state,” she said.
“Here but not here. Almost like floating above yourself and watching. A very
surreal, detached feeling.”
But she soon turned her focus on
keeping Murray’s case on the police’s immediate to-do list.
In March 2003, a Louisiana
sheriff’s detective received a tip that Lee had been heard talking about Randi
Mebruer, who had disappeared in 1998. Investigators began studying Lee’s
background, which included arrests for stalking and assaulting a woman in a
bar.
Baton Rouge police found Lee on
May 5. He agreed to a DNA test, a swabbing of his mouth.
Three weeks later the DNA test
results came back linking him to four killings in the Baton Rouge area,
including Murray’s, and another near Lafayette.
The next day, a warrant was
issued for Lee’s arrest in the killing just three weeks earlier of one of
those women, Carrie Lynn Yoder, a 26-year-old doctoral biology student at
LSU.
Lee, identified as a
suspected serial killer, had fled Baton Rouge. But Atlanta police, acting on a
tip, found him.
It would be his last day of
freedom.
While in Atlanta, Lee had started
teaching a Bible class, Ann Pace said.
*
Apparently, Lee randomly picked
his victims.
Some were in their early 20s. Pam
Kinamore was 44 and a married mother of a teenage son.
Gina Wilson Green — who
lived just down the street from Murray — was 41 and divorced with no children.
At least one of the victims — Dene Colomb — was black. Colomb, 23, of
Lafayette was a Marine recruit who had served two years in the Army. She was
abducted while visiting her mother’s grave.
Murray had discussed the killing
of Gina Green with Barrett.
“She didn’t seem too alarmed
about it,” Barrett said. “I was visiting her in Baton Rouge, and we were
sitting outside at 3 a.m. — that’s what college kids do — and she said, ‘Oh, by
the way, I hear a handyman killed the girl three doors down. How crazy is
that?’ ”
Family members believe Lee was at
Murray’s house the day before he killed her.
“She was on the phone with
a friend, Stephanie Land,” Pace said. “Murray stopped the conversation
once and said, ‘Can I help you? No, I don’t know that person. I know the people
who lived here before me and that’s not a name I recall.’ She started talking
to Stephanie again and Murray said suddenly, ‘Is there anything else?’ Then she
turned back to Stephanie and said, ‘Wow, weird.’
“She told her dad about it the
next morning, too. She said that the guy ‘gave me a creepy feeling.’ ”
*
Ann Pace first saw the man who
killed her daughter in a few news photos after his arrest.
“It was like I had a moment of
intense something,” she said. “And then I could almost not feel anything. They
say you can’t feel what is overwhelming to you.”
When Lee went to trial for
Murray’s murder in early October 2004, Pace sat three rows behind him,
separated by one row of police officers and another row of media members.
At one point, Lee turned and
looked at Pace. “It was shocking to me that he did that,” she said.
“And there
was no anger in his eyes. He looked at me as if to say, ‘Why are you doing this
to me? I didn’t do this.’ ”
DNA evidence said otherwise.
Julia Naylor, with the Louisiana
State Crime Lab, testified there was 1 in 3.6 quadrillion chance that the DNA
collected at the crime scene could belong to anyone other than Lee.
Naylor told the court 3.6
quadrillion required 15 zeroes if written numerically.
Dianne Alexander, the only known
target able to escape an attack by Lee, pointed to him from the witness stand
as the man who tried to rape and strangle her in 2002.
As the jurors went into
deliberations, Pace prayed they would make their decision based
solely on the evidence.
“I heard the jurors crying when
they passed the photos of Murray’s crime scene around,” Pace said. “But I
didn’t want to look at them. It made my stomach hurt. I didn’t know them,
didn’t know what they thought. It felt like they had your life in their hands.
What if they didn’t understand what quadrillion means? A lot of things went
through my head.”
It took the jury about 90 minutes
to deliver a verdict of guilty.
“That was a frozen moment,” she
said. “Sam (her daughter) sat on one side of me. And Lynne Marino, Pam
Kinamore’s mother who I became so close to, sat on the other. We all held
hands.
And when I heard guilty, I started crying and shaking.”
Pam Kinamore’s brother, Eddie
Piglia, reacted with a loud “Yesssss!”
But Pace knew there was one more
step needed for justice: The death penalty.
That came two days later, with
the jury deliberating again for about 90 minutes after impact statements.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Pace said
quietly when it was announced. Murray’s family and members of other victims’
families repeated their adopted mantra: “Justice for Murray, justice for all.”
Pace told reporters outside the
courtroom that “finally, finally, finally” the victims had been given “some
measure of peace.”
But what about peace for Ann
Pace?
That was nowhere in sight.
*
“I’ve
envisioned terrible loss as an injury that is never really mended. Like
breaking your leg and having it heal crooked. You know you can never dance as
you once did. The entire choreography of life is altered. However, what you
learn with time is that you can dance still — a different dance. You learn a
new and nuanced way of moving that only the music from a broken heart can
enable.” — written by Ann Pace
The tune Pace is moving to now is
life in a world in which Derrick Todd Lee is no longer breathing, no longer able
to file for appeals requesting a new trial.
A world where, in her heart, he
never received the punishment he should have.
Pace was in the courtroom for
each of his appeals, monitoring the situation and reminding Lee that she would
fight as long as it took to see him executed.
“Life seems so different since he
died,” she said this week. “I really didn't know just how tired I was.
And I really haven’t had enough time to formulate what I want the rest of
my life to look like.
“I know it will include writing.
It definitely will include my children and grandchildren, who are the most
important things on earth to me. I want to do the same things other people my
age want to do, things to support health and mental clarity.
“I do think I have a story to
tell, and I would like to tell it.”
She will continue speaking out on
the length of time it takes the death penalty to be enforced.
“DNA can be used to immediately
prove a person innocent — and if they’re in prison at the time, they are
released,” Pace said. “The same amount of time should apply when someone is
found guilty through DNA evidence. It is so scientifically sound, there is no
reason people who kill are allowed to drag things out in court for years and
years. It makes no sense. Plus, it’s not right.”
Pace will no longer grant
interviews about Murray’s death. “I’ve decided this story is it for me,” she
said. “I’m doing this one because I want people to know Murray as a person, not
as just a murder victim. I want people to remember her as she was before that
horrible day.
“Most of all, I can’t stand to
think of Murray being forgotten.”
“We couldn’t if we tried,” said
Bradley Bennett, the “we” referring to Murray’s friends from Millsaps. “I have
a picture of Murray in my office that I see every day. Certain songs make me
think of her. I remember her birthday every June. I can’t even let go of my old
accounting books from Millsaps. There is too much of Murray in there to ever
throw them out.”
Bennett has admired Ann Pace’s
strength. “She has been so articulate, so strong throughout this whole process.
I can’t imagine being that composed at times when I wondered how she was even
standing,” he said.
But behind closed doors, Pace
struggles.
Since Murray’s death, Pace can’t
fall asleep in a bed.
“Sleep seemed to be an
embarkation on a journey through sequences of nightmares," she said.
"The dreams woke me up over and over. I came to dread the darkness and the
silence.
Plus, my bed, which had been my grandmother's, had also been Murray's
bed."
So she dozes every night on the
living room sofa with the television usually tuned to Discovery Science.
“The TV banished the silence and
some of the darkness,” she explained. “Then, I suddenly didn’t dream anymore
about anything. So sleeping on the sofa has become a habit.”
She has scaled back decorating
for all holidays. “Murray was all about holidays. If one Easter bunny was
good, a thousand were even better,” she said. “If not for my grandchildren, I’m
not sure I would even put up a Christmas tree.”
Pace, who has retired from the
University of Mississippi Medical Center where she worked in the pharmacology
department, has donated her body to the hospital for medical research. “It’s
the one last good thing a person can do,” she said.
She has suffered more loss, this
time to cancer. Murray’s dad, Casey, who served as director of the Mississippi
Legislative Reference Bureau at the Capitol and a longtime coach of youth
soccer in the Jackson area, died on Feb. 15, 2015.
Three months later, Lynne Marino,
who shared the pain of losing a daughter at the hands of Lee, died at age 78.
Marino sat with Pace at the trial and in the courtroom for every appeal.
While Pace used to openly admit
she felt guilty for “not keeping Murray safe,” she doesn’t feel that way
anymore.
“Guilt is a powerful thing,” she
said. “Intellectually, I always knew that there was no way I could have
prevented Murray’s death. Emotionally, from a mother’s perspective, it was the
natural reaction. As parents, that’s what we do — keep our children safe.”
Behind her favorite living room
chair is a window. Through it, she can see what is known as
“Murray’s garden.”
It is a collection of colorful ground cover and a corkscrew willow tree
“that I planted as a stick,” she said. "They grow fast, but they don't
live a long time."
And beside her chair is a box
containing some of Murray’s ashes.
It led me to ask: Was cremation
something that had always been planned in case something happened to a family
member?
“No,” Ann Pace answered. “I did
so because I wanted to burn away every single molecule of Derrick Lee that was
left on my daughter.”
