By Chuck Hustmyre

December 24, 2006

advertisement

BATON ROUGE, La. (Crime Library) —   

"He took little Suzie to the junior prom

And he raped her and killed her; then he took her home

Excitable boy, they all said

Well, he's just an excitable boy"

—Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy

If there ever was anyone who fit the conventional wisdom profile of a serial killer, not the kind that comes from the FBI Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, but the kind that comes from the average citizen, the plain old common sense profile of a serial killer—you know the type, the shifty-eyed guy who acts weird all the time, the guy who makes your skin crawl, the guy who really does have a mommy complex—if ever there was a guy who fit that profile, it was Sean Vincent Gillis.

After Gillis's arrest in the spring of 2004 for the murder of seven women, people who knew him said they weren't surprised to find out that he was a serial killer. Gillis was a wacko and everybody knew it.

It didn't take a behavioral scientist to figure that out.

 

From the late 1970s until his arrest Gillis lived in a house owned by his mother. In the mid-1990s she moved to Atlanta and left the house to her son. It's a brick ranch-style house with a gabled roof and a big magnolia tree in the front yard. The house sits on a quiet residential street in a middle class neighborhood, just a few miles from Louisiana State University.

Some longtime neighborhood residents have known Gillis since he was a teenager.

"He's strange," one neighbor told The Associated Press. "He's always been strange. The girls in the neighborhood were afraid of him."

Years ago, that same neighbor, whose daughter lived down the street from Gillis, caught the accused serial killer in her daughter's backyard peeking in the windows.

While in his teens, Gillis once pounded on garbage cans in the middle of the street until the cops came, all the while wailing about not having a girlfriend.

When Gillis got older, neighbors would sometimes see him sprawled out on his front lawn barking at the moon and screaming curses at his mother.

Next Page

Sean Vincent Gillis Has Confessed To Killing, Mutilating Eight Women

See Feature Story on Derrick Todd Lee

See Feature Story on Baton Rouge Serial Killer

Contact Chuck Hustmyre at chuck3174@yahoo.com

For more daily crime news