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We began receiving a warning about a crying baby serial killer lure on 16 January 2003, when it came to be mailed to us by a number of readers. Although nothing in the text of the alert said anything about the serial killer operating in the Baton Rouge area of Louisiana, some of the first versions of the message to arrive in our inbox carried the name of Linda C. Mabile (along with her Baton Rouge address and phone numbers), presenting her as someone who might have been the author of the piece: Later versions of the same warning omitted the Mabile signature block and were instead prefaced by statements that amounted to saying this bit of intelligence applied to a serial killer on the loose in that part of Louisiana. A serial killer was operating in the Baton Rouge area at the time, but Derrick Todd Lee, the suspect indicted for the May 2002 beating and stabbing death of Charlotte Murray Pace (and linked by DNA to the murders of five more women in the area), is not known to have procured his victims by luring them from their homes with the help of a recording of a baby's crying, nor has he admitted to such since his arrest. We spoke to a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune who has worked on the story, and this bit of intelligence about a crying baby was news to her. She hadn't encountered anything like this in her examination of the case, not even a whisper of it from the police involved in the investigation. Were this killer luring women with the aid of an infant's taped cries, that detail would be known both to those investigating the murders and those reporting on them (especially if police dispatchers were announcing it to callers). The rumor has also been denied by the serial killer task force working on this case. If the public was in any danger or if there was any truth to it, we would let the public know, serial killer task force spokeswoman Cpl. Mary Ann Godawa said. We have no reason to believe this is true. They've posted a denial on their web site: In September 2002, America's Most Wanted devoted a segment to the hunt for south Louisiana's serial killer, showing re-enactments of the first three murders. In January 2003 it aired an update to the story, this time focusing on the November 2002 slaying of Trineisha Colomb, the fourth victim. The airing of that update appears to have provoked a further wave of rumor. In August 2010 a Farmville, North Carolina woman claimed someone had tried to lure her into opening her door late at night by using a recording of a crying baby. The woman said she heard some bumping around outside, got up to see what was going on, and then heard a baby crying from her back porch. Because her dog was barking and jerking on its leash, instead of opening her door she woke her stepsons and called the sheriff's office. All three saw a tall man dressed all in black outside their home walking away. It's likely the 2003 Don't open the door! warning was an expression of the anxiety the Baton Rouge serial killer provoked in that community, told in the form of a story that borrows a motif from a more traditional urban legend, the venerable Roommate's Death. That cautionary tale also requires the threatened female to not open the door lest she admit the killer, and the current crying baby warning carries an additional resonance from the Boyfriend's Death legend in the detail of a police officer's commanding the frightened woman to not look back at the car she'd just spent the night in. Sightings: During an episode of the television drama Criminal Minds (Children of the Dark, 17 October 2007), one of the characters made reference to Derek Todd Lee used a tape recording of a crying baby to lure women out of their home.
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