DNA is silent witness - LA
Victim’s roommate offers grisly testimony in first day of Lee trial
Richard Burgess
rburgess@theadvertiser.com
October 5, 2004
The Associated Press
FROM:
http://www.theadvertiser.com/news/html/6467A236-AE3B-4D1B-B7B8-79BD5FB07DB9.shtmlBATON ROUGE — Rebecca Yeager said the realization a murder had taken place came to her over a few seconds that seemed like an eternity. She arrived home the afternoon of May 31, 2002, and saw a half-eaten sandwich on the arm of a couch, then discovered her friend and roommate, 22-year-old Charlotte Murray Pace, lying on the floor.
“I noticed she was nude, and then I saw the blood all over the room. ... On the walls, in places where I didn’t understand how it could have gotten there,” Yeager testified Monday — the first day of accused serial killer Derrick Todd Lee’s murder trial in Baton Rouge.
Yeager said she frantically searched for a phone, called 911 and was asked by the person who answered if she could perform CPR. “That’s when I realized her throat was not just slit but cut open wide,” Yeager said, struggling through tears as she relived the day she found Pace’s body. Pace’s mother, Ann Pace, cried with her from the other side of the courtroom.
Yeager’s testimony, like much of the first day of the trial, was often graphic. She spoke of blood-spattered walls, a blood-soaked carpet and the stab wounds that marred Pace’s body.
<SNIP>