It was June, 1993. Bill Clinton was president. The Bulls were beating The Suns on their way to the NBA Finals. Janet Jackson was at the top of the charts. Peggy Lynn Grimes was 8 months pregnant. Peggy was also a prostitute. And serial killer Gerald Patrick Lewis didn’t like that.
Lewis took the life of Grimes, going so far as to try to cut out her baby. More than 10 years later, it would cost him his life. In 2004, a Douglas County, Georgia, jury sentenced Lewis to death for Grimes’s murder.
The Supreme Court of Georgia said this upon his appeal: “the murder of Peggy Grimes by the defendant was outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible, or inhuman in that it involved torture, depravity of mind, and an aggravated battery to the victim. We affirm the death sentence.”
Lewis has Grimes to strip naked before he forced her to the ground. He climbed on top and began choking her. He stabbed her again and again in the chest and throat. He tried to cut out the baby.
In at least 2 previous murders, he had sex with the mutilated corpses of his victims. The sick bastard.
Grimes was reported missing by her mother. Although her remains were found in September, 1993, she went unidentified for five years.
Lewis was arrested on unrelated charges and jailed until 1997. After his release, he continued to kill, until finally arrested for murder.
Grimes was the second Georgia murder Lewis confessed to. Based on his confession, the coroner took a second look at the evidence still being held. He finally found fetal bones in the recovered dirt.
A May 1993 sonogram picture of Peggy Grimes’s fetus was presented during the murder trial. So were crime scene photos. Court psychiatrists said Lewis had attempted to “feign psychiatric disturbance.” Imagine that: a murdering necrophiliac was also a liar.
Who would have imagined.
Lewis died of cancer in 2009, making many people happy.