They were both young black men, born the same year -- just a couple months apart, actually. They both raped and beat their victims, targeting women and leaving DNA at the crime scenes. Their cases both crossed jurisdictional lines with the police agencies that were investigating them, and those agencies didn't realize at first that they were working the same case. Both men died with health issues while in prison. But how else do these two serials -- Benjamin ("Tony") Atkins and Derrick Todd Lee -- share traits, or differ?

Well, let's look at victimology. Though they both hunted women -- one in Louisiana and one in Michigan -- these killers chose quite-different types. Atkins was said to be killing his mother over and over, choosing a particular type similar to his heroin-addicted prostitute mother. Lee, on the other hand, chose a variety of females, a mix of ethnicities who all tended to be successful, pretty, independent -- not living at risk on the street. And Lee did not hunt on foot like the homeless Atkins -- he drove around a pickup truck. Though Lee had trouble with the law at an early age, caught peeping at women in their homes, he evidently began killing a bit later than Atkins, in the latter 1990s as compared to 1991 (though Lee was suspected to have killed one woman in 1992). Lee varied his methods, sometimes strangling like Atkins but often stabbing. In the hunt for Lee, police were thrown off at first, pursuing a white man until DNA testing showed them their unsub was black. In Atkins' case, police profiled him as a black man throughout the investigation.

Besides having voyeurism in his background, Lee was suspected to have an abusive childhood, a trait he shares with Atkins. And both killers show one of the traditionally accepted markers of the Macdonald triad in childhood: Lee was known to abuse animals, and Atkins set fires. Both of these killers were assessed to have a lower IQ -- Lee perhaps a tad lower than Atkins. But both of these men had a nonthreatening demeanor, enabling Lee to knock on the doors of women asking for help and to be trusted by those women, while Atkins was able to lure females off to dark corners to smoke crack without a problem (the fact that his victims were drug-addicted unfortunately helped). Both of these men were said to present themselves in a way that put people at ease. Atkins was, after all, described by at least one cop who worked his case as "Gentle Ben."

At the same time, from a psychological standpoint, both of these killers were assessed as having compulsive behavior, as not being able to control their impulses (yeah, maybe you can insert a "duh!" here). Lee reportedly had complaints of battering on record from not only his wife, but his girlfriend and sister, as well. Atkins did not have any reports of battering the individuals close to him, but those who knew him or knew of him (including at least one of his assault survivors) said he became a different person when he smoked crack. He seemed demonic. For both of these men, there was a noted psychological effect on sexuality emerging from childhood. Their sense of sexuality or sexual behavior was altered at a young age. For Lee, it was termed "hypersexuality" in adolescence; for Atkins, it was evidently stemming from sexual abuse -- he claimed abuse by a staff member at the home for boys where he lived for two years, as well as at the hand of one of his mother's boyfriends. Details are murky, but whatever happened as they were growing up, their views of sexuality were obviously not healthy ones.

Certain life events can serve as triggers for serials. Job loss often comes up as one of them. This has been theorized as a trigger for both of these killers, though in my research of the Atkins case I tend to doubt that losing his job at the pizza place actually caused him to start killing people. I think it was another, much stronger, event.

While Atkins got multiple life sentences for killing 11 women and assaulting one other who survived, earning him multiples of Michigan's mandatory life sentence for first-degree murder, Lee received Louisiana's death penalty after being tried for two of his seven kills but died before he could be executed.

Above photos:
- Derrick Todd Lee, 34, is shown in this photo released by the police. http://crime.about.com/od/serial/ig/serialkillerphotos/lee_derrick_t.htm, fair use,  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20031894.
- Benjamin Atkins, from Detroit Police files, image obtained by FOIA. See this blog post for more on this photo and the confusion over photos of Atkins.

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For more on the Derrick Todd Lee case, see S2E1 of "Making a Serial Killer."  For a deep-dive of the Atkins case, see "The Crack City Strangler: The Homicides of Serial Killer Benjamin Atkins."

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