225BatonRouge.com

Susan D. Mustafa is not intimidating at 5 feet 2 inches. The 41-year-old has a pleasant face framed with thick curly blond hair. She flinches at the suggestion she will soon have few friends on the police force.

It is not Mustafa who officers might find intimidating. It is the recent release of her first novel—the first tell-all book about the south Louisiana serial killer Derrick Todd Lee.

She waves off the charge the tome will cost her law enforcement friends, claiming the book is not a cheap shot at the task force. She adds there is actually some defense of the reason it had so much trouble apprehending Lee.

“I just laid out the facts for people to be able to decide for themselves,” she explains.

In many ways, Mustafa was an unlikely writer for I’ve Been Watching You, which hit stores in mid-February. She spent most of her life in Slidell as a business owner before moving to Baton Rouge to begin her writing career.

“I remember my sister telling me it was a safe city,” she reflects on her move.

One year later, Lee began his bloody rampage.

The book represents the next journalistic step for the onetime editor of Business and Industry Connection and former managing editor of City Social. Watching You promises to be a controversial book that will force many Baton Rougeans to remember the dread that gripped the city’s women until that fateful day when Atlanta police arrested Lee.

So why read it?

For one thing, the book is a team effort with special prosecutor Tony Clayton. In fact, Mustafa says her first literary effort would never have been possible without co-authors Clayton and Sue Israel.

Mustafa also contends it is the first time the story that dominated state and national media has been told in its entirety. The whole story may offend the hundreds of people who worked on cracking the most frightening case to ever captivate Baton Rouge.

Lee’s life is chronicled from birth through his incarceration on death row. Mustafa toured Angola prison and observed him in his cell. She has also seen the room where he will die. She and Israel traveled much of South Louisiana—to the places where each of Lee’s known victims were found, where they lived and where they are buried.

She poured through volumes of court documents and evidence detailing the graphic nature of the crimes.

“The crime scene photos gave me nightmares—still give me nightmares,” she admits.

She warns the crimes are described in vivid detail, adding the past year’s work changed her.

“Since I began writing this book, I have lost all of my sense of security.”

In her mind, none of the Baton Rouge murdersshould have happened. She says Lee killed Randi Mebreur in 1998. At the time, the Zachary Police Department collected a sample of Lee’s semen from a trash can liner. Mustafa claims they knew he did it; but it was too expensive to test DNA then. Mebreur eventually became the final confirmed victim.

“Women died needlessly,” she says. “That’s the most tragic thing about this case.”

The authors believe there are 10 more victims based on their own research. In addition to individual chapters about the known victims, four of these 10 women receive their own chapters, and the final chapter details the other six potential cases.

“As you can see, there is a lot of material in this book that has not come to light that is going to upset people,” Mustafa says.

Her goal was to help Baton Rouge understand the depth of this tragedy. The book goes a step further; it explains why Lee did it. But she won’t reveal the answer in an interview.

“You have to read the book,” the author says.

For more information, log on to ivebeenwatchingyou.net.