Hello and welcome to Serial Killing, a podcast. My name is Alyssa Carroll and I am the host and the creator of AtSerial_Killing on Instagram, where we go through the life stories of serial killers to see if we might catch a glimpse of why they displayed their famous, vile, and disturbing behaviors. Now, of course, I want to give a special thanks to some of my patrons. Sophie, Nanette, Emily, Gabrielle, two Emmas, Gaylin, Cassandra, David, John, My Girl Judy, and a user that goes by the name WannabeSleuth.
Thank you so, so much. I appreciate you. I also want to thank another follower slash watcher, Coping Dreams, who adamantly wanted me to do this one. So this one's for you.
This podcast will be on William Howell. Now, William Devin Howell was born on February 11th, 1970 in Hampton, Virginia. So let's get into some history for that time. In March of 1970, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty became effective after it was ratified by the United Nations.
It was to prevent any further creation and movement of nuclear weapons to work toward a complete disarmament and for nations to work together in the safe development and use of nuclear energy. Also this year, U.S. President Nixon ordered a secret invasion of Cambodia by the U.S. and South Vietnamese troops.
Now, this move only worked to fuel more anti-war sentiments, and people staged massive protests against the United States involvement in Cambodia. And actually, the National Guard wound up shooting several students who were participating in a protest at Kent State, as well as Jackson State universities. There was a cyclone in Bangladesh that killed over half a million people, an earthquake in Peru killing 67,000, and South Australia suffered horrific fires, injuring 800 people and killing over 70. This was also the year that Paul McCartney announced the breakup of the Beatles with his departure.
The Apollo 13 mission launched, which was the third mission to the moon. During this mission, the second oxygen tank exploded, causing serious issues with the other tanks. From this came the infamous line, quote, Houston, we have a problem, unquote. Shortly after the oxygen stores were depleted and there was a loss of water, electricity, and the propulsion system.
Eventually, the crew safely landed back in the Pacific ocean, all crew members surviving. And also this year, Japan became the world's fourth space power after the Soviet union and the United States, and then France. The first Earth day was celebrated in 1970. The environmental protection agency began operation, but unfortunately there was a widespread cholera epidemic in Istanbul.
So as far as the cost of living goes for 1970, the average cost for a new home was about $24,000 or rent was about $150 a month. The average annual salary was a $10,000 and a gallon of gas was just 36 cents a gallon. So this was the atmosphere that William was born into. His parents were John and Melissa.
Now, most of my information about his life actually came from the book, quote, His Garden Confessions with a serial killer. Now, his parents had married young and had two sons, Randy and Rocky, before Melissa was even 20 years old. Melissa had lost her own parents when she was quite young, so her and her brothers had been shipped off to different family members throughout North Carolina. John had also been quite poor growing up.
Neither had grown up with electricity or indoor plumbing. His father had told him that he had had a hand-powered water pump for the kitchen sink. Now, John had worked as a machinist, working as many hours as he could. And Melissa had gotten odd jobs from time to time for extra money.
They were by no means carving out a comfortable life, but they kept food on the table, clothes on the children, roof over their heads. Melissa discovered that she was pregnant again at 35 years old when her first two boys were teenagers. At the time, she was working part-time at a Whataburger. She had also managed to break one of her legs while she was working and was kind of dependent on crutches in the last bit of her pregnancy.
And then another son, Kevin, was born. William was another surprise pregnancy when his parents were in their early 40s when the first two sons were already grown and gone. And now her pregnancy with William had not been an easy one. Rocky, her second born, was off fighting in the Vietnam War at the time William was born.
William, in the book, described his parents as, quote, old school with old school family values. They never did drugs or anything like that. I did hear that my parents threw a pretty nice Christmas party and Pops would go to North Carolina and bring back a bottle of moonshine, but that stopped well before I was born, unquote. In fact, the author wrote that William was specifically and repeatedly asking her to make sure that she got the point across that his parents were good people.
He said, quote, there was always food on the table, clothes on our back, heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. We never received welfare or food stamps, and I paid full price in the lunch line. We were far from rich, but we were poor either. My father was tight with money, but we always had what we needed, unquote.
And though he did seem to hold his mother up on a pedestal, he also mentioned that she spanked him with fly swatters, old wooden paddles, and even a switch, which for my non-English speaking friends is just a very thin kind of tree branch. And let me tell you, they hurt. Now, she told the neighbors that they were also allowed to spank him and send him home if it was necessary. His father also spanked him with a belt, but he was also again, very careful to say that they didn't beat him or hit him with their fists out of anger, that the discipline they doled out was very normal for the times.
So when he was just five years old, he went to a boys club on Wednesday nights and every other Saturday. There he shot pool. He played bingo, made model airplanes, and even learned a little magic. There was boxing and dodgeball in the gym.
His mother was a big supporter of the boys club and was active in the fundraisers and so on. Now his mother was still working at Whataburger when she fell ill when William was just 11 years old. She had been working there part-time for around 20 years at that point. She also worked in the school cafeteria as a, you know, quote, lunch lady.
His earliest memories are made up of catching tadpoles and crawdads in a small creek that ran pretty close to their house. Thursday nights, his oldest brother would bring his wife and their children over to play cards with the family. He described his father as a very typical dad who worked on things in the evenings and weekends. And he would dutifully hold the flashlight like good little boys and girls do and fetch tools when they were needed.
Now John smoked Granger tobacco in his pipe and he focused on one problem at a time. However, William did kind of mention that sometimes his father would get really angry and, you know, shout out a cuss word or kick something when he was very frustrated that he couldn't fix something. But I mean, really, who of us doesn't do that? His mother on her off time would do crafts such as crocheting blankets or cross-stitching pictures and sometimes even making ceramics.
And she taught him to do these too. They had a family garden that they ate from. Melissa canned and preserved food from the garden. And most every single night there was a home cooked meal, which William stated was ready and on the table when John got home from work.
During the summers, his parents got season passes to Busch Gardens of all places. And they would go a few times a week and they swam in a public pool in their neighborhood. Not terribly exclusive, but you still had to be invited. So as I mentioned, when William was 11 years old, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
She had a mastectomy to remove her breasts, went through radiation and chemo. And then after suffered a series of strokes after she had tried to go back to work. These strokes basically paralyzed her left side. She lived another few years.
When William was 15 years old, his mother passed away. William said that his mother had asked him on more than one occasion to go get his father's gun, bring it to her and then go play outside. But of course he didn't have the heart to do that because he knew what she wanted. During his mother's illness, William began drinking and smoking weed to escape the stress of it all.
He had a girlfriend and spent quite a lot of time with her as well. He also had a paper route, so he delivered the newspaper. He went to school. He got home and then he took care of his mother and all of her needs until his father came home from work.
And then when his father believed that he was fast asleep, he would sneak out of the house to party and his behavior became increasingly negative. It was also around this time that William experienced his first sex worker. He, quote, borrowed the family car and went to the red light district. He picked up a girl and after his first experience, he stated he was hooked, saying it was his, quote, secret addiction and later confessed to have slept with hundreds of sex workers over the years.
So after his mother died, he kind of began to tailspin. He stopped going to the boys club. He began stealing and was actually charged with burglary after he and a friend had broken into a Sears store. And most of the trouble he got into, alcohol was involved.
He said William really pushed home the issue that he had great parents, and I kind of think maybe he did. You see, there really wasn't anything in his early life that jumped out at me as a big problem. It seems it began to get really bad once his mother found out that she had cancer. Now, watching a beloved family member, especially your mother, and that's if you have that kind of bond with your mother, slowly dying from cancer would most certainly be upsetting.
She found out when he was 11 years old and died when he was 15. Those are some already tough years for young teenagers going through puberty and walking their own path of self-discovery. Then, of course, you have the added pressures and stress of caring for a dying parent on top of school and a part-time job, and it is not surprising that the cracks began to show. Losing a parent might make a teenager suffer through significant depression and even experience PTSD.
We know that William turned to his girlfriend, drugs, and mainly alcohol to cope with his feelings, which we know is not good. And then, of course, there were the sex workers, too. According to Better Health, young people are at a greater risk of alcohol-related harm than adults. As the brain keeps developing into the mid-20s, drinking as a teen can greatly increase the risk of damage to the developing brain.
And the earlier a person starts drinking, the more likely that person will develop serious problems with alcohol or drug addiction later in life. Studies have shown that alcohol significantly impairs learning and memory in teens. These years are crucial because the brain is undergoing important development toward maturity, including improvements in decision-making functions and associated connections with the memory center, which lasts through to the early 20s, according to an article from McLean Hospital, the Neurodevelopmental Laboratory on Addictions and Mental Health, which was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. So, kids, don't drink.
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Many experiment with alcohol in adolescence and yet they do not go on to become serial killers. So, let's get back into the story. Now, William and his girlfriend had actually had two children together, and not long after that, his father passed away in 1990 when William was just 20 years old. After this, he began using crack cocaine.
His girlfriend, seeing that he was headed down a very dark and dangerous path with the drinking and the drugs, took his two very small children and moved completely out of the area. As far as I could find, he never saw those children again. And then it was at this point when he basically became a drifter. So, in 1991, 21-year-old April Stone went missing after she was last seen walking along a highway in northwestern Orlando, Florida.
Her body was found two days later. She had been stabbed to death and wrapped in a blanket. William was living less than 15 miles away at the time in a trailer house. Just a few months after April's body was found, William was of course arrested for soliciting a sex worker not far from where April had been.
The authorities have looked into this case thinking William might have been the killer, but there's kind of some back and forth with that one. Continuing in the early 1990s, William went to live with one of his brothers in Virginia, and his nephew stated later in an interview that he only lived there a few weeks. His sister-in-law kicked him out because he could not seem to stay out of trouble. And this seemed to be a pretty common theme with him with regards to his relationship with his family.
AP News, who interviewed his nephews, cited that he had, quote, burned bridges with family members, but he continued to write to family while incarcerated and received prison visits from at least one relative, unquote. And William indeed spent his prime years in and out of jail on drug-related crimes. He was described as heavyset, 5'9", and about 220 pounds, having long, dirty blonde hair and a goatee, with his middle name Devin tattooed on his bicep. In 1994, he admitted to hiring a sex worker and, quote, shacking up with her for three days in a motel room.
He described this as the best girl he had ever had. But all the while, William was accumulating a rather impressive rap sheet of probation violations, false identification, drug charges, and more while drifting through Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, and Connecticut. In 1998, while he was in prison for a drug charge, he was hit by a ball while playing softball with other inmates. The sun had gotten into his eyes, and when he looked up to catch the ball, the softball hit him really hard directly above the temple.
He stated that a knot the size of a goose egg formed there, but it did eventually go down. Only a bump remained that seemed to have fluid in it. He tried to break open the skin to relieve the pressure, but he could never get through. So a doctor in the prison began to lance it open, but immediately saw that it was a serious situation, and he immediately stitched it back up.
He sent him to see a specialist, and it was determined to be a blood clot that formed due to him suffering a pseudoaneurysm. So he was paroled to a friend's residence in October of 1999. He stated that during his incarceration, that's when he started really fantasizing about raping women. Some sex workers had ripped him off over the years, and it had left him jaded.
He moved up to Connecticut in 2001, but he would travel south in the winter so that he could continue his landscaping and lawn care work. And this was work that he went into after he was released. He had a new girlfriend, and she was fine with him not being around for months at a time. Their situation seemed to work.
So 29-year-old mother of two Ruth Camelini was last seen on January 1st, 2003 in Seymour, Connecticut. She had been living in that area and had been seen with two men around the time that she disappeared. She was a drug addict, and it was not entirely uncommon for her to disappear for long stretches of time. Five months later, 44-year-old Janice Roberts from New Britain was last seen getting into William's blue van at a stop and shop in Wethersfield.
Janice was a transgender and solicited sex with William, but when he realized that Janice was actually male, he later admitted to strangling the victim to death. Close to that same time, 55-year-old Diane Cusack, who was also from New Britain, also disappeared. She was a drug addict who had been separated from her family for years and was never reported missing. 26-year-old Marilyn Gonzalez was a mother of two children.
She went missing after leaving her home in Waterbury, Connecticut. And then a month after Janice disappeared, 33-year-old mother of four from Wethersfield, Connecticut, Nilsa Arizmendi, sorry if I mispronounced that, was last seen in a grocery store parking lot sitting in a 1985 Ford Ecoline blue van with a sign on the side advertising, quote, Quality lawn service, call Devin, unquote. It also listed his phone number. Now she and her boyfriend had actually known William for a little bit of time because the three of them got together to smoke crack.
Nilsa was with him on the day that she went missing to purchase drugs. Her boyfriend specifically stated that he watched her get in that van with him to get drugs. Nilsa's sister filed a missing persons report stating that, yes, her sister had issues with drugs and was a sex worker, but she would have never abandoned her children. Nilsa's boyfriend, Angel, then told the police that he had, like I said, watched her get into William's van.
William was also on again, off again, living with his girlfriend and her three-year-old daughter in her house when the police went to interview him about Nilsa's disappearance. They were able to track him down through the van's registration. Unfortunately, they didn't have a warrant and quickly after, William fled. You see, his girlfriend answered the door and when they asked to speak to him, she said that he wasn't there, but they could see him through the window.
In October of 2003, 23-year-old Joivaline Martinez was last seen in her hometown of East Hartford. She lived with her mother at the time and went missing, but for some reason she was not reported missing until March of the next year. And then again around that same time, 40-year-old Mary Jane Menard, who was a substance abuse counselor, went missing from New Britain in October as well. Now all of these missing persons who disappeared in 2003, well, you know, the cases went cold for a while.
All the while, William's girlfriends, now grown daughters, said that he was, quote, unfailingly nice, unquote, and considered a kind-hearted giant by friends of her mother's. But to the authorities, he was well known to be violent toward women. The next year, the authorities found William and his van in North Carolina. At this point human bones in 2007.
It would turn out to be the actual burial ground that William used to bury his victims. This discovery would be what finally exposed him for the serial killer that he became and he was convicted of these murders of the six additional women and sentenced to 360 years. During his sentencing, interesting enough, it said that he cried and apologized to the families, saying that his behavior was monstrous, cowardly, and selfish. The author of the book also asked William while she was interviewing him in prison if he believed he would have stopped killing and went on to eventually lead some form of a normal life if he had been released before the other murders were discovered and he replied with, quote, maybe, unquote.
He indicated that when he was living in his van away from his girlfriend and other friends, that's when he would feel the need to rape and kill. But when he was back up north with people to go home to and people that he knew actually cared about him, he could actually restrain himself from killing. Many of William's friends were indeed in complete shock when they learned that he was a serial killer. They all said he was a genuinely good guy, willing to give the shirt off his back for anyone.
Old high school classmates were equally as shocked, describing him as the quote, nicest guy to everyone. But the consensus is that he had quite a few more victims that he has not confessed to. There were some photographs found in his van of two other women who he said he would quote, be willing to talk to the detective about, unquote, but insist he did not kill them. He stated he would even take a polygraph test to prove it.
So guys, this is an odd case to me. He had a pretty good childhood, though his parents were a little older by the time that they had him. Of course, nowadays, women and men, couples wait a lot longer to have children. And there's nothing wrong with having children later.
And yes, he was disciplined using some pretty hardcore methods, but so many of us were and way worse. His mother dying would definitely be a huge stressor. And I'm sure anyone can have empathy for him in that aspect. But there certainly doesn't seem to be anything, at least in my research, to indicate he was pushed in any major way to go on to become a serial killer.
So tell me, guys, what do you think? Leave me a comment on the video if you're watching down below, or you can DM me on Instagram at serial underscore killing. You can email me at serialkillinginstagram at gmail.com and consider sponsoring every little bit helps. But mostly thank you so, so much for watching because I know you could be listening to anyone else, but you guys keep choosing me and I'm blown away.
I appreciate you so much. Thank you and have a great day.