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[TENSE MUSIC PLAYS] BILL PAETZOLD: I still try to look at him and say, "Could he really have done this?"
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JIM WARDWELL: It's my belief if he wasn't arrested, he would have continued and that we would have more victims.
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He's probably the most infamous serial killer that we identified in Connecticut.
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JESSICA CAMILINI: He's a monster. Sick. [TENSE MUSIC PLAYS] The victims in this case, there were seven.
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One is bad enough, but seven is just so sad, so horrific. They were all loved, each and every one of them.
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Their families never stopped hoping or waiting for them to return home safely to them.
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Each one was a special person. She played piano. She was amazing. Yeah, she was amazing.
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There was a song she did for a competition, "How great thou are." Whew. I remember one time in high school, she played it for--
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we had a practice competition before we actually went to the competition and she played it.
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And she played it perfectly, not one mistake. I remember sitting in the back row with my goosebumps,
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hair standing on end. Opioids have been a plague within the country and the world.
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For a very long time, I was with the police department for over 25 years, and we dealt with it
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during my entire career. New Britain, like anywhere else in the country, was dealing with it.
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She had a really strong addiction. There would be so many times to where I would walk in
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and she would just be passed out. Not passed out on the couch, but you knew what she was struggling with
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and I wouldn't talk to her. I'd be so mad at her. But I can't understand it, because I
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didn't have that addiction. But, I mean, can't blame-- can't blame her. I mean, I couldn't imagine having something so strong
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taking control of you, to where I know she wanted to be a good mom. BRIAN HARRIS: Howell even though he was the lawnmower
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guy, as he drove around these neighborhoods he was preoccupied. He was preoccupied with sex, he was preoccupied with women.
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But not just any women, he was preoccupied with those women who were most vulnerable.
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ANN HOWARD: Melanie Camilini, a young mother of two children, she was working the streets in Waterbury, Connecticut.
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And unfortunately for her, when she stepped in to that 1985 Ford Econoline van, she was stepping into a death chamber.
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He knew that she was stepping into a death chamber. Of course, she didn't. He did, at first, attempt to kill her after raping her,
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with a hammer. He said that it didn't even knock her out, didn't even seem to faze her.
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But it terrified her and she plead for her life. At that point, he decided to strangle her.
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He thought it would be the quickest and most efficient way to bring about her death.
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He claims that he took no pleasure from the actual strangulation of his victims.
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It was completely a utilitarian act on his part to conceal the evidence, and so that he could
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go on and commit future rapes. Now keep in mind, if a woman uses drugs, to Howell, that's one of the two things
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that makes them a worthless object. He claimed that the only victim that troubled him
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was Melanie Camilini. And what bothered him the most was when she begged for her life, and said please don't kill me,
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I have children. He said, "That really troubled me when she said that, and I almost couldn't do it."
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Nonetheless, he knew that he had just repeatedly raped her over a 12-hour period, and that he, in his way of thinking,
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had no choice. LISA BACKUS: I believe he cut off her fingertips and, like, dislocated her jaw and hid those in Virginia.
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I know at one point in all this, they were digging up his former front lawn in Virginia.
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But I don't think they found anything. He actually kept the tarnished ring with a stone
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in it belonging to Melanie Camilini. That was the only item belonging to any of his seven victims.
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I asked him why he kept that. Was it a souvenir, a kind of trophy that serial killers are known to keep
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to symbolize their achievement? He said, "No, actually I kept that tarnished ring belonging
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to Melanie Camilini to remind me of the night that I stopped being a man and I became a monster."
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He didn't value them. He didn't value them as human beings, he didn't value most people as human beings.
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He thought of them as disposable. William Devin Howell was born in Hampton, Virginia,
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back in 1970. He was the last of four children. However, two of his brothers were
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quite a bit older than Howell. One of his brothers was serving in Vietnam at the time of Howell's birth.
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I talked to Bill quite a bit about his background, his childhood. And he described his upbringing as very happy.
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His mother and father were-- it wasn't a broken marriage, they were together. He describes a happy childhood.
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By the age of 12, William Devin Howell's mother got sick with breast cancer. She was, at the time, in her early 50s.
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And this really did affect Howell quite a bit. She was sort of a source of stability in his life,
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she gave him protection and routine, she was a strong disciplinarian. I still, every now and then, talk
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to his brother on Facebook. But his brother was a corrections officer and he was horrified.
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He wasn't raised this way. I believe as a teen, he was in trouble a bit. He told me that by the time he was in high school,
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there really wasn't a day when he wasn't drinking alcohol, sometimes in the morning before he went to school.
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He only kept his driver's license for about a year and a half before he got into a drunk driving accident.
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Howell had repeated incarcerations as a habitual offender that sometimes went for three to five years at a time, simply
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for not holding a valid driver's license. All of us make our own decisions. And regardless of background, he chose to do what he did
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to these seven innocent people. Howell began to solicit prostitutes at a very young age.
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He was only 14 years old. He stole his father's car in the middle of the night, and drove silently off, and picked up his first prostitute.
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It became his secret addiction, soliciting prostitutes in the middle of the night.
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He has been with well over 1,000 prostitutes over the years. [TENSE MUSIC PLAYS]
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I think he always had this binary view of women. There were the good girls and the bad girls.
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The good girls would be someone like the mother of his children. He says to me that she is a good girl.
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She does not drink, she does not smoke, she does not do drugs. She was a good mother to the children,
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she was faithful to him. And then there are the bad girls, and these would be the women that he
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would pick up on the streets. He's driving that blue van, and he's cutting yards
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and blending in with society. And so what may look as somebody that should stand out
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is somebody that was seen every day in the neighborhood. Howell, after killing Melanie Camilini, took a break
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and went down to Virginia for a few months and returned in April of 2003. In May of 2003, he was driving through the streets
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of Waterbury and he came upon Marilyn Gonzalez. She was also a young mother who had a drug addiction
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and was turning tricks on the street. As with Camilini and most of his other victims,
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Howell knew that that night the woman that he paid was going to end up dead. He knew that he would rape Marilyn Gonzalez,
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and as with all of his other victims, that took place over a 12-hour period, on again, off again.
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In between rapes, he would bind his captives to the back bench of his van, duct tape their mouths,
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and drive them to different locations. Mr. Howell completely misunderstood the people that he victimized, these innocent victims.
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He thought of them to be without value, without purpose in this world. He couldn't have been more wrong.
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Howell picked up Daniel Whistnant outside of this bar restaurant called the Cadillac
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Ranch in Southern Connecticut. It was Howell's habit to go to places like the Cadillac Ranch
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when he had a night off, and to sit at the bar for hours and hope to get lucky finding a woman at the bar.
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If he didn't have any luck at the bar, by the time the bar closed, he would go to the streets
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and solicit a prostitute instead. Now, the bar closed at 2:00 AM, and Howell went outside and saw Daniel Whistnant
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walking along the street. This was a transgender man who was dressed as a woman.
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He had long, silky black hair, Howell states, and a short miniskirt and high heels.
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And so thinking Daniel Whistnant is a female prostitute, he invites Mr Whistnant into his van.
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During the transaction that took place, Howell puts his hand on the head of Whistnant,
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and pulls off a wig. He becomes enraged that this man has deceived him into this vulnerable position.
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He throws Daniel Whistnant against the wall of the van and tells me that he punched him out twice,
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and then quickly strangled him. We're at the back of the strip mall in New Britain
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where William Devin Howell would leave the remains of his seven victims. First off, he would stop his van over there behind the strip
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mall, and dump the parcel, or the body of his victim, wrapped in garbage bags deep into the ravine.
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And then what he would do is he get back into his van and go over to the McDonald's parking lot, park his car,
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and come back to this location where we're at right now. There's a trail, as you can see.
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It goes into sort of a metal-- like, littered area. And William Devin Howell would walk this trail
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and make a sharp right that led into the ravine where the parcel that he had left was left in the ravine.
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He would retrieve a spade, a shovel, that he had stored behind the guardrail. And then he would drag that body along with his shovel
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about a few hundred yards into the woods to the location that he was known to call his garden, which is where he
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buried, in very shallow graves, the seven bodies of the people that he killed. In the case of Nilsa Arizmendi, he states that he didn't
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plan to rape and kill her. Now it's interesting that up until then, any time he planned
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to rape a prostitute, it was based solely, he says, on his lawn care schedule the following day.
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If he didn't have lawns that he had to mow the next morning, then that night he knew he was free to solicit a prostitute
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and keep her captive in his van for the entire night and throughout the next day.
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Now with Nilsa Arizmendi, when she stepped into his van and asked him to drive her to a location to pick up drugs,
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he said he would do so in exchange for a sexual transaction. What happened was when she refused
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to finish that transaction, he grew very angry. He decided in that split second, "I am going
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to rape and kill this woman." The next day, he had the lawn care schedule. So he had to keep Nilsa's body wrapped in tarp
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in the back of his van for the duration of his lawn care jobs that next day before taking her out to the back of the mall
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and burying her. And I remember going to the crime scene, and I walked down the embankment in my dress shoes,
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and it was kind of muddy and slippery. And when I was down there, I felt like I was in an amphitheater, kind of looking up
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at the parking lot area, which you couldn't really see the parking lot with the trees that were there.
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And I thought, this is actually a pretty interesting place to have buried bodies.
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You think, well, people might be driving by and look down, but it wasn't a place that you would suspect.
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So it probably was the perfect place. In a 10-week time period, in August, September,
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and the first two weeks of October, his last three victims died. The first of those three victims, in August of 2003,
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was Mary Jane Menard. He picked up Mary Jane Menard on the streets of Waterbury,
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Connecticut, and went through his typical routine of holding her captive in his van for 12 hours, raping her off and on,
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and eventually strangling her. In this case, he strangled her in the back parking lot
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of the McDonald's which was located right next to the strip mall, where his burial ground was located.
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The sixth victim was Diane Cusack. She had been addicted to drugs for many years
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and lived a very hard life on the streets. And in her 40s, Howell picked her up in New Britain, Connecticut, and went
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through his similar routine of raping and strangulation. In this McDonald's parking lot, three of William
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Devin Howell's victims died. He parked his car right over there, and raped and strangled three of his victims.
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Now as you can see, there is a very busy drive-thru to my left. This is a popular McDonald's, and it's not
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outside of the realm of possibility that quite a lot of people, even as Howell was killing
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his victims, or going up the trail to bury his victims, would have seen his van, and seeing
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him at least walking up the trail and made no question of it. Ironically, Howell would also go through this very
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drive-through with some of his victims held captive in the back of his van, tied-up and duct-taped.
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And he said to me that he would turn the music up high so no one would hear the victims if they were
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screaming or cried for help. And during that time, he would actually order food through the drive-thru
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and ask his victims if they also wanted something to eat. Joyvaline Martinez was Howell's last victim.
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She was a very beautiful, young girl. She was only 23 years old at the time of her death.
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William Devin Howell picked her up on Hillside Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut. And as with his other victims, he
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went through the routine of holding her captive in the back of his van for a 12-hour period, during which time
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he raped her off and on, and ultimately strangled her to death. [TENSE MUSIC PLAYS]
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Law enforcement didn't seem to be doing that much about the disappearance of the first three victims,
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until the Nilsa Arizmendi disappearance. When Nilsa Arizmendi disappeared on July 25, 2003,
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her family went almost immediately to authorities. She was known to frequently call her mother and her four
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children, and visit with them. So her not being around was a noticeable concern to the family members.
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He admits Nilsa Arizmendi was his downfall. Up until then, he believed he could continue
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to get away with these crimes, so long as he chose strangers, and that there were no witnesses who saw him driving
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off with these strangers. Ace Sanchez, who was her boyfriend, was a witness who saw Nilsa get into Howell's car
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and drive away. And so now, Howell not only had killed someone he knew, but there was a witness who saw him as the last person
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to be seen with the victim. The police are able to use their research skills, they are able to track down the van.
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Any time anyone registers a car, you can track the history of where did that car end up.
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Well, those police officers, they do that, they find the van. And there's one small piece of evidence that's still left.
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Despite the efforts to clean that van, there's one small piece of evidence and that is blood.
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And so what you would have now is a very good circumstantial case. You can't necessarily prove absolute murder off
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of one drop of blood in a van, but a reasonable person could come to that conclusion.
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So with a very circumstantial case, you have William Howell that pleads guilty. [TENSE MUSIC PLAYS]
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So I became involved in the investigation from the very first day. It was in 2007.
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We got called to a scene out on Hartford Road, behind one of our shopping plazas.
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A gentleman walking through the woods came across what he believed to be human remains.
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And he came across a skull. And he didn't care for his own, you know. Like, if he got in trouble, he knew he had to call the police.
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And he admitted he had been back there, you know, hoping to hunt and he had found a skull.
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That's a super busy street. One of the state's largest malls is literally a hundred yards up the road.
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But it's a little strip mall with a couple of restaurants. They proceeded with a whole search of the area.
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We got the state anthropologist and the state medical examiner involved. And they pointed out to us that although we only
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had a small amount of remains, we definitely had the remains of at least two human beings.
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But we found what ended up being the remains of three people. They were all identified at that time as unknown victims.
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They were referred to as Jane Does, which just broke my heart. They needed their identity, we needed to know who they were,
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reunite them with their families. The reason they figured out that it was three separate women was because there were three
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either right or left hip bones. So obviously, that indicates three different people.
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We relied heavily on reports of missing persons. We searched databases in the tri-state area
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to try to match with whatever we could, with whatever the science at the time was allowing us to do.
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LISA BACKUS: The New Britain Police Department did everything, everything they could possibly do,
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to identify these women. They had offered us, at that time-- this is the FBI through Quantico--
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to create approximations of the victims that we had. We had two skulls among the human remains.
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So about 2009, two New Britain detectives drove two skulls-- and at that point, they were known
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as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2-- to a specialized unit within the FBI in Quantico, Virginia.
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And what that unit does is it creates busts, basically, of what they thought the person would look like.
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And by 2010, the police announced, you know, we've got these busts come take a look.
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Huge press conference, and they unveiled the busts in the hopes that somebody would recognize these women.
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We published photos of it in the local media. And it was the same night, or the next night
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after it was ran, I received a phone call. It did lead to the discovery that Jane
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Doe 1 was Diane Cusack. Apparently, she and her family had been estranged for a good number of years.
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But the bust kind of looked like her a bit, and that prompted-- I think it was her brother and his wife--
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to come forward and say, you know what, hey, this may be Diane. And they did the DNA, and it turned out to be Diane.
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OK, so now they have one identified. He was a suspect back in 2007. Only because we were aware of his arrest
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in a neighboring town of Wethersfield, and that the person whose death he was convicted of
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and he was in prison for, her body was never located. So I had a vague awareness about him,
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and that he had taken a woman and that there was more blood in the van they had never identified.
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And so every now and then, I would say to the chief, "Are you sure it's not him?
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Are you sure this isn't him?" And he would say, "Yeah, we're looking at it, we don't think so."
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They had identified Joyvaline through her DNA. So I walk into the training room at the police station,
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and there is this really big poster of this gorgeous, young girl with jet black hair,
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you know, just done beautifully, red lipstick. And I'm just like, looking at that going, my god.
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You know, my god, someone has got to find justice for these people. Someone-- someone has got to find justice.
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Our instinct was that there was probably at least one more person in there, one more victim,
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because Nilsa was never located, and we knew the remains we found in 2007 were not Nilsa.
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The playing cards is a technique that the police and the prosecution have used to try to solve cold cases--
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cold cases, or cases where-- they haven't been solved yet for so many years. And these playing cards, inmates,
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a lot of times they pass their time playing cards with each other. And they put these cards into the Department
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of Corrections systems and allow the inmates to play cards. And on the back side of the cards are faces of missing,
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of deceased individuals, whose cases are unsolved. New Britain had submitted, you know,
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the remains of three women and when they were found. And he saw the card, he saw the cold case card because those
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are the only cards that they can play cards with in prison, because it is designed to spark conversation and confessions.
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The cards were being passed around, and he certainly recognized some of the faces as being in there,
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in the deck of cards. Howell pulls the card of a young woman name Joyvaline Martinez.
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He shows that picture to Jonathan Mills, and tells Mills, "I'm the one that murdered this young woman."
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And he told one of them, "See that? That's my work. I did that." I believe that person was the one who talked to a New
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Britain police detective. They have their phone number hotline to call, and a lot of inmates take advantage of that.
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Either because they know, or they don't know but they're going to try to pretend that they know
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information to try to get their sentences commuted or shortened, or something of that sort,
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some kind of benefit. "Not only did I murder Joyvaline Martinez, I murdered seven people and I put all of their bodies
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behind a strip mall in New Britain, Connecticut." He even went as far as drawing a map for Jonathan Mills,
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and showing him the placement of those graves in his burial ground. Now, Howell did that with the intention
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of confessing the crime so that he could go on to commit suicide. He was aware that they were investigating.
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JIM WARDWELL: He didn't cooperate in any substantial way with the police upon questioning.
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According to Jonathan Mills, Bill thought the net was tightening in around him and that's why he decided to take his life.
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Mills supposedly gave them some pills that he had accumulated, and Bill took those pills, thinking
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it was going to kill him. [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYS] At that point in 2014, we did identify the burial
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sites of the remaining victims. Within days, they made the announcement they had found
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four more bodies, and it took a few weeks or so to positively identify each one.
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Mom kind of kept me informed with what was going on. She had called me and said they want to meet with me.
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So I kind of knew. I knew something was going on. But she said that she would know--
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ironically enough, it was on Mel's birthday. Mom said, "I'll call you tomorrow after I meet with them."
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And I remember her calling and all she said was, "It's her." When it did get to the point where they
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announced that one of the remains was Nilsa's, then that was it. You know, everybody knew they had him,
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and it would only be a matter of time before they arrested him. We understood what had happened,
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and now it was proven. [TENSE MUSIC PLAYS] We built our case one step at a time.
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It was brick by brick. It was a long investigation, making sure we identified every victim, and making sure we'd left
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no one behind, really, as well. We wanted to bring peace to these families. It was September 18, 2015.
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They arrested him and charged him with six counts of capital felony murder. I did a preliminary review of the arrest warrant.
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And, you know, it paints a picture of a person who would consider doing this type of crime.
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And so I kind of formulated an image of him, and then I met him. And the person that I met did not correspond with the image
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that I had created in my mind. He was an affable southern gentleman, had a good sense of humor, and was very easygoing
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and laid back. Every time they brought him in in the orange jumpsuit, he just looked like this ordinary guy.
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It was like an ordinary guy, he looked like anybody else who would have been at that courthouse,
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or you know, just an ordinary guy. I guess ultimately, he decided to plead guilty,
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and he knew it was going to be a life sentence. They actually gave him six life sentences,
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and he agreed to that because he wanted to spare the families of going through the trial.
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Bill Howell, who knows he's going to die in prison-- and probably people aren't sympathetic towards that,
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but as a criminal defense lawyer, I always think about the client also. And in Connecticut, when you're charged with this type
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of-- convicted of this type of offense, you're in an 8 by 10 foot cell approximately, 22 hour a day lockdown,
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and you're isolated with your thoughts. And it's a pretty traumatic place to be.
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In court, I was, initially, somewhat hopeful for him and his soul, actually. His first words were, "I'm sorry."
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But then he went on to speak pretty much at length about how life is so difficult for him in prison.
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So it really very quickly turned into, he was sorry for the predicament he's in.
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Yet to my knowledge, he has not expressed any remorse. INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about him?
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Is there a word? There's no manual, there's no word. I don't know. You're talking about drugs being demonic,
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there's got to be something like that related with him. There's no way. He's a monster.
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He's a monster. Sick. INTERVIEWER: Do you think he deserves the death penalty? Yes.
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Mr. Howell's crimes destroyed seven families, seven communities around those families, friends.
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So much sorrow, so many tears. So many years of, first, waiting to find out what happened,
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and then what he put them through at his own sentencing, where he talked about his personal challenges in prison.
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It didn't help heal the wounds. I believe they were vulnerable because of addiction.
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But, you know, I don't know necessarily if I want to call them on the fringes of society.
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Do you know what I mean? I would prefer to say they were vulnerable because of addiction.
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Each of these seven victims were loved by their families. They had terrific relationships with their friends and others.
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Through some addictions to substances, they did encounter troubles. It never changed who they, were still the wonderful people
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that were born to this Earth. She was strong, very strong person. She was a good mom.
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She wanted to be better, and she fought to be better. Her ending isn't her full story.
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[SOFT PIANO MUSIC PLAYS]