William George Bonin (8 January 1947 – 23 February 1996), also called the Freeway Killer and the Freeway Strangler, was an American serial killer and sex offender who raped, tortured, and murdered numerous young men and boys between May 1979 and June 1980 in southern California. He was convicted of 14 murders, but he confessed to 21 and is suspected of even more.
Of eleven victims slaughtered prior to 1976, most were known or suspected homosexuals, their deaths lending credence to the notion that the murderer himself was gay. While strangulation was the favored mode of death, some victims had been stabbed with knives or ice picks, and their bodies bore the earmarks of sadistic torture.
Bonin's first known murder victim was killed in May 1979. He generally operated by luring his victims into his van under the pretense of having consensual sex. He became known as the "Freeway Killer" because most of his victims' bodies were discovered beside freeways. On many occasions, he was helped by one of his four known accomplices. One of them, Vernon Butts, was listed in court as an accomplice for 12 murders; he died via suicide before his trial in 1982.
Described by the prosecutor at his first trial as "the most arch-evil person who ever existed", he spent 14 years on death row before his execution by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison in 1996. He was the first prisoner in California to die by this method.
Background[]
William George Bonin was born in Willimantic, Connecticut, on January 8, 1947, the second of three sons to Robert Leonard Bonin Sr. and Alice Dorothy Cote. Both parents were alcoholics, and his father an ill-tempered World War II veteran who physically abused his wife and children. His mother suffered from severe mood swings and frequented a bingo parlor while her sons remained unattended. She was regarded as being a domineering and emasculating presence in Bonin's early life.
Due to their parents' constant abuse and absences, Bonin and his brothers were frequently left with his grandfather, a convicted child molester. They were also neglected by their parents and fed by neighbors. When he was six years old, Bonin was sent to live in an orphanage (where he was severely abused and repeatedly molested) and stayed there until he was nine. A year later, he was arrested for stealing license plates and other crimes and sent to a juvenile detention center. As a teenager, Bonin began to molest children. After graduating from high school in 1965, he became engaged and also joined the U.S. Air Force. He served in the Vietnam War as an aerial gunner, earning a Good Conduct Medal in the process. During his service, Bonin risked his life to save another airman but also raped two soldiers at gunpoint, though this crime was apparently never reported. He was honorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force in October 1968. Afterwards, Bonin returned to Connecticut to live with his mother but eventually moved to California.
A month later, Bonin began abducting and sexually assaulting youths, claiming five victims. He was arrested a year later, convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault, and sent to the Atascadero State Hospital to be medically treated. He was later moved to a proper prison after it was ruled that he couldn't be treated. However, Bonin was released in May 1974 after doctors concluded he was no longer a danger to others. Sixteen months later, he was arrested again and charged with the rape of 14-year-old hitchhiker David McVicker at gunpoint and the attempted abduction of another teenager, being sentenced to between one and fifteen years at California Men's Facility. He was released on October 11, 1978, and moved to Downey, where he lived in an apartment complex. Bonin eventually found work as a truck driver and began to date a girl. In Downey, he became acquainted with his neighbor, Everett Fraser, and became an attendee at the parties Fraser held at his apartment. During one of these parties, he met and became acquainted with a factory worker and part-time magician named Vernon Butts and a Texas native named Gregory Matthews Miley.
Bonin was executed on 23 February 1996, being the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the history of California after the gas chamber was branded as a cruel and unusual method of execution by the state.
Modus Operandi[]
Bonin's victims were young male hitchhikers, schoolboys, and male prostitutes. They were either enticed or forced into his camper van; and when inside, they were bound hand and foot with handcuffs, wire, or cord. They were then raped, tortured, and killed by a variety of ways, mostly by a signature "windlass" strangulation method. After killing them, their bodies were dumped alongside freeways in southern California. He was also assisted by Butts, Munro, Pugh, and Miley in a minimum total of twelve murders.
Quotes[]
"I'd still be killing, I couldn't stop killing. It got easier each time." - William Bonin