Naman Shrestha
When the remains of several young gay men began surfacing along the freeways of Southern California in the 1970s and 1980s, the police initially had no idea that more than one serial killer had been operating in the same vicinity. It was only later that they realized they were dealing with three separate sadistic serial killers — Patrick Kearney, William Bonin, and Randy Kraft. Out of them, William was actively involved in the murder of dozens of men and boys in the area in 1979 and 1980. His life, victims, and fate are explored in a detailed manner in Sundance Now’s ‘Butchers of L.A.,’ a three-part true crime documentary series.
William Bonin Showed Signs of Predatory Behavior Early in His Life
William George Bonin was born on January 8, 1947, in Willimantic, Connecticut, to Robert Leonard Bonin Sr. and Alice Dorothy Cote. Raised alongside his two brothers in a dysfunctional household, he was reportedly beaten and abused as a child, especially when he was sent to a detention center from a Catholic orphanage. William and his brother attended St. Mary’s Catholic School before transferring to the Franco-American School in Lowell, Massachusetts. In 1955, William was allegedly bullied and sexually assaulted by an older boy. The following year, he returned to his family in Mansfield, Massachusetts, where he went to Annie Vinton Elementary School.
In 1957, he was sent to a juvenile detention center for stealing license plates and metal tags off vehicles and other petty crimes. After he was released, William reportedly started molesting his younger brother, Paul, who told their mother about it. After attending North High School in Torrance for a while, he dropped out and allegedly began molesting children in his neighborhood in 1966. When his problematic behavior continued, his mother evicted him from the family house. Soon after that, he joined the US Air Force in December 1966. Around the same time, he got engaged to Linda, a woman he had been dating for a while. Since his mother allegedly did not approve of his sexual orientation, she encouraged him to get engaged.
On October 25, 1968, 21-year-old William Bonin received an honorable discharge after serving the nation for about three years. During his time in the Air Force, he reportedly engaged in multiple consensual relations with men as well as women. As per reports, he even assaulted a couple of soldiers under his command. When he returned home to Linda, he found out that Linda had married another man. Following the break-up, he went to live with his parents in Downey while working as a gas station attendant. For the next few years, William sexually assaulted multiple teenagers, for which he was convicted twice. He was even determined to be mentally disordered after several psychiatric examinations. He spent a few years behind bars for crimes like kidnapping, molestation, and sodomy.
One of William Bonin’s Accomplices Played a Key Role in His Arrest
After William showed signs of progress, he was released from detention in October 1978, but with supervised probation. Soon, his predatory instinct turned into something far more sinister. Between 1979 and 1980, William recruited a few young men, including William Pugh and Vernon Butts, to help him with multiple murders. He usually targeted schoolboys, young male hitchhikers, and male sex workers, whom he lured into his vehicle. He then proceeded to tie them up, torture and sexually assault them, and strangle them to death. The victims were then disposed of on freeways, the side of the road, or behind dumpsters. When one of his accomplices, William Pugh, was arrested on auto theft charges, he told the authorities that William Bonin could be the Freeway Strangler.
After the tip, the detectives started surveilling William’s movements and eventually caught him red-handed while he was in the middle of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy on June 11, 1980. Although he claimed that he was innocent, he admitted to his involvement in the murder of 21 young men and boys, including Dennis Frank Fox, Donald Hyden, Harry Todd Turner, Darin Lee Kendrick, Steven Jay Wells, and more. Out of the 21, he was only charged with the murder of 14 of them. Moreover, all his accomplices agreed to testify against him in exchange for getting the death penalty off the table for them.
William Bonin Was Sentenced to Death For His Gruesome Crimes
On November 5, 1981, William Bonin’s trial got underway. After an intense and lengthy trial, on January 6, 1982, he was convicted of ten of the murders he was charged with and sentenced to death. About a year later, he received another death sentence for four more murders he had committed in Orange County during his killing spree. William spent about 14 years on death row before he was finally executed by lethal injection on February 23, 1996, in the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison.
Before his execution, William Bonin gave his last words to the warden. He stated, “…I feel the death penalty is not an answer to the problems at hand. That I feel it sends the wrong message to the youth of the country. Young people act as they see other people acting instead of as people tell them to act. And I would suggest that when a person has a thought of doing anything serious against the law, that before they did, that they should go to a quiet place and think about it seriously.” His execution began at 12:09 am, and he was pronounced dead at 12:13 am, becoming the first person in California to die by lethal injection.
