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William Devin Howell Sentenced to Six Life Terms for the New Britain Murders

The Virginia drifter who buried seven people behind a Connecticut shopping plaza in 2003 told the families he hoped his slow death in prison would comfort them.

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Illustration of an empty courtroom with worn oak benches in low autumn sunlight from tall windows. Not the actual courtroom.

The families had waited fourteen years to see him sentenced. On Friday, November 17, 2017, in a courtroom in New Britain, Connecticut, a state judge gave William Devin Howell six consecutive life sentences for the murders of six people he killed in 2003 and buried in a wooded strip behind a shopping plaza in the city. Howell, 47, a drifter from Hampton, Virginia, who drove a van he called the "murder mobile," had pleaded guilty in September. A seventh victim, whose death he had already admitted as manslaughter, lay in the same ground.

Tiffany Menard was a child when her mother, Mary Jane Menard, disappeared. "He stripped away the youth from us and made me and my brother orphans," she told the court. She called him a monster and said she had twice tried to kill herself after her mother vanished. One by one the relatives described what the killings had done to them.

Howell cried and apologized. His acts, he said, had been "monstrous, cowardly and selfish," and he deserved the death penalty, which the Connecticut Supreme Court had abolished in 2015. He spoke of his diabetes, of amputations and organ failure to come. "I know what awaits me ... a slow painful death in prison," he said. "I hope that provides some comfort to each of the families."

All seven had vanished in 2003, the year Howell was mowing lawns and taking odd jobs: Mary Jane Menard, 40, of New Britain; Joyvaline Martinez, 24, of East Hartford; Diane Cusack, 53, of New Britain; Melanie Ruth Camilini, 29, of Seymour; Marilyn Gonzalez, 26, of Waterbury; Danny Lee Whistnant, 44, of New Britain; and Nilsa Arizmendi, 33, of Wethersfield. Police said what most of them shared was drug use. He was arrested in Hampton in May 2005 in Arizmendi's death and pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Three sets of remains were found behind the plaza in 2007; investigators returned in 2015 and found the rest. According to an arrest warrant affidavit, he called the burial site his "garden," told a cellmate there was a monster inside him, and kept one woman's body in his van for two weeks, sleeping beside it. Investigators found a victim's blood in the van. The count made him, by the Associated Press's reckoning, the most prolific serial killer in Connecticut's history, past Michael Ross, who killed six women in the eastern part of the state and was executed in 2005.

What this story covers. It draws on the Associated Press report of the sentencing carried by CBS News on November 17, 2017. The descriptions of the van and the burial site come from an arrest warrant affidavit as the AP reported it, and include what Howell is said to have told a cellmate. Some accounts give the victims' ages and names slightly differently; the names and ages here are the AP's.

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