"I just stabbed somebody with an ice pick," the caller told the St. Paul emergency operator in June 1981, weeping. "I can't stop myself." He begged them to find him. On June 3, Kimberly Compton, eighteen, a recent high school graduate from Wisconsin, had got off a bus in St. Paul that day to look for work and go to college. She was found near an unfinished freeway, stabbed sixty-one times with an ice pick. Two days later the same voice called again to say he was sorry. The papers called him the weepy-voiced killer, and the recordings were played on the radio across the Twin Cities.
Five months before, on New Year's Eve 1980, a young woman named Karen Potack had been beaten on the head with a tire iron after leaving a party, and left beside railroad tracks in St. Paul. She survived. On July 21, 1982, Kathleen Greening, thirty-three, a schoolteacher, was found drowned in the bathtub of her home in Lauderdale; her death was taken for an accident and no one called about it.
In August 1982 Barbara Simons, forty, left the Hexagon Bar in Minneapolis with a man she had just met, telling a friend she hoped he was nice, since he was giving her a ride home. She was found the next day, stabbed more than a hundred times. The voice called again: "Please don't talk, just listen. I'm sorry I killed that girl. I stabbed her 40 times. Kimberly Compton was the first one over in St. Paul." From witnesses' descriptions police identified a suspect, Paul Michael Stephani, thirty-eight, of St. Paul, and put a surveillance team outside his apartment.
On August 21, 1982 they briefly lost him. That night he picked up Denise Williams, a nineteen-year-old sex worker in Minneapolis, drove her to a dark dead-end road and stabbed her fifteen times with a screwdriver. She hit him over the head with a glass bottle and survived. Bleeding from the head and face, he called emergency services for help, and the dispatcher recognized the voice. In interviews he denied everything, until his voice rose to the high pitch the officers knew from the tapes.
He pleaded not guilty. At his trial in 1983 his former wife, his sister and a woman who had lived with him testified that the voice on the recordings was his. "We believed that Paul Stephani had killed Kimberly Compton and assaulted Karen Potack, but we didn't have the evidence," said Tom Foley of the Ramsey County Attorney's Office. He was convicted of murdering Barbara Simons and sentenced to forty years, and of assaulting Denise Williams, for which he received eighteen more.
Fifteen years later he was diagnosed with melanoma and told he had less than a year to live. On December 19, 1997 he confessed. He admitted Compton's murder, telling investigators he had met her at Mickey's Diner in St. Paul within minutes of her arrival and offered to show her around town, and that within fifteen minutes she was dead. He admitted the attack on Karen Potack, and he described drowning a woman in a bathtub whose name he did not remember; detectives went through the medical examiner's records of drownings from that period and found Kathleen Greening. He told the Star Tribune that he was sick, and sorry, if sorry meant anything after fifteen years. He wrote to a reporter asking for the victims' families' addresses so he could send them flowers and apologize; she did not answer.
He died in prison on June 12, 1998. The confessions closed the Compton and Greening murders, and no one was ever tried for them.