From the last night of 1980 to the summer of 1982, a man called police and emergency operators in St. Paul and Minneapolis after attacks on women. He sobbed, apologized and begged to be found. The recordings were broadcast, the public called in tips, and the calls were traced more than once, but no one was caught. Newspapers came to call the caller the weepy-voiced killer.
Paul Michael Stephani was arrested in August 1982 after a 19-year-old woman he had stabbed with a screwdriver fought back and hurt him badly enough that he phoned for an ambulance. He was convicted of trying to kill her and of the murder of Barbara Simons, a Minneapolis nurse killed earlier that month. At the Simons trial his former wife, his sister and a former housemate said they believed the crying caller was him, but the calls were not formally tied to him until 1997. That year, serving his sentence and terminally ill, he asked to talk to St. Paul police and confessed to two more killings and to a beating, all unsolved for 15 years. He was never charged with them. He died in prison in June 1998.
Stephani grew up in Austin, Minnesota, the second of ten children, according to his 1998 Star Tribune obituary. The criminologist Tomas Guillen, writing in 2002, noted that his stepfather worked as a meatpacker. Stephani moved to St. Paul in the mid-1960s. He worked as a janitor and as a shipping clerk, and he was married for a time and had a daughter, the Star Tribune reported.
Little else about his early life appears in reliable sources. In 1985 the Minnesota Court of Appeals, upholding his sentence in the screwdriver case, noted that the trial court had relied in part on a prior felony conviction for an offense in which the victim was injured. The opinion does not name that offense.
At about 3 a.m. on New Year's Eve 1980, an emergency operator in St. Paul took a call from a man who sounded upset. He said it was an emergency and asked for an ambulance, because there was a girl hurt by some railroad tracks, according to the accounts of Guillen and of the Forum Communications reporter Trisha Taurinskas. Police found a 20-year-old woman who had been badly beaten near an industrial site in St. Paul. She was in critical condition, but she recovered fully. She could not remember who had attacked her.
No one was charged. In 1997 Stephani confessed to the beating.
Kimberly Compton was 18. She had finished high school and came from Pepin, Wisconsin, to St. Paul to look for work, Taurinskas reported. She arrived on June 3, 1981. On the same day she was found dead in St. Paul. She had been stabbed to death with an ice pick, according to Star Tribune reporting from 1983 that Taurinskas cites.
Soon afterward, a man called emergency dispatchers in tears. "Will you find me?" he asked, according to Guillen, who quotes the Star Tribune's 1981 coverage. "I just stabbed somebody with an ice pick." He said he could not stop himself and that he kept killing somebody. Investigators went back through their call logs and matched the voice to the man who had reported the injured woman by the railroad tracks on New Year's Eve, Taurinskas wrote.
Stephani admitted in 1997 that he had killed Kimberly Compton. No one was ever charged with her death.
The calls about Kimberly Compton did not stop with the first one. Two days after her death the man called to say he was sorry and that he would turn himself in, Guillen wrote; he did not. On June 6 he called to complain that some newspaper accounts of the killings were wrong. On June 11 he called again, whimpering and hard to understand, to apologize for what he had done to her. Taurinskas quotes the call as beginning with a request not to talk but to listen, followed by an apology to Compton and the words "I couldn't help it."
Emergency operators traced several of the calls. One led to a bar near a bus depot and another to a phone booth downtown, but each time the caller was gone when officers arrived, according to Guillen. Broadcast stations played the recordings several times, and police received more than 150 calls from the public. The Star Tribune reported the tips in December 1981. The recordings were short and the crying distorted the voice, Guillen wrote, and none of the tips identified the caller. The Star Tribune also published police sketches of suspects in the Compton case, according to a caption in the Taurinskas article.
Kathleen Greening was 33. She was found dead in the bathtub of her home in a Twin Cities suburb in July 1982. Taurinskas gives the date as July 1, 1982; Guillen gives July 21. Local police first treated her death as an accidental drowning, a ruling that drew criticism, Taurinskas reported. The state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension later reviewed the case and classified it as a homicide, but no one was charged.
No call was made about her death, Guillen noted. In 1997 Stephani said he had drowned her. Investigators confirmed that he knew details of her home and of the scene that only someone who had been there would know, according to Taurinskas. No charge was ever filed.
Barbara Simons was 40, a nurse from Minneapolis. On August 6, 1982, she met a man at a Minneapolis bar and left with him, Taurinskas reported. She was found dead the next day. She had been stabbed with an ice pick.
The crying caller phoned again. He said he was sorry he had killed "that girl" and that he did not know what was the matter with him. "I'm sick," he said, according to the call as quoted by Taurinskas. In the same call, Guillen wrote, he linked the death to the first killing, saying that Kimberly Compton had been "the first one over in St. Paul." People who had seen Barbara Simons leave the bar with a man later identified him as Stephani.
Stephani was convicted of her murder. The Star Tribune described him in 1998 as serving a 40-year sentence for her murder and for the attempted murder later that month. The degree of the murder conviction, the date of the trial and the court that heard it were not published in the coverage.
The attack that led to his arrest is described in detail in the 1985 opinion of the Minnesota Court of Appeals, which reviewed his conviction in Hennepin County. On August 20, 1982, Stephani picked up a 19-year-old woman in Minneapolis, the court said, and drove her to St. Paul and back, according to Taurinskas, citing court documents.
On the drive back he turned into a parking lot on a dead-end street in Minneapolis. There, the court said, he grabbed her hand and attacked her with a screwdriver. She fought back. She hit him on the head with a pop bottle, tried to strike his eye, and bit, scratched and kicked him, cutting his cheek, head and hand. A man nearby heard her screams and came to help. Stephani chased him, then drove away. She survived serious injuries.
Stephani went home. At about 2 a.m. on August 21, 1982, he called a dispatcher, asked for an ambulance and said he had "got beat up," according to the court. He was taken to a hospital and treated for cuts to his head, hand and cheek and an injury to his nose.
Taurinskas wrote that his injuries were so severe that he had to call for help and that dispatchers found the voice familiar and connected it to the crying caller. Guillen described the link differently: he wrote that Stephani was tied to the screwdriver attack because he sought treatment for the wounds the young woman had inflicted, and that routine police work then connected him to the Simons killing. Both accounts agree that the call for medical help is what put him in the hands of police.
According to Taurinskas, investigators said publicly in 1983 that they had one suspect for both the Compton killing and the New Year's Eve beating, though they did not name him and called him only the weepy-voiced killer.
At his trial for the murder of Barbara Simons, Stephani's former wife, his sister and a woman who had lived with him testified that they believed the hysterical caller on the recordings was him, Guillen wrote. Guillen judged that this testimony alone could not have identified him, because the crying distorted the voice. Witnesses who had seen him leave the bar with Barbara Simons also identified him, Taurinskas reported. He was convicted of her murder.
In the screwdriver case a Hennepin County jury convicted him of attempted second-degree murder of the young woman and second-degree assault of the man who had come to her aid. The prosecution was handled by the Hennepin County Attorney's Office.
The 1985 appeal opinion gives a picture of the trial. His lawyer told the jury in opening statement that Stephani had told police he had been robbed and attacked by a prostitute during an epileptic seizure. The trial judge refused to instruct the jury on self-defense, finding no evidence of who had started the fight; the appeals court noted that such a claim is hard to support when the defendant does not testify. The judge also kept out evidence of the young woman's own past violent acts, because there was no foundation that she had been the aggressor.
Publicity was a concern at trial. Lawyers questioned prospective jurors one at a time, the defense received extra peremptory challenges, and the jurors were repeatedly told to avoid the news. After two newscasts that could have inflamed the jury, the judge questioned the jurors and excused one who had seen a broadcast. The jury was not sequestered. At one point the young woman said on the stand that another woman had told her the man was a murderer and that she had then called the police homicide and robbery office. The appeals court called the remark unanticipated and found it unlikely to have caused real prejudice.
Before trial, the defense asked to withdraw because another lawyer in the state public defender's office had represented the young woman in unrelated cases. The judge refused, and the appeals court found no actual conflict. The court also allowed the complaint to be amended at trial so that the assault on the man who intervened no longer required proof of physical contact.
The judge sentenced Stephani to 203 months in prison for the attempted murder, double the presumptive term under the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines, and added a consecutive 21 months for the assault. The judge based the upward departure on particular cruelty to the victim and on his prior felony conviction for an offense in which the victim was injured.
The Court of Appeals of Minnesota affirmed both convictions and both sentences on June 11, 1985, in State v. Stephani. Judge Crippen wrote for a panel that included Judges Wozniak and Nierengarten. Stephani was represented on appeal by the state public defender's office.
The court rejected each of his claims: the exclusion of evidence about the young woman's past, the refusal of a self-defense instruction, alleged misconduct in the prosecutor's closing argument, remarks by state witnesses, discovery violations, the conflict-of-interest claim, the handling of the jury and the amended complaint. On the sentence, it found that the attack showed particular cruelty, noting that he had held the woman down while he stabbed her with a tool not designed to cut. The consecutive term for the assault was allowed because it involved a separate victim. The Minnesota Supreme Court denied further review on August 20, 1985.
Stephani served his sentence in Minnesota state prison. In the fall of 1997, after learning that he was terminally ill with cancer, he asked to speak with St. Paul police, the Star Tribune reported. He confessed to killing Kimberly Compton and Kathleen Greening and to the New Year's Eve beating. He also confessed to the Simons killing and to the screwdriver attack, for which he had already been convicted. The Star Tribune reported the confessions in a front-page story by C. Brown on December 19, 1997, according to the citation in Guillen's article.
In December 1997 he told the Star Tribune that in his 15 years locked up he had wondered how all of it could have happened. "I'm sick and I'm sorry," he said, adding, "if sorry means anything after 15 years."
His confession, Guillen wrote, was what allowed police to link the killings and the calls officially. None of the newly confessed cases was charged.
Stephani died of complications of skin cancer in the prison at Oak Park Heights, Minnesota, at the age of 53. The Star Tribune reported his death on June 12, 1998.
Guillen, of Seattle University, used the Stephani case as an example in a 2002 article in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture. His wider argument was that such communications rarely identify a killer quickly, but that they can carry physical evidence and that police should consider releasing their content. In this case he concluded that the calls had no investigative value while the killings were being investigated. Police had traced them, broadcast them and received more than 150 tips, and still they did not lead to an arrest. Stephani was caught because of his own call for medical help after a victim fought back.
The killings of Kimberly Compton and Kathleen Greening and the 1980 beating rest on Stephani's 1997 confessions, which investigators said matched the evidence. They were never tested in court.
The surviving 1982 victim's age is given as 19 by the Court of Appeals and by Taurinskas, and as 21 by the Star Tribune in 1998 and by Guillen.
The date of Kathleen Greening's death is given as July 1, 1982, by Taurinskas and July 21, 1982, by Guillen. Neither source was a primary record of her death.
The cancer that killed him is described as skin cancer by the Star Tribune in 1998 and as lung cancer by Taurinskas.
Taurinskas wrote that dispatchers recognized his voice when he called for an ambulance. Guillen wrote that he was linked through his medical treatment and routine police work, and that the voice testimony was not by itself enough to identify him.
Guillen gives the Simons call with a citation to a December 1981 Star Tribune article, months before Barbara Simons died in August 1982. The words of the call rest only on Guillen's and Taurinskas's reports, and its date is uncertain.
Mid-1960s: Stephani moves from Austin, Minnesota, to St. Paul.
December 31, 1980, about 3 a.m.: a man calls for an ambulance for a woman hurt near railroad tracks in St. Paul; a 20-year-old woman survives a beating. Stephani confessed to it in 1997.
June 3, 1981: Kimberly Compton, 18, of Pepin, Wisconsin, is found stabbed to death in St. Paul on the day she arrived; a crying caller says he stabbed somebody with an ice pick. Stephani confessed in 1997.
June 6 and June 11, 1981: further calls about the newspaper coverage and an apology for Compton.
December 1981: the Star Tribune reports more than 150 public tips after the recordings are broadcast.
July 1982: Kathleen Greening, 33, is found dead in her bathtub; first ruled accidental, later classified as a homicide by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Stephani confessed in 1997.
August 6, 1982: Barbara Simons, 40, leaves a Minneapolis bar with a man; she is found dead the next day. Stephani was convicted of her murder.
August 20, 1982: Stephani stabs a 19-year-old woman with a screwdriver in Minneapolis; she fights him off and a passerby intervenes.
August 21, 1982, about 2 a.m.: Stephani calls for an ambulance, saying he was beaten up; he is treated at a hospital and later arrested (exact date not given in sources).
1983: investigators say publicly they have one suspect, the weepy-voiced killer, for the Compton killing and the 1980 beating.
Trials: convicted of the Simons murder and, in Hennepin County, of attempted second-degree murder and second-degree assault; sentenced to 203 months plus 21 consecutive months in the Hennepin case.
June 11, 1985: the Minnesota Court of Appeals affirms the Hennepin County convictions and sentences.
August 20, 1985: the Minnesota Supreme Court denies review.
Fall 1997: terminally ill, Stephani asks to speak with St. Paul police and confesses.
December 19, 1997: the Star Tribune reports his confessions to two unsolved killings.
June 1998: Stephani dies of complications of skin cancer in the Oak Park Heights prison, aged 53; the Star Tribune reports his death on June 12, 1998.