Stephani was born in 1944 and lived in St Paul, Minnesota. Between 1981 and 1982 he killed Kimberly Compton, eighteen, stabbed sixty-one times with an ice pick; Kathy Greening, thirty-three, drowned in her bath; and Barbara Simons, forty, stabbed more than a hundred times.
After several of the attacks he telephoned the emergency operators, weeping, and gave partial information about what he had done and where the body was, without identifying himself. The recordings were played publicly and the press called him the weepy-voiced killer; the voice was well known in the Twin Cities.
He was caught in 1982 after a woman he attacked, Denise Williams, shot him with his own gun and survived. He was convicted of her attempted murder and of the murder of Barbara Simons and sentenced to forty years in 1983.
In 1997, dying of cancer in prison, he confessed to the Compton and Greening killings and to a fourth attack, and the cases were closed. He died on June 12, 1998.
The telephone calls are what the case is known for and are also the reason it stayed unsolved: for two years the police had the killer's voice on tape and nothing else. The confessions came only when there was nothing left to lose, which is a pattern this archive records in several cases.