William Bonin had been locked up twice for raping boys before he killed one. In 1969, at twenty-two, after assaulting five boys and young men he had picked up hitchhiking in Los Angeles County, he pleaded guilty to molestation and forced oral copulation and was committed to Atascadero State Hospital as a mentally disordered sex offender judged amenable to treatment. Tests there put his IQ at 121. He spent the next five years between Atascadero and the prison medical facility at Vacaville. He was released in 1974. Within sixteen months he had assaulted a fourteen-year-old at gunpoint and was back inside. He was paroled again in October 1978, and the following spring he began to kill. Over the next thirteen months he and four young men he recruited picked up at least twenty-one teenage boys and young men from hitchhiking spots, bus stops and the streets of Hollywood, raped them in a Ford Econoline van, strangled them and left them beside the freeways of southern California. He was convicted of fourteen of the murders and executed in 1996, the first person put to death in California by lethal injection.
He was born in Willimantic, Connecticut, on January 8, 1947, the second of three sons of Robert Bonin, a World War II veteran who beat his wife and children, and Alice Cote. Both drank heavily, and his mother, who spent her evenings at a bingo parlor, left the boys with their grandfather, a convicted child molester; Bonin spent part of his childhood in a church orphanage and at ten was in a juvenile detention center, where he said older boys and staff abused him. He moved west with his family, joined the Air Force, and served in Vietnam as an aerial gunner, flying more than seven hundred hours and earning a Good Conduct Medal; two men from his unit later said he had assaulted them at gunpoint. After his second release he lived in Downey with his mother, drove a delivery truck, and made friends with young men at the edges of the neighborhood, among them Vernon Butts, twenty-one when they met, from a broken home in Norwalk, who dabbled in the occult and worked as a janitor, Gregory Miley, eighteen, illiterate and a high school dropout, James Munro, eighteen, a drifter he took in, and William Pugh, seventeen.
Thomas Lundgren was thirteen and was picked up hitchhiking in Hollywood on May 28, 1979; his body was found the same day in a field near Agoura, beaten, stabbed and mutilated. Bonin admitted killing him alone and was acquitted of the murder at trial, one of two on which the Los Angeles jury would not convict. Marcus Grabs was seventeen, a German student backpacking along the coast, picked up on August 5, 1979, by Bonin and Butts; he was bound, beaten with a tire iron and strangled and left near the Pacific Coast Highway. Donald Hyden was fifteen, taken from Hollywood on August 27, 1979. David Murillo was seventeen, from La Mirada, picked up on September 9 while riding his bicycle to the movies. Dennis Frank Fox was seventeen, taken on December 2, 1979, and found in Orange County. Charles Miranda, fifteen, and James Macabe, twelve, both from the Downey area, were picked up on February 3, 1980, in a single night by Bonin and Miley, and left in separate places; Macabe had been on his way to Disneyland.
The spring of 1980 was the worst of it. Ronald Gatlin was eighteen and was killed on March 14. Harry Todd Turner was fourteen, a runaway from a boys' home, taken from Hollywood on March 20. Glenn Barker was fourteen and Russell Rugh fifteen, friends from Garden Grove picked up together at a bus stop on the way to work at a restaurant on March 21, 1980, and strangled with a length of cord; Bonin had Pugh with him. Steven Wood was sixteen, from Bellflower, picked up on April 10 walking to school, and Lawrence Sharp, seventeen, the same night. Darin Lee Kendrick was nineteen, a stock clerk at a Stanton grocery, lured from its parking lot on April 29 with an offer of drugs and driven to Butts's apartment in Lakewood, where Butts raped him, Bonin forced chloral hydrate down his throat, burning it, and then strangled him while Butts drove an ice pick into his head. His body was left behind a warehouse near the Artesia Freeway. Sean King was fourteen, from Downey, and disappeared on May 19; Bonin led police to his body, and the jury acquitted him of that murder as well. Steven Wells was eighteen, a hitchhiker Bonin picked up on June 2, 1980, and strangled with Munro in the van; Munro drove the body to a gas station in Huntington Beach and left it behind the building. By then the police had a name.
Pugh, arrested on an unrelated car theft, had told a probation officer and then detectives that his friend Bill had talked about killing boys. Bonin's record as a registered sex offender put him at the top of the list, and on June 2, the day of the Wells murder, the Los Angeles police put him under round-the-clock surveillance. On the night of June 11, 1980, officers watched him cruise Hollywood for three hours, pick up a seventeen-year-old Orange County runaway identified in the record as Harold T., and park in a lot in the San Fernando Valley. They broke into the van and found him assaulting the boy. Harold T. was the last, and the only one on the indictments who lived.
He was indicted on sixteen counts of murder, with eleven of robbery, one of sodomy and one of mayhem, and held without bail. Munro and Miley were arrested within weeks and made deals. Butts, charged with six murders, hanged himself in the county jail in January 1981 before trial. Bonin talked, to detectives and to a reporter from a Los Angeles television station, in a jailhouse interview in which he described the killings calmly and said he could not stop. The Los Angeles County trial ran from November 1981 into January 1982, with Munro and Pugh testifying for the prosecution; the defense argued that the abuse of his childhood had left him insane, and the prosecutor called him "the most arch-evil person who ever existed" but not legally insane, and on January 6, 1982, the jury convicted him of ten first-degree murders, of Grabs, Hyden, Murillo, Miranda, Macabe, Gatlin, Turner, Wood, Kendrick and Wells, and acquitted him of Lundgren and King. He was sentenced to death. In Orange County in August 1983 he was convicted of four more, Fox, Barker, Rugh and Sharp, and sentenced to death a second time. Miley was convicted of first-degree murder and given twenty-five years to life, Munro pleaded to second-degree murder and got fifteen to life, and Pugh was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to six years.
His appeals took fourteen years. The California Supreme Court affirmed both judgments, the federal courts rejected habeas petitions arguing that his trial lawyers had failed to present his childhood and his brain damage, and Governor Pete Wilson denied clemency. On death row he wrote short stories, which a small publisher printed, and corresponded with a number of pen pals. At eleven on the night of February 23, 1996, he handed the warden a last statement: "I feel the death penalty is not an answer to the problems at hand. I feel it sends the wrong message to the people of this country." He was executed at San Quentin at midnight and pronounced dead at 12:13 on the morning of February 24, the first person in California to be put to death by lethal injection rather than in the gas chamber, which a federal court had ruled unconstitutional. Several of the victims' families watched; the father of Russell Rugh said outside the prison that it was too easy a death. None of Bonin's relatives attended, and his family refused to claim his remains.
He was never tried for Mark Shelton, seventeen, picked up near Beach Boulevard on August 4, 1979, with Butts and killed in the Cajon Pass; Robert Wirostek, eighteen, picked up in Newport Beach on September 17, 1979, and found beside Interstate 10 ten days later; John Kilpatrick and Michael McDonald, whose murders he confessed to; or a young man killed in November 1979 who is still identified only as John Doe. Prosecutors judged that the evidence tying him alone to those deaths was not enough. The count usually given, twenty-one, comes from his own account and from the cases police matched to it.