On April 19, 2012, one of William Clyde Gibson's sisters went to their late mother's house in New Albany, Indiana, to settle the division of the estate, and looked in the garage. On the floor, surrounded by garbage bags, was the body of Christine Whitis, seventy-five, her mother's close friend, who had always stood by Gibson and given him money. He had raped and strangled her the day before and mutilated her body. Later that day he was arrested for drunk driving in Whitis's car. Five days after that he was charged with her murder, and within days he had confessed to killing a woman in 2002 and led police to his backyard, where on April 27 they dug up the body of a third.
He was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on October 10, 1957, the youngest of four children of a tree-trimming foreman and a Sears cashier, and grew up in New Albany after the family moved there when he was two. He later said he was never abused and was even spoiled, but that his father was an alcoholic who turned combative when drunk. He was bullied at school until he grew big enough to bully others, started drinking at thirteen and was arrested for stealing a motorbike that year. He joined the Army and served as a mechanic in West Germany, became addicted to heroin, cocaine and LSD, and in 1979 was dishonorably discharged for stealing a car and given a year at Fort Leavenworth.
On January 26, 1991, fleeing a police officer after a minor collision, he crashed into another car, breaking the other driver's ribs and injuring his own head. Eight months later he sexually assaulted a twenty-one-year-old woman in a phone booth near the Louisville Galleria. A psychologist found an IQ of 79 and no mental illness that impaired his judgment, and he entered an Alford plea and was sentenced to seven years in Kentucky. He refused to admit the crime, so he was never allowed into the sex offender program, but he was judged unlikely to reoffend and released on April 5, 1999, onto Indiana's sex and violent offender registry. More arrests followed, for assaulting a former girlfriend, which was not prosecuted, and for stealing a Harley-Davidson, and he was released from the Floyd County Jail on March 12, 2002.
On October 10, 2002, in a bar in Jeffersonville, he met Karen Sue Hodella, forty-four, a beautician from Port Orange, Florida, visiting a boyfriend. They ended up at an apartment complex in New Albany and argued over prescription pills she accused him of stealing. He punched her, stabbed her repeatedly in the throat with a pocketknife and dumped her body in Clarksville. Afterward he had the date tattooed on his right forearm with a knife. Her badly decomposed body was found on January 7, 2003, and identified from dental records. It would be nearly ten years before anyone connected him to it.
In between he served three years for stealing a woman's purse, worked at a hardwood flooring company in Borden, went to a small church, made papier-mâché figures and looked after his sick mother. Neighbors thought well of him; bar regulars thought him strange. His mother went into a nursing home in August 2011 and died on January 18, 2012. On March 24, at the Uptown Bar in New Albany, he met Stephanie Marie Kirk, thirty-five, and offered her a motorcycle ride. They spent the day using drugs, and back at his house they argued over pills. He raped and strangled her, sexually assaulted her body and buried her in the backyard. Three and a half weeks later came Christine Whitis.
The three cases were tried separately. At the Whitis trial prosecutors played the interview in which he said an evil had come over him, and on October 25, 2013, the jury took less than twenty minutes to convict him on all charges. Sentenced to death in November, he told the judge it was no big deal and that he deserved it. He pleaded guilty to Hodella's murder and received sixty-five years. Before the Kirk case he had "Death Row X3" tattooed on the back of his shaved head, and the judge ordered that his hair be left to grow over it. He pleaded guilty again, and on August 15, 2014, Judge Susan Orth sentenced him to death a second time, calling it the only appropriate sentence.
The Indiana Supreme Court affirmed both death sentences, in 2015 and 2016, and in October 2019 unanimously upheld the denial of post-conviction relief, finding his trial lawyers had not been ineffective or conflicted. His federal habeas petition was filed two years late; in 2026 the Seventh Circuit heard the state's challenge to a district court order sending him to an Indianapolis hospital for mental health testing, as the lower court weighed whether the delay could be excused. A psychiatrist for the defense described bipolar disorder, addiction and a significant traumatic brain injury, and said the prison stopped some or all of his psychiatric medication between 2018 and 2023. Indiana resumed executions in December 2024 with Joseph Corcoran, followed by Benjamin Ritchie and Roy Ward, and by October 2025 its death row was down to five men, Gibson among them. On podcasts and in documentaries he has claimed about thirty more killings in several states, including the 2000 stabbing of Elizabeth Banister in Evansville. None has been confirmed, and he has not been charged with any other death.