The hearing on April 20, 1999, in the circuit court at St. Augustine had been called to decide whether William Darrell Lindsey's confessions could be used against him. He had made them in North Carolina two years earlier, to St. Johns County detectives who drove up after his arrest for a killing near Asheville, and without them the state had almost nothing. "There was no physical evidence that linked the defendant to the crime scenes," the prosecutor, Maureen Sullivan Christine, told the Florida Times-Union that afternoon. "If we'd had the confession suppressed, I didn't have a case." Instead, after three hours of talks between prosecutors and the victims' families, Lindsey stood up in shackles and pleaded guilty to four counts of second-degree murder.
Circuit Judge Robert Mathis questioned him carefully to be sure he understood that he was giving up any appeal on the question of guilt. "Yes sir," Lindsey said, in a low voice. He was sixty-four. The agreement was thirty years, the same deal he had turned down in the middle of 1997, and it took the death penalty off the table. Two women from Lashawna Streeter's family covered their faces when the judge accepted the plea.
The four women were Anita Louise Stevens, twenty-seven, killed in November 1988; Constance Marie Terrell, twenty-six, shot on June 10, 1989; Lashawna Streeter, beaten and strangled on March 1, 1992; and Cheryl Denise Lucas, thirty-one, beaten to death on June 17, 1995. The two papers that covered the hearing gave Streeter's age differently, twenty-six in the Times-Union and twenty-seven in the St. Augustine Record. Most of the women worked the streets or used drugs, and their bodies had been left in ponds, marsh and waterways where time and weather took the evidence away.
Stevens's mother, Mildred McQuaig, was in the courtroom. Her daughter had a job at a local restaurant and two sons at home, she said, and had gone out on an errand at about four in the morning and never come back. A county worker found her partly clothed body the next day in a pond off Fish Island Road on Anastasia Island. "I agreed to the second-degree murder charge, but everyone knows it was first-degree murder," McQuaig told the Record. "They didn't leave us much choice. They said he would walk if we didn't agree." Nancy Barnett, Constance Terrell's mother, said much the same thing: "We didn't feel like justice was done, but we got a little justice."
Two other women were on the original indictment. Donetha Laverne Snead-Haile, thirty-two, disappeared on April 21, 1993, and Diana Richardson, forty-eight, in 1995. Neither body was ever found, and in November 1998 the trial court threw out both counts for that reason. Donetha's sister, Stacy Snead, said the family still marked her birthdays and remembered her on holidays. "She would never wander off without telling someone where she was going," she said. "There's no question we'll never find out what happened to her." Later reference accounts say Lindsey pleaded guilty to those two killings as well, on July 8, 1999, after an appeals court revived the counts. The April 1999 press reports describe the counts as dismissed, and the two versions have not been reconciled from the published record.
He was caught for a different murder, three hundred miles away. Lindsey, a mechanic and farm worker born in Palatka, had been living for several years in the mountains of North Carolina and driving down to Florida now and then. On Christmas Day 1996, Lucy Arnett Raymer, thirty-two, was killed in Asheville by a blow that fractured her skull, and her body was found the next day in a ditch on Chunns Cove Road. A taxi driver had seen her go into Lindsey's trailer that night. He was arrested on December 29, and court papers later said he admitted killing her.
The similarities to a run of unsolved killings in St. Johns County brought detectives north within a month. In those interviews he confessed to at least six killings in Florida and took officers to places where four bodies had been dumped. By April 1997 the St. Johns sheriff, Neil Perry, was telling reporters that Lindsey had confessed to beating eight women to death and that five of the bodies had been found; the Buncombe County sheriff, Bobby Medford, said he might be responsible for twelve to twenty killings across Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. That month Lindsey led searchers into swamp outside St. Augustine where he said at least two more women were buried. Nothing was found. In November 1997 a grand jury indicted him on six counts of first-degree murder. He later recanted the confessions.
The oldest case came to him through a photograph. Lisa Foley, twenty-four, was last seen with him at the Tradewinds Lounge in downtown St. Augustine on October 9, 1983, and was found five days later in marsh off West Pope Road, near St. Augustine Beach. In January 1997 he picked her picture out of a lineup and said he had strangled her during an argument after sex. He was never charged with her death.
He had no felony record. He was born in 1935, and the sources disagree on the day, March 18 in some and May 18 in others. By the account usually given of his childhood, both his parents were killed in a car crash when he was an infant and he was raised by a St. Augustine couple whose surname he took. He married twice and had several children. One daughter, Robin Lindsey, later described growing up in his house for the Investigation Discovery series Evil Lives Here.
Under the agreement, the Florida sentence was tied to the North Carolina case, where he still faced a first-degree murder charge for Raymer; the Record reported that he had been offered a plea to second-degree murder there, twenty-one years to run alongside the Florida term. He was sentenced in St. Augustine on May 21, 1999, and some later summaries give that as the date of the plea itself. Christine said that under any sentencing guidelines the time would be long. "I don't think he's going to be cut any breaks," she said. "He's killed four people." He served less than two years of it. William Darrell Lindsey died of cancer at the Marion Correctional Institution in Ocala on April 17, 2001.