He was born William Armstrong Jr in Palatka, Florida in 1935, the only child of a roofer and his wife. When he was five months old the car his parents were driving left the road and crashed. Both died where they sat. He was found wedged between the front and back seats with scratches and bruises. He went by Red Bird.
He grew up as William Darrell Lindsey, left school early, worked in mills and at odd jobs and was often dismissed, and drifted through the southern states accumulating a record of small offences. He married twice, in 1958 and 1975, and had seven children; his second wife died in 1992. In St Augustine he was known as Crazy Bill.
The first killing attributed to him is that of Lisa Foley, last seen leaving a bar with him on October 9, 1983 and found days later in marshland. He later said he had strangled her after sex during an argument. Anita McQuaig Stevens was found on November 29, 1988, killed with a wooden plank. Connie Terrell was shot in the head with a .22 rifle on June 10, 1989. Lashawna Streeter was beaten to death on March 1, 1992. Donetha Snead-Haile was reported missing in April 1993. Cheryl Lucas and Diana Richardson are also named among the eight.
The victims were women working as prostitutes or using drugs. Three of them he picked up at a single intersection in St Augustine that local people called Crackhead Corner, at Volusia and West King Streets, and most of the bodies were found in the waterways near West King Street. Accounts of his method describe luring women with the promise of drugs or money, attacking them with blunt objects, a firearm or a ligature, and leaving the bodies posed, some near a large pit outside the town.
The last was Lucy Arnett Raymer, thirty-two, beaten about the head and found on Chunns Cove Road in Asheville, North Carolina at Christmas 1996.
He was caught because a taxi driver had seen her go into his trailer on the night she died. He was arrested on December 29, 1996, and while in custody in North Carolina he confessed. He put his own total at between twelve and twenty women, across four southern states; police were able to link him to six or seven, and the figure of eight is the number of deaths attributed to him in the reference accounts.
Extradited to Florida in April 1997, he took investigators to places where he said he had buried people. He rejected a plea offer of thirty years in the middle of that year.
Two years later he accepted the same terms. The hearing on May 21, 1999 had been convened to decide whether his confession in North Carolina could be suppressed; instead he pleaded guilty. The prosecutor, Maureen Sullivan Christine, said afterwards that they had not expected it, and that the case would have been hard to prove because it hinged on the confession. He was sentenced to four concurrent terms of thirty years, which is the maximum Florida allows for second-degree murder, and the plea took the death penalty off the table.
This answers the question the earlier version of this entry raised and could not resolve. It observed that thirty years was a short sentence for a case of this description and that the reporting did not explain the basis for it. The basis is that he pleaded to second-degree murder rather than first, that thirty years is the statutory maximum for it, that the terms ran concurrently, and that the state took the deal because without his confession it had little.
He died of cancer in prison on April 17, 2001.
Three conflicts in the record are left as they stand. His birth date is given as both March 18 and May 18, 1935. The number of counts he pleaded to is four in the contemporary reporting and in the account of the sentencing, and six in later encyclopaedia summaries. And the total attributed to him runs from six to eight in police accounts and to twenty in his own. As of 2025, DNA work on related cold cases had produced no further attributions.