William Devin Howell
- Victims
- 7 killings covered by convictions - 6 counts of MURDER by guilty plea in 2017, and 1 of MANSLAUGHTER in the first degree in 2005, over the death of Nilsa Arizmendi. The seventh was not a murder conviction
- Years active
- 2003
- Location
- New Britain, Connecticut, USA
- Method
- Strangulation
- Status
- Pleaded guilty in 2005 to MANSLAUGHTER in the first degree over the death of Nilsa Arizmendi and was sentenced to fifteen years, her body not then having been found. Three bodies were discovered behind a shopping plaza on Hartford Road in New Britain in 2007 and four more at the same site in April 2015, found with an FBI cadaver dog. He was formally charged on September 18, 2015 with six further killings, bail set at ten million dollars, and pleaded guilty to six counts of murder in New Britain Superior Court on September 8, 2017 before Judge Joan K. Alexander, his lawyers saying the plea spared the families a trial and the state nearly a million dollars. On November 17, 2017 he received six consecutive life sentences, sixty years each under Connecticut law, a total of three hundred and sixty years, of which one hundred and fifty are mandatory. He is held at the Cheshire Correctional Institution. At sentencing he wept and called his own actions monstrous, cowardly and selfish. Three of the seven were sexually assaulted, and prosecutors withheld those three names under Connecticut law protecting victims of sexual assault. He is regarded as the most prolific serial killer in Connecticut history, ahead of Michael Ross.
William Devin Howell was born on July 24, 1970, in Virginia, and by 2003 was living in New Britain, Connecticut, working odd jobs in lawn care and living in a blue Ford Econoline van he called the murder mobile. He went by the Chief.
In that one year he killed seven people: Nilsa Arizmendi, Diane Cusack, Mary Jane Menard, Joyvaline Martinez, Melanie Ruiz, Marilyn Gonzalez and Danny Whistnant. Six were women and one was a man; most were struggling with addiction and several worked as prostitutes. He picked them up, killed them in the van, and buried them in two clusters in scrubland behind a strip mall on Hartford Road.
The first bodies were found by chance in 2007 by a man walking his dog, and the second cluster in 2015 after a further search of the same ground. By then Howell was already serving fifteen years, having pleaded guilty in 2007 to the manslaughter of Nilsa Arizmendi on evidence from the van.
What made the murder case was talk. Howell had described the killings in detail to several fellow prisoners over the years, and those men gave evidence. He was convicted of Arizmendi's murder in 2007, and in September 2017 pleaded guilty to the other six, receiving 360 years. He is held out of state.