At 2:30 in the morning on July 25, 2003, Nilsa Arizmendi, thirty-three, a heroin user and sex worker living in a motel in Wethersfield, Connecticut, with her boyfriend, got into a blue van belonging to a man the couple had let sleep in their room that night. Her sister reported her missing on July 31. The boyfriend, a convicted drug dealer, was suspected first and cleared by a polygraph, and he named the man in the van: William Devin Howell, then thirty-three, who did odd jobs and lived out of the vehicle.
He was born on February 11, 1970. By April 2004 he was a suspect in Arizmendi's disappearance, and police seized the van in North Carolina. Several seat cushions had been removed, but blood from two people had soaked into the floor under the carpet, and DNA from Arizmendi's relatives showed one sample was ninety-nine percent certain to be hers. They also found six videotapes of Howell having what investigators called bizarre sex with women, filmed so that the women's faces could not be seen. He was arrested in Hampton, Virginia, on May 15, 2005, and, since her body had not been found, charged with first-degree manslaughter, and later with witness tampering for threatening another inmate. In January 2007, shortly after his trial began, he entered an Alford plea, not admitting the crime but conceding the evidence was likely to convict him. At sentencing he insisted the blood came from a fight Arizmendi had had in the van with her boyfriend and tried to withdraw the plea, saying his public defender had pressured him. He got fifteen years.
Weeks later a hunter looking for ground to hunt on found human bones in the wooded, marshy land behind a shopping plaza on Hartford Road in New Britain, which could not be reached by car. They were later identified as Diane Cusack, Joyvaline Martinez and Mary Jane Menard. Diane Cusack, fifty-five, of New Britain, had struggled with addiction and been out of touch with her family for years, and no one had reported her missing; police last had contact with her on July 9, 2003, over a landlord dispute, and she was identified in 2011. Joy Martinez, twenty-three, of East Hartford, a former high school track star, disappeared on October 10, 2003, and was not reported missing until March 29, 2004, when she failed to come to her own birthday party; she was identified in 2013. Mary Jane Menard, forty, a mother of two from Waterbury and a former addict who had become a substance abuse counselor, went missing from New Britain in October 2003.
On April 28, 2015, four more sets of remains were found at the same site. They were Nilsa Arizmendi; Marilyn Gonzalez, twenty-six, a mother of two from Waterbury; Melanie Ruth Camilini, twenty-nine, a mother of two from Seymour, who had been living in Waterbury and disappeared on January 1, 2003; and Janice Roberts, forty-four, a transgender woman from New Britain, last seen on June 18, 2003, getting into Howell's van outside a Stop and Shop in Wethersfield. Howell later told an informant that he had strangled Roberts on realizing she was transgender.
He had talked in prison. He told a cellmate there was a monster inside him and called himself a sick ripper, the name some papers then used for him. Over a card game he described keeping one woman's body in his van for two weeks because it was too cold to bury her, sleeping beside her and calling her his baby, and then cutting off her fingertips and taking apart her lower jaw and disposing of the parts in Virginia. He called the burial ground behind the plaza his garden. In July 2015 the attorney and writer Anne K. Howard began corresponding with him, and he was charged with the six further murders that year.
On September 8, 2017, he pleaded guilty to murdering Cusack, Martinez, Menard, Gonzalez, Camilini and Roberts. On November 17, 2017, he cried and apologized to the families, called his actions "monstrous, cowardly and selfish," and told the court he deserved the death penalty, which the Connecticut Supreme Court had abolished in 2015. He was sentenced to six consecutive life terms, each sixty years under Connecticut law, a total of 360 years. He is one of the most prolific serial killers in the state's history and is held at the Cheshire Correctional Institution. After the plea he gave detailed confessions to Anne K. Howard in letters and recorded calls, published in her book His Garden: Conversations with a Serial Killer.