William Edward Wells III, known to his family and to the courts of northeast Florida as Billy, was 27 years old when five people died in Mayport, a waterfront community about fifteen miles northeast of downtown Jacksonville, in the last week of May 2003. The dead were his estranged wife, Irene Wells; her father, Bill McMains; her brother, John S. McMains; and two acquaintances, Richard Reese and James Lee Young. Wells surrendered to police after a standoff of about twelve hours, confessed, and pleaded guilty to all five murders. Prosecutors, honoring the wishes of the victims' family and doubtful of his mental health, agreed not to seek his execution, and he was sent to prison for the rest of his life.
He did not stop there. Within the Florida Department of Corrections he was convicted of the attempted murder of a fellow inmate in 2008 and of the first-degree murder of a 21-year-old inmate, Xavier Rodriguez, in 2011. On July 5, 2019, he and another prisoner killed William Chapman, a 32-year-old inmate who was months from release. Wells had told prosecutors, reporters and the courts for sixteen years that he wanted to die by lethal injection. He pleaded guilty, dismissed his lawyers, waived a jury, and on May 25, 2021, a Bradford County circuit judge sentenced him to death. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and the sentence on April 13, 2023.
Wells's early life was set out in court in 2021, when his lawyers placed it before the judge who would decide whether he lived or died. The defense described a father who drank heavily, introduced the boy to drinking at the age of four, and abused him severely. He grew up watching violence between his father and the woman who raised him, and he was 14 when he learned that she was not his biological mother. His father died when he was 17.
Two former teachers testified that they remembered him as likable and pleasant, and he finished school through a dropout prevention program. A childhood friend and an older half-sister were described as the steadiest people in his teenage years. He told doctors he had thought about suicide from the age of 18.
His first marriage ended quickly. His second was to Irene, who had young children, and together they had a son. The judge who sentenced him in 2021 accepted, as mitigation, that he had suffered extreme abuse, neglect and trauma in childhood, and that he had a long history of substance abuse and alcoholism.
Wells came to the spring of 2003 with a record. He had been convicted of a violent offense and placed on probation, and he was ordered into First Step, a six-month intervention program for men who abuse their partners, run by a Jacksonville domestic violence agency. He enrolled three times and never finished. Near the end of his probation he was directed to a similar anger management course with the Salvation Army, and he did not complete that either. A Salvation Army official said in July 2003 that she had no record of his finishing the program. Whether the court ever required him to complete the classes, as opposed to attending them, was disputed after the killings. He had also tried to take his own life before May 2003.
By that spring his wife, Irene, was estranged from him.
Irene Wells was 30. Her father, Bill McMains, was 60, and her brother, John S. McMains, was 32. Richard Reese, 39, and James Lee Young, 20, were acquaintances of the couple.
The deaths took place over several days in Mayport. Irene Wells was the first to die, several days before the arrest. In the months that followed, her family asked prosecutors to spare the man who had killed her, and that request helped decide the case.
On the afternoon of Saturday, May 24, 2003, police went to Mayport, and Wells held them off for about twelve hours. Early on Sunday, May 25, he surrendered. He told investigators that he had killed his wife and four other people, and he was charged with five counts of murder.
In the first days of June 2003, Wells placed a collect call from the Duval County jail to the Jacksonville daily newspaper. Jail officials could not confirm that the caller was Wells, but he gave his Social Security number, his date of birth and the names of family members, and his account of the standoff matched what relatives had described. He said he wanted to confess and plead guilty. He described his wife's death as unintended, said he hoped prosecutors would accept a plea to involuntary manslaughter in her case, and said that after her death events "snowballed." In his own summary, "It turned into a bad situation, but it all started as an accident." He also said he wanted to be executed. He planned, he said, to fire the public defenders, who had been weighing a defense based on mental illness. The chief assistant public defender declined to discuss the case.
Days earlier, in May, he had telephoned a Jacksonville television station to confess to the five deaths.
On Thursday, June 5, 2003, an eighteen-member Duval County grand jury returned a five-page indictment charging him with five counts of first-degree murder. State Attorney Harry Shorstein said the confession appeared to be admissible and that his office intended to seek the death penalty, though he called talk of a plea offer premature. Wells's mother visited him in the jail and relayed his words to reporters: "I made my peace with God. I can't live with what I did to my son's mother." He told her he could not spend his life in prison or in a mental institution and would rather be put to death. He was on mental health watch in the jail. Arraignment was set for June 17.
In July 2003 Wells told police that he had killed a sixth man. No such death was established, and the matter ended without a charge. At the same time he asked to waive a trial altogether and to be sentenced to death.
The state did not give him what he asked for. Wells pleaded guilty to the five murders in exchange for the state's agreement to waive the death penalty, and he received five consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. Melissa Nelson, then an assistant state attorney, said the victims' family had asked for life sentences rather than death. Prosecutors had also expressed concern about his mental health and about whether he understood the criminality of what he had done. Shorstein later called the case "extremely egregious," but said the plea offer and the family's wishes had decided the question. He also said Wells appeared to suffer from a severe mental disorder that might have prevented a death sentence in any event. The plea dates from 2003 or 2004, and the life sentences were in place by 2004.
The decision followed the case for years. In 2016, when Nelson ran for state attorney against the incumbent, Angela Corey, Corey criticized her for not having sought the death penalty against Wells. Nelson won the election.
Wells entered the state prison system with five life terms. In 2008, at a prison in Miami-Dade County, he tried to kill a fellow inmate, who survived. He was convicted of attempted murder and given a sixth life sentence. From about 2007 or 2008 he was held under close management, a restrictive form of prison housing, and from 2008 at its maximum level; by the time of his 2021 sentencing he had spent roughly thirteen years in solitary or close management confinement. The sentencing judge treated those years, together with his serious mental illness and neurocognitive problems, as mitigation of some weight. A prison case manager testified that she had seen him suffer hallucinations, anxiety, agitation and flashbacks, and a psychiatrist who studies solitary confinement testified that the conditions had worsened his illness.
In 2011, at a state prison in Bradford County, Wells and another inmate, Wayne Doty, killed Xavier Rodriguez, a 21-year-old fellow prisoner. The State Attorney's Office for Florida's Eighth Judicial Circuit charged Wells with first-degree murder. After a jury voted 10 to 2 to recommend death, Doty was sentenced to death for the killing. The Florida Supreme Court has since upheld his sentence and rejected his later appeals.
Wells wrote to a Jacksonville television station in August 2011 to describe the killing, and in another letter that year he observed that he had "managed to prevail with a mere five life sentences" and was still seeking lethal injection. He blamed the prosecutors of 2003, Shorstein among them, for the deaths that followed. Shorstein disputed that, pointing out that executions in Florida seldom take place within five years of sentencing. The Department of Corrections refused a request to interview Wells because of the new charge.
The case came to trial in Bradford County in 2017. Wells's lawyers, Terence Lenamon and Tania Alavi, argued against a death sentence. Lenamon told the jurors that they did not have to worry about Wells offending again, and Alavi reminded them that Florida law did not allow jurors to weigh possible future crimes in deciding a capital sentence. The jury found Wells guilty of first-degree murder and recommended life. He received his seventh life sentence. After his next arrest he complained, in a recorded statement, that the jury had not given him the death sentence.
William Chapman, called Billy by his family, was 32. He was due to be released in October 2019. His sister later said that the prison system had failed to protect him.
In the spring of 2019 Wells and Leo Boatman, an inmate already serving life for two murders committed in 2006, were held in the same Bradford County prison. Wells blamed an assistant warden for a poor close-management review in June 2019 that kept him from returning to the general prison population. He and Boatman had discussed harming someone if their reviews went badly, and they had been talking about it since May. In August 2018 Wells had written to a Jacksonville television station complaining about conditions at the prison.
On July 5, 2019, Wells and Boatman killed Chapman. The Florida Supreme Court later found that the two men had planned the killing for at least a month. A lawyer for Wells said he had been classified at CM-3, the least restrictive of the three close-management levels. Chapman was one of fifteen deaths at the prison in 2019 by early November.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement led the inquiry, working with the inspector general's office of the Department of Corrections. Two FDLE special agents interviewed Wells on July 6, 2019, the day after Chapman died, after advising him of his rights. In that statement he spoke of the privileges available on death row compared with close management: "I can go to death row and get all that." He said he had "nothing to lose." In another recording made after the killing he predicted that this time he would be sentenced to death. Before he was charged, he told a Jacksonville television station that he was on a mission to obtain the death penalty, and in letters to the station afterward he wrote that he would keep killing until he received it.
The State Attorney's Office for the Eighth Judicial Circuit confirmed on Friday, July 19, 2019, that Wells had been charged with Chapman's murder. The corrections department's own inquiry lasted nearly four months.
On November 4, 2019, a Bradford County grand jury indicted Wells for premeditated first-degree murder and a further offense. State Attorney Bill Cervone announced that he would seek death. "Sometimes there just is no other option," he said, citing Wells's violent history and the killings inside the prison system.
Within days of the indictment Wells moved to represent himself and to waive a penalty-phase jury. The court ordered an evaluation by the psychologist Harry Krop, who had examined Wells in 2003 and had worked on mitigation in his 2011 case. Krop's report of December 2019 found Wells competent to proceed and capable of a rational decision to represent himself; Wells told him that he wanted to receive the death penalty.
At his arraignment in late 2019, Circuit Judge Mark W. Moseley questioned Wells under the Faretta decision, which governs a defendant's right to conduct his own defense, granted the request, appointed regional counsel as standby counsel, and accepted his guilty plea to the second count. Wells soon changed course and asked Moseley to appoint Regional Counsel John Broling to represent him. Broling withdrew the papers Wells had filed, waived his right to a speedy trial, and said he would litigate the case fully. At least nineteen uniformed officers, with others in plain clothes, stood in the small courtroom for that hearing. Cervone said the security was not typical for an ordinary defendant but was common in cases like this one, and that the delay did not change the state's plans: "I'm firmly convinced that under the state of Florida law this case is one that qualifies for imposition of the death penalty."
At a second Faretta hearing on February 26, 2020, Wells again chose to represent himself and discharged regional counsel. Moseley found him competent and warned him that representing himself was a serious mistake, while confirming that the Constitution allowed him to make that choice. That month Wells pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. Before accepting the plea, Moseley questioned him at length about his mental competence and his understanding of what he was giving up. He told Wells that the only possible sentences were life in prison or death. With the plea accepted, the case moved directly to a penalty phase. Wells waived a jury, so the sentence would be decided by the judge alone, and at first he declined to present any mitigation. He stipulated to two of the aggravating factors the state relied on.
The penalty phase opened on August 3, 2020, about nine months after the indictment. On its second day, as the state neared the close of its case, Wells asked for a lawyer again. Moseley reappointed standby counsel just before a witness was to testify, and granted a continuance. While the defense pursued review in the First District Court of Appeal, the case was stayed until about February 2021. Defense lawyers later argued that the COVID-19 pandemic had limited their ability to interview witnesses and travel, and asked for still more time; Moseley denied further continuances, including a request filed five days before the hearing resumed.
The penalty phase resumed on April 26, 2021, more than eight months after the state had rested. Over three days the defense called eight witnesses, four of them experts. The psychiatrist Jeffrey Danziger described serious psychiatric illness, a significant brain injury, schizoaffective disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and cognitive deficits. The psychiatrist Joseph Wu found evidence of at least nine traumatic brain injuries, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, psychosis and a mood disorder. The psychologist Heather Holmes testified about his childhood, and the psychiatrist Terry Kupers about the effects of long isolation. Wells asked the court to find 96 separate mitigating circumstances.
On May 25, 2021, Moseley held a combined Spencer hearing, the final hearing at which a Florida capital defendant may address the sentencing judge, and imposed sentence the same day. No new evidence was offered except Wells's own sworn statements. He spoke at length. He apologized to Chapman's sister. He said he now regretted the killing because he saw that it was morally wrong, not merely because of what it would cost him. He described his childhood, his substance abuse and his mental illness, and for the first time in the case he asked for mercy.
Moseley sentenced him to death. He found four aggravating circumstances: that the murder was committed by a person under a sentence of imprisonment and previously convicted of a felony, given great weight; that Wells had previously been convicted of another capital or violent felony, given very great weight; that the murder was especially atrocious and cruel, the statutory factor Florida courts call HAC, given great weight; and that it was cold, calculated and premeditated, given great weight. He rejected both statutory mental-health mitigators, finding that Wells had not acted under extreme mental or emotional disturbance and that his capacity to conform his conduct to the law had not been substantially impaired. He gave slight or some weight to eight nonstatutory mitigators: the childhood abuse, the mental illness and long isolation, cooperation with the authorities, acceptance of responsibility, respect for corrections staff and the court, substance abuse, the corrections department's neglect of his mental health needs, and remorse. "The aggravating circumstances far outweigh the mitigating circumstances which the court has heard and considered," the judge wrote. Wells was 45.
Boatman was tried separately. A Bradford County jury convicted him in August 2022 of first-degree murder and a further offense, his fourth murder conviction, and he was sentenced to death.
Every death sentence in Florida is reviewed by the Florida Supreme Court. Wells's appeal was argued on August 31, 2022, by Barbara Busharis, an assistant public defender for the Second Judicial Circuit, against Steve Woods for the state. The central argument was that Moseley had abused his discretion in refusing the reappointed lawyers more time to prepare mitigation. Woods answered that the defense had been given more than eight months and that much of the delay had been of Wells's own making.
The court ruled on April 13, 2023, in an opinion by Justice Jamie Grosshans. It held that denying a further continuance was not an abuse of discretion, because counsel had had more than eight months, the mitigation evidence from the 2017 trial, and a mitigation specialist who knew the case. It upheld the rejection of the two statutory mitigators and found that any error there would have been harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. It rejected arguments that the judge had to make his findings beyond a reasonable doubt, that Florida's capital statute violated the Eighth Amendment on its face, and that the protection against executing people with intellectual disability should be extended to the seriously mentally ill. Reviewing the plea on its own initiative, the court found it knowing, intelligent and voluntary. "In this case, the trial court conducted an extensive plea colloquy," Grosshans wrote. Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz and Justices Charles Canady and John Couriel joined the opinion; Justice Jorge Labarga concurred in the result only, and Justice Renatha Francis did not take part.
As of April 2023 Wells, then 47, was under sentence of death in Florida, serving that sentence alongside his seven life terms. In May 2024 he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida against a group of state corrections officials; a magistrate judge granted his application to proceed without prepaying the filing fee, and no ruling on the merits has been reported.
Wells was sentenced at a time of rapid change in Florida's death penalty law. For decades a Florida judge could impose death after a simple majority of jurors recommended it. In 2016 the United States Supreme Court struck down that scheme for giving judges too much discretion. The Legislature first required a 10 to 2 jury recommendation; after the Florida Supreme Court held that recommendations had to be unanimous, lawmakers required unanimity in 2017. In 2020 the state supreme court, by then reshaped by new appointments, reversed itself and held that unanimity in the recommendation was not constitutionally required, though the statutory rule remained.
That debate passed Wells by. By pleading guilty and waiving a jury, he placed the entire sentencing decision with the judge, a choice the court accepted after finding him competent. His 2017 jury had recommended life; in 2021 there was no jury to persuade. One week after the Florida Supreme Court affirmed his sentence, on April 20, 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law allowing a death sentence on the recommendation of eight of twelve jurors, which took effect immediately. The state supreme court had by then also abandoned comparative proportionality review of death sentences, a change it said did not alter its analysis of Wells's Eighth Amendment claim.
In July 2003 Wells told police that he had killed a sixth man. No such death was established and no charge followed; it is an admission only.
In June 2003 Wells gave his own explanation of how the first death came about. He described it as unintended and sought, without success, a plea to involuntary manslaughter in his wife's case. The state charged first-degree murder, and he pleaded guilty to the murders.
Some dates in the case are uncertain. The Mayport pleas and sentences fall in 2003 or 2004, and his arraignment in the Chapman case fell in late 2019, on November 27 or December 13.
1975 or 1976: William Edward Wells III is born (he is 27 in May 2003).
Before 2003: Convicted of a violent offense and placed on probation; enrolls three times in a Jacksonville intervention program and does not complete it.
May 2003: Irene Wells, Bill McMains, John S. McMains, Richard Reese and James Lee Young die in Mayport over several days.
May 24 to 25, 2003: Standoff of about twelve hours in Mayport; Wells surrenders.
Early June 2003: Wells confesses in calls from the Duval County jail.
June 5, 2003: Duval County grand jury indicts him on five counts of first-degree murder.
July 2003: He claims a sixth killing; no such death is established.
2003 to 2004: Guilty pleas to the five murders; the state waives the death penalty; five consecutive life sentences.
2008: Attempted murder of a fellow inmate in Miami-Dade County; sixth life sentence.
2011: Xavier Rodriguez, 21, is killed in Bradford County; Wells and Wayne Doty are charged.
2016: The Mayport plea becomes an issue in the race for state attorney in Jacksonville.
2017: Bradford County jury finds Wells guilty of first-degree murder and recommends life; seventh life sentence.
July 5, 2019: William Chapman, 32, is killed in Bradford County.
July 6, 2019: FDLE agents interview Wells.
July 19, 2019: The state attorney's office confirms the murder charge.
November 4, 2019: Bradford County grand jury indicts Wells; the state seeks death.
December 2019: A court-ordered evaluation finds him competent.
February 26, 2020: Wells chooses again to represent himself; he pleads guilty to first-degree murder that month and waives a jury.
August 3 to 4, 2020: Penalty phase opens; counsel is reappointed and the case is continued.
April 26 to 28, 2021: Penalty phase resumes.
May 25, 2021: Judge Mark W. Moseley sentences Wells to death.
August 2022: Leo Boatman is convicted of Chapman's murder and later sentenced to death.
August 31, 2022: Oral argument in the Florida Supreme Court.
April 13, 2023: The Florida Supreme Court affirms the conviction and death sentence.
April 20, 2023: Florida adopts the eight-of-twelve jury rule for death sentences.
May 24, 2024: Wells files a federal civil rights suit against state corrections officials.