William Jennings Choyce was born about 1954 and raised in Oakland by his mother and father with a brother and a sister; his sister later described their mother as the family's disciplinarian and their home as a good one.
At about 1:50 in the morning on April 3, 1988, Sergeant Ralph Lacer of the Oakland police found the body of Victoria Bell in an industrial area of West Oakland known for drugs and prostitution. She had been posed to expose her body, there was twine binding on or near her abraded ankles, and the clean soles of her feet told him she had been bound and killed somewhere else and left there. The two Stockton killings came later. Gwendolyn Lee was shot in the head from eighteen to twenty-four inches away. On the morning of August 11, 1997, San Joaquin County Sheriff's Captain Bruce Wuest found Lawanda Beck's naked body in an uninhabited industrial area, shot in the back of the head and dumped face down; he too believed she had been killed elsewhere. Accounts place the Stockton killings in 1997 and 1998. All three women were described at trial as working as prostitutes. He picked them up, raped them, shot them and left their bodies in sexual poses.
A criminalist, Dean DeYoung, testified that the .38-caliber bullet fragments from Lee and the bullet from Beck were fired from the same revolver. DNA identified Choyce as the major contributor of foreign material on Lee, and at trial he conceded that his DNA matched the samples from the victims. The killings went unsolved for years; the women were on late-night streets, and their deaths drew little attention.
He was in state prison for the rape of two women in Oakland when, in 2002, DNA linked him to the three murder scenes. A psychiatrist, Dr. Tucker, testified that Choyce admitted all three killings in interviews, diagnosed sexual sadism, and quoted him saying he always shot the ones who stayed defiant once the gun was out. Of the women he picked up, Choyce told him that they were selling their bodies and that he had used them "like a garbage can."
At trial three further women gave evidence that he had raped them at gunpoint. The defense sought life rather than death, arguing that he had been psychologically damaged by an abusive mother, and a defense expert testified that he would adjust safely to life in prison. The jury convicted him of the three murders and related sexual offenses in 2008, and at fifty-four he was sentenced to death on December 5, 2008, in San Joaquin County Superior Court, with terms totaling eighty-one years to life on the other counts, and sent to death row at San Quentin.
His automatic appeal was decided on July 21, 2025, when the California Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Evans, affirmed the judgment in its entirety, with only a minor correction to the firearm enhancement terms. It rejected his claims of instructional error, prosecutorial misconduct and victim impact evidence, and his constitutional challenges to the death penalty and the special circumstances. The San Quentin condemned unit was closed in 2024 and its prisoners moved to other prisons, and California has had a moratorium on executions since 2019.
Authorities have said they believe there were other victims beyond the three proved in court. No further conviction followed, and no execution date has been set.