At the end of June 1998 William Cody Neal bought nylon rope, duct tape and a splitting maul.
He had already taken money from Rebecca Holberton, as he had from the others. He had lived with her in Lakewood for two years and taken some sixty thousand dollars from her, he was out of work and fifty-one thousand dollars in debt, and she had made plans to throw him out. On June 30 he killed her at her townhouse in Jefferson County with the maul, and drained her bank account afterwards. On July 2 he killed Candace Walters in the same house the same way. He asked each of them to let him cover them with a blanket first; only Holberton agreed. The next day, with Walters dead a few hours, he proposed marriage to a woman he was seeing and threw a party for it.
Rebecca Holberton was forty-four. Candace Walters was forty-eight. Angela Fite was twenty-eight and had two children, Kyle and Kayla; Neal was seeing her and had gone into business with her. Her surname appears as Fife in one account.
On the night of July 5 he took a woman the court called Suzanne to the townhouse, telling her they were going to meet his lawyers. He blindfolded and gagged her, tied her to a mattress and cut off her clothes. He made her touch a piece of one of the dead women's skulls and kicked a body to show her it was dead. Then he brought Angela Fite in, taped her to a chair, and killed her while Suzanne was in the room, and assaulted Suzanne within inches of her.
He then took Suzanne to her roommate, whom he had just proposed to, set a gun and a tape recorder on the table, and talked into the recorder for two hours about what he had done. He kept Suzanne, the roommate and a thirty-four-year-old friend, David Cain, with him for three days. On July 8 he told them to telephone the police once he had left, and set out his own plans, which included killing himself. Suzanne had already told one of them everything.
By then a Jefferson County sheriff's deputy called Michael Burgess was on his way to the address anyway. Holberton's colleagues had reported that she had not come to work for several days, and he was sent on a welfare check. Every window in the townhouse had been papered over. He tried the front door, got no answer, went round to the sliding door at the back and opened it a few inches. He found all three bodies.
Neal was not there. By telephone he confessed and refused to surrender without a lawyer, and a deputy district attorney, Mark Pautler, got him to give himself up by pretending to be a defense attorney. He was arrested that evening. Pautler was later disciplined for deceiving him and for failing to advise him of his rights, and his license was suspended for three months.
He had let Suzanne live on purpose, and he said so. Her evidence alone, he said, was enough to put him into the penalty phase of a capital case. He also said that if he had not wanted to be caught he would have killed the three women in the mountains and disposed of the bodies where nobody would find them.
In February 1999, having fired his attorney and representing himself, he pleaded guilty at his arraignment to all of it: three counts of first degree murder, two of first degree sexual assault, two of second degree kidnapping and one of menacing. At the sentencing hearing the prosecution played parts of his confession, in which he said he had been better than Bundy would ever have been and that there had been a killer in him all his life.
The prosecutor's account of the three women was that they had all been vulnerable in one way or another and looking for happiness, and that he had preyed on each of them. He was a retired soldier, born at Fort Belvoir in Virginia on October 7, 1955, the younger of two sons with three sisters, named after a family pastor. His father was an Air Force chief warrant officer; his mother, the member of the family he loved most, died of cancer in 1995. He joined the army at seventeen. His sister said the FBI had once questioned him over the abduction and murder of a girl at a New York gas station in the 1980s and cleared him. He was married four times, with two children of his own, and he was known to the people he defrauded as Charmin' Billy.
A panel of three judges sentenced him to death on September 29, 1999. In 2003 the Colorado Supreme Court held that the judge-panel scheme was unconstitutional, and the sentence became life imprisonment without parole. He is seventy.