William Lee Neal, who called himself Cody, killed three women he knew in Lakewood, Colorado, in the space of six days in the summer of 1998. Rebecca Holberton, 44, had shared her home with him for two years. Candace Walters, 48, had lent him money and was pressing him to pay it back. Angela Fite, a dental assistant with two small children, had been seeing him. All three were killed with a wood-splitting maul. Before he gave himself up he assaulted a fourth woman and held her and two other people captive for more than a day, dictating an account of what he had done into a tape recorder.
He confessed by telephone, by tape and in court. In February 1999, acting as his own lawyer, he pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and a series of other charges, and that September a panel of three judges sentenced him to death. The case is also remembered for the way his surrender was obtained: a senior Jefferson County prosecutor came on the telephone line pretending to be a public defender, and the Colorado Supreme Court later upheld discipline against him for it.
Neal was born on October 7, 1955, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, according to the life story he gave Westword in a jail interview in July 1999. He was named after a family pastor. His father was an Air Force chief warrant officer who, in Neal's telling, was a hard disciplinarian and later drank heavily; Neal said he retired from the service when his son was about nine. The family had three daughters and two sons, and William was the second son. He spoke of his mother, who died of cancer in October 1995, as the one devoted presence in his childhood.
His account of his youth was one of grievance. He said he was shoplifting by the age of ten, that his sisters had falsely accused him of hurting them when they were children and that he was beaten for it, and that he had been abused as a youth, claims the sentencing panel later said it doubted because of his record of lying. He joined the Army shortly after his seventeenth birthday. Westword reported as his own unconfirmed claims the more dramatic military careers he described to the women in his life, which included service as a Green Beret, on an Alaskan mountain rescue team and as an Airborne Ranger.
Neal married four times. His second wife, whom he met in 1981 while she was working at an outfitters' store near Washington, D.C., told Westword that he was controlling and violent. They married in Houston in 1984, about ten days after arriving there, and the divorce was final shortly after Christmas 1985; she said he sold most of her belongings. For years afterward he kept finding her unlisted telephone number and calling, at one point asking for money to pay what he described as a debt to the mob, which she took to be another con. She later told her own relatives he was dead.
His third wife told investigators that he had been controlling and violent and that he took about $10,500 from her through credit card advances and a savings withdrawal before they separated in November 1990. She said she had always expected to see his name in the headlines.
In Denver, around 1992, he met the woman who became his fourth wife; she was nineteen. They married while she was pregnant, and their daughter was born in 1993. She described close control by Neal and sexual coercion during the marriage. She left him in 1995, and he filed for divorce in March 1996. He paid $350 a month in child support but saw little of his daughter.
He worked as a maintenance man at a Houston apartment complex, described himself as a part-owner of a security company called Dynamic Control Systems, and claimed to have run an alarm business of his own. He later admitted taking close to $70,000 from the security company and giving up his share. By July 1998, the lead prosecutor said, he had no job.
Rebecca Holberton had worked for the telephone company US West for about 25 years. She moved to Lakewood from Oregon in 1995, leaving family behind, and was due to start a new job with the company on July 5, 1998. Co-workers said she came in each day with a smile, and her former husband, an airline pilot, called her kind and gentle. Neal had been living with her since July 1996. He took as much as $70,000 from her, and she had told a friend she wanted him out of her life but wanted her money back first.
Candace Walters, 48, tended bar at a Sheraton hotel. Her only child, a daughter, had hired her to work in her real-estate financing business and was preparing to move to Missouri to open a branch office. She had divorced about 26 years earlier. Her daughter told the sentencing court that she had been the best mother anyone could have had; her hopes were simple ones, a house, a dog, and time for the near-daily hikes she took on Green Mountain. She met Neal shortly after Christmas 1997. He told her he was about to come into $52 million and promised her escalating sums, eventually $2.5 million and a house in Las Vegas, for keeping quiet about an invented past as a hired killer. He borrowed about $6,000 from her. She made him sign a promissory note and, the prosecution said, was threatening to expose him. On July 2, 1998, she sold her car, expecting the new vehicle he had promised her.
Angela Fite worked as a dental assistant and had two children, a boy of five and a girl of two. She was separated from her husband, whom her family described as abusive, and she had planned to marry about three weeks after the date of her death. Her sister told the court that she was always happy and wanted a healthy home for herself and her children and someone who would love and respect her. A trust fund was set up for her children after her death.
On the morning of June 30, 1998, Neal had Rebecca Holberton write checks for more than $56,000 to pay her creditors. She was killed in Lakewood the same day.
Westword reported that he killed Candace Walters about eight hours before he arrived, at about 7 p.m. on Friday, July 3, at the home of a woman he was then seeing. He went down on one knee and proposed with a diamond ring, and the evening that followed took in a stretch limousine, several bars and a strip club, where he tipped lavishly. He paid for it with the dead women's money: Westword reported that he drew $1,287 from Holberton's account and $403 on Walters's debit card. The prosecutor's view of the motive was that Holberton wanted her money back and Walters was threatening to expose him, so that, in his phrase, the walls were caving in.
Angela Fite was killed late on July 5, 1998. Over the following days Neal held three other people captive, a young woman he knew, her roommate and a male friend; the woman survived a sexual assault, for which he was later convicted. During that time he recorded a long confession. The Pautler disciplinary opinion puts the time he held two of them at about thirty hours.
On the morning of Wednesday, July 8, 1998, Neal left. He told the three people he had held to contact the police and gave them a pager number at which he could be reached.
The same day, Holberton's co-workers asked the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office to check on her because she had missed several days of work. Deputy Michael Burgess, a nine-year veteran, went to make the welfare check. The bodies of all three women were found that day. Chief Deputy District Attorney Mark Pautler was sent to the scene and arrived shortly after noon. Later that day the three people Neal had released contacted the police, and investigators interviewed them.
In the early evening, detectives paged Neal from that apartment as he had instructed. He called back on a cellular phone whose location officers could not fix, and for about three and a half hours he talked with Deputy Sheriff Cheryl Zimmerman (the Colorado Supreme Court's 2002 opinion calls her Cheryl Moore). Another deputy recorded the call; Pautler listened, read the deputy's notes and passed on suggestions.
Neal confessed to the three killings and said he was armed. According to the disciplinary judge, he made statements that could be taken as threats to kill others and rambling claims about work for the CIA, the FBI and the White House, while also saying things that suggested he wanted to end matters without hurting anyone else. A law review account of the record says that at one point he claimed to have killed 500 people and said he would kill again if provoked, and that he indicated he had seen officers at the scene. Zimmerman and Pautler both believed he was a serious danger to the public.
Neal said he wanted to surrender but first wanted to talk to a lawyer. He was not represented at the time. He asked for a lawyer named Daniel Plattner; when that office number turned out to be out of service, he asked for a public defender. The deputy told him one was being contacted. None was.
Instead, Pautler took the phone as a public defender named "Mark Palmer." He spoke with Neal twice, for less than seven and a half minutes of the three and a half hours, and never said that he was a prosecutor. Neal set out three conditions for surrender: that he be held apart from other prisoners, that he be allowed to smoke, and that his lawyer be present. Pautler told him he would be there. When Neal asked what his rights were, Pautler avoided the question.
After further talks with the deputies and with a Denver television journalist he had known, Neal surrendered that evening without further incident, in a store parking lot. Advised of his Miranda rights, he did not ask for a lawyer. He was put in a cell by himself and given cigarettes. Pautler was at the surrender site but did not meet him, and no public defender was called.
When an attorney from the public defender's office came to see him, Neal said he already had a lawyer, Mark Palmer. The office told him no one by that name worked there. James Aber, head of the Jefferson County Public Defender's office, learned of the ruse about two weeks later from the recordings. Neal then dismissed the public defenders and went on alone with court-appointed advisory counsel. Whether the deception caused that break was disputed in the later proceedings; a 2004 law review article argued that it did, quoting Neal as saying he could not trust any lawyer after one had lied to him.
On September 14, 1998, Neal gave investigators Jose Aceves and Cheryl Zimmerman an interview that lasted nearly eight hours. In it he described the killings as calm and deliberate, called them "a mercy thing," and said Walters "was not going to let up." He said he had kept the surviving woman alive so that she could testify against him, as a warning to others. He said he identified with Ted Bundy, whose story was his favorite reading, and claimed he had been better than Bundy would have been. He also claimed to have had at least thirty more people lined up to kill over three days.
In February 1999, representing himself, Neal pleaded guilty before Judge Thomas Woodford, who questioned him for nearly an hour. Westword reported the pleas as three counts of first-degree murder, three counts of sexual assault and seven other counts, including kidnapping and felony menacing. He told the judge he was guilty "without a doubt, your honor." His advisory counsel, Randy Canney, doubted he was prepared and threatened to argue that he was not competent to represent himself; Neal said a psychiatrist had found no reason to think he was incompetent.
When a Westword reporter met him at the Jefferson County Detention Center on July 28, 1999, Neal had been given extra law library time, a tape recorder, a VCR and ten minutes a day on a cell phone, which he used to call a girlfriend in Arizona, reporters and his sister. He ran up a collect-call bill of nearly $1,000. He said he would not tell a hard-luck childhood story to save himself, that there was "no excuse for this crime," and that he wanted to take "responsibility for the whole thing." He also said, "I do not want to die, for I know I've turned around," and spoke of serving Jesus in prison. The lead prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Charles Tingle, had kept about two hours of the voicemails Neal left him over seven months. Public defender James Aber called the death penalty effort a farce; the prosecutors disagreed.
His sentence was decided by a panel of three judges rather than a jury: Judges Thomas Woodford, Frank Martinez and William Meyer. The hearing opened on September 20, 1999. Tingle and Chris Bachmeyer prosecuted. Tingle outlined six aggravating factors. Neal represented himself, raised no objections, and promised not to cross-examine the surviving woman or the victims' families. He conceded that each aggravating factor was present and offered three mitigating factors: his age, duress, and his claim to be no threat to society.
The surviving woman testified. At the end of her evidence Tingle showed her a photograph of Angela Fite, and Neal told the judge he had no questions. On the fourth day the court played the whole of the September 1998 interview; Bachmeyer insisted on the full recording so that no appeal could claim an excerpt had misled the judges. Neal's sister had earlier testified in support of a competency challenge, telling the court he moved between rational and incoherent speech in a single conversation; Judge Woodford rejected the challenge. A spiritual adviser testified that Neal had surrendered himself to God. Aceves, asked whether Neal had killed others, answered that he had not, but that investigators could not know for sure. Neal declined to testify and instead made an unsworn statement asking to live so he could serve God in prison.
Family members spoke for each of the three women: Holberton's former husband and her sister, who read a letter (her mother, who had Alzheimer's disease, had not been told of her death); Walters's daughter; and Fite's sister, father and mother.
On Wednesday, September 29, Judge Woodford announced the decision: "the only penalty for the brutal, needless killing visited upon these kind and lovely ladies is death." The panel's 36-page written findings held that the state had proved all of its aggravating factors, with minor deviations, and rejected every mitigating factor Neal offered. The judges questioned his account of abuse given his "pattern of habitual lying," found him so self-absorbed that his capacity for remorse was in doubt, called his religious conversion suspect given its timing, and said his plea "rings hollow in light of his past deceits and evil deeds." Neal, the findings said, could not point to the past as a basis for mercy. Members of the victims' families said they would attend the execution.
In February 2000 a lawyer acting for Neal filed a complaint against Pautler. Pautler was charged under Colorado's rules of professional conduct with dishonesty and with improper dealings with an unrepresented person. The Presiding Disciplinary Judge ruled against him on the dishonesty charge and a hearing board found the second violation. In a decision dated April 2, 2001, with one dissent, the board imposed a three-month suspension, stayed during twelve months of probation, with conditions that included retaking the professional responsibility examination and twenty hours of ethics training.
Pautler argued that he had acted to protect lives. The Colorado Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Kourlis issued on May 13, 2002, rejected that defense, affirmed both violations and upheld the sanction, adding his failure to correct the deception afterward as an aggravating factor. Rebecca B. Cross argued in the Fordham Urban Law Journal in 2003 that the sanction was unwarranted, since Neal had already confessed twice in detail and the evidence against him was insurmountable; Livingston Keithley argued in the University of Colorado Law Review in 2004 for a narrow duress exception while stressing that the lie had damaged Neal's relationship with his own lawyers.
Neal later hired lawyer Jeff Pagliuca to appeal the guilty plea and the death sentence, on grounds that included Pautler's conduct. Pagliuca called the prosecutor's justification "the epitome of arrogance." Writing in 2004, Keithley reported that the appeal was pending, and that the death sentence was separately under review for a possible constitutional violation because a panel of judges, not a jury, had imposed it; that review was being held while the appeal of the plea went forward. Neal, according to the Fordham article, said he was spending his time in a cell watching television, reading about Pautler's case "and enjoying every minute of it."
Much of what is known of his early life comes from Neal himself, and the sentencing panel said plainly that it did not trust his word. The military exploits he described to the women he courted were his own claims. During the July 8 negotiation he claimed to have killed 500 people, and in his September interview he claimed to have planned thirty more killings; no other killings were charged, and the lead investigator, asked at the sentencing hearing whether Neal had killed others, answered no, adding that investigators did not know for sure.
Accounts of the case differ on several points. Westword's 1999 account dates Holberton's death to June 30 and places Walters's death about eight hours before 7 p.m. on July 3, the evening of the engagement, the day after she sold her car. The Colorado Supreme Court's 2002 opinion places Pautler's arrival at the scene on June 8, 1998, while the Presiding Disciplinary Judge's opinion gives July 8, which agrees with the rest of the record. The negotiating deputy is called Cheryl Zimmerman in the disciplinary judge's opinion and in Westword, Sheryl Zimmerman in the Fordham article, and Cheryl Moore in the Supreme Court opinion and the Colorado law review. The amount Neal took from Holberton is given as as much as $70,000 by the prosecution and about $60,000 in his own account.
October 7, 1955: William Lee Neal is born at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
1984: marries his second wife in Houston; divorce final shortly after Christmas 1985.
November 1990: separates from his third wife.
1992: meets his fourth wife in Denver; their daughter is born July 24, 1993.
October 1995: his mother dies of cancer.
March 1996: files for divorce from his fourth wife.
July 1996: begins living with Rebecca Holberton in Lakewood.
December 1997: meets Candace Walters.
June 30, 1998: buys a splitting maul; Rebecca Holberton is killed.
July 3, 1998: Candace Walters is killed, about eight hours before Neal proposes to his girlfriend that evening.
July 5, 1998: Neal takes a young woman captive; Angela Fite is killed that night.
July 6 to 8, 1998: Neal holds the surviving woman and two others and records a confession.
July 8, 1998: Neal leaves; deputies find the three women dead in Lakewood; after a telephone negotiation of about three and a half hours, including Mark Pautler's call as "Mark Palmer," Neal surrenders that evening.
About two weeks later: the public defender's office learns of the ruse; Neal dismisses his public defenders.
September 14, 1998: Neal gives investigators an interview of nearly eight hours.
February 1999: pleads guilty before Judge Thomas Woodford.
July 28, 1999: Westword interviews him in the county jail.
September 20, 1999: the death penalty hearing opens before a three-judge panel.
September 29, 1999: the panel sentences him to death.
February 2000: a complaint is filed against Pautler on Neal's behalf.
April 2, 2001: the Presiding Disciplinary Judge rules against Pautler.
May 13, 2002: the Colorado Supreme Court affirms Pautler's discipline.
2003: the Fordham Urban Law Journal reports Neal's appeal of his plea and sentence.
2004: the University of Colorado Law Review reports the appeal pending and the death sentence under review.