On March 17, 1981, Hernando County deputies digging in the junkyard behind the Mansfield family house at Spring Hill, Florida, found a skull and bones in a shallow grave under a blanket. They had come looking for one missing girl. Their warrant named only Elaine Zeigler, fifteen, who had vanished from a campground near Brooksville on New Year's Eve 1975, but an informant had told them there was a body under the property, and they kept digging. For weeks they turned up the bones of chickens and cows. On March 24 they found a small sack of human bones beneath the fireplace. By early April they had dug up four young women, and they had plowed through the water pipes and electrical wiring laid over the graves to reach them.
William Mansfield Jr., known as Billy, was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 23, 1955, the eldest of five children. His father, William Sr., was a convicted child molester who served sentences in Michigan and Nevada and who liked to set his sons fighting. Billy dropped out of school at fourteen and altered his birth certificate to get into the Army, where he started drinking hard and then using drugs; the Veterans Administration hospital in Tampa treated him for addiction in 1978 and again in 1980. He married Phyllis Spielmaker in 1975 and had two children with her. She stayed in Grand Rapids with the children after their divorce in 1979, and said later that he was easygoing sober and very violent drunk, and that he had once talked to her about a murder.
Elaine Louise Zeigler was on vacation from Parkman, Ohio, with her mother, Betty, and stepfather, Blaine Chalker, at a KOA campground when she walked off toward the showers and did not come back. She was treated at first as a runaway. Some witnesses had seen a man in his twenties talking to a girl who looked like her near the showers, and saw her get into his light blue 1966 Ford Fairlane with Florida plates. The Chalkers stayed another week to help search and then drove home without her.
In January 1977 Mansfield pleaded guilty in Grand Rapids to sexual misconduct against a babysitter and got six months and three years' probation. Soon after, he assaulted two teenagers and went back to prison for the violation. There his cellmate, Albert Lee III, told him he had murdered an eleven-year-old girl named Linda VanderVeen. Mansfield testified against Lee in return for a lighter sentence and was out within a year.
The year 1980 was the worst of it. On March 23, at two in the morning, a lone gunman forced his way into a room at the Treasure Island Motel in Daytona Beach Shores, where eight college students from Ohio were on spring break. He robbed them, made them undress, and went to take one of them as a hostage. Carol Ann Barrett, eighteen, of Zanesville, offered to go in her friend's place. Her body was found the next day in a ditch beside Interstate 95 near Pecan Park Road in Jacksonville, about ninety miles north. She had been shot, execution style. Theresa Fillingim, sixteen, was reported missing in Tampa on May 16. Sandra Jean Graham, twenty-one, a Tampa native who worked at Hillsborough Community College, was last seen in the parking lot of Pam's Liquor Lounge in Tampa with a man described as a biker; she left her cigarettes, car keys and glasses behind in the bar. That was April 27. On June 19 Mansfield forced an eighteen-year-old woman, Pamela Sherrell, into his van, drove her to a rented trailer, and beat her, cutting her lip and bruising her neck. She went to the police. He was gone when they came for him.
He had gone to California with his younger brother, Gary. He was arrested at Santa Cruz on November 23, his twenty-fifth birthday, and bailed. On December 7 passing motorists found the half-naked body of Rene Saling, twenty-nine, a mother of three from Watsonville, in a drainage ditch beside Buena Vista Road. Her husband, Raymond, had last seen her the day before. Her clothes were torn and her blouse and pants pulled to her ankles, and the coroner ruled that she had been strangled. Four days later a rookie officer at Winnemucca, Nevada, stopped two men who gave false names and ages but matched the descriptions of the Mansfield brothers, and held them at the Humboldt County jail. At their arraignment in Watsonville on December 16 they wore paper bags over their heads to protect the identifications of any witnesses, and the papers called them the Bag Brothers.
Information developed in the California case, and an informant's tip, sent Hernando County deputies to Spring Hill. The first skeleton, found March 17, was described then as a white woman aged twenty-two to thirty; forty-one years later genetic genealogy showed she was Theresa Fillingim. The second was tentatively identified as Elaine Zeigler from her skull and a missing tooth. The fourth, identified by a forensic dentist in April, was Sandra Graham. The third, first thought to be a child under thirteen, has never been named. Skull reconstructions made at Colorado State University produced no match. It was suspected for years that one of the unknown women might be Melinda Harder, twenty-one, missing from St. Petersburg since July 27, 1980, until Harder's own remains were identified elsewhere in 2008.
The Saling trial was moved to San Rafael because of the publicity, and in August 1981 it ended with a deadlocked jury. On October 27, 1981, Mansfield unchained himself in the recreation yard of the Santa Cruz County jail, climbed onto a roof with another inmate and jumped. A woman who saw two men in orange running took them at first for joggers. After eleven hours of searching, deputies found him hiding in bushes at Paradise Park, still in his prison clothes. A Hernando County grand jury indicted him for murder and for the attempted sexual battery of Pamela Sherrell, and at the second California trial, which began February 8, 1982, his brother Gary testified against him. He was convicted of first-degree murder later that month and sentenced in April to twenty-five years to life.
In August 1982, after claiming innocence, he pleaded guilty in Florida to all four Spring Hill murders under a plea agreement that spared him the death penalty, and received four life terms. "I am pleading guilty because I am guilty of the charges and I have no other reason," his prepared statement said. Days later inmates at the Hernando County jail, among them the spree killer Robert Dale Henderson, tried to break out. Mansfield was offered a place in the escape and turned it down.
The case did not close. In October 2020, after Gary Mansfield's arrest on drug charges, more human remains were found at the family property. Theresa Fillingim was named in July 2022. In September 2022, after two years of interviews, Mansfield told Jacksonville detectives that he was the man in the police sketch drawn after Carol Ann Barrett's abduction, and confessed to taking her and killing her. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office announced the confession in January 2024 and said it would not prosecute because of the life sentences he was already serving. He has told investigators there may be more bodies in Hernando, Pasco and Pinellas counties, though no agreement was reached that would have traded more information for reduced charges. On June 22, 2026, the Hernando County Sheriff's Office, the FBI, the state attorney's office and forensic teams from Florida Gulf Coast University began digging at sites near Dry Creek Ranch and Sunshine Grove roads, where cadaver dogs had alerted. "We're also dealing with a serial killer who is less than truthful," Sheriff Al Nienhuis said. The dig ended the next afternoon with no remains found, and the sheriff's office said no further excavations were planned. Investigators are working genetic genealogy leads to name the fourth woman from the junkyard. Mansfield is held at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton.