William Mansfield was born in 1956, the eldest son of a man who was later sentenced to thirty years for child molestation. He had a police record of his own, including a year for sex offences in Michigan.
He was paroled in March 1980 and went back to the family home, a six-acre junkyard at Weeki Wachee Acres near Tampa. He lasted three months. On June 19 he was charged with battery and false imprisonment of a young woman, and in early September he left for California.
He was arrested at Santa Cruz on November 23, 1980 and released on fifteen hundred dollars' bail. The source describes that as a mistake, and says that by the time officers tried to correct it two weeks later it was already too late for one of his victims. Rene Sailing, thirty, was last seen leaving a California tavern with him on December 6. Her body, shot through, was recovered from a drainage ditch the next morning. Warrants were issued, and he was taken days later at Winnemucca, Nevada, along with his twenty-three-year-old brother Gary, who was charged as an accessory after the fact.
On March 16, 1981 Hernando County deputies arrived at the family home with a search warrant, having been told that a missing woman from Tampa, Sandra Graham, twenty-one, might be buried on the property. They came equipped to excavate.
They found the first skeleton on March 17, a white woman in her twenties. The second, a week later, was Elaine Zeigler, fifteen, a tourist from Ohio who had vanished from a nearby campground on New Year's Eve 1975. A third was found on April 3 and was never identified either. The fourth, four days after that, was Sandra Graham.
All four were buried within forty feet of the house. Two of them have never been named. Police concluded that neither his father, then serving his sentence, nor his mother, who said she knew nothing about the bodies, had any part in the killings. No further remains were found and the digging was stopped in mid-April.
He was also suspected of two other Florida murders that were never charged. Melinda Harder, twenty-one, was a neighbour of his in St Petersburg and disappeared on July 27, 1980. Carrol Barret, another woman from Ohio, was abducted from her motel room at Daytona Beach in 1980, shot, and left beside a highway near Jacksonville; Mansfield matched the description of her killer but no witness could identify him.
He was convicted in both states and is serving concurrent life sentences. The reference work that carries this account gives the disposition as concurrent life terms and nothing further; the accessible material has no account of either trial and nothing about where he is held or whether he is still alive.
That source also dates the end of the excavation to mid-April 1980, which cannot be right, since it began in March 1981.