In March 1978 Willie Bosket, then 15, shot two men to death during robberies on subway trains in Harlem and shot and wounded a third man. Because he was under 16, his case went to New York City Family Court, where the most he could receive was a placement of about five years in a state youth facility. A newspaper account of that outcome, read by Governor Hugh Carey on a campaign flight in June 1978, set off a political reversal. Within weeks New York passed the Juvenile Offender Act of 1978, which moved children as young as 13 charged with murder, and 14- and 15-year-olds charged with a list of violent felonies, into the adult criminal courts.
The law did not apply to Bosket, whose case was already decided. He was released at 21 and was arrested again within months. In prison he waged what he called a war against the system, setting fires and attacking officers, and he stabbed a correction officer in the chest in 1988. He is serving three consecutive terms of 25 years to life and has been held apart from other prisoners since 1989, for many years in a cell built for him alone.
Bosket was 15 at the time of the killings. He has been named in news reporting since 1978, wrote and spoke publicly about his life, and has for decades been an adult prisoner known by name.
Willie James Bosket Jr. was born in December 1962 to Laura Roane, the New York Review of Books recorded in its 1995 review of Fox Butterfield's book about his family. He grew up in Harlem. A childhood friend who walked a WNYC reporter around the block in 2018 pointed to the family's first-floor apartment on 114th Street near Lenox Avenue and described a street where children played double Dutch and also ran indoors at the sound of gunshots.
His father, William James Bosket, known as Butch, was in prison before Willie was born. Butterfield, a New York Times reporter, told C-SPAN's Booknotes in 1996 that Butch and Laura had traveled from New York to the Midwest while Butch was absconding from parole, and that in Milwaukee, after a pawnbroker refused to pay him for some pictures he was trying to sell, Butch stabbed the pawnbroker and another customer to death. WNYC reported that Laura was pregnant with Willie at the time and that Butch was sent to prison in Wisconsin for murdering two men. The Review of Books described him as doing life in Wisconsin for a double murder.
Father and son never met. Butterfield said Willie learned the truth at about six, when he saw a photograph on his grandmother's dresser and was told that the man was his father and that he was in prison for killing two men. By Butterfield's account the boy took it as a mark of toughness, and he later told teachers and classmates that his father was a murderer and that he would grow up to be just like him.
Butch Bosket's later life took an unusual turn. While serving time at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, he earned a college degree, and in January 1980 he became the first prisoner inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, according to the Review of Books; Butterfield told C-SPAN he graduated from the University of Kansas with a straight-A average in computer science and psychology. TIME reported in 1989 that he was released in 1983 and found work as a university teaching assistant. In 1985 he was arrested on a charge of molesting a young child. Butterfield said Butch denied it. During an escape attempt from a Milwaukee hospital, he exchanged fire with sheriff's deputies, then shot his girlfriend and himself.
Butterfield traced the family further back, through Willie's grandfather James and great-grandfather Pud Bosket to an enslaved ancestor in Edgefield County, South Carolina. His book, All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence, published by Knopf in 1995, argues that the family's violence descended from a Southern code of honor and respect. The Christian Science Monitor's reviewer called it a serious and unsparing piece of reporting. Butterfield told C-SPAN that Bosket gave him his juvenile and psychiatric records and wrote letters of permission so he could obtain more from the state Division for Youth, and that he interviewed about 200 people.
Bosket's family and friends described a boy who was both very bright and violent from an early age. By the age of 9, WNYC and NPR reported, he had set fire to a homeless man, thrown a typewriter out of a school window, and attacked his younger sister after she told on him. His school sent him for evaluation at Bellevue Hospital's children's psychiatric ward. Bosket later told Butterfield that his paternal grandfather, recently released from jail, had sexually abused him at about that age; WNYC reported the account as Bosket's own.
His mother went to Family Court for help. At 9 he was placed at the Wiltwyck School, a residential program on a wooded property with a therapeutic approach, as a "person in need of supervision." Carole Darden, an intake social worker there, told WNYC he was like "a bright shiny penny" when he arrived, self-assured in a way most new children were not. He learned to read and write at Wiltwyck, but he also fought other children, and after he attacked a nurse and took the school's van he was sent away. Over the next three and a half years he moved from one institution to another.
At 14 a Family Court judge sent him to Brookwood, one of the state's two secure detention centers for boys. A documentary crew, Alan and Susan Raymond, filmed him there for their 1978 film Bad Boys. In the footage he spoke about how he felt free mowing grass on the grounds and said he expected to go home for good. Soon afterward, in a hallway, he smashed the camera into Alan Raymond's face. A Brookwood social worker, Sylvia Hoenig, told WNYC she wrote to the head of the state Division for Youth warning that he was still too dangerous to release. He was released in September 1977.
About six months later, in March 1978, Bosket began robbing passengers on the subway, sometimes with his cousin Herman Spates, who was 17. Butterfield described the trains as the boy's "wild west," the place he went for adventure, and said he had recently bought a handgun and holster.
On the afternoon of Sunday, March 19, 1978, a man named Noel Perez fell asleep on a No. 3 train heading north through Harlem. WNYC described him as middle-aged, wearing pink sunglasses and a large gold digital watch; City Journal described him as a man from the Bronx. As the car emptied, Bosket tried to take the watch. Perez stirred, and Bosket shot him twice in the head. NPR marked the 40th anniversary of the killing on March 19, 2018. Perez was a stranger to Bosket; Butterfield said the victims of the subway robberies were poor, Hispanic working people whom Bosket shot when he took a movement as resistance or disrespect.
Over the following days Bosket and his cousin kept riding the trains. They shot a transit worker in the back; he survived. City Journal described him as a motorman and WNYC as a maintenance worker. They committed other armed robberies. Then, within about ten days of the first killing, Bosket shot and killed a second passenger on another train. City Journal, writing in 2020, counted four shootings by Bosket in one month: two men killed, the motorman wounded, and another passenger wounded. Of the wounded men, nothing more was made public.
Of the second man who died, the accounts say only that he was a subway passenger shot during an attempted robbery and, in Butterfield's general description, a working man of Hispanic background. Nothing has been published about his family or his life. That silence is a gap in the record, not a judgment about him.
After the second killing, transit police identified Bosket as a suspect. Butterfield told C-SPAN that detectives built a profile from the pattern of robberies, that Bosket had thrown away one victim's wallet near his home, and that his record of earlier subway robberies meant they already knew his name and address. When he was picked up, Butterfield said, he admitted the shootings, in a way that sounded like boasting. The Daily News headline, read aloud in the WNYC series, reported that two youths aged 15 and 17, described by police as "real tough guys," had been arrested for the subway slayings of two men and the wounding of a third.
Under New York law in 1978, a 15-year-old could not be tried in the adult criminal courts for murder. His case went to Family Court as a juvenile delinquency proceeding. Assistant District Attorney Robert Silbering of the Manhattan district attorney's office prosecuted it.
A Family Court delinquency case differs from a criminal trial in ways that matter to this case. There is no jury; a judge decides whether the child committed the acts alleged, at a fact-finding hearing, or accepts the child's admission. If the acts are proved, the court makes a finding and adjudicates the child a juvenile delinquent, and then orders a disposition, such as placement in a state facility, rather than imposing a prison sentence. New York's Family Court Act says that such an adjudication may not be called a conviction and that the child may not be called a criminal because of it. In legal terms, then, Bosket was adjudicated a juvenile delinquent for the two killings and the shooting of the third man; he was not convicted of murder. Butterfield, speaking loosely in 1996, said Bosket was "convicted" of killing two men and of the attempted murder of a third.
The disposition was placement with the state Division for Youth for the maximum then available. The Marshall Project, the New York Times and WNYC put that maximum at five years; NPR's 2018 report said five and a half. The Saratogian, in 2018, summarized it as five years, "the maximum allowed at the time." The New York Review of Books recorded that Bosket boasted in court of having committed more than 2,000 crimes by the age of 15; he repeated the figure to TIME and the Times in later years.
Silbering told NPR in 2018 that Bosket was the most violent offender he had come across in 25 years as a prosecutor, and that some offenders had to be "warehoused" to protect the public. Thirty years after the case he told the New York Times he had watched the boy's rage build in the courtroom as if a switch had been thrown, and that he had never seen anything like it before or since.
In June 1978 Governor Hugh Carey, a Democrat, was running for re-election against a Republican who called him soft on crime; he had recently vetoed a bill to restore the death penalty. According to the Marshall Project, on June 29, 1978, while flying to Rochester for a campaign event, Carey read a Daily News article reporting that a 15-year-old who had killed two men and shot a third on the subway had been given five years in a juvenile facility. WNYC said the flight came two days after the disposition. The article, by reporter Neal Hirshfeld, opened with the claim that the boy liked to kill because it was fun, and it reported that he had been released from detention the previous year against the advice of several staff members.
Carey, who had long opposed trying juveniles as adults, reversed himself that day. WNYC aired his words: the case had him "outraged," and if a person was unfit to be part of society, that person would stay in secure custody for life. The Marshall Project reported that he said Bosket would never walk the streets again. Within a week he had called the legislature back to Albany for an emergency session on youth crime.
The bill, a broad crime package, was introduced in an extraordinary session of the legislature on July 14, 1978, and Carey signed it on July 20, 1978, as Chapter 481 of the Laws of 1978, according to an August 1978 analysis by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. Most of its juvenile provisions took effect on September 1, 1978.
The law created a new category of "juvenile offender." Thirteen-year-olds charged with second-degree murder, and 14- and 15-year-olds charged with murder or any of a list of serious violent felonies, would start in the adult criminal courts rather than in Family Court. Cases could be removed back to Family Court in some circumstances, but not after a conviction for second-degree murder. Sentences were adult-style indeterminate terms, though shorter than for adults: for second-degree murder, a minimum of five to nine years and a maximum of life. Sources count the eligible felonies differently; the Marshall Project gave 17 and WNYC 14.
New York was among the first states to start such children in adult court instead of waiving them there case by case. The Marshall Project reported that by 1997 all 50 states allowed or required some juveniles to be tried as adults, and it called the measure the "Willie Bosket law." NPR reported in 2018 that some 100,000 people under 18 were being tried in adult criminal courts each year. Researchers Simon Singer and David McDowall, analyzing arrest data in New York City and upstate New York in a 1988 study, concluded that the law had not been effective in reducing violent juvenile crime.
Carey won re-election in November 1978. Bosket stayed in the juvenile system under the 1978 disposition.
Butterfield said the first contact between Willie and Butch came after the arrest. A Daily News story identified the wrong man as Willie's father, a relative with the same name who was also in prison; Willie wrote to him, and that man passed a letter to Butch at Leavenworth, who then wrote to his son. TIME later quoted Willie as saying that genetics had played a part in what he was, but that what he learned from his father's life was never to conform to the system.
Bosket was released at 21 after serving his juvenile term. Butterfield said he was out for about two months, during which he married briefly; the Saratogian reported that he has spent all but 100 days of his adult life in custody. The Christian Science Monitor's review of Butterfield's book said he came close to leaving crime behind at 21, until an argument over a woman, in which he drew a knife, drew him back into the courts.
The New York Times reported in 2008 that shortly after completing his sentence he was arrested for assaulting a 72-year-old man. TIME described it in 1989 as an attempt to rob and knife a 72-year-old, half-blind man; NPR described the charge as attempted armed robbery; City Journal dated the assault and robbery to 1984.
Back in custody as an adult, Bosket was violent toward officers and staff. TIME listed, in 1989, a guard struck with a lead pipe, a cell set on fire seven times and a death threat mailed to President Ronald Reagan, among other acts. Butterfield described him throwing hot coffee and feces at guards, biting a nurse's finger and swallowing objects such as pens, nail clippers and razor blades, sometimes, he believed, in the hope of being moved to a hospital from which he might escape. Bosket called the criminal justice system his "surrogate mother" and described himself as a political prisoner.
One of the earlier prison incidents was an arson. The Appellate Division, Fourth Department, affirmed his conviction in Oneida County Court for fourth-degree arson. The opinion records that one juror learned during the trial that he had previously committed a homicide and was excused, and that the court went on to sentence him as a persistent felony offender, a status that allows a life term, after fingerprint evidence linked him to an earlier conviction.
On April 16, 1988, at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, a maximum-security prison, Bosket stabbed correction officer Earl Porter in the chest. Porter, a 1974 graduate of Ballston Spa High School, had been a state correction officer for about a year. He had never dealt with Bosket before. Butterfield told C-SPAN that Bosket had removed a rod from a typewriter he had been given for his legal work, ground it to a point and hidden it under his foot, which the escorting officers did not check. In the visiting room, where he was being interviewed by a young journalist, he announced that he had a weapon and stabbed the officer, who did not know him. TIME said it happened in full view of the reporter whom Bosket had enlisted to write his life story.
The weapon came within about half an inch of Porter's heart, Butterfield said. Porter needed emergency surgery at a hospital in Newburgh and left the hospital several days later. He went on to a long career in state corrections and retired on September 30, 2013. Speaking to the Saratogian 30 years after the attack, he said he tried not to think about it, but it never went away. His daughter, Kristy Roberts, said he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Bosket acted as his own lawyer at the 1989 trial. Butterfield said he admitted the stabbing in his opening statement and told the jury that the real question was why he had done it, describing himself as a product created by the system. The Saratogian reported that Porter, who testified, recalled Bosket saying that his only regret was that he had not killed him. Bosket was convicted of first-degree attempted murder, first-degree assault, third-degree criminal possession of a weapon and first-degree promoting prison contraband, and given a life sentence, with a minimum of 25 years.
Butterfield said the New York Times assigned him to look into Bosket during this trial, after an editor asked him to find out why Bosket was so violent.
In April 1989, while held at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in Sullivan County, Bosket swung a chain and padlock at a correction officer. A Sullivan County jury convicted him of two counts of second-degree assault, and he was sentenced as a persistent felon to two concurrent terms of 25 years to life, to run after the sentences he was already serving. On June 29, 1995, the Appellate Division, Third Department, affirmed. It rejected his claims that pretrial publicity had made a fair trial impossible and found that the trial judge had ample basis to treat him as a threat to courtroom security. TIME reported that in April 1989, on his way to court, he kicked an officer who was removing a leg shackle and shouted to photographers to ask if they had got the picture.
By 1995, the Review of Books noted, he was serving three consecutive terms of 25 years to life, with release unlikely before about 2062. The Saratogian reported in 2018 that his total sentence was 82 years to life.
The state built a special cell for him at Woodbourne, a medium-security prison in the Catskills, about 75 miles north of Manhattan. TIME described it in 1989 as lined with Plexiglas and watched by three video cameras, with Bosket chained backward to the inside of his cell door when a visitor came. Thomas Coughlin III, the state corrections commissioner, told TIME that it was all theater to Willie and that officials tried not to give him a stage. Bosket filed a lawsuit charging cruel and unusual punishment. He told TIME that if the state brought back the death penalty he would not kill, he would maim.
When Butterfield described the cell to C-SPAN in 1996, Bosket was allowed no books, newspapers, radio or television, four cameras watched him around the clock, guards were not supposed to speak to him, and the light fixtures had been removed after he ate light bulbs. Butterfield said guards called him Hannibal Lecter and that his custody cost well over $100,000 a year. Bosket had read Butterfield's book after it passed through prison clearance.
Prison reports cited by the New York Times showed that from 1985 to 1994 Bosket was written up nearly 250 times for disciplinary violations, including spitting on guards, throwing food and swallowing a spoon handle. Then the violations stopped.
By September 2008, when the Times visited him at Woodbourne, Bosket, then 45, had gone 14 years without a disciplinary violation. He spent 23 hours a day in a 9-by-6-foot cell with a cot and a combined sink and toilet. Visitors, of whom he had perhaps two a year, spoke to him through a small window of fogged Plexiglas and bars. He had one hour of solitary recreation a day. He said he was chained to a door during that hour; officials disputed it. He was scheduled to stay apart from the general population until 2046, though Erik Kriss, a Department of Correctional Services spokesman, said his status was reviewed periodically and that he had been violent or threatening violence "practically every day" in the past. Linda Foglia, another spokeswoman, said few if any current inmates had been in disciplinary housing longer.
Jo Allison Henn, a lawyer who had represented him in an unsuccessful challenge to his restrictions about 20 years earlier, told the Times that he was dangerous and had killed people, but that the conditions were beyond inhumane. Bosket described his life as the same every day and called it hell. He read whatever he could get. He said he had changed his conduct in 1994 as a deliberate choice, that he was not proud of many things he had done, and that he would rather be dead. His sister Cheryl Stewart told the Times he had expressed remorse in letters and would not do it again if he could.
In March 2018 WNYC reporters visited him unannounced at a prison in upstate New York and spoke with him for about an hour through Plexiglas in a no-contact area. They found a friendly, middle-aged man in bifocals who seemed shut down but eager for contact, and who did not know that his older sister had died several years earlier. When they passed on messages from his family, now living in North Carolina, he said he wanted them to forget him so he would not be a burden. His niece Danielle, who had visited him as a child with his mother, said he had taught her to read and write through the Plexiglas, and that he had been like a father to her. WNYC reported that he was no longer in the specially built cell but had been in solitary confinement for 29 years.
The Saratogian reported the same month that he was held at Five Points Correctional Facility in Romulus, Seneca County, that he had been in solitary since 1989, and that his originally expected release from solitary in 2046 had been brought forward because of improved behavior, with his status reviewed regularly.
On March 20, 2018, the Saratogian reported that Bosket was serving 82 years to life at Five Points Correctional Facility and remained in disciplinary isolation. Where he is held in 2026, and under what conditions, has not been publicly confirmed. He would be 63 or 64 in late 2026.
The Juvenile Offender Act remained the basis of New York's handling of serious crimes by 13- to 15-year-olds for decades, and the Marshall Project in 2014 traced the national turn toward trying children as adults to Carey's reversal in 1978. Bosket's case has been revisited whenever New York debated youth justice. In 2020, after the killing of a college student in Manhattan in which a 13-year-old was charged, City Journal's Nicole Gelinas cited Bosket's record of four shootings in one month to argue against loosening the law, while the WNYC series Caught, in 2018, used his life to ask whether the system built in reaction to him fit the children it now handled. Dwayne Betts, a lawyer consulting on the series, argued that the law treated young people as a class rather than as individuals.
Butterfield's All God's Children was widely reviewed, by Robert Stone in the New York Review of Books among others, and reissued by Vintage in 2008. Butterfield said that prosecutors and politicians cited Bosket in arguments for restoring the death penalty, which New York reinstated in 1995.
Beyond the circumstances of the shootings, little has been published about Noel Perez, the second man who died or the two men who were wounded. Earl Porter has spoken publicly about the lasting effect of the attack on him.
Proven, in a juvenile proceeding: the two subway killings and the shooting of a third man, through a Family Court delinquency adjudication in 1978. This is not a criminal conviction under New York law.
How the Family Court case ended: the reliable sources record only the adjudication and the five-year placement, not how the hearing concluded.
The length of the juvenile term: five years (Marshall Project, New York Times, WNYC, Saratogian) or five and a half years (NPR).
Other killings: Bosket claimed more than 2,000 crimes by age 15, and Butterfield said Bosket acknowledged killing more people than the two in his case and that he "almost undoubtedly" killed others. No other killing was ever charged, and no victim, date or place has been identified. These claims are unproven.
The second victim's identity and the exact date: reliable reporting gives neither his name nor the day he was shot.
The 1984 case: the outcome of the charge arising from the attack on the 72-year-old man, and the length of any sentence, have not been confirmed in reliable reporting.
The father's crime: Butterfield, speaking in 1996, placed the Milwaukee killings in 1961; WNYC and other accounts say Laura was pregnant with Willie at the time, which, given his birth in December 1962, points to 1962.
December 1962: Willie James Bosket Jr. is born in New York City; his father, Butch Bosket, is in prison in Wisconsin for killing two men in Milwaukee.
About 1968: Willie learns that his father is in prison for killing two men.
About 1971 to 1972: at about 9, after violent incidents at home and school, he is placed at the Wiltwyck School as a person in need of supervision.
Mid-1970s: moves between institutions; at 14 is sent to the Brookwood secure center, where he is filmed for the documentary Bad Boys.
September 1977: released from Brookwood.
March 19, 1978: shoots and kills Noel Perez on a No. 3 train in Harlem.
March 1978: over about ten days, shoots a transit motorman, who survives, commits other robberies, and shoots and kills a second passenger.
Late March 1978: arrested with his cousin, Herman Spates, 17.
June 1978: adjudicated in Family Court and placed with the Division for Youth for the maximum, reported as five years.
June 29, 1978: Governor Hugh Carey reads a Daily News account on a flight to Rochester and reverses his position on trying juveniles as adults.
July 14, 1978: crime bill introduced in an extraordinary session of the legislature.
July 20, 1978: Carey signs the Juvenile Offender Act (Chapter 481, Laws of 1978).
September 1, 1978: the juvenile offender provisions take effect.
January 1980: Butch Bosket, at Leavenworth, becomes the first prisoner inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.
1983: Butch Bosket is released.
1984 (reported): Willie, released at 21, is arrested within months over an attack on a 72-year-old man.
1985: Butch Bosket is arrested on a child molestation charge and dies in a shootout during an escape attempt in Milwaukee, after shooting his girlfriend.
1985 to 1994: Willie is cited nearly 250 times for disciplinary violations.
April 16, 1988: stabs correction officer Earl Porter at Shawangunk Correctional Facility.
1989: represents himself at trial; convicted of first-degree attempted murder and other counts; sentenced to life.
April 1989: swings a chain and padlock at an officer at Woodbourne; later convicted of two counts of second-degree assault and sentenced to 25 years to life.
1989 onward: held in disciplinary isolation, for years in a Plexiglas-lined cell at Woodbourne.
1994: last recorded disciplinary violation as of 2008.
June 29, 1995: Appellate Division, Third Department, affirms the 1989 assault conviction.
1995: Knopf publishes Fox Butterfield's All God's Children.
September 2008: the New York Times reports he has been isolated for two decades, with release to general population scheduled for 2046.
March 2018: WNYC and NPR mark 40 years since the first killing; the Saratogian reports him at Five Points Correctional Facility, serving 82 years to life.