Serial Killers of the '70s by Jane Fritsch
Author:Jane Fritsch [Fritsch, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:00+00:00
13.
WILLIAM BONIN
Vernon Butts attached a towel to a bar in his jail cell late one night in January of 1981 and quietly hanged himself. He was in a high-security area of the Menâs Central Jail in Los Angeles, and a guard had checked on him just after midnight. The guard checked again about forty minutes later, and Butts was dead. Jail officials said they were certain it was suicideâall the other inmates were locked down at that time of night and no one else was in the area.
Butts, a twenty-three-year-old who hoped to become a magician, had plenty of reason to be depressed. He had confessed to police that he was involved in the âFreeway Killerâ murders, another of the nightmarish episodes that terrorized Californians during the 1970s. Media speculation had put the number of Freeway Killer victimsâboys and young menâas high as forty going back to 1972, when the bodies of young men and teenage boys began turning up near freeways and major highways in Southern California. By the end of 1980, the real focus of the investigation into that long string of murders was William G. Bonin, a thirty-four-year-old truck driver from a suburb of Los Angeles. In the weeks before his suicide, Butts, more of a sidekick, had described for investigatorsâin gruesome detailâBoninâs attacks on some of the victims.
By early 1980, law enforcement officials in Los Angeles and four nearby counties had determined that twenty-nine murders in Southern California, dating back to April of 1978, were quite similar and were probably connected. But they stopped short of blaming them on one killer. The nude or nearly nude bodies of twenty-nine white males, all either teenagers or in their twenties, had been found along heavily traveled roadways in the area.
Bonin was in jail on the night of Buttsâs suicide at the end of 1981 and had been for more than a year. Police were suspicious of Bonin in 1980. They got a tip from a juvenile informant suggesting that Bonin might be involved in a string of murders, and on June 2, they put him under surveillance. Just before midnight on June 13, 1980, investigators tracked Bonin to a parking lot in Los Angeles and found him in the back of a van where, they said, he was having sex with a teenage boy. Bonin was arrested that night and charged with sodomy and oral copulation with an underage victimâa seventeen-year-old. More importantly, Bonin was also a suspect in the murder of Charles Miranda, a fifteen-year-old whose nude body had been found in February of 1980 in an alley in downtown Los Angeles. Miranda had been strangled to death. His face and other parts of his body had been beaten, and there were ligature marks on his neck, wrists, and ankles. To the public, it looked very much like the work of the Freeway Killer.
Prosecutors werenât quite ready to charge Bonin with Mirandaâs murder in June of 1980, but they did persuade a judge to set an unusually high bond of $250,000 in the case where he had been caught having sex with an underage victim.
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Espionage | Hoaxes & Deceptions |
Murder & Mayhem | Organized Crime |
Serial Killers | White Collar Crime |
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