Freeway Killer Case Twists Through Courts
by Los Angeles (AP)
Southern Californians, inured to the horror of mass murder by the likes of Charles Manson, have been shocked anew by a grisly case now snaking its tangled way through the courts. It is called “the Freeway Killer case,” and the gruesome details unfolding daily involve homosexuality, black magic and demonic tortures of perhaps 44 victims. The dead were young men and boys, mostly in their teens, whose mutilated bodies were dumped along or near the maze of high-speed freeways that crisscross this vast urban sprawl. The prime suspect, charged with 14 of the slayings, is a 34-year-old truckdriver and Vietnam veteran named William Bonin, a twice paroled sex offender whose sexual problems reportedly date back to the age of 10. He has been described by a prosecutor as “the most arch-evil person who ever existed.”
An informant told police that Bonin once said he liked to strangle teenage boys on Friday and Saturday nights so he could have Sundays free to take his girlfriend roller skating. Three young men, one of them said to be possibly retarded, have been charged as Bonin s accomplices in murder. A fifth defendant, Vernon Butts, 23, who confessed his role in some of the killings, was found dead in his jail cell last month, an apparent suicide. Butts had dabbled in the occult and kept two coffins in his home. In a detailed confession he called the murder spree “a good little nightmare.” The boyish Butts, who was said to have become despondent when his confession was made public, claimed he never killed any victims but rather held down the screaming youths while Bonin tortured and strangled them.
Butts gave a chilling account of Bonin’s search for victims as he cruised Southern California in a green van, picking up hitchhikers or offering rides to youngsters waiting for buses. One 12-year-old victim disappeared while waiting for a bus to Disneyland. Butts told of Bonin’s grotesque torture methods using an ice pick and a coat hanger before he strangled the young men with their own T-shirts. In one case. Butts recalled how he and Bonin left a movie and picked up a hitchhiker “somewhere in the middle of the city.” “We picked up the boy, took him out to the middle of nowhere and had sex with him and then he (Bonin) killed him,” Butts said. “Bill (Bonin) said he loved those sounds of screams.” Of his own role in the killings, Butts said, “After the first one I couldn’t do anything about it.”
Bonin, he explained, had “a hypnotic way” about him that led the younger man to follow. Others are said to have followed, too. Three men charged in the case are James Munro, 19, who once worked with Bonin; Gregory Miley, 19, whose family says he is retarded, and William Ray Pugh, 18, a sandy-haired man with braces on his teeth. Pugh first led the police to Bonin. “We know that Bonin had his group, and they did not act independently of him,” said one law enforcement official, who asked not to be identified. “In the cases of Butts, Munro and Miley, all came from broken homes with no strong father identification. Bonin became the father. He gave them love,” the official said. Authorities have also speculated that some young men helped Bonin because they feared they might be his next victims if they objected.
Before he died. Butts linked Bonin to 21 of the freeway killings a series of similar murders which began in 1972. Bodies have been found on or near freeways in Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, San Bernardino and Kern counties, but investigators say all 44 deaths may not be part of the same case. Bonin was in custody during the earlier killings. He was released in f Gregory Miley October 1978. The 14 murders with which he is charged date from May 1979 to May 1980. Recent disclosures in the case indicate Bonin and at least two co-defendants have made admissions to authorities as Bonin is scheduled for trial May 4. His prosecutor will be veteran Deputy District Attorney Willian Bonin Aaron Stovitz, who participated in the prosecution of Manson in the Tate-LaBianca murders of 1969.
Stovitz, who says he once thought the murders of Sharon Tate and six others was “the most horrible thing we would ever see,” shakes his head in contemplating the increase in multiple murders. “Is there a lesson to be learned from this case? Yes,” he said. “I would tell kids: ‘Don’t accept rides from strangers, either hitchhiking or gratuitous offers be they from girls, boys or in between.” “And I would tell parents: ‘Let your sons and daughters see the pictures of these murdered children.”
