Original subtitles

He called himself a "Sick Ripper."

He was an affable Southern gentleman,

had a good sense of humor,

and was very easygoing and laid back.

He shows that picture and tells a jailhouse inmate,

I'm the one that murdered this young woman.

She was stepping into a death chamber.

He's a monster.

Sick.

He told me things I don't know if I was ready to hear.

He's probably the most infamous serial killer

that we identified in Connecticut.

And she kept repeating, he's going to kill me.

And he shoots my daughter.

That's about the only time in my career

that I just wanted to shoot him.

You can run, but you can't hide.

I was in charge of the police department.

We got called to a scene out on Hartford Road

behind one of our shopping plazas.

A gentleman walking through the woods

came across what he believed to be human remains.

He knew he had to call the police.

And he admitted he had been back there,

you know, hoping to hunt.

And he had found-- you know, he'd found a skull.

That's a super busy street.

One of the state's largest malls

is literally 100 yards up the road.

But it's a little strip mall with a couple of restaurants.

It proceeded with a whole search of the area.

We got the state anthropologist

and the state medical examiner involved

um, and they ended up to being the remains

of three people.

They figured out that it was three

separate women was because there were three, like,

either right or left hip bones.

So obviously that indicates three different people.

They were all identified at that time as Jane Does.

Which just broke my heart.

We needed to know who they were,

reunite them with their families.

No human being should be left behind like that.

We relied heavily

on reports of missing persons.

We searched databases in the tri-state area

to try to match with whatever we could

with whatever the science at the time

was allowing us to do.

Someone has got to find justice.

In those years,

the New Britain Police Department did everything,

everything they could possibly do to identify these women.

These women were loved, and somebody is missing them.

And the trick is how do you figure out who?

So about 2009, two New Britain detectives

drove two skulls,

and at that point, they were known as

Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2,

to a specialized unit within the FBI

in Quantico, Virginia.

And what that unit does is it creates

busts, basically, of what they thought

the person would look like.

And by 2010, the police announced, you know,

we've got these busts in the hopes that

somebody would recognize these women.

We published photos of it in the local media.

And it was the same night or the next night

after it was ran I received a phone call.

It did lead to the discovery

that Jane Doe 1 was Diane Cusack.

She had been addicted to drugs for many years

and lived a very hard life on the streets.

Diane was never reported as missing,

but not because her family didn't care.

It was because there were periods of her life

where she wouldn't communicate.

This one had gone on too long.

They start-- they had become very concerned.

She and her family had been estranged

for a good number of years,

but the bust kind of looked like her a bit

and that prompted, I think it was her brother and his wife,

to come forward and say, you know what?

Hey, this may be Diane.

I remember her telling me, you know,

the face looks like Diane.

The hair is wrong, but the face looks like Diane.

We ran with that, and we were able to make

a dental match and a DNA match at that point with Diane.

We could talk to her family, friends, retrace her steps.

When was she last seen?

And that brought us back to 2003.

So now we had a date range.

In September of 2013,

again, we get the notice, oh, a big press conference.

So I walk into the training room at the police station

and there is this poster

of this gorgeous young girl

with jet-black hair, you know,

just done beautifully, red lipstick, smiling.

She had big, big hoop earrings.

They had identified Joyvaline Martinez

through her DNA.

She went missing in October of 2003.

I mean, she was missed terribly.

Her sister Sandra said

they refused to move out of New Britain

because they didn't know if someday,

she was going to return.

As time goes on, technology improves,

and their capability in terms of, you know,

calling DNA and examining DNA improves.

So enough time had gone by that they were able to identify her.

He told the other inmates what he had done.

And his name is William Devin Howell.

At that time, William Devin Howell

and Jonathan Mills were playing a card game

with a cold case card playing deck.

The playing cards is a

technique that the police and the prosecution have used

to try to solve cold cases, and they put these cards

into the Department of Corrections systems

and allow the inmates to play cards

and on the cards are faces of deceased individuals

whose cases are unsolved.

They have their phone number, hotline to call,

and a lot of inmates, um, take advantage of that.

Either because they know or they don't know

but they're going to try to pretend that they know

information to try to get their sentences commuted or shortened

or something of that sort, some kind of benefit.

Howell pulls the card of Joyvaline Martinez.

He shows that picture to Jonathan Mills and tells Mills,

I'm the one that murdered this young woman.

Not only did I murder Joyvaline Martinez,

I murdered seven people and I put all of their bodies

behind a strip mall in New Britain.

He even went as far as drawing a map

and showing him the placement of those graves

in his burial ground.

He said that he buried these bodies in his garden.

And he called himself a "Sick Ripper."

We brought in the cadaver dog that was offered by the FBI.

This dog alerted us to areas

in a very large piece of acreage that was again,

very heavily wooded and difficult to traverse.

Within days, they had found four more bodies.

- 22. - Mm.

Possibly.

Mm-hmm.

Mel, she and I, we had an amazing childhood.

We played with Barbies and she would play the piano.

She was amazing.

A very strong person.

Even physically.

She was tiny but still strong.

She was a good mother. She loved her kids.

I can remember being around 16.

She was around 17.

And I can remember seeing a change.

She had a really strong addiction to drugs.

I couldn't imagine having something so strong

taking control of you

to where I know she wanted to be a good mom...

and then she couldn't be.

I knew something really bad happened.

When Nilsa Arizmendi disappeared

on July 25th of 2003,

her family went almost immediately to authorities.

And she was known to frequently call her mother

and her four children and visit with them,

so her not being around was a noticeable concern

to the family members.

Nilsa and her boyfriend lived in a motel

where they would leave every afternoon

and walk about a mile and a half into New Britain,

where Nilsa would hustle the streets.

Nilsa's boyfriend was the one who said, you know what?

She went off with this guy and never came back.

The last person to be seen with his girlfriend,

Nilsa Arizmendi, was William Devin Howell.

When the investigators searched Howell's van,

they discover one DNA sample

belonging to Nilsa Arizmendi.

I think what motivated him to accept that plea was

the fact that the prosecution

had blood DNA evidence on hand

showing that Nilsa Arizmendi's blood was in that van.

Now, granted, it was just a single drop of blood,

but they had it.

It took a few weeks or so to positively identify each one,

and they announced that one of the remains was Nilsa's.

At that point,

we did identify the remaining victims.

There was seven victims

all buried in the same general area.

My mom was in contact with one officer.

And she had called me and said they want to meet with me.

So I kind of knew. I knew something was going on.

Ironically enough, it was on Mel's birthday.

Huh.

And I remember her calling.

And, uh...

all she said was it's her.

Melanie Camilini, a young mother of two children.

She was working the streets in Waterbury, Connecticut.

And unfortunately for her,

when she stepped into that 1985 Ford Econoline van,

she was stepping into a death chamber.

He did first attempt to kill her

after raping her with a hammer.

He said that it didn't even knock her out,

but it terrified her and she pled for her life.

At that point, he decided to strangle her.

He thought it would be the quickest

and most efficient way to bring about her death.

These victims were Diane Cusack, Mary Jane Menard,

Joyvaline Martinez, Danny Lee, Marilyn Gonzalez,

Nilsa Arizmendi, and Melanie Camilini.

I did a preliminary review of the arrest warrant,

and, you know, it paints a picture of a person

who would consider doing this type of crime.

And so I kind of formulated an image of him.

And then I met him.

And the person that I met

did not correspond with the image

that I had created in my mind.

He was an affable Southern gentleman,

had a good sense of humor,

and was very easygoing and laid back.

You know, every time they brought him in

in the orange jumpsuit,

he just looked like this ordinary guy.

He was like an ordinary guy.

Hey, Bill.

Yes, we do.

Let's talk about the crimes.

I've got to ask you a few questions about those.

What was it that brought you

some kind of satisfaction in that?

Mm-hmm.

My motivation from the start was, of course, to write a book

about William Devin Howell.

And at all times, he knew

that that was the reason why I was visiting him.

I mean, I would say by no means am I what I think of

as one of these serial killer groupies who is fascinated

with serial killers,

who wants to go visit these men in prison.

If anything, when I went to visit Powell in prison

to discuss information that I needed to get for this book,

I frequently found myself dreading that visit.

It was uncomfortable.

I felt nervous driving there wondering,

what would I say to this man who is a serial killer?

I wonder if I did the right thing

in getting to know this man.

He eventually told me things

+that I don't know if I was ready to hear.

William Devin Howell was born in Hampton, Virginia,

back in 1970.

He was the last of four children.

However, two of his brothers were

quite a bit older than Howell.

One of his brothers was serving in Vietnam

at the time of Howell's birth.

You know, I talked to Bill quite a bit

about his background, his childhood, parents,

and he described his upbringing as very happy.

His mother and father were-- it wasn't a broken marriage.

They were together.

He describes a happy childhood.

By the age of 12,

William Devin Howell's mother got sick with breast cancer.

She was at the time in her early 50s,

and this really did affect Howell quite a bit.

She was sort of a source of stability in his life.

She gave him protection and routine.

She was a strong disciplinarian.

Howell began to solicit prostitutes

at a very young age.

He was only 14 years old.

He stole his father's car in the middle of the night

and drove silently off

and picked up his first prostitute.

It became his secret addiction,

soliciting prostitutes in the middle of the night.

He has been with well over a thousand prostitutes

over the years.

In his late teens, he got into a drunk driving accident.

Following that accident,

he was frequently incarcerated for driving without a license.

William Devin Howell would work at places

like 7-Eleven as a cashier.

He worked at a gas station

and just petty cash that he earned mowing lawns.

I think there was a time period of hope

for William Devin Howell when his first child was born.

At the time he was in his late teens,

he moved down to Florida with the mother of his child.

At the time, he was working at a 7-Eleven.

And one could see that at that point,

there could have been a turning point in his future

where he became a responsible family man like his father.

However, I think what did him in

was the fact that he still had this addiction

to soliciting prostitutes.

I guess ultimately,

he decided to plead guilty.

They actually gave him six life sentences

and he agreed to that to spare, you know,

the families of going through the trial.

And that's what just confounds me, Bill,

is that after knowing you for three years,

I feel honestly like you have shown me

nothing but respect and goodwill.

How come I get good treatment and--and--

but they didn't?

What's the difference between me and them?

Mm.

You know, they had addiction issues,

and he was offering drugs, so they were vulnerable.

They were vulnerable people and he took advantage of that.

Now, keep in mind, if a woman uses drugs,

to Howell, that's one of the two things

that makes them a worthless object.

He claimed that the only victim that troubled him

was his first victim, Melanie Camilini.

And what bothered him the most

was when she begged for her life and said,

"Please don't kill me, I have children."

He said, "That really troubled me when she said that,

and I almost couldn't do it."

Nonetheless, he knew that he had just repeatedly raped her

over a 12-hour period

and that he, in his way of thinking, had no choice.

All of us make our own decisions,

and regardless of background,

he chose to do what he did to these seven innocent people.

He actually kept the tarnished ring

with a stone in it belonging to Melanie Camilini

after he killed her.

That was the only item

belonging to any of his seven victims that Howell kept.

I asked him why he kept that.

Was it a souvenir,

a kind of trophy that serial killers

are known to keep to symbolize their achievement?

He said, "No.

"Actually, I kept that tarnished ring

"to remind me of the night

that I stopped being a man and I became a monster."

Howell, after killing Melanie Camilini

in May of 2003,

he was driving through the streets of Waterbury

and he came upon Marilyn Gonzalez.

She was also a young mother who had a drug addiction

and was turning tricks on the street.

As with Camilini and most of his other victims,

Howell knew that that night, the woman that he paid

was going to end up dead.

He knew that he would rape Marilyn Gonzalez.

And as with all of his other victims,

that took place over a 12-hour period.

On again, off again, in between rapes,

he would bind his captives

to the backbench of his van, duct tape their mouths,

and drive them to different locations.

At the time of the killing spree,

I think in your mind,

you did see them as worthless human beings, am I correct?

You just kind of--

certainly, when you raped and killed them,

they weren't human beings to you.

They were objects. Would you agree with that?

Mm-hmm.

Howell completely misunderstood

the people that he victimized, these innocent victims.

He thought of them to be without value,

without purpose in this world.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

He didn't value them as human beings.

He didn't value most people as human beings.

He thought of them as disposable.

I think he always had this binary view of women.

There were the good girls and the bad girls.

The good girls would be someone like

the mother of his children.

He says to me that she is a good girl.

She does not drink. She does not smoke.

She does not do drugs.

She was a good mother to the children.

She was faithful to him.

And then there are the bad girls.

And these would be the women

that he would pick up on the streets.

Mm-hmm.

Howell picked up Daniel Whistnant

outside of this bar-restaurant

called the Cadillac Ranch in Southington, Connecticut.

It was Howell's habit to go to places like the Cadillac Ranch

when he had a night off

and to sit at the bar for hours

and hope to get lucky finding a woman at the bar.

If he didn't have any luck at the bar,

by the time the bar closed, he would go to the streets

and solicit a prostitute instead.

Now, the bar closed at 2:00 a.m.

and Howell went outside and saw Daniel Whistnant

walking along the street, who was dressed as a woman.

He had long, silky black hair, Howell states,

and a short miniskirt and high heels.

And so thinking Daniel Whistnant

is a female prostitute,

he invites Mr. Whistnant into his van.

During the transaction that took place,

Howell puts his hand on the head of Whistnant

and pulls off a wig.

He becomes enraged that this man has deceived him

into this vulnerable position.

He throws Daniel Whistnant against the wall of the van

and tells me that he punched him out twice

and then quickly strangled him.

We're at the back of the strip mall in New Britain

where William Devin Howell would leave the remains

of his seven victims.

First off, he would stop his van

over there behind the strip mall

and dump the parcel, or the body of his victim,

wrapped in garbage bags, deep into the ravine.

And then what he would do is he'd get back into his van

and go over to the McDonald's parking lot, park his car,

and come back to this location where we're at right now.

There's a trail, as you can see.

It goes into

sort of a meadow-like littered area.

And William Devin Howell would walk this trail

and make a sharp right that led into the ravine

where the parcel that he had left was left in the ravine.

He would retrieve a spade, a shovel that he had stored

behind the guardrail,

and then he would drag that body,

along with his shovel, about a few hundred yards

into the woods to the location

that he was known to call his garden,

which is where he buried, in very shallow graves,

the seven bodies of the people that he killed.

In the case of Nilsa Arizmendi,

he states that he didn't plan to rape and kill her.

Now, it's interesting that up until then,

any time he planned to rape a prostitute,

it was based solely, he says,

on his lawn care schedule the following day.

If he didn't have lawns

that he had to mow the next morning,

then that night, he knew

he was free to solicit a prostitute and keep her captive

in his van for the entire night and throughout the next day.

Now, with Nilsa Arizmendi, when she stepped into his van

and asked him to drive her to a location to pick up drugs,

he said he would do so

in exchange for a sexual transaction.

What happened was when she refused

to finish that transaction, he grew very angry.

He decided in that split second,

I am going to rape and kill this woman.

The next day, he had the lawn care schedule.

So he had to keep Nilsa's body wrapped in tarp

in the back of his van for the duration of his lawn care jobs

that next day before taking her out

to the back of the mall and burying her.

Mm-hmm.

I remember going to the crime scene.

When I walked down the embankment in my dress shoes,

and it was kind of muddy and slippery,

and when I was down there, I felt like I was

in an amphitheater kind of looking up.

And I thought, huh, this is actually

a pretty interesting place to have buried bodies.

You know, you'd think, well, people might be driving by

and look down, but it wasn't a place that you would suspect.

So it probably was the perfect place.

In a 10-week time period in August, September,

and the first two weeks of October,

his last three victims died.

He picked up Mary Jane Menard

on the streets of Waterbury, Connecticut,

and went through his typical routine

of holding her captive in his van for 12 hours,

raping her off and on,

and eventually strangling her.

In this case, he strangled her in the back parking lot

of the McDonald's which was located right next to

the strip mall where his burial ground was located.

The sixth victim was Diane Cusack.

Howell picked her up in New Britain, Connecticut,

and went through his similar routine

of raping and strangulation in the McDonald's parking lot.

And this is where

three of William Devin Howell's victims died.

He parked his car right over there

and raped and strangled three of his victims.

Now as you can see,

there is a very busy drive-thru to my left.

This is a popular McDonald's

and it's not outside of the realm of possibility

that quite a lot of people,

even as Howell was killing his victims

or going up the trail to bury his victims,

would have seen his van and seen him

at least walking up the trail and made no question of it.

Ironically, Howell would also

go through this very drive-thru

with some of his victims held captive

in the back of his van, tied up and duct taped.

And he said to me that he would turn the music up high

so no one would hear him-- or hear the victims

if they were screaming or cried for help.

And during that time, he would actually order food

through the drive-thru

and ask his victims if they also wanted something to eat.

That 1985 Ford Econoline van,

he told the fellow inmate that he confessed to

that he called it the Murdermobile.

And it really is a ghastly vehicle.

It's right here.

You know, it was all rusted and, you know,

treadless wheels

and there was some plywood on the back of the windows.

And this is where all the crimes took place,

was in the interior of that van.

He did give me title to this awful van.

And believe me, I won't be driving this van.

But I'm most definitely

going to take it to the junkyard

and get it crushed.

I think it would be a good thing

to extinguish this awful vehicle

from the face of the Earth.

Joyvaline Martinez was Howell's last victim.

She was a very beautiful young girl.

She was only 23 years old at the time of her death.

William Devin Howell picked her up

on Hillside Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut.

And as with his other victims, he went through the routine

of holding her captive in the back of his van

for a 12-hour period, during which time

he raped her off and on

and ultimately strangled her to death.

It's my belief if he wasn't arrested,

he would have continued.

And that we would have more victims.

He didn't value women as equal

or even worthy of life.

He--the terrible things he did without the remorse

and did it again and did it again and did it again.

In Connecticut, when you're charged with this type--

or convicted of this type of offense,

you're in a 8x10-foot cell, approximately,

22 hour a day lockdown,

and you're isolated with your thoughts.

And it's a pretty

traumatic place to be.

Some people will say that's where he belongs,

but that's his life until he passes away.

In court, I was initially

somewhat hopeful for him and his soul.

Actually, his first words were "I'm sorry."

But then he went on to speak pretty much at length

about how life is so difficult for him in prison.

So it really very quickly turned into

he was sorry for the predicament he's in.

To my knowledge, he has not expressed any remorse.

So that's a vintage wedding dress?

Mm-hmm.

- Oh, it's lovely. - Yeah.

It doesn't make sense.

It doesn't make sense that it was her.

You don't want to come to the realization

of what really happened.

It wasn't a car accident.

It wasn't health issues.

How do you cope? How do you process?

The victims in this case, they were all loved,

each and every one of them.

Their families never stopped hoping

or waiting for them to return home safely to them.

Each one was a special person.

Being demonic.

There's got to be something like that related with him.

There's no way.

He's a monster.

He's a monster.

Sick.

I will not let another man

destroy my soul by making me hate him.

I won't give him that. I don't think about him.

He would destroy me if I hated him.

Why would someone want a hero in our community dead?