William George Bonin was born in Willimantic, Connecticut on January 8, 1947, to gambling alcoholic parents, and spent much of his childhood in an orphanage and a juvenile home where he was abused. He served in Vietnam as an aerial gunner and was decorated.
He had convictions for sexual assaults on boys in 1969 and 1975, was twice committed as a mentally disordered sex offender, and was twice released. He was working as a lorry driver in Downey when he began killing, four months after the second release. That interval is the fact the case turns on.
Between August 1979 and June 1980 he abducted at least twenty-one boys and young men, most of them hitchhiking or waiting at bus stops, in his Ford Econoline van. They were bound, raped, tortured and strangled, usually with their own T-shirts twisted with a tyre iron, and left beside freeways in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties. The press called it the Freeway Killings, and for a period two separate freeway killers were operating in southern California at once.
He did not work alone. Vernon Butts, Gregory Miley, James Munro and William Pugh took part in various of the murders: recruited young, none of them older than twenty-one when the killings began.
It was Pugh, arrested for something else, who gave Bonin's name to police. He was arrested on June 11, 1980 in the act of assaulting a young man in the van. Butts hanged himself in custody before trial.
He was convicted in 1982 of ten murders in Los Angeles County and in 1983 of four more in Orange County, and sentenced to death. He gave interviews for years and admitted twenty-one.
He was executed at San Quentin on February 23, 1996, the first person in California to be put to death by lethal injection rather than in the gas chamber.
Two men had assessed him as a mentally disordered sex offender and two release decisions had been made in the years before the first body. Nothing in the record suggests either was made carelessly. What the case documents is a system that had every relevant fact about him on file and released him anyway, twice, and then took ten months and twenty-one deaths to find him again.