Serial Killer Documentary - William Devin Howell

0:00Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all, only at my dogs. In a deserted swampy patch of woodland in new Britain, Connecticut in 2007, the scattered remains of several women were discovered. I have never had a case where I had seven possible victims at one crime scene. For ten long years detectives work to discover who the victims were and who'd killed them. After the bones were found, I think it was clear that there was a serial killer. The investigation zoned in on a battered blue van

1:00belonging to local Gardner, William Devon Howell. And they just started to pick that van apart, fiber by fiber, droplet by droplet. It is a positive goldmine, a treasure trove of DNA, of all manner of clues. When the true nature of Howell's crimes were revealed, they were breathtaking in their brutality. Physical violence, strangulation, probably some of the most violent behavior that I've ever handled as a lawyer. Fourteen years after the first innocent victim was snatched from the street. William Devon Howell was finally confirmed as one of the world's most evil killers.

2:20In 2017, a case that had gripped and horrified a quiet corner of New England, concluded with one of Connecticut's most prolific serial killers, 47-year-old William Devon Howell being locked away for life. But when the story began 14 years earlier, it had gone largely unnoticed. The media hadn't really covered it very much. No one had really put together that we had all these missing women. If she was a drug taker with addictions, if she was a sex worker, it's not unusual for them to go missing and not be reported for quite a long time. When stories of the missing women's fate were finally told, it exposed a dark underbelly that many in this leafy part of Connecticut did not know existed.

3:20Central Connecticut was more of a manufacturing area back in the 30s, 40s, 50s. And over time, drugs has infiltrated those areas and with drugs as prostitution. But above all, the story showed the world a truly monstrous people are sometimes able to hide in plain sight. Bill Howell is one of those individuals that was convicted of committing horrific acts of violence. And yet, he's a likable man that you think about and you say, how could he have done this? This killer story begins on the 11th of February, 1970. He grew up in a Newport News, Virginia, which is a population of about 200,000 people.

4:23His mother was 14, his father was 45 when Howell came along. William Devyn Howell, known as Bill, was the youngest of four children. Despite a stable childhood, in his late teens, Howell began to take the wrong path. He went to school, he dropped out of school. Towards the end of his adolescence, Bill Howell drifted into drugs and he then got drugged. He was born into petty crime. He had some motor vehicle violations that ultimately caused his license to be suspended and it became a vicious cycle. He continued driving, kept getting arrested and it resulted in jail time. By his mid-twenties, Howell had collected convictions for drink driving, forgery, reckless driving, and public drunkenness.

5:29In 2001, age 31 years old, he left Virginia. He met a woman and she was from Connecticut and he ended up coming to Connecticut. Moving in with his girlfriend Dorothy in New Britain, William Howell took on a veneer of respectability. Howell appeared to be quite settled. He had a relationship, a girlfriend. He had a job. He had this landscaping business that he seemed to be doing okay with. He cut people's lawns. It was not the kind of lawnmowering service that you see. Landscapers and affluent communities, just a small 22 inch lawnmower. And it was in the more urban areas of older people that stayed in those communities and they hired him. And they said he was very nice, reliable, he'd come on a weekly basis.

6:35He had a dark blue 1985 Ford Ecololine van. He'd pretty smashed up. He'd applied wood over some of the windows. He had on the side quality lawn were called devine and his cell phone. But criminality was never far away. In 2002 Howell picked up more convictions for minor offenses. By this time, he was a frequent visitor to the Berlin Turnpike area, a 10 minute drive from the home he shared with Dorothy. The Berlin Turnpike has many, many commercial establishments, restaurants, hotels, motels, different shopping centers. The Berlin Turnpike was one of the main roads that used to go between New York and Boston. So there were a lot of little hotels and over time those hotels stopped being used by conventional travelers and ended up being used by hookers and johns.

7:42And more nefarious type of activity. William Devine Howell was drawn to the area where drugs and prostitution went hand in hand. Many people who are females who are drug addicts, they had a prostituting themselves in order to get the money. And Mr. Howell was able to get some drugs and party with these women. In April 2003, a young woman was reported missing from a town some 25 miles from the Berlin Turnpike. Melanie Ruth Kennellini, she was from Seymour Connecticut. She went missing from the city of Waterbury. She was the mother of two, dearly loved by her family. When 29-year-old Melanie's mother reported her missing to Waterbury Police, she hadn't seen her daughter for several months.

8:44Waterbury PD was taken point on in the missing person report, terrific investigators. Despite an investigation, there were no leads into Melanie's disappearance. A month later, there was another missing person's report in the same town. Marilyn Gonzalez was 26. She too was a mother of two. Last seen on the 15th of May 2003, Marilyn was reported missing by her mother a few days later. Her loved ones were just frantically trying to find what happened to her. On the 24th of June, another desperate mother went to the police. This time in New Britain.

9:44Janice Roberts is a transgender woman. She was in her 40s at the time. Her family thought that she went to New York City and possibly ran into some trouble down there. They just didn't know. No one knew if the missing women had chosen to leave the area or if something more sinister had been falling on them. Even when all of these women were reported missing, they weren't linked by the police. Things are made more complicated when people go missing from different police jurisdictions because they don't necessarily always share that information. They won't be looking at the missing person lists from neighbouring jurisdictions. By the summer of 2003, three women were missing from towns in the Berlin Turnpike area.

10:44There was no uproar, no panic. Women weren't safe on the streets, but they had no idea. In July 2003, 33-year-old William Devyn Howell was living with his girlfriend in New Britain, Connecticut. On the 31st of July, the mother and sister of 33-year-old Nilsa Arizmendi walked into Weatherfield Police Department nine miles away and reported that they hadn't seen Nilsa for almost a week. Nilsa Arizmendi had an on and off relationship with her childhood sweetheart who was always known as ICE and they were living in a motel in New Britain.

11:45She was a drug user, might have engaged in some prostitution also. She had quite a stable life actually, so her disappearance was flagged up as this is out of the ordinary vanilla. Nilsa's boyfriend, ICE, a convicted drug dealer, was first on the list of people to question. Insisting he had no idea what had happened to Nilsa, ICE passed a polygraph test. While it's sick about his girlfriend's disappearance, ICE was desperate to help. He gave the police all the information he had. ICE told detectives about the last time he'd seen Nilsa. It was late at night after the couple had been hanging out with a man they knew only as Devyn.

12:45Nilsa, her boyfriend and his guy were doing drugs and a parking lot at a supermarket in Weatherfield. After that, her boyfriend saw her again into this weird looking van that was partly blue, partly black and had wood boards where the side windows should have been. It was the first solid lead into working out what had happened to Nilsa. The Blue Van became a target of the Weatherfield Police Department's investigation. The name Devyn and the description of a van were all police had to go on in the search for Nilsa. But two months later, a sharp eyed patrol officer spotted the vehicle in Weatherfield. So they traced the van. The van is traced back. The owner is Dorothy Holcomb.

13:49That's when they went to this Holcomb's residence trying to interview her. Police records showed a man had been living at Dorothy's address, one with an outstanding warrant for an assault on his girlfriend. His name was William Devyn Howell. When the police arrived to talk to Dorothy, she said, oh, well, Bill has the van most of the time. It's just registered my name. They tried to dodge the interviews and she kind of protected him from the police. You know, they come in the front door, he go out the back door type of thing. Detectives were desperate to interview the man last seen with Nilsa, but he kept evading them. Meanwhile, they turned their focus on the van Nilsa had climbed into the night she disappeared. They got a search warrant for the vehicle. But when they returned in November to seize the battered blue van, neither Howell nor the vehicle were anywhere to be seen.

14:57In January 2004, Weatherfield police finally caught up with William Devyn Howell. The Gardner denied any involvement in Nilsa Alice Mendes disappearance. And his van, which they hoped might hold some clues, was still nowhere to be found. Parla Pram was, they didn't have her body. They didn't know what happened to her. She could have taken off. No one knew that she was dead at that point. With no van, no evidence and nothing to tie him to Nilsa beyond the word of her boyfriend, detectives had no choice but to let Howell go. Weeks later, another young woman was reported missing by her family. Joy Verlene, also known as Joy Martinez, she's 24.

15:57Joy Verlene was a popular girl at school. She was a track star. Born into a large and loving family, somewhere between her late teens and early 20s, Joy Verlene had fallen into drugs. She'd last been seen in October 2003. She doesn't appear for her birthday, which her mother finds quite strange, and then she doesn't appear at Thanksgiving. On 29 March 2004, Joy's mother reported her missing to police in East Hartford. Two days later, in Weatherfield, the team who were searching for Nilsa Alice Mendes finally had some luck. 600 miles away from Connecticut. They found the vehicle in North Carolina, the blue van. They then got a search warrant and then they had the van towed back.

17:01The van had been hidden on a property belonging to one of Howell's associates. Eight months after Nilsa Alice Mendes vanished, would it hold any clues about what had happened to her? The crime scene investigators are let loose on the Fordy-Conline van. They noticed that the back seat, the cushions had been replaced and they ended up pulling those cushions back and then they found what they believed was blood and then reddish brown stains on the carpeting. This disturbing find suggested that someone had lost a large amount of blood in the back of the battered work van. The question was, who? The police department submitted a piece of the car seat back and a piece of the carpet from the van to the laboratory. Forensic science examiner, Kristen Madele was part of the team at the state Forensic Lab tasked with analyzing the stains on the upholstery.

18:07The first set of tests confirmed the stains were in fact human blood. The next step was to find out who the blood had belonged to. When the results came back, there was a shock. From the initial testing of those two samples, they were two different DNA profiles. It appeared that at least two people had come to harm in Howell's van. As is common in missing persons cases in the US, Nilsa Aris mend his mother had given the police a DNA sample when her daughter disappeared. DNA gets passed from parent to child where you get half your nuclear DNA from your mother and half your nuclear DNA from your father. If human remains were found, the authorities would be able to say if the victim was likely to be a close relative of Nilsa's mother.

19:15Sadly for Nilsa's family, there was a match. The mother of the missing person did match the DNA profile from the van. It was an important breakthrough for the case, but a body blow for Nilsa's anxiously waiting family. The medical examiner said she couldn't have survived that much blood loss. It seemed certain that Nilsa Aris mend was dead. Police had no idea who the second DNA profile belonged to, with more questions and answers about what had happened in Howell's van. Investigators needed to tread carefully. It takes a long time for the prosecutors to be absolutely sure that they can charge Howell with Nilsa's killing. Blood in the van, opportunity, the fact that they should see her getting into the van.

20:20But the difficulty is there's nobody. On the 14th of May 2005, William Devyn Howell was arrested in connection with Nilsa Aris mend his death. Three days later he was charged with her murder, but the police knew getting a conviction would be tough. The problem was they didn't know what happened to her. They knew something bad happened in the van, but there was no weapon, there was no trace of the body. Howell was remanded in custody until his trial. For now a suspected killer was off the streets, but would it be for good? The murder of Nilsa Aris mend his disappearance. Almost four years after Nilsa Aris mend his disappearance, 36 year old William Devyn Howell stood in the dock at New Britain Superior Court in Connecticut.

21:24On the 24th of January 2007, William Devyn Howell stands trial for the murder of Nilsa Aris mend. The DNA evidence is produced, witnesses, including Ace are produced. Howell's defence was that it was her boyfriend Ace who detect Nilsa, arguing the couple had fought in the back of the van. The prosecution highlighted the amount of blood spilled in the van and the fact that Nilsa hadn't been seen since that night. On the 5th day of the trial, Howell changed his plea. He did a plea bargain and he used something called the Alfred plea. What the Alfred doctrine stands for is you'd say, I understand if I go to trial, there's a significant chance I'll be convicted and face harsher punishment. So in order to avoid that, I'm going to plead guilty. Even though I'm not admitting my guilt.

22:29On the 30th of January, Howell pleaded guilty to first degree manslaughter. Still refusing to give any information about what had happened to Nilsa Aris mend. All where her remains could be found, Howell was jailed for 15 years. Just months later, on the 20th of August 2007, local police got a phone call that had the potential to shed light on Nilsa's fate. The Nibirth Police Department got a call from a resident who was walking through some woods off of Hartford Road in Nibirth. He said he found what he thought were human remains. I was a lieutenant in the bureau at that point. So we responded, we can't this a scene.

23:29That area is very commercial. It was like a little strip wall and in the back is a little parking area. And right below that is a steep drop off and then there's a wooded area. It's really not a place you would easily walk through because of the briar or some of the wildlife that's there or completely swampy. It gets, goes underwater quite a bit. It's not where someone would want to walk and go have a picnic. More officers were brought in to search the densely wooded area. We found a few more remains that evening and into the next day. And that when we discovered it wasn't the remains of one person but it was the remains of two females. Confirming that they had found the partial remains of two adult women,

24:32the state medical examiner gave an estimate as to how long the scattered bones had laid there. It gave us a very wide range with the caveat is depends on weather, depends on animal activity. So we knew they were not a hundred years old. We knew that they were a year old. A couple of days later a third partial skeleton was recovered. There was nothing with the bodies to identify them but one conclusion seemed inevitable. The women had all likely been murdered and almost certainly by the same as silent. We certainly were working on the strong possibility that we had a serial killer. With William Devon Howell's conviction fresh in the minds of local law enforcement,

25:34the question on everyone's lips was, could any of the bodies be Nilsa Alice Mendis? The state forensic lab was brought in once again. They submitted a sample from the three different possible bodies for us to do DNA testing on. DNA profiles were developed from the bones but when they were run through the DNA database, there was more disappointment for Nilsa's family. We did try to make a connection with Nilsa but there were no matches there. In fact there were no matches in the system for any of the women. Without knowing who they were, investigating the women's deaths would prove difficult. If you don't know who the person is that has been killed, it's near on impossible to identify your suspects.

26:36There's always a motive for every murder. You're never going to find out what that motive is unless you identify the body. New Britain police threw themselves into working out who the women were. Looking at unsolved missing persons reports and just tried to chase them all down, the FBI down in Quantico offered their services to create an approximation of two of our victims. We put it in the newspapers, gave it to the media. It was a slow and frustrating process. And as James Wardwell and his team worked to identify the victims, they couldn't shake the suspicion there might be more bodies lying in the woods. Never stopped believing there was more in there, still believed in a heart of hearts Nilsa was in there,

27:39still believing that there might be more victims. Were police on the right track? Was William Devyn Howell in fact a serial killer? With Nilsa just one of his victims? We certainly were keeping all options open because we don't know yet, but that was definitely a working theory that there was a connection and Nilsa was also connected to our site. In December 2010, new Britain PD got their first breakthrough. When a woman called introducing herself as the sister-in-law of new Britain resident, Diane Qsac. She'd seen the photo in the papers of the facial reconstruction of one of the unidentified women.

28:41She said, oh, the face of the shirt looks like Diane. The hair's wrong, but the face looked right. Diane Qsac lived alone in New Britain. I don't think she really was in contact with her family. She wasn't reported missing right away. So we were ultimately able to make that connection through dental records in DNA and made our first positive idea. I remember going sitting down at their kitchen table, ensuring that news with them. I know it brought them pain, but I could see it also brought them some relief. I remember it like yesterday that part, because it's a... Nobody deserves what happened to her. The tragedy for Diane Qsac and her family was nonetheless an important step forward in the investigation.

29:46Really started opening everything, because then we could start retracing her steps, placing her in places. 53-year-old Diane hadn't been seen since July 2003. She'd lived in the same neighborhood as William Devyn Howell, and the police believed they may have crossed paths. But there was no proof or evidence to link Diane to Howell. The investigation went cold until 2013. The investigation went on for a few days. Connecticut State Attorney's Office has a cold case unit, and they put a task force together. DNA from the remains in the woods was resubmitted to the State Forensics Lab. And in September 2013, there was another positive ID.

30:46Joy Valene Martinez. She was actually the first remains that were found. That first day in 2007. The breakthrough also provided crucial evidence that William Howell had killed more than once. The second person's blood found along with knilcers in the back of Howell's van was proven to be 23-year-old Joy Valene's. The case was building, but detectives suspected there was much they still did not know. In 2014, they tried something new. One of the things that the two states attorneys called the case squad did was make playing cards or unsolved homicides. That they distributed in all the prisons. The freed for the inmates to use and assassinated anyone who has information, please call to spark conversations. One inmate couldn't believe the hand he'd been dealt.

31:51William Devyn Howell, who was a decade into his sentence for the manslaughter of Nilsa Arismendi, was about to blow the investigation wide open. At Connecticut's Cheshire Correctional Institution in 2015, 45-year-old William Devyn Howell opened up to his cellmate, Jonathan Mills, revealing what had really happened to Nilsa Arismendi 12 years earlier. Around 3am that night in July 2003, Nilsa and her boyfriend, who sometimes took drugs with Howell, met him in a supermarket car park. AC's Nilsa climb into Bill Howell's dark blue for the Conline van and drive off. Shortly after Nilsa entered Howell's van, he attacked her, punching her in the face, causing her nose to bleed heavily.

32:59He then grabbed her round the throat. She is strangled, and she is dumped behind the shopping mall. But Nilsa had not been his first victim. He tells Mills that I didn't just kill Nilsa, I killed six other people as well. Howell told Mills his first victim early in 2003 had been Melanie Ruth Kamalini. Howell had raped and strangled her in the back of his van. It was too cold to bury her body, and so he literally drove around with her body in the van for several weeks. He used to sleep next to her, calling her his baby. And he cut off her fingertips and tore off the bottom of her jaw to take her bottom teeth out and put him in a garbage bag and threw him in a dumpster.

34:08He told Mills that once he had killed the first woman that was like cross on the Rubicon, and it became easier after that, and he perfected his method. Over the next ten months, William Devyn Howell had targeted women on the fringes of society. Most of all, he's focused around drugs, whether Howell was providing them or people were getting his van because they were going to do drugs with him. Once in the back of the vehicle that Howell called his murder mobile, the women were brutally attacked. There was a lot of violence, physical violence, strangulation, hitting them with objects, a hammer, for instance. She controlled these women, he was a big guy. With his second victim, 26-year-old Marilyn Gonzales restrained through the night in the back of his van, Howell drove around the local area.

35:15He actually went through a drive-through to buy her a last meal. She ate the meal and it raped her and killed her. Howell was the first woman to die? Referring to himself as a sick ripper in his disturbing confession to his cellmate, Howell also shed light on the fate of a woman who had been reported listening in June 2003. Howell served victim who had picked up on the 18th of June 2003 was Janice Roberts, but actually she was transgender. While a sexual act was being performed, as to howell realized it was a trans person doing it, which caused them to become very angry. Howell strangled 44-year-old Janice to death. After the all-gay of violence, Howell would dispose of his victim's bodies.

36:18Howell told them about what he called his garden. And Mills realized what he was talking about was where he buried victims. The victims were just discarded like objects and not as people like yesterday's rubbish, just awful. Howell told Mills that after Melanie, Marilyn and Janice, he'd murdered Diane Qsac. The next victim was Nilsa Arismendi, followed by Joivaleen Martinez. Then Howell confessed to a final victim from October 2003, a 40-year-old woman from Waterbury who'd never been reported missing. Mary Jane may not have been out of my cigarettes, and I suspect she just encountered Howell who was often driving around the area, possibly looking for victims.

37:19Mary Jane's daughter was serving overseas at the time, so nobody noticed that Mary Jane had gone missing. Mary's partial remains were amongst those found in 2007 and had finally been identified in September 2014. One of the tragedies of Mary Jane may not is that although she'd had a substance abuse problem, she turned her life around and she in fact became a counsellor, making her death all the more tragic and all the more cruel. Having heard William Howell's horrifying story, Jonathan Mills hoped it might gain him some good will with the authorities. Mr. Mills contacted his lawyer, while you're contacted the prosecutors. Howell had boasted of six murders in addition to Nilsa's death. The problem for the police was that they only had three bodies. All of them had been identified and none of them were Nilsa.

38:28Incredibly, Jonathan Mills had the information the police needed. He showed him this map of what he believed where Howell's garden was, Howell had described like there were electrical wires and telephone poles and certain things in the air where he had buried them. Between April and May 2015, 12 years after the killings, they returned to this one. With the assistance of this amazing cadaver dog within days, we had found the burial sites of all of our victims. They found an additional four different human remains. Once again, the state forensics lab played a crucial role. So they submitted a sampling from each of the four different bodies in order to try and determine who they were by doing DNA testing on those bones. DNA profiles were developed.

39:36They tracked down family members, got their DNAs and then compared those DNAs to the bones that were recovered and then were able to identify the individuals. By June 2015, the bodies had been identified as Janice Roberts, Melanie Ruth Kamalini, Marilyn Gonzales and the one victim Howell had been convicted of killing Nilsa Arismendi. After more than a decade, the families of the women were learning of their fate. They were waiting for answers, praying that these were not the answers they were going to get. We couldn't change what was done, but we could change the way their loved ones were treated from the non-out and that justice is brought for them. But to get justice, detectives needed to build a case against William Devon Howell, the only suspect in the six murders.

40:43They believed the key to the case was Howell's battered blue work van. So we got a search warrant, got the van that was held in storage by the Weatherfield Police Department. So it's still just sitting there like as if in a time capsule. We brought in the state police evidence technicians because their skill level is just tremendous. And they just started to pick that van apart, fiber by fiber, droplet by droplet. Police admitted a whole bunch more evidence from the van that consisted of cigarette butts, hairs, hairbrush. There was a rock that appeared to have blood on it, as well as six graphic homemade videotapes. There was over 200 pieces of evidence submitted from the van at this point. The results of the DNA analysis were damning.

41:46Blood, hair and other traces were found in the back of the van that matched with six of the seven victims. In September 2015, Howell is charged with the six murders. For the next two years, the police and prosecution prepared their case against Howell. We wanted to convict. We wanted absolutely whoever was responsible for what happened to these ladies to be brought to justice. We wanted to make sure every tea was crossed, every eye was dotted, so it was meticulous work. William Petzold was appointed as Howell's defense attorney, faced with the mammoth task of defending Howell against the prosecution's claims. So they put the case together and it was a mountain of evidence. It was, in my opinion, an instrumentable mountain to overcome.

42:49Presented with the evidence against him, Howell and his attorney came to a decision. He ultimately pled guilty and was sentenced to 360 years. Families were emotional. Certainly, some belief that justice is being served, but anger too. Sadness, no matter what, none of what the court system was going to do was going to bring their loved ones back. 47-year-old Howell statement at the sentencing hearing at New Britain Superior Court was the first time any of the families had heard him speak. He started to cry and he said, I'm going to stay in prison, I'm not a well man, I'm going to die a slow, painful death.

43:55In no way was he actually trying to give any comfort to the victims, families. The use of the kind of himself, you know, we were sitting with the families, maybe some thought should have been for them. That's not where he went. In fact, one of Howell's comments to his cellmate had betrayed his true feelings about the seven victims. Howell said that his victims should have known that they were going to die, you know, just because of the kind of lives that they led. He didn't think of these beautiful people as people, as it might take on it. In a ten-month killing spree across 2003, Howell abducted, brutalized and killed seven women in the van he call his murder mobile.

45:02Before dumping their bodies where he hoped they'd never be found. His victims loved ones waited 14 years for justice, but when it finally came, they were left with no doubt that William Devon Howell is one of the world's most evil killers.