The authorities responded to Neal’s claim of other homicides. “We considered the possibility that there might be others, but at this point, we don’t have direct evidence that there are,” said sheriff’s sergeant Jim Parr. “Nobody’s unaccounted for.
“The more he would like to tell us, the more we’re willing to listen. We’re investigating everything we can think of involving Mr. Neal, all the way back to the date of his birth.”
As the days passed and rumors were hunted down and discounted or embraced—at least for the time being—small details about the victims and their killer began to emerge in the press.
In one report, Holberton’s ex-husband, Rodney, remembered her as filled with joy and warmth for others. “She always had a smile on her face. I mean, she was a kind, gentle person.”
George Holberton said that he didn’t understand how his former daughter-in-law could have been mixed up with someone like Neal. “Rebecca was this very gentle, kind of shy young woman, as I remember,” he told the press. “Not the kind that would get involved with anyone shady. It would be beyond her to harm anyone else.”
He recalled that she was “pretty conservative . . . didn’t drink or smoke or even go out much with men.” Even after their divorce eight years earlier, his son had remarked how she was the one woman he could trust. George noted that his daughter, Tammy, had remained Rebecca’s best friend. She was “shocked and distraught” that the man she’d met in Las Vegas had murdered Rebecca.
In another story, Rebecca’s neighbors told the media that she did not return greetings and kept to herself. After moving in, she’d even covered her windows with brown butcher paper, which had remained up for most of the two years that she lived in the home.
The press reported that Angela Fite’s relationship with her estranged common-law husband, Matt Rankin, had been an abusive one and he’d been arrested for domestic violence. She’d left him and was working as a dental assistant when she met Neal, according to the reports.
A week after Neal’s arrest, Angela’s family held a press conference. It had seemed that in some ways, it was Angela and the other women who were being scrutinized, not Neal. If nothing else, they were represented as having been particularly gullible, or even unintelligent lonely hearts just waiting for something bad to happen.
“We would first like to express our gratitude for the tremendous support we have received since the death of our beloved Angie,” said Deborah Hill, a family friend who read from a prepared statement.
Hill asked the public and press to remember that “Angie and the other victims were innocent of any wrongdoing. . . . Angie simply put her trust in the wrong person, as apparently did the other two victims, which resulted in this senseless tragedy.”
The family, she added, was “distressed” to have learned about her death from news reports. “Her name was released to the public before we were ever notified. No family should have to receive such horrific news through the media.” She said that the family’s priority would be helping Kyle and Kayla deal with the loss of their mother.
Candace Walters was recalled by family and friends as a small woman who enjoyed nature walks and lived for her daughter, Holly. “She was the most generous person I knew,” her ex-husband was quoted as saying.
But what of Neal? Why had he suddenly “snapped” and murdered three innocent women? Holly Walters told the police that her mother had told her about a letter she’d penned and left with a friend, “just in case” something happened between her and Neal. The police had been unable to find the letter.
A report filled in some of the gaps in what Suzanne Scott and others were able to tell the police about his behavior and activities. In the morning after he left Scott and Beth Weeks in their apartment, too stunned to even try to seek help, he went back to The Bonfire Lounge and started drinking his usual Bacardi and Coke.
On-duty bartender Ashleigh Raymondi recalled that he’d bought the woman sitting next to him a drink and then asked her to change seats with him. “So I got a clear view of the doors,” he said, indicating the front and back entrances into the bar.
“Why?” the woman had asked.
“I’m a bounty hunter,” he’d replied. “I have to watch my back.”
Bartender Maggie Champion, who’d served Neal and Scott the day before, was in the bar that same morning, off duty and sipping coffee, when Neal asked her if the bar pay phone would “block out the number if I make a call.” She assumed that for whatever reason he didn’t want the number to show up on someone’s Caller ID. “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. She found it curious when she stepped outside later and saw him talking on a cell phone.
Neal spent most of the morning in the bar with a $50 bill and several other denominations spread out in front of him. When Raymondi moved to deduct one of his rounds from the fifty, he grabbed her arm and told her to take one of the other bills. The $50 bill, he said, was for a bartender at another lounge.
A little later, two women entered The Bonfire and sat about ten feet away from Neal. He pushed $20 at Raymondi and told her, “Give the ladies anything they want.” The women accepted the drinks, but the strange thing was that he never looked up from beneath the brim of his black Stetson, or tried to talk to them, though they sat there for an hour.
Raymondi recalled talking to Angela Fite on the night she died. She said something about Neal taking her to a house that he was going to give her that night. “Something was tugging at me,” the bartender recalled. “Something was telling me to get her away from him. Seeing the excitement in her eyes just kills me now. She was so happy, thinking this was her future with this guy. She’s not the gold-digger type, but she was attracted to Cody. I don’t know why.”
Neal’s main attraction was the way he tossed money around, Raymondi said. “He wasn’t good-looking. He had no pizzazz. But he always told everyone he was worth millions.” She noted that she warned Angie not to go out with Neal. “I was just going on a feeling about him,” she said. “I just thought he was a liar, a total con artist. I didn’t think he was going to kill anybody. I just thought that he was full of crap.”
He did make a halfhearted attempt to pick up Raymondi that morning. “You’d be a lot of fun to go out with,” she recalled him saying. “What are you doin’ after work?”
Raymondi said that she shook her head and told him, “I don’t date customers.”
“Your loss,” she said Neal replied with a shrug. He left her his usual extravagant tip and even threw $5 to a bartender who’d just come on duty and hadn’t served him. “You’ll never forget me,” he said, and strolled out of the bar. Five minutes later, another regular came through the door with the news that Angela Fite was missing.
Neal had gone on to Shipwreck’s, where he gave one of the female bartenders the $50 bill that he’d been saving. “I’ve tried to analyze that, over many sleepless nights,” the woman told a newspaper columnist. “First I thought maybe it was so I wouldn’t tell Angie I’d seen him with another girl on Sunday night. You think all kinds of things. Was it bribe money? A tip? Or did he want to kill me, too? All kinds of stupid things go through your head.”
Raymondi might not have seen much in Neal, but others knew his appeal to women. “He was the gentleman’s gentleman,” said Louis Veraldi, a cook at one of Neal’s hangouts and one of his few male friends. “I’ve never met a guy who’s nicer, who treated women with more respect.
“It was almost like he was from medieval days. He’d open doors for men or women. He walked women to their cars to make sure no harm would come to them. And he was a very generous man.”
Florist Beverly Wise recalled the polite man who bought roses for strippers. “I always got the impression that if you were on a date with Cody, you were queen for a night,” she said.
Duane “Dog” Chapman, a big, strapping bona fide bounty hunter, told newspaper reporters that Neal had provided him with some tips that led to the capture of a few wanted methamphetamine users. The man he knew only as Cody would occasionally call up and volunteer his services. “But I never paid him for his information,” Chapman said, “or, for that matter, never knew his real name.”
It was as close as Neal had ever been to being a bounty hunter. As the press discovered, he’d occasionally worked as a house painter but had held no steady job for more than two years.
Meanwhile, Neal’s family did their best to explain the unexplainable. Nephew D. J. Hardy, a Denver resident, acted as the family’s spokesman, saying that Neal had changed following the death of his mother and subsequent divorce and loss of his business. “The last few years he has been to himself, pretty distant from the family,” said Hardy. “I want to make it real clear that we still love him. But everybody is upset. They are really mad—mad at him for what he did. We hope justice will be served in this case. We are behind the families of the victims one hundred percent.”
Eleven
As they began to piece together the events that led to the murders, the investigators wondered about the influence that Neal seemed to have over his victims. He was apparently able to juggle his time between them, keep his whereabouts a mystery, as well as his history. . . . Yet, he had gained their trust to the point that they were easy prey when he finally decided to murder them. He wasn’t particularly attractive, but there was something about him that disguised the killer inside.
They began to learn more when they located his four ex-wives. They were all attractive, intelligent, independent, trusting women—from what they could tell, just like his victims. The first wife had not wanted to get involved, though she said she was not surprised by the violence and was afraid of him.
They learned much more from his second wife, Karen Wilson, who told them about the handsome young man she had met in her Washington, D.C., store. Like the first wife, she was afraid that Neal would somehow “beat the rap” and get out of jail. But she felt that she owed it to the victims to tell the police what she knew about the “real” William Lee Neal, a man with an explosive temper, beset by jealousies and imagined betrayals.
Wilson heard of the murders on July 10, her birthday, and she’d had to do some fast explaining to her husband, Fred. When she’d told him years before that Neal was dead, she’d thought that she was through with her first husband. Several years had passed with no contact, or at least no verifiable contact. Sometimes the telephone would ring three times, his old signal, and then it would be silent, and she felt that it was his way of letting her know that he was still watching. But leave it to Bill and his flare for the dramatic to come roaring back into her life on her birthday.
She was outside on the porch of her Tennessee home when Fred opened the screen door and called to her. “I need to tell you something,” he said with a strange look on his face. One of Bill’s sisters had just called, he said, “about Bill.”
Oh, my God, he really is dead,
she thought.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Fred said softly, “but he just killed three women.”
Wilson fell to her knees and threw up. Guilt rose around her like the stench from her vomit. She recalled his threat to “fuck over every woman in my path.” She’d believed him, but she’d always thought he meant that he’d ruin women financially and emotionally, as he’d done to her. Never had it crossed her mind that he would kill someone. Now she knew that she’d been blind to the real man beneath the sweet smile and charm.
I knew it. I knew it.
She sobbed at the thought.
Over the next two weeks, Wilson wallowed in guilt. She begged God to forgive her for not watching Neal, not warning other women to stay away from him. She’d think of a hundred ways that she wished she’d killed him when she had the chance, and then ask God for forgiveness for wishing him dead.
She was afraid. If he’d killed these women, maybe he’d come after her. Not personally, he was in jail. But he knew
everybody,
had known how to find her when he wanted to, even knew what she was doing. She sent her daughter off to camp for two weeks, in case someone came to the house meaning harm.
She told the investigators that she knew how he had lured his victims. First there was the charm—the bubble baths, the roses, the extravagant gifts, and, most of all, the promises of a bright future. He knew instinctively what each woman wanted most—whether it was love, security, excitement, or just someone to listen—and then exploited their vulnerabilities.
Wilson wished that she’d been there to warn Rebecca Holberton, Candace Walters, and Angela Fite. “I would have told them: ‘If you ever meet a man named William Lee Neal, turn and run the other way.’ ” But now it was too late.
The third wife, Karen Boxer, told them she’d met Neal in the early 1980s when she was living in Virginia. She was dating another man at the time, who was working for Neal’s security systems company. She thought of her boyfriend’s employer as “a very creative person” who knew how to treat women right. He tried to teach her boyfriend his gentlemanly ways—unfortunately, she recalled, to little effect.
Neal always had a large bankroll on him and seemed to like wearing tuxedos and riding around town in limousines. But she had little contact with him because he was always traveling. She broke up with her boyfriend and didn’t see Neal for several years.
That’s why, she said, she was surprised when he called her out of the blue at work sometime in 1986 or 1987, after his divorce from Karen Wilson. They started dating, but it wasn’t a normal relationship. He would leave for a week or more at a time without telling her or even leaving a note saying when he’d be back.
“He was very controlling,” Boxer told the investigators. He separated her from her family and friends, and in 1988 he insisted that they move to Colorado, where he worked for Denver Burglar Alarm.
He told her about his first two wives, always claiming to be the victim of their lies and infidelities. She knew that inside, Neal was “full of rage.” One day he’d found his vehicle had been vandalized and he punched the curb so hard that he badly damaged his hand. He also seemed to cry at “inappropriate” times, but for the most part was able to control his emotions.
One day when they were arguing, she told him to leave. “And that really pushed his button.” He pushed her against a wall and started choking her.
Nevertheless, when he proposed that they go to Alaska, where he had supposedly been stationed in the army, and get married, she accepted. She had always wanted to go to Alaska. They were married on September 10, 1989, in Portage, and spent two weeks there on their honeymoon before returning to Denver.
Neal was quite the outdoorsman, she told the investigators, and dressed the part of “a mountain man” in flannel shirts and jeans, though he still liked going out dressed in a tuxedo. She never saw him as a cowboy.
In October, only a few weeks after returning from Alaska, he decided that it was time to return to Virginia. That move was followed in March 1990 by a move to Clifton Park, New York. He just couldn’t seem to settle down and would reach his decisions suddenly and without notice.
When they were dating, he spent a lot of money on flowers and gifts for her. After their marriage, she told him to quit wasting their money, that it wasn’t necessary. His whole demeanor seemed to change. He was often withdrawn and emotionally abusive, once calling her mother to report that she “sucks her thumb and sleeps in the fetal position.” On one other occasion, he shoved her roughly up against a wall and put his hand over her mouth as if to smother her.
With her marriage heading downhill, Boxer wanted to try counseling, but Neal wouldn’t go and was paranoid about what was being said about him when she went alone. They finally separated in November 1990. On that day, Neal called the New York State Police Department and told them that she was suicidal.
Boxer explained that she was plenty angry when he called the police, but “I was not suicidal.” The police, however, made her go see a counselor at the hospital anyway. She never went to the “loony bin,” as Neal had told his fourth wife, Jennifer Tate, but she did see another counselor to deal with issues from the marriage, including blaming herself “entirely” for the breakup.
When Neal left, he took more than her heart. He also took out cash advances on her credit cards totaling $9,000 and another $1,500 out of her savings account. Because they were still officially married at the time, she couldn’t recoup her losses. It made one of his favorite sayings all the more bitter: “Anybody stupid enough to believe me deserves to get fucked.”
Boxer warned the investigators that Neal was such a good con artist, she was sure that he would beat the system, even on this case. “I just knew I would see Bill’s name in the headlines someday for something like this,” she said.
Talking to Neal’s fourth wife, Jennifer Tate, the investigators heard more of the same, though the sexual aggressiveness seemed to have increased. Otherwise, the women’s stories had many similarities to those that the investigators were hearing of his activities in Denver, down to favorite sayings, such as: “Anybody stupid enough to believe me deserves to get fucked.” None of them found the violence out of character—extreme, perhaps, unimaginable in its brutality and consequence, but not out of character . . . just the logical conclusion for a man who seemed to have spent his adult life manipulating and testing the women he supposedly loved, a man ruled by his insecurities and jealousies, his obsessions and paranoia. A man given to fits of rage at the drop of a hat . . . or a test failed. To a woman, they were worried that he would find a way to hurt them from behind walls and razor wire.
Neal’s family had called Tate on Thursday, July 9, and told her of his arrest. Although she was in frequent contact with them, she hadn’t seen her former husband since March 1995. He’d paid fairly regularly the child support that he owed, but she never heard anything else from him.
Neal’s sister Peggy called and told her to watch the evening news. The next day, Tate went to see him at the jail. For all she had been through, she still couldn’t believe that he would kill. When she saw him, she was taken aback by how terrible he looked in the bright orange jail jumpsuit that he was wearing. He was haggard and pale, with dark circles under his eyes.
“Oh, my little Baby Half-pint. I’ve always loved you, Baby Half-pint,” he moaned as the tears welled in his blue eyes. He choked up over the words of how much he missed and needed her.
She didn’t respond the way he would have liked. “Why’d you do it?” she asked, angry. “You had everything. You can do anything.”
Neal stopped whining and looked at her coldly. The tears were gone. He shrugged. He had loved them all, he said, just like he had loved her. “But that’s what happens when you fuck with me.”