The Scorekeeper

The body was found on the shoulder of the San Diego Freeway on a June morning in 1980, and the investigators who arrived on scene understood almost immediately that this was not the first time. The positioning, the condition, the location — all of it bore the signature of something they had been tracking for more than a year, a pattern that had turned the freeways of Southern California into a kind of open-air crime scene stretching from Los Angeles to Orange County and back again. They were looking, though they did not yet know his name, for a man who kept count. Who, according to prosecutors, regarded each young life he destroyed as an entry in some private, terrible ledger.

His name was William George Bonin. And by the time California was finished with him, the ledger would be closed for good.

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To understand what was lost, you have to understand who was taken. The victims of William Bonin were overwhelmingly young men and teenage boys, many of them hitchhikers, many of them runaways, some simply in the wrong place — on the side of a highway, waiting for a bus, walking along a frontage road in the particular California sunshine that makes everything look, at first, like possibility. They ranged in age from twelve to nineteen. They had names, families, and futures that were severed without warning or mercy.

There was Thomas Lundgren, fourteen years old, the first victim attributed to Bonin in 1979, a boy from Reseda who had simply stepped outside and never come back. There was Marcus Grabs, seventeen, a German exchange student in the United States for the summer, a young man from another country who came to California and found only cruelty. There was Harry Turner, whose family searched, and Steven Wood, and Donal Crisel, and Billy Pugh — each one a person whose disappearance left a hole in some family's daily life, a chair at a table that no one knew quite what to do with. Some of the families would wait months before learning the worst. Some would live for years in the particular anguish of not knowing.

What connected them, beyond the unspeakable manner of their deaths, was geography. Their bodies were discovered along the freeways and major highways of Southern California — the San Diego Freeway, the Golden State, the Santa Ana — as if the roads themselves had become the killer's calling card, as if he wanted them found. Investigators would later come to understand that this was not carelessness. It was confidence. William Bonin, prosecutors would argue at trial, believed that confidence was a kind of armor.

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Bonin had a history that the justice system had already seen and, by his own later account, inadequately addressed. Born in Connecticut in 1947, he had endured a childhood marked by deprivation and documented abuse. He had a prior record of sex offenses against children dating back to the late 1960s, and had served time in California state prison. He had been evaluated, treated, released, and evaluated again. A 1969 psychiatric report, which would be referenced extensively in later legal proceedings, flagged him as dangerous and likely to reoffend. He reoffended. And then he reoffended again. By the time the bodies began appearing along Southern California's freeways in 1979, Bonin was living in Downey, working as a truck driver, and operating, according to the evidence that would eventually emerge, with an almost systematic deliberateness.

He did not always act alone.

Prosecutors established that Bonin committed a number of the murders with accomplices — younger men whom investigators described as variously coerced, complicit, or somewhere in the terrible territory between. Vernon Butts. James Munro. William Pugh. Gregory Miley. These men would eventually become central figures in the legal proceedings against Bonin, some of them cooperating with authorities, some of them facing their own charges for their roles in specific murders. The prosecution's case against Bonin would rest, in significant part, on what some of these individuals would ultimately be willing to say in court.

But before any of that, there was the matter of catching him.

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The investigation that would eventually close around William Bonin was a multi-jurisdictional effort, as complicated and ungainly as the geography it covered. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the LAPD, the Orange County Sheriff, and various local police departments were all working pieces of a puzzle that no single agency had all the parts to. There were task forces formed and disbanded. There were tips that went cold. There were profiles generated by investigators who understood they were looking for someone organized, someone mobile, someone who knew these freeways the way a commuter knows them — by feel, by instinct, by repetition.

The toll mounted across 1979 and into 1980. By the spring of that year, fourteen deaths would be attributed to Bonin. Some investigators believed the actual number was higher. Bonin himself would later claim, in statements that prosecutors treated with the careful skepticism that confessions from men in his position tend to warrant, that the number exceeded twenty. That claim was never fully corroborated, and the official count of proven victims in his two trials remained at fourteen, a number large enough on its own to constitute something that resists ordinary language.

The break in the case came not from forensic science, not from a tip line, but from a survivor.

In the spring of 1980, a young man named William Ray Pugh — not to be confused with the victim Billy Pugh — came forward and told investigators that he had been present during at least one of Bonin's attacks, and that he had information about what Bonin had done and with whom. Pugh was himself charged in connection with one of the murders and ultimately pleaded guilty, receiving a reduced sentence in exchange for his cooperation. His account, combined with information provided by another accomplice, gave investigators the framework they needed to seek a warrant.

On June 11, 1980, police placed William Bonin under surveillance. They watched him cruise the streets of Huntington Beach in his van. And they watched him, according to testimony that would later be presented in court, pick up a young man. Investigators moved in before the encounter could follow the pattern they had documented a dozen times over. They arrested Bonin on the spot. The young man in the van, according to court records, was unharmed. He had, in the most literal sense imaginable, been saved by timing.

Inside the van, investigators found what they would later characterize in court as a mobile crime scene — evidence consistent with the crimes already under investigation. The case against William Bonin was about to become a matter of public record.

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He was charged first in Orange County, where the prosecution moved with deliberate speed. The Orange County trial, which began in 1982 and concluded in 1983, focused on four of the murders — those of victims Mark Shelton, Manny Lopez, Donald Ray Crisel, and David Murillo. The proceedings were detailed, methodical, and at times harrowing for those who sat through them. Prosecutors laid out a pattern of predation that left little room for interpretation.

The defense raised the expected challenges — questions about the reliability of accomplice testimony, about the evidentiary chain, about Bonin's psychological state. A man who had been flagged as dangerously disordered as far back as 1969, defense attorneys suggested, was a man the system had failed, not merely a man who had chosen evil. The jury, which deliberated carefully, did not find this argument sufficient to alter the conclusion the evidence demanded.

In the spring of 1983, William Bonin was convicted on four counts of first-degree murder in Orange County. The jury recommended death.

The Los Angeles County proceedings came separately, as California's judicial machinery worked through the weight of a case this large. The Los Angeles trial addressed the remaining ten murders attributed to Bonin in that jurisdiction. By the time that trial concluded, in 1996, Bonin had been convicted on all fourteen counts across both proceedings and had received two separate death sentences. The legal journey between the two trials — the appeals, the habeas petitions, the constitutional challenges that are the standard architecture of capital cases — consumed more than a decade. Every avenue, as the law requires, was examined. Every argument was heard. The courts, at each level, affirmed what the juries had found.

Throughout his years on death row at San Quentin, Bonin gave occasional interviews to journalists and researchers. He was by most accounts an unsettling presence — articulate in some respects, capable of discussing his crimes with a detachment that observers found disturbing, and given at certain moments to self-pity and at others to something closer to self-congratulation. He spoke about his victims in terms that made clear, if any clarity was still needed, that he had not experienced the kind of moral reckoning that the word "remorse" requires. Some investigators who had worked the case and followed the appeals over the years said, privately, that the interviews were difficult to read. Not because they revealed anything unknown, but because they confirmed it.

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On the evening of February 23, 1996, William Bonin was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison. He was forty-nine years old. The execution was notable for a reason that had nothing to do with him specifically: he became the first person executed by lethal injection in the state of California, which had switched from the gas chamber following court rulings about the humaneness of that method. Representatives of some victims' families were present, as California law permits. Some spoke to the press afterward. Some did not. The things people say in those moments, if they say anything at all, tend to resist easy summary.

The accomplices who had participated in the murders and cooperated with the prosecution received sentences that varied according to their specific roles and the terms of their agreements with the state. Vernon Butts, who had been charged in connection with several of the murders, died in jail in 1981, before the trials concluded, in what was ruled a suicide. James Munro was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years to life. Gregory Miley was convicted of second-degree murder and received a sentence of twenty-five years to life. William Ray Pugh, whose cooperation had been instrumental in the initial arrest, received a sentence of six years and was released. The divergence of outcomes among the men who had been present for these crimes — some cooperating, some not, some dying before judgment, some walking out of prison — is one of those aspects of the criminal justice system that does not resolve into anything comfortable.

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There is a question that hangs over cases like this one, and it is not asked often enough, or at least not in the right rooms. William Bonin had been identified as a sexual predator and a danger to others more than a decade before the first murder attributed to him in this series. He had served time. He had been evaluated. He had been released. The men and boys who died along those Southern California freeways in 1979 and 1980 were, in some sense, paying for a collective failure that preceded them — a failure of supervision, of post-release monitoring, of a system that knew what it had and let it go regardless.

That is not an exculpation of William Bonin. The jury found him guilty, the courts upheld that finding, and the record of what he did — what prosecutors proved he did — is as clear as such records get. Evil, where it exists, is responsible for itself. But the boys who were hitchhiking, who were runaways, who were simply young and mobile and vulnerable in the way that the young and mobile and vulnerable always are — they deserved a world that had been paying closer attention before they ever appeared on a freeway on-ramp.

Thomas Lundgren. Marcus Grabs. Harry Turner. Mark Shelton. Manny Lopez. David Murillo. Donal Crisel. Charles Miranda. James McCabe. Ronald Gatlin. Lawrence Sharp. Steven Wood. Billy Pugh. Donald Ray Crisel. Their names deserve to outlast the name of the man who took them from the world. That is always the wish in cases like this, and it is rarely the way memory works. The hope is that it can be, at least a little, different here.

The freeways of Southern California still run in every direction from Los Angeles, out toward the desert, down to the coast, north into the valley. Millions of people drive them every day without a thought for what those corridors once meant to investigators and to families waiting by telephones. Time has a way of repaving things. But somewhere in the archived case files of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Orange County District Attorney's office, the record remains. The testimony of the living and the documented facts of the dead, preserved in the particular amber of the legal system — imperfect, exhaustive, and final.

William Bonin is gone. The record is not.