News

Charmin' Billy

William Cody Neal knew how to spin a story. Believing him was murder.

By Steve Jackson 

July 28, 1999, Jefferson County Detention Center: William Lee Neal walks in with a grin on his face and his hand extended. "I'm Cody Neal," he says, shaking hands like a used-car salesman, warm and ingratiating. "Cody's a nickname...My friends call me Cody."

• 

  Life of the party: "Wild Bill Cody" Neal.

• 

  Rebecca Holderton, Candace Walters and Angela Fite all made fatal mistakes: They believed William Neal.

Details:

Previous Westword articles

"Judging the Judge,"
September 30, 1999
After a year on the Jefferson County bench, Brooke Jackson knows it can be a real hot seat.
By Steve Jackson

"Judgment Day,"
May 6, 1999
The state's first death-penalty panel spares the life of Robert Riggan.

He glances through the glass partition to the left, smiles and exchanges nods with another inmate in the cubicle next door. "He's a great guy...brings me my food every morning," Neal says of his younger compadre, who laughs wildly at whatever his weepy mother is saying through the thick Plexiglas that separates her from her son.

There's no such barrier in this room. Neal has demanded a contact visit because he doesn't want "other people" to hear him tell his story. The request was denied by jail authorities at first; he is, after all, a confessed mass murderer. But after Neal complained to jail higher-ups, the request was quickly granted. Whatever Cody wants, as long as he behaves himself and nothing delays his death-penalty trial in September.

Manipulating, always manipulating. That's "Wild Bill Cody" Neal.

Because he's defending himself, he's already received a number of "special" considerations. Pro se defendants are always allowed a certain number of hours in the jail's law library to prepare their defenses; in Neal's case, the jail brought in extra personnel so that he could spend entire nights in the library, sometimes with a fellow inmate to help him make copies and collate his material. The court purchased a special tape recorder so that he could listen to taped interviews and make duplicates (and pass extra time listening to music). He also has a VCR and television so that he can watch videos, such as the tape of his confession; he's allowed to keep law books, legal documents and all sorts of writing materials -- provided by the court -- in his cell.

Then there's the cell phone. Robert Lee Riggan Jr., the last killer in Jefferson County to try to represent himself, had to use a public telephone in the jail for frequent discussions of his case with the prosecutor. And when Riggan was interviewed by the press, it was through Plexiglas, holding a telephone to his ear.

Neal, however, can use a cellular phone to call out ten minutes a day from his cell. He'd entered a motion claiming he had a lot of out-of-state people -- friends and family -- that he might call as witnesses. But while he's supposed to use the phone to prepare his defense, he's also used it to call a new girlfriend in Arizona and to contact the press. He's rung up huge collect telephone bills, including one for nearly a thousand dollars, talking to the one sibling in his family who has any contact with him. Still, ten minutes doesn't go too far, he complains, and he's petitioning the court for more airtime.

Neal takes a seat on one of the two stools that rise out of the floor like gray mushrooms; between them, an equally drab and secured table juts from the wall. The muted light of the single fluorescent tube in the ceiling and the interview room's brain-gray cinderblock walls do little to improve his complexion; he has the pallor of a corpse. The skin around his eyes is puffy, as if he doesn't sleep too well these days. Only the bright-orange jail jumpsuit and his voice -- a gravelly baritone with a Western rumble you might expect from an old cowboy -- give him any color. And his eyes: Those wide-set blue eyes are a bit too pale, somewhat disconcerting...but really, only if you know what he did last summer.

Neal says he wants to tell his story -- and to keep telling it as he heads down a road that he expects to end with his execution. But he doesn't want a defense attorney, appointed by the court to advise him, to use this story to try to save his life, or for the prosecution to use it in its efforts to kill him. So he hasn't told them much about his life, he confides, and will have to be careful how much he reveals now.

Already the truth is being twisted. There are "lies in the press," he says. Accounts of what he did -- "bad as it was" -- have been "sensationalized."

Neal sees himself as "owning up." This is why he says he pleaded guilty in February to three counts of first-degree murder, three counts of sexual assault, and seven other counts that include felony menacing and kidnapping. "We need to end the violence by taking responsibility for our actions," he says earnestly. "As some old Turk once said, 'No matter how long you've gone down the wrong road, turn back, turn back.'"

But he also admits it's crossed his mind that "owning up" might persuade the three-judge panel to spare his life. "It's my only chance."

He doesn't want his court-appointed advisor, attorney Randy Canney, to interfere with his strategy. "He wants me to reverse my guilty plea and is threatening to petition the court that I'm not competent to represent myself," he says. "I'm fightin' more with my defense counsel than the prosecution. I get along real well with [Chief Deputy District Attorney Charles] Tingle. He's been helpin' me protect my rights to self-representation and to accept responsibility by pleadin' guilty. And I'm thankful for that."

On the other hand, Canney doesn't think that Neal is prepared for the hearing. "And that could be true," Neal concedes. There are some 10,000 pages of discovery to read -- including the transcript of that seven-and-a-half-hour confession he gave sheriff's investigators Jose Aceves and Cheryl Zimmerman in September 1998. Neal complains that he still hasn't received some of the addresses and telephone numbers he needs to implement his "strategy" -- which he won't discuss with anyone, especially his attorney.

But he's at last ready to discuss what he claims a jailer told him has been an "extraordinary life...from livin' with the rich and famous to the dregs." Not even his family knows his tale, he says. "I've lived a private life...where I didn't want them involved in it."

When he goes before the death-penalty panel on September 20, Neal will be asked to present "mitigators" -- factors that counter the prosecution's arguments, called "aggravators," for why he should be put to death. In many death-penalty trials, mitigators include physical, emotional and sexual abuse in the defendant's childhood, or addictions to drugs and alcohol that left the defendant unable to assess the impact of his behavior, or a lack of criminal history, or even past good deeds that might show the defendant wasn't all bad.

"Like that fella Bob Riggan, who I guess had a helluva time growin' up," Neal says of the man found guilty of murdering a prostitute by a Jeffco jury in October 1998. During his death-penalty trial the following April, Riggan's defense attorneys described their client's childhood in an extremely dysfunctional family in which incest, sexual abuse and emotional deprivation were common. But while Riggan escaped the death penalty, it was because the jury couldn't decide if he had "intentionally" killed his victim. This absence of intent, not the sorry tale of his life, was what persuaded that panel of judges to spare Riggan.

There'll be no sad stories for Neal. "I grew up in an all-American family," he says.

William Lee Neal was born October 7, 1955, in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. His father was a chief warrant officer in the Air Force, "a good man, a disciplinarian," Neal remembers. "It was 'Yes, ma'am' and 'No, sir' and 'Don't you raise your voice to your mother,' or you'd find your lip on the wall."

Neal's father retired from the service "when I was nine or so," he says. "Some of these dates are hard to pin down. I have a lot of places where the memory just isn't there."

But he knows he got his passion for country music from his dad. "You know, Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash." There was even a little Rick Nelson: "Hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart. Sweet Mary Lou, I'm so in love with you," he sings, breaking out in an impromptu serenade.

And his memories of his mother are clear. "I absolutely loved my mother," he says. His eyes tear and his voice grows even huskier as he tries to describe the woman who died in 1995. "Mom was awesome -- the definition of love was my mom. She was beautiful, a gorgeous brunette. She looked like a movie star. But she was very much the mother...devoted to her family."

His parents never fought, Neal says. One word from his soft-spoken mother was enough to let his dad know he had stepped over the line, "and he would do anything to make it right."

His father was an honest man who taught his three daughters and two boys the difference between right and wrong. "Don't steal. Don't lie," his second son remembers. "Do what's right, tell the truth...and if you do something wrong, 'You'd better come to me before somebody else does.'"

Neal was ten years old when he and a friend were caught shoplifting toy cars at a local five-and-dime. Brought to the owner's office, where a security guard loomed over the boys, the owner threatened to call their fathers. "I was cryin' and beggin', 'No, anything but that,'" he says, then laughs.

The boys ended up talking their way out of trouble, promising they'd never steal again. "She thought she was givin' me a break," he says. "And we thought we had really put one over on her. But she should have called my dad and had him whip the tar out of me...Maybe if she didn't give me a break, things would have been different."

It might go better for him, Neal acknowledges, if there was some dark secret -- some evil done to him by his father, or some twisted relationship with his mother -- that might help the panel of judges understand why he did what he did. But no, he says, there's nothing to explain how he ended up in this cell.

Neal had a couple of different ideas about what he wanted to be when he grew up. After his father took him to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and he looked through its museum filled with stories about Elliot Ness and J. Edgar Hoover, he thought he might want to be an FBI agent. The life of a G-man sounded exciting, and he thought he could do a lot of good, catching bad guys and all.

His other choice was to be a minister. Neal had been named after a family pastor, William Lee, and one of his uncles was a minister. "He was kind and gentle," Neal remembers, "and he helped people who were hurtin'. I loved the Word and Lord Jesus, and I liked going to Sunday school, 'cause people just seem to be nicer on Sunday."

Neal pauses, furrows his brow. "Never did like mean people...My sister told me there was a bad storm when I was born, and that was the reason there was a light about me. I always got along with everybody and loved people."

But when he was twelve or thirteen years old, he says, "the light went out."

By then, his father was drinking pretty heavily, and he was quicker to lay it on with the belt. But it wasn't the occasional beatings his son minded so much as the efforts to embarrass him in front of the other drunks at the bars his father would drag him to. "He'd think it was funny. Then he'd black out and forget all about it."

The darkness settled around Neal when an older married woman seduced him, he says. The woman's husband was running around on her, and she used him as a way to get even. "I couldn't wash myself enough," he says. Nor could he talk to anybody about what was going on. "She said if I ever told, my family would disown me."

Then again, sex with a beautiful woman wasn't all bad. "It was such a contradiction," he says. "I enjoyed it, but afterward I would feel so guilty." In the interview room, Neal rubs his hands across each other. "It was like the two sides in me was sanding each other and there wasn't much left in between."

After six months, the older woman called things off. She and Neal didn't talk about it again until he got out of the Army, which he'd joined shortly after his seventeenth birthday. The woman was now divorced, he remembers, and eager to resume their affair. "I told her, 'You had me as a boy; now have me as a man.'" She started talking about them staying together, even marrying. "But that's where it ended," he says. "I turned and walked away.

"I have no ill feelings towards her. Lord knows what she's goin' through now, wonderin' if she was the cause of all of this. She was just passin' on her anger and pain, almost like it was a demon, and givin' it to me. I don't blame her, but that's when the light went out.

"I became more distant from my family, not as cheerful. I started gettin' into trouble more. I knew I couldn't be a minister or an FBI agent...not after what I done."

And he'd done more than get involved with an older woman. Soon after that affair began, he'd turned the tables and molested a younger girl. He also says he was an unwilling victim in a few other instances of sexual abuse -- by a church elder while in his teens, by an Army sergeant -- although he doesn't blame his rampage on any of that.

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