Charmin' Billy

"Then Dad would beat the tar out of me with his belt while my sisters would peek in at what was goin' on and laugh. I'm not sayin' I never did any of that...but 90 percent of what they said I did wasn't true...Just like what people are sayin' about me now -- a lot of it ain't true."

Years later, when their mother was dying of cancer, his sisters confessed how they had framed him. "My mother was furious with them for getting me beat for something I didn't do." He tears up again at the thought of his mother.

Suddenly, the man in the cubicle next door shrieks with laughter as his own mother wipes her eyes. Neal pauses mid-sentence and looks over, scowling, as though he can't believe he has to live with people who act, well, so damned crazy. "It's like going to bed one night," he says, "and waking up in the pit."

Last September, Neal told Aceves and Zimmerman that while he was still in his twenties, he lost count at a thousand sexual conquests -- although he also claimed to have killed more than 500 people. But while there are still questions about whether he has left other bodies behind, it is clear that William Neal began hunting women for his own purposes long ago.

Many women have fallen for Neal's charms, his lies and deceits, his ability to make himself whatever they wanted or needed, to touch their dreams and make them believe that he was the one who could make those dreams come true.

At least three of his victims can't speak to what hold he had over them -- although the families of the women will try to explain it at his death-penalty hearing. One woman survived that rampage; she is ready to tell the court about his cold-blooded efficiency during those days when he says he just "snapped."

There are other witnesses who will not be testifying: the women Neal married. Four of them. All of them attractive, intelligent, independent and trusting -- just like his victims in 1998. Some of them still live in mortal fear that Neal will somehow find a way to reach out from behind walls and razor wire and hurt them. Neal's actions in the summer of 1998 were extreme, they say, but not out of character and the inevitable conclusion for a man who spent his adult life manipulating and testing the women he supposedly loved, a man ruled by his jealousies, obsessions and paranoia.

Neal's first wife has tried to stay out of the picture. She talked to Jeffco investigators but didn't say much. Neal told the woman he would marry next that his first marriage ended when he caught her in bed with another man. That's a lie, his own family says.

Karen, who became Neal's second wife, has a whole collection of his lies.

She was born in upstate New York in 1959 to upper-middle-class parents. "I was not the perfect child," she says. "I had my teen-age rebellion, but I went to college for two years, studying English and horticulture. In other words, I'm not stupid, nor did I come from a dysfunctional background."

Karen was an accomplished outdoorswoman -- a rock climber and cave explorer. She taught kayaking and tried twice to make the U.S. Olympic canoe team, coming in second both times. There wasn't any adventure she wouldn't try. But with William Neal, she got more adventure than she bargained for.

In 1981, she was working as an assistant manager at a Hudson Bay Outfitters store in the Washington, D.C., area, a prestigious job for a 23-year-old woman. Karen was beautiful, with long, strawberry-blond hair, as well as financially self-sufficient and as tough as the wilderness treks she led. Then he walked in.

Many years later, she would hear unflattering physical descriptions of William Neal and say there must have been a transformation, "a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." The description of a soft, somewhat pear-shaped man doesn't match the "Bill" who approached her one day in the store, looking for information and equipment to hike the Appalachian Trail. He said he was leaving that very afternoon.

"He wasn't dressed to kill or anything, but he had long blond hair and those blue eyes and was as sweet as can be," Karen says, her voice full of the Tennessee hill country where she now lives. "He was bubbly, and I'm bubbly. And he was into what I was into; we were alike." She had already hiked the Appalachian Trail, and for an hour they discussed what he could expect. She could have talked to him all day.