Charmin' Billy

Those assembled now rise to their feet as the three judges -- Thomas Woodford, the presiding judge from Jefferson County, and Frank Martinez and William Meyer, both from Denver -- enter and take their seats at the enlarged dais built especially for death-penalty hearings. Since a recent law took such decisions out of juries' hands, Jefferson County has had more death-penalty cases than any other district. First there was Robert Lee Riggan Jr., who was spared in April. Then Daniel "Bang" Martinez Jr., who was also spared, in May. Third was Francisco "Pancho" Martinez Jr., now sitting on death row.

Most expect William Neal to join him soon.

Tingle walks to the lectern in front of the prosecution table and, after pausing to look one more time at his notes, begins. When they met William Lee Neal, he tells the court, Rebecca Holberton, Candace Walters and Angela Fite "were all vulnerable in one way or another and in search of happiness...He preyed upon each one of them. He promised to rescue them emotionally and financially. But he was a phony, a master manipulator. And he sucked them in with his lies and deceit."

In February, acting as his own attorney, Neal informed Judge Woodford that he was guilty "without a doubt, your honor." He also told the court that he'd met recently with a psychiatrist who "didn't see any reason why I was not competent." The judge then grilled Neal for nearly an hour, making sure he knew what he was doing. If he pleaded guilty to the three counts of first-degree murder after deliberation, his future held two possibilities: life without parole or death by lethal injection. "I understand that, sir," Neal replied.

After that hearing, Jim Aber, the public defender Neal had fired before entering his plea, criticized Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas for continuing to seek the death penalty. "This is a total farce," he told the press after Neal's guilty plea. "Seeking the death penalty against a person not represented by counsel is like trying to kill an unarmed man. There is no morality or justice in this."

Tingle and Bachmeyer considered that a cheap shot: If prosecutors dropped the death penalty every time a convicted murderer decided to go pro se, every murderer who wanted to avoid the possibility of a death sentence would automatically demand to represent himself. Except for Jeffco investigator Aceves, Tingle has had more contact with Neal than anyone else -- including his advisory counsel. As a pro se defendant, Neal had the right to contact Tingle to discuss legal matters, as would any attorney appointed to represent him. And he took full advantage of his cell-phone privileges, calling four or five times a week.

Although he was not allowed to tape their other conversations, Tingle kept the voice-mail messages; over a seven-month period, he'd accumulated two hours of Neal, at an average of a minute a message. It wasn't unusual to come to the office on Monday morning and find ten messages or more from the defendant, who would talk until cut off by the machine, then call back, often only to repeat the same information.

In fifteen years as a prosecutor, the forty-year-old Tingle had never run into anybody like Neal. The defendant was extremely intelligent, at least in his niche as a pathological liar and sociopath. He was also very meticulous, putting together an eighteen-inch-thick stack of case law regarding the death penalty in the United States.

It was clear from their conversations that he'd read every page of it, as well as the thousands and thousands of pages of discovery. And if there was a page Neal couldn't read or a clarification he needed, he'd stay after Tingle until he got what he wanted rather than let it slip, like most pro se defendants the prosecutor had dealt with in the past. Nor did the pressure seem to get to Neal: The day before the trial, he had reminded Tingle of several outstanding telephone bills for collect calls he'd made to his sister Sharon and two friends.

Of course, given the methodical way Neal had gone about the business of murdering three women and raping a fourth, his organizational skills shouldn't have been a surprise. Beyond their brutality, the one thing that stood out about these murders was the incredibly detailed web of lies he'd spun to trap his victims. He was indeed a master manipulator.

That was Tingle's greatest fear. He worried that the court, the judges and the jailers would underestimate Neal.

In their pre-trial dealings, Neal had always been courteous and respectful, often overly so. Although he would become irritated if some issue had not been taken care of quickly enough to suit him, he was never threatening on the telephone or in the dozen or so face-to-face meetings they had held. And he couldn't thank the prosecution enough for respecting him and helping him pursue his pro se course.

It made Tingle's skin crawl to hear him talk like they were on the same team. But then, he had the benefit of knowing what Neal had done. He'd been called to the scene while the bodies were still there. He'd prosecuted more than a dozen murder cases, all with their own grisly crime scenes and autopsy photographs, but none came close to those he'd had to study for this case.

Tingle had noticed something different about Neal this morning: The killer was wearing a new gold wedding band.

A few days before the trial, Tingle had received a call from deputies at the jail. An upscale Denver jewelry-store manager was complaining that the store was getting "harassing" telephone calls from Neal, who wanted a wedding set and felt he was getting the runaround.

Tingle knew that Neal had a new girlfriend, "Julie," a "trust fund baby" in Phoenix, according to a Jeffco investigator. She sent him money regularly and had even been up to visit him since his arrest. According to the investigator, Julia had met Neal in 1995 at a Lakewood bar, where he'd introduced himself by pulling up her shirt.

Incredible. Neal was still able to cast his spells inside and outside the jail. Ted Bundy, the serial killer executed in 1989 whose exploits had become favorite reading material for Neal, had married while on death row -- but at least his bride had been able to convince herself that he was innocent. Haircuts in the jail cost $6. Tingle has seen records that Neal paid cash for his -- and left $14 tips.

Neal didn't have a job in July 1998, Tingle now tells the panel. Yet he hung out at neighborhood bars and strip joints and threw money around "like it was going out of style. He'd buy a ten-dollar lunch and leave a 150 percent tip," he says. "The problem was, it was not his money." By then, he had bilked Rebecca Holberton out of as much as $70,000 and Candace Walters out of another $6,000.

But "the walls were caving in." Holberton, a 44-year-old blonde who worked at US West, had told a friend she was ready to get Neal, who had been living with her since July 1996, out of her life. But first she wanted her money back.

And Walters was trying to find out more about her secretive lover Cody, who said he had homes in Las Vegas and Denver but wouldn't tell her where he lived. She had made him sign a promissory note for the money he owed her and was threatening to expose him to Holberton and, perhaps, the police.

"Rather than risk being exposed for who he really was," Tingle says, Neal came up with a plan.

Early on June 30, 1998, Neal drove to Builder's Square for a little shopping. He bought Lava soap, four eyebolts, nylon rope, duct tape -- Tingle goes over to the jury box in front of the prosecution table to grab some evidence -- and "a seven-and-a-half-pound splitting maul."

Half ax, half sledgehammer, the maul has a wooden handle the length of a baseball bat. Even some of the spectators who know how the murders were done groan at the sight of the tool. But it is not the murder weapon, just an identical match. The actual murder weapon waits in a clear plastic bag, still stained with blood, although the Colorado Bureau of Investigation has removed most of the gore for testing.

At the time, Neal was living with Holberton at her townhome on West Chenango Drive in Lakewood. Apparently they were doing some renovations to the place -- the carpeting had been removed from the hallways leading into the living room, and butcher paper covered the windows and the glass sliding door at the back of the townhouse.

When Neal returned home from his early-morning shopping trip, he placed a chair in the middle of the living room and invited Holberton, still wearing her bathrobe, to take a seat. He had talked about a surprise he had for her, which she thought meant he was going to repay her from the "millions" he'd come into as the result of a settlement. In fact, earlier that morning he'd had her write out checks for more than $56,000 to pay back her creditors. In Neal's own words, Tingle says, she was "filled with joy and happiness."

Neal opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate Holberton's impending financial solvency, then put his briefcase on her lap and told her to place her hands on it, intimating that it contained the cash to cover her debts. He covered her with a blanket so that she couldn't see, and there she waited for her surprise.

It came quickly. Neal fetched his splitting maul and "ambushed Rebecca from behind, unleashing a violent and ferocious attack using the hammer side of the maul," Tingle told the court. He brought the weapon down "with such force that it completely caved in the back of her skull," sending skull fragments into her brain and gouging out a two-inch piece of skull that went flying across the room.

Holberton fell to the ground, "never to rise again." Neal wrapped her head in clear plastic to catch the blood, and then, after binding her limbs and body with nylon rope, wrapped her in black plastic like a mummy and placed her against a wall of the apartment.

From his seat at the defense table, Neal looks quickly behind him, then just as quickly ducks his head beneath the hard stares. He returns his attention to Tingle and continues to scribble notes on a yellow legal pad.

The day after killing Holberton, Neal told 48-year-old Candace Walters, a woman he'd met in December 1997 when she was working as a bartender at the Sheraton Hotel off Sixth Avenue and Union, that he was about to receive $52 million. He told her that in the old days, when he was "a hitman for the mob," he'd warned one of his assigned targets, and the man, who lived in Las Vegas, had been so eternally grateful that he'd left his estate to Neal. Now that his benefactor had died, Neal told Walters, he'd be able to pay off his former wife, a stripper, and get custody of his daughter.

Neal's heartwarming battle for his daughter was one of the things that had endeared him to Walters. She was told that she would now be "paid handsomely for maintaining her silence" about his former occupations. Just how handsomely had changed radically that final week. First she was to get $100,000, many times what she was owed, and they would fly to Las Vegas to get the money. Then it was $1 million and a new Toyota 4-Runner, which they would drive to Las Vegas to get the money and attend a wild party with "the family" for which he had once worked. Finally the amount reached $2.5 million -- one million in cash and the rest to be wired into a bank account. There would also be a new home -- a mansion, really -- down the street from Neal's own place in Las Vegas. He showed her pictures of both that he kept in a white photo album. They were beautiful.

On July 1, 1998, Candace Walters saw her daughter, Holly, for what would be the last time. Holly, who had hired her "best friend and mother" to work for her real-estate financing company and had also offered Neal a job, was leaving in a couple of days to set up a branch office in Missouri.

Holly had her doubts about Neal, particularly his tales of being a former hitman and the magnanimous gift. But it had been a long time since she had seen her mother so happy, and Neal was so warm and attentive toward her that Holly ignored the feeling that something wasn't right.

At Neal's suggestion, Candace Walters called her bank and asked how to go about wiring a large amount into her account. And on July 2, with Rebecca Holberton dead three days, she sold her car to an auto broker. She wouldn't be needing it: Cody was bringing that new 4-Runner that they would drive to Las Vegas.

The next morning, Holly called. Candace told her that Cody was running late but that she expected him anytime. And in fact, a little while later Neal showed up and took her to the townhouse on West Chenango Drive, where the 4-Runner had been delivered, he said.