The cellmate couldn’t believe what he was hearing. William Devin Howell, a man serving time for manslaughter, was calmly describing how he had killed not one woman, but seven. He called the victims his “garden,” and he told his cellmate exactly where they were buried. In 2007, a man walking through a swampy patch of woods in New Britain, Connecticut, stumbled upon what he thought were human remains.
The police arrived and began a careful search of the dense, briar-choked area. By the next day, they knew they had found the partial skeletons of two women. A few days later, a third body was recovered. There was nothing with the remains to identify them, but one conclusion was unavoidable: these women had been murdered, and almost certainly by the same person.
For ten long years, detectives worked to discover who the victims were and who had killed them. The investigation eventually zeroed in on a local gardener named William Devin Howell, a man who drove a battered blue van with plywood covering the side windows. When they began to pick that van apart, fiber by fiber, droplet by droplet, it became a gold mine of evidence. The case began quietly.
In April 2003, a young mother named Melanie Ruth Gammellino was reported missing from a town near the Berlin Turnpike. A month later, another mother, Marilyn Gonzalez, disappeared. In June, a transgender woman named Janice Roberts was reported missing. These women were on the fringes of society, struggling with addiction and sometimes engaging in sex work.
Their disappearances went largely unnoticed and were not linked by police. In July 2003, the mother and sister of 33-year-old Nilsa Arizmendi Mendez walked into a police station in Wethersfield. They hadn’t seen her for almost a week. Nilsa had a stable life, so her disappearance was unusual.
Her boyfriend, a man known as Ace, told police that the last time he saw her, she had climbed into a strange-looking van with wooden boards where the side windows should have been. The van belonged to a man they knew only as Devon. Two months later, a patrol officer spotted the van in Wethersfield. It was registered to a woman named Dorothy Holcomb, who lived with a man named William Devin Howell.
When police arrived to question her, she was evasive, saying that Bill had the van most of the time. Howell himself dodged every attempt to interview him. When police returned with a search warrant to seize the van, both Howell and the vehicle were gone. In January 2004, police finally caught up with Howell.
He denied any involvement in Nilsa’s disappearance. With no body, no van, and no evidence, they had no choice but to let him go. Months later, another woman, Joyvilyn Martinez, was reported missing by her mother. She had last been seen in October 2003.
Then, in March 2004, investigators got a lead. The blue van was found hidden on a property in North Carolina, belonging to one of Howell’s associates. They towed it back and let the crime scene investigators loose on it. They found reddish-brown stains on the carpeting and cushions in the back.
The stains were human blood. DNA testing revealed two different profiles. One matched Nilsa’s mother, confirming that Nilsa had lost a massive amount of blood in that van. The second profile belonged to someone unknown.
In May 2005, Howell was arrested and charged with Nilsa’s murder. On the fifth day of his trial in January 2006, he changed his plea. Using the Alford plea, he pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter while still refusing to admit his guilt or reveal where Nilsa’s body was. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Just months later, in August 2007, the police got a call that would change everything. A resident walking through woods off Hartford Road in New Britain had found what looked like human remains. The area was swampy and difficult to traverse, not a place anyone would casually wander. More officers were brought in, and by the next day, they had found the partial remains of two females.
Eventually, a third body was recovered. There were no matches for the DNA profiles in the system. The police were stuck, but they never stopped believing there were more bodies in those woods. In 2010, they got their first breakthrough.
A woman called to say that a facial reconstruction of one of the victims looked just like her sister-in-law, Diane Cusack. Through dental records and DNA, they made their first positive identification. Diane Cusack, 53, had lived in the same neighborhood as William Devin Howell. In 2013, the cold case unit formed a task force.
DNA from the remains was resubmitted, and in September 2013, they identified another victim: Joyvilyn Martinez. The second blood sample from Howell’s van matched her. The case against Howell was building. In 2015, the break they needed came from an unexpected source.
Howell’s cellmate, Jonathan Mills, contacted his lawyer with a horrifying story. Howell had confessed to killing six people in addition to Nilsa. He had described his first victim, Melanie Gammellino, whom he had raped and strangled in the back of his van. It was too cold to bury her, so he drove around with her body for weeks, sleeping next to her and calling her his baby.
He cut off her fingertips and tore out her teeth to prevent identification. He told Mills that after the first killing, it became easier. He perfected his method. Howell described his other victims: Marilyn Gonzalez, whom he bought a last meal for at a drive-thru before raping and strangling her; Janice Roberts, a transgender woman he killed in a rage; Diane Cusack; Nilsa Arizmendi; Joyvilyn Martinez; and finally, Mary Jane Maynard, a 40-year-old woman from Waterbury who went out to buy cigarettes and never came home.
Her daughter was serving overseas, so no one noticed she was missing. Mills gave the police a map of what he believed was Howell’s “garden. ” In April and May 2015, investigators returned to the swamp. With the help of a cadaver dog, they found the burial sites of all the victims.
Four more sets of remains were recovered. By June 2015, they had been identified as Janice Roberts, Melanie Gammellino, Marilyn Gonzalez, and Nilsa Arizmendi. With the bodies recovered, detectives needed to build an airtight case. They obtained a search warrant for the van, which had been held in storage by the Wethersfield Police Department, sitting like a time capsule.
Evidence technicians picked it apart, submitting over 200 pieces of evidence, including cigarette butts, hairs, a hairbrush, and a rock that appeared to have blood on it. The DNA analysis was damning: blood, hair, and other traces matched six of the seven victims. In September 2015, Howell was charged with six counts of murder. Two years later, faced with an insurmountable mountain of evidence, he pleaded guilty.
He was sentenced to 360 years in prison. At the sentencing hearing, Howell cried and said, “I’m going to stay in prison. I’m not a well man. I’m going to die a slow, painful death.
” The families of the victims sat and listened, but there was no comfort in his words. He was thinking only of himself. Howell’s confession to his cellmate had revealed his true feelings about his victims. He said they should have known they were going to die, just because of the lives they led.
In a 10-month killing spree in 2003, he abducted, brutalized, and killed seven women in the van he callously called his “murder mobile. ” For 14 years, their families waited for justice. When it finally came, it confirmed what they had feared: William Devin Howell is one of the world’s most evil killers.
