Everything is mixed up for me forever,
And who is a man and who a beast
Will never now be clear….”
Anna Akhmatova, Requiem, 1937
It was an unexpected phone call, the kind that etches itself in your memory and changes your life. I was in Phoenix at an academic computing conference. From the shaky tone of my wife’s voice calling from home in Michigan I knew that the message would not be good. Something had happened to one of my elderly parents who lived in Grand Rapids, I thought.
The bad news came from a completely unexpected place, Ft Lauderdale, Florida, home of my long time, good friend Bill. My wife, Barbara, called to tell me that a homicide detective had just phoned our house and asked to speak with me. Ft Lauderdale Police were searching for William Coday Jr. They had recently found the stabbed and bludgeoned body of his ex-girlfriend in his apartment, one I had helped him pick out on a visit I had made about a year earlier. My name and phone number were in some of Bill’s papers. The detective asked Barbara to have me call if we had any contact from Bill or any ideas of where he might be. Shortly afterwards, Ft Lauderdale newspaper reporters began to call our house.
Shaken, I first imagined that my friend had fallen victim to drug dealers. He liked to date exotic South American women—particularly Columbians—and my fear was that he had turned up at the wrong party, encountered the wrong people and with his ex-girl friend had gotten himself murdered or perhaps kidnapped. That he was directly responsible for the murder of anyone was unthinkable.
Over the next several days a different and far more awful picture took shape, one I envisioned with the greatest reluctance. Bill’s ex-girl friend was dead—killed in his apartment—and Bill had disappeared. The police recovered her car at the Miami airport parking garage. Bill had driven it from his apartment to the airport after the slaying, abandoned it, and then purchased a one way airplane ticket to New York City. More ominous, a day or two before her murder Bill had emptied out his bank account. My good friend, it appeared, had committed a horrifically violent, premeditated murder and then fled.
Over the next several weeks, I diligently tracked the events from the newspapers on the Internet. It was a sensational story and got national attention in part because of the starkly incongruent picture of someone like Bill—a man of books and erudition—committing such a primitively violent crime. His personal history was indeed a remarkable departure from that of the typical slayer of ex-girlfriends: marks of social and economic privilege, impressive educational credentials, extraordinary intellectual attainment. Bill’s life had been considerably advantaged. His father was a highly successful attorney, first in St Louis, then in California. A cum laude graduate from Washington University-St Louis, Bill had completed a law degree at St Louis University and a master’s degree in information science from the University of Michigan. An experienced world traveler—urbane, cultured, and fluent in four languages—Bill was a man of extraordinary charm, intelligence and thoughtfulness. Imaginative, outrageously funny, often boisterous and dramatic, Bill injected energy and life into almost any gathering in which he found himself.
Bill was not some glib Cliff Notes intellectual. The range and depth of his knowledge was truly phenomenal. He could converse insightfully about the influence of Kantian ethics on German legal positivism, help you fathom the aesthetics of Arnold Schoenberg’s atonalism, and substantively compare English translations of pre-Socratic philosophers. He had read Cervantes in Spanish, Goethe in German and Voltaire in French. An intense, engaging conversationalist, he could draw out the best ideas and observations in others. He understood classical music, knew its history, and evinced an extremely sophisticated appreciation of poetry and literature.
At the time of the murder Bill was employed as a foreign language librarian at the Broward County Public Library in Ft Lauderdale. He had gotten the job in part because the library had a large Spanish-speaking clientele and Spanish was one of the languages in which he was fluent. According to the newspaper accounts, it was at the library where Bill met Columbian-born Gloria Gomez, whom he dated and whose battered body the police later discovered in his apartment. Gloria had broken off the relationship and become engaged to another man. Distraught, Bill called her repeatedly and tried to persuade her to reunite. Finally, he concocted a story calculated to take advantage of her sympathy. He phoned to say that he had been diagnosed with cancer and needed desperately to see her. Her friends strongly advised her not to go. But her feeling of compassion for him fatally trumped her caution. When she entered his apartment, he exploded in rage and murdered her.
The news got worse. Gloria’s murder was a repeat performance. An investigation into Bill’s distant past by Florida officials produced an appalling, eerie piece of personal history that he had successfully concealed. Bill had killed another woman, Lisa Hullinger, in Germany nineteen years earlier. At that time he was a DePauw University exchange college student. His victim, Lisa, was a fellow exchange student from Cincinnati, a former girlfriend. Like Gloria, Lisa had broken off with him shortly before the fatal encounter. Like Gloria, Lisa had been bludgeoned, an object of murderous rage. Bill’s German attorneys successfully plea bargained the charge down to what in the United States would be comparable to manslaughter. So the young American exchange student served sixteen months in a German prison, greatly improving his German language skills. He then returned to the United States where he completed three university degrees and eventually settled into the library profession, my own, one which I had encouraged him to enter.
Weeks went by. I daily consulted the newspapers to see if the police had apprehended my friend. Bill’s initial flight from Ft Lauderdale was to New York City, and from there, the authorities learned, he had flown to Paris. A Ft Lauderdale police detective told me that he thought that Bill would remain in Western Europe where, if apprehended, extradition would probably not be granted to a jurisdiction such as Florida where sentences of death are imposed. The detective also relayed an additional item of information from the investigation to round out the horror of the picture. This murder, he told me, was the most brutal he had seen in his twenty years as a homicide officer.
Interpol was searching for Bill. His photo appeared on the FBI’s web site: “Wanted by the FBI – Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution – Murder.” The story was also featured on television’s “America’s Most Wanted.” The Atlantic Monthly did a cover story on a nation-wide support group, Parents of Murdered Children, whose members gave mutual comfort to families of murder victims. The founders of the group were the family members of Bill’s first victim, Lisa Hullinger. When they learned that Bill had done to another woman what he had done to their daughter, they were once again shattered.
This man had been my friend for fifteen years. We met when he was a first year law student at St Louis University in 1982. I was a librarian at the law school, teaching part time and finishing a dissertation for a Ph. D. in philosophy. Bill worked as a student in the law school library and after a couple of initial encounters we became friends. Few friendships in my life formed so quickly and with such intensity, in part because we shared a passion for systematic and voracious historical and philosophical reading. He had read more and knew more than any other person even close to his age that I had ever met. His personality was ebullient, gentle and almost sweet. He was big and boyishly disheveled but handsome and charming.
Bill finished law school but never took the bar examination. His application to the Missouri Bar at the end of his second year automatically triggered a criminal background investigation that turned up the sixteen month sentence he served in Germany for the manslaughter conviction when he was an exchange student. He had lied on his application to law school, specifically denying that he had ever been convicted of a felony.
The Missouri Bar refused to let him take the exam and the Dean of the Law School was set to expel him, but Bill got an attorney and negotiated a deal that let him finish the final year with the assurance that he would never attempt to practice law, anywhere. At the time he told me that he had gotten into legal trouble when he was an exchange student in Germany but did not elaborate. I assumed that it was one of those youthful indiscretions, perhaps a fling with illegal drugs. To me Bill had always appeared completely normal, even conservative in his personal habits, orientation and behavior. He seemed almost indifferent to many of the usual sorts of things that entice so many of us into excess: food, alcohol, and popular entertainment.
After he finished law school, Bill worked for a time as a claims adjuster for an insurance company and was often gloomy and frustrated. For all of his gifts and talents, he was struggling to find a purpose or direction. He had married Nishi, a sweet and quiet woman, a Sikh he had met on a trip he took to India just before entering law school. The marriage, however, began to flounder and they both often seemed to be depressed and unhappy.
I left St. Louis with my wife and daughters and eventually returned to Michigan where most of my family lived and took a position as a librarian and administrator at Central Michigan University in Mt Pleasant. Bill and I kept in touch over the years, and, when he asked me about the possibilities of becoming a librarian, I enthusiastically encouraged him and wrote a glowing recommendation to the University of Michigan’s School of Information to support his application. Michigan gave him a scholarship, and he moved to Ann Arbor from St Louis, much to my delight since we were able to get together over weekends.
When he finished his degree, the country was mired in the recession of the early 1990s, and Bill struggled to find a job. I wrote many recommendation letters for librarian positions primarily at colleges and universities, but he never found a position at a university library. Because he could speak Spanish, Bill eventually got a job at a branch library of the New York Public Library in Queens where the clientele was largely Puerto Rican. By then he had split from his wife, Nishi. After a couple of years he interviewed at the Broward County Public Library in Ft Lauderdale and again because of his Spanish fluency was hired and moved there. It was at that library where he met Gloria Gomez, whom he eventually murdered. In the early spring of 1996 I went to visit him in Ft Lauderdale. It was the last time that I saw him.
After I learned of the Ft Lauderdale homicide, and then the first one in Germany, for some time I could think of little else. I began to pose to myself what, I suppose, was a series of inevitable but unanswerable questions. How could this extraordinary man I had known for so long and for whom I had so much affection, commit such horrible crimes? He had killed two young women. I had two young daughters. Their bedrooms had served as temporary guest rooms when he visited my home. I had proudly shared with Bill the stories of their achievements and adventures over the years, and he was an attentive, enthusiastic listener. My wife adored him and thought he was one of the funniest, wittiest people she had ever known. She was distraught with the news of the murders. We could only faintly conceive of the unrelieved anguish of the families of the victims.
How could I not over the years have seen any indications that he was capable of such murderous fits of rage? Did my friendship mean anything genuine to him, or was I a kind of social prop who served a darker pathological purpose? Was there a flaw in my character not to have recognized the malignancy in his? My friends reacted with insinuations and inflections signaling suspicions that I was tainted by this friendship. “What’s with you, with friends like that”? Of course! How could the character of such a treacherous individual not eventually become apparent to someone who had been so close?
Two Bills emerged for me. One was built from my many memories, a delightful, warm and gentle friend. The other was formed in my imagination by the contemplation of the recently acquired details of his crimes, a monster who brutally murdered two defenseless, young women, someone’s beloved daughters. Were all of the wonderful qualities I remembered of him—the ironic humor, the concern for other people, the profound appreciation for human frailty—consciously, cynically, carefully crafted poses made to conceal a deep self-aware absence of certain basic human feelings or impulses? I could not begin to put these two men together, and I came to realize that the capacities that I had refined and developed over the years, capacities that I confidently used to gauge the character of people I met, were terribly flawed. Never again would I trust my instincts and intuitions when I made a judgment about someone.
Approximately three months went by and Bill remained at large, presumably in Europe. The story eventually dropped out of the news and I began to think that Bill might be permanently successful in evading capture. Perhaps he would assume a new identity, settle into some obscure corner of the world, live out his days, and never be held to account for the wreckage. Gregarious and insinuating, Bill had a remarkable capacity to find and engage people and to make friends. I could envision him, with his charm, intelligence and adaptability, creating a new life, never to return to the United States.
One evening I went to my office and found a message on my voice mail from Tooska, an Iranian woman calling from her apartment in New York City. Tooska was Bill’s second ex-wife. When I returned her call, she told me that Bill had returned to the United States and had appeared at her apartment the night before. There he was eventually taken into custody by the police. She was distraught and asked me if I thought that Bill would be executed. She told me that the FBI had been tapping her phone during the time Bill was a fugitive. In our conversation another dark revelation emerged. When I asked her if Bill had ever threatened or abused her, she answered that he had nearly strangled her one night in a fit of rage.
Bill met Tooska when he was a graduate student in Ann Arbor and eventually married her. I had been with them several times over the years and was somewhat puzzled by the relationship. When I had last seen Bill in Florida, he told me that he had married Tooska in order to help her secure a green card and thereafter divorced her. He did not want to see her deported to Iran, he told me, where it was difficult for Westernized women to live. Tooska was an extremely sympathetic person, an intelligent and attractive woman. I did not have the impression, though, that he loved her, and also the slightly uneasy sense that he was somehow using her. To this day I do not know why he married her and why he divorced her. Tooska, though, was in love with him.
The Florida authorities extradited Bill from New York and put him in the Broward County jail to await trial for the murder of Gloria Gomez. There he remained for nearly five years before his case came to trial. Why it took so long I don’t know. He never denied the murder. In fact, he had written about it. During the three months he was in Europe evading the authorities, he had maintained a diary he called, appropriately enough, “Crepusculo,” Spanish for “twilight.” I suspect that there was a great deal of legal maneuvering by his attorneys and Bill himself had a law degree. He attempted suicide twice when he was in custody, which no doubt raised questions about the state of his mental health and his competency to stand trial.
When the case finally came to trial, the local papers gave it intense coverage. The jury deliberated for eight hours and returned a verdict of “guilty” of premeditated murder, which made him eligible for the death penalty. Bill’s attorneys tried to convince the jury to no avail that the killing was not planned, that he had just erupted in a jealous, uncontrollable rage. The trial then moved into the penalty phase. The jury had to decide whether the state of Florida should execute my friend or imprison him for life.
In an attempt to keep their client off of death row, Bill’s attorney’s successfully fought to shield the jurors from the knowledge of the manslaughter conviction in Germany nineteen years prior. In the same endeavor the attorneys also painted a picture of Bill for the jury that bore little resemblance to the person I had known for so many years. They said Bill was a socially inept, maladjusted loner, a man who had been irreparably damaged by an indifferent and emotionally distant father. About his upbringing I have no direct knowledge, but I do remember over the years how consistently he spoke with respect and admiration of his father, particularly his basic decency and integrity. Bill had many long term friendships, some of them reaching back to his days in high school.
As I followed the accounts in the newspapers and contemplated this part of the trial, for the first time in my life the subject of murder and the justice or injustice of the death penalty became more than an abstraction, more than a “controversial social issue,” suitable for high school debates and college term papers with the predictable pros and cons. I have changed my view of it and have come to believe that the moral dilemmas of capital punishment notwithstanding, an appreciation for the innocence of the victims has been lost or at least intolerably diminished. When we think of murder in this country, how depressingly common it is, how endlessly and pervasively it is featured as a theme of popular entertainment, how extremely protracted and arbitrary the legal process is for determining and exacting punishment, a perverse and ignominious social equation seems to be apparent: the victims lose their lives and the families lose their loved ones; those that take them are the recipients of vast amounts of time, attention and resources.
The jury concluded the penalty phase of Bill’s trial with the recommendation of death. The judge sentenced him to die. Bill, however, eluded the executioner. Some time ago, a friend e-mailed me with news that he had picked up over the internet. Somehow, even with the vigilance of death row security, Bill put an end to himself. His third attempt since his arrest to take his own life was successful. He was fifty-one.
Bill’s story is now indelibly marked in our own family history. My oldest daughter has childhood recollections of him. We remember the large reproduction of the Monet painting he brought her once when she was very young because he knew that she liked it. In my visits to my daughters when they were students at the University of Michigan, I would drive past the apartment on Liberty Street in Ann Arbor where he lived as a graduate student and where I stayed when I went to see him. His friendship and his involvement with our family haunt us and always will. My wife and I still think and talk about him and punctuate these conversations with professions of incomprehension and exclamations of anger and sadness. All of the many good memories of him are intermingled and ultimately stained with the horrible images in our minds of what he did to the two young women and their families, and hence a deep and melancholy ambivalence as we reflect on his life and how it touched us over the years.
In thinking about this friend whom I never really knew, I remember as a boy when my Father told me that the essence of human nature was best expressed by the Hebrew Prophet, Jeremiah. “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” I grew up with this notion and for years resisted it as harsh and benighted. But now, I think that my Father had it right. Jeremiah’s wisdom, I believe, resides in the simple question he poses with its vast epistemological and moral implications: who, really, can “know” the heart of any individual and its capacity for wickedness? Who can tell with certainty from even the most thoughtful and intimate engagements we may make with someone—from the experience of the words, the gestures, the visible emotions we take away—what darkness or emptiness is within? The deceit we all practice at times to conceal our inner selves, our hearts, from others is understandable, protective and necessary even, and usually forgivable. But there are among us those with terrible holes in their human core, who harbor a fundamental wickedness that puts them apart. No scientist, no philosopher or theologian, no one, can predict who they are or explain how or why they come to be so flawed.
I was asked by friends, who knew about my relationship with Bill, if I had any desire to communicate with him, perhaps to ask him how all this could have happened. After I learned about what he had done, I never sought any contact with him, nor desired any. There were no questions he could answer for me. He was either mentally ill or wicked, depending, I suppose, on your world view. His lawyers, to keep him off of death row, opted for mental illness. Making that case required clinical attention from the experts and a medical certification of psychic injury for the jury to entertain. He did not, the doctors opined, emerge from childhood with quite the right emotional-psychological equipment intact and hence was never able to “manage” anger.
During the penalty-phase of the trial, psychologist Alan Goldstein was asked if he thought Bill was conscious of the pain he was inflicting on Gloria while he was killing her. “He was focusing on his own pain as he was hurting her” was his response. I think not. It is outrageous, obscene even to equate Bill’s “pain”—an after-the-event clinical construct—with the excruciating flesh-shattering, terror-filled agony of Gloria’s final moments. The outrage of such an equation is that it inevitably collapses the profound moral gulf between killer and victim. Both are reduced to people to whom bad things happen, morally and spiritually indistinguishable. Gloria’s victimhood was real. Bill’s was contrived.
To my knowledge Bill never expressed any genuine sorrow or remorse for what he did. He permitted or encouraged his lawyers to present him as the victim, and victims don’t need to be sorry. They need to be felt sorry for. They need to be, well, victims. With the second slaying, though, Bill was held to account in Florida, not Germany, and somewhere in the future there might be an executioner waiting. The Germans gave him a free pass the first time around and a second chance. Gloria Gomez paid the bill nineteen years later in his apartment in Ft Lauderdale. As for the real victims he left in his wake, the women and their families, I continue through the years to imagine the senseless, pitiless violence they experienced as it exploded from his dark and raging soul. It is them I think of when I contemplate the desperate wickedness of this man who was once my friend.
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