William Bonin became the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the state of California, marking a significant moment in the state's criminal justice history.
William George Bonin was also called the Freeway Killer and the Freeway Strangler, was an American serial killer and sex offender who raped, tortured, and murdered young men and boys between November 1968 and June 1980 in southern California.
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He was convicted of 14 murders, but he confessed to 21 and is suspected of even more.
Bonin's first known murder victim was killed in May 1979. He generally operated by luring his victims into his van under the pretence of having consensual sex.
He became known as the "Freeway Killer" because most of his victims' bodies were discovered beside freeways. On many occasions, he was helped by one of his four known accomplices.
One of them, Vernon Butts, was listed in court as an accomplice for 12 murders; he died via suicide before his trial in 1982.
Described by the prosecutor at his first trial as "the most arch-evil person who ever existed",[5] he spent 14 years on death row before his execution by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison in 1996. He was the first prisoner in California to die by this method.