In the autumn of 2003, Mary Jane Menard, a 40-year-old White female, disappeared from New Britain, Connecticut. A mother of two and a substance abuse counselor, she was last seen on October 4, 2003. For years, her family held onto hope, but the unsettling silence surrounding her whereabouts hinted at a grim conclusion. The first break in the case came not with answers, but with more questions. In 2007, a hunter walking through a wooded area behind a strip mall on Hartford Road in New Britain stumbled upon skeletal remains. This grim discovery would eventually be linked to Menard, but identification would take several more years.
The site where the initial remains were found became a focal point for a much larger and more terrifying investigation. Law enforcement determined that the remains belonged to three different women, all of whom had vanished in 2003: Menard, Diane Cusack, and Joyvaline Martinez. Investigators announced that the deaths were the work of a serial killer. The area behind the shopping plaza was described by the killer as his "garden," a place where he discarded his victims. In the spring of 2015, authorities, aided by an FBI cadaver dog, returned to the location and unearthed the remains of four more individuals, bringing the total number of victims to seven.
The suspect in these slayings was identified as William Devin Howell, an East Coast drifter who had been doing odd jobs in central Connecticut during 2003. Howell was already incarcerated, serving a 15-year sentence for the 2003 manslaughter of Nilsa Arizmendi, one of the seven victims whose bodies were later found in the wooded burial ground. In September 2015, while still in prison, Howell was charged with the murders of Menard and the five other victims. The investigation revealed that Howell used a distinctive blue Ford Econoline van, which he called the "murder mobile," to commit his crimes. He eventually confessed to the seven murders and in 2017, received six consecutive life sentences for his horrific killing spree.
