William George Bonin (January 8, 1947 – February 23, 1996), also known as the Freeway Killer, was an American serial killer and twice-paroled sex offender who committed the rape, torture, and murder of a minimum of twenty-one young men and boys in a series of killings in southern California from May 1979 to June 1980. On at least twelve occasions, Bonin was assisted by one of his four known accomplices; he is also suspected of committing a further fifteen murders. Described by the prosecutor at his first trial as "the most arch-evil person who ever existed", Bonin was convicted of fourteen of the murders linked to the "Freeway Killer" in two separate trials in 1982 and 1983. He spent fourteen years on death row before he was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison in 1996. Bonin was the first inmate in California to die by this method. Bonin became known as the "Freeway Killer", as well as the Freeway Strangler, due to the fact that the majority of his victims' bodies were discovered alongside numerous freeways in southern California. He shares this epithet with two separate and unrelated serial killers active in and around southern California in the 1970s: Patrick Kearney and Randy Kraft. Early life Childhood William George "Bill" Bonin was born in Willimantic, Connecticut, on January 8, 1947, the second of three sons – each of whom were three years apart – born to Robert Leonard Bonin Sr. (1919–1980) and Alice Dorothy Bonin (née Cote, 1920–2004). Bonin's parents were both alcoholics; his father was a machinist, an ill-tempered war veteran and gambling addict who was frequently physically abusive toward his wife in the presence of his children, and who is known to have occasionally beaten his sons during his wife's absence. In contrast, his mother was an overbearing, co-dependent and passive woman who suffered from wild mood swings and who spent much of her free time at The French Club, a local bingo parlor as her sons remained unattended at home. Often moody and bedridden, Bonin's mother seldom cooked meals for the family. Frequently arguing with his wife – who obtained a job at a local thread mill to supplement for his gambling habit – over finances, Bonin's father lost their home in Andover, Connecticut, in a high stakes poker game in January 1950, forcing the family to reside with Bonin's maternal grandmother in Willimantic