Criminal - Willie Bosket

Episode Date: March 9, 2018

Before he was 10 years old, Willie Bosket had skipped school, started fires, picked pockets, and stolen a car. A psychiatrist at Bellevue called him the "saddest little boy she’d ever seen.” By the time he was 16 years old, he was known all over New York City as the “Baby-Faced Butcher." His crimes led to the passing of the Juvenile Offender Act of 1978 and changed how juvenile offenders are punished all over the country.  This episode was reported in collaboration with a new podcast from WNYC about the juvenile justice system: Caught. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Please use discretion. When Willie was very young, he didn't know anything about his father. His mother made up a story that his father was in the military. This is journalist Fox Butterfield. He's talking about a little boy named Willie Bosket. Willie Bosket was born in New York City in 1962, and, as Butterfield says, he didn't know his father. If Willie asked about him, his mother and grandmother would say,

he's a bad man, and you're just like him. When Willie was about six years old, he found out the truth. He was in his grandmother's apartment, and he saw a picture of a man wearing pants that looked like part of some uniform, and he was lifting weights, and Willie said, who's that? And his grandmother told him, that's your father. It sent this chill down his spine. I mean, it excited him. And he said, well, what's he doing? Where is he?

And she said, he's in prison. And Willie said, what's he in prison for? And she told him that he'd murdered two men. William Boskett Sr. committed the murders during a botched pawn shop robbery. He was in prison in Wisconsin, but then he escaped and ended up on the FBI's most wanted list. He was caught and sent back to prison where he learned computer programming. He put himself through college and became the first prisoner ever elected to the Academic Honor Society Phi Beta Kappa. When he got out of prison, he got a job with an aerospace company,

but was back behind bars pretty soon for molesting his girlfriend's daughter. He escaped from prison again with the help of his girlfriend, who pretended to be a prison nurse. It seemed like it was going to work. They made it about 900 miles, and then police caught up to them. There was a shootout, and William Boskett Sr. used his last two bullets to shoot his girlfriend and then shoot himself. He never met his son Willie. Willie's mother, Laura, was pregnant with Willie when William Boskett was sent to prison. She's in her mid-70s now. She says Willie was the spitting image of his father. Exactly he looked like his father. He was tall, good-looking, nicely built, and mean.

When Willie was little, Laura worked in a candy store and also as a teacher's aide at Willie's school. But she had a lot of trouble managing him. When he was in second grade, Willie broke into his school's storeroom and threw a typewriter out the window. It almost hit a pregnant teacher three floors down. When he was about eight years old, he attacked his sister Safi. Their friend was there. She doesn't want us to use her name. He was like, I'm going to shut her mouth once and for all. And he ran in the kitchen and got the long cooking utensil. And he pulled her over. She was trying, she was struggling. She was fighting with him, trying to get away. And he held her down, held her mouth open,

and he stuck the fork down her throat. The school told Willie's mother to take him to the children's psychiatric ward at Bellevue. The doctor who evaluated him called him the saddest little boy she'd ever seen. Not only did Willie's father spend time in prison, so did his paternal grandfather. When Willie was nine years old, his grandfather was released from Rikers, where he'd been serving time for kidnapping and sodomizing a child. Fox Butterfield interviewed Willie Bosket many years later, and Willie said that after his grandfather got out of prison, he raped Willie repeatedly. He started skipping school, started small fires, he picked pockets, he stole a car.

His mother knew that he was out of control and had no idea what to do. After some prodding from the Department of Child Welfare, she petitioned a judge to have Willie declared a person beyond the lawful control of a parent. The judge said to Willie, your mother is worried about you. For nine years old, you're turning out to be quite a problem. That roused Willie. You're a lying motherfucker, he told the judge.

You can go fuck yourself, and I don't need no motherfucking white lawyer neither. Spending any time with him at all, you knew that he was brilliant. He could charm anybody. He had that magic. And I don't know how many people said to me, people who had worked with him,

social workers, psychiatrists, had remarked at the time when they were working with Willie, he could grow up and become president. One of those social workers was Carol Darden at Wiltwick School for Boys, a reform school that was said to be able to rehabilitate the worst boys in New York City. The exact same reform school Willie's father had gone to many years before, when he was Willie's age. It was just a beautiful setting, an enormous property, a wooded property, a lake, and with people who were really trying very hard to meet a need. She remembers meeting Willie when he arrived.

She did his intake interview. He just seemed very sophisticated, which ordinarily wouldn't set off alarms. It was just interesting. Most children coming into an intake interview are not that self-assured. They don't know where they are, what's going to happen next. He didn't seem to have those anxieties. So he was a child that one would hope could be reached because he was obviously so intelligent.

And the what if of taking that intelligence and putting it toward positive expression. What if you could do that? In the 70s, Wiltwick was known for having a cutting-edge therapeutic program. They didn't use medication. They believed that the boys who ended up there had been, in some way or another, unsupported by their family and by society. Wiltmick wanted them to know that the school would be there, no matter what.

The director of psychiatry was Dr. Joel Katz. He wrote in a memo, shipping a boy out means the staff has flunked. He felt the problem was that a lot of kids had grown up in families where the parents couldn't deal with them, and then at school the teachers couldn't deal with them, the principal couldn't deal with them, and they'd been in other juvenile institutions

where the institutions couldn't deal with their behavior and so would transfer them on to somebody else. And what that did was, he felt, it just created more and more intense and bigger feelings of grandiosity by acting out, by being aggressive and impulsive and horrible, that they would be transferred on. They just built up their egos. Willie learned to read and write.

It was the first time he'd consistently gone to school in his life. But he also got into a lot of fights. He threw a chair at his social worker. Wiltwick made an exception to their no-drug policy and put Willie

on Ritalin and then Thorazine. But it didn't work. He stole a van, kicked a pediatrician, and wrapped a phone cord around a nurse's neck. Dr. Katz wrote that the most disturbing aspect of Willie's behavior was that he seemed to be in control of it at all times. And after all of that, Wiltwick did the one thing they said they wouldn't.

They kicked him out. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Hi, Kari. Hi, Phoebe. This is Kari Pitkin, a reporter for WNYC Radio. They have a new podcast about the juvenile justice system. It's called CAUGHT. Kari, you've been reporting this story about Willie for months.

Yes, I have. So what happens to Willie next? Well, Willie spends the next three and a half years breaking the law and being sent to juvenile institutions and then getting kicked out. And, you know, in this time, there were people who really tried to help Willie. There was one woman who even wanted to adopt him. But nothing seemed to make a difference. He was very, very difficult to manage. And then when he was 14, a family court judge ordered Willie to

the Brookwood Detention Center in upstate New York. Brookwood was a state facility, one of two high-security juvenile detention centers. There was no therapy, aside from some group sessions. They helped me, man. They helped, hold up. Hold up. You know how I used to feel? I didn't care about nothing, man. That's actually Willie's voice. This is from Alan and Susan Raymond's 1978 documentary film, Bad Boys. One day all the money come there, so that's why I'm going to follow them and be like them. That's why I don't care. Willie, the thing is this.

I don't mind following nobody. Willie, the thing is this. You see where Bill is right now, man. Like him, man. The staff at Brookwood didn't have a lot of training, but with Willie, they tried something new. They tried to create incentives to reward good behavior, to lead with a carrot, not a stick.

Here's Sylvia Honig. She was a social worker at Brookwood. All the other boys had to go to school, but Willie was given a special job. Even though he was 14, he did not have to go to school. I'd be on my own. If I feel like the grass across the road need to be cut, I don't have to tell nobody where I'm going.

I just go, cut the grass. I was over there today driving a riding lawnmower. I didn't tell nobody where I was going. You know, I feel free. Even though I'm locked up, I feel free. Sylvia believed that Brookwood's director, Tom Pottenberg, who was 6'8", was actually afraid of 14-year-old Willie. He didn't like to be alone with Willie,

and Willie seemed to be calling the shots. Tom Pottenberg started to push to have Willie released and sent to a halfway house. But Sylvia was worried, so she wrote a letter to the head of the state's division for youth, saying Willie was still too dangerous to be let go. In the end, the state did not intervene to stop Willie's release. Do you think this time you can stay up for good? Yeah. I feel, you know, like since I've been working downstairs, you know, with maintenance, I, you know, learned a lot. You know, I realize now, you know, that you have to, you know, be a man sometime. You know, you gotta grow up. Soon after this interview with filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond, Willie suddenly smashed the camera in Alan's face, giving him a black eye.

Where's Willie? Willie! Hey! Don't do that! Oh, shit. Willie was released a few days later, in September of 1977. When he was driven away in a van, one of the supervisors said to Sylvia Honig, Willie will end up killing someone.

He was taken to a halfway house operated by the Division for Youth. The halfway house was only two blocks from Willie's home on 145th Street. And after one night, Willie just walked out and went home. He spent his time riding the subway and looking for what he called bums, people who were asleep or passed out and easy to rob. The subway becomes a real object of fascination to Willie. It was where he could go to see life and have adventure.

It was sort of his Wild West. In March of 1978, Willie was riding the subway home from his grandmother's apartment. He noticed that a man on the train was wearing a gold watch. The man was asleep. As the train traveled uptown, people got off, until eventually there was no one in the car but Willie and the sleeping man. As Willie told Fox Butterfield, the first thing he did car but Willie and the sleeping man. As Willie told Fox Butterfield, the first thing he did was go over and kick the man's feet. He didn't wake up. Willie began to remove his watch.

Then the man woke up and Willie took out a gun and shot him in the eye. Willie shot him a second time in the temple. The man's name was Noel Perez. Willie took the watch and also a ring from his finger. Over the next 10 days, Willie, sometimes with his cousin Herman Spates, robbed other subway riders. He shot a maintenance worker in the back and murdered a second subway passenger. Cops nabbed two tough kids and two slayings on the IRT. Two youths aged 15 and 17 described by police as real tough guys were arrested yesterday

for the late night subway slayings of two men and the wounding of a third. Police said the two netted $3.68 in one of the shootings and were so indignant that one of their victims was penniless, they kicked his body after shooting him. I did not think that he could be rehabilitated. Robert Silbering was the prosecutor in Willie's case. I think he was the most violent offender that I had ever come across in 25 years as a prosecutor. I mean, you know, in all my experience, I think that there were certain cases where for the protection of society, an individual has to be warehoused.

I thought he was one of those. Willie pled guilty to three separate felonies, two counts of murder and one of attempted murder. The judge gave Willie the maximum possible sentence, placement in a youth facility, for five years. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Thank you. Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts.

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It was a very specific time in New York City's history. Police officers circulated a so-called survival guide for visitors. It had a picture of the Grim Reaper on the cover and said, Welcome to Fear City. It offered nine tips for making it out alive. Things like, don't go out after 6 p.m., don't leave Manhattan, and stay off the subway. New York's Democratic governor, Hugh Carey, had come into office in 1975 promising that he'd help people feel safe.

A government that does not protect people against violence is a government that fails its very justification for existence. We must act so that every policeman on the beat, every citizen on the street, knows that he is not alone when his life or safety is threatened. Three years after that speech, Kerry was running for re-election. He was a liberal, and he had recently vetoed the death penalty, an extremely politically unpopular move. His Republican opponent started calling him soft on crime. And right in the middle of all of that came the Willie Bosket case. When Governor Kerry learned that Willie Bosket had

gotten the maximum possible sentence and that it was only five years, he was furious. This case has me outraged. I am aroused. I feel that it points up the failure of the criminal justice system that I've been talking about for three and a half years. And then Kerry announced that he was going to change the law. As far as sentencing is concerned, as a practical matter, if this person is mentally unfit to be in society, the person will stay within secure lockup for life. New York State changed its law and would now treat kids as adults. You know, an enormous flip-flop from more than a century of judicial precedent. The Juvenile Offender Act of 1978 meant kids as young as 13 and 14 years old

would be tried in adult criminal court when they were charged with 14 specific crimes, some violent and some not, like burglary in the second degree. It became known as the Willie Bosket Law, and Governor Kerry won his re-election. After the so-called Willie Bosket Law passed in New York State, many other states changed their own laws to punish juveniles more harshly. According to the latest numbers from the Campaign for Youth Justice, every year between 200,000 and 250,000 Americans

under the age of 18 are charged as adults. Thirteen states allow children of any age to be charged as adults. It became common after Willie Bosque's crimes. Legislators across the country decided that we no longer needed to think about children as individuals, but instead we should think about them as a class of young people who should be treated with the same kind of harshness and severity that is usually reserved for adults who commit crimes. Dwayne Betts is a lawyer, but when he was 16, he and a friend were arrested for carjacking. He was charged as an adult and spent eight years in prison. Remember, those laws were passed when he was 15, 16 years old, when they knew that he would

be getting out of prison. Nobody even imagined who Willie Bosket would be when he got out of prison after that first stretch. In December of 1983, a few days after his 21st birthday, Willie Bosket was released. That March, he was arrested again for assault and attempted robbery. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, where he set fire to his cell over and over, attacked guards nine times, and attempted several escapes. And then, while he was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter, Willie suddenly pulled out a homemade knife

and stabbed a prison guard in the back. The guard survived. It was so random, so senseless and stupid, the reporter said. He didn't even know the guard. That was in 1989, and Willie Bosket has been in solitary confinement ever since. The commissioner of the Department of Corrections said the only noise Willie Bosket is going to hear is the sound of his toilet flushing. We don't ask ourselves what amount of ruin is acceptable for somebody who we send to prison.

And in fact, we take that question off the table based on how serious the crime is. So we don't even wonder who Willie Bosket is today. You know, we get up like 5, 4 in the morning, get to the bus station around 6. We'd arrive about 7.30. It's like an hour and a half, two hours away. This is his niece Danielle. She was raised by Willie's mom, Laura. And when Danielle was a kid, they would go see him. We'd have to go through a long hallway. And then once we'd go past there, we would go upstairs a little bit further.

And then his was like through a secondary cell after the special housing unit, and then through another little block. And then once we get through that gate, he was behind another gate, and then he would come out of his room, which was locked, and then into the special cell they built for him visiting. The Department of Correction built a plexiglass cell just for Willie. It was like a plexiglass with holes in it, but even the holes didn't match up so he could hear,

but he could never be able to stick anything through the glass if he wanted to. Through the plexiglass, Willie taught Danielle to read and write and the names of the 206 bones in the human body. I remember, you know, when it was time to leave, I didn't want to leave a lot of times. I just wanted to stay. I asked Danielle what she thought about the law created after the murders. I think that changing the laws to have juveniles charged as adults

is somewhat necessary because they are children that are incorrigible. Something is wrong. Like, there are signs, and we don't say, what do we do to fix it? Today, Willie Bosket is 55 years old, in solitary confinement, at Five Points Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Kari Pitkin drove up to speak with him. When she got there, it'd been so long since he'd had a visitor that his records weren't up to date in their

computer system. They agreed to let Kari go in, but not record the conversation. You know, we kind of went through all the security and everything, and we went into this big, long room with lots, rows and rows of tables. And there's kids doing coloring books, and I saw a couple making out and, you know, families eating and spending time together. And then down sort of at the end of the hall was where the no contact visits happen. And that section was completely empty. And we were brought into this kind of booth that was totally enclosed and waited for about 10 minutes. And then they brought Willie down a kind of separate hall and brought him into the adjoining booth, and he sat down in front of us. Did he kind of say, you know, who are you? I mean, did he have any idea

who you were? No. I mean, definitely the most awkward moment was the kind of that look of, who are you and what do you want from me? But the fact is, you know, the few people who do visit Willie have tended to be journalists. So he's kind of used to sitting down and talking about his life. So the second he knew who we were and what we were interested in, he kind of clicked into a mode and he was incredibly welcoming and, as everyone had said, quite charismatic and really easy to talk to. What did you talk about? Well, you know, for one thing, I had talked a lot with his family members, and they are not in touch with him because, you know, I think for a while they maybe wrote letters but didn't hear back. And they really haven't visited him in probably about 15 years. So, you know, I was curious what they would want to say to him. And

they said that they really do miss him and they think about him all the time and they still really love him. So I had these messages to kind of relay to him. And I, you know, I did that and he was interested to hear about their lives and what was happening. But he also said he really didn't want them to think about him because he would just be a burden on them. 29 years in isolation. I mean, I can't imagine what that does to someone. It's really, that was actually something that I was very interested in talking to him about to get a sense of how does he survive that because he is very engaged and sort of intelligent and someone who said is that he lives completely in the present. He can't think about anything in the past, and he can't think about anything in the future.

He has to just deal with what's right in front of him in that moment. In 1996, Fox Butterfield published an almost 400-page book about Willie Bosket. It's called All God's Children, The Bosket Family, and the American Tradition of Violence. Has he read Fox Butterfield's book? Yeah, I asked him about that, and he said, yeah, it's a really good book. I have one problem with it. And I said, oh, what's that? And he said, it's a really good book. I have one problem with it. And I said, oh, what's that? And he said, it doesn't provide any solutions.

And I thought that was kind of poignant in a way that he was interested in thinking about how things could have been different for a kid like him. WNYC's Kari Pitkin. You can find their new podcast, Caught, when it debuts March 12th. Caught follows a group of kids as they navigate their way through our criminal justice system, from the experience of being arrested, charged, and punished, to attempts at rehabilitation and how they move forward.

Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Matilde Erfolino is our intern. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Special thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Thank you. asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Tell your doctor about medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eden syndrome in medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300.

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