True Crime Campfire - Book Smart: The Crimes of William Coday

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

You can’t judge a book by its cover. There’s no shortage of gold-hearted biker dudes and wicked ministers—you can’t really know what someone’s like inside right away. Like that guy in the library over there, with the glasses and neat hair and preppy style and self-effacing affect. He seems harmless, right? He isn’t, though. He’s as full of anger and danger as someone on death row. Sometimes it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for. Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy tickets.   Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027. Sources: Stella Sands, Behind the Mask https://library.law.fsu.edu/Digital-Collections/flsupct/dockets/sc02-1920/02-1920ini.pdf https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2002/06/05/defendant-described-as-kind-and-gentle/ Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. You can't judge a book by its cover. There's no shortage of gold-hearted biker dudes and wicked ministers. You can't really know what someone's like inside right away. Like that guy in the library over there with the glasses and neat hair and preppy style. and self-effacing affect. He seems harmless, right? He isn't, though. He's as full of anger and

danger as anybody on death row. Sometimes it's the quiet ones you have to watch out for. This is Booksmart, the crimes of William Coday. So, campers, for this one, we're in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the Broward County Main Library, July 12, 1997. Marjorie Morfield was worried about her friend Bill, who hadn't shown up for work and wasn't answering his phone. This wasn't like him at all. Bill Coday was the kind of librarian you might see on TV, bespectacled, intelligent, witty, sometimes shy, and he took his work seriously.

He'd hardly ever missed a day, and never without calling to let somebody know what was going on. Marjorie had developed something of a maternal attitude toward her younger co-worker, and she had reasons to be concerned for his safety. For one thing, the week before, she and her husband had been driving home from a bookstore and saw Bill crossing the street while reading a book, apparently just completely oblivious to traffic. Now she couldn't shake the thought that maybe he'd been hit while pulling that stunt again.

Her other worries were darker. She and others at the library had been worried about Bill's mental health. He'd lost weight and stopped caring about his appearance, which he was usually meticulous about. He'd come to work all scraggly and unshowered, his clothes all wrinkled and stained. He barely spoke to anybody at work. The guy just seemed severely depressed. Marjorie knew Bill had recently broken up with his girlfriend, Gloria, and was deeply unhappy about it. She worried he might have hurt himself, so she had someone cover her desk, and Marjorie and another librarian drove to Bill's apartment on Fifth Street. Bill's bicycle was chained to the wooden fence around the front yard, but he didn't answer the door.

The librarians found the number for the weekend apartment manager, taped to the mailboxes and headed back to work. The Broward County Main Library was a significant operation, comparable to college libraries, and there was an established rule for dealing with emergencies. They got in touch with their supervisor, who called the weekend manager and told him they were worried about Bill Koday in 1B, who might be suicidal. The manager, Thaddeus Yannick, said he'd check on the apartment, and shortly afterwards was knocking on Bill Koday's door. There was no response. Yannick looked through the front window, but he didn't see anything except a kind of messy apartment.

He didn't know Bill at all, so he didn't know that that was way out of character. It seemed perfectly normal for a guy living alone. He went and got the master key, knocked again, and then opened the door, calling out, Hey there, anyone home? Again, there was no response. Yonik walked through the apartment, noticing nothing unusual at all, until he came to the bedroom door, on which there was a small, smear of blood. Having been called to check on a possibly suicidal tenant, Yonick's heart was racing as he

pushed the door open. Lying on the floor in a pool of blood was a woman's body. The first thought that jumped into Yonick's scared mind was that maybe Bill was the woman's name and this was the person he'd been asked to check on. But then he noticed a phone cable wrapped around her throat. This was not a suicide. It was a murder. Yonick raced out of the apartment. frantically looking for her phone. Officer Chris Reyes was less than a minute away from the scene when the dispatcher called him. He found just what Yonick had described, a woman lying face up in a pool of blood close to the bedroom door. He saw what looked like puncture marks in the purple dress she was wearing.

And in the pool of blood, he saw a knife. Reyes walked out of the apartment, not touching anything, and called for detectives. Then he secured the area with crime scene tape and waited. Detective Tom Hill was the lead investigator. He noted that a lot of the blood on the floor was smeared, as if the victim had rolled around or pushed herself through it trying to get away from her attacker. He also noticed that the phone cord around her neck was loose.

This wasn't a ligature, and he thought the victim might have accidentally wrapped it around herself, maybe as she was trying to pull the phone down or pull herself up. Her body was in a corner, where she might have pushed herself trying to get away from her attacker. One shoe had come off, probably from trying to kick her killer. There was blood spatter on a nearby bookshelf. Detective Hill was a veteran of the crime scene investigation unit, and despite the clear indications of stabbing on the victim, he immediately recognized that the spatter was

consistent with blunt force blows. In addition to the knife, he would find two claw hammers in the room, both bloody. On one of the pillows of the bed, obviously placed deliberately, was an old photograph of the victim, peacefully sleeping on the same bed. Oh, creepy. I know, right. It didn't take the investigators long to discover the identity of the victim. Her pocketbook was on the couch in the living room. She was Gloria Matilt Gomez, Bill Coday's ex-girlfriend.

Like we said, Detective Hill was highly experienced, but even a rookie could have guessed the broad outlines of what had happened here. When a woman's body is found in an ex's bedroom, obviously that ex is going to become suspect number one. The big problem for the investigators was that they had absolutely no idea where Bill Koday was. Gloria Gomez was a beautiful woman who had been absolutely brutalized. At her autopsy, the medical examiner determined she had suffered 57 blunt force injuries consistent with hammer blows and 87 sharp injuries, 41 of them stab wounds. Forty-six of them were cuts.

Both of her hands had injuries that probably came from trying to defend herself. The hammer blows had come first, most of them to her head and face, smashing her features and causing significant brain damage. These wounds were fatal and may have caused Gloria to quickly lose consciousness. The knife wounds were all over her body and head, and many of them could have also been fatal, but deadly damage had already been done with the hands. hammers. Stab wounds to Gloria's abdomen had barely hemorrhaged because she was already on the brink of

death. Evidence showed that she'd been killed on the afternoon of the previous day, Friday. 144 injuries. That's the kind of overkill that usually indicates both a personal relationship between victim and killer and deep rage. There certainly wasn't anything in the autopsy that made Bill Coday less of a suspect. The investigators carefully spoke to people at the library, for the moment not letting them know there had been a homicide. Marjorie Morfield, who knew Bill better than anyone else there, thought his breakup with Gloria had just been a little blip in an otherwise happy relationship. Just a couple of days earlier, Gloria had called the library to speak to Bill, and although Marjorie couldn't catch any of Bill's side of the conversation

because he spoke Spanish, afterwards he seemed delighted. From others at the library, investigators drew a vague outline of Bill Kode's romantic life. He apparently preferred to date foreign women. An ex-girlfriend from Puerto Rico said Bill had told her he didn't trust American women. Passport bros were a thing long before shitty YouTube influencers. Oh, yeah. He'd been married twice, first to a woman from India and then to an Iranian lady. He'd started dating Gloria Gomez a little over a year ago, and she'd ended the relationship about

three months before her murder. It didn't take long for the detective's suspicions about Bill Koday to deepen even further. Two days earlier, the same day he'd gotten the call from Gloria in the library, he'd withdrawn $6,000 and converted it into traveler's checks. On Friday evening, shortly after Gloria had died, he'd bought a ticket from Miami International Airport up to LaGuardia, New York, where he'd spent the night at a fancy baria on Broadway. On Saturday, the day Gloria's body was discovered,

he took a Delta flight to Paris, but as soon as he touched down in France, Coday stopped using his credit cards and his trail went cold. Well, that doesn't look great, does it? On Saturday night back in Fort Lauderdale, detectives had the awful task of calling glorious family in Columbia and telling them the devastating news. They also called Bill's parents to ask if they'd heard from their son or had any idea where he might be.

His dad, Bill Sr., who was something of a cold fish, said he hadn't heard from Bill in a long. time and would cooperate in any way that he could. But that wasn't quite the truth, as he neglected to share with them some extremely pertinent info. On the other hand, when detective spoke to Bill's mom, Pauline, she told them something that turned the whole case sideways. William Coday Jr. was born on January 25, 1957 in Missouri. He was born two and a half months prematurely and spent the first four weeks of his life in an incubator. Premature birth can some contribute to poor health later on, and young Bill was a sickly kid with severe asthma,

eczema, and allergies. He was in and out of the hospital a lot and missed a lot of school, becoming very close with his mom, who was a nurse and took expert care of him. His dad, though, often thought Bill was exaggerating or outright faking his symptoms. I'm sure that's got to do a kid the world of good. Oh, you're faking it. Yikes. When he was six years old, some older kids shoved Bill into an abandoned freezer and shut the door on him. He would always remember the sound of teenage girls laughing outside as he hammered on the door and screamed to be let out. Well, maybe. Much later on in this story, Bill would brag about being able to fool psychiatrists into providing whatever diagnoses he wanted. How true that was is debatable, but I think we should

be careful about self-reported stories like this from Bill, which a first-year psych student might connect to a deep-seated anger at women. Bill spent a lot of time holed up in his room, with humidifiers and air purifiers cranking to prevent his asthma attacks. All his absences meant he hadn't gotten good grades through his early years in school, but when he discovered the joys of reading in his lonely room, it was like all the doors in his brain opened up. He read everything he could get his hands on, and it was soon clear to his parents and teachers that he was actually a gifted kid. His grades skyrocketed. He taught himself chess and learned French, and by high school he was proficient enough at both that the school asked him to help teach the younger kids. His health improved enough for

him to play on the baseball and football teams, which for teenagers is almost guaranteed to be a situation where you're going to make friends, but Bill, awkward and odd, didn't. He'd never been good at making friends, never brought anyone home, hardly ever hung out with other kids, just stayed home and read. When Bill was 16 and his younger sister was 12, their parents brought them into the living room and said they had something to tell them. The kids had no idea what this was about. Maybe they were moving or going on vacation. But no, their mom and dad calmly told them they were getting divorced. It was shocking. The kids had never seen them fight or even heard them raise their voices at each other. As far as they knew, their parents had a peaceful, idyllic marriage. Their dad, an attorney,

moved out, and all of a sudden the family's comfortable middle-class life changed to a small apartment and living paycheck to paycheck. Bill's dad remarried two years later, then moved to California and hardly ever saw his son again. Wow, charming. Dad of the year. In 1975, when Bill was about to start his senior year in high school, he applied for and was accepted to an exchange program in Germany to study for a semester in the ancient college city of Augsburg. Also accepted into the program was a senior from Cincinnati named Lisa Hollinger. Lisa was a straight-A student, a bright extroverted kid who was good at everything she tried. She was a great tennis player and first violin in the Cincinnati Youth Symphony.

She was friendly and warm and fascinated with languages. Augsburg, with its winding cobbled streets and Renaissance architecture, can be kind of a romantic place for a couple of American language nerds, right? I think I would be charmed by that. I'm not a language nerd, but I'm a nerd nerd and any place like that, I mean, you'd be likely to fall in love, right? Bill and Lisa hit it off immediately and explored the city together. Before long, they were dating and dreaded going back to the States where they'd be hundreds of miles apart. Back home, they kept up a long-distance relationship through letters and phone calls with Bill, traveling to Cincinnati a few times to visit. Her parents liked him. He was obviously smart,

polite, calm. He seemed like a good match for Lisa. After graduation, they went to different colleges, Bill to DePaul in Chicago, and Lisa to Miami University in Ohio. They were still hundreds of miles apart, but they continued the long-distance thing, promising to apply to any program that might get them back to Germany so they could recreate their early months together. And early in their sophomore years, they both accepted a year-long language immersion program in Hamburg, starting the following summer. But before that came around, the bloom was coming off the rose for Lisa. Neither high school nor long-distance relationships have great track records of lasting all the way through college, and in this case, Bill screwed it all up by getting jealous and possessive and pushy. Classic mistake, dude,

classic mistake. We tend to create what we fear in relationships. Have you ever been in that situation where you're jealous, and so you get clingy and you get pushy and you end up creating the very thing that you were afraid of because your partner gets so sick of you that they actually do cheat on you, you know, you got to wrestle down that insecurity or you're going to blow it, 100%. Yeah. The jealousy really upset Lisa, and by February of 1978, she decided to break things off for the sake of her own mental health. She knew both she and Bill were scheduled to go to Hamburg, but plenty of other people.

people were going too, and it was a big city. She hoped things wouldn't be too weird, and they could still be friends. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. Save on lunchbox savers, like Ziggy's sliced deli-meat products for always 375. And get Life Brand Pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready, with a whole world and more. From the parents behind law and order comes a mystery the whole family can enjoy.

Patrick Picklebottom Everyday Mysteries. Step into the whimsical world of Patrick Pickle Bottom, a precocious 11-year-old, with a love for reading and an uncanny ability to solve mysteries. Inspired by the beloved children's book of the same name, this podcast vividly brings Patrick's tales of deduction and everyday adventures to life as he unravels baffling enigmas and solves clever cases. Patrick Picklebottom Everyday Mysteries is perfect for kids and is just as entertaining for grownups who love a good mystery. The whole family can listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hamburg is not at all like Augsburg. It's a huge port city with people from all over the world, an exciting and sometimes kind of wild place. I think we talked about Hamburg a little when we covered the profumo case.

And as we said then, if you want to go to Pizza Hut next to an enormous brothel that's just called sex house, this is the city for you. Sex house. And you know, sort of says it, doesn't it? And then Pizza Hut right next door. Nothing classier. And getting your boners seen to at the sex house and then hopping on over to the hut, get you a personal pan pizza. It's like two of the most, yeah, two of the most literally named businesses. It's like a German city planner's wet dream.

Like, kitty cornered from the sex house would be Radio Shack. And then right next door would be, you know, I don't know. I'm out of like, structurally. structure-themed business names. So like maybe the cake veranda. Anyway, of course, there's plenty to do that doesn't involve bored German sex workers, and Lisa was having a blast, exploring the city and making new friends. She enjoyed her classes, and the school arranged lots of sightseeing tours for foreign students. Bill, though, wasn't doing so well. He was sad and withdrawn, skipping the tours and soon skipping classes, too.

Lisa was the only person in the city he had any connection with. Lisa was torn. Not only did she still care about Bill, but she was a kind person who didn't want anyone to be unhappy. But she was also a young woman enjoying being independent and free in a big city for the first time in her life. She felt some responsibility to take care of Bill, but she also found him increasingly strange and sometimes even scary. Look, if you only remember one thing that we've told you on this podcast, let it be this.

you cannot fix them. You can't save somebody. You always need to do first and foremost what you know is best for your own well-being. The other person is not your responsibility. It's above your pay grade. No matter how much they try and guilt trip you into believing that you're responsible for their happiness, you're not. You can't be. Yeah, I always think it's a red flag if you're your partner's only friend.

That is a huge red flag because that's. That's a tool for them to isolate you. Like, you're my only friend. What do I do when you're gone? Absolutely. Nobody should be everything, you know, to anybody, not everything. They'd only been in Germany for three weeks when Bill asked Lisa to come visit him in the apartment he was renting. He said he was painfully, lonely and needed someone to talk to, and she was the only person he knew in the whole city, his only friend.

She agreed to come see him, and on September 12th, she crossed the city to see him. After some small talk, Bill got to his point. He was miserable. He wanted to get back together. Their relationship was by far the most important thing in his life, and he just wanted things to go back to the way they had been. Yeah, well, that ship had long since sailed, unless Bill could get hold of a time machine and a new personality. Lisa could tell he was depressed, so as gently and softly as she could,

she told him she had no interest in a relationship with anyone. She just wanted to study and explore the same. city while being free to do whatever she wanted. Perfectly reasonable, especially for her age, you know? Bill Kode started to get mad. He told her she had to get back together with him. Oh, hello, entitlement. Nice to see you again. Lisa said she couldn't do that. They could still be friends. They could study together, go out for dinners together. She was offering him a lifeline out of his loneliness, a human connection at the cost of her own time and independence. But she made it clear, there was no chance of any kind of romantic reconciliation. It wasn't enough for Bill.

He flew into a rage marching around the apartment and yelling while Lisa sat quietly, shocked, and scared. She'd never seen him act remotely like this. Eventually, Bill stormed out of the apartment. Lisa sat there for a couple minutes. She thought he'd gone out to calm down and would soon come back and apologize, but what Bill was actually doing was stomping down two flights of stairs to the basement, where he knew there was a shoemaker's hammer. He grabbed it and hurried back up to his apartment, where he immediately hit Lisa on the back of the head. She slumped down onto the floor, possibly unconscious already, and Bill just kept beating her head with the hammer, hitting her again and again. A neighbor heard the commotion and called the police, who arrived

quickly. Bill was arrested, and Lisa, in a coma, was taken to hospital. Her distraught parents flew to Hamburg to be with her, but her injuries were too severe to recover from. She remained in a coma for two weeks before dying on September 25th. She was just 19 years old. When they flew home with their daughter's body, the Hollinger's had a heartbreaking surprise waiting for them, a letter from Lisa that she'd mailed before her murder. In it, among other things, she wrote that she'd started to be scared of Bill and worried that he might be capable of killing someone. That is goosebumps-inducing. In Hamburg, Bill Cote had admitted killing Lisa and was imprisoned awaiting trial while his father hired an expensive defense attorney.

When the trial started, nine months after Lisa's death, the defense used an insanity strategy, arguing that Bill had been in an uncontrollable emotional condition when he killed her. And now he's fine and he'd like to go, right? The panel of judges agreed to a point, but they didn't go as far as the defense. wanted, which was to just dismiss the charges, which is astounding. Like, really, you thought there was a chance in hell of that? Instead, Bill was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to three to five years in prison. Oh, my God. Obviously, this is a foreign legal system and, you know, a while ago, but I don't think the case would have played out like that in an American court. This wasn't Bill getting suddenly angry and snatching up a hammer that happened to be like right there

close to hand. He remembered where the weapon was, went down two flights of stairs to go get it, and come back, and then attacked his ex who had just turned him down. Come on, that looks like conscious decision-making to me with plenty of opportunities to change his mind. While he was incarcerated, several psychiatrists interviewed Bill to try and figure out whether he was capable of committing other violent crimes if he was released. Their opinions differed wildly, but the court sided with one doctor who was certain that the attack on Lisa was a one-off. Great. Want him to move next door to your daughter? Hmm? You're going to set him up with your kid?

Nine months after his sentencing and after spending a total of 18 months behind bars, the German authorities released Bill Koday on the condition that he'd pinky swear to get some psychiatric treatment. I seriously, I just need to sit with that for a second. What the actual... Horr. Of course, once he was back in the U.S., they had no way to enforce that condition, of course. Bill saw a therapist like eight times, then just stop going and carried on with his life as if nothing had happened. Thanks to his time in a German prison, Bill got his bachelor's degree in 1983 when he was 26.

Afterward, he took a long vacation in India, and while he was there, he met and started dating a woman named Abnashkar. they soon decided to get married, which Abnash's parents weren't super thrilled about. They thought their daughter was going to move to the U.S. with Bill and they'd hardly see her again, which is pretty much exactly what happened. Bill and his new wife moved back to his hometown of St. Louis, where he enrolled in law school and Abnash began a career as a teacher. Their marriage lasted six years, and we don't know a lot about it. We do know it was pretty dry, though.

Abnash would later testify that they only ever had sex one time. during their marriage, which is just, wow, like, you don't see that every day, right? One time in six years. And we know that Bill was mostly calm, but sometimes prone to sudden angry violence. One time he grabbed Obnash by the throat and wouldn't let go until his mom pulled him away. When Bill decided to pursue a second advanced degree, a master's in library science up in Ann Arbor, Abnash told him she was staying in St. Louis, and they separated. Bill had gotten his law degree but didn't take the bar. It's unclear if this was purely his own decision because he wanted to take a different path

or if the Missouri Bar Association had a quiet word with him. You know, something along the lines of, hey, Bill, just wanted to let you know that you're probably not going to pass our character in fitness reviews. You know, on account of that time, you beat a girl to death with a hammer. Yeah. Bill probably slipped so easily from this marriage because he already had his eye on someone new. In 1989, the year before he headed up to Michigan, he'd met a young Iranian woman named Tuska Amiri who'd been visiting friends in St. Louis. She lived and studied in Ann Arbor, and Bill asked her to send him information on the library program there, which she did.

And they spoke on the phone a few times after that. This is just speculation, but I have a sneaky suspicion that Bill's decision to move to Michigan was something he'd jumped to as soon as he met this pretty woman. Yeah. He wrote her a long letter as soon as he was. up there, and they were soon dating and living together. It's unclear if he did this with Abnash, but he did share some version of what had happened with Lisa with Amiri, which is to say he lied about it, saying Lisa had fallen and hit her head on a radiator, and the German authorities had wrongfully imprisoned poor Bill for a

year and a half. In 1992, Bill landed a job at a library in Jackson Heights, Queens, and he and Amiri moved to New York. They had a fun couple of years exploring the situation. together, but then Amiri found out Bill was seeing other women. Mostly just flirty lunch dates, but then a woman named Magdalena started calling their apartment for him. Having made the rookie mistake of giving his mistress his home number, Bill tried to cover by demanding that Amiri never answer the phone.

In fact, he became more demanding and controlling in general. One night when he was about to go out, Amiri stood in his way and told him they needed to have a serious talk. Bill was immediately furious, pushed her against the wall, and screamed that if she didn't stay out of his way, he would kill her. Yikes. A few days later, when Amiri told him she was moving out, Bill wept and begged her to stay, saying he was so sorry, sorry for hurting her and sorry about the other women. He just had a compulsion he couldn't control. Aw. Well, in that case, yeah, you're fine. They should just get married and everything would be fine. In 19, 1995, they did get married, and everything was very briefly fine.

Later that year, they moved to Florida for Bill's new job at the Broward County Main Library, while Amiri worked at the Lord and Taylor department store. He started cheating almost immediately, getting dressed up to go out to dinner and slinking home at four or five in the morning. It's not exactly clear what he was doing out so late, or when he'd stayed out all night in New York with Mcdalena, because Bill was riddled with sexual hangups and had been impotent for years. But I mean, this was still cheating.

There were messages in Spanish on their answering machine, which, like the phone, Bill had forbidden Amiri to use. She had friends translate the messages for her, and they were along the lines of, Hi, baby, meet me there. I miss you. You know, obviously not just calls from friends. One night, Amiri had been expecting a call from a friend at work, so she answered the phone when it rang. Bill immediately lost his shit, ripping the phone and answering machine off the wall and smashing it on the floor. He threw Amiri on the bed and started choking her, yelling that he

was going to kill her. Amiri managed to gasp out that she wished he would because she'd rather be dead than live like this. Why don't you kill me? She said. You killed another person. Kill me too. God bless her heart. Bill's face twisted into something terrifying and almost inhuman, but after a few terrifying seconds, he let her go. The next day at work, Amiri's manager saw the bruises on her face and arms and helped her move out. Her relationship with Bill was over, but she was a kind person, and because he seemed to be distressed, she eventually let him rebuild a friendship with her. There were two main triggers for Bill's violence. Lisa and Gloria had severed the relationship without his permission, taking control away from him, which drove

him to petty fury. With his wives, I guess he felt a simmering resentment that he was still miserable and somehow made that their fault. And by the end with Amiri, she was getting in the way of him going out and finding the woman he was sure would make him happy once and for all. A few months after Amiri left, in January of 1996, a beautiful young woman named Gloria Gomez came into the library. Gloria had arrived from Columbia fairly recently, and her English was somewhat hesitant, so she was relieved when her inquiries about books on marketing were met by Bill Code's fluent Spanish. Physically, Bill was about as exciting as a slice of American cheese on unbuttered wonder bread, just a standard guy stamped out at the guy factory. But since his awkward high school years,

he'd learned how to be charming. He was genuinely intelligent and witty, had an encyclopedic knowledge of the arts, and could quote poetry in multiple languages. That last one, I have to say, might have gotten me at a point in my life. Some of these poems were his own, and were terrible, but Bill had success with this approach on intellectual ladies. Gloria was just as smart and funny as he was, and she was charmed by him. They talked for hours at the library, and when he asked her out to dinner, she accepted. They saw each other casually for a few weeks, but were soon dating seriously. Gloria and Bill were a good match intellectually, but otherwise they were kind of an odd couple. Tweedy Bill either walked to work at the library or rode there on his

bike, while Gloria, sexy and glam, zipped around town in a maroon transam. Ooh. She was open and uninhibited in bed, and although I'm sure it's not a universal solution, apparently the cure for Bill's impotence was a hot girl in a transam. Apparently, this was the first sexually satisfying relationship of his life for some reason. He'd hit the jackpot, so of course, he fucked it all up by getting jealous and needy and demanding. Not immediately, though. They had some good months, but there was always an imbalance there. Bill was getting more out of this than Gloria was.

When he started imagining other men in her life and they started fighting all the time, Gloria had just about had enough. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury.

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Get tickets now. In a final attempt to see if their relationship could be saved, she agreed to move in with Bill early in 1997, but moved right back out again and dumped him after just a couple months. She told him she hoped they could still be friends, and they could even go out together sometimes. But she was in an excitement. new country and wanted the freedom to explore it without being tied down to a serious relationship.

There was no way for her to know it, but her words almost exactly mirrored what Lisa Hollinger had told Bill 20 years before in Germany. Bill stewed about the relationship for weeks, then came up with a perfect solution. He'd just ask Gloria to marry him. Just delusional. He knew her immigration status was a little iffy, and he was sure. sure, for some reason or other, that she still loved him. So he was astonished when she turned him down and still couldn't wrap his head around the new shape of her life, even when she told him she was dating somebody else. Bill paid for his own flight down to a book fair in Bogota, Columbia, and while he was there, he took a trip outside the city to visit the small town where Gloria had grown up, with her mother and five older sisters.

He visited her family and told Gloria's mom that he was in love with her daughter and was going to marry her. Digest the creepiness of this for a second. They're not together. She told him she's seeing somebody else, and this is what he does. Gloria didn't share news about her romantic life with her mom, so her mom was thrilled. But Gloria did talk to her sister Ranirez on the phone quite a bit, and Ranirez knew she considered Bill nothing more than a friend. She called her sister and told her what Bill had done. Gloria was furious.

And when Bill got back to Florida, she made it crystal clear to him. Their relationship was over. She was seeing somebody else. He needed to back the hell off out of her life. He didn't. He started calling her multiple times a day and pestering mutual friends about where Gloria was staying and what she was doing. Eventually, he found out she was staying with an old friend of her mother's,

and Bill started calling there again and again, leaving messages that Gloria never responded to. Eventually, on July 9th, Gloria agreed to speak with him when he called. Bill tearfully told her that he'd just been diagnosed with terminal skin cancer and desperately needed to talk to her just one more time. Gloria was a kind-hearted person.

She couldn't bring herself to abandon a friend in that kind of distress. So around 11 a.m. on Friday, July 11th, she drove over to Bill's apartment in Fort Lauderdale. she would never be seen alive again. Bill, needless to say, did not have cancer. It was just a ploy to play on Gloria's empathy and get her into his apartment. There, things played out very much like they did with Lisa Hollinger,

with Bill demanding Gloria taken back, her refusing, and him attacking her with a hammer. Jesus. And the fact that he chose the same weapon he'd used on Lisa is so creepy. It suggests he vividly remember. killing Lisa and tried to recreate the experience. Ugh, God, either because it worked or because he liked it. I'm not sure which, but ugh. Yeah, either option is creepy.

By Monday, detectives already knew Bill was in France and off the radar. That day, Gloria's Trans Am was found in the parking lot of Miami International Airport. Forensic investigators found a bloody fingerprint of bills on the seatbelt. In Europe, Bill wandered down through. France and Spain before eventually crossing over to Morocco, all the while scribbling over 200 pages of a letter to the woman he had just murdered. An essay called Crepuscolo, which is Italian for I'm a pretentious little twat. Actually, it's Italian for Twilight, and I kind of think Bill was intending this for publication

because the full title was Crepuscolo, a journey into obsession, which just screams true crime paperback. He's just such a pompous fucking loser. Like, shut the fuck up, dickhead. 200 pages. I know. It's like, haven't you done enough?

Like, haven't you harmed everybody enough without making them read this absolute nuttery? It was a rambling, self-important retelling of their entire relationship, utterly devoid of remorse. Gloria mainly appeared

in descriptions of her body at about the same level as Dennis Reynolds and it's always sunny in Philadelphia. You know, like, her breasts were awesome. Oh, my God. Bill was probably anticipating that his shitty book would eventually appear in a courtroom. He wrote, Your love, our love was the only thing I cherished, the only thing I wanted. I don't remember anything else, dear Gloria. Only returning to my senses, looking down, seeing me there on top of you, the knife plunged deep in your throat and blood everywhere. You were crying, out why, Bill, why? And uttering those final words. Oh, oh dear. I find it interesting that she was able to

speak with a knife in her throat, according to him. I don't believe him. I think he remembers the whole thing and was combining everything. Yeah. Didn't remember anything and then came to his sentences. Sure, Bill. Sure. Do you remember luring her over there with your stupid fake cancer story, buying those plane tickets. It seems clear that he'd not only duplicated Lisa Hollinger's murder, now he was trying to recreate the circumstances for the light sentence he'd gotten afterward. He ended with,

I watched this magnificent crepusculo, knowing that soon darkness will settle in. One day, perhaps soon, darkness, permanent darkness, will descend on me too. I shall that day enter the night and join you, dear Gloria, in that unending peaceful darkness.

And then everyone vomited into the crepusculeo. And y'all get this. He sent a copy of Cripoosculo to Gloria's mother in Columbia, along with a letter confessing to the murder and saying he was sorry. You know, like, I'm sorry I murdered your daughter, but would you mind reading my book? Maybe just give me some notes. Speechless. This poor woman, of course, was terrified.

and we'll see a little later that that may have been the whole point. Just simple sadism, just causing more distress to the family of the woman that he was still furious with. The quotes from Crapusculo, by the way, are from Stella Sands' book Behind the Mask, which was one of our main sources for this case. So we didn't have to read the whole thing ourselves. Thank God. It's mad fun to say, though, wouldn't it? Say it with me. Crepuscule.

It's still delicious. Bill hadn't had many plans for Europe beyond squeezing his dreary little book out of his ass, and by early October, he was running out of money. He flew from Paris to Montreal and easily crossed the border into the U.S., despite being high on the most wanted list of both Entropole and the FBI.

While in Europe, Bill had occasionally sent letters to his ex-wife Amiri, who was now living in Queens. She'd turned those over to detectives when they arrived. In October, he called her to let her know he was back the U.S., but he wouldn't tell her exactly where he was. She told him he should turn himself in, and he said that was what he was planning to do. A few days later, he called again and said, I'm here, let me come upstairs. Hell no, Amiri was shocked. She also wasn't alone. Her college roommate Christine was visiting with her husband. Amary told Bill to call back in five minutes,

then asked her friends to leave, which is just, what? Worried for her. her, they didn't want to, but Amiri insisted that she wasn't scared of Bill. She should have been, scared. He'd brutally killed two women, and he'd threatened to kill Amiri twice. Still, after her friends left, she and Bill had a tearful reunion, and he promised to turn himself in soon. And maybe he would have, but he wasn't in control of the situation anymore. The next morning, two detectives stopped at the McDonald's across the street from Amiri's apartment to meet with Christine, who'd called to tell them a wanted murderer was staying with her friend. The detectives had Christine call Amiri and ask her down for coffee,

and it only took a minute for the detectives to convince an exhausted Amiri to cooperate. She's lucky, seriously, that she got out of this alive. She took them upstairs to the apartment. They went in with guns drawn and found Bill lying down in the back bedroom. They handcuffed and searched him, finding a wallet when they did. The wallet is glorious, Bill said. I took it after I killed her to try and find her. out who the other guy was she was seeing.

I didn't take it for personal gain. Jesus, Murphy. He'd already killed this woman, and he was still obsessing about who her new boyfriend was. I wonder if he was thinking about killing him, too. I think he probably was, but, like, did he think it made him look better? I know, right? No, no, fellas. I didn't kill her to rob her.

I was just a jealous failure of a man who doesn't view women as people. It's fine. Yeah. So Bill Kode's trial was not about establishing whether he'd killed Gloria Gomez. There was no doubt about that. The only significant issue was whether the jury would buy the defense argument of mitigating circumstances due to severe mental or emotional disturbance, knocking the verdict down to second-degree murder or manslaughter. It was a hard sell. Where the jury's supposed to believe he'd also been severely disturbed when he withdrew $6,000 the day before the murder? when he booked his flights to New York and Paris. It takes control and conscious thought to do those things. And who has two hammers just laying around in their bedroom? In a brief tangent here, we mentioned Bill was being sadistic when he sent a letter to Gloria's mother.

While he was awaiting trial in Broward County Jail, he had a fellow inmate call up Gloria's sister in Columbia and asked to speak to Gloria. When the sister said Gloria had been killed, Bill told the prisoner to ask how she died. died. Gloria's sister said she'd been killed by some crazy white librarian and started crying. Bill listened to all this with a big smile on his face. Sick fuck. On April 10, 2002, a jury found Bill Koday guilty of first-degree murder.

On June 6, he was sentenced to death. Yeah, you ain't in Germany now, my dude. The next month, there was a so-called Spencer hearing in which the defense presents evidence not showing during trial to try and convince a judge to reduce a death sentence to life imprisonment due to mitigating circumstances. In this case, those circumstances were Bill's post-arrest diagnoses of borderline personality disorder and severe depression with psychotic features. You know, I find his insistence that, well, I just blacked out and can't remember anything. I can't remember what I did. is super interesting because do you think that a kind of person

that can lose control so completely to murder another person and not remember it belongs with the general public? Right. I know. It's like you're still incredibly dangerous if that's the case. So I'm fine with putting you in a little box for a while, you know?

If all it takes for you to lose it and murder women is that they don't want to be with you, like you don't belong in, you don't belong with us. Go, go away forever. You don't get. It's a mingle. No. The judge did not alter the sentence, but in 2006, the Florida Supreme Court determined he should have given more weight to the testimony of expert psychiatrists, and Bill's case was sent back

for resentencing, much to the prosecutors discussed. And not only the prosecutor, Bill sent the judge a 25-page confession, in which he claimed to have started researching borderline personality disorder and psychosis as soon as his attorneys decided on that defense, and had deliberately deceived the defense's experts. He made it clear that Gloria's murder had been deliberate, writing, These facts were presented by the prosecutor to show evidence of a planned murder. This interpretation of the facts, a murder planned at least three days in advance, is in fact correct. The truth is that I actually began thinking about killing Gloria Gomez in early June. Contrary to what I wrote in Cropuscalo, I was not in a state of mental confusion about what Gloria was going to tell me about

our relationship. While I intended to make strong effort on Friday to win her back, I was determined to kill her if she refused. At no time did I ever have a psychotic break from reality. I did not dissociate while I was killing her. Wow. The judge not surprisingly reinstated Bill's death sentence, but we shouldn't necessarily take his confession or anything else he wrote or said at face value. See, according to other inmates, Bill was terrified of being moved back into the general prison population. Other than the violent end looming at the end for someone like Bill, death row might have been his best option for prison life. He shared a highly controlled environment with a small familiar population, had meals brought to his cell, and could spend

most of his time reading. And as for that looming violent end, Bill was also suicidal. He made several unsuccessful attempts before cutting himself deeply four times on April 28, 2008, and bleeding to death in his cell. The last and least missed of the three bright lives ended by this twerp. A man who seemed to have simultaneous superiority and inferiority complexes and took out that confusion on the women who showed him the most kindness and compassion. It's depressing, isn't it? How much pain has been caused by the deep insecurities of pompous, self-important men.

Now, before we go, don't forget about our two amazing lives. shows coming up. First, we've got Summer Camp, September 10th through 13th, an awesome four-day festival in Equinunk, Pennsylvania, hosted by Dan and Lindsay Cummins of TimeSuck and Scared to Death. We'll be performing live alongside them in the podcast

Astonishing Legends, in addition to a roster of hilarious stand-up comedians and local bands. Go to badmagic Productions.com for more info, and to buy tickets. Then, we've got our True Crime Cruise, CrimeWave 2.0, February 8th through 12, 2017. If you

want to come to the Bahamas with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal podcasts in the world, like case file, unexplained, last podcast on the left and true crime garage, here's what you got to do. Tickets are on sale now, but they are over 90% sold out. So if you want to go, make sure you get over to crimewave at sea.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP. You'll get $100 off plus a private meet and greet with us. The great thing is you can pay all at once or set up a payment plan and pay it off. over time. So get on it, y'all. That's crimewave at sea.com slash campfire. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now,

lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Beatrice, Shawnee, Brooke, Werewolf Weed, Laura and Michael. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And when you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rad enamel pin or fridge magnet while supplies last, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you.

So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. The war is over and both sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders, an army scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight. But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins. This is old school adventuring at its most cruel. Your torch ticks down in real time. And when that flame dies, something else right?

to finish the job. This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make. This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s and man, it is so good to be back. Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the Shadow Dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on YouTube.com slash the glass cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark. Please, not that music. That music gives me nightmares from my childhood.

Could we get something a little bit lighter? Some lighter music here. Are you a fan of true crime TV shows? And what about Unsolved Mysteries? The show that jumped started all of our love of True Crime. I'm Ellen Marsh. And I'm Joey Taranto. And we host, I Think Not,

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