Serial Killer Who Drove ‘Murder Mobile’ Gets Sentenced

The Connecticut man who drove a “murder mobile” and took the lives of six people was sentenced on Friday to life in prison.

William Devin Howell was served six life terms, or 360 years in prison, for the murders of five women and one man, PEOPLE reports.

Howell, who has now become the most prolific serial killer in Connecticut history, murdered Melanie Ruth Camilini, Diane Cusack, Marilyn Mendez Gonzalez, Joyvaline Martinez, Mary Jane Menard, and Danny Lee Whistnant over a six-month period starting in 2003. It is reported that he mutilated and strangled his victims, and sexually assaulted three of the women.

According the authorities, he called the van that he drove his “murder mobile,” and he is alleged to have referred to the wooded burial site behind a strip mall as “his garden.” He reportedly told a fellow inmate that there was a “monster inside him.”

Howell, who is from Hampton, Virginia, was already serving a 15-year prison sentence for manslaughter in the death of a seventh victim when he was charged in 2015 with murdering the other six victims. He pleaded guilty to the six murders in order to “spare the victims’ families further emotional pain through a lengthy and drawn-out trial that would have taken several weeks, if not months.”

“He stripped away the youth from us and made me and my brother orphans,” Tiffany Menard, the daughter of Mary Jane Menard, said in court on Friday. “I would see my mom on the streets thousands of times only to realize every time that it wasn’t her.”