I Won’t Kill, I’ll Just Maim

Once he has been locked up, a homicidal maniac has limited opportunities. He can spend the rest of his life in prison, or he can be put to death by the state. But Willie Bosket Jr. is not your everyday homicidal maniac. A self- described “monster,” he is intelligent, well read and sophisticated. At least three books are being planned to memorialize his life story. He has at his disposal a “spokeswoman” to handle inquires from the media and Hollywood. He is only 26 years old, and in the view of many people he is the best possible argument for instituting capital punishment in New York State, which currently lacks the death penalty.

He is also the most burdensome inmate of the state’s prison system. For him alone authorities have built a special dungeon at the upstate Woodbourne Correctional Facility, where Bosket is scheduled to spend the next 31 years in solitary confinement. (For the remainder of his life, if he behaves himself and stops assaulting his guards and quits hurling feces and food at them, he may be moved into more conventional quarters.) His room is lined with Plexiglas, and three video cameras track him constantly. He is so prone to commit mayhem that when a visitor calls, Bosket is chained backward to the inside of his cell door. When the door is swung open, there is Bosket, pinned to the bars like a specimen in a bug collection.

What did Bosket do to deserve such barbarous treatment? Plenty. He was 15 when he shot to death two New York City subway riders (BABY-FACED BUTCHER! cried the headlines). In the eleven years since then, he tried, while briefly out of prison, to rob and knife a 72-year-old half-blind man. He has also stabbed a prison guard, smashed a lead pipe into another guard’s skull, set his cell on fire seven times, choked a secretary, battered a reformatory teacher with a nail-studded club, tried to blow up a truck, sodomized inmates, beat up a psychiatrist and mailed a death threat to Ronald Reagan. Bosket claims to have committed 2,000 crimes by the time he was 15.

To a visitor, Bosket plays the cunning Mr. Charm. He is handsome, slightly built at 5 ft. 9 in. and 150 lbs., articulate and witty. He has 200 books in his cell and converses easily about the works of Dostoyevsky and B.F. Skinner. “I’m really a loving and caring person,” he protests. “I hunger for knowledge. My pain and suffering have stroked my ability to be intellectual. If the system wasn’t so quick to incarcerate me as a child, I could have become a well-known attorney. I could have been a Senator.”

Instead, he says, he is a “political prisoner” embarked on a “revolutionary struggle” aimed at killing anyone who represents oppression. In New York, one of the few states that still prohibit capital punishment, legislators are yet again debating the death penalty. The monster is unimpressed. “Willie Bosket is gonna keep striking,” he says. “If they / bring back the death penalty, I won’t kill. I’ll just maim. I want to live every day I can just to make them regret what they’ve done to me.”

What “they” did to him began, he says, when he was a boy, the product of a broken home in New York City’s Harlem. By nine, he was a chronic and violent troublemaker. When he was given mental tests, he threatened to set fire to the hospital ward and kill a doctor. The tests showed that Bosket was suffering from a severe antisocial personality disorder. His helpless mother had him sent to a reform school, where he began to emulate his father.

Bosket never met his father, but the parallels between the two men are dramatic. Each had only a third-grade education, was sentenced to the same reform school at nine, went on to commit double murders, and displayed a superior intelligence. The father’s goals, however, were different: he studied hard and became the first convict in history to be inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. After his release from prison in 1983, Bosket Sr. found work as a university teaching assistant.

His rehabilitation was short-lived. In 1985 he was arrested for molesting a six-year-old child. Later, after a shoot-out with police during an escape attempt, Bosket Sr. shot and killed his girlfriend and then blew his brains to pieces. This has given Bosket Jr. food for reflection. “I can say with all conviction that genetics has played a role in what I am. But what I learned from my father’s life was never to conform to the system, never to forgive, as he did.” The “system,” he adds, became his “surrogate mother.”

Bosket has now filed a suit against his surrogate mother, charging cruel and unusual punishment at Woodbourne. He is also angry because the authorities have ignored an eight-page handwritten letter in which Bosket volunteered himself for study as a way to help prevent future Boskets. “It’s all just theater to Willie, and we try not to give him a stage,” says Thomas Coughlin III, New York’s commissioner of correctional services.

But Bosket still finds ways to attract attention. While en route to court last month, he kicked a guard who was removing a leg manacle and then shouted to photographers, “Did you get that picture? Did you get that on film?” That act was reminiscent of the time last year when Bosket plunged a makeshift 11- in. knife into the chest of a guard, in full view of a newspaper reporter Bosket had enlisted to write his life story. The guard was critically injured but recovered. “Sensationalism sells newspapers,” the baby-faced butcher blithely explains, “and the system responds to violence.”