CRIME HUNTER: Serial killer Billy Mansfield’s junkyard of terror

Article content

The template for Billy Mansfield’s ill-starred life was set before he took his first breath.

Article content

For starters, his father Billy Sr. was a convicted child molester who did jolts in prison in his native Michigan and Nevada. Junior and his brothers were encouraged to fight each other.

Billy Jr. soon followed a similar path. He dropped out of school when he was 14 years old in 1970 and later joined the army where he developed a serious booze problem.

In 1975, he married Phyllis Spielmaker and the couple had two children. They divorced four years later when she decided to stay in their hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

His ex-wife would later say that Billy was bisexual and often brought home hustlers from gay bars and would have sex with them in front of her. Billy Jr. was mostly even tempered but a violent drunk.

While he committed a slew of sexual offenses in Grand Rapids and in Florida in the 1970s and was jailed on several occasions, detectives believe he graduated to murder on New Year’s Eve 1975.

Article content

The victim’s name was 15-year-old Elaine Louise Zeigler. The teen vanished from a KOA campground in Brooksville, Florida while on holidays with her parents.

Cops said she was a runaway but one witness saw the girl climb into a light blue 1966 Ford Fairlane with Florida licence plates driven by a man in his 20s.

Next to die was René Saling, a 29-year-old mother-of-three from California. Her naked body was later found in a drainage ditch near Watsonville. She had been strangled to death after meeting Mansfield at a local bar.

But cops caught on quick and zoned in on Billy Jr. and his brother Gary. The duo were dubbed “The Bag Brothers.”

It was all closing in.

In Hernando County, Florida, detectives turned their focus to Junior’s junkyard. There they found four bodies.

Article content

A Jane Doe buried under a concrete slab, a white teenager, Theresa Fillingim, 17, finally identified last week, and Sandra Jean Graham, 21, last seen at a low-rent watering hole in 1980.

By April 1981, neighbours in Brooksville were calling the Mansfield place a “house of horrors.”

It took weeks to find the bodies.

It took years to develop a DNA profile for Fillingim.

“Using DNA evidence from this investigation, Snapshot produced trait predictions for the associated victim. Individual predictions were made last week for the victim’s ancestry, eye color, hair color, skin color, freckling, and face shape,” the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office said in a press release.

A DNA sample from Fillingim’s sister confirmed the long lost girl’s identity.

Article content

After Mansfield was busted in California, an anonymous tipster told cops there may be bodies in Mansfield’s Florida home.

Poor Elaine Zeigler was the second body recovered. The Jane Doe has never been identified.

The 66-year-old Mansfield is now caged in California. He pleaded guilty to killing all four women to escape the death penalty.

“I am pleading guilty because I am guilty of the charges and I have no other reason,” he told the California court as he signed away his life.

Mansfield’s son, Bill, told Fox News he can’t understand why his father and his brother didn’t do the right thing decades ago as a new search of the property got underway in 2021.

“I want to find out if they found anything and how old it is,” he said. “Why didn’t he (Gary) give these people their family members back 40 years ago if he knew their bodies were there?”

Article content

AUSTRALIAN MURDER MYSTERY UNRAVELED?

One of the most vexxing criminal cases in Australian history may have finally been solved.

Cops and the public called the dead man lying on the beach, with a burned cigarette between his fingers, the Somerton Man. Now, a university professor is claiming he has disseminated the mystery.

Derek Abbott says the dead man was Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in Melbourne in 1905. He worked with famed American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick to identify Webb.

When the man’s corpse was discovered on the beach, cops made a death mask. Trapped in the plaster mask were strands of Webb’s hair that would years later prove his identity.

The mystery began on Dec. 1, 1948, when beach bums discovered the body lying on Somerton Beach in Adelaide. He was a well-built man, 40 to 50 years old, about 5-foot-11, with gray-blue eyes and gingery-brown hair graying at the sides.

He had no identification and the labels inside his clothes had all been cut off. A global search for his identification provided few answers, only more questions.

Was he a spy, a victim of cold war intrigue? And what of the piece of paper with some kind of code?

“The last known record we have of him is in April 1947 when he left his wife Dorothy,” Fitzpatrick said. “He disappeared and she appeared in court, saying that he had disappeared and she wanted to divorce.”

One thing appears certain: Webb was poisoned.

The investigation continues.

[email protected]

@HunterTOSun