Anne K. Howard

This is a strange and repellent book. Over a three year period Anne Howard, who is a lawyer, collaborated with William Devin Howell, who is a serial murderer, to write an account of his crimes. The first part of ‘His Garden: Conversations with a Serial Killer’ is a record in stupefying detail of the police investigation that resulted in his convictions. The second and repellent part draws on Howard’s conversations with Howell and the hundreds of pages of his written confessions in which he explained how he had killed his victims and his reasons for doing so. Howard tells of the distress she suffered from the ‘’horrific images’ that haunted her as she read Howell’s explicitly detailed account of his crimes. She has excluded some of the more horrifying details and her preface warns unwary readers to proceed with caution and ‘put the book down if it results in emotional distress’.
Why begin reading ‘His Garden’ in the first place? Quite apart from its horrifying content,Anne Howard displays an emotional vocabulary that seems altogether inadequate for her project. When Howell asked her for money at the beginning of their collaboration she worried that readers might think that she was a ‘crummy human being’ if she gave money to a serial killer? ‘Was I willing’, she asks, to give him money to ‘get the inside scoop’? She sends the money without hesitation. ‘Crummy’ does not suggest a finely tuned moral sensibility. Nor does her comment that writing the book became ‘a head trip of the highest order’, though the relationship with Howell sometimes weighed on her ‘like a wet blanket’. Howell can match her insensitivity on occasion: in one of his letters he says that no-one could have suspected he was a serial killer until he was caught; ‘I was a good guy with a bad hobby’. Why read ‘His Garden’? It provides an unusually articulate account of the anatomy of a particular variety of human wickedness that is associated with a marked division between a good or socially acceptable self and second self that consciously revels in the violation of its selected victims. Readers uninterested in the varieties of evil are given timely warning of what to expect by Howard.

Over a period of nine months, beginning in February 2003 Howell, who was an itinerant gardener and odd job man then in his early thirties, tortured, raped and killed six drug addicted sex workers and strangled a transsexual whom he thought at first to be a woman like his other victims. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves in a dumpsite near a shopping mall where they remained undiscovered until 2007 when three were found; the remaining four were found in 2015. This wasteland was Howell’s ‘Garden’ of the book’s title. Police investigation of his crimes was at first intermittent; the transient lives of his victims provided no stimulus and few leads for police to investigate their disappearance.

Anne Howard’s project began in July 2015 when she wrote to Howell, who was serving a 15 year sentence for the manslaughter of one of the women and under investigation for the murder of the other six victims. In her letter she said that she was a journalist who simply wanted to hear ‘your side of the story’. Over the next three years, they spoke at monthly intervals by telephone in a prison visitors room, where they were separated by a plexiglass screen. The last of the conversations to which she refers occurred in March 2018, as the book was in final preparation for publication.

Almost two years elapsed before Howell provided Anne Howard with an account of his crimes. He eventually agreed to plead guilty to six counts of murder in September 2017 and was sentenced to imprisonment for six consecutive 60 year sentences. Part 2 of ‘His Garden’, is based on their conversations and his letters to Howard after he was sentenced, when there was no longer any reason to deny his guilt. It is apparent from his written confessions and reflections that he is intelligent and far more articulate than one might expect from his scanty education and itinerant, alcoholic lifestyle. Howard presents Howell as a ‘selective psychopath’ who had many friends, worked regular hours as a contract gardener and maintained reasonably stable relationships with the women who lived with him at various times and with his children. His frequent transactions with sex workers outside these relationships were almost always concluded without violence. When he did kill the crimes were rehearsed in fantasy and carefully planned to fill slack times in his work schedule when he could imprison his victims for a day or more before he strangled them. Though Howard has her doubts, Howell insists that he was in control of himself at all times during the planning and execution of his crimes.

Howell said he selected his victims because they were desperate addicts whose lives were already imperilled. He distinguished his ‘real’ self from the ‘monster’ who violated and murdered them. This enabling fiction allowed him to view his crimes in retrospect as if he was ‘in a movie’, where reality was suspended and he was ‘pretending to be someone else’. Killing the women after they were raped was essential to the maintenance of his divided life: ‘The only people to see the part I was playing were my victims. Everybody else saw the real me’. This same Jekyll and Hyde split between a bad self and a good self permits Anne Howard to reveal that she has ‘come to see Howell as a true friend, however despicable the crimes that he committed’, for the crimes were committed by the ‘monster’. Their friendship, which may be continuing, was mediated by telephonic communications through plexiglass and written testaments in which Howell detailed his crimes for the author who would tell his side of the story. One of the more remarkable elements in Howard’s collaboration with Howells was her decision to share the manuscript of her book with him and include his disagreements, disappointments and expressions of hurt over some of her adverse comments in a concluding set of footnotes. Howard introduces the revelation that Howell had become a true friend in one of these footnotes. She does so with an expression of concern that this revelation of friendship may ‘offend’ her readers. The nature of her concern is not immediately apparent, but one may speculate that it has to do with her acceptance of Howell’s distinction between his good self and his bad self.

William Howell has a literary predecessor, the respected Victorian physician Dr Jekyll, who found release from the stifling conformity of his life by transforming himself into the monstrous Edward Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson’s concluded his novel on a morally satisfying note of retribution. Dr Jekyll takes his own life when he finds he can no longer sustain the division between his good self and his evil alter ego. Should we be concerned that William Howell might continue to the end of his life sustained by the enabling fiction that the serial killer is ‘not the real me’? Is it a cause for concern that Anne Howard and others might support him in sustaining this enabling fiction to the extent of making friends with the ‘good guy’? Perhaps, but why deprive Howell of this remaining solace? Modern prisons are not penitentiaries: they are entirely lacking in the institutional resources required for moral regeneration of the wicked or the management of unbearable remorse. Howell is safely imprisoned for the rest of his life. Perhaps the most and least that can be done for Howell is simply to contain him in a secure and humane environment among his fellow offenders. He is a sociable man who seems make friends easily. It is unlikely that he will live to be old. He is a diabetic for whom prison food, his uncontrolled obesity and the futility of prison time with no prospect of release is likely to ensure an early, natural termination of his life.
.… (més)

I enjoy reading true crime novels. When you step back and think about it; it is in our human nature to be curious about things we don't understand or sadly death...whether it be from natural causes or the act of a violent crime. If lots of people did not like reading about true crime stories, there would not be a lot of books published. Ok, enough of my mini rant and on to the book.

At first I thought it was the fact that I found William to be uninteresting as to the reason I was struggling to stay focused with this book but after reading several other readers comments; I realized that what I was feeling about this book was due to William but also the author. Now I am not saying I have anything against the author herself. It is more with the writing of this book. It did feel more like the author was putting together her case to go to trial. This way of writing for me personally felt like it weighted the book down.… (més)

Anne K. Howard took on a daunting task: get to know and understand a serial killer.
William Devin Howell murdered seven individuals and dumped their bodies behind a strip mall in New Britain, CT. It took years to discover all seven victims. Some of the victims had been missing for years.
Anne's writing is good. And I can definitely feel the trepidation she has in confronting and talking to a man who was so violent to his victims. I get the feeling that she probably liked him, other than the fact that he did such horrendous things.
I don't leave the book liking the man. Or even finding anything about him that makes me want to like him. I don't believe that there is anything about what he did that can be found "likable".… (més)