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The killer at middle age lives in a stately Georgian colonial in a swanky Baltimore neighborhood.
He pads in his socks across Persian carpet. He passes the leather sofas arranged by his interior designer in a living room where classical music is almost always playing.
The tranquil ambiance offers no hint of the defining moment of Bill Bond’s life: a sudden flash of teen violence nearly three decades ago that he once tried to profit from and has never denied.
Rather than occupying a prison cell, Bond has spent most of his adult life among Baltimore’s elite, playing tennis at the finest clubs, dining at French bistros, schmoozing at gourmet groceries, walking his Briard showdog, Magic.
But anxiety has entered Bond’s carefully constructed world.
He’s lost his heiress wife, whose wealth, along with his own inheritances, helped him indulge in the good life without a paying job before their separation. He’s lost a long legal battle aimed at preserving control of the untold story of his dark history – a complicated copyright dispute that he pursued, unsuccessfully, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court this year.
Now he’s about to lose his finest wine.
“I’m not going to watch this,” he says, turning his back and pacing.
Even more off-limits is the box at the opposite end of the basement. Inside is a 600-page manuscript that has never been published. Once, it amounted to an attempt to explain himself and make him as rich as the people around him.
But Bond can’t truly be understood without going back to the beginning, to a small town in Ohio, where he was a bright, athletic, angry teenager. A twin everyone called Billy.
The boy who killed his father and got away with it.
Billy and his twin, Richard, lived privileged lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. Their mother, whose maiden name is Elizabeth Johnson, came from old money, locals say. Their father, Mirko Rovtar Jr., hailed from a Slovenian immigrant family who had built a business but lacked high-society bona fides.
Billy, who changed his last name to Bond as an adult, attended private school. There were Caribbean vacations and tennis lessons. In photographs from the 1970s, he and his brother wear stylish clothes, looking tanned and happy.
Bond now stands at 5-foot-8 and weighs 180 pounds, chiseled by biweekly boxing workouts, distance cycling and ping-pong lessons with a former Soviet national team coach.
Forty-five and balding, he no longer flaunts the blond locks that once made him look like tennis star Bjorn Borg. He has a sardonic wit and flirts habitually.
He is reluctant to talk about his childhood but hints at class conflicts roiling his family. His parents met, he says, at Transylvania University, a small, liberal arts college in Lexington, Ky. His mother’s parents were not pleased when she became pregnant, Bond says.
The birth of twin boys did not make things easier. He describes his father as tall and “very good-looking,” but distant and unloving.
“What’s worse?” Bond asks. “I hit you one time in my kitchen, or every day for 10 years I tell you, ‘You’re no good.’ ”
By the late 1970s, his parents’ marriage had unraveled. His father, who had operated a successful insulation business and worked in the chemical industry, had moved to Georgia. At home in Ohio, Billy clashed with his mother, accusing her of favoring his twin brother.
“I was the bad one,” Bond says. She finally demanded that he live with his father, Bond recalls. He was 17 when his father came to pick him up in June 1981.
“It was in the fall of my junior year when Ricky and I (had begun) talking, over ping-pong, of killing dad,” Bond wrote in his manuscript. “We both became infatuated with the idea, and we talked about it all the time. My mother did tell us not to discuss things like that … but Ricky and I definitely got the impression from her that it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if dad was dead.”
Bond said his manuscript is a “highly fictionalized … stylized” account, but Maryland courts have said the work’s outline tracks the facts.
Bond’s mother and his brother, Richard Johnson, an attorney, could not be reached for comment. Richard Johnson denied to the Washington Post in 2001 that he had plotted with his brother to kill their father.
Before they could leave for Georgia, Billy argued with his father in the garage at the home of his grandfather, Mirko Rovtar Sr., in nearby Bainbridge, Ohio. Bond says his father told him: “I don’t want you to come live with me. I never wanted to have you.”
Billy responded by smashing his father’s skull with a hammer.
“I see the garage bathed in shadowy light, my father lying in a pool of his own blood, and, for the first time, I can see myself quite clearly. I am filled with vanity,” Bond wrote.
A Maryland appeals court gave more details, paraphrasing Bond’s manuscript – which has been kept under seal in a Baltimore courthouse after being used in a custody case related to Bond’s stepchildren. The court said he wrote of “how his dying father attempted to raise himself off the floor of the garage before Bond delivered the final blows to his neck and head. (The manuscript) describes Bond wiping away his fingerprints, scrubbing the garage floor, cleaning blood, flesh and bone from his clothes.”
The body was found in his father’s car, parked near a convenience store on the edge of town, says Bainbridge Police Chief Jim Jimison, who investigated the crime. Blood dripped from the trunk. Police discovered a note that suggested Rovtar was killed in a dispute over illegal drugs, but police weren’t buying it, Jimison says.
While police looked for clues, Billy went to a concert with a friend. Police questioned him the next day. He failed a polygraph, Jimison says, but “there was no repentance.
“That’s what really bothers you,” Jimison says. “Only person in my career that when the evidence is put forward and the jig is up, who wasn’t able to show some remorse. You talk about calculating and selfish.”
The motive was uncertain. Quotes from Bond’s manuscript indicate that he killed his father to gain an inheritance. Indeed, Bond acknowledges that he later inherited money from his father’s estate.
Bond says he eventually was “found delinquent” as part of a deal with prosecutors to keep the case in the juvenile court system. He had killed his father eight months before his 18th birthday. Instead of going to prison, he was ordered to receive treatment at Sheppard Pratt, a Baltimore psychiatric hospital.
“He got off far too easy,” Jimison says. “In my opinion, he should still be in prison. It seems like he went from riches to riches.”
Bond steers his BMW onto the grounds of Sheppard Pratt.
“That’s where I lived,” he says, nodding up at a sterile-looking building. “Hall C7.”
Many of the teens at Sheppard Pratt were drug abusers or fighting through emotional troubles, he says. He doesn’t recall other teen killers: “I was very unusual.”
“In group therapy,” he says, “I wasn’t allowed to discuss why I was there. I’d get all the crazy kids upset.”
He remembers only one visit from his mother, and two from his father’s parents, who would give him money from time to time. In the years since, he has had an on-again-off-again relationship with his mother. He is estranged from his twin brother.
“The whole family was sick,” Bond says. “I’m glad I got out of it. For all intents and purposes, I’ve lost them as a family, and I’m glad.”
At Sheppard Pratt, Billy formed a bond with one of his psychiatrists, Kay Koller, who would drive him to tennis clubs and helped prepare him for life outside the facility. Released after 10 months, tennis gave the young Bond exposure to people of means in Baltimore – he taught lessons at clubs and resurfaced courts.
“I made myself likable,” he says.
In the winters, Bond traveled, spending months in Brazil and Central America. He also visited Jamaica, where he fell in with a well-to-do crowd. Friends set him up with a house in Port Antonio, Jamaica, the very house, he says, where Robin Moore wrote “The French Connection.” It was there, in 1987, he says, that he set out to write his own best-seller.
Over seven years, Bond’s manuscript “went from fiction to non-fiction” to fiction again, he explains. “By the time it went through this, it was Truman Capote fiction-non-fiction; the way it reads is Gay Talese-ish.
“I wanted to make the manuscript a creative work. … The way I constructed it – the unapologetic narrative – it was like (Albert Camus’) ‘The Stranger,’ ” he says.
Bond attracted the attention of a literary manager, Ken Atchity. They met in the early 1990s in New York, Atchity recalls, and Bond was “very charismatic and persuasive. … You would never have thought we were sitting there talking about murder. He was very crisp and matter-of-fact about it.”
Atchity’s firm later produced promotional materials for a book called “Self-Portrait of a Patricide: How I Got Away with Murder.” But Atchity couldn’t get a publisher interested, and he soured on Bond.
The manuscript “was self-justifying, flat, emotionless, almost like he was in the audience watching somebody onstage,” Atchity reflects.
“Did he change” after the murder? Atchity asks. “In this case, the answer is no. … He wasn’t feeling the dark night of the soul that one would expect.”
In 1995, Bond began dating a mom of three named Alyson Slavin, who owned an antiques store. He shared his manuscript with her, he says, and moved that same year into her 8,000-square-foot home in Guilford.
Alyson is the daughter of Kenneth Blum, co-founder of Baltimore-based United Healthcare. In March 1996, Bond sent Blum an extraordinary letter asking for a “dowry” before he would marry Alyson. Along with the dowry, Bond asked for a studio apartment, a salary to compensate him for helping Alyson with her family problems and the promise of a severance package if the marriage broke up.
“You can pay me now or pay me later,” he said.
The letter, particularly the request for a dowry, incensed Alyson’s father.
“That says it all,” says Blum, now 82 and retired in Boca Raton, Fla. “At best, I would say he’s very strange.”
Blum had been giving Alyson $200,000 a year for living expenses and paid for her children’s private education, according to court records. He eventually hired a private investigator to look into Bond’s past.
Despite her father’s fury, Alyson married Bond on May 8, 2001. About that time, the investigator acquired a copy of the manuscript from the widow of Bond’s former attorney. That discovery, along with the investigator’s acquisition of Bond’s Ohio juvenile record, set off a chain of events that has played out in Maryland courts ever since.
The grudge match between Bond and Blum has cost Bond $600,000 in legal fees and threatened his financial stability. Along the way, Bond has accused some of Maryland’s most prominent lawyers and judges of all sorts of shenanigans.
After Bond’s manuscript was found, he was arrested for allegedly lying on a gun-purchase application about whether he had been in a mental institution. (The charges were dismissed.) Back then, Bond says, he seldom left the house without a weapon, a habit from his days in Jamaica.
About the time of the gun issue, attorneys for Alyson’s first husband, William Slavin, tried to introduce the manuscript as evidence in a custody dispute. Slavin said he was concerned about his 14- and 12-year-old daughters living with Bond.
Bond tried to block the manuscript from being used by filing a copyright infringement lawsuit, which he lost. (In the years since, Bond has continued asking for attorneys’ fees and damages of more than $140 million, and he also has failed to prevail on claims that Blum, U.S. District Judge Marvin Garbis, attorney Gerald Martin and others rigged cases against him.)
Despite the introduction of the manuscript in the child-custody case, Alyson Slavin Bond retained physical custody of her minor children. But Bond says the family was riven by resentments and discipline problems, and the next year, he and his wife sent the children to live with their father.
Alyson, now 53, did not return calls. Her father says Bond “destroyed her life.”
As the court fight went on, the couple wasn’t as flush with cash as before. Alyson’s father cut off financial support. The couple remained in Guilford, but they downsized to a 2,500-square-foot house.
Few neighbors knew about Bond’s history, and those who did weren’t particularly bothered by it.
“I don’t think anybody who knows him focuses on that,” Howard Friedel, head of the Guilford homeowners association, says of Bond’s criminal past. “He’s been a positive individual in the community.”
Bond lives by himself now in the Georgian colonial. He says the difficulties with Alyson’s children strained their relationship, and they are getting divorced. He still sees a few friends for lunch. But it can be a lonely existence, Bond acknowledges.
He’ll play tennis or ping-pong with a pal, Chris Taylor. Bond “matter-of-factly” revealed his past to Taylor, who calls his friend a “moral person, a very good guy.”
Taylor says he wonders sometimes how Bond can live so well without working. Bond won’t reveal much about his finances. Sometimes, he fiddles with a business plan: a newspaper advice column and Web site called DearBill.tv. Often, he sits in his upstairs office, poring over a legal case that he cannot let go.
Just as Bond is enamored of his writing in his unpublished manuscript, he is in love with his prose in hundreds of pages of legal briefs, which include lines comparing a federal judge to a “blindfolded child … swinging his stick at the colorful piñata.”
On his office counter, there is a list of goals for 2009, among them, finding “Mrs. Right!!!!!”
Mrs. Right would resemble the wife of agent Ari Gold on HBO’s “Entourage” – “minus the temper,” Bond says. Or, maybe, the Playboy model Shauna Sand “sans the insecurity.”
“When I put all these qualifications into Match.com, I had zero matches for the entire United States, which made me laugh very hard, then cry,” Bond says. He didn’t put “father killer” into his Match.com profile. But he knows that label is with him forever.
“I wish I wouldn’t have done it,” he says one day after much prodding. “Not because I miss my father so much, but because of what I did to myself.”
