Word: bosket
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...