Hi everyone, this is Deb from Dying to be Found.
Before we get started, I just wanted to say that episodes contain disturbing discussions on harmful acts and crimes against animals and or humankind.
Recordings are not intended for young or sensitive audiences due to the content nature of this podcast.
Listener discretion is strongly advised.
Hi everyone, I'm Deb, your host of Dying to be Found True Crime Podcast.
Thanks so much for joining in this episode today.
I always say that it's all in our name.
We leave our episodes open for interpretation to our listeners.
If you have a storyline that you want us to cover, DM me on Instagram.
Then make sure you tune in every Thursday for new episodes.
We cover both solved and unsolved cases where a criminal past could have caught up with someone.
We do missing persons plus a whole lot more.
And for our new listeners, I bring in a different family member every week.
Plus some really cool guests from my very own favorite indie podcasts.
Today, my son Cory is here to talk about true crime.
And that means that we get a law enforcement's perspective.
And Cory, you do not even know how much of a law enforcement perspective you're going to bring today because I have a little bit of a storyline that does not include bombs.
Good, something different.
Definitely. So a couple of weeks ago, Cory, you and I went to lunch.
And to me, it turned into a little bit of a work session, which I really love.
That was pretty cool. And I know you're a busy man, but any time that you spend with me is a good day.
I just have to say that during that lunch, Cory, we talked about a little segment of your adventures while you were working in the jail.
When you first started in law enforcement and we're going to call that jailhouse rock because I know you're going to rock our listeners today.
Kind of throwing this at you. Are you ready to tell us a story?
You said way back when you had a thousand stories to tell. So why not do it today?
Well, I did have one where this this guy actually tried to escape.
So this guy was not completely all there because he had shot himself and failed.
Oh, no. Yeah. So he lowered his IQ a couple of points from that one.
So we had these cells and he tried to he walked out of one of them while I was doing my checks or something.
I was doing something in there. He tried to go through another one.
He only had one more and then he'd be to another hallway with another locked door.
He wouldn't have gotten any further.
So I ran over there and I grabbed him and basically said, you know, what are you doing?
Put it nicely. And he turned around and pushed me.
So I very, very gently put him on the ground and his shoes flew off.
And a lot of inmates saw that and they were not happy about it because he's not he's not all there anymore.
Oh, that's sad. Yeah. But what are you supposed to do?
I mean, he tried to escape jail.
He just casually tried to walk out and turned around and pushed me.
So I took care of business. Oh, wow. OK. That was a good story.
That was actually better than the first story you told me, which was horrifying.
Oh, yeah, that was terrible. All right.
So I do have a couple of questions for you.
First off, you're on the road now. You're not in the jail.
Do you miss the jail? Not at all. Not one bit.
What are you referred to as? Are you like a beat cop?
What do they call you? I mean, yeah, a beat cop deputy.
Well, I'm a senior deputy now.
Yeah, just patrol, patrol deputy, patrol officer, beat cop, whatever you want to say.
Any kind of slang. Yeah. OK, I got you.
OK, so you're a patrol officer and I'll refer to this term in just a moment.
So what's your demeanor when you pull somebody over?
What's your demeanor?
I know that you told me a while back that people have actually said that you're very nice.
But how do you perceive yourself? Do you have a good demeanor?
Are you do you try to scare sense into people? What do you do?
No, I'm very laid back. I kind of just mirror my personality.
I've tried the robotic type, trying to scare people, but it's just it's not my personality.
So I'm very laid back and personable.
And it actually disarms people a lot. Oh, that's good.
Yeah, it's a good little tool I've learned to use, especially whenever I'm trying to get some information out of people.
They just perceive me as this very laid back, chill guy.
And I can usually get a little bit more out of them.
So you're the good cop? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, we played good cop, bad cop by accident, and I was the bad cop.
Really? We didn't realize until afterwards. Oh, yeah.
Reviewing the film? Yeah, we just went back and looked at it.
And I was the bad cop without realizing it.
And the guy ended up telling my buddy, he was like, hey, that guy's kind of a jerk.
But I'll tell you everything.
I mean, honestly, it still worked in your favor. That's great.
I mean, yeah. Yeah. All right.
Well, today we're going to be talking about a patrol officer named William Leisure.
And he was a mild mannered cop back in the day.
He maintained what they called at the time his title was Officer Two.
And he played this role for 17 years in the police force beginning back in the 1970s.
As Officer Two, just so you know, this is one step above being a rookie.
That's like basically what my rank is.
So you've got deputy and you've got senior deputy and you've got corporal and so on.
OK, I see. I don't know the story yet,
but it's not necessarily that he was a bad cop and he was kept in this position.
I've got a guy in my shift. He's 56 years old.
He's getting ready to retire.
He was a sergeant at another agency and he's just a senior deputy at our place for 15 years
just because he doesn't want to take the rank.
I mean, it's anything above senior deputy would be a supervisor position.
Right. Which is a desk job and a lot more responsibilities. I get it.
Well, in 1974, William Leisure married Betsy Mogul, a senior prosecutor
in the same district where William worked.
And the two were considered a power couple in their social circle.
William was dubbed Mild Bill.
That was his nickname that he was given.
And I'm assuming this was probably because of his temperament.
And Betsy ran for L.A. City attorney.
So she is the I'm going to call her the go getter.
Now, Betsy didn't win the bid when she ran for that position.
But it didn't stop her from moving up and moving forward with her career,
with the support of her husband.
After all, William had a good job.
He was a police officer.
He apparently had morals or did he?
Because we wouldn't be talking about him today if he really did.
At least as a public servant, though, William displayed outward morals.
He rarely handed out traffic tickets.
He preferred to give drivers a stern talking to kind of scaring them to ghost.
What was that old show that was on TV before?
Scared straight. So he would do that.
And he preferred to let his wife take on the spotlight.
In fact, he always rooted for her whenever she got promotions.
William, on the other hand, was just as content like we talked about.
There are people that want to move up through the ranks.
And he held the officer to position during the 17 years on the police force.
Oh, no. I mean, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I think that's pretty normal.
I mean, that sounds completely normal.
I mean, I don't I don't really write tickets.
I do chew people out sometimes on the side of the road, but it's only to say,
like, hey, stop going so fast.
You've got a kid in the back of your car.
Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Stuff like that.
I mean, I've had that plenty of times.
And I mean, there's nothing wrong with just being a beat cop for your whole career.
It's really the best position there is. It's great. Oh, yeah.
So I mean, everything that he's doing so far sounds pretty normal.
Yeah, he led a relatively normal life, at least in the public eye.
Moving on, as most of us do, Corey, William did have hobbies.
He loved fixing up old Corvettes and especially liked yachting with his buddies.
Now, this is California, so he's on the coast.
Remember that. I don't think he actually owned a yacht,
even though his wife was probably doing well.
She was the breadwinner.
I don't think that they would have had enough funding for that.
Probably not.
On a cop's salary, even if she's higher up and our sheriff doesn't even afford a yacht.
So what do you think he did instead?
I mean, I assume he's got rich friends.
Yeah, he sure did. Not only that,
but one of his hobbies was stealing other people's yachts.
Ah, that'll do it.
It will. There goes the morals.
There goes the morals.
On May 29th, 1986, William Leisure did exactly what I just said.
He and two buddies, a man named Robert Denzel Coons and another guy named Gino,
they took the La Vida yacht out for a joyride.
According to the Los Angeles Times,
Robert Coons was a convicted bank robber who was out on parole
when he was introduced to William through an acquaintance.
The two took to each other rather quickly and they became bosom buddies.
They vacationed together, went boating together,
and Corey, apparently, they stole yachts together as well on multiple occasions.
Seems like he's got a friend with bad influence.
I know, exactly. Unbeknownst to William,
there was a low-key sting operation in the works with the LAPD
and Robert Coons was on law enforcement's radar.
Detectives had been working on a string of yacht thefts in the area and received
a tip that the boat that Robert and William were on was part of this theft ring.
Investigators decided to go up to the Marina Bay Yacht Harbor,
which is just north of San Francisco,
just to check things out.
They're doing their job, they're going to investigate.
As William, Robert, and Gino glided up to the docks of the Marina Bay Yacht Harbor,
police were waiting for them.
Now, Corey, imagine the surprise on both the LAPD's faces
and William's face when they locked eyes.
Remember, William worked for the LAPD and he was just approached by some of his own.
Could you imagine?
No, I couldn't.
I've had some guys we've had to get rid of,
but nothing super serious like that.
For unethical behavior?
Yeah. Luckily, some of them have left before they became a problem.
Within our agency, they typically show themselves after they leave,
but it's always crazy to see,
oh, wow, you are actually not the guy that you perceived yourself to be.
Yeah, wow.
Obviously, the LAPD was just a surprise to see William on board.
When they told him why they were there,
William feigned innocence, of course he would.
He's going to say, what are you talking about sort of thing?
He had a reputation to uphold.
Telling the investigators that he had volunteered to be a crew member for his friend,
Robert Coons.
In fact, William had said that he had been picked up in Long Beach,
so he wasn't even on board for the entire trip,
which began in San Diego and ended up just north of San Francisco.
If you were to look at the map, Cory,
you can see that San Diego is way down at the bottom of California,
close to Mexico, and then of course, San Francisco is in the northern area.
They had a little bit of a trip to go,
and not that he was backpedaling,
but William also dropped his wife's name,
saying that he had no reason to steal yachts when Betsy was the breadwinner in their household.
But you had just mentioned that they couldn't afford yachts themselves.
You mentioned that.
Yeah, and name dropping isn't my favorite thing.
It's kind of a cheap thing to do.
A lot of people name drop just to get out of tickets,
and I don't think it's the right thing to do personally.
I don't care who you know, that doesn't make it right.
Does that keep you from?
No, no, of course not.
But people do it all the time just to try to get out of tickets.
I think it's kind of a cheap move,
because just because you know somebody doesn't make it right
that you were breaking the law in whatever manner you were doing it.
Yeah, so true.
I've had people do it in domestic disputes,
and they've tried to use the military thing against me,
like, oh yeah, my husband's been a Marine for 20 years.
Well, it doesn't have anything to do with what just happened right now, does it?
Really?
I don't think it's the right thing to do.
I don't like it. A lot of cops don't like it.
So if you ever come across law enforcement,
please don't name drop. It's not OK. It's dishonest.
I love it. That's a great teachable moment right there.
William was successful in appeasing his colleagues
with his pleas of innocence for really, Cory, just about a hot minute
because that third crew member named Gino, well, he's sung like a canary.
Gino told investigators that he, William and Robert
had all boarded the La Vida yacht in San Diego.
So right there on the spot, William's caught in a lie.
And the distance between San Diego and that Marina Bay
yacht harbor was about 74 miles or 120 kilometers or 65 nautical miles,
which would be roughly 100 nautical kilometers away from where the yacht
had been docked and where it had been stolen from.
William was quickly arrested under the suspicion of masterminding
a multimillion dollar yacht theft ring that operated out of Newport Beach.
There you go. He got caught red handed.
So now I'm going to go into the investigation here.
I'm going to ease into this just a little bit because, Cory,
you have no idea what's coming.
And let's start with William's vacation buddy, Robert Toons.
After his arrest at the Marina Bay yacht harbor, Robert told investigators
that he had made his living on the docks as a boat maintenance man.
Remember here, he's a former bank robber.
And do you really think that he's going to settle for making an honest living
at that, maybe at minimum wage?
No, not in the 70s robbing banks.
Not going to happen. It's too easy to rob banks back then.
Yeah, it really was.
And there was a lot of bank robberies going on back then everywhere.
It was pretty easy. Yeah, good money, too.
I mean, not exactly like a walk of the walk.
That's right. As Robert settled into marine life,
he quickly began to realize that he could make a killing off of stealing yachts.
So he devised a plan with his buddy, William Leisure, to steal yachts
and sell them anywhere between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand dollars.
What they would do, Corey, is they would put different names on the boats.
You know, boats have a christened name, so they would change the names and registrations.
And just so you know, one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand dollars
back in the 1970s is worth around six hundred and twenty three thousand dollars today
or eight hundred and forty three thousand Canadian dollars.
So so not on a cop salary.
Yeah. Nope.
Robert also told police that he and William had planned to steal yachts for just one more year.
Then they plan to retire and never look back.
But as we know, your luck is going to run out eventually.
And on May 29th, it did.
So this is where the La Vida yacht comes in.
Robert, William and Gino sailed that yacht up to the harbor to complete a sail.
And this is where the LAPD had intercepted.
Obviously, police began investigating William as Robert's partner in crime here.
I'm thinking obviously he is guilty by association with a convicted felon.
Of course, they're going to look at him rather closely.
Why are you a police officer hanging out with a felon on a regular basis?
Yeah. I mean, you surround yourself with like minded people.
Yes, absolutely. That's human nature.
You surround yourself with people that are like you.
So I'm assuming that he's there's just no good reason to be hanging out with felons.
I mean, I'm not going to go out and hang out with drug addicts and thieves and whatnot.
But felons are people too.
Yeah, but they have they have a certain way of making their way through life, their lives.
And they're not going to just that's a tangent.
Are you saying leopards don't change their spots?
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically.
Exactly. All right.
So let's go back to William's reputation here for just a moment.
He's married to this high profile attorney in the community.
And L.A. is a rather large community.
So obviously, he's being portrayed as the supporting husband and an upstanding citizen.
Then he's got this nickname where he's called Mild Bill, which to me gives off the impression
that he has an even temperament and probably a very accepting personality.
I mean, you're not going to call somebody Mild Bill for any other reason, right?
Yeah, but probably comes off as a extremely, extremely boring person.
But you could be a psychopath.
Who's that murderer that was a politician?
Oh, was it Ted Bundy?
I think so. John Wayne Gacy was the clown.
Yeah, he was a politician and everyone had a really good.
Well, even the clown, too. Yeah.
Even even he was perceived as a really good guy.
Oh, yeah. Very charismatic.
Ted Bundy was the yeah, he was the one that was perceived as attractive and a good, good personality.
I mean, both of them, really.
Well, when you watch these documentaries, they all seem to have the same temperament.
Yeah. And I mean, it's a psychopathic trait.
They can perceive themselves as one boy one way and be completely different behind closed doors.
You just never really truly know how people are.
Yeah, I guess maybe it's just a control thing.
They're very controlled. They're very matter of fact.
But yeah, to me, they come across as charismatic.
I watched one on Jeffrey Dahmer. Same thing. Very charismatic.
Yeah, I'm too. And I mean, they're not stupid.
They know how people react to certain personality types.
They're not. I mean, they're not dumb.
They analyze everything. They're they're paying attention of what turns people on and off.
Yes. They're going to do what they can to perceive themselves as the most normal looking person possible
so they can just blend right in.
I mean, so I've noticed it a lot whenever I was working in jail.
The difference between your typical thief, violent guy, drug addict,
the difference between them and the sexual offenders is completely different.
The sexual offenders, a lot of the time, they seem like normal people.
It's insane. They don't seem like the inmates.
They were always the cleanest, the best behaved, typically better as far as personality goes.
Just talking to them every day stuff, but they're just different.
They blend in. But then when you go back and see what their warrants were,
think, oh man, you come off as this typical normal person that keeps telling me that they're innocent.
But you're a monster. Yeah, they're they're they're different.
Very and they're very calculating.
All right. Well, interestingly enough, no one and I mean no one, Corey,
in the 17 years that he was on the police force could say that William was of questionable character.
In fact, so many of his co-workers said that they would come to his defense
and they would give up their own badge if they ever suspected
William was capable of what he was accused of doing.
By that, I mean stealing yachts.
It's the typical neighbor saying, oh, I never would have thought he would have this.
He was just a normal guy. See it on every documentary, every one of them.
Obviously, authorities were building a case against William here.
They were beginning to take a stance that he, not Robert, was the kingpin of the yacht thefts.
So what do you think they're going to do next?
They're going to serve a warrant.
Once they accessed William's property, they discovered a few interesting things here.
First, they discovered several Corvettes, which I had told you that he liked to collect
and I didn't see it in any of the articles that any of the Corvettes were stolen.
So I'm going to say that he definitely had a car collection hobby.
Interestingly enough, they also found a fuselage from a World War II training plane.
Okay, who does that?
And how much did that cost on a police officer salary?
Yeah, exactly. I mean the Corvettes alone.
Last of all, they did find parts to some stolen yachts.
So it was at this point where William was pretty much caught red-handed
and before investigators could verify that William had stolen property in his possession,
they began, just like you did, Cory, they began to wonder why all that stuff was there
and how William could have afforded such luxuries with his salary as a police officer.
And again, like you said, with his wife's earnings,
there was no way he should have had this kind of inventory.
Yeah, absolutely no way.
So there was one more thing that they found on his property.
While executing the search warrant, they also discovered a Ford Thunderbird in William's possession,
which belonged to one of his other partners, a man named Robert Girard.
He had reported this Thunderbird stolen months earlier.
The keys were still in the ignition.
William had been hiding that Thunderbird on his property after it was reported stolen.
And of course, the insurance company made the payout.
So what happens next, you can see that this would be insurance fraud.
And William was involved in that.
So all these charges are beginning to stack up against William, obviously.
Everything that was coming to surface, he lost his job with the LAPD.
Further search warrants were issued.
Only this time, police went inside the house.
And during their search, they found a room full of guns.
There's nothing illegal about that.
I know he was probably just a gun enthusiast, right?
Okay, so hold on. His wife.
Yeah.
Are sirens not going off?
Or, you know, I mean, she's a cop too.
She's not like, man, where's all this very, very expensive stuff coming from?
You've got all these guns and cars and yacht parts.
Like, I'm not paying for that.
Where's this coming from?
Is she oblivious and involved?
Yeah, either.
Well, first of all, she's not a cop.
She's an attorney.
Oh, I thought she, okay.
I thought she was law enforcement.
But still, still though.
I know, right?
Okay, so she's either turning a blind eye or she believes him because she's married to him.
And she's probably, hey, honey, I just made the greatest deal on this Corvette.
I can afford a World War II airplane now.
Yeah, eBay, you really get some good deals out there.
Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
Exactly.
Well, during the search inside William's home, police found a little book with lots of contacts inside.
I'm going to call this William's Little Black Book.
So you know what I mean, right?
Everybody's got a little black book.
Oh, yeah.
When detectives took a closer look, the book led them to a man named Dennis France.
Dennis was a semi-illiterate welder and longtime friend and business partner of William Leisure.
I guess my question here is how many business partners does William have in that little black book?
I mean, I can't imagine stealing yachts is the most simple task.
I feel like you need to have a couple of connections and whatnot.
Sure.
Well, I mentioned that Dennis was his business partner.
But Cory, what I really meant is Dennis was a hit man.
But okay, so wait a minute.
He's a hit man.
Can we pause here for just a moment?
Because these are my thoughts.
When I was looking this up, I mean, here we go.
We're going to go down the rabbit hole here.
I'm thinking back to Brian Wells and that pizza delivery bank robbery.
You remember how his circle of friends, I'm going to say, took advantage of him because he was a simple person.
And because Dennis was maybe in the same mindset, he was semi-illiterate.
I'm thinking he probably had a simple approach to life.
So, yeah, you know how people get taken advantage of like that.
Yeah.
Any business dealings that William had going on and it didn't really matter if he was stealing yachts or other things.
Everything was documented inside this book.
Never put in writing what you don't want repeated.
Yeah.
I probably said that to you, Cory.
Yes.
Entries inside William's little black book corroborated authority suspicions that he was indeed the kingpin in those yacht thefts.
And this had been going on for several years.
Now, investigators still didn't have enough to go on to make a full-blown arrest.
But they did pull Dennis France in for questioning.
They wanted to see how much they could get out of him and point his finger towards William Leisure.
Unfortunately, though, despite his simple mental capacities, Dennis France had enough sense to keep quiet.
He would not budge.
He did not tell the police officers anything.
He actually asked for immunity before he would even speak.
So the police thought, okay, well, you know, we want to put this case to a close.
So we'll go ahead and give him his immunity.
And as soon as the plea deal was made, just like Gino back on the yacht when they got caught gliding up to the docks, Dennis sang like a canary.
It's not that simple, I didn't.
Nope, he sure wasn't.
Okay.
So what he had to say went much, much deeper than making a career out of stolen property.
Here we go.
This is where it's going to get a little bit crazy.
Since I've said singing like a canary a couple times here, I've got three different chirps for you.
Chirp number one, May 20th, 1977.
According to Dennis, William Leisure held a string of jobs outside the LAPD.
And really, we're going to be talking about, I wouldn't say that he was with the mob or anything, but it was definitely a mobster lifestyle
because William had ordered a hit on a man named Gilberto Cervantes, a man who held real estate interest inside Elso Tortilla Factory in Los Angeles, California.
Gilberto was gunned down in front of his home, but to this day, authorities really couldn't make a connection to William.
However, Gilberto's daughter-in-law was allegedly attempting to take control of his tortilla factory.
This daughter-in-law knew William Leisure, and although they could not connect the two, a man named Tony De Los Reyes, a jazz band bassist,
he was believed to be the hitman in that incident.
He had just inherited Gilberto Cervantes' $600,000 estate.
Okay, so he's probably looking for insurance money at this point, but I do want you to remember Tony De Los Reyes' name because that's going to come up in just a moment.
We're going to move on to chart number two on May 2nd, 1980.
Now, Dennis told investigators that William had ordered him to kill a woman named Ann Smith.
Ann was the wife of one of William's close friends.
The friend who Ann introduced William to was her husband.
So basically, Ann had taken up tennis lessons several months earlier where she had met William.
The two became friends, she introduced her husband to William, and they hit it off rather well.
So now William is brought into Ann and her husband's mix.
Ann's husband and William start hanging out just a bit, but I do want to back up about a month here because on April 23rd, 1980,
Ann Smith had just filed divorce from William's best friend.
In the divorce papers, Ann had requested a split in all communal properties that included the family residence, an apartment building,
some real estate property in Central America, plus some sales proceeds from additional real estate.
So apparently that couple had a lot of investments.
She requested that a 38-foot boat and a 55-foot yacht be awarded to her in the divorce.
Plus, she was asking $3,000 a month in spencil support.
So do you think that's a reasonable request?
No, not at all. Find a job. Work for yourself.
Yeah, but I do want to just kind of throw it out there.
Back in the 70s, there were still a lot of stay-at-home wives and stay-at-home mothers.
Oh, yeah, certainly.
All that was built whenever women weren't working as much.
So now it's a little bit more reasonable back then.
Sure.
Well, this is 1980 by now.
Yeah, you're right. It is.
So but still just on the, you know, on the fringes of the 70s, right?
$3,000 a month back in the 80s. That's a lot of money.
It is a lot. I didn't even look up to see how much that is today.
I mean, it's a lot today.
Yeah, it's a lot. This is my paycheck.
Exactly.
Well, after the couple went to court,
Anne was eventually awarded $500 in spencil support
and she was allowed to stay in their couple's residential home.
That in itself, I'm sorry, I don't get.
Apparently, they were both living there, Cory.
That'll work out great.
Yeah, exactly.
So Mr. Smith was ordered to refrain from video or tape recording
his ex-wife while she was in the home.
I'm sorry. Have to shake my head there.
He was also ordered to install a second home line
and she got to stay in the master bedroom.
Oh my God. If you're going to get a divorce.
So it seems like there was an issue beforehand within the home.
Like, hey, you can't record it.
It's like clearly this is a problem.
I never thought of that, Cory.
He was probably already doing that.
Okay, that's another rabbit hole.
I don't want to go down.
It could just be simple conversations trying to screw her over legally.
That's probably more so what it is.
Oh, yeah.
See it all the time.
But you're getting a divorce.
Why would you stay together?
Why are we staying in the same house?
Well, it's a nice house.
I assume. I wouldn't want to get rid of it.
I suppose.
I guarantee what they were doing was they were trying to record each other
and screw each other over legally and they're going to stay in that house.
So the other person eventually gets kicked out of that house from settlement.
Yeah.
And they get to stay there.
I guarantee that's why they were both trying to stay there.
So they could each individual could keep the house.
Yeah, screw each other till the end.
Yeah, forces are dirty.
Yes, they are.
After the divorce, Mr.
Smith sold some real estate property and kept the proceeds stating that
Ann had a gambling problem.
Of course, this is not going to sit well with her.
On May 2nd, 1980, less than a month after divorce papers were served,
Ann Smith was shot in the back while styling her own mother's hair in their beauty salon.
Apparently a man had entered the shop,
grabbed Ann at gunpoint,
emptied the register and then shot Ann at close range in cold blood.
He ran out the back door,
got into a getaway car and off he went.
Well, I guess we found out who gets to keep the house.
Wow, Cory.
That was cold.
Now here's a little caveat for that.
William Leisure called in sick the morning of Ann Smith's murder.
All right, chirp number three.
I had just told you to remember the name Tony De Los Reyes.
During the discovery process,
investigators also found that William had put another hit out on Tony.
He was the husband of another one of Williams' friends.
Oh man, I don't think I'd like to be Williams' friend because they don't last very long.
Nope.
Although there was no specific motive,
investigators believe that Tony was cheating on his wife and she had confided in William.
Who are these women that befriend William?
That's not good for them.
William provided one of his cronies,
Dennis France, with a thousand dollar down payment to take Tony out in a crowded bar.
Now how he was going to go about doing this,
I'm not really sure,
but he was locked and loaded.
Prisma takes you a long way.
Dennis tailed Tony into the bar,
but Tony left before the job could be done.
So I guess my question here is why,
Cory, would somebody want to take someone out with a ton of witnesses in a crowded spot?
How do they think they're going to get away with that?
Can blend in pretty easy.
Blend in and then blend out?
Yeah, there's a shooting at a school that happened not too long ago
where the shooter just blended in with the crowd as everyone was running out.
Oh no.
It's easy to do.
No one's paying attention.
You hear gunshots, everyone freaks out and runs, you kind of just blend in.
Oh wow.
I mean, I think I've seen that in enough movies where they get really, really close,
they do the job and then they disappear.
So I guess you're right.
They are, you know, blending and if they're in a bar, there's a lot,
it's probably loud, the music's playing.
Yeah, no one's paying attention.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Well, here's the tough part.
William had apparently been just around the corner from where Tony was taken down.
He had even been following the entire event when Tony left the bar.
William had advised Dennis to take Tony down and make it look like a robbery.
So, I mean, what's going on?
Ah, I wonder if he had walkie talkies because he's a police officer.
So he probably does.
I know they had walkie talkies back in the 70s.
Yeah.
Yeah, even if it's just a walkie to walkie.
A walkie to walkie?
Did you say walkie to walkie?
What is that?
Yeah, it's like walkie to walkie.
So like our channels are connected to a tower.
So they have more distance.
So our radio waves will connect to that tower and then bounce off that and go to the next radio or wherever.
So you can get a lot more distance.
But if we were to go outside of the area, we have to use walkie to walkie.
So the radio waves just bounce from one walkie talkie to the other, one radio to the other.
So that's how that works.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Okay.
As Dennis approached Tony, who was completely unaware that he was being followed, Dennis shot Tony in the middle of traffic before he disappeared into the night.
So he just kind of came up on him, did his job and off he went.
Back in the police station, while Dennis is giving up his business partner, William Leisure, charges against William are beginning to fall into place.
I think at this point, Corey, the police officers were wondering what in the heck are we getting here?
Because we offered you immunity, but we had no idea that you were going to tell us this much.
Yeah, this guy's a crime boss.
At this point, William is already behind bars.
But for obvious reasons, he's isolated from the inmates because you know what inmates think of cops behind bars.
In fact, William Leisure was held on a special floor in Los Angeles County.
He was held in the same facilities as other corrupt police officers, as well as famous celebrities who I'm not going to say get special treatment.
But you know, and I know that celebrities still get a spa treatment when they're put behind bars.
Certainly.
Yeah.
Not that there's anything wrong with celebrities getting special treatment, but I really do hope they're humbled by making a dollar an hour.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, you're still in prison, but it's probably more so like an isolated thing.
Just I see why they do it because people are going to know who they are and they're going to try to say, hey, you better send, especially now,
you better cash out this amount of money to my buddy's account or else we're going to beat you up or whatever.
So, I mean, I see why they do it at the same time.
It just I don't know.
Yeah, and they would have to.
It's kind of their responsibility.
If they're going to lock them up, they're still going to have to protect them. And I understand that.
Absolutely.
Yeah, same with cops.
I mean, we've had we've had cops in our jail and they change agencies.
They like they'll go to a neighboring County if they're arrested just because they probably arrested some people within that County.
But yeah, they have to separate them completely from everybody.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, Dennis France brings up all sorts of criminal activities.
William Leisure was eventually fired from the Los Angeles Police Department, which I had mentioned for being in possession of that stolen vehicle,
which was the Thunderbird that had been reported stolen, insurance fraud, etc.
He had charges for the stolen yachts.
And last but not least, he was charged with the deaths of Ann Smith and Tony De Los Reyes.
It took another three years before William would have his day in court.
On April 19th, 1991, a witness testified against him, stating that William had paid him $3,500 US dollars to kill Ann Smith in 1980 because she was divorcing one of his best buddies.
He had also paid his hit man $1,000 to off Tony De Los Reyes at that bar in 1981.
The District Attorney's Office of Los Angeles County charged William Leisure with one count of conspiracy to commit murder.
Another count for murder for the intent of financial gain.
William pleaded not guilty to all of these charges, but was sent to trial with the possibility of the death penalty, although the jury at the time did not recommend it.
In fact, Corey, the trial ended in a 10-2 hung vote in favor of conviction.
In order to find him guilty, the jury did need a unanimous vote, which didn't happen.
So the case ended in a mistrial.
When William was retried, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and he was sentenced to two life sentences with a minimum of 15 years behind bars.
He was granted parole in August of 2021.
So he's out there in the streets.
During the initial stages of these trials, Robert Coons cut a deal for a 10-year sentence for the yacht theft.
His sentence was reduced to two years in exchange for pleading guilty to his testimony against William Leisure.
So there you have it.
This is where we come to an end of William Leisure.
Or, as we know him, Mild Bill.
I have something to say about this wife of his.
Oh, yes, please.
I mean, I honestly did not see very much in the articles that I read.
I didn't see very much on her.
She didn't see very much either.
What was she doing?
There's so much going on.
He's clearly cheating on her, and he's this criminal mastermind.
And where is she?
Like she's paying the bills too.
And she's like, well, there's all these Corvettes I'm not paying for.
There's this stolen vehicle and all these yacht parts that I'm not paying for.
Where is she?
Is she that oblivious?
I don't know.
That's a great question.
She's an attorney.
She's smart, but she's just not that smart, clearly.
Yeah, I don't know how to answer that.
That's a great question.
I can't imagine her.
I mean, because I think he was, I would assume he was having an affair with that and woman.
So there's a lot of things just going right over her head.
You know, now that you say that, I'm pretty sure he was.
He seemed to befriend women a lot.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of money, a lot of power, clearly.
I mean, he's most certainly having affairs.
I don't know.
I'm thinking just from the timeline, they were probably married for eight years
when he was caught doing what he was doing.
So, you know, for the first eight years of their marriage,
William was stealing yachts and doing all this crazy stuff with his little black book.
That is nuts.
You're right.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't know where her mindset was.
If she was a city attorney, you know, she probably had a lot on her plate
and she probably worked long hours.
I don't know.
Really, what I was thinking too is, I mean, she's probably going to be working a whole lot,
especially working in LA.
But still, that's just so much that's going around you
and your personal life that you're just completely overlooking.
Yeah.
I don't know if it's just will for ignorance or what.
Well, that's, I don't know.
That's a mystery.
If any of our listeners have anything to add, absolutely DMS on Instagram.
This guy's running a mob.
Exactly.
All right, Cory.
So that is William Leisure, also known as Mild Bill.
Oh, and your thoughts.
So, mom, what are your teachable moments for today?
Oh, well, I've got a teachable moment for you today, Cory.
Just from mother to son, I know that you are on the good side of the law,
but I do want to say something to you here and I'll start by telling you.
I don't know if I've ever said this to you before.
Your sister Shelby is in finance and when she got her degree
and she started working in that field, I told her
and I also told your cousin because he also has a finance degree.
You have got to be ethical because when people start working with money,
they can turn greedy.
You always hear about this white collar crime, right?
Same concept here.
So here this teachable moment for you today is that
I want you to stay on the right side of the law.
Believe it or not, Cory, I have a friend whose husband was fired
from the police department because he was caught in a string of wrongdoings
and internal investigations were called in.
You do hear about dirty cops.
So my teachable moment to you is to tell you to continue on working
on the good side of the law.
You're one of the good ones.
So stay that way.
Yeah, I mean it really sucks because I mean we've we've dealt with them
and you know, we have psychological exams and everything,
but it can only do so much because I've worked with guys that it's rare.
These dirty cops are rare, but they do happen.
They just get highlighted in the news, especially,
but you can't always tell because we had one guy that I thought was genuinely
a really good guy and he did something really dirty and we were kind of all on his side.
We were kind of irritated with the way that he was being treated by the higher-ups.
The higher-ups that I actually truly trusted and I thought I've always backed up.
Turns out this guy had been lying to us and these higher-ups that I had trusted,
I should have trusted them wholeheartedly in the first place, but you just never know.
You really never know how people really are.
And I mean, there's bad people in every every line of work,
but just law enforcement.
It's just in such a bad position right now that it's really being highlighted.
Every little tiny mistake that's being made.
Absolutely.
It's not a good time to be in law enforcement really,
but I hate that it is the way it is right now.
So you feel like you're under the microscope?
Oh, certainly.
I get recorded. I get phones in my face all the time.
I don't mind when people record.
It's reasonable. I'm recording also the whole time.
It's just whenever the phone is in my face when it's disrespectful and it's irritating
because typically if the phone's in their face, then they're trying to amp you up.
But I mean, it's one of those things you just have to brush it off or stay professional.
Get through it and afterwards you can...
Talk about how much of a jerk that guy was to your buddies.
As you book them and fingerprint them.
No, it's not even... It's just minor stuff like where where no one's going to jail.
I mean, I could... I could be stopping somebody over for just a headlight out or something
and they want to stick a phone in my face.
What's the point of this?
I mean, you're not... what do you...
You're just talking yourself into a ticket, you know.
I don't write tickets, but you know, that's a good way to do it.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
And I mean, I think that's the best way to do it.
It's the best way to do it.
Yeah, absolutely. All right.
Well, that is the story of William Leisure.
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And there we go.
We are done.
Thanks so much for being here, Corey.
I always love spending time with you, whether it's virtual or in person.
So we will talk to you soon.
Bye, everyone.
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