Librarian/Murderer Goes on Trial
in Florida
A former supervisor at the Broward County (Fla.) Library went on trial in Fort Lauderdale March 28 for bludgeoning and stabbing his ex-girlfriend to death in his apartment July 11, 1997. William Coday, 45, is charged with premeditated murder and evading prosecution by fleeing to Europe after the crime. He was arrested in New York the following October after an international manhunt.
Coday’s attorneys do not deny that he killed Gloria Gomez, but they dispute the allegation that he planned the murder, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported March 29. However, the prosecution will enter as evidence a 208-page diary that Coday kept—and titled Crepúsculo: A Journey into Obsession—to detail his compulsive relationship with the 30-year-old Colombian woman, whom he met while working in the library’s foreign-language section.
Coday served less than two years in Germany for the killing in 1978 of American exchange student Lisa Hullinger, whose parents founded a support group, the National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children, that lobbies against early release for convicted murderers.
The trial is expected to last three weeks.
Posted April 1, 2002.
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