VICTORIA THE FIRST

After receiving his undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics from Florida State University, Bill worked as a materials engineer for the Boeing Company. After being caught in a massive layoff, Bill took a lifelong detour into the craft of writing. At FSU he’d been a student of Mike Shaara, who later was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (for “The Killer Angels”).

Show More

After receiving his undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics from Florida State University, Bill worked as a materials engineer for the Boeing Company. After being caught in a massive layoff, Bill took a lifelong detour into the craft of writing. At FSU he’d been a student of Mike Shaara, who later was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (for “The Killer Angels”).

Bill wrote some satirical humor columns and used them to get a start in journalism. He has worked as a reporter for 11 newspapers based in six states, and has reported from nearly every state in the Union and from other countries including Brazil, El Salvador, India, Poland, Colombia, Mexico and France.

Bill has covered Presidents and Popes, tsunamis and tornadoes. He has been in the middle of many important stories. In Ohio, his investigation of the conviction of a man for the savage murders of the man’s stepdaughter and her boyfriend contributed to getting the man released from Death Row; 25 years later, the real killers confessed.This story is the basis of Bill’s non-fiction book “Guilty By Popular Demand”, published in 2012 by Kent State University Press. Bill has completed a screenplay based on this story. The book won awards from three independent publishing groups in 2013.

In Kentucky, Bill’s name was written on a coffin paraded by police supporters outraged by Bill’s stories challenging an internal investigation that had cleared a state trooper of blame for his killing of a suspect in the shooting death of another trooper. Bill stayed on the story, the state attorney general re-opened the case, and an autopsy proved the suspect had been shot in the back, also proving the trooper had lied and had actually shot the suspect in the back and in cold blood. (This is the basis of Bill’s screenplay, “Shooter”).

Also in Kentucky, Bill and two colleagues were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for their series exposing coal mining as an outlaw industry.

During his investigation of the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, a strange Egyptian-styled cult that relocated from Brooklyn to a farm in rural Georgia, Bill had to battle not only the criminals he was trying to expose, but also the editors of his newspaper and state officials up to and including the Governor. Nevertheless, Bill persisted, and the cult leader Dwight York, aka Imam Isa, aka Dr. Malachi Z. York, was ultimately convicted as perhaps the worst sexual predator in U.S. history.

That story became “Ungodly”, Bill’s non-fiction book released in June, 2007. The Barnes & Noble bookstores of Georgia made it their featured title for that summer. His telling of the story also earned him appearances on the Montel Williams Show and the Dr. Phil Show. Director Lee Daniels signed a letter of intent to direct Bill’s screenplay of this story.

Bill has written a total of eight screenplays. One of them, “Victoria The First”, is the true story of Victoria Woodhull, who in 1870 became the first woman to run for President. Bill has also completed a novelized version of this story. Bill’s comedic screenplay “The Flag Wavers, is the story of a black Ferris Bueller who hijacks the Rebel flag at a high-school homecoming game and turns a Southern town upside down.

In 2009, Bill reached a tentative agreement with best-selling author Andrew Greeley to collaborate on a screenplay based on Greeley’s novel “Patience Of A Saint”.

Outside of their professional lives, Bill and his wife Eileen are devoted to sharing the power, beauty and joy of marital love. They were leaders for 20 years in the marriage enrichment movement, Marriage Encounter. They have three grown children – Mark, Celeste and Carmel -- and eight grandchildren.

Show Less