World News | Human Interest
First Impressions of “Wild” Bill Holbert: The Serial Killer of Bocas Del Toro
It was his eyes; he didn’t look at me as a human would; he looked at me like I was meat.
I went to Bocas Del Toro, a small island of runaways and misfits off the coast of Panama, in 2007. I went there to visit my sister, embroiled in another one of her whacky adventures on an island where like-minded hedonists congregate to tan and obliterate their nasal cavities.
She and a few friends rented a house on a private island overlooking the bay. It was rustic but cozy in a flophouse way and kept out the deadly creatures from the encroaching jungle outside. The house smelled of sweat and deli meat courtesy of a fleshy young man named JJ, who traveled to Bocas to show the people back home that he could exist on nothing but pre-packaged salami.
It wasn’t ideal, but I was there to have a good time, and the two-digit number in my bank account gave me few options anyway. The jungle abode belonged to Cheryl Hughes, her husband Keith, and a rotten little capuchin monkey I affectionately named Shit For Brains.
The first few days were everything you’d expect from a lawless island getaway. We drank heavily, consumed all manner of pharmaceuticals, swam in the bioluminescent waters, kayaked around the jungle-lined beaches, and let the island erode our memories of home.
Locals on the island often say Bocas is a place for the wanted and the unwanted, either wanted by the authorities or unwanted by everyone else. It became apparent in my fleeting moments of sobriety that Cheryl wasn’t in Panama because of her fondness for canals; she gave me the impression that she was running from something. Sadly, I never got the chance to find out what.
Cheryl, who we called Cher, was an unpleasant woman, from what I experienced. She was strident and humorless, and she attempted to balance out her behavior by being overly kind in the evening with help from a cocktail of narcotics. I wasn’t a fan, but no one deserves what happened to her after we fled the island.
One afternoon, a group of us took some of Cher’s kayaks to paddle to a nearby bar on the water. After paddling for about an hour, we made it to the bar, tied off the kayaks, and went inside to tie on one. As soon as I walked in, I saw a solid block of granite named William Holbert.
I didn’t know his name at the time; he was massive, by far the biggest white man I’d ever seen in Panama. For reference, I’m six foot one, and while my memory may be tainted from the brain cells I vaporized on that trip, I remember him towering over me; he could have been seven feet tall.
I remember he wore a Viking helmet, and I thought he looked like a party guy, so always willing to meet one of my kinsmen, I went over and introduced myself.
This man crushed my hand when I shook it. Not in the usual way someone would shake a stranger’s hand if they were trying to establish dominance in a business deal, but it felt like he genuinely wanted to cause me pain. He introduced himself as “Wild Bill” and looked at me for an uncomfortable amount of time.
It would be easy to say there was nothing behind Bill’s eyes and leave it there; that’s a pretty standard eyewitness account of a psychopath. But, I saw life in Bill’s eyes; they weren’t warm, but they weren’t vacant either. It felt like he wanted something from me, but he wasn’t sure what that was yet. Like a predator encountering something it’s never eaten before.
Wild Bill was boisterous and extremely loud. Being around him felt like a terrorist attack in an enclosed space; it didn’t seem like he had much of a plan; he ran on instinct, and his will would be forced on all of us whenever he felt like changing moods. My sister and I were not safe, but we had no idea. Like any effective apex predator, Bill hid himself well.
We left the bar a few hours later, very drunk and none the wiser about who this gargantuan party animal really was. That was the only time our paths crossed with Bill’s because shortly after our encounter at the bar, Bocas got slammed by a once-in-a-century rain storm that didn’t let up for ten days.
Vast swaths of the island, like the famous Starfish Beach, were washed away, and the already tenuous infrastructure of Bocas began to collapse. The electricity went out for days; no one could access ATMs to get cash, and the internet was down; it got a little weird.
Luckily, our father planned to visit and got a flight to Bocas during a brief break in the rain. Seeing the state of the island, our new tattoos, and the drained look on our faces from all the revelry, he made the executive decision to get us out of there and back to Louisiana immediately.
Years later, in 2010, after we’d returned home and settled back into normalcy, we received news that Cheryl had gone missing. Neighbors on the island became alarmed because they noticed she left her beloved pets unattended, something she’d never do, and called the authorities.
After questioning the locals, the Bocas police realized that other island residents had also gone missing. Shortly after neighbors reported Cheryl missing, they found her body buried in the backyard. She’d been murdered.
On July 26th, 2010, authorities arrested Bill Holbert and his girlfriend as they tried to cross the border into Nicaragua from Costa Rica. Wild Bill was charged with the murders of four adults, including Cheryl Hughes, and one child.
Between 2007 and 2010, Bill would kill and take over the properties of four different ex-pats in the area. Given the secretive nature of Bocas, it was the perfect hunting ground because people rarely asked questions. Everyone knew there was something off about Bill, but after Cher went missing, the inquiries started to pile up, and the walls started closing in.
In 2007, I met a serial killer. To my knowledge, he was the only one with whom I’d shaken hands. There was something off about Bill, but to be honest, I’ve met much more distasteful people in my life. I was much too intoxicated that entire trip to delve deeper into Bill and see what he was all about when I was there; I didn’t really care; I was there for the same reasons he was, well, not all of the same reasons.
I was on the run just like Bill was; I was a college dropout with no job, and I got sick of hearing what a loser I was, so I left. I felt like an outsider at the time, and I often shiver thinking how much I had in common with Wild Bill during that time in my life and that our paths would cross.
Bocas is a refuge of the damned, a tropical island of prisoners who built their cells long ago. There is no peace there but the peace you bring with you, and that will be shattered given enough time. Maybe had I not been so self-involved and wrapped in my failures, Cher would still be alive.
