Bill Stonebraker's Testimony
Bill Stonebraker grew up in Southern California, in and around the Redondo area. Like many children today, Bill grew up without a consistent father figure. He hardly knew his biological dad, and although he had four stepfathers, none of them were particularly close to him.
This lacking had a negative affect on him from very early on. “As I got a little older, I looked at pictures of my real father, and I noticed that he would always be holding my sister, but never me,” Bill remembers. “And it always hurt. I wondered why didn’t my dad want to hold me? Why didn’t he want to pick me up?”
BILLY'S A BAD BOY
Bill got into trouble at a very young age. His mom worked, and so he lived with his grandfather and cousins for a time. Nine people lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath home. Unfortunately, grandpa did not keep a watchful eye on young Billy, and he began running wild in the neighborhood.
“I had a friend who was my age, but he also had three older brothers,” Bill tells us. “They got us into a lot of bad situations. When I was very small we were lighting fields on fire. We would break into houses, brand new houses. We would take bricks and throw them through the windows and run away. We would go onto local farms and trample down corn fields and rhubarb patches.”
“As a kid I used to steal from my friends, steal from stores, even my aunt’s purse. Then I would take my friends out for a hamburger and malt. Maybe it was a way of getting attention, of getting people to be my friends. One time a kid asked me, ‘Where do you get all this money, Billy?’ I didn’t know what to say to him.”
One other time Bill was at a fountain shop having a hamburger and malt. Looking out the window he saw his uncle pulling up into the parking lot. He got out of the car and came over to young Bill and asked, “Where’d you get the money?” He suspected the boy was stealing from his aunt. So Bill was caught in the act, but it didn’t change him at all.
Under the influence of his friend’s older brothers, Bill got into some unsavory sexual behavior. He was abused when he was very young. The older boys led Bill into perverted situations that are still in his memory. Nobody was aware of what Bill was doing; he was left to fend for himself.
Some friends came one weekend to take his sister on a trip to a farm, and Bill wanted to go with them very badly. “I can still remember her friend’s father saying, ‘We’re not going to take Billy, because Billy’s a bad boy. He ruined my corn field.’ Which I had done.”
In fact, young Bill got into so much trouble, that by the ripe old age of seven, his mom felt compelled to move. So they left North Redondo for Manhattan Beach, where something important happened to Bill a few years later.
