His father, Willie Sr. (Butch), killed Dave Hurwitz and William Locke at a Milwaukee pawn shop on July 20, 1962, shortly after his son was conceived.
[3] He was sentenced to life in prison for the crime and later earned a degree in computer science and psychology while incarcerated.
[4] Butch was released from prison and went on to get a job as a computer programmer for an aerospace company but was charged with a crime.
[6] His mother, Laura, had different live-in boyfriends who beat her and, as a boy, Bosket often jumped in to defend her, in one incident hitting a man with a pipe and slashing him with a knife and in another threatening "I'm going to burn that motherfucker up".
In between, Bosket and his accomplice shot a New York City Transit employee working in the Lenox Yard adjacent to the Harlem–148th Street station and committed two other armed robberies, one of them on the A service.
Governor Hugh Carey had opposed efforts by his opponent in that year's gubernatorial election, State Assembly Minority Leader Perry Duryea, to have juveniles tried as adults for certain crimes.
However, after reading a report on Bosket's sentence, Carey called the state legislature into special session to pass the Juvenile Offender Act of 1978.
After 100 days he was arrested when a man living in his apartment complex claimed Bosket had robbed and assaulted him.
While at Woodbourne, nominally a medium-security prison, Bosket was housed in a specially-built plexiglass-lined cell stripped of everything but a cot and a sink/toilet combination, with four video cameras watching him at all times.
[12][13][4] Bosket once declared "war" on a prison system that he claimed made him a "monster," and was cited for almost 250 disciplinary violations from 1985 to 1994.
According to a 2008 report in The New York Times, due to his numerous incidents of violence during the 1980s and 1990s, he was initially not slated to move into the general population until 2046, when he will be 84 years old.
Department spokesman Erik Kriss told the Times, "This guy was violent or threatening violence every day.
Although he is still in solitary confinement, he is evaluated periodically, and due to his clean disciplinary record in recent years may join the general population sooner than 2046.