Serial killer Billy Mansfield Jr. murdered five women between 1975 and 1980, including an 18-year-old whose body was dumped in Jacksonville.

Mansfield is serving multiple life sentences in California after four of the victims were found buried at his home in Spring Hill. Some people believe more victims remain out there.

Now the cold-blooded 69-year-old killer has becomes the inspiration for a thriller film set to premiere nationwide on Friday. The Man in a White Van is directed by Jacksonville native Warren Skeels, who co-wrote it with local writer Sharon Cobb.

At a local premiere at the Tinseltown theatre complex last week, Skeels said he wanted to make a suspenseful thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which he saw when he was 8 years old.

“It scared me. It terrified me, and it kept me completely riveted the entire time and what was going to happen next,” he said. “In this film, I just really want to take everyone back into the ’70s where there was no internet, no social media; 911 didn’t exist and missing persons on milk cartons wasn’t a thing — it was sort of an ‘ignorance is bliss’ time period.”

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Skeels wants to take viewers back and show them experiences of somebody facing extraordinary circumstances and finding a way to survive.

As Cobb awaited the film’s beginning in a packed theater, the longtime screenwriter remembered how Skeels worked with her to co-write a film based on a real-life killer.

“When he told me what the story was, I said, ‘You are kidding me. This is really true?,’ and he says yes,” she said. “The van we sort of saw as the shark in ‘Jaws.’ And we didn’t want to show the man’s face because the monster was the van, and the man both. The man in the white van is everywhere; he’s everywhere in every community.”

Serial killer’s story

The Man in the White Van is set in 1975 in a Florida town and follows what happens to teen Annie Williams, played by Atlanta actress Madison Wolfe. In the film, Annie is stalked by an ominous man in a white van. She sees it while playing sports with friends, walking home from school and elsewhere. And soon, the menacing white van is inching closer and closer.

Her parents are skeptical about what she said she saw — until one Halloween night when she gets abducted. (Her father is played by Sean Astin of The Goonies and The Fellowship of the Rings.)

Skeels is a Douglas Anderson School of the Arts theater major who has a degree in acting from the University of Southern California. His feature film credits include Thespians and Who’s Your Monkey, as well as the television series Siesta Key. He said the idea for The Man in a White Van came from a woman who survived one of Mansfield’s attacks.

“She recounted her experience as a young lady growing up in Hernando County, being followed and stalked by this man in a white van, who ultimately proved to be Billy Mansfield Jr. and a serial killer years later,” he said.

For Wolfe, who was 18 when the film was shot in 2019 in Louisiana and Sarasota, she remembered how Skeels talked a lot about how to portray her character.

“We nitpicked the story, really focusing on where Annie is in her emotional journey, what she is feeling in every single instance so on the day of filming, it just came out as honest and raw as possible,” Wolfe said. “That’s one message in the film — that there is this sort of imminent danger, especially for young girls who are more targeted now than ever. The story took place in the ’70s, but it’s still relevant.”

As for Mansfield, he ultimately pleaded guilty to the murders to avoid the death penalty in Florida. He is serving multiple life sentences in a California Department of Corrections health care facility in Stockton.

He was not connected to the March 1980 murder of 18-year-old Carol Ann Barrett until 11 months ago.

Barrett, from Zanesville, Ohio, was discovered dead March 24, 1980, in a ditch along Interstate 95 near Pecan Park Road in Jacksonville, the Sheriff’s Office said. She had been enjoying spring break with high school friends at the Treasure Island Motel in Daytona Beach Shores when she was abducted by a then-unknown assailant.

“When she was taken from the hotel in Daytona, it was actually someone else in there that he was trying to take,” Skeels said. “She stepped up and said, ‘No, I’ll go instead, take me.’ That was just the kind of person she was. She was sort of an angel.”

A police sketch was compiled from descriptions by friends in the motel room, but no suspect was found. A day after the abduction, her body was found 100 miles north in Jacksonville.

Barrett’s death was ruled a homicide after an autopsy, but years of work by Jacksonville and Daytona Beach detectives turned up no leads, police said. Then Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Detective Ray Reeves and Project Cold Case founder Ryan Backmann looked into Barrett’s death in recent years and worked with Hernando County detectives.

“They identified Billy Mansfield Jr. as a very possible suspect,” Skeels said. “And when Ray went out and interviewed him in California, (Mansfield) at first denied it. But when he visited him again, he brought it back up and Billy was, I guess, in a different state of mind.”

In September of 2022, Mansfield told investigators who had been questioning him for two years that he was the suspect in the police sketch. He ultimately confessed to Barrett’s abduction and murder shortly later, police said. 

Throughout the course of the follow-up investigation, the State Attorney’s Office in Northeast Florida’s 4th Judicial Circuit was consulted, the Sheriff’s Office said. The State Attorney’s Office decided not to prosecute because Mansfield was already serving five concurrent life sentences in California. 

“The Man in the White Van” is distributed by Relativity Media, a Legion M production. Along with the director and Cobb, other Jacksonville participants in the film include actor Gareth Paul Cox, music composer Scott Borland and co-executive producer Lawrence Najem.