Did A Desire For Money Cause A Florida Teen To Kill Her Father?

By all accounts, Bill Hudnall was a likable guy who loved his children and tried to do right by the family he had built with a woman 10 years his junior.

That woman, however, did not have Bill’s best interests at heart.

Bill was a divorced, 30-year-old Marine Corps veteran when he met Stephanie in 1990. The couple went on just a couple dates before Stephanie got pregnant, and the pair married in January 1991, just one month before the birth of their oldest child, Joshua. Their daughter, Guenevere followed a year later.

As the family grew, Stephanie quit her job to stay home with the kids, though her spending habits did not adjust with the loss of income. According to Bill’s brothers and sister-in-law, Stephanie spent money the couple didn’t have and lived beyond their means despite Bill’s good job working as a pipefitter.

Still, despite the strain between Bill and Stephanie, he was an engaged dad who took his children to the park, cared for them, and worked hard to try and provide for the family.

It just wasn’t good enough for Stephanie.

Eventually, the money issues led Bill to move Stephanie and his children into his mother’s house in Louisiana, where he had grown up. With a roof over their head, it was a relief on their strained finances, but the tension between Stephanie and Bill’s mother grew.

Bill’s mother cooked for the family each night, but it wasn’t good enough for Stephanie — instead, she kept complaining about how much she disliked her mother-in-law and refused to help keep the house tidy despite still not having a job. Eventually, Bill’s mother told him that he would need to take Stephanie and the kids and go. The family left Louisiana and went back to Florida where Bill got another pipefitting job and Stephanie continued to stay home.

Bill’s brothers, Tim and Joe, tried more than once to get Bill to leave Stephanie, but he was always afraid that she would figure out how to keep the kids from him. Rather than risk separation from the children, he just tolerated Stephanie’s poor spending habits and the havoc her decisions wreaked on his family.

Bill finally opened a secret bank account where he began squirreling money away. It took nine long years, but in 2007, he was able to purchase a double-wide trailer for the family — which had grown to five people after the birth of a daughter in 1998. The new home didn’t do anything to quell Stephanie’s spending habits either, and finally, after more than 15 years of marriage, the couple split.

Bill settled into a small home nearby and maintained a contentious co-parenting relationship with Stephanie. She would allow the children to visit him, but she was quick to tell them that their father didn’t love them or he wouldn’t have left.

A 911 call on June 9, 2011, would reveal just how deep that perceived betrayal had affected their middle daughter, Guenevere. Find out what went so wrong on American Monster on discovery+.