The ex-husband of former first lady Jill Biden has been charged with the murder of his wife.
A Delaware grand jury charged William Stevenson, 77, with one felony count of second-degree murder of his wife Linda, 64, police in New Castle announced on Tuesday.
The details of her killing are not immediately clear but Stevenson’s indictment on Monday came after an “extensive weeks-long investigation” into her death, police said.
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Linda Stevenson died on December 28 just after 11pm. Police had responded to a domestic dispute at their home in Oak Hill, Delaware, outside of Wilmington. When officers entered the home they found Linda “unresponsive in the living room”.
The officers administered life-saving measures but she was pronounced dead at the scene. Her body was then turned over to the Delaware Division of Forensic Science for an autopsy to determine the cause and manner of her death.
Joe and Jill Biden married in 1977, two years after she divorced William, seen with her below
REUTERS/ELIZABETH FRANTZ
William Stevenson was not named in connection to her death in the police’s initial release. He was arraigned on Tuesday and is being held at the Howard R Young Correctional Institution on a $500,000 cash bail.
He and Jill Tracy Jacobs, as she was then known, married in 1970 when he was 23 and she was 18. They divorced five years later. She married Joe Biden in 1977 when he was a senator.
The former first lady has not yet publicly commented on the charge against her ex-husband. In 2020 Stevenson told Inside Edition: “I was betrayed by the Bidens … Joe was my friend. Jill was my wife.”
William Stevenson
NEW CASTLE COUNTY POLICE
Stevenson said he met Jill on the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey, in August 1969. “Sure, I fell in love with her, because I married her six months later,” he said.
Jill reflected on her first marriage in her 2019 memoir Where the Light Enters. “Looking back, it may seem like that relationship was a mistake of my youth,” she wrote. “But there was a time when I truly believed we were destined for each other.”