Bill Stevenson, the ex-husband of former First Lady Jill Biden, was charged with first-degree murder Monday, February 2, in the death of his wife Linda, who was found dead in their Delaware home late on December 28, 2025, after police responded to a domestic dispute call.
Linda Stevenson, 64, was discovered unresponsive in the living room of the couple’s Wilmington residence in the Oak Hill community around 11:16 p.m. that Sunday night. Officers immediately administered life-saving measures, but she was pronounced dead at the scene.
Following what police described as an “extensive weeks-long investigation,” a grand jury indicted William Stevenson, 77, on the murder charge. He was taken into custody without incident at the same Idlewood Road home where his wife died.
Stevenson was arraigned and committed to the Howard Young Correctional Institution after failing to post $500,000 cash bail. Authorities have not disclosed Linda Stevenson’s cause of death.
In a grim detail that emerged after her death, Linda Stevenson’s obituary made no mention of her husband.
Bill Stevenson gained national attention as the first husband of Jill Biden, who served as First Lady until President Trump’s inauguration last month. The two married in February 1970 while Jill was still an undergraduate at the University of Delaware. Their marriage ended in divorce in May 1975, following a 1974 separation.
Jill Biden biographer Julie Pace told People magazine that the young Jill “had these expectations of sort of what that marriage was going to be, and the marriage did not live up to those expectations.”
Bill and Linda Stevenson had been married for nearly four decades at the time of her death.
The tragedy has brought renewed attention to longstanding allegations Bill Stevenson made about his ex-wife’s relationship with then-Senator Joe Biden. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Stevenson publicly disputed the Biden campaign’s official narrative about how Joe and Jill Biden met.
According to the Bidens’ account, Joe’s brother Frank set up a blind date between the future president and Jill in March 1975, after her separation. They married in June 1977. But Bill Stevenson has maintained for years that Jill met Joe around 1972 while working on his first Senate campaign.
Stevenson went further, alleging his ex-wife had an affair with Biden before their marriage ended. A Biden spokesperson firmly denied these claims during the 2020 campaign: “Jill Biden separated from her first husband irreconcilably in the fall of 1974 and moved out of their marital home.”
The timing of the alleged affair would have coincided with one of the darkest periods in Joe Biden’s life. In December 1972, weeks after his election to the Senate, his first wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident that also injured his two young sons, Beau and Hunter.
Bill Stevenson made headlines in 2021 when he alleged he had an affair with Kathie Durst—the missing wife of real estate heir Robert Durst—just ten days before she vanished in 1982. “I feel like I’m the missing link in this case,” Stevenson told News 12 Westchester. He claimed Robert Durst confronted them the morning after the encounter. Durst was convicted in 2021 of murdering a friend and died in prison in January 2022.
Linda Stevenson’s daughter, Christina Vettori, had previously told reporters her mother’s death was being treated as a murder investigation. The New Castle County Police Department had initially described it as a death investigation before Monday’s indictment.
A representative for former President Joe Biden and Jill Biden did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the murder charge.