Singer Bill Medley, left, the Santa Ana native who found fame with The Righteous Brothers, posed for a photo in 1981 with Santa Ana resident Anthony Reichardt and onetime ’60s soul singer Betty Jane Willis at Medley’s Fountain Valley nightclub in 1981. Medley recorded a duet with Willis in the mid-1960s that was never released. He called her a real talent and a “sweet” woman. Reichardt worked with Willis at the U.S. Postal Service and as a music buff knew of her recordings. (Photo courtesy of Anthony Reichardt)
By Theresa Walker | thwalker@scng.com
January 8, 2018
People who knew Betty Jane Willis or maybe only casually saw her sitting at her favorite spot on the corner of Second Street and Forest Avenue in Santa Ana will tell you she didn’t look like someone who was homeless, except for the shopping basket always beside her.
At 76, Willis still kept herself well-groomed — clothes clean, hair and nails done. She was congenial and generous, always sharing what she had with others around her. But she liked her privacy, too, and didn’t talk much about herself.
It wasn’t until she was killed in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day on the streets of Santa Ana that her life, which included a decade spent trying to make it as a soul singer, that the general public and many of those who knew her learned of her brush with fame.
Betty Jane Willis, shown here in a recent photo, would spend time regularly with family members who visited her in Santa Ana. Sometimes she would stay overnight with her daughter in Riverside County, but Willis resisted overtures to leave the streets, family and friends said. Willis, 76, was killed early New Year’s Day morning at the spot in a strip mall where she slept every night. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Walker)
Singer Bill Medley, left, the Santa Ana native who found fame with The Righteous Brothers, posed for a photo in 1981 with Santa Ana resident Anthony Reichardt and onetime ’60s soul singer Betty Jane Willis at Medley’s Fountain Valley nightclub in 1981. Medley recorded a duet with Willis in the mid-1960s that was never released. He called her a real talent and a “sweet” woman. Reichardt worked with Willis at the U.S. Postal Service and as a music buff knew of her recordings. (Photo courtesy of Anthony Reichardt)
Betty Jane Willis, who had a modest singing career in the 1960s, is shown here in a photo from 1981 at a nightclub in Orange County. Willis, who became homeless, was killed in an early morning attack on New Year’s Day.(Photo courtesy of Anthony Reichardt)
For more than a year, Betty Jane Willis, a homeless woman in Santa Ana who was a 1960s soul singer, bedded down at night next to a fabric store on First Street under this covered walkway with the store owner’s permission. Willis, who became homeless after a career as a postal worker, was killed in an early morning attack at this spot on New Year’s Day.(Photo by Theresa Walker, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Geraldo Rodriguez smiles at the memory of Betty Jane Willis, a homeless woman and onetime ’60s soul singer who slept outside his father’s fabric store on First Street in Santa Ana. Rodriguez, standing near the spot where Willis bedded down every night for more than a year, described Willis as someone who was nice, neat and clean, and respectful of the business, arriving after the store closed and leaving in the morning before it opened. Willis was killed in an early morning attack at this spot on New Year’s Day.(Photo by Theresa Walker, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Betty Jane Willis, second from right, poses with visitors from the Santa Ana Black Historical Society at the Southwest Community Center in Santa Ana who brought Christmas gifts for people who received services at the center. Willis, 76, was homeless and stayed in the area of First Street and Bristol where she once lived. She is shown here with, left to right, Wellington Bennett, Nellie Berry and T. Leon Berry, who had known Willis for 30 years. Willis was killed on the streets New Year’s Day (Photo courtesy of T. Leon Berry)
Most of the other people who took their meals and received social services at Southwest Community Center didn’t know that Willis had a voice filled with raw, soulful power. She didn’t sing for them and didn’t bring up her past. She never hit it big as a singer, yet her talent once attracted the attention of Santa Ana native Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, who recorded an unreleased single with her, and pianist and music legend Leon Russell, who produced several singles featuring Willis.
After her go at the music business, Willis lived an anonymous life far from the spotlight. For about 20 years she raised a daughter in Orange County as a single mom, working for the U.S. Postal Service. She took early retirement but, sometime in the 1990s, she ended up homeless, staying on the streets by choice, according to her daughter and friends.
Her death at 4:15 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 1, 2018, put her name in the headlines in the most brutal of ways: Willis was killed on the spot where she slept at night for more than a year, in a strip mall off First Street in Santa Ana, during what prosecutors say was an attempted rape.
Suspect Rosendo Xo Pec, 22, was arraigned Wednesday in Orange County Superior Court on one count of murder with a sentencing enhancement for attempted rape. The enhancement makes Pec eligible for the death penalty.
Willis’s death — and her life on the streets of Santa Ana — had those who knew her, from family members to friends to fans of her old recordings, shaking their heads in shock and sadness.
Medley, who learned of Willis’s tragic ending when contacted Thursday by The Register, remembered right away the singer he called a “sweet, sweet little girl” and “a hell of a talent.”
“She had the talent to make it, and she certainly deserved to make it,” Medley said.
“It just breaks my heart to hear this … Damn… It’s a wonderful world, isn’t it?”
Medley, whose career with Bobby Hatfield as the blue-eyed soul duo The Righteous Brothers was just taking off when a mutual friend told him about Willis. He recalled recording the song “My Tears Will Go Away” with her at the famed Gold Star Studios in Hollywood sometime around 1963 or ’64.
“She had, without question, the talent to be a huge star. Or I wouldn’t have wanted to record her,” Medley said. “Neither would have Leon (Russell), if we didn’t feel she wasn’t a home run.”
But Willis never got that extra bit of “magic” that Medley said was needed to make it big in the music business: “It just takes getting that first hit record and then following it up and getting polished up for stage.”
Before that could happen for Willis, in the late ’60s or early 1970s, she left the music business, choosing to raise her only child.
Willis’s daughter, Stephanie Walker, said her mother had grown frustrated after a mishandling of paperwork scuttled a music tour in Africa. Walker said her mother also did not want to get caught up in the excesses — booze and drugs — that often go along with a career in entertainment.
“She did want a singing career, but she would always talk about how hard the music business is, how it was a crazy business,” said Walker, who lives in Riverside County.
“She just wasn’t up for what you would have to go through, the partying life,” Walker said. “She just wasn’t that type of person.”
Willis, born March 10, 1941 on a farm in Mississippi, was one of seven children. The family moved to Fresno when Willis was 2 and she came to Santa Ana in the early 1960s, according to Walker. She sang regularly in Los Angeles area nightclubs.
“I don’t know if she sang in the church and all that,” said Medley. “But she had that quality that Leon Russell and myself were drawn to … that wonderful, black church soulful thing.”
The duet Willis recorded with Medley was never released. Medley, who had also sung the song with Hatfield on one of their early albums for Moonglow Records, said he didn’t push for the song’s release, or to record more with Willis, because he was suddenly busy following the 1964 release of his Phil Spector-produced mega-hit, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” Medley said he figured Willis was in good hands when he heard that Russell was producing some songs for her.
Willis — who sang in a voice described as deep and raw — made a few recordings under Russell’s guidance for a Spector subsidiary, Phi Dan. In 1965, she cut an R&B version of “Act Naturally,” originally recorded in 1963 by Buck Owens and the Buckaroos and covered in ’65 by The Beatles. Russell at the time was pianist for the famed “Wrecking Crew” studio musicians.
She and singing partner Ray Lockhart cut several other singles — all released in the 45-record format — including “You’re Too Much” and “Turn Your Love Lights On” as part of a duo, Betty and Ray, for Rendezvous Records. Her last record came in 1968, when she cut “Ain’t Gonna Do You No Good” for Mojo Records.
Much of what is publicly known about Willis’ music career has been chronicled by music buff and former post office colleague, Anthony Reichardt, who recently retired after a 37-year career with the Postal Service. Not long after he was hired in 1980, an 18-year-old Reichardt heard Willis singing along to music that was playing from a Sony Walkman that she wore while sorting mail at the Grand Avenue office.
They got to talking; he shared how he liked to collect records and she told him she had recorded some records of her own. When he started singing along with her to one of her songs, she pulled her glasses down on her nose, peered at him and asked how he knew the song.
“You’re Betty Willis!” Reichardt remembers telling her. He went home for lunch that day and brought back several of Willis’s 45s that he had collected to show her. Nobody else at the post office knew she’d ever had a singing career.
“She’d already worked there for several years,” Reichardt said. “Nobody knew she had that past. She didn’t tell anybody.”
But when she sang around Reichardt, who eventually left the Grand Avenue office, he said her voice was unblemished, even without fine tuning in a studio.
“She’d say, ‘Here’s another one I sang’ She still sounded the same way the records do.”
At the time, Willis had only one of her records. So Reichardt gave her some copies of her music from his collection. Stephanie Walker said she still safeguards those records her mother made.
Growing up, Walker knew her mother had been a singer. On a couple of occasions Willis even sang at Lincoln Elementary where Walker attended school before graduating from Valley High in Santa Ana.
“People would come the next day and they would be ‘I didn’t know your mom could sing!’
Walker said her mother had no regrets about her singing career. She called it fun while it lasted and then “just went on with life.”
They lived in Garden Grove briefly, then settled back in the southwest Santa Ana neighborhoods where she had resided when first coming to Southern California. At the time, most of the county’s black residents lived in the area and they formed a tight-knit community.
Her mother briefly worked in a factory before passing a test for the U.S. Postal Service. For much of her time with the post office, Willis worked the machines that key in ZIP codes.
“She knew every ZIP code,” Walker said. “We’d say what’s the ZIP code for San Jose and she’d say it right off.”
How Willis ended up homeless is unclear. She did not suffer from mental illness, but she briefly did struggle with drug abuse, Walker and friends confirmed. She was clean at the time of her death; she suffered a stroke a few years ago, but her health generally was good.
At one time, Willis lived in a van parked near the former Masonic
Lodge in downtown Santa Ana. Her boyfriend at the time was a janitor at
the lodge, said T. Leon Barry, a local historian who knew Willis for
more than 30 years.
Berry, who heads the Santa Ana Black Historical Society, said Willis continually resisted offers from family and friends to come live with them. She also declined money offered by friends who wanted to help her find an apartment.
“She didn’t want to stay in a shelter, she didn’t want to stay with anybody,” Walker said.
“I don’t know why to this day.”
Walker said she’d come to see her mother most days, visits that included taking her to get her hair and nails done, or bringing Willis’ grandchildren and identical twin great-grandkids to spend time with her. Occasionally, Willis would spend a night or two at Walker’s home, in Riverside, but she always wanted to return to Santa Ana. Walker said she last saw her mother around noon Sunday, the day before she died.
Willis spent the night before her death sleeping in her usual spot, beneath a covered business walkway on First Street, around the corner from the Southwest Community Center and across the street from the Bristol Station Post Office. With lights left on for security purposes, Willis told the owners of a nearby business, La Amiga Fabric, that she felt safe.
She wasn’t.
“A monster took her,” said Gerardo Rodriguez, the son of the fabric store owner.
Rodriguez said Willis was the only homeless person they let sleep in front of their shop. He’d often chat with Willis, who he said took care to arrive after the shop closed and to be gone by 6 a.m., before it reopens. She also kept the area clean.
Like so many who knew Willis, Rodriguez was surprised to learn, after she died, that she’d been a singer.
He went to YouTube to listen to her recordings.
“I was just amazed.”
The family plans a memorial service on Jan. 13 that will be open to the community.
SCNG staff writer Scott Schwebke contributed to this report.
https://www.ocregister.com/2018/01/04/betty-jane-willis-more-than-another-homeless-death-she-was-a-soul-singer/
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