Note: This story first appeared Sunday in the Journal Sentinel print edition.

Peter Zimmer, 14 when he murdered his adoptive parents and brother at their Iowa County farmhouse in 1983, got the kind of second chance that would be impossible today.

Wisconsin law at the time - since changed because of his case - did not allow Zimmer to be charged as an adult. He pleaded no contest to the killings and was found delinquent. There was no trial. He never expressed remorse or explained his crimes. He never accepted clinical counseling and therapy during his four years at Ethan Allen School, a state-run detention center in Waukesha County.

As he was about to turn 19, he was set free with a new name, a plane ticket to Florida and a six-figure trust fund pried from his dead parents' estate.

How did things turn out?

For a long time, on the surface anyway, just the way advocates for a more forgiving juvenile justice system might have hoped. He learned a trade, attended some college, briefly joined the military and started a business. He got married, divorced, had children and reunited with his birth mother. He seemed to stay out of serious trouble.

As Jovan Anton "Joe" Collier, he managed to keep Peter Zimmer hidden in closed juvenile files and some newspaper clips too old to pop up on an Internet search.

"I was successfully reinvented," Collier said.

Twenty-three years after his release, however, Collier might have to reinvent himself again. A run-in with the law in Florida has left him facing charges, magnified by his long-hidden past.

"There are things you can never quite forget, and this (case) is one of them," said Joseph Tregoning, who as a member of the state Assembly at the time introduced the bill to allow those younger than 16 to be charged as adults.

Tregoning, who represented the district where the crime occurred, said he wasn't surprised to hear about Collier's new trouble.

"It's hard to think," Tregoning said, "that unless they have a complete change of life, they won't reoffend."

Life as a Zimmer

Collier never talked publicly about his past until a March interview with a Journal Sentinel reporter in a Florida jail, where he's charged with felony stalking and held on $500,000 bail. He offered only a glimpse of his life as Peter Zimmer.

He recalled childhood visits to Germany, where his father was born, and where he never saw any resemblance between himself and relatives. He noticed other things that made him wonder, and when he was about 12, an aunt slipped and mentioned he was adopted. He said he asked questions and his parents confirmed it.

From then, he said, relatives continually told him bad things about his birth mother and warned him never to try to look for her. He felt the family treated him like Cinderella.

He called his father "someone who puts on a nice, humble persona to the public. Behind closed doors, in my face, it was not pretty."

Collier said he kept a diary at Ethan Allen and has been writing more in jail, to understand himself better.

He wouldn't talk about the murders but said he still cries over them.

"I've seen the same picture for 27 years," he said. "Time doesn't change it. It's sad. It hurts my heart."

During most of the two-hour conversation, though, he tried to appear upbeat, like a smooth salesman, talking up travels, high-paying jobs, his children, his biological roots.

"I've got good blood," he said. He clearly seems proud of making what he did of his life on his own.

But he said he's saving most details to help him market his story. He said he's working on a memoir, has been in discussions with publishers and a TV production company. He also talked of plans for an agency or organization to work with adopted children and their families.

"It's a serious subject, a serious case," he said. "It's not me cashing in."

He initially wanted $200,000 for an interview; he eventually talked without payment.

But he couldn't completely hide his anger that his new persona had been tainted with the full truth of his life. He thinks relatives of his adoptive family are responsible for outing him.

"They had the resources" to keep track of him all these years, Collier said. "They were committed to ruining my life at some point."

Tom Sokol, whose aunt adopted Collier, denied that theory.

"We're not bothering him, he's not bothering us," Sokol said. "We've had nothing to do with him. We just wanted him to go on and have a successful life."

Candy Williams dated Collier in Florida for more than three years. She loved him for his good qualities but broke up because he cheated on her and then endured events that led to his stalking charges. Today, she only shakes her head at his claims.

"He's a compulsive liar," she said. "He has no remorse. It's all about Joe."

Move to Wisconsin

Hans Zimmer immigrated to the Chicago area from Germany as a young adult. He married Sally Sokol, and in 1968 they adopted a newborn boy they named Peter, after Hans' father. Four years later, they adopted another son and raised the boys in Wauconda, Ill.

When Hans lost his job as an airline mechanic, the family moved to Mineral Point, where Sally's brother owned a company that made crystals for radios.

They lived in a farmhouse a few miles from town. Peter Zimmer enrolled as a freshman at Mineral Point High School, where he was considered a popular new kid and a fast addition to the track team. Some friends in Illinois recalled at the time that Zimmer didn't seem too happy about the move.

In May 1983, the family had been in Wisconsin about two months. That's when a Mineral Point High counselor received a call from someone at Zimmer's former school in Illinois, saying a boy there had said Zimmer told him that Zimmer was going to kill his family.

When Iowa County sheriff's deputies went to the Zimmer house, they found Hans, 48, dead on the porch from five gunshot wounds. His wife, Sally, 44, had been stabbed at least 15 times and dragged to a shed. Their son Perry, 10, was found dead in an upstairs bedroom, stabbed more than 20 times.

Zimmer had fled with his father's car. He picked up another youth hitchhiking, and they went to Kansas City, where they were arrested after Zimmer used his father's credit card. There were six handguns in the car.

Zimmer eventually pleaded no contest to the murders and was adjudged delinquent. He was kept at the Ethan Allen School until shortly before his 19th birthday, the limit of the law at the time. News stories about an annual court review of Zimmer's confinement indicate that he refused clinical counseling and therapy. But he read voraciously and carried on correspondence with teens he knew in Illinois and Wisconsin, according to a 1984 Milwaukee Journal story.

Because he was never found guilty, just delinquent, he was able to claim the Zimmers' estate as the sole heir - another loophole state lawmakers closed after his case.

His uncles fought the payout but in the end reached a settlement. Zimmer got to keep a couple of custodial accounts his parents started for him, and a new trust was set up for his education and support. He would get rent, tuition and a $100 a month for four years, unless he violated the agreement by returning to Wisconsin, Illinois or Arizona, where his victims' relatives lived.

In July 1987, now named Jovan Collier, he got on a plane to Fort Lauderdale to start a new life on his own.

Restless ambition

Based on Collier's words, those of friends and public records, a picture emerges of restless ambition.

He spent his first few weeks of freedom on the beach in Fort Lauderdale meeting girls, he said. "I had to re-socialize," he said.

About a year later, he had a daughter with a woman from Wisconsin. He would tell people later that he had gotten a minister's daughter pregnant while at Ethan Allen. But the girl would have been conceived soon after Collier left the facility. Her mother declined to comment for this story.

A couple of years later, he was attending a college in St. Louis, according to court records. He served in the Air National Guard for eight months in 1990, at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, according to national archives.

He told other people that he was in the Navy until 2005, but the archives had no such record. Collier said he was married in a Jewish wedding. The union lasted less than a year, he said. Missouri court records show his wife won a default divorce judgment in 1993. She could not be reached.

He met his next wife at a company picnic while both worked in a newspaper printing plant, and they moved to her home state of Indiana. They married in March 1994.

Collier owned a couple of construction companies, and one wound up in bankruptcy. His wife had a personal training business that also failed. They had a son, now a teenager. Collier said his second wife didn't know about his past at first, but she found out later and agreed to stay with him anyway. She told police in Florida that she learned of the Zimmer murders only during her divorce from Collier, which started in 2004 and was finalized in December 2005. She declined to discuss Collier with a reporter.

Collier admits that he never volunteered the truth about his family during his post-Wisconsin life.

"That would pretty much be an automatic deal breaker, don't you think?" he said.

Instead, according to friends, he said he was orphaned when his parents were killed by a drunken driver. He even took his Indiana family to visit their graves, where he would cry and place flowers, one friend recalled.

Around the time Collier's second marriage was falling apart, he was starting yet another life near St. Petersburg.

A new love interest

Candy Williams said she met Collier on St. Petersburg Beach in the second half of 2005, and a whirlwind romance ensued.

"He was instantly likable," she recalled in an interview. "He knew just what to say. He was charming, slick."

Within three months, he moved in with her. At one point, they planned to marry.

At first, she said, Collier said he was divorced, had a son in Indiana and flew there several times to visit him. Later, she learned that he was still married and spent weekends trying to reconcile with his wife.

That led to a short breakup, but Williams said he talked his way back into her good graces. He admitted then that he had a daughter, now 21, in Wisconsin with a different woman.

According to Williams and Collier, he also was spending a fair amount of time in Atlanta with his birth mother.

Collier said his mother first contacted him about five years ago, and DNA tests confirmed their relationship.

"I figured she was looking for a kidney, or the blocks had fallen out from under the trailer," he said, explaining his expectations that she would be someone looking for some kind of handout.

Instead, she turned out to be a successful Atlanta real estate agent married to a plastic surgeon.

"We had a nice reunion," he said. "For 37 years, I didn't know where I came from, except for what people told me, like, 'Your mother's a whore.' You hear that as a kid, it sticks with you and you believe it."

Collier said he assumed his mother knew his history because she hired a private detective to help find him. In fact, she didn't know about the murders.

They got along fabulously, Collier said. He moved into her Atlanta home while he worked for Noble Investments Group as a project supervisor, a job that landed him in Milwaukee on the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee hotel renovation for a while in 2008. She introduced him to her country club friends and to the rest of his family, at his grandmother's 80th birthday celebration in Chicago a couple of years ago.

"There were people who looked like me," he said. "It was really neat."

Through a lawyer, Collier's mother declined interview requests for this story. But in 2008, records show, she hired a private investigator to get records of his Wisconsin case. The Georgia investigator said the woman did not go looking for Collier as he contended. Rather, he showed up on his mother's doorstep one day. She later developed suspicions about his claimed background, the investigator said, and she ultimately learned the truth about Collier in 2008.

It appears Collier's mother largely kept the information to herself.

Collier said he almost can understand why she abruptly ended contact with him when she learned what he had done as a boy. But he called it unfair to his children that she stopped communicating with them, "after she'd gotten them to call her 'Nana' and everything."

He said he felt abandoned a second time.

Breakup in Florida

Williams, who briefly broke up with Collier when she learned he was married in Indiana, said she later learned that Collier wasn't always with his mother in Atlanta but had a girlfriend there. Then after he lost his job with the investment company in August 2008, he moved back in with Williams in Florida, where he got another construction job until he was let go. He was spending lots of time on the computer. When Williams discovered he was posting his profile on two dating sites, she kicked him out for good in May.

She said the harassment and stalking began almost immediately. He sent hundreds of e-mails about his love, his commitment to change, his explanations of the dating sites.

Then her home was repeatedly vandalized.

"He wanted me to feel scared and ask him back for protection and to fix the stuff," she said.

Instead, she called police and got a domestic violence injunction against Collier. He kept calling and e-mailing her about getting back together while he stayed with a former co-worker in Sarasota.

Williams was getting more annoyed, angry and scared - and she still didn't know about Peter Zimmer.

The Journal Sentinel obtained the discovery material in Collier's pending criminal case, including the hundreds of e-mails and Facebook messages Collier sent to Williams beginning in May.

Some of the e-mails purported to be from other people Collier knew but were from fake e-mail accounts he created. Many are long, passionate descriptions of how much he loved and missed Williams and detailed arguments as to why she should take him back. Some mention business deals the phantom writers have cooking with Collier. He posed as his ex-wife, his children, friends. He even posed as an Atlanta therapist, saying Collier had checked out early from mental health treatment and the clinic hoped Williams would help persuade him to return.

"When we talked the other day he sounded different than I have ever heard in his voice before," one e-mail purportedly from a friend in the drywall business in Indiana read in part. "Like he has some serious goals and something about stepping up and growing up and proving himself to not just you but everyone. Really have been pulling for you guys."

In June, after she had ignored most of the missives, she got several that said Collier hanged himself. She replied to the writers but got no response.

Finally, she called Collier's mother in Atlanta. Though she had visited Atlanta several times and seemed to get along with Collier's mother and her husband, Williams hadn't talked with them in about a year. To explain the sudden absence, she said, Collier told her that the couple had begun suggesting he was too good for Williams, and that in defending his love for her, he had created a deep rift with his mother.

And that's what she accepted until her June call about the reported suicide.

Williams asked whether Collier was dead. His mother's husband said they didn't think so but hadn't heard from him in about a year, since they learned about the murders.

" 'What murders?' I said. He said, 'Don't you know?' "

As Williams heard how Collier had killed family members in a Wisconsin farmhouse, she leaned against the wall and sank to the floor.

Disappearance

By this time, in late June, Williams had obtained an injunction against Collier, and he had been charged with misdemeanor stalking. He was arrested but disappeared after posting bail.

Williams now told police about the Wisconsin murders. They called authorities in Iowa County and confirmed that Collier was Zimmer. A story about the connection of a local stalking suspect and a triple murder years ago appeared June 30 in the St. Petersburg Times. Collier's big secret began shrinking fast.

And then the stalking escalated. Williams got packages in the mail at home and at work - flowers, sex toys, a dead piglet. Collier approached her at the beach in violation of the injunction. She had her car checked for a GPS tracking bug and bought a gun.

According to charges, Collier created profiles at online sex sites using her name and address and posed as her in online chats with men, some of whom then appeared at her house.

Local police followed tips about Collier in Atlanta, Indiana and around the Tampa Bay area all summer but could not find him.

Prosecutors now contend Collier's motive for the stalking had changed from expressions of "I love you/ I hate you" to blaming Williams for exposing his long-hidden secret past.

"What comes around goes around, so just remember that," he wrote in a September e-mail from the court records. "You took my life from me and I am very lost and angry at you for that. . . . I am here in St. Pete and hope to hell I run into you. You messed me over and I will pay you back, your rep, your job, all of it."

Armed with the new information, prosecutors charged Collier with felony stalking, based on a credible threat, and his violations of the domestic violence injunction. They asked the U.S. Marshals Service for help in finding Collier, and three days later, on Oct. 21, they arrested him at a motel in Savannah, Ga., where he had gone on a trip with a new girlfriend from Indiana who said she had no idea he was wanted for stalking or that he'd killed his family.

Williams said she got the news via e-mail at work and collapsed in tearful relief.

Prosecutors wanted to use the details of Collier's juvenile crimes to help show how his recent threats were credible, but a judge ruled against them. All prosecutors can say is that Collier has a violent past, unless Collier or his attorney mentions facts that "open the door" to further inquiry.

At a hearing last week, lawyers noted that Collier refused a plea agreement. If convicted as charged, Collier could face up to five years in Florida prison. The Zimmer murders would be fair game at sentencing, prosecutors think.

Williams feels safe for now but has had to miss work more than 10 times for court hearings.

"It's going on a year now, and it's really not even started," she said, referring to the criminal case. "It's consumed my life."

And she knows that when Collier gets out, the fear might return.

"I've been advised to relocate," she said, but she likes Tampa Bay and thinks Collier could find her anywhere.

"All I ever wanted was for him to just leave me alone," Williams said. "If he had, none of this would ever have come out."

Friend feels betrayed

Many others who knew Collier wouldn't talk about him.

But one friend who took Collier in even after he learned the truth feels betrayed.

Nick Chochos knew Collier and his wife in Indiana for about 10 years. He said he hired him as a subcontractor a few times and hung out with him socially, too. Chochos said that after he heard in early July that Collier was in trouble in Florida - and had killed his family in 1983 - he called him and asked, "You know you're on the news in Tampa Bay?"

Collier's response was, " 'How 'bout that. That's something, isn't it?' There was no apology, no explanation, no remorse," Chochos said.

And yet, when Collier called a month later begging for a place to stay and visit his son, Chochos agreed because he felt sorry for the boy. "Call me naïve. Call me stupid, or a bleeding heart liberal."

Chochos' wife asked Collier why he killed his family. He told her it was because his father beat him, his mother didn't protect him and he was jealous of his brother, whom his parents considered the perfect son.

Collier stayed about a week, then moved into a rental house owned by Chochos to do repairs. In September, he also did some work for Chochos' father-in-law. A handgun that turned up missing there later was recovered from the woman Collier was with when he was arrested in October.

"People should be forgiven, given a second chance," Chochos said, "but Joe, he's had more than a second chance."