Who is Bill Stevenson? Ex-husband of Jill Biden whose second spouse died after ‘home dispute’ at Delaware residence

Jill Biden‘s ex-husband has been thrust back into the spotlight after his wife was found dead in her home after an alleged domestic dispute, just years after he released a memoir about his and the former first lady’s union. 

Bill Stevenson’s 64-year-old wife, Linda, was found unresponsive in her Delaware home on Sunday, TMZ reported, after police were called to the property. 

Bill, 77, married Jill in 1970 when she was just an 18-year-old student and he was just a few years older.

At the time, Jill, now 74, believed their union would last a lifetime, but the pair split after five years of marriage in 1975. 

That same year, she met the would-be president, Joe Biden, and two years later, the two would marry when she was 26 and he was 34. 

In her 2019 memoir, When the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself, Jill admitted she first thought she and Bill were ‘destined for each other.’

‘Looking back, it may seem like a mistake of youth,’ she scathingly wrote about the man she indirectly referred to as ‘charming and entrepreneurial’ in the book. 

Bill, who owned an ale house, told the Daily Mail a different story in 2020. He claimed the would-be political powerhouse couple’s love story was born from an affair that shattered his marriage to Jill.

‘I don’t want to hurt anyone, but facts are facts and what happened, happened,’ he said at the time. 

Representatives for Jill told Inside Edition in 2020 that the affair claims were ‘fictitious’ to ‘sell and promote a book’ that Bill was preparing to release. 

‘The relationship of Joe and Jill Biden is well documented,’ the spokesman said. 

‘Jill Biden separated from her first husband irreconcilably in the fall of 1974 and moved out of their marital home. Joe and Jill Biden had their first date in March of 1975, and they married in June of 1977.’ 

However, Bill declared that he knew Jill was cheating on him with the Democrat while working on the latter’s New Castle, Delaware, campaign for county councilman in the 1970s.

Bill said he was certain of the infidelity when his then-wife refused to meet Bruce Springsteen because she was watching Joe’s boys, Beau and Hunter, whom the former president had with his late wife, Neilia Hunter Biden. 

‘Bruce Springsteen was going to play at The Stone Balloon and I had to go to Northern New Jersey to pay him in advance,’ Bill told the Daily Mail at the time. 

‘I asked Jill to go with me and she said no – she had things to do, she had to look after Joe’s kids, Beau and Hunter. It was kind of a big deal to go meet Springsteen. I had no idea she and Joe were that kind of friendly.

‘Then one of her best friends told me she thought Joe and Jill were getting a little too close. I was surprised that she came to me.’

He said he got his confirmation after a man came into his business and asked if he owned a brown Corvette.

When he told them it was his wife’s car, the man said he had been in a fender bender with the vehicle and never heard back about an estimate. 

‘Funnily enough, Senator Biden was driving,’ Stevenson claimed in 2020. Afterward: ‘I asked Jill to leave the house, which she did.’ 

Her ex-husband claimed that her father begged him to take Jill back, but he ‘wasn’t interested.’ 

‘I considered Joe a friend,’ he told the Daily Mail at the time. ‘I’m not surprised he fell in love with Jill. Everyone who meets Jill falls in love with her immediately. It’s hard not to.’

But Jill tells the story a little differently from her former lover.  

In her memoir, Jill admitted their love story was just young love and that they quickly ‘grew in different directions.’ 

‘I tried to make the relationship work. I thought I could will our marriage back to life. But I had to separate what I thought my family should be from the reality of what this relationship was.

‘Before long, I began to see that the breaks were beyond repair,’ she added. I wouldn’t settle for a counterfeit love. Like a broken spell, the truth of the reality struck me suddenly: I was going to get divorced.’

For Joe’s part, he said he saw a photo of his now-wife in a March 1975 advertisement, after her marriage collapsed, while he was passing through the Wilmington Airport with his brother Frank. 

He told Frank that she was the kind of girl he would like to date and Frank said: ‘Why don’t you then? I know her,’ and passed on her number. 

Jill wrote that Joe called her and asked her out. She said she already had a date, but he persisted because he was only in town for one night and she relented.

They went to Philadelphia to see the French movie, A Man And A Woman, ironically about a widowed man falling in love, and then went out to dinner.

Despite him saying he was only in town for a single night, the couple went out the next two nights as well, she wrote. 

And the rest is history. The pair were married at the Chapel of the United Nations in New York in June 1977. 

Bill finds himself single once again following Linda’s death. The couple have a daughter, Christina Vettori.

She was discovered unresponsive in the living room and police has suggested they were called to the house over a domestic dispute. 

The New Castle County Police Department is now investigating whether Stevenson’s death was the result of a criminal act.

An autopsy will be carried out to determine how Linda died, with a 911 call audio obtained by TMZ mentioning a cardiac arrest.

No further details have been given about the alleged domestic dispute or who it involved.

The Daily Mail has reached out to the Bidens and Bill for comment.