What Jill Biden Has Said About Her Divorce from Bill Stevenson, Who Was Just Charged with Murdering His Wife By Meredith Kile

Dr. Jill Biden’s ex-husband, Bill Stevenson, has been charged with the murder of his wife, Linda Stevenson.

Bill was indicted on a first-degree murder charge and taken into custody without incident on Monday, Feb. 2, the New Castle County Police Department said in a press release.

Linda, 64, was found dead in the couple’s home in Oak Hill, Del., after police responded to “a reported domestic dispute” and found her unresponsive on Dec. 28, according to the department.

Bill, 77, was arraigned and is currently being held in lieu of $500,000 bail, police said.

Jill, now 74, was married to Bill from 1970 to 1975. They met as college students at the University of Delaware, and the future first lady was just 18 years old when they tied the knot.

“Looking back, it may seem like that relationship was a mistake of youth,” Jill wrote in her 2019 book, Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself. “But there was a time when I truly believed we were destined for each other.”

“He was charismatic and entrepreneurial and eventually started his own business,” she wrote of Bill. “We rented a sleek modern house. Suddenly, I wasn’t just a student, eating cheap food and living in student housing any longer—now I was a wife… My parents didn’t object; in fact, my parents loved him. And most importantly, I thought I had found a love like my parents’, a partnership built on loyalty and devotion.”

“For a moment, we were happy. I had found my Prince Charming, and I was sure it would last forever,” she added.

Ironically, Jill wrote, Bill was a “big supporter” of Joe Biden’s Senate campaign in 1972. On election night, the young couple even attended the victory party, where Jill met her future husband’s first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden.

Just weeks later, Neilia and the couple’s 1-year-old daughter, Naomi, would be killed in a car accident, leaving Joe a single father to two sons: Beau and Hunter. But before Jill more prominently entered their lives, she had to endure the dissolution of her first marriage.

“My parents loved each other until they left this earth,” Jill recalled in her book. “Even in their old age, they were playful and affectionate. They loved faithfully and unconditionally. Marriage, for them, meant forever. And I knew, deeply, unquestioningly, that was what I would have as well. So, when my marriage fell apart, I was lost. I watched, devastated, as it slipped from my fingers before I could even figure out how to hold on.”

“We were young, and it didn’t take long before we grew in different directions,” she continued. “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.”

Jill wrote that after a while, she realized their differences were “beyond repair,” saying she didn’t want to settle for a “counterfeit love” with Bill.

“I’m not sure if I knew anyone who was divorced back then,” she said. “The very idea horrified me. It meant failure, and in my still-young life, I had never failed at anything serious.”

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Jill wrote that she hated feeling like she let her parents down by divorcing her first husband — especially her father — but even worse was the feeling of letting herself down.

“I felt ugly and inadequate; I was embarrassed and ashamed,” she said. “In a single devastating year, I went from thinking I had it all to feeling shattered and alone. I questioned if I would ever find love, if I would ever have a family of my own. How could I give my heart to someone again? How could I again risk this humiliation, this hurt? And how could I figure out who, exactly, I was?”

She said her parents stood by her and she even declined their offer for her to move back home.

“In my mind, my former husband thought I would disintegrate without him, and I aimed to prove him wrong,” she wrote.

After putting her life back together, away from the University of Delaware campus and the memories of her feelings of failure, Jill did find love again.

She agreed to a blind date in 1975, which turned out to be with Joe, and the future first couple married two years later. Jill helped raise Joe’s two sons and together, the couple welcomed daughter Ashley in 1981.

It was this personal turnaround that helped Jill offer some uplifting advice to a newly separated Kelly Clarkson during a 2021 appearance on her talk show.

“This is what I would say to you if I were your mother: My mother always said to me, ‘Things are going to look better tomorrow. And if you can take one day at a time, things will get better,’ ” the first lady shared.

At the time, Clarkson had recently filed for divorce from her husband of seven years, Brandon Blackstock. Their divorce was finalized the following year. Blackstock died in August 2025 of an aggressive form of skin cancer.

Despite their personal struggles, Jill assured Clarkson that better days were ahead.

“If I hadn’t gotten divorced, I never would’ve met Joe,” she said. “I wouldn’t have the beautiful family I have now, so I really think things happen for the best.”

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The Bidens gave PEOPLE their first White House interview in January 2021, and Jill shared a similar sentiment at the time, expressing how the pair leaned on each other through good times and bad.

“All that we’ve been through together — the highs, the lows and certainly tragedy and loss — there’s that quote that says sometimes you become stronger in the fractured places. That’s what we try to achieve,” she said.