Billy Coen: the Death Row Marine of Resident Evil 0

Billy Coen is a former US Marine lieutenant, sentenced to death for murder, who escapes into the Arklay Mountains and becomes Rebecca Chambers's partner in Resident Evil 0. He spends the game proving he isn't the killer his record says he is, and ends it as one of the few people in the series who simply walks away. (Resident Evil 0)

Who is Billy Coen?#

When Resident Evil 0 starts, Billy is a prisoner on his way to execution. He had been a second lieutenant in the Marines, court-martialled and sentenced to death for killing 23 people. On the night of 23 July 1998 the truck carrying him crashed in the Arklay Mountains. Bravo Team found it overturned, with both military police escorts dead and the prisoner gone, and assumed he'd killed them. (Resident Evil 0)

He isn't the monster the file describes. He's sardonic and guarded, and at first he only wants to get away, but he saves Rebecca's life within minutes of meeting her and keeps doing it. (Resident Evil 0)

Was Billy Coen guilty?#

The game says no. Billy tells Rebecca, and flashbacks show, what happened in Africa. His Force Recon squad was sent after a guerrilla base deep in the jungle, lost men to fever and ambushes on the way, and found a village instead. Their commander ordered them to kill the villagers anyway so they wouldn't come back empty-handed. Billy refused and was knocked out with a rifle butt, and the others shot all 23 people. (Resident Evil 0)

When the massacre came out, the blame landed on him. A file in The Umbrella Chronicles describes the investigation that followed: the deaths were put down to one Marine losing his mind, and that Marine was Billy. Rebecca believes him, and nothing in the game suggests she's wrong. (Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles; Resident Evil 0)

Billy and Rebecca on the Ecliptic Express#

Rebecca found the stopped train first and Billy already on board, armed. Neither trusted the other, but the train was full of the dead and they couldn't get out alone. When the train lurched into motion with nobody at the controls, they worked the brakes from both ends and slowed it before it ran off the line into an underground station beneath Umbrella's old executive training school. (Resident Evil 0)

In the school they found evidence of Dr. James Marcus's experiments on his young recruits, and a singing young man who controlled the leeches. On a cable car platform one of Marcus's creatures knocked Billy into an underground river, and Rebecca carried on alone until she found him washed up, alive, among the bones of Marcus's test subjects in the water treatment plant. (Resident Evil 0)

The singing man was the Queen Leech, a creature that had absorbed Marcus's body and memories and believed it was him. In the final fight Rebecca opened the roof to the sunlight that weakened it, Billy kept it busy, and he finished it with a magnum as the facility began to self-destruct. (Resident Evil 0)

What happened to Billy Coen?#

They came out on a clifftop at dawn. Rebecca could see the Spencer Mansion where the rest of her team had gone, and she knew that if she brought Billy in he'd be executed. So she took his dog tags and told him that, as far as she was concerned, Lieutenant Billy Coen was dead. He thanked her and walked off into the forest. (Resident Evil 0)

She kept her word. An extra file added to the Nintendo 64 version of Resident Evil 2 is Rebecca's report on the case, in which she reports that Billy was dead and his body could not be recovered. Rebecca herself went on into the mansion and the events of the first game, and Billy doesn't appear there. (Resident Evil 2 (Nintendo 64); Resident Evil)

That is the last word on him. No game since has shown what Billy did next, and Capcom has never brought him back for a new story. (Resident Evil 0)

Billy in The Umbrella Chronicles and the HD Remaster#

Billy's only other appearance is in Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (2007), a light-gun game that retells the Ecliptic Express section with him and Rebecca as the playable pair. It adds the files on his court martial but no new events. The 2016 HD Remaster of Resident Evil 0 brought the original game to modern consoles with the story unchanged. For where his night fits in the wider story, see the Resident Evil timeline. (Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles; Resident Evil 0)

How Billy shapes Rebecca's story#

Billy matters most for what he does to Rebecca. She starts Resident Evil 0 as a rookie on her first mission and ends it having watched a teammate die, fought through Marcus's facility and broken the rules to let a condemned man go because she believed him. That decision is the first sign of the steady, independent character she becomes by the time Chris Redfield finds her in the mansion the next night. (Resident Evil 0; Resident Evil)