Gary Evans wasn’t the only full-time criminal Jim Horton had been investigating since his arrival at the Bureau in 1984. By the end of 1989, Horton was quickly rising up through the ranks of the Bureau, well on his way to becoming one of its coveted senior investigators. During each year, he and other Bureau investigators had worked dozens of murder cases, often juggling many of them at the same time. As a father and husband, the cases that haunted Horton most involved young women and children: sexual molestation, rapes, abuse and murder. He brought that type of work home with him and spent many nights tossing and turning, trying to figure out that one missing link in the chain of evidence that could solve a particular case.
One case in particular that bothered Horton and his longtime partner, Doug Wingate (who was, in many ways, Horton’s mentor), involved a local Filipino housekeeper, Rose Tullao, who had gone missing in early 1986.
Horton and Wingate had it on good information that a local repeat sexual offender, Jeffrey Williams, a bushy-haired loner who “liked to hurt women,” was responsible for Tullao’s disappearance and, ultimately, had murdered her in an act of evil so chilling it was hard to stomach, even for two seasoned cops.
In October 1987, Tullao’s skeletal remains were found in a park in Cohoes. As soon as Horton and Wingate learned the details of the crime, they saw Jeffrey Williams’s trademark all over it.
“A pillowcase was involved,” Horton noted. “Jeff Williams had used a pillowcase before to subdue and sodomize a woman.”
What’s more, two local cops had spotted a car late one night down by Peebles Island State Park in Cohoes and went down to check it out. Touching the hood of the car, it was warm. After observing Williams walking out of the woods near the car, one of the cops asked him what he was doing.
“Taking a piss,” Williams said.
The cops then took his name, wrote down his license plate number and let him go.
Two years later, when Horton found out that someone fitting Williams’s description had been questioned by local cops down by “a wooded area” in Cohoes, he ran the plate number of the car. When it turned out to be Jeffrey Williams’s car, Horton knew he was close to getting him.
By the end of the day, they had found was left of Tullao’s decomposed body.
“He must have just finished killing her,” Horton recalled later, “when those local cops spotted him emerging from the woods. Doug Wingate and I had made it a priority to keep Jeff Williams on our radar. We knew he had killed Tullao, and suspected he killed others.”
Born on July 8, 1960, Jeffrey Williams, with his boyish-looking face, thick, dark black eyebrows and bone white, perfectly straight teeth, could have doubled for Peter Brady, one of the characters on the popular ’70s sitcom The Brady Bunch. Yet, at six feet five inches, nearly 235 pounds, the women Williams preyed upon were no match for what was a monster of a human being. His criminal background dated back to his early teens when he was arrested for stealing a car. A few years after that, at nineteen, he was arrested for “sodomy, robbery and burglary” after he attacked a Clifton Park, New York, woman who later identified him. Realizing prosecutors had a rock-solid case against him, Williams pleaded guilty to “attempted sodomy” and ended up with a two-to six-year sentence.
“That first woman Williams raped, he didn’t kill her and she identified him,” Horton said later. “That’s what these rapists learn—that killing their victims is the only way to be certain they won’t be identified.”
After serving time on the sodomy and assault conviction, shortly after being released from prison in 1983, Williams pleaded guilty to shoplifting, which placed him under what New York State called its “second felony offender” status. He ended up doing almost three years for, essentially, no more than lifting a pack of gum.
In 1987, the Bureau began focusing on Williams in the disappearance of Diane Deso, a local girl whose body was found washed up on the banks of the Hudson River that summer. She had been strangled and possibly raped. There was also Karen Wilson, a twenty-two-year-old local girl who had been missing for years but whose body had never been found; and a seventy-eight-year-old woman who had been raped and robbed in 1986.
Horton and Wingate felt Williams was responsible for all three crimes.
“He’s an animal,” Horton said later. “He hates certain types of women.”
Indeed, somewhere along his sociopathic jaunt through life, Williams had, according to Horton and Wingate, developed a burning hatred toward a certain cluster of females. In a statement to police, Williams once said he “had problems with women” and admitted there were “certain types” he despised and, more important, “there were certain types…[he] wished to injure.” Reading aloud the police report during one of Williams’s many court proceedings, Justice Joseph Harris added that Williams especially hated women with “large buttocks, women who wore short skirts, women who were old or over forty years of age and women who tried to look young.”
This didn’t sit well with Horton, whose wife, Mary Pat, at a mere five feet, one hundred pounds, couldn’t, in any way, be put into Williams’s “big butt” category (nor was she over forty at the time), but she liked to “dress young” and fashioned her clothes by trends set by younger women.
Perhaps more frightening than that, though, was the hatred Williams harbored for Horton himself, who, with Doug Wingate, had pursued him vigorously since 1987. It was no secret Williams had told other inmates that Horton was enemy number one on his list. And some prison rumors had it that he had even mentioned Mary Pat and Alison, Horton’s daughter, on occasion, threatening to grab one of them as soon as he had the chance.
Obviously, this scared Mary Pat, seeing that Williams lived five miles from Horton’s home. At one time, they changed their phone number because they thought Williams was calling the house.
“I knew he didn’t live far from us,” Mary Pat recalled later. “I knew he was a really big guy. I knew he once said he didn’t like women who tried to dress ‘young.’ I almost always shop in the junior department. I’m petite. I like to wear current fashions. I knew he could easily overpower me. I asked Jim to show me pictures of him. I wanted to know exactly what he looked like. I wanted to study his face.”
Mary Pat, a dental hygienist, described Williams as having a “big lower jaw, like Jay Leno,” a feature she would notice right away on any person.
“If he ever came to our door, or approached me in a parking lot, I wanted to know that it was him…. I was worried he would try to ‘get even’ with Jim by raping and then killing me or Alison, our daughter. I felt this was a real possibility. He was huge, frightening, and he had killed before and gotten away with it.”
After Williams’s release from prison in 1986, he met—and eventually married—a local girl, who was only sixteen when they met, while he was twenty-six. When they married the following year, the girl became pregnant and ended up having the child while Williams was in Albany County Jail waiting to go to prison on a twenty-five to life bid for, of all things, stealing a rocking chair out of a garage. Shortly before that, on January 23, 1988, Karolyn Lonczak, a beautiful eighteen-year-old from Cohoes who worked as an “overnight monitor” for Residential Opportunities Inc., a group home in Cohoes for mentally challenged adults, was abducted in the middle of the night from the living room inside the group facility. Two months later, her nude body was discovered about twenty miles north of Cohoes on the banks of the Tomhannock Reservoir. She had been strangled and stabbed several times. Because her body was so decomposed, an autopsy failed to determine if she had been raped.
At the time, Williams had lived only blocks from the group home. Needless to say, he became one of Horton and Wingate’s main suspects.
After Lonczak’s body was found, Horton and Wingate decided to put Williams under a twenty-four-hour surveillance. There were too many girls turning up dead. Too many attempted abductions. And way too many pieces of evidence pointing directly at him.
One night, two Bureau cops tailing Williams spied him breaking into a garage and stealing a rocking chair. A day or so later, he was seen peeping into a window, watching a young woman while she readied herself for bed.
“When they saw him doing that,” Horton recalled, “we realized he was getting closer to doing what he did best: rape and murder. We knew he had killed before. So we grabbed him.”
Horton ended up interrogating Williams for seventeen hours that night. Taking three separate statements from him, Williams confessed to killing the Filipino girl, Rose Tullao, during his final statement.
“The second statement he gave me,” Horton said later, “showed more culpability on his part. An hour later, during his final statement, he admitted everything. He said he burglarized Tullao’s place. He piled some things up under a window to get in. Then he chased her throughout the home, tackled her, punched her, knocked her unconscious, knocking out several of her front teeth, put a pillowcase over her head and strangled her with a phone cord.” When Williams was finished killing Tullao, he told Horton, he had sex with her corpse.
Admitting to knocking her teeth out was important, Horton added, because only Tullao’s killer and the police could have known that detail.
After a lengthy trial, Williams was found innocent of murdering Tullao, but was convicted of stealing the rocking chair. When the jury read the “not guilty” verdict, Williams turned around and looked over at Horton, who was sitting in the back of the courtroom. Fuck you, Williams mouthed with a smile. Fuck you…Horton.
I beat you.
The smart judge, perhaps believing Williams was guilty, sentenced him under a persistent felon guideline to twenty-five to life for stealing the rocking chair, noting that Williams had “confessed to Horton that he had killed Tullao.”
“It kept him in prison until we could build our other murder cases against him,” Horton recalled. “Williams and his team of defense attorneys beat us fair and square. The jury was concerned about the seventeen-hour interrogation; Williams’s lawyers argued that I had ‘coerced’ a confession out of him by depriving him out of food and water and a bathroom. It wasn’t true. But the jury believed it was. In retrospect, seventeen hours was a long time to interrogate someone. But I was ordered to do that. The DA was there. The entire interrogation was bugged. Two-way mirrors.”
In the criminal justice system, Horton added, it is, at times, “a game of wins and losses. On that day, the bad guy won.”
Leaving the courtroom, Horton was conflicted, confused, angry and depressed. He questioned the criminal justice system, how it worked, how it protected criminals and his role in it all.
“I was so disappointed after that, I felt like quitting the job,” Horton remembered later. “I did everything by the book…everything I was told to do. The system let me down. I pushed the envelope a little, I suppose, with that seventeen-hour interrogation. But this guy was bad.”
Horton knew that not only had Williams murdered the forty-year-old Tullao, but he’d also murdered and possibly raped Karolyn Lonczak, who was only eighteen. To let a murderer like that go free, it was all too much for Horton to stomach.
A competitive person by nature, having competed as a downhill skier for years with a wall filled with medals and ribbons, Horton had never really been on the losing side of anything so important. It was his first major homicide case with the Bureau—and he lost.
To make matters worse, the rocking chair theft conviction was eventually overturned. Then Williams was released from jail for “time served,” but ordered by the court to wear an ankle bracelet and serve out the remainder of his sentence at home.
“I was devastated and embarrassed by the entire incident,” Horton said. “I couldn’t believe the jury let this guy get away with it. Some members of the jury were crying while walking out of the building. I hoped they were crying because they had made a huge mistake.”
What bothered Horton most was that Williams targeted truly innocent, defenseless females. They were powerless against him. He could strike now at any time. The judge had even called him a “walking time bomb.”
Horton didn’t know it in 1990, but Gary Evans would be one of the key factors involved in bringing down Jeffrey Williams—and the fact that Williams had chosen young women as his victims was the bait Horton would use to attract Evans.