Chapter 20

Special Prosecutors

SUE’S COLLEAGUES BILL Wirskye and Toby Shook had been appointed as special prosecutors when I officially made the decision to recuse the Kaufman County DA’s office from the prosecution of Eric Williams. Sue Korioth had convinced me that being the Judge that signed the search warrant and later prosecuting the same case could potentially create a conflict. Moreover, the District Attorney’s office had another unique conflict; never before in the history of this country had two members of the same DA’s office (and one of their family members) been assassinated. While we were not the family members of Mike, Mark, and Cynthia, everyone in the District Attorney’s office felt victimized by these murders.

As the new Criminal District Attorney, I also was faced with Mike McLelland’s prior decision to recuse the DA’s office when Mark Hasse had been killed in January 2013. Before Mike’s untimely death, Mike had already determined that there was good cause for the office not to prosecute the murder of one of its former employees.

Enter Wirskye and Shook. Wirskye had been working nonstop on this case for the last few months leading up to the jury selection, which was scheduled for September 22, 2014. He and Shook had put together a trial team, combining state, federal, and volunteer resources. Everyone was eager to help. No one killed prosecutors and got away with it in Texas.

Essential to proving Williams’s guilt and getting the death penalty, was getting his wife, Kim, “to flip,” she had to tie her husband to Hasse’s murder in the prosecutor’s case-in-chief—the portion of the trial in which the prosecution presented its case—to the McLellands’ murders in the punishment phase of the trial.

During her debriefing, Kim gave evidence of the crimes, which led the investigators to locate weapons and some of the other items of evidence that Eric Williams had tossed to the bottom of Lake Tawokoni.

She also named other potential victims, which proved to be a critical part of her testimony. If Eric Williams had not been caught by the police, he would have continued his killing spree. He would have made his way down that list to the next innocent person. That means he was considered a future danger. And that gets you the needle in the state of Texas.

Kim Williams had been portrayed by the media as an unwitting accomplice. I felt differently. She had lived with Eric and knew the people he hated. And the people he hated, she hated. His slights were her slights. They were married for twenty-one years and she enjoyed playing the “kill game” as much as he did.

The kill game was something she had bragged that she and Eric played together and it was just what it sounded like: planning the gruesome murders of people and how they could get away with it. Imagine a couple entertaining themselves with that game in the evening.

If I had previously doubted that recusing my office was the correct legal decision for the Kaufman District Attorney’s office, when I learned I was one of the pawns in their twisted game during the spring of 2014, I knew that our office could not have tried that case. If our office had not recused in 2013, we would have discovered the evidence from Kim Williams months before the trial in 2014, which would have then clearly been reason to recuse, delaying the trial even more.

I learned about the kill list in April from Bill Wirskye. Bill was a giant of a man. He stood six foot eight. He had a pleasant face and an easy demeanor, unless you were a man charged with capital murder; then he was deadly serious. So, when Bill asked to speak to me privately in my office and shut my office door, I glanced up from my seat—it was no small distance. His face was grim. He was deadly serious.

“Bill, what’s up,” I said, as I began to rise to meet his gaze.

“Judge, why don’t you sit down,” he said, pointing to my chair.

“You are scaring me, what’s up,” I asked again. I was firmer and I still stood.

“Erleigh … sit down, I want to talk to you about something,” he countered gently. Lowering his voice, as I slumped back into my sit.

He continued “We’ve been debriefing Kim. I can’t tell you about her testimony, but I can tell you that there was a list.”

“… a list,” I mumbled, interrupting Bill.

Bill continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, “Yes, Eric Williams had a list, and your name was on the list.”

The list was real. It may not have been written, but Kim and Eric knew who they were going to assassinate next. She said that Eric Williams planned to kill me and Judge Glen Ashworth. Bill didn’t know the order and I don’t know that it actually mattered.