Chapter 22

Pre-Trial

THE WEEKS LEADING up to Williams’s trial were more emotional for my office than I could have imagined. I knew about PTSD and understood the concept, but I didn’t realize until the trial neared that many members of my office staff suffered from the condition, in varying stages.

As the Thanksgiving holiday ended, I sat in my office with Michelle Stambaugh. She was the office manager and the heart of the office. Therefore, I went to her to try to get an opinion of how the office staff was emotionally handling the upcoming trial.

“Judge, I know the girls are trying to work, but they are distracted,” she said.

We were discussing the lowered productivity among the support staff, which the attorneys had complained to me about, and I had subsequently brought the concern to her.

“I know,” I said. “I just didn’t realize how affected they would be with the trial approaching.”

“I know, but it’s real. I feel it too,” she said. Hesitatingly she began, “I think it will help, I mean, I’m glad that since there is a live feed of the trial, we will be able to watch the trial. That is, if you don’t mind?”

I had thought about the trial feed before Michelle even brought it up. In fact, I’d already discussed it with the County’s IT chief, George York.

George loved technology and could easily go on and on after you asked basic computer questions. I knew how to turn on my computer, check my email, and use Microsoft Word to draft documents. After that, everything else was a mystery to me.

Not so for George. He had explained to me that since there was a television cable coming from the courtroom live, we just had to get permission from the network to access the feed. They were already allowing a viewing of the court trial outside of the courtroom. In anticipation of the overflow of court watchers, newspaper journalists, and media reporters, there would be a room set up carrying the trial.

“I don’t want them watching the trial all day,” I said. “They’ve got to work. But on their breaks, if they want to watch it, they have to do it at their desks, with ear plugs. I’m not blasting the trial on the televisions in the office.”

I paused for a beat, and then went on.

“Besides, I don’t want to hear it and I shouldn’t because I could be called as a witness,” I said. “And I think it may be unnerving for other people that don’t want to hear the trial.”

“Agreed,” Michelle said. “Thanks, Judge.”

As she stood to leave, I really looked into her face and realized that this was really hard for her too.

As the heart and soul of the office, Michelle had been a rock for the staff since the murders happened. After their boss and his wife were killed, she was the point of contact for all DA office employees. Michelle had sent text messages about breaking news; made sure to account for office personnel to law enforcement; and kept in touch with all DA personnel during those first scary days of uncertainty. Ultimately, on the day of Mike’s funeral, she’d driven the entire office over en masse to his funeral services in her church’s bus.

I could only imagine her wielding a bulky church bus, full of grief-stricken ADAs, investigators, and paralegals, with her slight frame. That image stuck in my mind just then, making my heart full and my throat dry.

Not only had Michelle kept the office together, but she had assisted the victim-witness coordinator with victim services. Victim services are exactly what it sounds like: aid for victims. It consists of a coordinator who works behind the scenes offering services to the family of victims while the attorneys are getting cases ready for court. In some ways, trials function like any other production. Outwardly one only sees the players in the courtroom, such as the judge, the lawyers, and the witnesses called to testify. However, it’s people like Shirley Bruner, the victim coordinator, with the help of someone like Michelle, who work to get the witnesses to court and find accommodations for them while they are waiting to testify.

Even though this case was being tried by other lawyers and another judge in an adjacent county, Kaufman County had assisted in coordinating with the victims with their questions, concerns, and needs leading up to the trial. The costs were paid by the state of Texas, but the County had to initially make the accommodations and pay the costs and await the state’s reimbursement for the victims’ families.

Our office had contacted the McLellands’ family, assisting them with travel arrangements, once we were certain that the trial date was firm. As we got closer to the trial date, we were glad to get their calls, as they had questions about logistics about the upcoming trial. Our office had gotten particularly close to Mike’s sons and daughter.

“Are you okay?” I asked Michelle, coming out of my reverie, as I realized she was still standing and looking at me expectantly.

“I’m going to be okay,” she said. “I just want this behind us. I can’t ever feel too bad for the office because I just remember Mike and Cynthia’s families … and I know how hard it must be for them. They lost their mom, dad, son, daughter, sister.”

She didn’t finish as she choked on the last words, thinking about their losses.

AS 2013 ENDED with another capital murderer in Kaufman County awaiting trial, I realized that in the last year, I had been in contact with capital murderers more than I could have ever anticipated in my career.

I was preparing to prosecute one accused of killing five people, including his mother. I had learned that another hated—and planned to assassinate—me. Ultimately, I discovered I would have to testify in the trial against the killer of my colleagues in the punishment phase of the trial, where prosecutors were seeking the death penalty. The last part of my “capital murderer trifecta” came in the form of the conversation I had with Bill Wirskye. Looking back, I realized that conversation was pivotal for me; up to that point, I never fully comprehended that Eric Williams wanted to kill me and that he would have acted on his hate.

Don’t get me wrong—I knew he had killed three people.

Still, my mind rejected that heinous thought, as it related to me: that I was supposed to be next.

Up until then, I denied the truth that, in Aaron’s astute observation, I was always one of Eric Williams’ targets, since he would not stand for me telling him what to do. I ignored my husband’s warning that a man like Williams was not ashamed of his bad behavior—cheating the county out of money for work he didn’t do—and that he would see me as an intermeddler, a judge overstepping her boundaries.

For all my hesitation in accepting the reality that Eric Williams hated me with a murderous passion, now I knew that it was true. His wife had no reason to lie about that. She divulged the “hit list” that she and her slaughtering husband created with the dispassionate, detached ease of someone ticking off sightseeing attractions on their summer vacation.

As my mind turned that thought over again and again, I realized how naïve I had been. I realized suddenly that we try to explain away most people’s criminal behavior. We look at their rough childhood, their bad parents, and their prior criminal behaviors.

Sometimes, it makes sense.

But then we see another person who was a bed-wetter, or had horrible parents, or dropped out of high school. That person doesn’t turn into a serial murderer.

Williams was an anomaly. He’d set out to collect victims because of some perceived injustice or grievance. He had twisted his wrongdoing into some public service he was doing for the county. He never accepted that he stole from either his overbilling of county services—or, later, computer equipment—and that the job he was doing was something any competent attorney with integrity could do.

The psychopathic malignancy that Eric Williams embodied would have to be explained by a highly trained professional.

To me, he personified pure evil.

I knew I had brushed shoulders with the devil. I felt that the Lord, like in Exodus, had allowed evil to pass over my family and me, leaving us untouched.