A source told me two special prosecutors were appointed for the Hasse/McLelland cases: Toby Shook and his law partner, Bill Wirskye.
—E-mail signed ERIC sent to a Dallas TV reporter
There seemed little doubt that Eric Williams enjoyed his new role, being sought after by the media, fielding requests from TV and print journalists, e-mailing tips to some when he had new information. Once news broke that he’d been questioned in the notorious cases, he received voice mails and e-mails from the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Dallas Morning News, and the national TV news networks. Sergi and Sickel issued statements and turned down requests.
At the command post, the conversations were more somber. The week after the McLellands’ funeral, an FBI agent found a record on LexisNexis that showed Eric had logged onto the service through his old Kaufman County law library account. With stacks of information to look through, eventually the analyst discovered that the prior January, before Mark’s murder, Eric ran a license plate number belonging to Mark Hasse’s neighbor. That left many working on the case wondering: Did Eric have Mark under surveillance?
Meanwhile, at the Overlook house, in between playing Mafia Wars, Eric spent most days searching the Internet for information on the killings, on Toby Shook, and on Bill Wirskye. A Dallas Morning News blog about the appointments perhaps pleased Eric when he read that in the White House President Barack Obama kept “tabs on the Kaufman County killings.”
That day, too, Eric searched for information on Judge Glen Ashworth, the target he’d told Kim he planned to kill next. At one point, he looked at a health article on “10 Ways to Take Charge of Depression.” From there, he looked up information on Christopher Dorner’s manifesto, then settled in and returned to Mafia Wars.
Nerves continued to plague those working the investigation. One day during a meeting, Bill Wirskye’s wife called and said she saw “a suspicious guy” outside their house. “To save my marriage, I’ve got to head home to Dallas,” he told the others, and they understood. When he arrived, the man had disappeared.
Like so many others, by then Shook and Wirskye carried guns. “You think like the guy you’re after,” said Shook. “What could be better. ‘I’ll kill the guys who think they’re going to get me.’ We were armed, but so was Mark and so was Mike McLelland.”
At night, Shook placed a shotgun and a pistol next to his bed, another pistol stationed elsewhere in the house. When he left in the mornings, he had a gun in his hand. His wife told him he made her nervous. “It got to be comical,” Wirskye said. “We laughed about it. But we were scared.”
At an early meeting, Major Dockery had asked if anyone else felt they needed protection, beyond the Kaufman officials who were already under guard. Although frightened, Wirskye and Shook hadn’t raised their hands. “We didn’t want to appear to be cowards,” said Wirskye. But as time passed, their families worried, and they became increasingly anxious.
One day, after the two prosecutors discussed their situation, Wirskye arrived at the command post intent on requesting guards for both him and Shook, but at the morning meeting an FBI agent grumbled about a terrified federal prosecutor who’d walked away from an ABT case. “Can you believe it? Big pussy.”
“It wasn’t a good day to ask,” Wirskye told Shook.
One of the FBI agents, Aaron Beggs, worked on the Williams team off and on, assigned to set up a timeline of Eric’s life, find out where he grew up, went to school, where he’d worked. “Everyone we talked to confirmed our belief that he was our guy.”
In hopes of finally interviewing their prime suspect, e-mails continued to go back and forth between Eric’s attorneys and Bill Wirskye. Then one day, Eric e-mailed Sergi and Sickel and said: “You are authorized to release my email address to the authorities regarding the Hasse/McLelland investigation. . . . If they have some simple questions for me to answer, perhaps it can really be that simple. Thanks for everything. ERIC WILLIAMS.”
His attorneys disagreed, wanting to keep Eric distanced from the investigation, musing that if they stepped out of the middle, Eric would lose his layer of protection.
Off and on, Wirskye stopped at the DA’s office. With Mike McLelland dead, Wirskye talked to the interim DA, Brandi Fernandez. When he did, “he felt the staff’s tension.” One paralegal had her whole family sleeping in one room. When she arrived home, she held a gun in her hand while she looked under the beds and in the closets.
“You didn’t know who was going to come through the window,” she said.
At the same time, at the command post, video kept arriving. Two weeks after the McLellands’ murders, on surveillance camera footage from a building half a mile from the Blarney Stone address, someone noticed a white sedan, one that looked like the car in the earlier video. “Look, we’ve got a photograph,” the man said when he handed it to Michael Hillman. “It’s a Crown Vic.”
Looking at it, Hillman could barely see the outline of the car and wasn’t impressed. “Good job,” he told the man. “Come back to me when you have something.”
“We think this could be it,” the man said, pointing out that the time frame matched.
Hillman looked at the photo again, this time more impressed.
Off and on, JR McLelland thought about the day his dad and Cynthia died, trying to figure out how it happened. When he visualized it, knowing what he did about the evidence, what he’d seen at the house, he figured his dad was in his lounge chair and had it pushed back when the gunman burst in. Since Mike rarely locked the door, JR assumed the most likely scenario was that Cynthia sat on the couch. The gunman entered and started shooting, and the way JR saw it, his dad, who’d put on weight since his heart bypass, couldn’t jump out of the chair as he needed to in time to grab a gun.
The sadness followed JR until one day he went out to a trailer he kept in the pasture. He stayed there alone for three days, shooting guns like he used to with his dad, letting his grief bubble to the surface.
At work in his Dallas PD uniform, Nathan thought about their parents, too. At times, other officers asked him about the case, where the inquiry stood. He didn’t have anything to tell them, because the investigators weren’t including the family in their briefings. “It was just bizarre,” Nathan said. “Usually I’m the investigator. Now I was on the other side.”
American Mensa e-mailed Eric a birthday greeting on April 7. That day he turned forty-six. By e-mail he discussed with his attorneys how to handle Bill Wirskye’s continuing requests for an interview and information. While Eric had asked to have them send his e-mail to the prosecutor, David Sergi continued to advise that everything had to go through either him or John Sickel “to preserve the attorney-client privilege.” Eric agreed.
“Pursuant to our telephone conversation a few minutes ago, Mr. Williams is declining a face-to-face meeting with representatives of the state of Texas. He has, however, indicated that he will answer written questions submitted by you and Mr. Shook,” David Sergi e-mailed Bill Wirskye on the eighth.
The next morning, JR appeared on the Today show. After describing the murders as domestic terrorism, he said, “It needs to put all public officials on their toes. It’s not just Texas.”
Perhaps Eric saw the program that morning. If he did, maybe he had that slight smirk on his face, watching the press coverage mushroom. Later, Eric played Mafia Wars and at 10:38 that night Googled “upper receiver groups AR–15.” On a Web site called Bravo Company USA, he looked at upcoming gun shows. Then he searched for information on the Rock River Arms Web site for .223 caliber uppers.
It appeared that Eric Williams was in the market for a new upper for his assault rifle, presumably to replace one he’d disposed of after killing the McLellands. And he planned to buy it through a venue that didn’t require background checks.
Nearly two weeks after the McLelland murders, little appeared to be going the investigators’ way. They still hadn’t interviewed their prime suspect. In response, on April 10, they became more aggressive. Two sheriff’s deputies knocked on Eric’s door, asking to talk to Kim. Saying she’d been up all night and was sleeping, Eric took their cards.
When Eric informed his attorneys, John Sickel sent Wirskye an e-mail, complaining about the intrusion. Wirskye apologized and claimed he didn’t know what the investigators planned. Wirskye “advised that maybe he wasn’t clear enough with them yesterday that he was in contact and working with your lawyers,” Sickel e-mailed Eric, copying David Sergi.
“Apparently at or about the same time this morning, a ranger and another officer visited my in-laws’ house, asking all sorts of interesting questions. Other than being old, sick, and dying, I’m okay with that, since there’s nothing for them to tell and nothing to hide—just keeping you up to date,” Eric responded.
In e-mails with his attorneys that same day Eric agreed to do as Wirskye requested, to draw up a timeline of where he’d been on the days of the murders. To Sickel, this seemed a reasonable course of action. Someday, if Eric were ever charged, his attorneys would need the same thing, an account of his whereabouts at the times of the murders.
That same day, Eric’s attorneys issued a press release, one in which he denied any knowledge of the murders, and David Sergi said, “Eric has nothing to hide.”
That night on Overlook, Eric again searched the Internet for gun shows and other venues where he could buy a gun without filing paperwork. He keyed in “law on guns and felons,” and “discount guns for sale.” He checked gunauction.com, and Armslist classified listings.
The big news that day was that Governor Perry named a replacement for Mike McLelland, Judge Erleigh Wiley. “You can’t be fearful. You just have to be prayerful,” she told reporters when asked if she worried about her safety. Since the McLelland murders, Wiley’s entire family had round-the-clock guards. “You have to know that we’ve got good people that are going to protect us until justice is done. I think I can do this and not be scared.”
Perhaps Kaufman’s new district attorney would have felt differently had she known that her name hovered just below Judge Glen Ashworth’s on Eric Williams’s kill list.