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You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski. Good evening on a cold January morning, the killer executed Assistant District to Attorney Mark
Haas in broad daylight. Eight shots fired a block from the Kaufman County Courthouse. Two months later, a massacre the day before Easter, the couple slept bunnies eggs, a flower centerpiece gracing the table. Death rang their door bell and filled the air with the sound of an assault weapon discharging round after round into their bodies. Eric Williams and
his wife Kim celebrated the murders with grilled steaks. Their crimes covered front pages around the world, many saying the killer placed a target square on the back of law enforcement. Williams planned to exact revenge on all those who had wronged him one at a time. Throughout the spring of twenty thirteen, Williams sowed terror through a small Texas town in a quest for vengeance turned to deadly obsession, his intention to keep killing until someone found a way to
stop him. Book their feature this evening is in Plain Sight, the Kaufman County Prosecutors Murders, with my special guest, journalist and author Katherine Casey. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Katherine Casey, glad.
To be here, Dan, thank you for inviting me.
Thank you. This is, as I mentioned to you just before, we got on one really exciting book. Edge of your seat, page turner. I know those are cliches, folks, but this is incredible and let's get right to this incredible story. Now we start, and you start with the book where we really get a really detailed background on how this incredible disaster came to be from promising people and careers
and a small little community in Kaufman County. Let's first talk a little bit about Kaufman County and before we start talking about the the early life of our main character, Eric Williams.
Well, Kaufman is kind of a sleepy little town and it's the county seat. The courthouse is kind of an undistinguished building in the center of it, and it's surrounded by a town square with old storefronts, and it's kind of a quiet little place. But it's on the outskirts of Dallas, and it's the kind of place where people of families have been there for generations. There are cattle
ranches surrounding Kaufman Proper. It's the kind of place where Aunt Ban in the Old Mayberry series might be seen walking down the street carrying one for pies to a neighbor's house. It's, you know, not the kind of place where you would think people would be gunned down in the street.
Now, you talk about Eric Williams and not such a spectacular or eventful early life, But would you talk about high school and some of the oddness is noted by people. So tell us a little bit about some of the oddness at high school. You mentioned a briefcase, and really what his character is known for by people in that little community. What do they see and what are the first things that he does at high school towards his dreams?
Well, Eric really wanted to go into the military, and he was really geared toward that mindset. He was very bright. Eric Williams is a very smart man. He was one of the brainy kids in high school, and he was a little quirky. Instead of talking to the other kids on the school bus, he'd sit and he'd read a book. He carried a briefcase, which is unusual in a small town for a kid to do. I think it's actually unusual any place, but especially in a little Texas town.
And he was an Eagle Scout. He was really well thought of, but people did notice that he was a little odd like when he took his Eagle Scout exam, he was asked some questions, and the man who asked him the questions, a scout master, noticed that when Eric couldn't answer a question, his eyes just got kind of dark and dead, and the guy thought, there's really something wrong here, but he didn't know what it was. And then he was off to college and it was just
it continued like that. People have told me that in high school, Eric and his group of friends. He had a really tight group of friends that he played games with like Dungeons and Dragons, where they took on rolls of fictional fantasy characters. He played Star Trek, and they played different characters from Star Trek, and he was really into that. That was his life. And I've heard it referred to as being a little bit like the popular show on TV, The Big Bang Theory, right right.
You talked about too that he was very intelligent and he had got a chemistry scholarship at the Texas Christian University and he start but then he had joined ROTC and he focused on law enforcement. Tell us how he progresses in his interests for military and how that changes his direction and education.
Well, he really did want to be a soldier. Eric really wanted to be a career, career army, but the army was at a downsizing point when he was graduating from TCU and he wasn't picked up. A lot of his friends were. And Eric had always been this kid who was you know, everybody talked about how smart he was, how great he was, And this was like the first failure to I mean this, and this was a really
sad one for him. So he enrolled in a or he joined another group of like a voluntary military organization and uh then he went into law enforcement and he he was after college, he started getting jobs working for small police departments in and around the Fort Worth area where he was living at that time.
You talk about those early jobs, you say that certainly there was a disappointment in him not having a future in the military. Realized that, so you said that he applied to small police forces in Fortworth, Texas, and you talk about a suburb called White Settlement. What was the situation that he left both of those police departments.
Well, he was fired from both and this wasn't something people expected of Eric Williams. Eric was gung ho and Eric was going to be a success. And the first department he was let go after he asked to have time off to take a college class and he was denied it and then he called in sick and just didn't shook for work to go to the class. But
the second one was more troubling. One evening, Eric and another police officer, instead of circulating through town as they were supposed to be this is a small Texas town checking on residents, didn't do that, and it's thought that they went to a topless bar and instead Eric hacked into the fourth level of the computer system at the police office, which was the most secure and changed his report to show that he had been in town circulating
that night. The police chief got to call that night reporting and showed up the next morning, looked at the proof and confronted Eric. Eric denied it, and he fired Eric. And at the time the police chief thought that the whole thing was very odd because obviously Eric was very well schooled in how to hack into the computer, and he thought he should have been able to cover his
footprints if he'd wanted to. And the police chief thought it was almost as if Eric was thumbing his nose at them, that he wanted them to know that he'd been able to hack into the computer system and do what he wanted with it.
Now you talk about In November ninety three, at twenty six years of age, Eric moves with his friend Paul Lilly to Kaufman County, says about forty minutes southeast of Dallas, and his friend Lily got a job at the sheriff's office and they lived in Terrell and Eric began studying for a law school entrance exam. So tell us what he does in terms of he needs money, So what happens and who does he meet?
Well, Eric went into kaufmin looking for work, and work got to the county judge that there was this promising young man who'd been an Eagles scout, who'd been in law enforcement, who was looking into law school, who was looking for work in the area. And the county judge called him in and his name is Ashworth, Glenn Ashworth, and interviewed him and Eric was very impressive. He you know, he looked on paper, he looked very good. And the judge needed a new county clerk, or I'm sorry, a
clerk for his office. The clerk's act is kind of an assistant. They do the scheduling. They're kind of the gatekeepers for the judges. They do a lot of the paperwork. He sat down, talked to Eric, and he hired him. Glenn Ashworth at that point was the only state level judge in Kaufman County, Texas, and he wielded a substantial amount of power in that little community. And with that hire, Eric became aligned with one of the most powerful men in this in Coftin County.
You also talk about all of the as you mentioned, all the things that he oversaw for the judge as a court coordinator, and he wielded a lot of power just in that rule, but also what Judge Ashworth suggested Eric do was register as an unpaid reserve officer with the DA office. And once he did that, what did that enable Eric to do which was very important to Eric.
He was able to keep his gun with him to go through security and into the courthouse and even into the court room. The judge wanted him to have it. I mean, it's one of those things a lot of the you know, the bailiffs are there and they're armed, and we all have metal detectors now at the entrances at the courthouses, and this was another level of security.
So Eric liked this.
He started doing some things part time with the Sheriff's Department. He became kind of an active volunteer.
You also talk about that first summer though that there's a little, well not a little, an incident that in hindsight forebod things to happen in the future. But that first summer he attended a court coordinating a court coordinator's conference, and he met a woman named Janice Gray. What happened that summer with janis Gray.
They started dating. Eric hadn't dated a lot of girls. But he'd had a few girlfriends over the years, and he liked Janice. Janis liked him initially. She thought he was just this great guy, you know, a little quirky, kind of funny, you know. It seemed like a really
sweet guy. And they dated for a while, talked on the phone, got together even though they lived in separate counties, they lived quite a distance apart, and then something and then Janie found somebody she really really was attracted to, really cared for, and saw a future with, and she broke it off. She thought that Eric took it well.
But then they showed up at the Cork Coordinators conference that next year, and Eric came up to her and showed her a gun in the lobby of the hotel that they were staying at, and then said that he brought it to give to her son. Janice didn't want it. It kind of gave her an odd feeling. So but later that and he wanted to go out to dinner,
but she refused. Later that evening, she showed up with friends at a restaurant bar and Eric was suddenly there again, standing right beside her, and he pulled the gun out and showed it to her. He pulled her away from her friends and then showed her the gun and said, I don't have anything to lose. Her friend saw this happen and came over and got her and walked off
with her, and they reported it to the police. The police couldn't find Eric, but when they got into the conference next morning, there he was sitting in the conference room as if nothing had happened. The police took him away and brought him to the courthouse. Janice was filing charges and they talked. The police talked to the district
attorney and Kaufman, who talked to Judge Ashworth. Judge Ashworth, who assumed, and probably not unsurprisingly so, just thought that his young coordinator had done something foolish, had too much to drink and done something foolish, took responsibility for him and had him brought back to Kaufman, and Janie agreed not to go forward with anything as long as Eric left her alone.
Yeah, amazing. In the fall of ninety five, you write that at twenty five years of years of age, he began law school in Fort Worth and his future seemed really bright, and that Judge Ashworth and Eric became increasingly closer. Tell Us a little bit about this developing relationship between the two. How far did it really go and how close did they become?
You know, they were really good friends. They went out to the judge included Eric and pretty much most of the things that he did. Eric was invited into the judges home for different events when he had parties. They had lunch together every day, along with a couple of other people in Kaufman, people from the courthouse and the county surveyor. They liked Eric. The judge really liked Eric, thought he was funny. Eric did a good job for him. Judge Ashworth was proud of the fact that Eric was
going to law school and bittering his future. It got to the point where they became such good friends at one point that the judge actually included Eric as a beneficiary in his will. He just thought, Eric is this really great kid, and he was trying to help him start. He was acting as his mentor, and he obviously saw Eric as his protege and he was proud of him.
And when Eric did so well in law school and then graduated from law school, Eric actually gave the judge a plaque thanking him for what he had done for him. People in Kaufman saw the two of them as just very close friends.
You said that time, and you include though that again, he was accepted as a quirky guy with his odd smile and his behaviors, just accepted overall. They considered him a nice guy. But you include this odd statement about if he you say, if I ever if he ever decided to go out, what did he say? And in the context of how did he come up with the statement which people thought was odd?
Eric said odd things at times. You know, he was one of those guys he sat there and kind of had a little smile on his face, and people weren't sure what he was thinking. And at times he'd blurred out strange things. And there'd been a shooting someplace in the country that was in the news, and sitting at lunch one day with a group of friends, Eric said, if I ever go out, I'm going to take a bunch of people. If I ever decide to go out, I'm going to take a bunch of people with me.
And no one knew quite what to think of it, you know, I mean, it's such an odd thing to say. They knew Eric, they liked Eric, Eric's friend, They didn't think Eric would really do that. Why would Eric really
do that? So they kind of looked at each other, and then one remark to the other when they were leaving that Charles Whitman, who shot from the ut Tower in the nineteen sixties, was an eagle scout like Eric, and somebody wondered if one day Eric would shoot people from the roof of the Kaufman County Courthouse.
Wow, you talk about that. In ninety six, he was on online message board and he met someone. Tell us who he meets and a little bit about Kim Johnson's early background.
Kim was working at that point at a doctor's office. She was kind of a medical receptionist. She'd done very well in high school. Smart, pretty, big, blonde Texas hair, a great laugh. People liked to Kim. She'd gone to college, she went to SMU, decided to drop out, and was working, you know, for a doctor at that point. Kim, on the surface looked kind of like just a happy, go lucky girl. The truth was that her home life had
been pretty traumatic. Her father. She describes her father as having been abusive over the years, and the family home had not been as happy as people, you know, as Kim portrayed from the outside. So she was somebody who had kind of this undercurrent of tension in her life growing up, and she was looking for somebody kind of like Eric. She the guys she dated, she decided, were too you know, laid back, and they weren't the kind
of guys she wanted to be with. And Eric was fun, and he was smart, and she was really attracted by his intelligence. And Kim is a smart woman, and they kind of saw in each other something and in no time at all, Eric was you know. They met, they met online, and then they met in person, and they spent time together and they fell in love.
You say. Shortly after this union really seemed to change Eric around the office, and his character almost seemed to change, including some things in behavior where he lost weight, seemed to get healthier. Tell us a little bit about some of the positive changes it seemed to happen.
But once he met Ke, well, Eric's friends were a little worried about this relationship in the beginning. You know, people who meet on the internet, especially back then. A lot of people do it nowadays, but back then this was all pretty new, and people were concerned about who Kim was and you know whether or not should be good for Eric. But Eric's friends saw that he was happier. He seemed more content in his life. He was really
proud of Kim. He carried a picture of her in his wallet, had a picture of her on his desk, talk to people about, you know, how beautiful she was. And he just seemed to be opening up to life. He did. He looked healthier, life looked really promising, he was finishing law school, the future was ahead. Everything looked really good for Eric Williams.
Now you talk about that he lost weight, but that at the same time, the again, this story has got a lot of people with not good health. So what does he discover in terms of his own health. Soon after meeting Kim, well.
Had they had some bad turn of events. Shortly after they married, Eric found out he started losing weight. He started having to rush to the restroom all the time. It turned out that he had type one diabetes, and this was something that really changed his life in many ways. He had continued to be a volunteer in the Armed Services and at that point had to tender his resignation because he knew he could never be called up for active duty and things hadn't really gone very well for
Eric at that point. I mean, his life was opening up for him. His legal degree was you know, he was getting to the point where he was graduating. But he'd had all of those disappointments. The military thing, hadn't worked out, the law enforcement thing, he'd been fired at the jobs that he'd had, and now this, you know, now this health thing. And then Kim got some bad news. It turned out that she developed a lump on her
leg and she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. So both of these young people at the beginning of their lives together, you know, all of a sudden, their lives as they're turned around.
You talk about Becky Calabria, and they owned a little law office and she was one of Becky Collabria was one of the people that went for lunch routinely with Judge Ashworth and Eric. And so when nineteen ninety eight he starts working with these people, tell us what happens at this law office.
Well, at the law office, Eric signed on right after he got his law degree, as he said, and the intention was that he would work and that a percentage of whatever he earned would go toward the law firm. But Eric was a known quantity in Kaufman Car County, and so he immediately started getting court appointments and he was a good friend of the judge handing out the appointments.
Not that he was getting really special treatment from Judge Ashworth, but he, you know, he got his fair share of the cases and they started, you know, his calendar started to fill up, the money started to come in and he Eric wasn't paying Becky Calabriel what she had thought she had expected he would be paying. So there were some words that passed between the two of them, and
Eric describes it as a misunderstanding over the wages. But he left and he hung out his own shingle right across from the county courthouse and opened his own office.
You talk about the really good money that flowed in from Eric's court appointments. And in two thousand and one they bought a almost a twenty nine hundred square foot three bedroom house about a mile and a half from the courthouse at sixteen hundred Overlook with a three car garage. Tell us how close Judge Ashworth was with him.
Literally, Judge Ashworth was right across the fields at the back of the well, at Eric and Kimsey house, he had a place that was directly across that whole area. Kaufman is kind of an incubator. A lot of little towns are. But the area that the Williams has bought in was actually developed by one of the Judge's cousins. And the house that Eric and Kim bought was once owned by a member of the judges family. It was all very close.
You talk about Eric at this point indulges his interests at the courthouse, he shows off firearms and at least you say, ten or so handguns and rifles was the word around town about his weaponry. But you say, why was that not a concern?
Well, Eric had always when Eric and came married, he had about ten guns, ten firearms, and once there the money started coming in. He was buying more and he was showing them to people at the courthouse, letting them hold them. He was really proud of the guns, the rifles. He bought some ar weapons. He was really into this, and word started floating around the courthouse that Eric had an arsenal, a small arsenal in the closet at his office.
People didn't think a lot about it because this is rural Texas, and most people in rural Texas have guns. So it was something that people noted. It was something that they knew about Eric, but it didn't foster any major concern.
You talk about the political climate in this town changing, and in two thousand and two, Judge Ashworth is a Democrat facing re election in a county that's turning conservative. Tell us what happens as a result, and what is this effect? What does this change in Eric's life?
Well, the judge, Judge Ashworth, decides not to run again. A lot of Texas judges do this. They step down at a certain point after they've got all their years in and they start working on the side of visiting judges and they take life a little bit easier. So Judge Ashworth makes that decision. Eric at the time was concerned about it. But another judge, the new judge that
came in, the Republican. Judge Ashworth had been a Democrat, as he mentioned, Judge asked Judge Tigrid, who is the Republican took over, and all of a sudden things started to change a little bit in the legal community in Kaufman. Judge Tigrit started paying the contract attorneys who are working for the state more and you know, and Eric was
one of those. And Eric had decided a little while earlier to specialize in CPS cases to do family law, and he soon kind of carved out a niche for himself where he was the CPS attorney who was appointed by as guardian at lightem cases in the county. Judge Tigrit gave him a lot of assignments. It was before long Eric had real stature in the community as the CPS ad item.
You talk about too, that the Tigrit, the new judge, also increased the amount of money that he was paying to these people. So he actually didn't do worse. After Ashworth retired, he actually did better. But there is a yes. And you say that Ashworth was a visiting judge and visited courthouses and one day there was an incident with Eric again, the person that he had helped and had befriended and treated just like almost like a son. Tell us about this little incident.
Well, Judge Ashworth walked into the lunch room at the courthouse and saw Eric sitting at a table and went
over to talk to his friend. And what he saw was Eric surrounded by paperwork from the county and they were blank forms for him to fill out the hours that he spent on his CPS work as a guardian at LTEM for the on these cases that he was appointed to and Judge Ashworth was troubled when he saw that they had already been signed by Judge tygrit So Eric was filling in his time, putting down whatever he
wanted without oversight. The judge said something to him about that he shouldn't be doing that, and that night Eric sent him an email and chastised him for criticizing him and said that they couldn't be friends anymore. Judge Ashworth responded and said, well, I'm sorry you feel that way.
I always think of you as a friend. And then Eric responded and said something on the order of let's just forget about this, and the two men went out to lunch and everything continued on as if nothing had happened. But at home at the house, Kim noticed that Eric talked differently about Judge Ashworth. Where before he'd always been proud of his allegiance with the judge and talked about
what a great man he was. All of a sudden, Eric started saying he was prissy and fighting about him, and this kind of animosity was building up within Eric against Judge Ashworth.
You also talk about a woman, Sandra Howard, that worked with him, and by two thousand and five she had some disturbing emails from him. Again, you talked about his shift in how he spoke about Judge Ashworth. What was his attitude in these emails to her? What was conveyed well.
Eric was becoming a powerful person in this little town of Kaufman and in Kaufman County. He was wielding a substantial amount of influence over these cases, and he started sending emails. Sandra represented the state, Eric was representing the children as a guardian at Latam, and then there were attorneys for the parents or for the relatives, and the
most of them defense attorneys in the area. And Eric started sending out these strange emails at night in which he called the defense attorney's horrible names and talked about doing terrible things to them, and in one case actually talked threatened the defense attorney's family. Sandra didn't believe that Eric would do it. She didn't believe any of it
was serious. She kind of thought, as you know, the people in the courthouse did when he talked about if I go out, I'm going to take other people with me. She kind of took it as Eric just spouting off, letting off steam. Later, of course, they'd look at that very differently.
Absolutely, Now you chronicle the time that the first time that Eric meets Michael McClellan, So tell us who this Michael McClellan is, just a little bit of his background, and even from the start you say that they clash. So tell us why, and tell us a little bit first about Michael McClelland.
Mike McClelland grew up in that part of Texas. He grew up kind of in central Texas near Dallas, and he was a military guy. He'd been a major. He was a retired major from the US Army. He'd served time, and he'd been over in Germany and then had been in the reserves and had retired out, and he'd gone back to school and become a law a lawyer, and he signed on with the same agency that Sandra Harward worked with, and so he was representing the state of
Texas in the CPS cases. Well, Mike was the real thing. He was a soldier, he'd been a major, and Eric had always wanted to be what Mike was, and he would have thought maybe that would have been a bond between the two men. But from the beginning there was just bad blood there. They just they brushed each other the wrong way. You know, Dan, It's like walking and meeting somebody for the first time and for some reason you can't stand that person. Well, that's what the two
of them were like. Mike saw Eric as a wannab soldier, as somebody who was pretending to be what he wasn't. He was a you know, would be soldier who never
got in the army. He was a wannabe cop who couldn't work, you know, who'd been fired by law enforcement and was a volunteer soldier with the Sheriff's department, and he couldn't abide Eric Williams and around Eric, Mike kept talking about his military experience as if he was kind of showing off a little bit, and before long Sanders said it was when it was like tying two cats together with a rope and throwing them over a clothesline. They were at each other, hissing and just posturing whenever
they got together. Sandra didn't like working cases with the two of them because it was just so uncomfortable being around both of them.
How does Mike McClelland tell us a little bit briefly about how he gets to the point where these people are working and competing and at odds with each other.
Again, Well, Mike had always wanted to go into criminal law, but had no history in it. He actually had a master's in psychology and had worked as a counselor and it had done a lot of mental health law before he worked for CPS. But he decided to run for the DA slot in Kaufman County and he and his wife, Cynthia, who is a nurse, a mental health nurse at the state hospital there, very funny, kind woman who used to
break into song at the drop of a hat. They went out campaigning and they worked really hard, and Mike's family helped. He was a real underdog, but he got into the runoffs and it looked like maybe he'd have a shot at the DA's office. People would say, well, he doesn't have the experience, and he didn't. He was running against a guy who was a seasoned Dallas County prosecutor.
But Mike maintained that he didn't need experience, that the DA was a figurehead, that he ran in office, that he was a manager, and that he you know, he could do that, that he had this military experience and it would work. But Eric, who didn't like Mike, Eric who did like the guy Mike was running against, ran an ad in the local newspaper questioning Mike's character and making kind of a veiled comment about ask him why he left the state of Texas, you know where he
was working with Sandra Harwood. Well, Mike had left under rather a cloud because Mike was doing something he wasn't supposed to do at the time. He was taking court appointment cases in other counties, which was frowned upon by the state. Right, Mike lost the election. I think it was by about sixty five votes, which isn't a lot, and that letter that ran in the paper that could
have cost him the election. So at that point, if there'd been animosity between Mike McClelland and Eric Williams, there was just flat out bad blood.
Absolutely. So you talk about how he doesn't give up, and so what happens in the ensuing time for Eric and what happens in the ensuing time for Mike McClellan.
Selection comes around, and four years later and they're both running for office. This time Mike is back running for the DA's slot again against the incumbent, the guy who defeated him, the former the you know, the first time around, and Eric has decided to run for a slaughter as Justice of the Peace. There was a guy named Johnny Perry,
and it's just the piece. He was the lone Democrat in office in Kaufman County because, as we said earlier, the county had turned Republican, and Eric decided to go ahead and throw his hat and he thought that the Perry had been in that office for like twenty years, but Eric thought that he was beatable. So they were both on the ballot that year and it was a hard fought but they both won. So as that year started, I think it's twenty eleven, Mike mc clelland comes in
as the news or maybe it's at twenty eleven. Is that right, Dan, I haven't got the timetable right in front of me. Yes, yeah, okay. Eric comes in as a new Justice of the Peace in Kaufman County and Mike McClelland is the new district attorney.
Now with Eric's role as Justice of the Peace, it's very similar to a judge ship, or at least he believes it's a path ship to judge ship like Judge Ashworth. Tell us about those powers and what is Eric's behavior before we get to what happens shortly after.
Well, you know, Eric had always been one of those guys who didn't like to ask permission to do things, and he got into the Justice of the Peace office and started to change things right away. His duties were to preside over a court room. It's kind of like a junior jem. You know. They have they handle small cases, misdemeanors, they do traffic court. They you know, they have all kinds of different cases. They don't do the big cases. But he was handling the small cases in rural Texas
where there aren't corners and counties. They go out on death investigations and rule whether or not they're be an autopsy. Uh. They perform weddings and often make quite a bit of additional money. Uh, you know, performing weddings. That money is money they make on the side. And Eric, but Eric did have that rebellious stint and he started doing things on his own for the office, much of which were good.
He put up a mailbox outside to get separate mail for the Justice of the Peace office because he thought it worked better. He installed a safe in the closet, bought it with his own money, put it in. He had already done some other things with the county computers where he had tried to update them on his own without getting permission. He'd had his hands slapped by the IT department, but he didn't. Once he got in the JP's office, he started talking a lot about putting in
a video magistration system. Eric Williams loved technology. He loved computers. He was always on the cutting edge. He wanted Kaufman County to be there too. He didn't want to have to go down to the jail to read people their rights. He wanted to be able to do it over a Skype type of hookup, which a lot of the other counties in Texas were already doing. Kaufman County is a rural, slow moving county. They'd been talking about this for a long time, hadn't gotten anything done. Eric at a certain
points started to get frustrated. He wanted the changes he brought a couple of the judges, the other justices at the pieces in to his office showed him how it could work. They all liked it, but they had to go through committee. It had to go through the IT department, and Eric wasn't very patient.
You talk about these video monitors and some of the things that he wanted for this and him going not getting requests filed. Tell us what he does and how do they find out what he has done?
Well, Eric didn't want to wait for that hookup to go through, and he started kind of nosing around in the IT department with the office was in the same building that his Justice of the Peace Court was in, so during off hours, especially on Sundays, he started popping over and looking through the IT department. One Friday, there was a woman named Lorii Friimel who was working there and she had a pile of monitors next to her desk. There were about six of them, and she had her
computer up on them working on it. She left for the weekend, got back on Monday morning and three of those monitors were gone. They were brand new Dell monitors. They each cost around one hundred and eighty dollars. They were just gone. So she called around, tried to find out if somebody had taken them to deliver them to the Sheriff's department. That's where they were going, That's what they were bought for for the nine to one to one system. No one knew what had happened to them.
She pulled the videotape for the surveillance and was shocked to see Eric Williams walking out of the IT department and through the courthouse the Sunday before the day before, carrying the boxes Dell computers. He had taken them. He wanted them for his video magistration system. The next day she walks in and she sees one of them on Eric's deaths. By then, the county sheriff is becoming involved, and you.
Talk about his chief's deputy, Rodney Evans, questioning Eric. What else did they see on that videotape that struck them as very unusual and disturbing.
Well, the videotape was troubling. Eric was holding a little radio, like a shortwave radio, as if he was monitoring calls to the Sheriff's department. You know, it was one thing that he had taken the computers, but then he didn't say to Lauri on Monday. Hey, I took three computers. I'm trying them out for the video magistration system. And they found one of the computer boxes out in the
dumpster behind the courthouse. It was just odd the way Eric had done all of this, so Evans they started investigating and they put up a they get more evidence, said, Eric is going into the ITEA.
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The following Sunday, they see him leaving with something else and they show up at the JP's office with a warrant for Eric's arrest for the theft of the three monitors. They take him down to the courthouse and Evans starts interrogating him, and Eric says, yeah, I took the monitors, but one of them's in my office and the other
ones in my car. He claimed that he had returned the third one, and he says they're for the Medio magistration system, and Evan says, well, you didn't have permission to take those, and we don't have the third monitor back. So Eric is booked and charged with the theft of property.
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hundred dollars worth of monitors. Given that he had all this power, all this importance, and the powerful friends that he had, and the incredible background he seemed to have. What does Eric think is going to happen as a result, and what does happen as this progresses?
Well, Eric in the beginning tried to work something out with the DA's office, you know, and they did make an offer to him. They offered to allow him to plead to a misdemeanor, but the misdemeanor included a theft charge, and Eric believed that he would lose his law license, so he decided to go ahead and fight it. He decided he wanted to go to court. His attorneys wanted to have the case moved out of Coffman Colony, but Eric said, hey, you know, these people just elected me
Justice of the Peace. I'm well liked here, I have a lot of friends here. I'll be okay, let's do it here. And Mike McClellan wasn't about to walk back. I mean here he had Eric Williams, who'd been this thorn in his side since he got to Kaufman County. Didn't like the guy at all, and you know, he decided to pursue it. So he brought in a guy named Mark Hassey, who was one of his chief prosecutors in the office. He'd once been a really good prosecutor
in Dallas County, and they pursued the case. They took it to court. A lot of the people in Kaufman County, especially in the law community, were really unhappy with this. They didn't like that the Sheriff's department showed up in Eric's office, handcuffed men walked him out. They didn't like that.
Everything Eric held he here, you know, his his justice of the piece, his judgeship, his law license, everything was hanging in the balance over six hundred dollars worth of computers, especially when our computer monitors, Especially when one of the monitors was found in his desk and the other one was out in his car in the county parking lot. He was planning to take it to the jail. So they were upset over it. This really tore the county apart,
especially the legal community. But Mike McClellan was bound and determined that Eric Williams was going to pay for what he did.
We did not mention, and this is a very important part of the story is the importance of the Texas State Guard for Eric and for this case. So let's go just a little bit backwards and talk about his importance to Eric of the Texas State Guard.
Eric once he left lawn for once he left military after he was diagnosed with diabetes and really felt kind of at a loss, so he joined what's called the Texas State Guard. It's kind of a state militia and they do all kinds of things during they handle like security at parades, at big events. They go in when there's been a hurricane here on the Gulf Coast where I live, and they help people out. They bring in
water and food and things like that. And Eric loved it, and he was moving up the ranks and he'd actually gotten a promotion shortly before this happened. I think he was a captain at that point when he was arrested, and he was living and breathing the Guard. He used
to he had a segue. Eric had one of those little you know, those little vehicles, personal vehicles that people ride on and okay, he had when he used to go through the neighborhood in his stateguard uniform with an air weapons strap to his back and circulate around it at night patrolling the neighborhood. I mean, he had really got gotten into this so and he'd worked his way up. He was really he worked really hard at it. Well.
When he got arrested on the charges, the theft charges, he was forced to step down from that as well. He was suspended from the guard. So Eric was really looking at losing pretty much everything that was important to him if he lost this case.
You also mentioned too, just to add to this, that Mike mccolland personally mailed the video of the guards to this Austin headquarters to make sure that he was removed from State Guard, wasn't he?
You know, I think there's no question that this was personal for Mike McClelland, and certainly that was one of the things that he didn't have to do that he did as you said, he mailed, He personally mailed that to the to the State Guard.
You talk about his behavior afterwards in terms of his substantial arsenal. What happened in terms of that substantial arsenal didn't increase.
Well, all along it had been increasing. Kim said. There were she didn't know how many guns Eric had. That there were guns all over the house. There were the guns at the office. And after Eric lost the case, after he was convicted on the theft charge, much to his surprise, he was forced to he was told he was going to have to get rid of the guns. Felons in Texas and I think most states aren't allowed
to have firearms. So he was told that he that the case went the theft case was on appeal, but he was told he was going to have to get rid of the guns. He told the sheriff that he was doing that, but in truth, he had no intention of getting rid of the gun.
You talk about too, that there was so much controversy with this that Taron Davis, his attorney, withdrew from the case. And then Eric asked a friend from the Guard named John Sickle, and they had to get another person as a second chair. David Sergey, a colonel in the Guard, tell us how things proceed with this court case?
Well, they went to court with it, and Mark Hassei's a good was a really good prosecutor. He was trained in Dallas during the during the you know, I mean he handled mob cases. He handled murders and drug cases. He didn't want to handle this case. He said from the beginning that he thought it was too personal. He wanted them to bring in a special prosecutor to do it, but Mike didn't want to. Mike second chared as he
sat right next to Mark during the case. And they brought in their evidence and you know, tried to prove that Eric had done this, that he had taken this. Appealed to the jury as citizens of Coffman County, saying he's stealing from you. Batman's a thief. At one point, Mark has He pointed at Eric Williams and said, you know, he's a thief. Look at him, that's what he is.
It got pretty nasty in that courtroom. Dan and Eric was convicted on the case, and the case did go into an appeal and in the meantime Eric lost everything. It had been a gamble. He was put on probation two years probation, but he lost his law license, was taken away, He lost the JP position, which meant that he had was also looking at losing his insurance, his health insurance, and he had a sick wife with rheumatoid arthritis and he was a Type one diabetic. This was
a problem. He was no longer a member of the National or the State Guard, something he was really proud of. Eric Williams lost his life over basically six hundred dollars worth of computer monitors, two of which were on county property.
Now, Mike and Mark Hassei, what kind of relationship did they have and even after this conviction, you say that they continued, So what was that continuance of what did they do and what did they say?
Well, you know, there was this animosity in the law community in Kauflin County over this case. A lot of people were upset about the way this case had been handled, so they were spending a lot of time trying to appeal to the attorneys in the area, showing them things like that surveillance tape, saying, look, look the guy's a thief. Look what he did. And you know, Mike didn't have the background that he probably needed to be the district attorney in Kaufman County. Mark did. But Mark wasn't in
a position to tell Mike what to do. Mike was his boss, so Mark backed him up, did what Mike told him to do, and you know, the result was that Eric lost his life basically everything. Oh you know, he had no way to support himself, he had a sick wife, he had no insurance, He'd lost everything. So Mike and Mark were really good friends. They went out
to lunch off and together. You know, this is really it's kind of like like I said earlier, small town courthouses are kind of incubators, and this was festering in that courthouse and county.
Now, after this conviction, what was the response in terms of how close he lived to the courthouse and that former access he had to the courthouse and this arsenal of weapons that everybody knew.
About, well everybody knew about these weapons, and they were worried about the weapons. And one day Eric showed up at the courthouse. Remember his office is right across the street from the downtown courthouse, and they stop him coming in and they search him. So where before he'd had his own pass key, which was unusual for lawyers to get into the courthouse. Now he was so untrustworthy, so worried about that he was being treated differently when he
walked in the door. The Justice of the Peace office that he worked in was right across the field from his office, in a different direction than Judge Ashwad. They kind of made a triangle. And when in the winter, when the leaves were off the trees, you could actually see the courthouse building from Eric's backyard, so it was
just really close quarters. Another thing that happened, and I think you were talking about this earlier, Dan, I didn't pick up on it was that throughout this time Mike and Mark were making disparaging remarks about Eric to Eric's friends at the courthouse. They were voicing their opinion of who Eric Williams was. They found out about the Janice Gray incidents in Huntsville, the one where he had shown the woman the gun and said I have nothing to lose.
So they thought, perhaps rightly, that Eric was kind of, as we'd say in Texas, locked and loaded, that he was kind of on the edge, and they started to worry about Eric. They did throughout this They were worried about Eric. Mike thought. Mike, with his experience as a psychologist, thought that Eric was dangerous, that he could go over the edge and over the top. And Mark was very
worried about Eric Williams. He told a lot of friends that of all the cases he'd handled, and he'd had major criminals he prosecuted, this was the guy that scared him.
You also talk about Mark talking about running for Eric's judge ship or justice of the Peace, which couldn't have made him anything more than just more angry than he was.
You know, Eric didn't know that Mark was looking at doing that. That was something that Mark talked about with some of the people in his office. But it certainly raises the question of you know, did Mark, like Mike have a personal reason to want to go after Eric Williams. It's not that Eric shouldn't have been punished for what he did, it's the extent to which he was punished.
A lot of people in Coffin knew that he wanted to build that computer system, and that Eric had a history of trying to do things on his own without going through channels. So when you look at his intentions on this, it kind of raises the question of how personal was all of this. And Mark very wisely, he was a good prosecutor, He knew what he was doing.
He very wisely thought he should not be the one to prosecute that case, and that Mike shouldn't and that somebody from the outside should be brought in to take a look at it. But Mike wouldn't have anything to do with that.
You talk about all the punishments that happened immediately, and all the loss for him, including insurance and all the privilege, and his life has turned upside down. Yet at the same time, Mike McClelland still wanted and had asked for, and still demanded jail time for these minor crimes.
Mike was determined that he'd run on a clean up costin County you know, no favoritism in the courthouse platform. And he was determined that Eric Williams was going to pay to the full extent of the law for what he had done. And yeah, he wanted jail time for Eric. To judge didn't agree. Eric put it in Judge Mike Cichi's hands, and he did not agree, and he came back and gave Eric probation. Mike was unhappy with that,
and he told people he was unhappy with that. He saw Eric Williams as a thief and he wanted him in prison.
Now you say, meanwhile, Kim, married to Eric, is really livid about him losing his job. And she has the same blame for the people. The obvious blame for who had him was his job. And you say they're at home playing video games called Mafia Wars. But you talk about that in November. There's another bit of things to worry about for Eric. And what is that in terms of something coming from Mike McClelland again, well, they.
Found out while they were working on all of this that Eric was the head of the law library, which was a room that the attorneys were supposed to be able to use at the main courthouse and that Eric
had been ordering supplies for the library. The library had a big budget, It had like two hundred thousand dollars in the bank out of a ten dollars fee on civil cases that went into the coffers, and that he'd be having that Eric had been having supplies that he ordered from the local office supply place delivered to his office, not to the law Library. Well, actually made sense because nobody was at the law library to sign for them.
But some of the things raised questions, things like headphones that they went up and looked at the Law Library didn't find all of the things that Eric. As a matter of fact, found very few of the things that Eric had ordered through the office supply store for the law library. And they filed more charges against Eric for theft. This time I think it was for up to seventeen hundred dollars worth of misappropriation of office supplies from the county.
And despite the fact that they had already taken away everything they could from Eric, the only thing that remained was jail time. They filed those charges, and those were hanging over Eric's head.
You also talk about a very disturbing thing that wouldn't help Eric whatsoever in terms of his mental attitude. Is that his lawyer was speaking with the prosecution, and meanwhile she had her tape recorder on and recorded some of the things that they said about her client, and she transcribed those and sent copies to lawyers and to Eric. Again, just what is some of the things that they said or intimated in that conversation.
Well, that was with Mark Cassey, and he was calling Eric names, calling him a thief, saying he was dishonorable and that they were going to go after him. And you know that the lawyer representing him, he felt sorry for him because he had such an unsympathetic client. Things like that. But they, you know, Dan, they were saying things all over that courthouse and it was getting back to Eric through Eric's friends. You know, the animosity was just building. It was just building.
So they talk about the court case itself. And to add even more complication to this, Mike is not supposed to be Mike mccaugh is not supposed to be involved in this prosecution. Tell us how he does become involved with this?
Well, when he's another woman, a woman named Michelle Gosh. I'm sorry I'm losing her last name, right, now I think it's sutten, but I'm not positive. Is that righting it was second. There's so many people in this book. I think I interviewed well over one hundred people. Michelle was supposed to be second chare with Mark, but Michelle was diagnosed with breast cancer and stepped down, and rather than assigning somebody else in the office to work with Mark,
Mike decided he wanted to do it. This was one of the first criminal cases Mike McClelland had ever u the DA in this county, and he had, you know, a handful of criminal cases he'd worked over the years. It was his first in Kaufman County.
Now with this they also you talk about, meanwhile, what is Eric and Kim doing at home with all of this faced What is their behavior and what are they doing? And what is Eric researching and doing? And we soon find out planning.
Well, he starts even before the end of the theft trial. Eric is walking around the house talking about Mike and Mark. He had names for them. Oh gosh, I'm drawing a blank now, I'm so sorry, disparaging names for the two of them. He stopped calling them Mike and Mark uh and started using other terms for them, and he starts there they're playing on their computers all the time, as
he said, they've played Mafia Awards incessantly. And he also starts looking up he has he's still able to log into the Lexus Nexus account through the courthouse, and he starts looking up personal information like addresses uh and information on car registration and things like that for Mike and Mark, and you know, he's searching for information. And then he starts talking to Kim about his enemies list, the people
he plans to get revenge against. And the list has names on it that are at this point not surprising. Judge Glenna Ashworth is on the list. Early Wiley, who is one of the judges at the courthouse and who had been responsible for Eric losing some of his CPS work, was on the list, and of course high Am the list were Mike and Mark, and the sheriff was on the list. At that time, he was angry with the sheriff. He saw the sheriff as a friend and thought the sheriff should have protected him.
Now, what is the health of Kim at this time.
Well, Kim is getting sicker and sicker, and she's getting increasingly dependent on painkillers and pain medications. She starts out she's taking things like vicodin and opiates, and before long you know she's needing perkadin. She's taking more and more of these things in order to just function. She's spending an increasingly large amount of her time in bed. Parents live nearby, they've moved a block away, and when she's not in bed, she's over at her parents house, watching
over them. They're elderly and her father's dying of cancer. But most of Kim's time is spent in bed in kind of a Hayes, a drug induced haze from her prescription medication.
You talk about this list that Sam Keats talked about, and where does that list go, what happens from that list, and finally who's on the list.
Well, one day Sam Keats, who's a friend of Mike McClellan's, is in his office and a secretary comes in with a faxed list and it has five names on it, four or five names. They had five names on it, and she said, this came over. It's a list that Eric Williams supposed to is supposed to put together, and on it were the names of Judge Ash towards early Wiley, Mike Mark and a woman named Denise who runs a small newspaper in UH in the in that area, in
the Forny area, which is nearby. And Mike says, well, what am I supposed to do with this? This is some kind of a hit list. And he looks at Sam and they look at the names, and he folds up the list and he puts it in his desk drawer and then uh, you know. And but then afterward he he says, do you think I should tell these people?
And Sam says, well, yeah, I think you should. And afterward he does get in touch with Denise, the UH newspaper woman who's on the list, and says, hey, you know, Eric Williams got this list and and your name's on it, and if things start to go bad, run.
You talk about Ron Harrington After that, whenever he ran into Mark at the courthouse, he talked about Eric. Mark talked about Eric, and he said, what did he say about Eric to Ron Harrington?
He said he said that Eric was going to kill him, that he was afraid Eric was going to try to kill him. Mark started carrying a gun. Mark flew airplanes and at the small airport where he flew his plane out of When people would see him working on his plane, he'd have a He never did this before. He had
a holster on with a handgun at his side. He wore one in the courthouse at all times, registered with the DA's office as a you know, law enforcement officer, so he could bring it into the courtroom with him. He was afraid. Mark was afraid. He moved his car. He used to park his car a block from the courthouse behind the dry cleaner. He'd done that since he started in Kaufman. All of a sudden he was parking in the county lot, you know, coming at different times,
fluctuating a schedule. Mark hass he was really afraid. Eric Williams, you.
Talk about Eric and Kim, and Eric talking to Kim in this drug out state that she was sick and mostly in bed, but she shared his anger and listened to him. It's hard to say how seriously she took him, but he was talking about very serious things like assassinating these some of these people. Now, when he talked about some of these things, what did he also include in terms of preparation to do these things? What else did they do together?
Well, he started talking more and more about killing Judge Ashworth. He was really angry with Judge Ashworth. He thought that jash Worth had told Mike and Mark about the Janice Gray incident. Ashworth hadn't, but he thought that he had, so he started talking about different ways to kill the judge.
He talked about buying a crossbow, going over to the judge's house and then shooting him with a crossbow, bringing him back to the house, to Eric in Kim's house, pouring nap hom, gutting him while he was alive, pouring napalm into his stomach to kill him, and burying him in the backyard. And Eric started digging up the rose bushes in the backyard and Eric Kim walked out, So what's that for? And he said, well, I want to see if if the judge's body will fit in here.
Eric made an a palm to do this. And one day Eric came home after shopping with Eric with Kim's father at a store, and he had bought the crossbow, but then he changed his mind and he thought he'd go after Mark first, and he drove he and Kim. Kim didn't want to go with him. Kim kept saying, you know, I'm not going to do this now. She was angry at Mark and Mike. They had destroyed their lives as far as Kim was concerned. But she kept saying, I'm not going to do this, and Eric's response was
you have to, You're my wife. And Kim was afraid of Eric. She had reason to be afraid of him.
So at one point she drives them out to Mark's house out in the country and they sit down at the end of the driveway and watch the cars coming and going, and Eric hatches a plot where he's going to shoot Mark because he leaves for the office in the morning through the glass window of his truck and he thinks then that Mark's carl kind of careen off the road and hit a tree and people think he's been hit by a stray bullet.
This plan obviously changes, but we'll talk about part of this plan too, is that he had some friends in this State Guard Texas State Guard. In fact, they keep calling them captain, so there's a lot of respect from these fellow State Guard members. And he calls a fellow Guard member named Roger Williams no relation to him, but a man named Roger Williams. What does he ask him to do and what does Roger agree to do.
Eric calls Roger Williams and says that Kim's brother is moving to the area needs to put his stuff in storage, and the families asked Eric to get a storage building form to put in and or you know, storage like a garage kind of thing at a storage center, and Roger Williams agrees to go down and help Eric get it. The reason Eric says he can't do it on his own is that because of the theft conviction, that it could be searched at any time, and Eric doesn't want
Kim's family to go through that embarrassment. So Eric the other I'm serious. So Roger Williams agrees to do this with Eric goes to this storage area in Siaguville and they rent a unit. And after they rent this unit, it's kind of the size of a one car garage, you know. Roger offers to help Eric move Kim's brothers things in, and Eric says, oh, don't worry about it. It in, I'll take care of it, no problem, And you know, Roger Williams drives off, assuming that that's what's
going in that storage area. But that's not what Eric intends it for.
You're saying that Eric also logs onto the Lexus Nexus website account and searches for information about mark driver's license and where Mike mccloull lived. You talk about the bottom Mercury Sable, So they had a getaway car that wasn't their sport track black truck that also that he prepared by buying all kinds of assault and military equipment before in preparation for this. Let's get to the day that Mark hasse is assassinated.
Well, it's a cold morning in Dallas, outside of Dallas, in this little town, and Eric wakes him up that morning. She knows that it's the morning that they're going to do this. By then she's agreed because he's threatened to kill her parents if she doesn't help. And they drive into downtown Kaufman where they've left this getaway car, this Sable, and she drives him. They get in the Sable, leave the sports track Eric's car there, and they drive into town and they wait for Mark in the parking lot.
Eric has hit him under surveillance obviously because he knows that's where Mark's parking, and as Mark gets out of the car out of his truck that morning. Eric gets out of the car dressed all in black, wearing a hood with mesh in front of it over his face, and walk surround and you know, walks up to Mark. There are words between the two of them. Eric pushes and then the shooting starts. Mark has a gun on, but he's got a coat on over it, and the
coat's buttoned and he can't get to it. And Mark's a smaller man, and Eric's pushing and shooting, and he Marks takes the Eric takes the gun and shoots like it at the base of Mark's neck, straight down into his body, and Mark falls and by then Eric is used up the five shots the five bullets, and one handgun pulls out another one shoots him two more to shoots him again, shoots the bullets into the air. They get into the car and Kim drives Eric away.
Incredibly, there was a witness, somebody that knew Eric because of the situation. She thought there was a much taller and much heavier man. Eric is, of course a natural suspect. Tell us how on earth he gets away with this?
You know, in investigations like this, sometimes chance plays an incredible role, and in this case, it certainly did. When Mike McClelland hears about this, the first thing he says is at Eric Williams. He's standing over Mark's body at the hospital, and he tells the corner, the Justice of the Peace who's there looking at the body order in the autopsy, that Eric Williams did this. He told everyone
that Eric Williams had done this. But the problem was that at the same time he's saying this, there were things going on at Coffin Connie involving the Riyan Brotherhood, and there had been threats made by the Aryan Brotherhood that had been reported by different law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Texas Department of Public Safety, warning people that the Aryan Brotherhood could be coming after people
in law enforcement. So this whole situation unfolds where you have Mike McClellan telling anyone who will talk to him, and a lot of other people in Coffman County pointing the finger at Eric Williams. But the local police chief in Kaufman, Texas, who's the lead investigator on the case, he's in charge of the case, is sending the FBI the Texas Rangers and a lot of his resources off on a wild goose chase looking for evidence against the
Aryan Brotherhood or the Mexican mafia. The irony in this case is just overwhelming, man, I mean you have you know, there were so many people talking about Eric Williams and the people in law enforcement because of the circumstances, and they do have to investigate all leads. It could have been the area and brotherhood, but they're off investigating, spending most of their resources in investigating dead ends.
At the time, you say, meanwhile, Eric Williams kim is still sick and wants to be oblivious to what's going on, but still a participant in and hearing about these plans, and they has plans for the next person on his list, not content to have gotten away, been so intelligent to
have fooled all these law enforcement experts. At the same time, Mike McClelland puts an ADT securities service in his home, and this is a man that has a hundred weapons in his home and this military experience, and he still believes that Eric is the person responsible. Despite that the police, FBI profilers, and this increasingly big group of people are still chasing leads as the Riian Brotherhood and also the
Mexican cartel. Tell us how long what is going on and what happens to Mike McClellan and his wife Cynthia.
Well, this goes down for two months where they're trying to figure out what happened in this case. The FBI arrives, the Texas Rangers are there. There are a lot of people working this case, but most of them, as I said, are off investigating the Arian Brotherhood. Eric has his lawyers from the deaf case. They're a barrier against interviewing him.
He's refusing to be interviewed. This wears on, The investigation wears on and wears on and wears on, and in the house on overlook, Eric is saying to Kim, we're going to do the next one. We've got the next one coming up. He starts talking about Mike and Cynthia and she says, well, you know what if Mike's all right?
So it goes They have different scenarios again, like drive by shootings and things that they talk about, and then Eric says that he's going to kill Mike at the house the day before Easter, and what he's seeing is that the investigation is kind of winding down. It's not that they've given up, but fewer people are working. At the command station, which is a block from Erik's house, has been vacated and they've moved a smaller force into
the Sheriff's department. Easter Sunday, a lot of the detectives and a lot of the people will be with their families. They won't be working over the Easter holidays. So he sees this as his opportunity. So the next one on his list is Mike McClelland. So the Saturday before Easter, Holy Saturday, again, they get up early. Kim and Eric get up early. They go to the storage area. This time he's driving a Crown Victoria. He's dressed in full
swat gear, and they drive out to McClelland house. Kim, who's ill, is scrunched up against the door, not wanting to be there. Eric goes up to the front door, disappears inside. He's got an ar weapon with him. She
hears the gunshots. He's in there a short period of time, just rat tat tat, and he less than two minutes later, he walks back out puts his the AAR weapon in the backseat of the car and they drive off, and as he leaves, he said, she opened the door for me, which is Cynthia, and then went to get Mike and I just started shooting.
Now, they had bought a Crown Victoria getaway car, the first car they got rid of, and again chance plays a part in them being able to get We only have a couple minutes left in this interview, and we can't get into some of the more exciting things that go on afterwards. And you got to interview both of these Eric and Kim later. Maybe just in closing, you could tell us a little bit about those interviews.
You know, they were really pretty remarkable. Eric's on death row now and I spent quite a bit of time with him. I think I interviewed him five times. And he insists that he didn't do it. He says that Kim is lying. Kim turned state's evidence. Eric got the death penalty, Kim got forty years, Kim is repentance. Kim understands that they killed three people and what they did
to these families. Eric still maintains his innocence, and I think he feels entitled to have done what he did based on what he believes Eric, what he believes Mike and Mark did to him.
It was an incredible trial as well, and we didn't have time to go through it whatsoever. There is so much incredible detail. The characterization is so visual this book, and it's so exciting. You're at the edge of your seat through this entire thing, even though you know just from the description of the book itself, you know what the outcome is. But this is a very exciting book. I want to thank you very much Catherine for coming on and talking about in plain site the Kaufman County
Prosecutors murders. For those that might want to read about other work you've done. Do you have a website or Facebook page for this? How can people look at this other information about I do?
I have both on Facebook. It's my name Katherine Casey k A T h R Y n c A s e Y and my website is Katherinekacy dot com. And thank you so much. Dan, It's always such a pleasure to talk with you.
It is always a pleasure, and you've outdone yourself with this book. Incredible story and incredible writing. Thank you very much for coming on and talking about in plain site. Hope to talk to you again.
Thank you very much, than bye, good night,