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And we're live from the living room as Doug eyes up the match. Say spread. He's reaching for the buffalo wing. Perfect. Hang on. What's this? Oh, he's gone for a can of Pepsi, too.
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Incredible.
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What a finish.
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Sensational combination.
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Look at the delight on his face. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a pack of Pepsi.
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Zero sugar.
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For today's match, it's poetry in motion.
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A top cop in an East Texas town is murdered in broad daylight. A tragic, isolated incident. Or is it? On an ordinary Thursday morning In January of 2013, a prosecutor was gunned down in a parking lot a block from his own courthouse on his way to a 9 o' clock docket. Two months later, the district attorney and his wife were shot to death inside their home. Same small Texas county, two months apart. And for a while, nobody could tell who was behind these murders or when they would stop. Welcome to Crime Scene, the show where we tell the stories behind the world's most unforgettable crimes. This week on the show, the Kauffman county murders. An assistant DA Shot in the street. A district attorney and his wife were slaughtered at home on a holiday weekend. A county that armed itself and waited to find out who was next. And a killer who turned out to be hiding in the last place anyone thought to look. From Sony podcasts and the Binge, this is the story we're calling Da Killer. Hey, y'. All. Welcome to Crime Scene. My name is Jonathan Hirsch. Each week in three acts, we dive into the most shocking and complex true crime stories of our era. And each week, I'm joined by my friend and fellow documentarian, Cooper Mull. Hi, Cooper.
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Hey, Jonathan. Hey.
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Don't forget, this show is a part of the Binge, a true crime network that I head up, where each month we bring you a new limited true crime series. You can go to get the binge.com to find out more. All right, Cooper, here is the thing that makes this case so different from any of the others that we've done so far. When somebody kills a prosecutor, they're not just killing a person. A prosecutor stands for an entire system. And the idea that we settle our scores in the courtroom, not in a parking lot. So when two DAs die in eight weeks, it doesn't just register as a murder, it sends a message.
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Exactly.
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Somebody is no longer playing by the rules that we've all agreed to live by. And the most terrifying part, in those first weeks, the message seemed to be coming from Everywhere and nowhere at once.
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Let's get into it.
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Yeah. It's the morning of Thursday, January 31, 2013. We're in Kaufman, Texas, a rural, conservative community about 30 miles southeast of Dallas. It's the kind of place where prosecutors, the judges, the defense attorneys all know each other by their first name, eat at the same lunch counters and run into each other at church. At about 8:40 in the morning, 57 year old Mark Haas park parked in his usual spot and started the short walk to the Kaufman county courthouse. Haas was a legend in the building. He's the chief assistant district attorney for the 422nd District Court. And he'd cut his teeth as a Dallas county prosecutor back in the 1980s working organized crime. He was fearless, but a casual guy. He greeted everyone the same way. Dude. Colleagues called him one of the two best trial lawyers they'd ever seen. A man who delivered his openings and closings without notes. The courtroom was his natural habitat. But this morning, he never made it inside. A masked man, head to toe in black and wearing tactical gear, came for him in the parking lot. Witnesses heard a man shouting in terror. Then the shots rang out, slow and deliberate. Five rounds. A pause, then three more. Haas was hit multiple times, including in the face. He died on the pavement steps from the building where he'd spent his career. Here's the thing. Haas was armed, but his pistol was tucked under a button jacket and he never had a chance to draw it. There was one striking clue that only made sense much later. A witness reported hearing the prosecutor say two words before he died. I'm sorry. Investigators would later call it strange, almost intimate. After firing eight shots, the masked gunman climbed into the passenger seat of a getaway car and was gone. Which told police something important right away. There were at least two people in on this. There were no shell casings on the ground, which suggested a revolver. And the whole thing had the choreography of a hit. The mask, the body armor, the precision of the shots. He's not breathing.
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There you go. There you go, buddy. Keep breathing for me. Oh, my God. It's Mark. Cassie, anybody know anything about him?
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He's one of the DA Prosecutors. Get you another breath, Mark.
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Come on.
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Hoffman county reeled, but investigators ran straight into a wall. That feels unique to this kind of a victim. When you murder a prosecutor, you don't have too few suspects. You have way too many. Mark hoss had spent 25 years putting people in prison. Every one of them had a motive, as did all of their relatives. In those first hours, police did interview a local man who had a grudge from a recent conviction. But he denied it, passed a gunshot residue test and nothing tied him to the scene. A huge task force began to grind through a quarter century of people haas had put away. But without a shred of physical evidence tying any one of them to the scene. It was tough going. Then came easter weekend. In the pre dawn dark of Saturday, March 30, someone came to the home of District Attorney Mike McClelland, out in the rural talty area near forney. Mcclelland was the man at the top. The elected d. A. 63 years old barrel chested former army major who wore a big black cowboy hat and kept guns all over his house. After haas was murdered, McClelland had publicly dared the killer to come for him. I hope that the people that did this are watching. We're going to find you, we're going to pull you out of whatever hole you're in and we're going to bring you back and let the people of kauffman county prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. Eight weeks later, though, McClellan was dead. The home security records would later mark the attack at about 6:40 in the morning. The killer was inside for under two minutes firing off an assault rifle. Roughly 20 shots in about a minute. McClellan's 65 year old wife Cynthia was also there. She was killed first. Mike was shot more than a dozen times. Their bodies weren't discovered for roughly 12 hours. A family friend had been trying to reach Cynthia and when she couldn't, she drove to the house with her son, a Dallas police officer. They found the front door unlocked, which didn't make any sense for a d. A that had been on high alert because of this other killing. They found shell casings on the entry floor. Sheriff David burns put it plainly, quote, in my 40 years of law enforcement, I've never seen anything like this. Now the pattern was undeniable. This wasn't a one off score being settled. Somebody was hunting the people who ran the kaufman county justice system. If these armed prosecutors weren't safe, then who was? News helicopters descended on the county. The nation started paying attention. And we begin on this Saturday night with breaking news. Kaufman county district attorney Mike mcclelland and
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his wife have been found shot to
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death inside their home. And then came the part that honestly was the most disturbing of all. A message came into the kaufman county crime stoppers tip line. Whoever sent it claimed responsibility for all three murders and included details about the ammunition and how the killings Were carried out that only the killer could have known. It opened with a line that put a chill through the entire task force. Quote, do we have your attention now? There was more. Another anonymous message demanded that a Kaufman county judge resign and threatened more attacks if the demand wasn't met. A deadline was set. The man said, quote, we are not unreasonable, but we will not be stopped. And whoever sent it routed it through a decentralized network to hide its origin. This killer and his accomplice were strategic, they weren't taking chances, and they were cocky enough to demand a judge step down. Authorities were being taunted on a clock by a killer who said this was nowhere near over. Cooper, we cover a lot of murders on this show, But I've got to say, statistically, the targeting of a sitting prosecutor in this country is vanishingly rare. And there's a reason it horrifies people in a way that a lot of equally violent crimes don't.
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When you assassinate a prosecutor, you're not just ending a life, you're almost. There's, like, the symbolism to it, right? You're attacking the thing that's supposed to make vigilante justice unnecessary in the the first place, Right?
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Yeah, it's so true. McClellan didn't treat Hoss's murder like a personal tragedy. He treated it like a declaration of war, we're gonna pull you out of whatever hole you're in, type of vibe.
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Yeah, and that's just such a gut punch, knowing what comes for McClelland next, right? I mean, he understood the threat to say it out loud on camera. And then it came for him.
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And by that Monday after his death, the Kaufman county courthouse, the square looked like a military encampment. Every member of the DA's office was under armed guard. Judges were carrying pistols to the bench. And the working theory in law enforcement and in the national press at this point was that maybe this had been a white supremacist prison gang. And a warning issued weeks earlier that the killing of public officials had only just begun. Coming up, a federal bulletin warns of mass casualties. Here's something kind of alarming. Apparently, three out of four homes in the United States have toxic chemicals in their tap water. And the problem is contaminated water still looks completely clear. We're talking about things like chlorine, lead forever chemicals, even microplastics. And a lot of standard pitcher or fridge filters don't remove most of it. That's why Aqua Tru caught my attention. Aqua Tru is a countertop water purifier that's tested and certified to remove 84 contaminants from your water using a patented four stage reverse osmosis purification system. And the nice thing is there's no plumbing or complicated installation. You just plug it in and use it. Aqua Tru has been featured in places like Business Insider and Popular Science and has even been named Best Countertop Water Filter by Good Housekeeping. Plus, 98% of customers say their drinking water is cleaner, safer and healthier. Head to aquatrue.com and get 20% off your purifier using promo code Aqua Crime Scene. Aqua True even comes with a 30 day best tasting water guarantee. That's aquatru.com, a Q u a t r u.com promo code crimezine if you've tried to quit smoking or vaping and somehow just keep ending up right back where you started, maybe the problem isn't you. Maybe it's how you're trying to quit. Because vaping isn't just about the nicotine. It's about the habit. It's reaching for something. When you're stressed, bored, driving, taking a break, patches and gum deal with part of that. And quitting cold turkey can leave you relying on your willpower alone. But those hand to mouth routines, those are really hard to shake. That's why Fum is so interesting to me. Fume is a flavored air device designed to help people quit vaping and smoking by giving your hands, mouth and brain something better to reach for when cravings hit. No nicotine, no vapor, no batteries. The first thing that surprised me is that it feels like a real object. It's weighted, well made, honestly, kind of satisfying to fidget with. You can draw through it throughout the day, and the mint core gives you that fresh breath feeling and a little bit of that throat hit. It's not as intense as vaping. And that's exactly the point. I'm a Chris Mint fan because it's clean and refreshing, but don't sleep on peach blush. It's a little unexpected. Over a million people have already used Fume to quit differently. Join them today and grab a Journey Pack. Plus get a free gift purchase by using the code. Crime Scene Addiction is really good at saying later. Don't let it. Head to trifune.com that's T-R-Y-F-U-M.com and use code Crimescene for a free gift with your first purchase. Thank you to Fume for sponsoring this episode.
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Okay Jonathan, so this is where we are. Yeah, in the spring of 2013 in the space of two months in Kaufman County, Texas. They've lost an assistant DA, their elected district attorney, and the DA's wife. All murdered. The killer has taunted investigators through the tip line, demanded a judge resign, and even promised more mayhem. But nobody's been arrested yet. And an entire county of prosecutors and judges are now showing up to work in body armor, wondering if they're next.
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Yeah, Cooper, how do you investigate a case where the victim's own profession gives you a suspect list that's 25 years long? For weeks after Haas's death, that was exactly what the problem was. The investigators were looking at everyone he'd ever prosecuted, but kept coming up empty. But one lead did keep rising to the surface. Months before Haas was killed, Texas law enforcement had circulated a bulletin warning that high ranking members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a violent white supremacist prison gang, were issuing orders to inflict, in the bulletin's words, mass casualties or death on law enforcement. And Kaufman county prosecutors had repeatedly helped indict dozens of alleged Brotherhood members on racketeering charges. So here was a credible, organized enemy with a documented grudge against exactly these kinds of officials and an active warning on file that they were planning to kill. The Aryan Brotherhood theory got even more convincing. On March 19th, right between the two, Kaufman attacks, the head of Colorado's entire prison system, Tom Clements, was shot dead when he answered his own front door 800 miles away. The man who killed him was a paroled white supremacist named Evan Ebel, tied to a gang called the 211 Crew. He had also murdered a pizza delivery driver, and days later, he died in a high speed shootout. With law enforcement in Texas not far from Kaufman. Nonstop news starts with new cell phone video showing the dramatic Texas shootout that brought down a Colorado murder suspect. And 7News obtaining documents that outlines key evidence possibly linking several criminal cases. FBI offices in Dallas and Denver started comparing notes to the investigators working it. The picture seemed straightforward enough. A coordinated white supremacist campaign was assassinating justice officials across state lines. And Texas was the front of that line. This is when the massive task force assembled. Kaufman police, the sheriff, the Texas Rangers, FBI, atf, US Marshals, dea. Running out of a compound post in an old National Guard armory. This all happened in a town with a population of less than 12,000 people. At its peak, the investigation logged more than 20,000 person hours. Governor Rick Perry put up a hundred thousand dollar reward. Today I'm announcing that my office is offering a cash reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to the capture and indictment of those responsible for the deaths of Mr. And Ms. McClellan, as well as Mr. Hasi. Reporters camped in the courthouse square. Everyone had settled on the same story. By now. A gang had declared war on Texas law enforcement, and Kaufman was the front line. And it was wrong, every single bit of it. Because when investigators actually ran this Evan guy down, the timeline didn't hold. He wasn't in Texas when Hoss was killed. He couldn't have been the masked man in the parking lot. One by one, the gang leads that had consumed weeks of work and a nation's attention dissolved. It did nothing. So investigators went back to this huge list, the 25 years of defendants, and they started doing the unglamorous thing of cross referencing them all. Not who hated Haas, necessarily. Not who hated McClelland. They asked who had reason to hate them both specifically, at the same time. And that is when they got lucky. There was exactly one defendant that Mark Hoss and Mike McClelland had ever prosecuted together. One as a special prosecutor brought into the case. Bill Werski would later put it, the answer had been there in plain sight the whole time. In fact, when Wirsky and his partner, Toby Shook, were driving out to the McClellan murder scene that first night, before any of the gang theories collapsed, they reportedly turned to each other and said nearly the same thing at the same time. It must be that JP A justice of the peace, Not a cartel or a prison gang. A local elected judge, a man with a law degree who had stood in that very courthouse, who had been prosecuted by both victims over a petty theft. He'd even gone on camera after the murders, giving interviews in which he calmly denied any involvement and discussed the case. He was a talking head, commenting on the very killings he had committed. Chilling. Investigators had learned he'd lied about using his official access to county databases to look up the home addresses of the very people who were now dead. His name was Eric Lyle Williams. People described him as a friendly, baby faced guy, A rising star in the local legal community. He'd been married to the same woman for about 15 years at this point. And once they started really looking at him, the question stopped being who could have done something this calculated? And became something much more unsettling. How had this local been plotting against his former co workers the entire time? Okay, Cooper, so I think the thing that can slow you down in understanding this case is to look at the cops as being incompetent for not seeing this all along. But you have to remember that this Aryan Brotherhood Lead was pretty good. It was a reasonable thought that any investigator in the country would chase down, knowing the history of this organized crime group.
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Yeah, I mean, the crime, this crime feels enormous. Right. It makes sense that your brain reaches kind of for an outsized villain to match it. Right.
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How else would two established members of law enforcement be summarily killed, one in broad daylight?
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Yeah, there's something about this. Almost like conspiracy. Like a lone man with a grudge feels almost too small to have pulled this all off. Right? It's. Yeah, it's a. A static mismatch, in my opinion.
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I totally see that. And there's also, you know, a precedent there with the Aryan Brotherhood where it would make sense. You know, weeks of manpower, this national panic. Officials across the country are demanding security. People are really freaked out when something like this happens. So this killer had not, by his own design, stepped into this larger discourse, and people weren't looking for him. They were focused on what they thought was a much bigger case about organized crime.
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Yeah, and meanwhile, the actual guy is, like, at home watching the coverage of this.
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Yeah. I mean, and that's what is so arresting about this story, Right? That stays with you. We tell ourselves that someone who murders multiple people is a monster, that he must have these uncontrollable urges that pushed him to kill. But in this case, the motive is incredibly human and shockingly specific. So to understand how Eric Williams ended up in that parking lot in a mask, you have to go back past the body armor and the napalm and the hit list to something almost absurdly small. A locked county storage room and three computer monitors. And about $600. Coming up, the man behind the deadliest attack on the American justice system in a generation turns out to be one of its own.
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Your bill, ladies.
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I got it. No, I got it.
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B
Seriously, I insist.
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I assisted first.
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Okay.
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B
Rock, paper, scissors for it. Rock, paper, scissors.
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Shoot.
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No, The Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card. Visit Wells Fargo.com ActiveCash Terms apply
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to bring everyone back. Before we get into this third act, the Aryan Brotherhood theory is dead. The Colorado killer's been ruled out, and the investigators have landed on the one person both murdered prosecutors had ever taken to trial together. A former justice of the Peace named Eric Williams. So I gotta know about this guy. What. What caused this intense grudge?
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So Eric Williams was by every conventional measure, a respectable man. He was born in 1967 in Texas. He'd been a boy Scout, played in the school band, gone through an ROTC program, earned a law degree. He served in the National Guard.
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He.
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He practiced law in Kaufman County. And In November of 2010, the voters made him justice of the peace For Precinct 1, an elected judicial seat that as one writer put came with power. One attorney called him thoughtful, considerate and kind. But the people closer to him saw something underneath that. A man who believed he was the smartest person in any room, who did not take criticism or setbacks gracefully, and who nursed grievances in silence. A judge once corrected Eric Williams for over billing the county too much for his court appointed legal work. She said he did not appreciate her pointing out that fact. He didn't react well to having egg on his face. Then came the thing that broke him. 2011, barely into his term as a sitting judge, Williams walked into the county's IT storage room on a Sunday when the building was closed and walked out with three Dell computer monitors worth about 600 bucks. He was a smart guy. And later, once he went on this killing spree, took precautions to hide his identity. But not this time. The whole thing was caught on courthouse surveillance video. Williams had an explanation. He said he had taken the monitors to build out a video arraignment system for the county, that his under resourced Little JP office needed the tack, and that he was doing the county a favor. He genuinely seemed to believe he'd done nothing wrong. Anything else that you think that you may have taken? I can't think of anything. But to the prosecutors, an elected judge stealing government property on camera was simply a crime. He was charged with felony theft and separately with burglary. And here's the hinge the entire case turns on. Prosecutors offered Williams a deal, plead to a misdemeanor and walk away with his career intact. All he had to do was take it. And he refused. He was convinced he was right and convinced he could talk his way through a trial and be vindicated. So he rolled the dice. That decision is what put both of his future victims in the same courtroom. The case was tried by Assistant DA Mark Haas, with District Attorney Mike McClellan sitting second chair. The only case the two men ever tried together. McClellan almost never tried cases personally. He joined this one because his family said he was offended that an elected official would steal from the county he served. And there was a tell about who Williams really was buried in the theft trial. To establish a pattern, prosecutors put a woman named Janice Gray on the stand back in the mid-90s. She testified Williams had cornered her at a conference when she turned down his advances and said, I have a gun, and if you walk away, I'll use it. I have nothing to lose. In March of 2012, the jury convicted him of stealing those computer monitors. McClellan pushed for prison. The judge gave Williams two years of probation instead. But the sentence almost didn't matter because the conviction had already detonated his entire life. A felony conviction meant Williams automatically lost his elected judgeship, his license to practice law. He would ultimately be disbarred. And in a matter of months, Eric went from your honor to an unemployed, disgraced felon on probation. So by now, it should be clear that this was not some impulsive decision. Williams had been planning this. He came home after the conviction and told his wife, Kim Flatley, that Mark Hoss would be first. First as in there was a kill list. Which brings us to the other half of the story. Kim Williams, his better half. Kim Williams was, by her friend's description, put together Outgoing Dallas girl. She'd married Eric in 1998, and by every account, she had been completely absorbed into his world by the time of the murders. She was also deep in an addiction to prescription painkillers. When she finally described her marriage to the people who would judge it, she didn't describe being forced. She described a merger of resentments. Why did you agree to drive to the murder of Mark Hassel?
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I so believed in Eric and everything
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that he told me.
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His anger was my anger.
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And so the couple went to war over that $600. The planning was meticulous. Williams bought a used police car, a white Ford Crown Victoria that once belonged to the Irving police off of Craigslist. Under a fake name, Richard Greene. He rented a storage unit in a nearby town, putting it in the name of an old national guard buddy so it wouldn't be traced back to him. And he assembled an arsenal. On the morning of January 31, 2013, Kim drove Eric in body armor and a mask, walked up and shot Mark Hoss eight times. Then they got back in the Car. And according to Kim, Kim. The two of them drove away happy. Catherine casey is the only journalist who has interviewed both eric and kim williams at prison. She highlighted a detail that tells you a lot about how he saw himself. When he described to kim how he'd approached the haas killing, he reportedly referenced the movie tombstone and a particular gunfight in the town square the morning of the murder. He dressed all in black. Black like the gunslinger in the film. In his head, he was the hero of a western. Two months later came the mcclellans. Williams pulled up to their rural home before dawn in that crown victoria wearing a bulletproof vest and a sheriff's badge. The disguise that got cynthia to open her door to a stranger before sunrise on easter Sunday. Prosecutors would later reconstruct it in unbearable detail. Cynthia seeing what was coming, raising a hand against the bullets. Mike emerging to help his wife. And being gunned down as he retreated. Williams standing over him, emptying the rifle into him. And a final shot fired down into the top of cynthia's head. A wound she could only have received on the floor. To kim, Cynthia mcclelland was simply, in her own cold words, collateral damage. A witness who couldn't be left alive. Did he describe to you the final
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moments of mcclellan's life? He didn't tell me about mike, but
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he told me about Mrs. McClellan. What did he tell you about how Cynthia mcclellan died?
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He told me that he had to shoot her an extra time because she was still moaning. What is the mood and demeanor in that life?
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Found Victoria, as y' all are leaving the mccullough murder scene Happy satisfaction. And then the williamses went home and celebrated. Kim told the court they marked the murders of a district attorney and his wife by grilling steaks. Eric, she said, loved the news coverage. He was glued to the TV and the computer, Watching a terrified county and a national press chase. A phantom gang. That hunger for the spotlight is also what undid him. The taunting crime stopper's message. Do we have your attention now? The one routed through the dark web to hide his identity. He sent it from his own computer. When investigators searched his home on April 12, 2013, live on national television, they found gun parts, scopes, even a thermal heat seeker device police suspected he meant to use to hunt human beings in the dark. They found the title to that white crown victoria in his name. And they found a small scrap of paper with the crime stopper's login codes written on it, Tying him directly to the killer's own taunt. A special prosecutor, bill Wirsky later put it, they knew instantly that Eric Williams was the man who had been mocking them. It was enough to arrest him for making a terrorist. The murder case broke open the very next day. When the National Guard friend saw the televised search, he recognized what was happening and called the police to say he'd rented Williams a storage unit. The investigators eventually recovered that Crown Victoria that was used in both of the crimes. Tactical gear, bulletproof vests, more than a dozen fake police badges and uniforms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and an arsenal of firearms. Reports vary, but as many as 64 guns were eventually put on display. At trial, there was a crossbow, jars of homemade napalm, and surveillance video from the storage facility showing the white car leaving and returning in a one hour window when the McClellan murders happened. The rifle investigators suspect he had used to kill the McClellan's wasn't found though. But a smoking gun was. Inside the unit, investigators found a single live AR15 rifle round. A firearm examiner testified that microscopic tool marks proved the same weapon had cycled both that live round in Williams storage unit and the spent casings left at the McClellan murder scene. Even without ever recovering the rifle itself, they could put the murder weapon in Williams hands. After Williams was arrested, his wife agreed to speak to the FBI and eventually confessed. Eric was the shooter in all three killings. She was the driver. And the motive was exactly what it looked like. Revenge for the theft case. She led investigators to a bridge over a lake where she said Eric had thrown evidence. The night of the McClellan murders, divers pulled up two pistols, a black mesh mask, and a mangled cell phone. Ballistics confirmed one of those pistols had been used to kill Mark Hoss. But the detail that haunts this case most isn't about the murders that happened. It's about the ones that didn't. Because Kim told investigators that the killing was never going to stop with three, Eric's kill list continued after the McClellans were killed. Were there more on the hit list? Yes. Who is that?
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Early Wiley.
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And who else?
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Judge Ashworth.
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How did he tell you he was gonna kill Judge Ashworth?
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He was gonna wait until after super bowl and he was gonna wait for him and shoot him with the crossbow.
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The next name on it was a former district judge named Glenn Ashworth, whom Williams believed had leaked information that helped convict him. The plan Kim described for Ashworth is almost too grotesque to say out loud. Ambush him, shoot him with the crossbow, then cut his stomach open and pour the homemade napalm inside. Also on the list, Judge Wiley the one who had called him out for overbilling the county. In a final irony, she was appointed the New Kaufman County DA. After McClellan's death, prosecutors were certain if Eric and Kim Williams had not been arrested, more people would have died. The trial moved to Rockwell county at the defense's own request to escape the saturation of coverage. Williams was tried first only for the capital murder of Cynthia McClelland, charged as a murder committed during a burglary, the element that made it a death penalty case.
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Cynthia McClelland died for two reasons.
- [36:20]
B
She died because she was married to Mike McClelland, and she died because this man didn't want to leave a witness to a murder. Justice in this case is to find that man guilty as charged in the capital murder of Cynthia McClellan. It opened on December 1, 2014, with Williams sitting through it clutching a paperback bible. The state's case was almost entirely circumstantial. No eyewitnesses in this phase, no recovered rifle, no DNA at the scene. But over three days and 28 witnesses, the prosecution wove the alias, the storage unit, the the vehicle swap, the tool mark match and the dark web taunt into a net there was no slipping out of. The defense barely cross examined and rested without calling a single witness. On December 4, the jury was out for roughly 90 minutes before he came back guilty. The smirk witnesses said fell off of Williams face. We the jury unanimously find the defendant Eric Lwin guilty of capital murder is charged in the indictment. On December 18, 2014, the jury sentenced Eric Williams to death. He was sent to Texas death row that same day. Mr. Williams, the jury having found you guilty of the offense of capital murder, now the duty of this court to assess your punishment death. And as is always the case in these stories, it landed hardest on the people that were left behind. Mark Haas was 57. He had never married and had no children. But the people who grieved him were his elderly mother and the tight knit circle of Texas prosecutors who considered him one of their own. Mike and Cynthia McClellan left behind a house full of children and grandchildren. And at the sentencing they faced him one by one. Cynthia's son, Nathan Foreman, told the court there was a hole in his life that he could never fill, that he could never forgive and could not forget. Mike's son, J. R McClellan, told Williams he would be there to watch him die. And judge Mike Snipes, who had presided over all of it, turned from the killer to the county himself. He said, quote, to the people of Kaufman county, I know you have Been scared the last couple of years, and there's no reason to be scared anymore. Kim made her own deal on December 30, 2014. She pled guilty to her role in the murders and was sentenced to 40 years. During the victim statements, Mike McClellan's daughter, Christa Ball, spoke directly to her. You started our family in a whirlwind that.
- [39:01]
A
It's been the worst nightmare ever.
- [39:05]
B
You took people out of our family.
- [39:08]
A
And what, you.
- [39:08]
B
Why you thought you had the right to do that? I will never understand. Never, ever. Okay, Cooper, this is one of those cases where we know who did it, how, and why. But it's still hard to reconcile how Williams killing spree was even remotely proportionate.
- [39:27]
A
I was thinking about that, too. I mean, this is like three Dell computer monitors. It's over $600.
- [39:33]
B
It's like a going postal type of moment, right?
- [39:37]
A
Yeah.
- [39:37]
B
Even something like the Aryan Brotherhood has aims that you can at least figure out. $600 worth of monitor equipment.
- [39:47]
A
His logic was, like, entirely internal, Right.
- [39:50]
B
It was his own world. I mean, it's clearly a narcissist. He enjoyed the coverage.
- [39:54]
A
Yeah. I mean, and every single escalation of his was a choice, like, take the misdemeanor, dude. Like, drop the appeal and move on. He chose over and over to, like, keep upping the ante in this. Right. Like, there's a world where he could have just never even had to have these resentments to begin with.
- [40:13]
B
And the fact that it was so deeply planned and that this was just the beginning of a much longer murderous trail to be plotted out for him himself.
- [40:25]
A
And then there's Kim, who I can't stop thinking about. Right. Like, the defense for her is real. Like, she had the painkiller addiction, a domineering husband, you know, marriage that the prosecutors called horribly toxic.
- [40:39]
B
Right.
- [40:39]
A
You know, she's like. She felt like she aligned with his resentments. His anger is my anger. Whatever. But she also drove the car.
- [40:49]
B
She did.
- [40:50]
A
And waited in the parking lot. Well, you know, he emptied a revolver into a man, so I don't know.
- [40:58]
B
And she celebrated with him. She was along for the ride.
- [41:01]
A
I. Yeah. I mean, there's also an argument to be made that, you know, she was his last victim. Right. I mean, if she was coerced, that is. But I don't think this case really, truly answers that. We just have to kind of live without knowing what their dynamic was like there.
- [41:15]
B
We sure do. And Eric Williams himself is, by the way, still Alive more than 12 years after he was sentenced to die. As of early 2026, he's on death row in West Livington, Texas. No execution date has been set. He still insists he never killed anyone and is fighting to overturn his death sentence in federal court. His current lawyers argue that earlier defense teams were buried under a roughly 25 terabyte discovery data dump, nearly 16 million files, and that newer science undercuts the ballistics and the DNA used to convict him. In January of this year, a federal judge gave the state of Texas more time to respond, pushing the next deadline into February. Kim Williams, for her part, remains in prison, eligible for parole in 2034. Their divorce was finalized in 2018. Okay. Also, a respected judge is humiliated. Over $600 winds up in court. And to exact revenge for that courtroom defeat, he murders three people, execution style, and his wife drives the getaway car, and they go home to celebrate with some steaks. A whole country spent weeks thinking the Aryan Brotherhood was to blame because the truth felt too small to be monstrous. But I'm curious. The question I feel like we're left with is what? What level of involvement did Kim Williams really have? Was she the victim that we don't know in this case, or was she truly the accomplice? Tell us what you think.
- [42:50]
A
Okay, Jonathan, before we go, we are two episodes into the latest binge title, the Poet we are. And after listening, I think what strikes me the most is this is a series that is about an infamous serial killer, BTK killer, someone we all already feel like maybe we know a lot about. Yeah, but in the first two episodes, this has already taken a wild turn, and I've learned so much more that's never been reported.
- [43:16]
B
Yes, that's very true. So by episode two, Ruth, the Witchita woman, who has been getting these threatening letters, she gets kidnapped. And this case that was once a kind of a low priority for the Witchita pd, it starts to escalate and things get crazier from there. So if you want to hear the whole thing, subscribe on Apple Podcasts to the binge or go to getthebinge.com and you can listen to the whole series Right now. The letters that she receives are certainly way more than creepy, and we get into all of that. As you start to make your way
- [43:54]
A
through the series, listen along with us.
- [43:56]
B
Hey, y', all, thank you so much for joining us on Crime Scene.
- [43:59]
A
Thank you.
- [44:00]
B
Just a reminder here, you can watch or listen to us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is a production of Sony Podcast and the binge. Thank you to everybody who makes this happen week in and week out. Also, we're journalists. We love journalism. These stories have been deeply reported, the ones that you hear on the show. And you can find an extensive bibliography by going to the show notes of this episode and to every episode to learn more about the reporting that informed all of the great stories you hear on Crime Scene. And just one last note, you can get exclusive content from us and the binge over 60 jaw dropping true crime stories bingeable and ad free right now by signing up for our patreon@getthebinge.com so go to gettheb binge.com to get access to our entire catalog of stories, but also to get behind the scenes access to all of the stories that Cooper and I are working on. To join us in the conversation about these cases, go to getthebinge.com to learn more.
- [45:07]
A
Stitch Fix Stop shopping. Get styled a plus on the outfit. Ms. Turner, you are about to slay parent teacher conferences.
- [45:14]
B
Oh these just the most perfect fitting jeans my stylist sent me.
- [45:18]
A
Oh hello you who didn't set one foot in a mall and still looks amazing. Just share your size, style and budget and your stylist sends personalized looks right to your door. Stitch Fix get started today@stitch fix.com to my stylist. This look is dedicated to you. Thank you, thank you.