The Killings in Kaufman
Two public officials dead and a
third behind bars: Politics turn bloody in a small town.
By Brantley Hargrove Thursday, May 2 2013
Mike Stone/Reuters/Newscom
Photo
A police officer salutes at an
April 4 memorial service for Kaufman County Sunnyvale
There was a time before 8:38 a.m. on January 31 when the people
of Kaufman County Dallas County
Jail mugshot of Eric
Williams.
Jail mugshots of Kim Williams.
Courtesy of the Kaufman County
District Attorney’s office
Veteran prosecutor Mark Hasse was
a pitbull in court, an acquaintance recalls.
Related Content
Former
Justice of the Peace Eric Williams Now Charged with Capital Murder in Kaufman
County Slayings
Then there is the time after 8:38 on a clear, chilly Thursday morning. If
they didn't witness the thing with their own eyes, for all anyone knew it might
have been a backfiring old pickup. But the crack split the air again and again,
fast and sharp. Word soon spread through the courthouse and the sub-courthouse
and all the little shops around the square that Assistant District
Attorney Mark Hasse, the most accomplished prosecutor Kaufman had ever seen,
was riddled with bullets and bleeding out on the cracked asphalt of the county
parking lot.
A lawyer performed chest
compressions until the paramedics arrived. She told investigators that a man in
dark clothing, wearing a hood or mask, walked right up to the prosecutor. Hasse
regularly carried a pistol because his business upended lives, and because he
believed one man in particular was a threat to his. If he carried a gun that
day, though, he didn't get to it in time. There was a brief altercation before
the man shot Hasse at close enough range that the medical examiner
found minuscule abrasions from unburned gunpowder around the entry wounds. The
killer probably used a revolver, and a .38- or .357-caliber cartridge. No spent
casings littered the ground.
The man stepped into what
witnesses described as a gray or light-brown four-door sedan driven by a second
person. They pulled away and in moments were gone. Hasse was taken to nearby Texas
Health Presbyterian
Hospital
By lunchtime, downtown Kaufman was
crawling with federal agents in navy windbreakers and Texas Rangers in felt
hats. The thwock of TV news helicopters reverberated through the
square.
On the outskirts of town, at the Kaufman
County Law Enforcement Center
"We lost a really, really
good man. He was an excellent friend and a spectacular prosecutor," he
said, his voice deep, even, matter-of-fact. "I hope that the people that
did this are watching. Because we're confident we're going to find you, pull
you out of whatever hole you're in, bring you back and let the people of Kaufman
County
Some of McLelland's friends
watched the newscast that night and wondered why — why provoke the kind of men
who killed in the light of day, a stone's throw from the courthouse?
McLelland's son J.R. said that's
just how his dad was. McLelland believed in protecting himself. He carried a
pistol too, for the same reason Hasse did. But as long as he was on the right
side of the law, he'd never cower, and he'd never varnish his words.
"We'll still make the walk.
We'll show up for work and send bad guys out of Kaufman
County
But days passed, then weeks, with
no arrests. Investigators scoured every dash-mounted camera on every law
enforcement vehicle in the county for a glimpse of the sedan that witnesses
described. They read and reread the files on every case Hasse prosecuted. He'd
had a successful career heading the organized crime unit at the Dallas DA's
office in the '80s. The list of convicts he'd sent to prison was long and
intimidating.
With little information coming
from the investigation, the media's focus quickly centered on the Aryan
Brotherhood of Texas, a violent prison gang with a presence in Kaufman
County Kaufman
County Colorado Decatur
McLelland didn't believe any of
it. He said he knew who killed Hasse, knew it in his bones. He just couldn't
prove it yet.
The knowledge would not save him.
On the Saturday before Easter, he and his wife, Cynthia, were gunned down,
the floor of their new Forney home strewn with spent shell casings. Cynthia lay
near the front door. McLelland fell in a hallway leading to the back of the
house. The home security system logged an event at 6:40 in the morning. That made sense, because McLelland
was still in his pajamas.
Kaufman had never seen the like of
it. Was this Mexico Colombia
The focus on the Aryan Brotherhood
intensified. Experts speculated about drug cartel involvement. The mystery of
the assassinations drew national attention to a county few outside of North
Texas had ever heard of. Network news satellite trucks crowded the
courthouse square to follow the unbelievable story. Lawmen were being gunned
down in broad daylight, on small-town streets, in the safety of their own
homes.
In the coming weeks, however, its
residents would be stunned by the plot uncovered by investigators. They weren't
under attack by shadowy brotherhoods or cartels. Charges would fall on one of
their own, a man the tight-knit legal community knew well. But for all this
story's twists and turns, the truth is, what happened in Kaufman could have
happened almost nowhere else. In this law-and-order county, its DA lived and
died by the laws of God and men, and the thing he wouldn't tolerate was the
violation of the public trust by those charged with keeping it. It didn't
matter how insignificant the offense. An example would be made.
The murder cases that now stain Kaufman
County
Becoming justice of the peace was
the first step toward greater elected office for Eric Williams. He had his
eye on the county court at law, and after that who knew? He was well-liked and
respected in Kaufman legal circles. His background looked sterling: a member of
Mensa; an honorably discharged Army lieutenant; a captain and weapons
instructor in the Texas State Guard; a Kaufman
County
He'd lived and breathed the law
his whole life. He came up as a lawyer in this town, first as the coordinator
for Judge Glen Ashworth of the 86th District Court, then with a
thriving private practice. He made good impressions on people who
mattered. Sandra Featherston, then the district clerk, saw him every day
when he was a court coordinator and liked his respectful manner. "He was
great to work with," she said, "always friendly and courteous."
He was a little quiet, maybe shy,
until you got him going on guns or the law. Then he came alive. His wits were
matched in equal measure by his eccentricity, at least by Kaufman standards.
His next-door neighbor Richard Mohundro said he often heard the whir
of Williams' Segway on Saturdays as he steered for his law office on the
courthouse square, dressed in full combat fatigues. Occasionally, Williams and
his wife, Kim, rode through the neighborhood together, he on the Segway, she on
an adult-size tricycle. They played video games and often went to the gun range
for target practice with a few of the many guns he owned — assault rifles and
pistols of all kinds, including a powerful Desert Eagle. Kim was a sweetheart,
Mohundro said, but sickly. She suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren's
syndrome — an autoimmune disorder that hinders tear and saliva production — and
chronic fatigue. "She'd come out some days and say she didn't hardly feel
like getting out of bed," Mohundro said.
She was a technician at the local
hospital before her failing health forced her to quit. Williams himself was a
diabetic and wore an insulin pump.
Over the years, his illness wore
him down along with his wife's. Williams' career, on the other hand, was only
burning brighter. He struck out on his own, started a law practice, handled
nearly all of the county's child welfare cases as the guardian ad litem appointed
by the court to represent children's interests. "When I first met him, he
was what I'd call the golden boy," said attorney Tina M. Hall, a former
friend and colleague. Williams wasn't the most experienced lawyer in town by
any stretch, but he was treated like an encyclopedia for family law by
attorneys with thorny legal conundrums. He looked at the law like a puzzle to
be solved. When seemingly no law or precedent offered guidance for some of the
"crazy stuff" they encountered in Child Protective Services cases,
"Eric would find something in the statutes to solve the problem,"
Hall said.
It made him cocky, she said, and
impatient. When he became director of the county law library, Williams resolved
to bring the musty, analog institution into the digital age. But the glacial
pace of the county information technology department frustrated the avid
technophile. He often complained about its director, George York.
That didn't change much when
Williams was elected JP of Precinct 1 in November 2010. The systems, he griped,
were outdated. His predecessor didn't know how to send an email. "Eric was
streamlining processes, doing a lot of good in the county," said Jenny
Parks, an attorney and friend. "IT was giving him hell. George York and he
did not get along."
There'd been talk of setting up a
video conferencing system so Williams and his fellow JPs could conduct hearings
without driving from far-flung corners of the 800-square-mile county to the
jail in Kaufman. But it was never more than talk.
That might or might not explain
what Williams was doing inside the sub-courthouse on a Sunday in May 2011 when
the building was empty. Surveillance cameras captured him wandering through its
halls, looking out of the front windows, peering into various offices and rifling
through them. Within minutes, he was carrying three Dell computer
monitors out of the county IT
"He probably thought, 'I'll
get the parts for this magistration system myself.'" Parks said.
But not everyone saw it that way.
York, the IT director, looked at the footage and saw theft. He turned the tapes
over to the sheriff. Within a week Williams' friend Ernie Zepeda, a
sheriff's investigator, showed up at his office with warrants.
"... He said, 'Well, let me
see the warrants,'" Zepeda testified. "I said, 'Judge, you don't
understand. These warrants are for your arrest.'"
Williams looked stunned. He asked
Zepeda if he was joking.
"... I said, 'Judge, I
wouldn't joke about this. These are actual warrants issued by Judge Chitty for
me to search your office, your vehicle and also for your arrest for burglary of
a building.'"
Williams insisted there was a
simple explanation for all of it.
"Right now, we're gonna take
you to the sheriff's office, and we can talk about that there," Zepeda
replied.
One monitor was right there on
Williams' desk, one was in the closet, and the last was in the back seat of his
pickup. Williams was cuffed, taken to the jail, seated in a small, windowless
room, interviewed and processed — a sequence he knew well, only this time, he
was on the other side of it. His arrest was front-page news in Kaufman. The
legal career, the elected position he'd held for less than five months, the
good name he'd made for himself, the health insurance he needed for his wife —
all was gone, everything, for what he said was a misunderstanding over three
computer monitors. They were worth less than $500.
Mike McLelland believed he had a
mandate. The people of Kaufman County Dallas
But his opponent had the
endorsements: the sheriff, the district clerk, the defense bar. The race was
close, but Harrison won by the slimmest of margins. As
McLelland drove through the county, retrieving his campaign signs, it was like
he was picking up the broken pieces of a dream.
He was back in 2010, more
determined than ever. "He worked the hardest of any candidate I've ever
seen," said a friend, Randy Lockhead. The race got ugly. McLelland, Harrison
said, was completely unqualified for the job. He hadn't tried a case in years.
McLelland sent out mailers with Harrison 's mugshot from
his second drunken-driving arrest. How could a man uphold laws he violated?
McLelland asked.
This time, Kaufman
County
Those weren't empty platitudes.
McLelland lived by a code. He was a God-fearing man who attended First
United Methodist in Terrell. The first Sunday of each month, he taught
Bible study, where he usually shared a Diet Coke with Cynthia. They
sang in the choir together, and the preacher recalled watching McLelland pluck
the sermon from his Bible, appraise it and loudly announce, "Get ready,
it's gonna be a long one today." Then he'd file out with the rest of the
choir into the chapel, with its creaking wooden pews and the stained-glass
windows that softened the midmorning sun. And while the preacher delivered his
sermon, an oscillating fan beneath the piano would billow their bright blue
robes. When the McLellands stopped singing in the choir, they usually sat with
the rest of their Sunday school class on a pew in the back corner.
The laws of men and God were clear
to him, and they shaped the way he viewed the world.
"The right thing is gonna be
done," said his son J.R. McLelland. "There's right and wrong,
and there's the law. No ifs, ands or buts about it, no bullshit."
His life had been marked by
discipline and hard work. He was a rancher's kid and a retired Army major who
ran an orderly household. "His life was extremely structured," J.R.
said, right down to the way he arranged his closet.
Yet his professional life was
characterized by incoherence. He was a clinical psychologist who counseled
troubled juveniles. Later, in Dallas
He yearned to be part of the
criminal justice system, and he saw his chance as the district attorney.
"I remember him being so anxious to get in there," J.R. said.
"[Mike] wanted it for a long
time," said Tonya Ratcliff, a friend and the county tax assessor.
"He didn't talk about it as a power play. It was always, 'I want to be
where I can do the most good.'"
And once he had it, he didn't
clean out the office, didn't fire anyone. He wanted to articulate a vision and give
his prosecutors the discretion they needed to carry it out. "Mike's
philosophy was: Every victim deserves to have their case prosecuted. If it's a
good charge, we'll prosecute it," said Bruce Bryant, McLelland's
friend and chief investigator. "He didn't like crime, corruption, and
didn't believe we should have to tolerate it."
He wouldn't try cases like his
predecessor, and truth be told, McLelland wasn't experienced in criminal law.
Most often, he walked around the office, chatting with his prosecutors, always
carrying a Texas Longhorns insulated mug rattling with ice and Diet Coke.
Hasse, who was hired by his opponent, became McLelland's right hand, his chief
felony prosecutor.
Hasse cut his teeth in the Dallas
DA's office, prosecuting every kind of felony case you could imagine. A Rowlett
woman with a troubled marriage was the sole survivor of a house fire that
consumed her husband, a house guest and her two daughters in 1985. Hasse
convinced the jury that she doused her husband with gasoline and burned him.
"We alleged the accelerant she used was a deadly weapon," said Marcus
Busch, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney and former colleague.
"And that was the first time that had been done."
Hasse could compose a closing
argument in his head and deliver it to a rapt jury without notes, never
stumbling. "I've only seen one other lawyer better in the courtroom in my
30-plus years as a Dallas
That he was in the courtroom at
all, though, was a minor miracle. In 1995, Hasse participated in a Freedom
Flight to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. He was
piloting a single-engine T-6 used to train Air Force pilots during the war. The
engine failed, and Hasse made a forced landing in Virginia
The broken bones healed. He was
left with an indentation that creased his temple. The damage to his short-term
memory lingered. Hasse had to relearn how to remember. He worked at it, Busch
said, and soon was trying cases again in private practice. But the call of the
DA's office beckoned, and Hasse couldn't tell Rick Harrison no when he asked
him to lead his felony division in Kaufman. He still saw himself as a guardian
who fought for the victims who couldn't stand up for themselves. He couldn't
say no because he believed there was no greater calling.
In that respect, he and McLelland
were an ideal pair. "[Hasse] was the most black and white guy you'd ever
see," said Eric Smenner, a defense attorney who occasionally faced
off against him in court. "He was going to follow the rules whether it
helped him or hurt him."
That didn't mean he wasn't
aggressive. "If Mike McLelland was a bulldog, Hasse was a pit bull,"
said County Judge Bruce Wood.
It was risky, then, for Eric
Williams to spurn the deal Hasse and McLelland offered him: plead guilty to a
Class A misdemeanor and resign as JP.
"The deal with Eric Williams
got out of hand," said a Kaufman attorney who once employed Williams.
"He had an opportunity to resolve the situation, but he was the one who chose
to go to trial. The DA's office was bending over backward. He could have walked
out with a deferred misdemeanor."
But Williams was as stubborn as
McLelland and Hasse. He said he hadn't committed any crime, and insisted on a
jury trial, where his peers, not a DA who he believed nursed a grudge, would
decide his fate. If he wouldn't take their deal, which McLelland and Hasse
thought more than generous, they would go after him as hard as the law allowed.
McLelland sent letters to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct and to the
Judge Advocate General's office of the Texas State Guard at Camp
Mabry
The DA normally didn't intervene
directly in his prosecutors' cases, but he took an interest in this one. He
said he wanted to see Williams behind bars. There was no graver offense, he
would say, than violating the public trust. Williams' attorneys saw it
differently. They would argue McLelland was pursuing a stale political
vendetta. Each side clung to its convictions, its own aggrieved sense of
justice. Neither would give ground now.
David Sergi, Eric Williams'
attorney, tried to have McLelland kicked off the theft case before the trial
even began. "The indictment of Mr. Williams was not the result of a crime
having been committed as much as it was an attempt to settle a political
grudge," he argued. On the witness stand, he asked McLelland about a
letter Williams wrote during McLelland's failed 2006 run for the DA's office.
It questioned McLelland's Republican bona fides and hinted obliquely at a
troubled work history. "You must ask for a better explanation from Mr.
McLelland as to why he no longer works for Child Protective Services," it
read. The DA brushed it off.
"Well, I never attributed
that to him," he responded in his characteristically blunt manner. "I
attributed it to Rick Harrison, who simply found somebody dumb enough to sign
it."
Judge Michael Chitty declined to
disqualify McLelland. The trial began March 19, 2012. Hasse laid out the
evidence in painstaking detail. He told the jury about a pending charge against
Williams for allegedly buying $1,700 worth of personal office supplies with
money from the county law library. Sergi, meanwhile, claimed portions of the
security videotape were missing — portions that might show his client returning
the computer monitors. He noted that none of the monitors or office supplies
were ever found in his home or his law office.
"The DA will get up here next
and paint an evil picture of Eric," Sergi said. "He's not evil. He
was trying to save the county money, and he did it the wrong way. He bulldozed
his way in. There is only one verdict you can come to: not guilty."
McLelland, for the first time
since he took office, decided to make the closing argument himself.
"...You have to be able to show everybody else out there that the people
of Kaufman County will not tolerate this from their regular citizens or their
leadership, elected or not elected," he said. "He took an oath to do
just that. He spat on that oath. He took an oath to protect as an officer. He
spat on that oath. I take umbrage with both of those."
The jury took less than four hours
to find Williams guilty.
McLelland appealed to the judge to
send Williams to prison for two years, the maximum sentence allowed. "He
took all kinds of different oaths. He didn't honor any of them. He's a man
bereft of honor. [The citizens of Kaufman County] see that too. The guy swears
he's going to protect me. He steals me blind. They want something done about
that. They just need something done to regain their trust because they don't
trust the courthouse right now."
Judge Chitty gave him two years'
probation instead. "Mark said McLelland was not happy with Judge
Chitty," said Colleen Dunbar, a Dallas
But Williams was convicted of a
felony. He lost his seat as a justice of the peace. He lost his law license. He
was no longer a member of the Texas Guard or a licensed peace officer. Said
Williams in a presentencing report: "My life has taken a drastic turn."
Eric Williams retreated from
public life following his conviction. His lawyer friends say they didn't see
much of him anymore. Neighbor Richard Mohundro said Williams let his lawn guy
go and started cutting his own grass, trimming his own shrubs and pruning his
trees. "He absolutely butchered his trees, pruned 'em way up high,"
he said. Moundro still saw him cruise through the neighborhood on his Segway,
but he seldom saw Kim.
According to investigators,
though, neither was idle. Williams asked a friend from the Texas State Guard to
rent a unit for him at Gibson Self Storage in Seagoville on December
28. Williams told him it was for his in-laws. With all his legal troubles, he
explained, they might search the unit if his name was on it. He fronted the
cash for a one-year lease. On January 4, he had lunch with another friend and
asked him if he knew how to get rid of an "upper," the receiver of an
AR-15 rifle that could be used for ballistics comparison. Two days later,
records indicate he spent an hour on the LexisNexis digital database,
searching for information on McLelland and Hasse. The search would have
provided home addresses and vehicles associated with them. On January 23, he
searched again for the license plate belonging to Hasse's neighbor. Four days
later, he performed another search with the license plate number belonging to a
gray Mercury Sable sedan. And on January 30, the night before Hasse was
shot to death near the courthouse, storage company logs showed Williams' unit
was accessed. The next morning, it was accessed again.
On February 23, a man who said his
name was Richard Greene bought a white 2004 Crown Victoria
The morning the McLellands were
murdered, a surveillance camera captured footage of Williams' Ford
Explorer Sport Trac entering the storage building. Then, a white Crown Victoria 6:40 a.m.
— the time logged on the McLelland's security system. Seventeen minutes later,
Williams' truck is seen leaving the facility.
In the meantime, Williams maintained
his innocence as rumors swirled around him. He granted brief TV news interviews
in which he applauded investigators' thoroughness. When he was finished, the
cameras observed him zipping down the street on the Segway, a placid expression
on his face. His friend Jenny Parks said she spoke to him shortly after each of
the murders. "He'd say, 'Yeah, Jenny, they've been to my house. We're just
watching a movie,'" she recalled. "He was so calm. He said, 'Don't
worry, they did forensics on my hands.' It was within 30 minutes of the Hasse
killing."
But on April 11, investigators
interviewed Williams and he consented to allow them to search his home. They
saw parts consistent with the kind of weapon used in the McLelland slayings.
They noticed none of them had "uppers."
They found packaging for a Smith
and Wesson .357-caliber pistol, one similar to the gun that killed Hasse.
And they found evidence that Williams had made "threats by electronic
communication against Kaufman County
Two days later, the friend who
rented the storage unit for Williams reached out to investigators. Sheriff
David Byrne would later refer to that as the "watershed moment"
in the investigation. They searched the unit and found 41 weapons. Two of the
AR-15 rifles had no uppers. They discovered an "incendiary device," a
crossbow and a white Crown Victoria
Williams was arrested on a
terroristic threat charge. His wife, Kim, was arrested and charged with capital
murder. During an April 16 interview, she allegedly told investigators she was
there for both murders, and that her husband pulled the trigger. The next day,
Williams was charged with the murders of Mark Hasse and Mike and Cynthia
McLelland The couple remain in a Kaufman County jail, he on a $23 million bond
and she on a $10 million bond.
On Good Friday, nearly two
months after Mike McLelland lost his friend, he had the day off. It had been
sunny all week, but low clouds now moved over Kaufman
County
He put the gun back. He rarely
bought anything here. His ample frame filled the doorway a couple of times a
week, more for the companionship than the shopping. He loved to talk guns, and
he knew just about everything there was to know about old Smith & Wesson
revolvers, the kind lawmen before him carried when Texas was still a wild,
unsettled place. McLelland carried a snub-nosed .38 since the Williams trial. Sometimes
he'd ask Kidwill if he'd heard anything interesting. Never talked much about
Hasse's murder. "The only thing he said was, 'I think we're getting close
on it.'"
Later that day, he pulled his
white Toyota Tundra into the Shamrock Ridge development and up his
driveway. His lawn was neat and trimmed cleanly around the young trees. The
garden hose was coiled in the yard. Cynthia's yellow flowers filled two
aluminum pots on the front porch. They were expecting company for Easter
Sunday. Cynthia loved to entertain more than anything, except maybe knitting.
If McLelland was right about Eric
Williams, then he must have known Williams had every reason to come after him,
and who knew when that day might arrive? But he couldn't disappear. As he said
to reporters after Hasse's slaying, "An old TAC
officer at Fort Sill
There were still catfish fries for
the Mabank Volunteer Fire Department. The First Assembly of God in Kaufman
had expected him and Cynthia at the Valentine's Day banquet they held last
month, and the couple did not fail to show. Come the Fourth of July, the church
would throw a big party with bounce houses for the kids. Life in Kaufman
County 8:38 a.m. on January 31, had to go on.
And so he and Cynthia went to bed
that night at around 11:15 . Thunder
rattled the houses in Shamrock Ridge. The rain came down hard. He drifted off
to sleep certain in the knowledge that a man he believed to be a murderer
walked free through his county this night. McLelland had been a step ahead of
the investigation. He'd felt it in his gut, though he knew that wasn't enough.
But if Eric Williams is his killer, McLelland might have finally known he was
right all along at dawn on March 30, when a man came through the front door.
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