Authors: Pat Brown
And then there were the politics involved in the particular case, which no one could have predicted and I didn’t learn about until almost a decade after the crime.
Anne Kelley’s family was friends with George W. Bush, the future president and, in 1990, son of the then-president of the United States. The family reportedly asked W. to help them. W. reportedly called Bush Sr., and he called the state’s attorney, who was told to take good care of this case.
I was told that the state’s attorney was pursuing a federal judgeship, and he did not want his career going down the toilet because of a police department that had never handled a murder. So when Michael Potter, an eighteen-year-old boy who lived near the wooded path where Anne was murdered, blew his brains out five days later, the police said, “Eureka, he’s the guy who did it! Case closed.” Everybody went home happy. Except me.
It took nearly ten years and a volatile town meeting to find out that information. The park police showed up to defend their handling of the case and bragged about how hard they worked on it because Anne Kelley’s family knew the Bushes.
Then, behind closed doors, they told me Walt Williams was still the one and only suspect.
THERE WAS NOT
much more I could accomplish on the Anne Kelley case. All I could do was keep an eye on Walt’s whereabouts.
Then he got married. Married! Walt had problems dating. Girls refused to go out with him; girls dumped him. Kim lasted a month and she still wonders why she gave him a chance. Now Walt was married. To a “smart” woman, with a master’s degree, who worked for a college. She was also a religious woman and she didn’t tolerate drinking or drugs. Her mother told me that she had reported her first husband to the police when she found marijuana in their home. But here she was with Walt. And they had a child.
I felt bad about suspecting a family man, but I couldn’t let that sway me. I went to see Walt’s wife’s mother. She gave me a nice two-hour interview. “Yes, Walt is a bit odd and I know he has some problems, but what man doesn’t?”
“Did he tell you what he did for a living?”
“I believe he was a police officer with the MPD at the time. He left the job to have more time with his wife.”
The interview proved that Walt was still lying. I knew he couldn’t qualify for a job with any police department. I sent Walt’s wife an e-mail and attached all the information about Walt on it. I told her his background and that he had been a suspect in a sexual homicide.
She got mad. She e-mailed me back and told me to “be a woman” and talk straight to Walt about my suspicions. Okay; I called.
“Hey, Walt!”
“Hey, Pat, how are you doing?”
Walt was mighty jovial that day. I could hear his wife telling him to find out what my problem was. I told Walt that he needed to clear
up a decade of lies if he wanted me to think he wasn’t involved in the Kelley crime.
Walt admitted to what I already knew and could prove and denied anything he thought I was unsure of or couldn’t prove. I asked him questions over the phone while his wife listened in. I couldn’t tape the conversation without his consent because I lived in a state where this was illegal, but I am a fast typist and I transcribed the questions and answers.
WALT WILLIAMS:
“I NEVER walked that path home. I don’t like the path. That night I broke up with Kim, she told me she didn’t want to see me anymore. It was starting to get dark on the way home and I said, ‘Hell, no way, I’m not walking down this path.’”
(This was the first time I had any idea as to the exact time he walked down that path. Originally when he told me the story, he simply said he was on the path; he gave no time frame. Now that he stated it was getting dark, this put him even closer to the time
of the murder. If he was telling the truth here—about it becoming
dark when he “decided to cross the stream”—then if he did NOT do what he said, he would have ended up at the site of the murder approximately the same time as Anne Kelley.)
WILLIAMS:
“I decided to jump from this side of the stream bank to the other. I lowered myself and I ended up landing in the water. It was waist deep to my surprise and I pulled myself up, dirty, muddy, and wet.”
(He also mentioned it was too far to go back to the road on the path and too far to the next road to continue. I have looked at the location. It would have been approximately a five-minute walk to the intersection of the next road.)
WILLIAMS:
“I threw my clothes away. I don’t like wet jeans and threw them away—after they get wet, they get hard as a
rock. After shoes dry out they don’t feel right. Yeah, I washed them before I threw them out. I wiped the mud off my shoes with the plastic because I didn’t want to track it into the house.
“The condom was just curiosity. I had never used one before. I didn’t ejaculate in it.”
(That was likely a lie because the condom was stuck together and stiff.)
“It was just taken out of the pack and put back. I threw them away because I didn’t need them because I wasn’t with Kim anymore.”
(I asked him about his paranoia of AIDS and his time in the military.)
“Yes, I had sex but AIDS was not a fear back then; I just picked girls that looked healthy.
“The letter opener was really a throwing knife I bought at Beltway Plaza when they had a store with martial arts stuff.”
(When I had seen this in the trash after the murder, I didn’t recognize what it was. It looked like a filed-down letter opener. Having looked at martial arts equipment since then, it did indeed look like a throwing knife and this was more consistent with what Walt would have owned. It is still interesting that he tossed a perfectly good knife.)
WILLIAMS:
“The next day I covered my arms and legs because it was cool in the mountains. I always did that.
“The night of the murder, Kim and I broke up and she came over and stayed in the [Brown] house. She was on the bed and I was on the floor on a mattress. I had called her on the phone and talked with her—I was hurt. I did everything I could to get her to come over and she did.”
(I questioned Walt on this and he then admitted maybe it wasn’t that night—I had no recollection of Kim EVER staying overnight in our home, especially in his room.)
WILLIAMS:
“The park police left a message on my voice mail. They called three times. I called them back. They said maybe I could help in this investigation and they picked me up.
“They told me to write down where I was living. [The detective] told me to write down the names of the girls I dated. Then he read me my rights.
“He told me he had been looking for me for a year. I was in the next county over, so I don’t see why he would have any trouble finding me. I moved there about six months after I was put out of your house.
“In February, I was incensed. I told the detective, ‘When you see I had nothing to do with anything, I want an apology.’
“He showed me an artist’s rendition…from somewhere and asked if it didn’t look like me and I said no.”
WILLIAMS:
“I didn’t get the name of the girl that was murdered. I started getting irritated. He said, ‘Why don’t you take a lie detector test?’ and I said, ‘Fine.’ I fell asleep during the time they were setting it up.”
WILLIAMS:
“I asked ‘Why am I here?’ but they never gave me any answers. They kept me six hours and I missed my work. Then he said, ‘What about a blood test?’ I said fine and we went to the hospital.
“They didn’t tell me anything about why they brought me in.
“I volunteered for both tests.
“I called the police department every day. Nobody would tell me anything.
“Finally, I got the detective and he told me I was excluded by the DNA and he was sorry he had been so hard on me.
“I should sue them for the way they treated me.”
(We also discussed Walt’s work and dating history; he disputed the veracity of much of my information.)
WILLIAMS:
“I did NOT call in bomb threats. I went to pick up my check. I came back to visit and someone said, ‘Walt did it.’
“I quit—they didn’t fire me.
“I didn’t get fired from that security job, either…
“I worked for that man but he wasn’t a colonel.
“All of my life, I have kept my family at arm’s length.
“I lived with my aunt—yes, I was suicidal.
“Tiffany Byrd was the girl decapitated on prom night. No, she was not my girlfriend. I made that up.”
(Byrd did die on prom night in an accident. She did not get decapitated. She was not from Walt’s school and he apparently borrowed the story from either the paper or friends.)
WILLIAMS:
“I know I have done some extremely stupid things. I just wanted to be accepted. I wanted sympathy.
“I never stole anything except some quarters from my father’s piggy bank during high school.”
(He knew I had talked to his dad.)
WILLIAMS:
“I got depressed in the air force. Didn’t like my job classification. They sent me to another base for evaluation. Said I had a personality disorder.
“I was upset when my father remarried. He changed completely. The woman was a friend of the family and I didn’t like her and I wondered if she was around before my mother died.”
WILLIAMS:
“No, my mother didn’t die in my arms.
“I am very close to my sister. I talk to her every day. No, she hasn’t seen my son yet. I will get over that way one day. I sent her pictures.”
(His sister says he does tend to call her every day for weird abbreviated conversations but she had seen him only once after he got married.)
WILLIAMS:
“I tried for the MPD, but that one dropped charge on my record for supposedly carrying a machete on a college campus screwed me up.
“My wife and I knew each other one week before we got married. Met through the phone dating line. I fell in love instantly. We knew we were for each other. I put the message on in August. I said, ‘I am Walt. I work as an SPO [special police officer]. These are my interests.’”
WILLIAMS:
“No, I didn’t have any college. I said that because I was ashamed when I got married.”
(Walt put down that he attended college for three years on their marriage certificate.)
WILLIAMS:
“I have never felt I was good enough for anybody. I wanted so much to be useful to someone; I tried too hard.
“If I didn’t know the person, it wouldn’t concern me.”
(This was in response to my question of why he was so blasé about the murder of Anne Kelley.)
Walt said that he spoke in such detail with me after all these years because he wanted to set everything straight. He said that my investigation and suspicion of him changed his life for the better and he no longer tells lies and foolish stories. He now tells
only
the truth. He practically thanked me for getting him in this situation and making him face his foolish behaviors.
It was interesting to note that Walt wanted to set things straight only after I contacted his wife and she wanted me to talk to him. Until then, although he had my phone number and knew where I lived, he never attempted to contact me and discuss anything. He never called me to tell me to knock it off. It was my conclusion that he simply wanted to impress his wife with his “honesty” so she would think
I
was the crazy one.
What struck me as odd in this conversation was that Walt talked
to me as though I were a close friend, although he knew me for only four weeks in 1990 as his landlord. Why the strong connection? Why no hostility? Perhaps Walt was telling the truth and he was just one great guy, but more likely it was one major snow job. His wife stayed on for a few more years and then divorced him.
I was happy to find out that Walt was on the path exactly at the time Anne Kelley was murdered. In 2009, a detective from a town nearby told me that Walt Williams remained the only suspect in the murder of Anne Kelley.
WHEN I LOOK
back on twenty years of dealing with the murder of Anne Kelley and the walking anachronism that is Walt Williams, I still wish more than anything that this case could be resolved.
I have the private satisfaction that the police still consider him a top suspect, that they agree the circumstantial evidence is convincing enough to believe Williams might have committed the murder. Sure, there is always a possibility that Williams is a nutjob who lies and says and does stupid things and on the same night that he waded across the stream, another killer popped out of the bushes and murdered Anne. Anything is possible, and that’s why you have to have enough evidence to convince a jury that a suspect is truly guilty.
Although I know that I was justified in gathering evidence and pushing for the police to pay serious attention to Williams, everyone just got the story secondhand from me. If I had to go to a court of law to prove Williams should be the number one suspect, I could do it; I have enough statements, written and oral, to back my claim. I couldn’t prove he did it, but I could prove the police should have investigated him thoroughly.
But nobody else—and I mean
nobody
—saw what I saw and experienced what I experienced.
I didn’t go looking for this case. It came to me. I never thought the world of Sherlock Holmes I enjoyed as a child would become my reality three decades later. Sometimes fate takes a very strange turn. Here I was, a homemaker and sign language interpreter no more.
I was a criminal profiler.
I
’ll never say that I know what a family who has lost a loved one through violence goes through. I don’t have a family member who was the victim of a horrible crime. No one wants to be that person. I don’t ever want the knock at the door that tells me my child has been murdered.
I have observed the agony families go through and how they never get over it. I have talked with many families of murder or suicide victims and have heard them express their despair over feeling separate from all others, and of being alone. Friends don’t want to hear about it after a while. They get sick of you.
Oh, there you go again
. They have normal lives. They don’t have killers in their past. They just want to talk about what happened at their son’s baseball game or how their daughter has a new costume for Halloween. They don’t want to think about evil monsters. They don’t understand what you’re talking about or why you’re so obsessed. You become a pariah, a strange being with knowledge that nobody else has and a situation of which nobody else wants to be a part.