Left: Eric Williams listens to testimony from ATF special agent, Matt Johnson during his capital murder trial at the Rockwall County Courthouse in Rockwall, Texas, on Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2014. (AP Photo/The Dallas Morning News, Vernon Bryant, Pool). Right: Kim Williams, former wife of Eric Williams is escorted to the witness stand during sentencing at the Rockwall County Courthouse in Rockwall, December 2014. (AP Photo/The Dallas Morning News, Vernon Bryant, Pool)
A former judge in Texas found guilty of murdering a prominent district attorney and his wife in cold blood and shooting down another prosecutor in front of a courthouse while donning a Halloween mask has asked for a new death penalty trial.
It is the latest attempt by one-time Kaufman County justice of the peace Eric Lyle Williams to have the case retried roughly a decade after he murdered Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland, his wife Cynthia McLelland, and Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse in a vengeful rage.
At trial, prosecutors said Williams carefully planned the murder of the district attorney and Hasse in early 2013 as he fumed over his own prosecution and conviction for the theft of Kaufman County computer equipment a year before. Williams, who had lost his law license and job as a result of his prosecution, was out on bail for theft when he shot Hasse down before at least there witnesses.
The assistant prosecutor was walking to the Kaufman County courthouse from his car that January when Williams approached him wearing a Halloween mask and bulletproof vest and started shooting. Williams fled the scene and a manhunt promptly got underway.
Nearly three months passed. Then, over Easter weekend in late March 2013, Williams knocked on the front door of the McLelland’s Foney, Texas home, got inside under the guise of impersonating a police officer and unloaded 16 bullets into the district attorney before shooting Cynthia McLelland eight times.
Gunshot wound evidence pertaining to Mike McLelland during the Eric Williams capital murder trial at the Rockwall County Courthouse in Rockwall, on Monday, Dec. 1, 2014. (AP Photo/The Dallas Morning News, Vernon Bryant, Pool)
Williams was accompanied by his wife, Kim Williams, on both occasions. She acted as a getaway driver, waiting for her then-husband in their vehicle as he committed the brutal murders and listening to him coolly recount his deeds to her afterward.
She testified at trial that he told her he considered Cynthia McLelland “collateral damage” and that he had to “shoot her an extra time because she was still moaning,” after he murdered her husband in front of her, according to reporting from Dallas outlet WFAA in 2014.
She also told prosecutors her husband had a hit list.
Kim Williams pleaded guilty and divorced Eric Williams from jail after the trial was over. She was sentenced to 40 years in prison for her role in the cold-blooded killings, Dallas-Fort Worth NBC affiliate KXAS reported in a retrospective of the murders.
Public court records reviewed by Law&Crime on Thursday show there was at least one other unsuccessful attempt for a retrial made by the former justice of the peace. In a filing before the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal in 2018, prosecutors excoriated his request.
Eric Williams “waged war” against the justice system and his attacks were “on the entire criminal justice system,” prosecutors argued. He murdered the McLellands and Hasse “because they did their jobs.”
“Williams challenges not only Texas’s death penalty scheme, he challenges the death penalty itself, challenges he did not make to the lower court. He complains about disparities in race and wealth without acknowledging that he is an educated, white and formerly a licensed attorney and elected county official who was represented at trial by three of the best attorneys in the state,” a brief in opposition to Eric Williams’ petition for an appeal to the Supreme Court said.
Undeterred, Eric Williams now argues that he was not given a fair shake when a jury first convicted him of capital murder and sentenced him to die in December 2014, according to the Dallas Morning News. Though a copy of the motion for a new trial was not immediately available on the public docket, according to the outlet, Eric Williams claims now that he was unable to properly prepare for his case, that the judge handling it was biased against him and the media atmosphere was no better.
Eric Williams’ case venue was moved from Kaufman County to Rockwall County, Texas, due to the intense media attention sparked by the bold murders, CBS reported in 2014.
But he argues now that even this was not enough.
The family of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, comfort each other during their funeral services at the First Baptist Church of Wortham Friday, April 5, 2013, in Wortham, Texas. The couple was found shot to death in their house near Forney, about 20 miles east of Dallas. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)
In sentencing Eric Williams for the McLelland murders, Judge Mike Snipes compared the defendant’s ruthlessness to some of the most notorious, calculating serial killers in modern history. If given the chance, Snipes told him, he believed Eric Williams would kill again seeing that he had a hit list targeting at least two other justice officials. Evidence also emerged at trial that he wanted to kill his wife and that he once threatened an ex-girlfriend, flashing a gun at her and telling her if she wouldn’t go to dinner with him he would kill her.
“That puts you right there with Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Speck,” Snipes said, according to local PBS affiliate KERA.
In that vein, days after he killed the McLellands, Eric Williams was interviewed by reporters from KXAS when word got out that he might be a suspect and had been interviewed by police in the hours after the district attorney and his wife were shot.
Eric Williams claimed he didn’t own a gun and that he had “nothing to do with it.”
“I’ve cooperated with law enforcement. I certainly wish them the best in bringing justice to this incredibly egregious act,” Eric Williams said before telling the outlet he wasn’t upset with prosecutors for his conviction a year before.
But he had lots of guns — at least 30, according to prosecutors — and ahead of the murders, he successfully carried out a plan to stow them in a storage unit under an unwitting friend’s name.
Attorneys for Eric Williams and prosecutors for the state of Texas did not immediately return requests for comment Thursday.
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