00:00:01
[music] >> On May the 24th, 1992, a grieving man arrived at a quiet cemetery to place flowers on his
00:00:13
father's grave. But something disturbing caught his eye. >> He looks off in the distance and he sees
00:00:22
this man that appears to be assaulting this woman. And so he realized something was really
00:00:29
wrong. >> The man rushed out of the cemetery to find help. After a police chase, the
00:00:36
assailant was caught and the woman was rescued from the back of his car. >> She was near death because she was being
00:00:44
asphyxiated by some sort of device around her neck. >> The attacker was 38-year-old Leslie
00:00:53
Allen Williams and police soon discovered that this wasn't his first abduction.
00:00:58
After finding evidence in his home linking him to four missing teenage girls, Williams confessed to their
00:01:06
murders. >> I think Williams confessing was for his own benefit and absolutely nobody else's
00:01:13
benefit whatsoever. >> When we interviewed him, he expressed no emotion. It was like he was ordering a cup of
00:01:22
coffee. >> Left with nowhere to run, Leslie Allen Williams had been unmasked as one of the
00:01:30
world's most evil killers. >> In July 1992, at Oakland County Circuit Court in Michigan,
00:02:02
Leslie Allen Williams pleaded guilty to the murders of 18-year-old Kami Villanueva, 16-year-old Michelle Urbin,
00:02:10
and her 14-year-old sister Melissa, and 15-year-old Cynthia Jones. The serial killer even led police to the
00:02:19
sites where he'd buried their bodies. >> There can be no doubt [music] that
00:02:24
Leslie Allen Williams was a truly evil man. He took the life of four young high school students who had their
00:02:33
whole lives in front of them. It was an act of grotesque depravity. >> A really sad thing about this case is
00:02:43
each one of these four teenage girls he killed, he told them that he would let them go.
00:02:50
He told them that if they just did what he said, they'd be okay. He'd release them. And I
00:02:57
think that makes it >> [music] >> way worse. >> The families and the jury were horrified
00:03:03
to learn that Williams had previously been let out of prison early for good behavior.
00:03:09
>> Leslie Allen Williams had been a career criminal and was released many times
00:03:16
by our parole boards and it was shortly after his release that the first of the four girls that he kidnapped and
00:03:28
killed disappeared. >> There was a great deal of criticism publicly, especially in the media.
00:03:37
There were people at the time of the Williams case who began campaigning for a reform of Michigan's parole system.
00:03:46
>> If Williams had not been caught in May of 1992, [music] he would not have stopped.
00:03:55
There would have been other people kidnapped, violated, and killed. >> This killer's story begins in the
00:04:07
Midwest. Leslie Allen Williams was born on Independence Day, July the 4th, 1953,
00:04:17
and he grew up in Detroit, Michigan. >> His mother had been married before, and
00:04:24
she had two daughters. But then, she married Leslie's father, and they had three boys together.
00:04:33
But neither were exactly perfect parents. >> He grew up in his earliest years in a
00:04:42
suburb of Detroit called Garden City, and his mom was known to work prostitution in the home.
00:04:51
His dad was sexually abusing Leslie's sisters. So, it was a troubled upbringing.
00:05:00
>> When Williams witnessed the sexual violence in his home, the sexual abuse
00:05:05
of his siblings, and the sex work of his mom, he probably learned quite early on
00:05:12
that relationships are highly transactional, and they're not about emotional connection. And that is going
00:05:20
to have a significant on the way he conducts his own relationships. >> After an investigation into the sexual
00:05:28
abuse of his stepdaughters, Williams' father was committed to a state hospital for the criminally
00:05:36
insane, but not before alerting police to his wife's sex work. >> Leslie's mother took
00:05:46
some of the family to California in an effort I think to escape the reputation that she had
00:05:53
in Detroit. She then fell in love and after she was divorced, she married her third husband.
00:06:03
But that too didn't really go well. In the end, she decided that she would divorce the third husband.
00:06:16
But then tragically on the night [music] before the divorce hearing, her third husband went to visit her
00:06:24
and killed her, shot her in the head before killing himself. She has two boys of hers with her
00:06:34
and anything they might have seen as normal has gone out of the window. It's hard to imagine a worse upbringing.
00:06:43
>> At just 9 years old, Leslie Allen Williams had lost both of his parents.
00:06:50
>> His mother was murdered, his father was a sex offender, he had no stability, no
00:06:58
boundaries in his [music] life at all and and no child should have to tolerate that.
00:07:07
>> [music] >> Now Leslie was without either parent. So at that point, he and a brother of his
00:07:14
were brought back to Michigan to live with their grandparents in Milford, which is another Detroit suburb on the
00:07:20
west side of Metro Detroit. >> As Williams neared adulthood, he turned towards a darker, criminal path.
00:07:31
>> [music] >> He was only 17 years old in 1970. He was arrested for breaking and entering in a
00:07:38
home and that began a long criminal career. >> Williams' history of offending, it
00:07:46
started when he was really young. And the younger it starts, quite often the more longevity it has, the more it's
00:07:54
going to carry on. >> Between 1972 and 1983, he's literally in and out of prison, in and out of the
00:08:02
court. It's just a litany, including burglary, more significantly sexual assault and attempted kidnapping.
00:08:13
He's either being charged, waiting on bail, in prison. >> For somebody like Williams, who was
00:08:21
relentless in his offending, he may have felt empowered by the system not holding
00:08:27
him to account. But also, I think given his personality traits, I think he already felt quite
00:08:36
entitled and empowered to behave the way he did, and probably manipulated and used the system.
00:08:44
>> In 1983, Williams broke into a woman's home. But what started as a routine burglary
00:08:52
quickly took a sinister turn and escalated to attempted kidnap and sexual assault.
00:08:59
>> He was recognized at that point as being a habitual offender. And so, he had a
00:09:05
couple different sentences in front of him. For the actual assault, he had a sentence of 5 to 10 years. For being a
00:09:11
habitual offender, he had a sentence of 7 to 30 years. >> It's the first lengthy sentence he's
00:09:19
had, so he's going to be an older, or at least an old man by the time he gets out
00:09:24
of jail. >> With Williams behind bars, women in Detroit could finally sleep a little
00:09:32
easier. But not for long. >> He's an absolutely model prisoner. He has a particularly receptive
00:09:40
psychiatrist who says, "Well, I think, you know, you have really made splendid progress and
00:09:47
you know, we want to rehabilitate you." And so writes [music] a very glowing
00:09:52
report to the prison authorities about just how well Leslie Williams has done. >> In 1990, 37-year-old Williams was
00:10:02
released on parole after serving just six years of his maximum 30-year sentence.
00:10:09
>> People were probably manipulated [music] by this idea that because he was polite,
00:10:15
that somehow that meant he wasn't dangerous. Despite all of the evidence showing that
00:10:22
he was a repeat and serial offender. >> In my opinion, he could have been kept
00:10:30
in longer and he should have been. I don't know why they were so lenient with him given the nature of his
00:10:38
offending. >> Despite the severity of his crimes, the parole system was satisfied that
00:10:45
Williams was a changed man. The following year, the mysterious disappearance of an 18-year-old woman
00:10:53
from her home would spark fear across the community. In the early hours of September the
00:11:08
15th, 1991, in the quiet village of South Lyon, Oakland County, Michigan, 18-year-old
00:11:16
Kami Villanueva was home alone whilst her older sister was out on a date. >> Kami Villanueva, she's 18. She's a
00:11:27
bright, honor student, cheerful, whole world in front of her. >> [music] >> Quite a shy girl. She wasn't a great
00:11:35
party-goer and she lived with her sisters. >> [music] >> Cammie's older sister came home and saw
00:11:44
that uh Cammie was not home. She went into her room. She saw that things were basically undisturbed.
00:11:55
>> The bedroom is deserted, but everything that Cammie left is all just exactly as
00:11:59
it was. In fact, she's astounded. Is her inhaler, the solitaire she was playing,
00:12:08
purse, denim jacket, which she never went out without. It's as if she's disappeared into thin
00:12:14
air. >> She wondered, "Okay, what happened? Where is she?" The following day, she reported her
00:12:21
missing to police. >> There was no signs of any kind of forced entry. From you know, my conversations with
00:12:32
the Oakland County Sheriff's Department detectives that worked that part of the
00:12:37
case, it was unknown why she was no longer home. >> Nobody knew what [music] happened to
00:12:45
her. She was a missing person case. They don't They didn't know if she had been
00:12:49
killed or if she ran away or what happened. >> Just as police were getting to grips
00:12:55
with Cammie's [music] case, 2 weeks later they received another call from the concerned parents of two teenage
00:13:02
girls, 16-year-old Michelle and 14-year-old Melissa Urban. >> Melissa and Michelle Urban had a
00:13:13
perfectly normal sisters relationship, partly wonderful friendship, partly hating each other. It was a [music]
00:13:19
typical sisterly bond. >> They lived in a rural area of Michigan near the town of Hartland, which is
00:13:28
about an hour northwest of Detroit. >> They have nothing particular to worry
00:13:35
about, and it's a perfectly ordinary day. >> On September the 29th, 1991,
00:13:43
after a Sunday dinner with the family, the two girls set off on an evening walk.
00:13:50
>> The morning after they had gone for their walk, when the father noticed they weren't
00:13:56
home, he said, >> [music] >> "We need to call the police."
00:14:02
A young trooper was sent to make contact with the parents, and it was learned from them that they
00:14:10
did not return home the night before. >> The police retraced [music] the steps
00:14:16
the sisters had taken on their walks, and found no trace of them. They also began to interview the local community
00:14:23
[music] to find out the background, but nothing led them to what had happened to the sisters.
00:14:31
>> The information we got >> [music] >> in contacting friends and family members
00:14:36
was that they did not know anything about it. They had not seen the girls, had not heard from them.
00:14:42
They were concerned. They did not understand why the girls would have been been gone for so long.
00:14:52
>> Although these contacts didn't provide an explanation for Michelle and
00:14:57
Melissa's disappearance, they did reveal this wasn't the first time the girls had
00:15:02
gone missing. >> A young trooper did a very good background finding that they had at one
00:15:09
point run away for a weekend before returning home. With any missing person report, we
00:15:17
always expect the worst. But because of their the past history where the girls had
00:15:26
had been missing voluntarily, it wasn't until several days later, perhaps a week or two actually before
00:15:34
the concern became greater. They had never been gone this long. They had left behind items that
00:15:43
they would not have left behind before. >> They were reported as missing and then
00:15:49
the family struggled for months not knowing what happened to those girls. >> With no leads and concern mounting for
00:16:00
the whereabouts of Michelle and Melissa, police brought in Michigan state profiler David Minzey to help with their
00:16:07
investigation. >> First thing I did was make sure that I go meet with detectives.
00:16:16
I want to know the things that weren't in the report. What bothered them? What
00:16:20
about that case was troubling them? >> [music] >> We focus on the victimology. These are
00:16:26
very low-risk victims who now are missing. Something terrible likely happened to them.
00:16:32
>> [music] >> And to help them develop media releases that will hopefully get the good tips,
00:16:37
to look more into the background. >> A closer look at the Milford area revealed that cases of female missing
00:16:46
persons were rather [music] uncommon. Highlighting chilling similarities between the Urban sisters and Kami
00:16:53
Viaduct Weaver. >> It must have begun to strike the authorities that the disappearance of three high
00:17:01
school girls within a period of literally [music] three weeks was quite unusual.
00:17:10
>> They lived in a very rural area, very sparsely populated. Crime was almost non-existent up there.
00:17:21
>> All of a sudden we had something pop up here in Oakland County primarily. In
00:17:27
fact, in the Milford area. And I grew up there, so I knew that the area did not have a whole lot of crime, particularly
00:17:32
involving missing teenage [music] girls. Something came into this area and likely was connected to all of these
00:17:42
victims and we needed to find out who that was. >> Just 1 year before the teenagers went
00:17:51
missing from [music] Oakland County, 37-year-old Leslie Allen Williams had been granted early release from prison
00:17:58
after serving just 6 years of a maximum 30-year sentence for attempted kidnapping and sexual assault.
00:18:08
>> He was released very quickly in 1990. He was surprised to be paroled that
00:18:15
early. >> His first residence was in Wayne County, [music] Michigan. The parole officer that he saw there
00:18:25
said that Williams complied with everything that was required of him. >> He was checking [music] off the boxes.
00:18:31
He was working a job and then he was providing proof that he was working a job. He was showing them his check
00:18:37
stubs. [music] He was reporting in regularly. >> He was engaged in counseling.
00:18:45
He moved to Oakland County. His parole agent changed. So once again, new eyes looking at him,
00:18:56
but he was still complying with the requirements that the parole board had set for him.
00:19:02
>> His parole officers over the years considered him what they called a model
00:19:07
parolee. He seemed to be doing everything that he was expected to do. >> He caused no trouble. He attracted no
00:19:15
attention. In fact, I think one parole officer said that he was ideal to deal with.
00:19:22
>> As Williams was settling into a new life seemingly on the straight and narrow,
00:19:27
Oakland County police were still baffled as to the whereabouts of 18-year-old Kami Villanueva and teenage sisters
00:19:35
Michelle and Melissa Urban. But before police could begin to connect the dots, another teenage girl
00:19:44
would vanish into thin air. On January the 4th, 1992, 15-year-old schoolgirl Cynthia Jones
00:20:01
>> [music] >> was hanging out with her 16-year-old boyfriend in his car at Central Park in
00:20:07
Milford. >> She was an archetypal high school girl. She was an honor student. She was a
00:20:14
cheerleader. She was cheerful. She was very much happy with her boyfriend. >> They were in the car and while they were
00:20:22
sitting there in the car, this man ran up to them in a ski mask. And tells them he has to have the car.
00:20:31
Get out of the car. I need the car. He gives them a story that he just robbed a place. And so he forces them
00:20:38
out of the car. >> You can imagine they were very frightened. And he marches the couple into a nearby
00:20:45
wooded area where he proceeds to tie up the boyfriend to one of the trees. The boyfriend tries to escape
00:20:55
but the man with the ski mask ushers Cindy into a wood not far away. And it's the
00:21:03
last the boyfriend [music] ever sees of her. >> Just minutes later, the boyfriend freed
00:21:10
himself from his restraints and called the police. They searched the entire park, but
00:21:17
despite their best efforts, they were unable to find any clues to Cynthia's whereabouts
00:21:24
nor the identity of her abductor. >> Her boyfriend was not able to identify
00:21:31
him because his identity was obscured, but still at least her boyfriend was able to report this to police so they
00:21:39
knew that Cindy had been abducted. >> But the lack of details on the assailant
00:21:46
>> [music] >> meant the police were struggling to find the teenage couple's attacker.
00:21:51
>> Predators are really difficult to identify and to capture. And there's
00:21:57
quite a few reasons for that. The biggest one obviously being that they rarely have any relationship
00:22:06
to the person that they've assaulted. Nothing that links them in any way. Police have to start from a position of
00:22:15
there's 30,000 people that live in this area. It could be any one of them. They
00:22:19
have to go on other motivations, forms of evidence, identifying suspects. >> As a result, police had to consider one
00:22:31
potential suspect. >> Because of the odd circumstances, the boyfriend, he was thought to be a
00:22:39
suspect for the longest time. >> [music] >> Was he trying to cover up the fact that
00:22:46
she'd run away? Was he trying to cover up even worse that he'd killed her and
00:22:51
hidden her body? >> Police could find absolutely no evidence to suggest Cynthia's boyfriend was
00:22:58
involved in her disappearance and he was officially ruled out as a suspect 6 days
00:23:04
later. >> The 16-year-old boyfriend was traumatized by this experience. How
00:23:10
could he not have been? He's watched the girl he was >> [music] >> falling in love with being escorted away
00:23:15
by a masked man. He's left tied to a tree, and then he's suspected of Cynthia's abduction.
00:23:21
It is something that would be very, very difficult to recover from. >> With their only suspect eliminated from
00:23:29
the inquiry, police were no closer to finding Cynthia's true kidnapper. >> Four missing girls that turn up in the
00:23:41
span of a few months from September 1991 to January 1992, and you have [music] three different police departments that
00:23:49
are investigating their disappearance. >> They were at cross-jurisdictional
00:23:55
boundaries where the communication wasn't always there. This was at a time before
00:24:02
there were yellow alerts, which in the United States [music] and in Michigan, when there are missing juveniles,
00:24:10
there are alerts sent out over cell phones telling people, "Watch for these
00:24:16
people. They're missing. They may be endangered." But there was no indication at that time
00:24:22
that they were connected. >> The luck of the police would soon change. Over 4 months later, on May the 24th,
00:24:36
1992, Oakland County's Deputy Sheriff was taking a traffic accident report in
00:24:42
Springfield Township when a panicked man approached and told him about an attack
00:24:48
that was happening in a nearby cemetery. >> He's there to visit his dad's grave.
00:24:54
He pulls up in his car, and there's another vehicle sitting there in the way
00:24:58
blocking his path, and one of the doors of the car is open, but the car is empty.
00:25:05
He looks off in the distance, and he sees this man that appears to be assaulting this
00:25:10
woman. And meanwhile, this man looks over and sees this guy notice him. And that's when he says,
00:25:20
"Leave us alone. We're just having sex." This witness was knowing that was not
00:25:26
the case. They were both fully clothed for one thing, and this did not appear to be a sexual situation. This seemed to
00:25:32
be a violent assault. >> The woman is clearly being attacked, and the passerby goes and finds a traffic
00:25:42
policeman who's not far away. The policeman comes back. >> He was speeding out of the cemetery as
00:25:49
the cop was coming in, and the cop realized, "Okay, that's the guy." And
00:25:53
chased him. And this started a little bit of a harrowing car chase that was also a foot chase cuz at one point this
00:26:02
man wrecked his car and got out on foot and tried to get away. >> After an intense chase, police were able
00:26:10
to capture their assailant, and they were shocked to learn that this wasn't their suspect's first time in handcuffs.
00:26:18
He revealed himself as 38-year-old seasoned criminal Leslie Allen Williams. Williams is slightly shamefaced, but
00:26:28
nevertheless is arrested on suspicion of the attack on the woman in the cemetery.
00:26:34
But then announces to the officer that actually the woman he was attacking is in the boot of his car, and she won't
00:26:42
be able to breathe for very long as she's in there. >> She was near death, I believe, because
00:26:50
she was being asphyxiated by some sort of device around her neck. >> Williams had placed her in the trunk
00:26:58
reportedly with one of his plastic ties that he liked to use around her [music] neck. And so, the police officer was
00:27:05
able to get into the trunk and get to her right before anything terrible happened and rescue
00:27:13
her. >> The police officer reached the woman just in time and she was quickly
00:27:22
transported to hospital where she made a full recovery. With the victim safe, the focus shifted
00:27:31
to questioning her attacker. >> Williams was arrested, taken into police custody.
00:27:38
And as they were talking to him, he really wasn't giving much up. >> Because of looking at his criminal
00:27:46
history and past, that uh further investigation was done. There was a search warrant
00:27:56
that was executed at his home. >> They found plastic zip ties. They found the shovel in his car, too.
00:28:04
So, they knew there was something more to this guy than just trying to attack somebody in a cemetery.
00:28:11
And when they searched his house, they found a ring. >> That ring belonged to none other than
00:28:19
the missing 18-year-old Cammie Villanueva. Suspecting Williams may be involved in
00:28:27
Cammie's disappearance, they made contact with his ex-girlfriend to find out more about the man they had in
00:28:34
custody. And what she had to say filled them with dread. >> She told police how she had during their
00:28:44
relationship given Williams a kitten to take care of. And Williams told her later that he killed the kitten
00:28:51
for whatever reason, who knows. But he also buried the kitten. And so police were very interested.
00:28:58
>> Williams' ex-girlfriend gave police the location of the burial site. And on a
00:29:04
hunch that Williams might have revisited a place he already knew, they headed straight for it.
00:29:11
>> They started digging and they realized that they were about to discover Cammie
00:29:16
[music] Villanueva. >> Once presented with the overwhelming evidence, Williams had no choice but to
00:29:26
confess to Cammie's murder. And what he revealed next added a disturbing twist.
00:29:35
>> When he was on parole from prison in 1990, >> [music] >> he worked in a gas station.
00:29:42
And another girl who worked in the gas station had a sister called Cammie Villanueva.
00:29:50
>> Williams would actually see Cammie coming to the gas station where he worked. He was aware of where they lived
00:29:57
and what their [music] habits were. >> Absolutely Williams' cup of tea.
00:30:03
And so when he gets out of jail, one of the first people he targets is Cammie Villanueva.
00:30:12
>> Cammie was home alone. She was in her bedroom. She was sitting there playing
00:30:18
solitaire with a deck of cards. >> Williams told investigators that after donning a ski mask in a bid to disguise
00:30:26
himself, he approached the home of Cammie Villanueva armed with a pocket knife. >> He realized that her door was unlocked.
00:30:37
He came inside. He abducted her. He forced her into his car. He took her to another location.
00:30:48
>> Williams takes her to a cemetery not very far away where he proceeds to uh
00:30:54
rape her and to kill her. >> His method was strangulation, which is very common among killers because it's
00:31:00
up close and personal. You get an opportunity to, you know, interact with your victim and control
00:31:06
their life. That's the ultimate exercise of power. And I think that that's what he did.
00:31:14
>> He actually dug a shallow grave in a field and buried her. Only to revisit her months later.
00:31:25
>> There were reports that Williams had dug up and had sex with the body. So,
00:31:32
there's some kind of necrophilia going on here. >> That is not unheard of with killers.
00:31:39
They will, if they can, revisit a body again to get that emotional moment, [music] relive it, maybe
00:31:51
re-assault the victim. >> How could somebody come back and the smell is terrible and the it's, you
00:31:58
know, condition of the body is bad? How could they do that? But we're talking
00:32:02
about people who are wired differently. The going back allows him to relive that
00:32:07
whole event over and over again. >> Leslie Allen Williams had confessed to
00:32:14
the murder of Cammy Villanueva, and he hadn't finished yet. As he continued to talk, the 38-year-old
00:32:23
would reveal even more disturbing information that would leave detectives horrified.
00:32:38
On the evening of May the 27th, 1992, in the Oakland County Sheriff's Office,
00:32:45
38-year-old Leslie Allen Williams had confessed to raping and killing 18-year-old Kami Viən Weaver 8 months
00:32:53
earlier. What began as a single admission soon snowballed into a cascade of confessions.
00:33:04
>> When Williams was interviewed by the Sheriff's deputies and began telling about Kami, he also
00:33:11
admitted to the kidnapping and murder of the Urban sisters. >> The two teenage sisters, 16-year-old
00:33:20
Michelle and 14-year-old Melissa Urban, had gone missing on September the 29th, 1991,
00:33:28
after going out for a walk. It had been a cold case for 8 months until now. >> At that point, the state police in
00:33:38
Brighton was contacted. Our detective bureau was activated. We're able to take
00:33:44
Williams into our custody and interview him. >> Williams admitted he'd been watching the
00:33:52
Urban sisters for several days. >> The reason he was up in that area stalking people was because he was
00:34:01
court-ordered to see a psychotherapist who was just miles away from where the Urban
00:34:10
sisters lived. >> They went out for a walk near their home in that remote area
00:34:18
>> [music] >> and Williams realized this. He saw them and he hid in some bushes and he waited
00:34:24
for them to come up on him and he jumped out. >> And with a small pocket knife,
00:34:32
he threatened the girls, grabbing one of them. The other girl submitted to his demands,
00:34:40
fearing for her sister. >> And what's more, he'd gone to the lengths of taking photographs of them,
00:34:47
which he'd kept as souvenirs, which again the police found in their search of his house.
00:34:53
>> Taking a trophy really is about a conquest. You hear the term souvenir and
00:34:58
trophy. A souvenir just means that we were at some place. A trophy means that we won. We conquered something. And so
00:35:06
taking those things allows him to relive those events over and over again. >> He first tried to completely
00:35:15
incapacitate them with starter fluid, much like an ether, to put them to sleep, and suffocated them.
00:35:27
>> After killing the two girls, Williams told detectives that he drove 4 miles to
00:35:32
the outskirts of Fenton, Michigan, where he callously buried the teenage sisters,
00:35:38
once again digging a shallow grave in a nearby cemetery. >> He covered the Arbin sisters with
00:35:47
blankets, and that quite possibly was to protect the bodies from the earth and and everything around them
00:35:55
to perhaps keep them in a better state for a longer time. He didn't bury them deep enough that he
00:36:05
couldn't get access to them. >> Williams also revealed his cruel final
00:36:12
words to the terrified young sisters. >> He told [music] them that he would let
00:36:18
them go. He told them that if they just did what he said, >> [music] >> they'd be okay. He'd release them. And I
00:36:26
think that makes it way worse. >> In police custody, Williams had confessed to three murders, but he
00:36:35
didn't stop there. Detectives were about to discover one final victim. 15-year-old schoolgirl Cynthia Jones,
00:36:44
who was abducted whilst on a date with her boyfriend [music] in Central Park in Milford.
00:36:51
>> He took Cindy in his car and like with the other victims, he raped her.
00:36:58
He did change his MO a little bit though. He had strangled Kimmie Villanueva. He had suffocated the two girls, but
00:37:08
then with Cynthia Jones, he actually stabbed her in the chest with his knife and buried her in a shallow grave.
00:37:18
>> Now, that could be many reasons for that. It It could be that uh she got out
00:37:24
of his control. It could be that he needed to do [music] it very quickly and efficiently and to
00:37:32
strangle someone takes longer potentially than stabbing someone. >> After confessing [music] to the murders
00:37:41
of the four teenagers, Williams made one final deal with police. >> When they were able to obtain
00:37:49
confessions from Williams, he agreed to take them to where the other girls the three other girls were buried. So, that
00:37:56
was up to the cemetery in Fenton where the urban girls were buried and then that was to the other part of Bruno Road
00:38:03
where Cindy Jones was buried. >> I think Williams confessing was for his own benefit and absolutely nobody else's
00:38:12
benefit whatsoever. If he says, "Look, I can help you find more bodies and see
00:38:18
what a great guy I am and see how sincere I am because this might help with him making arguments that he wants
00:38:27
to change or that he feels remorse or guilt or shame. >> With an overwhelming amount of evidence
00:38:35
in front of him, including photographs of the Urban sisters, Kami Vianueva's ring, and the bodies,
00:38:43
Williams decided to plead guilty to all four murders at the Oakland County Court
00:38:49
on June the 3rd, 1992. >> He said something to the effect that he just wanted to save [music] the
00:38:56
taxpayers the expense and save everybody the grief, save the victim family members the grief of going through a
00:39:03
trial. So, it was pretty quick that he was sentenced. He was arrested in May 1992 and he was sentenced to everything
00:39:10
in July 1992 [music] without a trial. >> In Michigan, the punishment for first-degree murder, capital murder,
00:39:21
is mandatory life in prison without parole. Kidnapping [music] in Michigan also carries
00:39:28
a life sentence. >> On July the 7th, 1992, Williams was sentenced to life without
00:39:37
parole for the murder of Cynthia Jones. Later that day, he was given four consecutive life terms for kidnapping,
00:39:45
attempted murder, and the attempted rape of the woman at the Springfield Township
00:39:50
Cemetery. Williams was also sentenced to life for Kami's murder on September the 24th and
00:39:58
for the Urban sisters murder on October the 5th. >> Cindy's mother was horrified
00:40:07
by the fact that her daughter had been killed by a man who'd been let out of prison
00:40:13
when he shouldn't have been. Unfortunately, it's a plea we hear so often from the victims of crime,
00:40:20
particularly violent murder. >> I think Leslie Allen Williams represents a failure of the entire criminal justice
00:40:27
system, particularly the parole system. Leslie Allen Williams never should have been on the street.
00:40:32
And there's four young ladies that are dead because of that. >> When he was serving a 30-year sentence
00:40:39
[music] back in 1983 for kidnap and sexual assault, Williams' prison psychiatrist wrote in her [music] report
00:40:47
that she felt he was making good progress and was eligible for rehabilitation. >> The year that Williams was released from
00:40:57
prison on parole, there were, I believe, 11,000 people in Michigan that went before the parole
00:41:06
board. The parole board released almost 9,000 of those people on parole. Subsequent to Williams'
00:41:16
>> [music] >> convictions and sentencing, the parents of Michelle and Melissa
00:41:22
Urban were instrumental in making changes to the way the parole board in Michigan
00:41:31
reviews people and releases people. >> There was legislation enacted later in
00:41:38
1992, as I understand, to reform Michigan's parole system. So, I guess you could say that that's something that
00:41:46
hopefully is good that has come out of the [music] case. >> And it wasn't just the families that
00:41:52
were impacted by these tragic killings. >> Now, I'll tell you, you know, people who
00:41:58
work on a serial killer case never want to do that again. It is so physically and emotionally draining
00:42:06
that, you know, it affects their family life because they're spending more time
00:42:09
on the case. Uh, and you know, there's a lot of pressure from the media, from the
00:42:14
public, from you know, your boss to solve these cases. >> [music] >> And while you do feel good that we
00:42:19
caught the guy, it's something that they really don't want to have to go through
00:42:23
again. >> My department, the Michigan State Police, [music] have counselors and psychologists on
00:42:31
staff because they know of the toll that investigations can have. I personally feel there is no such thing
00:42:41
as justice in a case like this. The girls will never be brought back. The only thing we have is the knowledge
00:42:51
that Williams will never be able to do this again. And so that the other young women out
00:42:57
there will be safe. >> The decision to release Leslie Allen Williams early proved to be
00:43:09
catastrophic. He was a dangerous seasoned criminal whose frequent appearances in and out of
00:43:16
prison didn't deter him from taking the lives of Kami Vie Weaver, sisters Michelle and Melissa Urban, and
00:43:24
15-year-old Cynthia Jones in the space of just 9 months. This undoubtedly makes Leslie Allen Williams one of the world's
00:43:33
most evil killers.