Murray contacted the F.B.I., rather than local police, “because I did not trust the Johnson City Police Department,” she told me. She said that she’d previously experienced sexist treatment from the department, including a frisking that she found humiliating and intrusive. Nevertheless, the F.B.I. referred the matter to a J.C.P.D. officer, who immediately informed Sparks. Though Sparks was off duty at the time, he went to the F.B.I. field office to assume control of the case. Later that day, when Sparks interviewed her, he said, inaccurately, that no other woman had wanted to pursue charges against Williams, because, as she remembered the remark, “everyone else had been too fearful.” Murray, who interpreted the comment as an effort to dissuade her, replied that she wanted to press charges. She didn’t hear from the police again for five months, at which point she went to talk to Sparks. He told her not to expect further follow-up until her rape-kit results were returned. More than four years later, she still has not received the results.
Sparks and the other detectives seemed to have no plan for pursuing Williams. Dahl suggested avenues for investigation, to little avail. “I was going home and researching and combing through social media until, like, one in the morning, and coming back to them, like, ‘I found a possible lead,’ or ‘I think you should check this out.’ I was always given the side-eye and told, ‘Kat, we’re tired of hearing about Williams,’ ” she said. “And meanwhile more victims were coming in.” At least six assaults are now alleged to have taken place between October, 2020, and the following April, as Dahl struggled to advance the case.
Dahl had been investigating for almost a month when she decided that she was at an impasse. In December, she reached out to her supervisor at the D.O.J., Wayne Taylor, who scheduled a meeting between Dahl and officials with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, a state organization that Dahl hoped might provide oversight. When Karl Turner, the chief of the Johnson City Police Department, found out about the meeting, he called Taylor, furious that it had been planned without his consent. The meeting was cancelled, and Turner called Dahl into his office. Dahl recorded their meeting, in which Turner seemed indifferent to the case and rejected her suggestion that they contact women whose names matched those on the list that officers had seen at the apartment. “I don’t know if that’s girls he’s raped or girls he’s had consensual sex with and he calls it whatever he calls it,” Turner said. Instead, he proposed merely that they place cameras outside Williams’s garage. Increasingly distressed, Dahl warned Turner that, based on the baby-doll sex toy, she believed that Williams might be preying on children. (Taylor and Turner, through representatives, declined to comment. Turner has denied any wrongdoing.)
Dahl’s relationship with the police department was deteriorating. Turner contacted Taylor, Dahl’s supervisor, and told him that she had exhibited poor communication skills. In the following months, Turner continued to complain to Taylor about Dahl. Her focus on the Williams case became a running joke in the department. Once, Dahl recalls, a colleague jokingly suggested that she serve as bait, telling her, “If you’re so obsessed with this case, why don’t you go have a drink at Label”—a bar where Williams was rumored to prey upon women—“and let him take you up to his apartment, then give us a call?”
It’s not clear why officers told Dahl about the rape allegations while discouraging her from pursuing them. Dahl believes that they wanted to eliminate the increasingly visible problems Williams was creating while avoiding scrutiny of their errors in policing his more serious crimes. “A simple weapons charge was the way to do that,” she told me. Dahl was reluctant to pursue an indictment only on the ammunition case, which was not a particularly serious offense. “I was very keen to avoid anything that I thought could fail and let him get away,” she said. “But the flip side of the coin is the longer I wait, the more opportunities he has to hurt people.” She finally decided that she could wait no longer. Grand-jury hearings were limited, owing to COVID precautions, but eventually, in April, 2021, she secured an indictment on the ammunition charge.
The arrest warrant was placed under seal, to reduce the risk that Williams might flee. During the next three weeks, Dahl lodged more than thirty requests with Sparks and other Johnson City police officers, asking them to arrest him. She was offered various excuses—the officers were busy, or had conflicting training schedules, or, as one officer, Jeff Legault, told her, Williams simply wasn’t a priority. (Through a lawyer, Legault said that he was aware only of the minor ammunition charge, which was not his primary responsibility.) At one point, an officer told Dahl that they couldn’t execute the warrant because they lacked the code to the front door of Williams’s building. Dahl recalled asking, “Are you law enforcement?”
Finally, in mid-May, an officer was sent to knock on Williams’s door. Williams, who was hosting a party, didn’t answer. “I could see through the peephole. It was one single cop by himself,” Williams later told me. “I called 911. I was, like, ‘What the fuck is this cop outside of my door for?’ ” During the call, an officer at the station disclosed the existence of the warrant. Williams fled the apartment, evading the officer by rappelling out of a window.
After the botched arrest, Turner pressed Dahl to focus on other cases. In a meeting that month which Dahl recorded, Turner referred to Williams as a nuisance who had already been dealt with. “He just needs to calm down,” Turner said. “He’ll get over it.” Captain Kevin Peters, who was also at the meeting, said, “I think we’ve achieved our desired outcome.” (A representative for Peters denied any wrongdoing.) But Dahl was convinced that Williams still posed a danger. “I was obsessed with Williams,” she told me. “I was, like, I don’t care. I am going to work on this as much as I want. What are they going to do? Fire me?”
A month later, Turner told Dahl that her contract would not be renewed, and that her job would be terminated in less than a week. It was an unusually blunt firing for a prosecutor in the midst of several cases, including one, unrelated to Williams, with a trial date two months away. The department later argued that Dahl had brought an insufficient number of indictments before grand juries. But Dahl’s productivity appears to have been roughly on par with that of her colleagues. From the start of the pandemic until her firing, she secured nineteen indictments; in the same period, five colleagues working in the same courthouse brought between ten and twenty each. Dahl told me that her job performance was being judged by the uniquely harsh standards reserved for institutional whistle-blowers. “Everything that I’ve done within this job is now under a microscope,” she said.
In July, 2021, during her final days at the J.C.P.D., Dahl wrote to me using an encrypted e-mail account and a pseudonym. She told me that she was a federal prosecutor who was desperate to apprehend a serial rapist and encountering obstruction. “Worst case scenario, I believe there is a possibility that this person is being protected by local law enforcement,” she wrote. “All I want is some accountability in this case.”
Even after Dahl was fired, the Williams case dominated her life. Living in a community where she was at odds with the police took a toll. “I had joked with several friends, ‘If I get mugged downtown, congratulations to the mugger, because I’m not calling the cops,’ ” she said. She bought a .22-calibre mini-revolver, “just in case.” She supported herself with freelance legal-drafting work, and continued to investigate. Ultimately, she connected with several of the women on the list from Williams’s apartment, all of whom told her similar stories of being drugged and assaulted; they recalled feeling discouraged when they went to the police.
Even her social life was consumed by the case. Drinks and meals often became opportunities to gather leads. “It was usually met with something along the lines of ‘Oh, are you talking about the drug-dealing rapist?’ ” she said. “It became apparent pretty quickly that this was an open secret.” The day after her firing, she went on a date with a man she had met on Hinge. She mentioned the garage, and the man instantly identified Williams. “ ‘Oh, yeah, that guy is a creep,’ ” she recalled him saying. “ ‘There was a girl who got into an accident and died after she left the apartment.’ ”
This was news to Dahl. She found an obituary for Laura Shea Trent, who had died in a car crash in November, 2020. Dahl reached out to Trent’s sister Sarah, who told her that, on the night she died, Trent and her boyfriend, Noah Sedam, who was an acquaintance of Williams’s, had briefly stopped by the garage after drinks at a brewery. After they left, Sedam realized that his phone was missing and returned to the brewery to look for it. When he came back, five minutes later, he told me, “she was just gone, disappeared, vanished.” The garage was closed. Trent’s car was nearby.
Sedam told me that, when he left Trent, she was drunk but walking and talking competently. But soon afterward she began placing frantic calls to family members, sounding incoherent and inconsolable. “She was just in such distress that she didn’t even know who she had called,” her sister Stacy told me. She drove around looking for Trent while she and Sarah tried to get their sister to describe where she was. Eventually, Trent stopped responding.
Minutes after her last call to her sisters, Trent crashed her car into a concrete traffic island, dying at the scene. Sarah told me that both Diaz and Williams later told her that Trent had gone with them and had more to drink. When I spoke to Williams, he didn’t deny that Trent may have been in his apartment. He asked, “Didn’t they do a toxicology report? Was there any sign of downers?” (Trent’s blood showed a high level of alcohol, but exhaustive testing for date-rape drugs was not carried out.)
Two days after Trent’s death, Sarah called the Johnson City police, telling them that she believed Williams had been with her sister before she died. After she named Williams, an officer told her that Johnson City lacked jurisdiction in this case, and advised her to call law enforcement in nearby Elizabethton, where the crash had happened. Elizabethton sent her back to the Johnson City police, whom she eventually again asked to look into Williams, telling them that she feared Trent had been drugged. She never heard back. But Dahl realized that Sparks had assigned her the Williams case within a day of Sarah’s first phone call. “The fact that they gave me the case a day later, without mentioning any of this—it’s not a coincidence,” Dahl said.
By the time she learned about Laura Trent, Dahl had pieced together much of Williams’s history. “I had a picture in my head of what he was like,” she said. Williams had been brought up in a modest suburban home in Largo, Florida, where a slab of concrete in the back yard still bears his child-size footprints. His sister Auburn Shapiro told me that their mother, who died in 2020, was “a hustler” who “worked her ass off” to support the family, taking jobs as a notary and at the reservations line at Delta, and eventually doing clerical work for Williams’s business. When Williams was nine, his parents divorced. A few years later, his mother remarried and moved with Williams to what he described as “redneck fucking hillbilly-town North Carolina,” where his stepfather owned property. “It was almost doomed from the start,” Shapiro said. “There was no house. We lived in trailers, on welfare.” Williams’s stepfather, a lawyer who was later disbarred for billing clients for work he didn’t perform, was an alcoholic who also struggled with heroin addiction. He was, Shapiro told me, physically and emotionally abusive. “He would make Sean sleep outside on an unheated porch in the cold, or punch him in the stomach,” she said. “Sean doesn’t call what he went through ‘abuse.’ But I think it shaped how he sees boundaries and consent.”
After the move to North Carolina, Williams, still in his early teens, fathered a daughter. When he was fourteen, child-protective services took him into custody. For the rest of his teens, he was sent to a series of foster homes and juvenile-justice programs, often running away soon after he arrived. At one point, he fled a disciplinary camp with several other students he’d persuaded to join him. At one of his placements, a woman whom Williams described as his foster mother began a sexual relationship with him, leading to the end of her marriage.
At eighteen, Williams started a relationship with a thirty-five-year-old woman which lasted seven years. While they lived together, Williams grew marijuana and launched a business, first cleaning high-rise windows and then expanding into waterproofing, pressure washing, and historical-building restoration. The company grew as he netted contracts on large buildings in Greensboro and other cities in the area. In the mid-two-thousands, Williams got a contract to restore a building in Johnson City and began renting the first of several apartments he would ultimately own there, including the condo where much of his alleged criminal activity took place. Those years were also marked by increasingly heavy drug use—eventually, Williams was buying large quantities from out of state. “I was a collector,” he said. “Any kinds of drugs that came in, I would buy it.” Williams told me that he only occasionally sold drugs, preferring to give them to friends and acquaintances, but several of his associates said that they believed he had ties to traffickers.
While Williams was evading arrest, Dahl tried to track him down herself. She drove past his garage and his apartment, to see if the lights were on. His attempts to stay out of sight were halfhearted. He continued to post on social media, sometimes revealing his location. Dahl followed information in one post to a construction site operated by his company in Asheville, North Carolina. At a nearby hotel, she spoke to a manager who told her that Williams had recently been kicked out for being too rowdy and for keeping drugs in his room. The manager also feared for the safety of a young woman Williams had with him. Dahl repeatedly called the U.S. Marshals with leads about where Williams might be. She told them to search the area surrounding a house she had visited in Cullowhee, North Carolina. His mother had once lived there, and Dahl believed that the location was significant to Williams—and that the surrounding woods might provide a hiding place. An official with the U.S. Marshals said that Dahl’s tips were taken seriously. Nevertheless, Dahl told me, for nearly two years, “it just never went anywhere.”
