The Snow Killings Page 9

  Even so, Williams’ zeal for cuffing the bad guys frequently landed him in the hot seat in the chief’s office. In one two-year span, he was suspended three times. During that same period, Williams’ platoon of some three dozen officers had earned the dubious distinction of crashing 98 police cruisers. Still, Williams would go on to become the most decorated officer in Livonia. In all, he spent 27 years working for the Livonia Police Department, variously as a sniper on the SWAT team, as an officer in special operations, and working undercover narcotics.

  Livonia Police Det. Cory Williams, following in his father’s footsteps. He would go one to become the most decorated officer in Livonia (courtesy Williams family).

  In 1996, while working on a drug raid in West Bloomfield, Williams went to the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office to obtain an arrest warrant. Behind the counter was a tall blue-eye blonde named Michelle Wetherford. Smitten, Michelle cajoled her best friend, Lisa, to find out if he was single. When Lisa coyly asked “for a friend,” Michelle fled to the bathroom.

  “Well, go get her. I want to talk to her,” Williams told Lisa.

  Michelle came out, beet red. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said. Introductions were made and phone numbers exchanged.

  When Williams got back to the office, his lieutenant said: “Did you get the warrant?”

  “Yeah,” Williams said smiling. “And I got a date too.”

  The two were married a year later. A daughter, Taylor, was born in 1998 and a son, Cory Jr., in 2002.

  Cory Williams never got a chance to talk to his father about the case. In 1999, Lee Williams, then 75, was admitted into the hospital to have scheduled surgery to remove a small tumor from his stomach. A few days after surgery, Lee Williams suffered a massive heart attack and died.

  Years later, when he was assigned to the Oakland County Child Killer investigation, Cory would come across familiar names in the file—cops his dad had worked with on the case. Names like Duncan, Anger, and Piche. He even found himself investigating two cops as possible suspects, good friends of his dad, cops he knew well as a kid, and he would think: “How in the world did I get here?”

  In 2004, Williams was assigned to reexamine a 15-year-old cold case, the homicide of Exavor Giller, the owner of the Detroit Cab Company. After arriving home from work with his wife on a warm June night in 1989, Giller, a father of five, had been gunned down in his own driveway. The killers had left him pleading for his own life on the pavement. Inside the house, Catherine Giller lay unconscious on the kitchen floor, knocked down by the butt of a shotgun. The house had been ransacked; guns and bags of coins were gone.

  When she recovered, Catherine described the suspects as two white males, one “as tall as the doorway,” and the other suspect was short with dark hair. Shoeprints in the kitchen were later determined to be from British Knights sneakers. There was also an Omega Stun Gun left behind. Witnesses who reported seeing a silver station wagon with Florida plates leaving the area. But, after a year-long investigation, the family was told all leads had been exhausted.1

  In December 2004, Bonnie Giller, Exavor’s daughter, received an odd phone call while working the dispatch line at Greater Detroit Cab Company. Ever since Exavor had been murdered, Bonnie and her mother, Catherine, had taken over running the cab company.

  The caller, a female with a Spanish accent, sounded nervous to Bonnie; she said she was looking for a cab company that used to be owned by a “Mr. Gillum.”

  “This company was owned by a Mr. Giller,” Bonnie told her, both annoyed that somebody would mangle his name and startled that somebody was asking for him. Bonnie tried to engage the woman but she would only give her first name: “Leticia” and that she lived in California. Then she said: “He died, right? In 1989?”

  “Yes,” Bonnie answered, snapping her fingers in the air to put her mom on notice: something was up with this phone call. “That’s right.”

  “I’m sorry to ask,” Leticia said. “But was he murdered?”

  “Yes,” Bonnie said, grabbing a Post-It. “What did you say your name was again?”2

  Leticia hung up.

  Bonnie immediately called the new officer on the case. Williams told Bonnie to expect that the woman would probably call back and told her to be sure to write down the date and the exact time of Leticia’s call.

  A week later, same time in the afternoon, Leticia phoned again. This time she said that her brother who was in prison in California might have information about Exavor’s murder. She also wanted to know if there was there any reward money for information. Just as Bonnie started to ask questions, Leticia hung up on her again. Bonnie called Williams right away and he got a search warrant for the phone records.

  In January 2005, Williams phoned Leticia Delgado Duran in Glendale, California. As soon as Williams identified himself as a detective working the cold case homicide of Exavor Giller, Leticia became frantic. She said she was terrified that anything she might tell the detective could get her brother, Jessie Delgado, who was locked up in the Los Angeles County jail, killed for snitching. Williams did everything he could to keep her on the phone but she hung up.

  Later, she called back and Williams recorded the calls. Leticia said Jessie Delgado had been serving time in the Los Angeles County jail and his cellmate was a 32-two-year-old man named Richard Mudica. Mudica was awaiting sentencing for several armed robberies.

  She confessed to Williams she had fallen in love with Richard Mudica while visiting her brother and passing out Bibles as part of a prison ministry program. With his dark hair and mystical blue eyes, Leticia found Mudica kind, gentle. But Leticia had a problem. She was married to a L.A. Police Department captain and had two grown daughters.

  Leticia said it was not just the affair that troubled her, but also what she learned about Mudica’s involvement in the death of a Detroit cab company owner 15 years prior. She told Williams she convinced Mudica to confess his sins to her; she felt she could reform him. “I promised him that if he became a warrior on fire for God, I would marry him,” Letitia told Williams. “I would walk away from everything I had. My marriage, everything. I would marry him. But he had to show me that he was sincere. He had to ask for God’s forgiveness. So, I told him to write the whole thing out. But when I got the letter, I had no idea what I was about to read.”3

  In 1988, Richard Mudica was a 15-year-old runaway living on the streets in California whose mother was a prostitute. While selling newspapers, Mudica met Richard Lawson, then a notorious pedophile in his forties driving a newspaper delivery truck for the San Francisco Chronicle. At six-foot-six and 260 pounds, nobody said no to Lawson. Lawson “befriended” Mudica and the teenager got free booze and a place to sleep in exchange for sex.

  Lawson was from Detroit. He previously drove a cab in the city and he told Mudica that his former boss, the owner of the Detroit cab company, would take the earnings home every night—tens of thousands of dollars in cash. They agreed they would go to Detroit and rob this guy, but first, Lawson said, they needed “seed money.” After robbing a coin shop in San Francisco, the pair took a bus to Las Vegas, gambled a bit of it away and then flew to Miami. In Miami, they bought a station wagon, a shotgun and a stun gun, and drove to Detroit to rob Giller.4

  On June 19, 1989, Mudica and Lawson waited across the street from the Gillers’ modest brick home in Livonia all morning for Exavor Giller to leave the house. After realizing the Gillers were not at home, they broke in and ransacked the house, removing small items, including guns and bags of coins.

  Mudica said he was scared to death that evening when he saw the Gillers’ headlights turn into the driveway. At one point, he told Williams, he couldn’t feel his legs. When Catherine Giller entered the house, Lawson blocked her in the kitchen doorway and struck her in the face with the shotgun, knocking her unconscious. Lawson then went after Exavor who was outside parking his car in the garage.
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  Mudica said he heard Lawson say outside by the garage: “Hold it right there.” He said Exavor was crouched down and he watched as Lawson shot him in the chest with the shotgun. Mudica said he could hear Exavor gasping for help; the sound would come to haunt him.

  Lawson gunned the accelerator and the station wagon spewed gravel in its wake. The two drove all night with Lawson repeatedly asking Mudica if he would keep quiet about the murder. He said he was amazed Lawson didn’t kill him. They didn’t stop until they reached Atlantic City, where they checked into a motel next to a drive-in theater near several ponds. The following morning, they ditched the handguns they had stolen from the Giller home, one by one, tossing them into a pond. Then they left and travelled up and down the east coast, doing armed robberies in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, where they were finally caught and charged with robbery. Mudica was sent back to California Juvenile Authority. Lawson went to prison in Maine for nine years on the robberies, eventually returning to California.

  Fast forward 15 years: Leticia Delgado finds out her lover participated in an unsolved murder and is hoping to cash in on some reward money. Williams thanked Leticia for the information and told her he would be contacting her again soon.

  Williams knew Mudica wasn’t going anywhere. But he had no idea if Lawson was even still alive, much less living in the United States. A criminal history check located a Richard Macrae Lawson, born in Detroit in 1946, with arrests in Detroit for arson and attempted murder. When Williams saw that Lawson was six-foot-six, he remembered Catherine Giller saying the intruder was as tall as the doorway. The report also showed that Lawson had been arrested August 1, 1989, for armed robbery and child endangerment in Dormont, Pennsylvania, a small borough of Pittsburgh. This would have been six weeks after Exavor Giller was killed. It had to be the right Lawson.

  Later that night at home, Williams poured over the Dormont arrest and interrogation records. Lawson and Mudica were arrested for the robbery while driving a silver Chevy station wagon with Florida plates. They committed a robbery in Dormont using a 12-gauge shotgun: the same type of gun used to kill Giller. Mudica had also been wearing British Knights tennis shoes, which fit the bloody footprints in the Giller kitchen.

  During Lawson’s interrogation with Dormont detectives, Lawson tried to strike a plea deal. He said he had firsthand information about the Michigan “Snow Killings.” Williams froze. He read it again. “Snow Killings.”

  The small-town Pennsylvania detectives had no idea what Lawson was talking about. But for Williams, the words jumped off the page. Since the murders had occurred in winter, many had dubbed the Oakland County Child Killings “the Snow Killings.”

  It was as if the gauntlet had been thrown. Here was an informant in the maddening hunt for the Oakland County Child Killer who had never been tapped. Not only was Williams confident Richard Lawson had killed Exavor Giller, he also knew he could be staring at a huge break in the cold case of his father’s era, the bane of many investigators who had hoped solving it would be their crowning achievement.

  By early January 2005, Williams’ mission was clear: gather the evidence to prove Lawson killed Exavor Giller. Then he could proceed with the bigger conquest: whatever information Lawson might have on the “Snow Killings.”

  Born in 1946, in Gaylord, Michigan, to a single mother (his father was serving in the army overseas), it seems Richard Macrae Lawson never had a chance. As an infant, his mother left him on a doorstep at a home for boys in downtown Detroit. He was later adopted, but he was a troubled child and very unruly. By the time he reached his teens, Lawson had been picked up and charged with molestation several times over.

  When he was 18, he was arrested in Detroit and charged with “indecent liberties with a child.” Records indicate he performed oral sex on an eight-year-old child in the basement of the Hope Reformed Church in Detroit. He had paid the boy ten cents. Lawson pled guilty and was sentenced to two years’ probation.5

  In adulthood, Lawson worked sporadically as a newspaper delivery truck driver, a carpet salesman, a cab driver and a gas station attendant. But the sinister was always within reach. When triggered, the giant-sized Lawson could unleash a mighty temper. In the early nineties, he was charged with attempted murder after he nearly bludgeoned to death his adoptive father.

  By the time Williams was on his tail, Lawson was 59 and living in San Diego on federal probation after being charged with “Alien Smuggling.” Going by the alias of “Coyote Negro Lawson,” the career criminal had been running young Latino boys across the border and forcing them into sex trafficking.6

  To get to Lawson, Williams planned to interview Leticia Delgado in person. Then, her brother, Jessie Delgado, would have to be questioned about his conversations with his former cellmate. Then Mudica would have to be convinced to be a witness for the prosecution. Finally, if all went as planned, Williams would arrest Lawson in a surprise ambush: showing up unannounced at a scheduled appointment with his parole officer.

  Before leaving for California, Williams met with Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy and Rob Moran, chief assistant prosecuting attorney and head of Wayne County’s homicide unit. He needed to ensure that if he locked down Lawson on the Giller murder, he would have permission to offer Lawson a deal in exchange for whatever information he might be sitting on concerning the Oakland County Child Killings.

  On January 24, 2005, Williams, accompanied by Moran and two other officers, boarded a plane for Los Angeles. The following day, Williams sat in a small interrogation room at the Glendale Police Department with Leticia Duran. She was not the prim Bible-thumper he was expecting. Leticia wore shoulder-length platinum blonde hair, worked out religiously and dressed to prove it. The interview went well up until the end, when she asked when she would collect her reward money. Despite the fact no reward money had ever been offered in the Giller murder, Leticia maintained she had played an integral part in solving a murder and was thus entitled to compensation, especially after enduring the heartache of discovering her lover was an accomplice to murder. (Later, after Mudica was convicted, and with no cash to show for her efforts, she was so appalled she wrote a detailed complaint to then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

  The day after the interview, Rob Moran went to interview Leticia’s brother, Jessie Delgado, in Glendale, while Williams drove north to interview Mudica at the California State Prison at Lancaster.

  Mudica was shackled around his wrists and ankles as guards walked him across the prison yard. Williams could hardly believe that this was the same malleable teenager Lawson had dominated during the Giller murder. Now 31, with long black hair, a beard and piercing blue eyes, Mudica looked just like Charles Manson.

  Despite being in and out of prison for most of his life, Mudica was intelligent and well-spoken. He also knew the law. When Williams pressed him for his involvement in the Giller murder, Mudica knew he was just as culpable as Lawson for the murder, even if he hadn’t pulled the trigger.

  After a couple hours, Williams stopped the interview and phoned Moran, who was then in an interview room with Delgado. Moran then called Kym Worthy in Detroit and she gave the authorization to use immunity: Mudica would receive a lighter sentence for his part in the Giller murder in exchange for his cooperation in the form of a confession and his agreement to testify against Lawson. Mudica agreed on the spot.

  Williams was especially interested in the pond behind the motel in Atlantic City where Mudica said they had thrown the stolen handguns. Mudica said the place was approximately three to six miles outside of Atlantic City, in view of the Trump Plaza Hotel. It was a stretch, but Williams asked Mudica to draw a map of the area. The map indicated a strip mall and an abandoned drive-in theater complex next door.

  The following day, with an arrest warrant in his pocket, Williams sat in a hallway at the San Diego Police Department waiting for Lawson to report to his probation officer. As soon as he walked in, Williams
walked up to Lawson, identified himself, and told Lawson he was under arrest for the murder of Exavor Giller.

  “I don’t know any such person,” replied Lawson.7

  Williams pulled out Lawson’s laminated employee I.D. card from the Detroit Cab Company and held it at eye level.

  Lawson shrugged. “I hated him all right,” he said. “But I didn’t kill him.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Williams said.

  Richard Lawson was charged with armed robbery and child endangerment in Pennsylvania in 1989. He had been on the run for six weeks, after murdering Exavor Giller in Detroit. Lawson tried to make a deal with police in Pittsburgh, offering to provide information on the Michigan “Snow Killings”—an unfamiliar reference that meant nothing to them at the time (Livonia Police Department).

  Over the next several days, plans were made to extradite Lawson from California while detectives conducted a search of his apartment, with the assistance of U.S. Marshals. Williams began the first of several seemingly endless interviews with Lawson, both in his cell at the San Diego County jail and later at the Wayne County jail, where Lawson was awaiting trial.

  Lawson’s dubious claim to fame was his role as an informant for the Detroit Police Department in the early seventies. He provided information on criminal activity for Isaiah “Ike” McKinnon, then head of Detroit Police Sex Crimes Unit. (McKinnon would later go on to become chief of police in Detroit; in 2013 he ran for mayor unsuccessfully.) McKinnon told reporters in 2007: “Lawson had an uncanny knowledge of the underworld of pedophiles. He had a knowledge none of us could get because it’s like a secret society.”8

  Lawson’s stomping grounds in Detroit was the Cass Corridor, the six-square block area of the city just west of downtown proper that had become a haven for the sex trades.