by Pat Brown
* * * *
I TOOK THE information gained from my interviews and turned it over to the police department that had jurisdiction over the crime. In the beginning there had been a dispute over who should work the case; the park police, because Anne Kelley was murdered in the park, or the county police, because the park was within county jurisdiction. It would have been better for the county police to handle the case, because they had a lot of experience with murder investigations and the park police had very little. I never knew why the park police won out, but it was clearly their case. I had to go back to them with my new information and I got another tepid response, but I handed over the information anyway and went away again. I had compiled a substantial history on Walt, including all the places I knew he had worked, and a list of his old girlfriends. Whether he murdered Anne Kelley or not, I did not know, because that must be proved with evidence, but based on my investigation, there was no doubt in my mind that he should be a suspect or at least a person of interest. Information about him now came not just from one “bored housewife” but also from employers, family, and friends. Now there were even more reasons for the police to take a look at Walt Williams. I could only hope they would.
IN THE SPRING of 1996 I got the phone call that I had been waiting for for the last six years. Walt Williams finally became the number one suspect in the murder of Anne Kelley.
A new investigator had taken over the case, and he said, “Can you come in? I want to interview you about Walt Williams.”
I said, “Thank God.”
We talked the next day at police headquarters. I was back in the same building I had first walked into carrying my cardboard box of evidence all those years before. The investigator looked at me, motioned toward the evidence—my evidence—sitting on the table in between us, and shook his head. “I don’t know why they missed this the first time around. This is crazy. This is crazy.”
The police picked Walt up, brought him in for an interview, and polygraphed him. The police told me afterward that they laughed about his interview because it was full of bogus information. They were most amused that he had been given the “option” to leave the air force as part of a “Manpower Reduction Program.” They said that he now had an alibi for the night that Anne Kelley was murdered, that he had been playing softball at the time. That was an alibi we could strike down, because he told me that he left Kim’s and came back to the house. He never mentioned a softball game to me.
The polygraph showed that he was being deceptive. “He’s our guy. We know it’s him. We got his DNA and we’re waiting on the test to come back.” I don’t know if Williams gave consent for the tests willingly or if he was pressured into it or if there was a court order, but I was happy to hear that they were going after physical evidence.
Then the investigator looked at me and said, “You should watch your back. Walt’s really angry now.”
I said, “Can I get a Maryland gun permit? A carry permit?”
The police said no. In Maryland, you can get a carry permit only if your life is being threatened, and since Walt hadn’t threatened me, I couldn’t get one.
So that was that. I went home, relieved it was almost over, exhilarated that all my hard work had paid off, and thankful my analysis of Walt Williams hadn’t been so wrong after all. Then I waited, and I waited, and I waited.
People think DNA tests come back quickly, but this one took five months. While intellectually I never thought he’d come after me, and he didn’t, emotionally it was unnerving to know that he was out there and angry. He knew who turned him in and he heard that I had visited his relatives asking questions, so there was no doubt in his mind that he ended up being interviewed by the police six years after the murder because of me.
I kept calling and calling the police station. “What’s going on, what’s going on?” Finally the investigators received the test results.
“Walt has been excluded by the DNA,” the detective told me.
“WHAT?” I shrieked.
He said, “Yeah, the DNA excluded him. He’s no longer a suspect.”
I went berserk. I was just blown away. I could not understand it. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s been excluded.”
“I don’t believe this,” I said. “I can believe that it’s inconclusive—that I can buy. ‘It’s inconclusive’—we don’t have enough DNA to prove he did or didn’t do it. I can accept that and it’s okay with me if you can’t take it to court. You can tell me that and I’m not going to hound you over it. But please don’t lie to me.”
“Mrs. Brown,” he said, “you need to get a life.”
I DID GET a life, and I decided something needed to be done about the police investigative system, because I no longer believed that catching killers was being handled properly. The system was failing and innocent people, mostly women, were going to be killed because of it.
Some people said, “You just can’t accept defeat. You totally believe this guy killed this girl, and that’s all there is to it. No matter what evidence there is, you’re going to believe he did it, and you won’t admit you were wrong. You’ve got some kind of issue that you’ve just got to prove yourself. You’re just obsessed.”
But my problem wasn’t that. The investigator’s justification didn’t make sense to me. I’d grown distrustful of how the system worked, and I wanted proof. Six years ago I was told Michael Potter killed Anne Kelley, but that was never proven. Now I was being told Walt didn’t do it and they were looking for someone else. If Walt’s DNA didn’t match the DNA at the crime, then he was innocent. But I wanted proof. Prove to me he didn’t commit the crime.
For a year, I called and called, pushing for the right to see the DNA report. I was always refused. One day, for some reason, I got hold of another investigator and he read the DNA report to me! Go figure. But what a bonanza, because that officer said, “There were no PCR products obtainable from the sperm factions.” In other words, There was no DNA. A later statement by the Maryland State’s Attorney’s Office confirmed what the detective had told me: “There is no DNA evidence to take anyone to trial.”
One of the reasons they could not confirm that Anne’s killer was Walt was that there simply wasn’t any DNA found in or on Anne Kelley that could link him to the murder. The results were inconclusive. He had not been excluded.
I was furious, because the investigator did lie to me.
Now I knew that the DNA was inconclusive and that Walt should still be a suspect. And I wondered whether they ever tested the condom I found in his trash. It didn’t seem that they had, but if he were the killer, the victim’s DNA might have been found on that. I guess they didn’t think killers ever used them.
SOMETIMES I LOOK back at the Anne Kelley case and I realize the first investigator wasn’t especially skilled at solving cases. The park police had never had a murder in their jurisdiction before, so this guy probably had little or no experience in homicide or criminal profiling or psychopathology. And in comes a housewife with a box, she tells him a great story, and he shrugs it off.
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 fin
d 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 depresse
d 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.
