Sources: Former sheriff meddled with murder suspect in ongoing investigation

It was just days after Rick Walter had reopened the Mischelle Lawless murder case, when, he said, Kevin Williams walked into the sheriff's office.

Josh Kezer was still in prison for the murder that a judge would rule later he did not commit.

At that point in 2006, it was not widely known that Walter, then the sheriff, had reopened the case. He had only told those in his department. He now knows someone must have leaked information from his office.

He hadn't yet developed suspects, and he didn't know at the time Kevin Williams was connected to the case. He hadn't yet found the 1997 report of an interview documented by officer Bill Bohnert, where Mark Abbott (another suspect) had implicated Williams while Abbott was in jail on federal drug charges. Walter didn't yet know witnesses would later claim Williams had told them details about the murder, including where the murder began -- at a mobile home dealership near the I-55 exit ramp where Lawless was killed -- and who he said pulled the trigger.

So Walter was baffled the day Williams walked into his office.

"Kevin came to my office and said that he was told that I opened up this investigation ... He said he was told that he was a suspect in this murder," Walter recalled recently.

During that surprise visit, Walter said, Williams proceeded to call his then-wife Terri Williams to provide an alibi that he was at a party in Commerce at the time Lawless was killed. Terri Williams confirmed this account on speaker phone, Walter said. Terri Williams has since rescinded that alibi in interviews with the Southeast Missourian and previously in 2015 with Walter.

Some time after that initial surprise meeting, Walter said, Williams told him he had learned he was a suspect from Walter's predecessor, Bill Ferrell.

Ferrell was the sheriff in charge of the original investigation.

Walter and Ferrell have become bitter political rivals over the years. Walter said reopening the case angered many within the law enforcement community, and he's met opposition at the local, state and federal levels. "I begged the highway patrol to help. They never would," Walter said.

Scott County Sheriff Rick Walter speaks with a Southeast Missourian reporter Dec. 28, 2016 at the Scott County Sheriff's Office in Benton, Missouri.Southeast Missourian file

Still, as unusual as it would be for Walter to reopen a solved murder, so too would it be for a former law enforcement officer to inform a person he was a suspect in an open and ongoing investigation. Walter said he did not ever ask Ferrell to help him with the case, nor did Ferrell ever offer to help, and nor did Ferrell share any information he'd gleaned from conversations with Williams. Such communications would be highly unusual in a murder investigation.

In a recent interview, Ferrell denied having a relationship with Williams, but Walter is one of three sources who told the Southeast Missourian on the record that he did.

As for the tip that Ferrell told Williams he was a suspect, Walter said he learned this from Williams in subsequent conversations.

Williams "told me that he was demolishing a building in Sikeston, actually it was in Miner, Missouri, the old Ramada Inn," Walter recalled. Kevin Williams owns an excavation business. "When Bill Ferrell approached the work site, he stopped him while he was working and informed him that I had opened the case and that he, Kevin, was my number one suspect."

Walter said Williams told him that "he and Bill (Ferrell) talked about the case every day and talked about me every day."

In a memo that Walter added to the case file, Walter wrote, "He admitted that he and the former sheriff did talk about me and the Lawless murder. Again, I asked him, and he said, 'I am sure you know exactly what we say because I am sure that you have our phones tapped and are recording our conversations about this.'"

Walter said he never tapped their phones. But he said he is confident Ferrell and Williams have communicated about the case.

Ferrell, sheriff when Lawless was killed, had garnered many accolades during his 28 years as the county's top law enforcement officer by the time he retired in 2004. He'd helped usher in a new SEMO Drug Task Force, served as president of the Missouri Sheriffs' Association for a time, served on the advisory boards for the Southeast Missouri Crime Lab and the Law Enforcement Academy at Southeast Missouri State University. Ferrell was a powerful and popular sheriff. He was widely revered in law enforcement, known for his white cowboy hat and cowboy boots. He loved rodeos and horses, and has wide family roots and friendly relationships in the county.

Ferrell insists he never told Williams that the murder case had been reopened. He said he and Williams are not friends. "I didn't know Kevin Williams that well," Ferrell said.

Ferrell said his father had an excavating business as did Williams. Ferrell said he saw Williams at construction sites.

"I haven't talked to Kevin in a long, long time," said Ferrell.

But Ferrell, who has horses, said he is aware that Williams is now raising horses.

"It seems like he (Williams) has turned his life around," Ferrell said. "I have nothing bad to say about Kevin Williams."

Meeting at bank

In January of 2011, Kevin Williams' sister reached out to Josh Kezer on Facebook regarding Kezer's advocacy in another potential wrongful-conviction case. By this time, Kezer had been out of prison for nearly two years.

During the subsequent Facebook exchange, Kezer shared with Williams' sister that if evidence was collected that implicated her brother in the Lawless case, that Kezer would work to put him in prison. Kezer, in part through a private investigator who was working on his behalf while he was in prison, has known information about the case that has not been made public. He shared with Williams' sister that there was more evidence against Williams than just Mark Abbott's statement. Kezer provided the Facebook exchange to the Southeast Missourian upon request, because it was this exchange that prompted a meeting between Kevin Williams and Ferrell, according to Gayla Mooney, Williams' ex-girlfriend. Kezer's exchange was as Mooney described and confirms at least part of Mooney's statement about how and why a meeting between Williams and Ferrell transpired.

Mooney said she began dating Kevin Williams around 2009. They dated for about two years, she said. She said Williams had a hot temper, including one incident where she "popped off" about Williams and the Lawless murder. "When I said that, he stood up out of the chair, he grabbed me by my throat, picked me up in midair and slammed me against the wall. He was so mad he was spitting. He threatened to kill me."

Mooney said Williams' sister forwarded Kezer's message to her to pass along to Kevin Williams.

When she did, she said Williams immediately phoned Ferrell.

After the phone call, Williams and Mooney met Ferrell at the Montgomery Bank parking lot in Sikeston, Mooney said.

"We got out of the car. I got in the back seat of Ferrell's (pickup) truck and Kevin got in the front passenger seat," she remembered, adding that Ferrell had dogs with him that were in the back seat with her. Williams showed the Facebook message to the former sheriff, Mooney said. "Bill Ferrell said, 'You have nothing to worry about. There ain't nothing there,'" she recalled him saying.

Ferrell denies the meeting took place. When informed of that denial, Mooney stood behind her account. "I have no reason to lie," she said, adding that her specific recollection of the Facebook exchange obtained by the newspaper confirms her story.

Mooney said she doesn't know if Williams killed Lawless, adding that Williams told her he didn't know Lawless.

Terri Williams, who was married to Kevin Williams for 21 years before divorcing in 2009, told the Southeast Missourian that Williams and Ferrell were friends. Terri Williams recently told the Southeast Missourian that she no longer vouches for Kevin's whereabouts at the time of the murder, a statement she said she shared with Walter in 2015.

While developments with Abbott and Kevin Williams were coming to light in 2008 and 2009 -- including information that Walter was seeking new DNA testing -- Williams obtained a passport to Belize, and was thinking about leaving the country, Mooney said.

Changing stories

Another law enforcement oddity in the case is whether, or how much, investigators considered Mark Abbott as a suspect.

Abbott's story changed multiple times in terms of the description of people and the car he saw at the crime scene. Part of Mark Abbott's testimony was that he stopped at a pay phone at a nearby parking lot before heading to the sheriff's department to report the crime. But Wes Drury, now sheriff and who was then a jailer, said initially that Mark's twin brother, Matt, reported the incident. Drury later said he was not certain if the individual who came to the sheriff's office was Matt or Mark.

Mark Abbott and, later, witness Dallas Butler, are the only two people who have claimed to have seen Lawless at the crime scene before officers arrived. Abbott, who says he never met Lawless -- which contradicts the statement of a witness -- told police that Lawless was wearing rings on her fingers, but those rings were found in her console, according to documents.

The judge who exonerated Kezer wrote in his ruling that Mark Abbott was considered a suspect three days after the murder because his story changed so much. But Scott County's investigator, Brenda Schiwitz, told the jury he was never considered a suspect.

However, the judge wrote in his ruling that "other entries in Deputy Schiwitz's notes, in addition to the November 11 suspect list, indicate that she considered Abbott a suspect herself, at least during the first months of the investigation -- because he returned to the scene of the crime and because he gave inconsistent accounts of the events the night of the murder."

It's not clear how or why the original investigators cleared Mark Abbott.

In a recent interview with the Southeast Missourian, Ferrell simply said that the names of Abbott and Williams "were brought up and they were checked out."

He said he remembers that Williams had an alibi. "He had been to a party or something. I am going from memory," he recalled.

Ferrell said, "At that particular time, we had names coming out of the woodwork. If you didn't like somebody, you threw their name in the pot," he said of possible suspects mentioned to law enforcement.

Drug involvement

In the mid-1990s, Williams, Mark Abbott and Matt Abbott were known methamphetamine distributors in Southeast Missouri and were convicted of federal crimes during that decade, according to records. The Southeast Missourian could not find any state records where Williams or Mark Abbott were arrested for drug charges at the time by local law enforcement. Walter said he knows that Williams at one point was working with the SEMO Drug Task Force as an informant. The federal indictments involving Williams and the Abbotts are sealed records.

"He definitely was an informant," Terri Williams said of her ex-husband. "They (DEA agents) would come to the house. He would make calls to his source in California."

Terri Williams added that Kevin even "sold to a (Scott County) judge at the time." The allegation of a judge being involved in the drug trade was also made by another source when Walter was sheriff.

Williams served five years in federal prison for his role in distributing meth from California. The SEMO Drug Task Force often works with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

But despite being heavily involved with the SEMO Drug Task Force, Ferrell told the Southeast Missourian recently that at the time of the murder "I don't remember any connection" between Mark Abbott and Kevin Williams.

In August 1997, Mark Abbott was sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, federal court records show. He was subsequently placed on supervised release, but his release was revoked in 2014 and he was sentenced to two months in prison. In August 2017, he was arrested for probation violations including possession of crystal methamphetamine, court documents show. He is currently serving time in a federal prison in Greenville, Illinois, He is scheduled to be released this September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons website.

Abbott's revelation

Mark Abbott, hoping for leniency, told an officer, Bill Bohnert, in 1997 that Kevin Williams was with him on the night of the murder, and that Williams shot Lawless, according to documents. Abbott wasn't a random snitch at that point. When he made this claim, he was doing so as the state's former star witness, the man who pointed Kezer out of a lineup, providing the only evidence that Kezer was even in the state of Missouri on the night of the murder. Upon the suggestion of Cape Girardeau County Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle, Bohnert told the lead detective with the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Don Windham, about the information.

Ferrell said recently the information provided by Bohnert was never brought to his attention.

But Windham, now retired from the highway patrol, told the Southeast Missourian that he did indeed pass that information along to Ferrell. He recalled that Ferrell was informed twice about the interview -- once by himself. He said he remembered Bohnert saying he had called Ferrell as well. Windham said the highway patrol was working as an assisting agency. He said he doesn't remember specifics about the information, including Williams' name. But as an assisting agency, it would not have been his call to reopen the case. That would have been Ferrell's call. He also said that he and another officer (not from Scott County) tried to follow up with another interview with Mark Abbott, but when they did, Abbott would not cooperate.

Windham told the court in 1994 that Ferrell filed charges in the case without his advisement.

The charges "were a surprise to me because I didn't, at that point, feel like that I had finished the investigation enough to know what the truth of the charges were," he said in his court testimony. "The sheriff got the warrants on his own, without telling me that he had the warrants charging him with first-degree murder."

But when Walter reopened the case, Ferrell was quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as saying that "you need to talk to the highway patrol instead of me because they are the ones that conducted the investigation."

Windham's comments and testimony of Schiwitz, Ferrell's then lead investigator, contradict Ferrell's statement. Ferrell testified that he was the man in charge at a pretrial deposition.

In a deposition, Schiwitz made it clear that Ferrell led the investigation when he was sheriff. She called it "his investigation," adding that even Windham, the state trooper on the case, did as Ferrell directed.

In January 2002, Kezer's former attorney, Al Lowes, sent a letter to Ferrell about a phone call he received from Cathy Fowler of Cape Girardeau. She said that she was once married to a man who had "messed around with meth," Lowes wrote.

Lowes added that "she said that Kevin Williams and Mark Abbott were both apparently involved in running meth from California to our area."

Fowler said Kevin Williams and Mark Abbott boasted one time that they killed Lawless, Lowes wrote to Ferrell.

Editor's note (Update): After this story published, Cathy Fowler said Lowes' letter was inaccurate. She said Abbott never visited her home, nor does she believe Abbott committed the murder. She said she informed Lowes of her information, because when she called then-sheriff Bill Ferrell with the information, he said they already had a conviction in the case and hung up on her.

In the letter, Lowes told Ferrell that "I know you would not want anybody to be in jail for something he did not do. I would hope you would assign somebody on it to run this down."

Ferrell left office two years later without reopening the case.

In an interview about his retirement with the Southeast Missourian two years after receiving that letter, Ferrell said the Kezer conviction was one of his proudest accomplishments.

"We got a conviction almost entirely on circumstantial evidence," he said in the 2004 interview. "I'm really proud of the effort that went into that case and brought it to a conclusion."

But 10 years earlier in a deposition in the Kezer case, Ferrell testified that he thought "more than one" person was responsible for the murder. "I wouldn't want to speculate other than what the facts show as we found at the scene," he told Kezer's defense attorney.

Kevin Williams said in an interview with the Southeast Missourian in 2008 that he never made statements about the murder to anyone. Matt Abbott said in 2008 neither he nor his brother had ever met Lawless, which contradicts a statement from a witness.

In 2017, the brothers told the Southeast Missourian they were volunteering to take polygraph tests in an effort to clear their names. However, they did not reveal the results.

Williams declined to be interviewed through his attorney.

The Southeast Missourian also sought to interview Mark Abbott. A woman who answered a phone number listed for Mark Abbott said she would inform him of our request. The Missourian did not hear from Abbott, who is in prison.

He previously has denied making statements against Williams to Bohnert.

Scott County Prosecutor Paul Boyd and current Sheriff Wes Drury, who was a jailer on duty the night of the murder, said the unsolved case remains under investigation.

mbliss@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3641

bmiller@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3625