something about the murders, she helped her husband carry them out. now, during the penalty phase, prosecutors planned to use her testimony to make sure the jury would give him a death sentence. she led us to a lot of evidence. and i think it was important for the jury to see and have all their questions answered. he came up with the plan to dress like law enforcement. they were a husband-and-wife murder team, and they went through a dress rehearsal the night before the mcclelland murders. he was modeling it for me. describe to the members of the jury what he was modeling for you the night before. he looked like he was in the army or s.w.a.t. he had a bullet proof vest with sheriff on the front. more than likely mrs. mcclelland was going to answer the door, and he was going to introduce himself as a policeman. and the next morning, she said, she was lookout in the crown vic, as her husband went inside to murder the
killed the mcclellands and mark hasse. investigators had seen that ford crown victoria on video roaming near the mcclelland home and thought it might be a police car. the terrible possibility it might be one of their own had to be ruled in or out immediately. we checked with every law enforcement agency in the area and identified where every police car was in the area. and none of them were even close to where this image was captured. next, they looked for anyone who for any reason had issues or disputes involving both prosecutors. there didn t seem to be anybody in that group of people that were upset enough that they would want to commit homicide. but there was one defendant involved in a felony they couldn t ignore. there was only one common denominator for those two prosecutors. which was? that was eric williams. eric williams? who was eric williams? he was a former deputy sheriff and longtime attorney with an
eric williams was making the tv interview rounds. but he hadn t sat down for a formal interview with investigators. because of his connection to both mark hasse and mike mcclelland, investigators had to take a serious look at him. on the surface it may seem implausible because he s a lawyer and a judge and successful. the more we learned about him, the more viable in our minds he became as a suspect. just the year before, williams had been prosecuted for theft by hasse and mcclelland. you must be champing at the bit to talk to eric williams. obviously, we wanted to talk to him. the problem with that was he was still represented by lawyers. lawyers who kept williams from talking. but then, two weeks after the mcclel lands were killed in their home, the special prosecutors got a big opening they hadn t seen coming. we get an email back from the lawyers basically saying, we do no longer represent eric williams. they figured this was their one window to talk to him, and
hard as hell to try to sell. he said, i don t have any guns, except one gun. and so, he let them look around. and and they began finding gun parts. gun parts. some very specific gun parts that appeared to match the type of automatic weapon used in the mcclelland killings. and at the same time, the fbi discovered williams had done computer searches on hasse and mcclelland before the murders. he specifically told them that he had not ever searched the two victims before the murders. now you ve got him lying. yeah. that lie and those gun parts were enough to get a warrant for a more thorough search of his house. investigators, including a crack fbi evidence team were back the next day. they went room to room, then to the garage. and, bingo! in a filing cabinet in the garage there was a manual for a ford crown vic. and there was also a title to a crown vic. the task force, of course, had been looking for a crown victoria.
i know that i start carrying a gun. sleep with a gun under my pillow. even shannon, who wouldn t carry a gun before, now slept with protection nearby. we had a big ol shotgun sitting on our dresser ready to go just in case. the killer s threat to unleash more violence in kaufman county kept the task force working around the clock. a special team scoured the surveillance video collected near the mcclelland crime scene, hoping for a new lead. so many people now have surveillance cameras on their house. so, we re trained to go in and collect that sort of evidence. and, finally, the video team s painstaking search seemed to pay off. they found images of a car that didn t belong, a white ford crown victoria, cruising near the mcletland clel land home during the time of if murders. no one in the neighborhood owned a car like that. but the crown vic model is popular with law enforcement. so the fbi jumped on that angle.