Williams was born in 1954 and lived in Chicago. She was addicted to heroin. Between December 1987 and July 1989 she killed three elderly people in their homes: Lonnie Laws, seventy-nine; Caesar Zuell, sixty-four; and Mary Harris, ninety-seven. They were strangled or stabbed, and their homes were robbed.
She was convicted and sentenced to death on April 18, 1991, one of very few women on Illinois's death row.
In January 2003 Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of every condemned prisoner in Illinois, and hers became life imprisonment. Illinois abolished capital punishment in 2011.
She belongs to the group of cases in this archive where the deaths were incidental to robbery and the robbery was to buy drugs. The pattern the American courts of the period treated as capital, and which the Ryan commutation swept up wholesale.