On May 24, 1992, witnesses at a cemetery in Springfield Township, Michigan, saw a man snatch a woman into his car and called the police. When officers stopped him she was found alive, and the man, Leslie Allen Williams, was taken into custody for attempted rape. Within days he had confessed to killing four teenage girls, and over the next three weeks he took the police to the shallow graves where he had buried them.
He was on parole. He had been sent to prison for a sexual assault in 1983, and he had been out since 1990. Nine months after his release he killed for the first time. Every one of the four deaths happened after the state had let him go, and it was that, more than the killings themselves, that made the case one of the most consequential in Michigan's recent history.
He was born in Detroit on July 4, 1953. His mother neglected him, and he was raised by his grandparents. He was first arrested in 1970, at seventeen, for breaking into a house in his neighborhood, and served about a year. Over the next twelve years his arrests grew steadily more serious. In September 1983 he was arrested for sexually assaulting a woman in her home. Accounts of the sentence differ: one gives it as twenty years, another as seven to thirty. He served seven or eight years, depending on the source, before he was paroled in 1990.
On September 14, 1991, he attacked Kami Villanueva, eighteen, in her home in Oakland County, raped and killed her, and buried her in a shallow grave he had dug. Two weeks later, on September 29, he came upon the sisters Melissa and Michelle Urbin, fourteen and sixteen, walking at night. He raped and killed them both, drove their bodies to a secluded spot and dug two graves, and he later said that before he buried them he had sex with their bodies. On January 4, 1992, he raped and killed Cynthia Marie Jones, fifteen, and buried her the same way.
He was charged with nineteen counts: four of first degree murder, five of kidnapping, six of first degree criminal sexual conduct and three of breaking and entering. He pleaded guilty, and on July 8, 1992, in Oakland County Circuit Court, Judge Hilda Gage sentenced him to life without parole for the murder of Cynthia Jones, with four consecutive life terms on the related counts.
The Urbin family said publicly that the parole board had killed their daughters. Until 1992, Michigan's parole board was made up of civil servants, and it had the power to release prisoners serving life sentences after ten years. Within weeks of Williams's confession Governor John Engler abolished that board and replaced it with ten appointees answerable to him.
He has remained in the custody of the Michigan Department of Corrections since 1992. He was reported to be held at the Carson City Correctional Facility in 2021, and in September 2024 at the Ionia Correctional Facility.