Leslie Allen Williams was a Detroit parolee, 38 years old by UPI's count and 39 by the Associated Press, when he was arrested in Oakland County, Michigan, in May 1992. Witnesses had seen him abduct a woman in Springfield Township and called the police. Within days, police said, he had confessed to killing four girls and young women who had vanished over the previous eight months, and he led investigators to the places where he had buried three of them.
The four were Kami Villaneuva, 18, of South Lyon; Cynthia Jones, 15, of Milford; and the sisters Michelle Urbin, 16, and Melissa Urbin, 14, of Tyrone Township. He received a life sentence for each of their murders.
Williams had been on parole since 1990. He had served seven years of a seven-to-30-year sentence for a 1983 kidnapping case, and his criminal record went back more than two decades. The fact that every one of the killings came after the state had released him made his case a political crisis. Governor John Engler's office said the governor was furious, the families of the victims campaigned for change, and Michigan's parole board, until then a body of career civil servants, was replaced with political appointees. The board that emerged from the case approved parole less often for years afterward.
UPI reported in 1992 that Williams's criminal career began in 1970, when he was 17 and broke into a neighbor's home in Garden City, a suburb of Detroit. For most of the two decades that followed, the agency said, he was either awaiting trial or serving time in prison.
The convictions on his record, as UPI listed them, included attempted breaking and entering, larceny from an automobile, breaking and entering, assault with intent to commit murder, and assault, with other charges. In 1983 he pleaded guilty to assault with intent to commit kidnapping, with other charges. That 1983 kidnapping happened less than two weeks after he had been released on parole from an earlier prison term, according to UPI. A Livingston County journalist who later covered his court hearings wrote that the 1983 sentence included additional time under Michigan's habitual offender law.
He was paroled again in 1990, after serving seven years of the seven-to-30-year term, UPI reported. At the time of his arrest in 1992 he lived in Detroit and worked at a gasoline station. The Associated Press described him as a parolee with a history of attacks on women; UPI said his record covered 22 years.
The four victims disappeared on weekends between September 14, 1991, and January 4, 1992, according to Captain Glen Watson of the Oakland County Sheriff's Department. Watson was the first investigator to suggest that one person was responsible for more than one of the disappearances, UPI reported.
Michelle and Melissa Urbin lived in Tyrone Township, in Livingston County. On September 29, 1991, the sisters went for a walk near their home and did not come back. Maria Stuart, who covered Livingston County news for three decades, recalled in 2020 that their parents searched for them for eight months and that a large search by the community turned up nothing. Michelle was 16 and Melissa was 14.
Kami Villaneuva was 18 and lived in South Lyon, in Oakland County. The Associated Press gave her full name as Kami Marie Villaneuva. Cynthia Jones, of Milford, was 15 according to UPI and The Livingston Post; a Deseret News report from the same week gave her age as 16. She is named in that report as Cynthia M. Jones.
Two of them were sisters who disappeared together. Their families spent months not knowing what had happened to them.
Williams was arrested after he abducted a woman in a rural part of Springfield Township, about 40 miles north of Detroit, according to UPI. Witnesses alerted the police, and the woman was found in his car. She was recovering a few days later, the Deseret News reported.
Accounts differ on the date of the arrest. UPI's report from the week of the arrest says he was arrested on a Sunday, days before his Friday arraignment. Maria Stuart's 2020 retrospective in The Livingston Post gives the date of his capture as May 28, 1992.
He was held at first on the abduction charge, with bail set at 1 million dollars, while investigators questioned him about the missing girls, the Associated Press reported.
The first body was found on a tip. Acting on information from Williams's former girlfriend, police on a Wednesday found the body of Kami Villaneuva in Milford Township, UPI and the Associated Press reported. The next day Williams led police to the body of Cynthia Jones, not far away. He then took investigators to Fenton, in Genesee County, where he had buried Michelle and Melissa Urbin.
Police said he gave a detailed account of abducting and killing the four. They also said he admitted at least four other assaults that had gone unsolved or unreported.
What he said to detectives about himself was quoted widely. "I want to be locked up. Lock me up so I don't do it again," he told State Police detectives, according to UPI. "I have no control over my life." He also told them that he did not want "to cause any trouble" or "to cause taxpayers any grief," and he asked to be imprisoned and for the authorities to "throw away the key."
Oakland County Sheriff John Nichols was blunt. "Leslie Allen Williams should never have been on the street," he said, according to the Associated Press. Nichols also suggested that other women might have been attacked by Williams in offenses that were never reported. "God knows what Mr. Williams may have done short of murder," he said, in remarks reported by UPI.
In the days after the arraignment, police used a search warrant to take a blood sample from Williams so that its genetic profile could be compared with evidence from other crime scenes, the Deseret News reported on June 4, 1992. The sheriff's department had received many calls from police agencies in Michigan and other states who wanted to talk to him. Authorities said they had no evidence linking him to any other killing.
Williams was arraigned on a Friday before District Judge Michael Batchik, in a hearing UPI reported from Walled Lake. He entered a plea of not guilty, UPI reported; the Deseret News wrote that he did not enter a plea. As he was led out, a crowd outside the courthouse shouted "Kill him, kill him!"
The Oakland County charges covered the deaths of Kami Villaneuva and Cynthia Jones. They included first-degree murder, premeditated murder, kidnapping and other charges. A further charge involved a separate case in which a girl had survived. Batchik ordered Williams held without bond and set a preliminary hearing for June 9, 1992.
Asked about bail, Williams told the judge that it did not matter. "It's moot," he said, according to the Deseret News. "I wouldn't let anybody post it." The paper noted that Michigan had no death penalty, so the most he faced on a murder conviction was life in prison.
The deaths of the Urbin sisters fell under a separate jurisdiction. UPI wrote that Fenton was in Genesee County and that no arraignment had yet been set there. The Deseret News reported that he was due in Livingston County the following Monday in the sisters' deaths.
Williams received a life sentence for each of the four murders, Maria Stuart wrote in 2020. She sat near the Urbin girls' mother during his court hearings, and she remembered the girls' father speaking softly and lovingly about his daughters at the sentencing. Stuart, who had listened to Williams's confession being described in court, wrote that after one hearing she went home and took a hot bath because she could not get warm.
Williams's case landed on a parole system that was already under pressure. "When you can't keep violent criminals locked up, there's something seriously wrong," said John Truscott, Governor Engler's press secretary, in May 1992, according to UPI.
Before 1992, Bridge Michigan's Ted Roelofs wrote in 2014, the Michigan Parole Board was made up of professional civil servants, and it had the power to grant parole to prisoners serving life sentences after ten years. After Williams confessed to the abduction and killing of four teenage girls in Oakland and Genesee counties, Engler replaced the civil service board with ten political appointees.
The changes that followed, as Roelofs described them, went well beyond the board's membership. Parole eligibility for prisoners serving life rose from 10 years to 15, and the interval between reviews grew from two years to five. In time the board stopped interviewing many lifers in person and reviewed their records instead. Parole rates for every kind of sentence fell. A 1997 Department of Corrections study found that the share of parole decisions that were approvals fell from 66 percent in 1988 to 1991 to 56 percent under the new board, and the number of prisoners held past their minimum sentences nearly doubled, from 5,992 in 1991 to 11,855 in 1997. In 1999 the board's chairman, Stephen Marschke, said the board's philosophy was that "a life sentence means just that: life in prison."
The Urbin family took part in the push for change. Maria Stuart wrote that the girls' parents lobbied for a parole reform bill that Governor Engler signed into law hours before a memorial gathering held on the first anniversary of their daughters' deaths. The law, she wrote, made it harder for offenders like Williams to be paroled before serving their full sentences. "It was something we had to do for them," the girls' mother said.
In December 2020, The Livingston Post reported that Williams was serving the life sentences imposed for the four murders.
Police said in 1992 that Williams admitted at least four other assaults that were unsolved or unreported. No charges arising from those admissions have been reported. Police in other states and in Michigan sought to question him about other cases, and his blood was taken for comparison with evidence from other crime scenes, but in June 1992 the authorities said they had no evidence linking him to any other killing.
1970: Aged 17, breaks into a neighbor's home in Garden City, the start of his criminal record (UPI).
1983: Pleads guilty to assault with intent to commit kidnapping, with other charges; the offense came less than two weeks after a parole release. Sentenced to seven to 30 years.
1990: Paroled after serving seven years.
September 14, 1991: Start of the period in which the four victims disappeared, according to the Oakland County Sheriff's Department.
September 29, 1991: Michelle Urbin, 16, and Melissa Urbin, 14, go for a walk near their home in Tyrone Township and do not return.
January 4, 1992: End of the period in which the four victims disappeared.
May 1992: Arrested in Springfield Township after witnesses report an abduction; confesses to four killings, according to police. A tip from a former girlfriend leads police to Kami Villaneuva's body in Milford Township; he leads police to Cynthia Jones's body and then to Fenton, where the Urbin sisters were buried.
May 1992: Arraigned before District Judge Michael Batchik on Oakland County charges including first-degree murder; held without bond. Governor Engler's office calls for change in the parole system.
June 1992: Police take a blood sample by search warrant for comparison with other cases.
1992: Receives a life sentence for each of the four murders. Engler replaces the civil service parole board with ten political appointees.
1992: Engler signs a parole reform bill the Urbin family lobbied for, hours before a memorial on the first anniversary of the sisters' deaths.
1997: A Department of Corrections study finds parole approvals down from 66 to 56 percent under the new board.