Leslie Allen Williams

Victims

4 CONVICTIONS on counts of first-degree murder, entered by guilty plea, part of nineteen counts in all: four of murder, five of kidnapping, six of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and three of breaking and entering. He was on parole for a 1983 sexual assault at the time of the killings

Years active

1991 - 1992

Location

Oakland/Genessee, Michigan, USA

Method

Not recorded

Status

Arrested for the final time on May 24, 1992 after a witness saw him abduct a woman from a cemetery in Springfield Township and police found her in the boot of his car. He confessed to the four earlier killings and over the following three weeks led officers to the graves. HE PLEADED GUILTY to four counts of first-degree murder, and was convicted in all of nineteen counts: four of first-degree murder, five of kidnapping, six of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and three of breaking and entering. At a hearing on July 8, 1992 in Oakland County Circuit Court, Judge Hilda Gage imposed life imprisonment without parole for the murder of Cynthia Jones together with four consecutive life terms on the associated counts. HE WAS ON PAROLE WHEN HE KILLED: sentenced in 1983 to seven to thirty years for a sexual assault, he was released in 1990 having served seven, and killed his first victim nine months later. THE CASE CHANGED MICHIGAN LAW. Until 1992 the state parole board was a body of civil servants empowered to release prisoners serving life after ten years; after his confession Governor John Engler abolished it and replaced it with ten political appointees. The family of Melissa and Michelle Urbin publicly blamed the board for their daughters’ deaths. Held in the Michigan Department of Corrections; sources place him at the Carson City Correctional Facility as of 2021 and at the Ionia Correctional Facility as of 2024.

Leslie Allen Williams abducted and killed four teenage girls in southeastern Michigan in 1991 and 1992. He was a paroled rapist, and the case became an attack on the parole board that had released him.

He was born in 1953 and had a record as a serial rapist before the killings. Kami Villanueva, eighteen, was killed in 1991. The sisters Melissa and Michelle Urbin, fourteen and sixteen, were taken from Oakland County. Cynthia Marie Jones, fifteen, was the fourth. He was arrested on May 29, 1992 and confessed to all four.

His confession, reported nationally within days, prompted immediate criticism of the Michigan Parole Board for having released him. He was sentenced in 1992 to life imprisonment without parole on one count of the four. The murder method is not reliably recorded in accessible sources and this roster's own field for it is empty.