The first jury could not agree on what to do with her. It had convicted Manling Tsang Williams in 2010 of three counts of first degree murder, and found true the special circumstances that there had been multiple killings and that she had lain in wait. Asked to choose between death and life without parole, it split eight to four for death and hung. A second penalty jury was empaneled, and in August 2011, four years to the week after the killings, it returned a verdict of death.
She lived with her husband and their two sons in a condominium on the 18200 block of Camino Bello at Rowland Heights, in the eastern part of Los Angeles County. Neal Williams was twenty-seven. He stayed at home with the boys and collected swords; his wife was the household earner. Devon was seven and Ian was three, and they slept in bunk beds.
On the morning of August 7, 2007, she called police to say she had come back from grocery shopping and found her family dead. Neighbors described her running from the house screaming that her husband was hurt. Officers found Neal Williams slashed and stabbed more than ninety times, and both boys dead in their beds without a mark on them. She was taken into custody the following day.
The account the prosecution put to the jury had the killings happening in two stages with an interval in between. Deputy District Attorney Stacy Okun-Wiese told jurors that Williams waited for the family to be asleep, put on gloves, and held a pillow over the younger boy's face until he lost consciousness, then climbed the bunk bed stairs and did the same to his brother. She then went back to her computer and looked at the MySpace page of the man she had been seeing, went out with friends, and came home. Her husband was still asleep. She took the heaviest and sharpest sword in the house.
The interval is what made the lying-in-wait allegation available, and it is the difference between this case and a domestic killing in a single rage.
The motive the state advanced was that she wanted to be free of the marriage. She had been infatuated with the man since they were at school together. The trial account has him telling her he would end things because she had a husband and children; sheriff's investigators described him instead as a man who was encouraging her to divorce. The prosecutor put it to the jury as selfishness and nothing more.
Her lawyer, Thomas Althaus, argued that the killings had not been planned. He told the court his client would carry the consequences of what she had done for the rest of her life. At least one later account reports her saying she attacked her husband in a rage on finding that he had killed the boys, an account no court accepted.
After the first jury hung, both families, the Williamses and the Tsangs, asked the prosecution not to try the penalty phase again and to accept a defense offer of life without parole with a waiver of appeals. The prosecution went ahead. At sentencing her sister, Shun Ling Tsang, asked the judge to spare her, called the pursuit of death ego-driven, and said two penalty trials had been like two rounds of chemotherapy. The judge himself said the death penalty in California was precariously close to becoming a hypothetical, and imposed it. Judge Robert Martinez sentenced her at Pomona on January 18, 2012. She was thirty-two, and she sobbed and shook as he told her the order of the court was that she should suffer the penalty of death. Neal Williams's mother, Jan Williams, came out of the courthouse and said she had not processed how she felt, only that she was relieved a jury had reached a verdict at all, because her fear had been another hung jury and a third penalty phase. She also said she had reservations about a death sentence, which could take decades to resolve and was hard on families.
The appeal to the California Supreme Court is automatic in a capital case. Fourteen years after the sentence, hers has not been decided: the case is on the court's docket as S199741 and was still in briefing in 2023, with her appellate counsel obtaining extensions and further extensions contemplated. California has executed nobody since 2006, has had a formal moratorium since 2019, and dismantled the condemned unit at San Quentin in 2024. The sentence is not expected to be carried out.
One date is not settled. The boys died on August 7. Her husband was killed after she returned home, which at least one contemporary report places in the early hours of August 8, though the case is generally dated to August 7 throughout. Both dates are reported and neither is certain.