Sharon Tucker Stone, forty-six, of Monroe, North Carolina, was killed in January 2006, and her remains were found in the woods of Chesterfield County, South Carolina, by a man out collecting cans. She had been shot in the head, and her body had been mutilated and dismembered. Investigators working the case turned up a name among her acquaintances: Scott Wilson Williams, forty-two, a member of a North Carolina Department of Transportation road crew who lived a quiet life in Monroe and had no criminal record. Nothing had ever drawn police to him. He had not been questioned about the unsolved killings of Sharon House Pressley in 1997 or Christina Parker in 2004. In interviews, detectives learned that he had known both of those women as well, and that Parker and Stone had known each other.
He was arrested at 1:30 in the morning on March 9, 2006. A sergeant of the Union County sheriff's office later told the court that when detectives came to the house he gave in at once: he was sitting on the couch, shrugged, put his head in his hands and said he had not meant to hurt those girls. A Union County and Chesterfield County homicide task force, working with the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the FBI, built the case. At a news conference an investigator said he had lived a normal life except on three or four occasions.
Sharon House Pressley, of Charlotte, was killed in September 1997; she is reported as thirty-six and as thirty-seven. Christina Denise Parker of Monroe, called Christy, was killed in 2004, at thirty-three or thirty-four; some reports give her middle name as Outz. Each of the three women was shot in the head, and each body was mutilated in ways described in court as similar but increasingly gruesome, then left off rural roads in Union County or across the state line in Chesterfield County.
Two other women survived him. He abducted and raped a woman in 1995 and another in 2000, and let both of them go. One told investigators that he had taken out her shoelaces, wrapped them around her breasts and tightened them until they turned blue, and then told her he had once been her worst nightmare but was now her guardian angel, and that if anyone troubled her he would kill them. The woman taken in 1995, abducted from the parking lot of an all-night supermarket, spoke at his hearing. She held up a photograph of herself from shortly before, a smiling woman with curly brown hair, and said she had been vivacious and full of life. She had since married and had a child, and she said that although she had been lucky to survive, mentally and emotionally she was always looking over her shoulder.
The evidence included DNA and ballistics from weapons found on his property, identification by the two surviving women, and his own statements, which detectives said showed him picking women up, torturing them and killing them. They described him as a fetishist and a predator, insecure in his sexuality and quick to anger. From his house they seized whips, chains, handcuffs, knives and handguns. He also told investigators he had planned to eat part of one woman's remains and had been put off by the smell of cooked flesh; that rests on his own statement alone.
Union County prosecutors sought the death penalty. His first lawyers withdrew, citing a lack of support staff and a strained relationship with him, and new counsel was appointed in January 2008. After his arrest the judge sealed documents containing much of the detail, and several news organizations went to court to get them. Plea talks ran for months, and he agreed only the day before the hearing. On July 18, 2008, in Union County Superior Court, he entered Alford pleas to three counts of first-degree murder and to kidnapping, rape and sexual offense charges in the two surviving women's cases, acknowledging that the state could convict him without admitting guilt. The district attorney said he offered the plea in light of the nature of the case, the sensitivity of the victims and the uncertainty of capital punishment. Williams's lawyer told the court the evidence was overwhelming and it was not a close call. He received three consecutive sentences of life without parole.
The two-hour hearing was thinly attended, with fewer than two dozen family and friends of the victims and of Williams in the seats. He came in through a side entrance in a gray suit without a tie, shackled at the wrists, answered the judge softly, and looked down at his hands and rocked slightly as the families read their statements. Sharon Stone's daughter wrote that she had at first been shocked he would not be put to death, and that her mother was always around and smiling, called on every holiday and every birthday, and worked as hard as she could in restaurants until she met Scott Williams. In a later interview he claimed that his confession had been coerced. He died at Alexander Correctional Institution on August 6, 2022.