Scott Wilson Williams was born in 1963 and lived in northern Union County, North Carolina, where he had worked on a state road crew. He was forty-four at the time of his hearing.
He killed Sharon House Pressley in 1997, Christina Outz Parker in 2004 and Sharon Tucker Stone in 2006. All three were shot. Their bodies were mutilated, in ways described in court as similar but increasingly gruesome, and were found off rural roads in Union County and in Chesterfield County, South Carolina.
Two other women survived him, and their existence is the part of this case the entry did not have. He abducted and raped a woman in 1995 and another in 2000, and let both of them go. He entered Alford pleas to first-degree kidnapping, rape and sexual offence in both cases.
One of those women told investigators that he had taken out her shoelaces, wrapped them round her breasts and tightened them until they turned blue, and that he 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 earliest known victim, the woman taken in 1995, spoke at the hearing. She held up a photograph of herself from shortly before she was abducted from the car park of an all-night supermarket, showing a smiling woman with curly brown hair, and said she had been very vivacious and full of life. She had since married and had a child. She spoke in a slow, soft monotone, and said that at least she had been lucky to survive, but that mentally and emotionally she was constantly looking over her shoulder.
The evidence that tied him to the killings is on the record, and an earlier version of this entry wrongly said it was not. It included DNA and ballistics from weapons found on his property, together with statements by Williams himself and by the two surviving women, 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. Investigators seized whips, chains, handcuffs, knives and handguns from his house.
He also told investigators that he had planned to eat part of one woman's remains and had been put off by the smell of cooked flesh. That is his own statement, given in evidence, and nothing was established beyond his saying it.
A sergeant of the Union County sheriff's office told the court that when detectives came to his house in early March 2006 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.
The prosecution had sought the death penalty and then offered a plea. The Alford plea meant he acknowledged the strength of the evidence without admitting guilt. His counsel said the defence had no grounds to dispute the statements read in court, that it was not a close call and that the evidence was overwhelming. Negotiations had gone on a long time and he only agreed the day before.
The hearing lasted two hours and was thinly attended: about a third of the seats were filled, with fewer than two dozen family and friends of the victims and of Williams. He came in through a side entrance in a grey suit without a tie, shackled at the wrists, answered the judge softly and showed no emotion. As the families read their statements he looked down at his hands and rocked slightly in his chair.
The daughter of Sharon Stone wrote that she had at first been shocked he was not getting the death penalty, and that her mother was always around and smiling, called every holiday and every birthday, was not a woman of the streets, and worked as hard as she could in restaurants until she met Scott Williams.
His first set of lawyers withdrew, citing a shortage 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 of the case, and several news organisations went to court to get them.