In February 2016 Texas Ranger James Holland sat down with a prisoner serving 60 years for a 1997 kidnapping. William Lewis Reece had just been charged in Oklahoma with the 1997 murder of a 19-year-old woman, and prosecutors there could seek his execution. Holland brought documents from two Texas district attorneys promising not to seek death in Texas. Within the month Reece had led Holland and a Friendswood police detective to the place where Kelli Cox was buried, confessed to four murders, and told them where to find Jessica Cain. Families who had waited nearly 19 years got answers, and the promises Holland made became the center of Reece's appeals.
Reece grew up near Yukon, Oklahoma, and spent part of his youth in foster care. His lawyers later said he had scored just above the threshold for intellectual disability, with an IQ in the 70s. In 1986 he was convicted of two rapes in Oklahoma, one in Norman and one in Anadarko. He served about 10 years and was released in October 1996. He moved to the Houston area, where a sister lived, and worked as a truck driver and in construction. "He was out of prison for one year, from October 1996 to October 1997," said the author Kathryn Casey, who interviewed him in prison.
Laura Smither was 12 and lived in Friendswood, south of Houston. In April 1997 she went for a morning jog near her home and did not come back. More than two weeks later her remains were found in a retention pond near Pasadena, about 30 miles away. The case went unsolved for 19 years.
In May 1997 Reece abducted a 19-year-old woman, Sandra Sapaugh, from a Waffle House in Webster, Texas. She escaped by jumping from his moving truck, and she later testified against him. In 1998 he was convicted of aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to 60 years. According to the Oklahoma appeals record as reported by NonDoc, two teenagers, 16 and 17, were taken from a cafe in Pearland in early July 1997 and assaulted at his Houston apartment; they escaped and did not report it until after his arrest.
Kelli Ann Cox was 20, a psychology student at the University of North Texas in Denton who hoped to become a juvenile counselor. She had a 19-month-old daughter, Alexis. On a day in July 1997 she went with her criminal justice class on a tour of the Denton city jail. She left the group around noon to take a test, but her spare key would not open her car, and her phone was locked inside. She called her boyfriend from a gas station payphone nearby. When he arrived about 45 minutes later, her car was still in the lot and she was gone. The last thing her mother, Jan Bynum, remembered her saying was "I love you." Accounts of how Reece encountered her differ.
In July 1997, about nine days later, Tiffany Johnston, 19, stopped at the Sunshine Car Wash in Bethany, Oklahoma. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond later described her as "a young bride with her whole life ahead of her." Reece abducted her there, sexually assaulted her and killed her. Her body was found the next day in a field west of Yukon, in Canadian County. Her mother, Kathy Dobry, pressed every year on the anniversary for the case to be reopened.
Jessica Cain was 17 and lived on Tiki Island, across from Galveston Island. In August 1997 she went with friends to a theater cast party and never arrived home. Her car was found abandoned on Interstate 45 near Tiki Island. She was Reece's last known victim before his 1998 kidnapping conviction.
In late 2013, while Reece was in a Texas prison, DNA testing in the Johnston case could not exclude him as a contributor. In 2015 Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater charged him with her murder.
Holland's interviews began in February 2016. According to transcripts cited by the defense, Holland told Reece he would be treated like a "rockstar," offered him a helicopter ride to McDonald's and spoke repeatedly of his own record of solving cases. The Denton and Galveston County district attorneys had agreed not to seek death; Harris County and Oklahoma County had made no such commitment. Reece showed investigators Cox's burial site in Brazoria County that month and then confessed to the murders of Cox, Cain, Johnston and Smither. Cox's remains were identified through dental records. Cain's remains were recovered in April 2016 from a pasture on the southern edge of Houston. A Brazoria County grand jury indicted him for capital murder in Cox's death in December 2017.
Jury selection in the Johnston case began in Oklahoma City on May 10, 2021. Reece did not testify. Jurors heard recordings of his confessions. His lawyer, Jacob Benedict, did not dispute that Reece had killed Johnston; he argued that the confession came only after a Texas Ranger made a promise about the death penalty he could not keep. After a 17-day trial Reece was convicted of first-degree murder, and on June 2, 2021, the jury recommended death. "After 24 years, and 10 months, this is Tiffany's time," Kathy Dobry said. He was formally sentenced to death that year.
On June 29, 2022, Reece, 62 and using a walker, pleaded guilty in a Galveston County courtroom to murdering Laura Smither and Jessica Cain and received two life sentences. That afternoon, in Angleton, he pleaded guilty to murdering Kelli Cox and received a third.
Gay Smither, Laura's mother, thanked him for leading police to the remains, saying he "did the right thing," and explained her forgiveness: "I chose forgiveness because I didn't want to live in the prison of anger anymore." Jan Bynum said she told him the crimes were his alone. Alexis Bynum, Kelli Cox's daughter, said seeing him in person showed her she had built him up to be more than he was.
On direct appeal Reece raised more than a dozen claims, among them that Holland's promises and displays of power, combined with his low intelligence, improperly induced his confessions, and that testimony about earlier rapes should not have been admitted. In July 2025 the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously affirmed the death sentence in a precedential opinion by Judge David Lewis, holding that evidence of sexual propensity can be admitted in a murder case with a sexual motive. Rehearing was denied in September 2025.
Texas returned Reece to Oklahoma custody on December 29, 2025, and he is held at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. On April 20, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court denied his petition for review. The Attorney General's office has said it will ask for an execution date once his appeals are exhausted. As of October 2026 no date had been reported.