The Heart of Darkness (Mark Hasse, Mike and Cynthia McClelland)

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It's a terrifying feeling.

Who's next?

What are we dealing with?

I mean, it's always urgent when you have a serial killer, but now you feel like you're up against the clock because more people are going to die in a very specific, very short timeframe.

I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.

I'm Anasega Nicolazi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.

And this is Anatomy of Murder.

Today's case, like so many homicides, is the story of betrayal.

Not of a spouse or a lover, but a betrayal of the public trust.

In Kaufman County, Texas, the 2013 targeting of two prominent lawyers that claimed three lives was not just an attack on public servants.

It was an attack on the justice system itself and an attempt to undermine the promise that investigators and prosecutors can serve their community without the threat of reprisal.

Which is why this case proved to be about even more than murder.

Because using violence to intimidate or disrupt the functioning of civil society, there's a name for that.

It's called terrorism.

With us to talk about this extraordinary case is Bill Worski, who is currently the first Assistant District Attorney in Collin County, Texas, a neighboring county just north of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.

Started in the DA's office back in the early 90s in Dallas County and worked my way up through the ranks, tried quite a few murders and capital murders.

And ultimately, when I left, I was assigned to the homicide unit, helping police officers investigate crime and following it through to the courtroom.

Back in 2013, Bill had left the DA's office and was working in private practice as a defense attorney when he got a call from Kauffman County to come aboard an investigation as a special prosecutor.

It was quite common back in those days if you had a reputation as a former homicide prosecutor.

When different counties needed special prosecutors, they would call and see if you were available.

Kaufman County had a little over 100,000 people and was considered an up-and-coming suburb of Dallas where gated communities were slowly filling in the surrounding cotton fields.

It was still very rural and had a country flavor to it.

The city of Kaufman was the county seat for Kaufman County and it's a small southern East Texas town.

It had a courthouse square.

It was kind of a quaint setting.

Their office had less than 10 prosecutors at the time, so they weren't very big.

But among those prosecutors in the small city of Kaufman was a talented ADA with a big reputation.

His name was Mark Cassie.

They were lucky to have Mark.

Mark was a very experienced prosecutor.

He started out in the same same office I did, the Dallas County DA's office, and had tried a number of big high-profile cases in the 80s and early 90s.

So when Mark decided to go back into prosecution, it was really a coup for the Kauffman DA to get someone of Mark's experience in an office that size.

After he set up shop in the Kaufman DA's office as first assistant, everyone in town soon learned that Mark was not only an experienced and talented trial lawyer, he had an immense personality as well.

You know, people used to call him the little man with the big voice.

He was kind of small in stature, but he commanded a courtroom.

He was in the organized crime division of the Dallas DA's office and tried drug conspiracies and the murders that arise from those type of cases.

So very well-known guy.

A lot of us that knew Mark were kind of worried that he might get bored in Kauffman County because they don't have a lot of big cases out there.

And Mark always liked the big stage and the big cases and the big courtroom.

But he enjoyed his time out there.

He was a mentor to a lot of the younger prosecutors in the office.

Now, it didn't take a detective to tell you that Kauffman County was not at all like Dallas.

It was still the kind of place where everybody knew each other and no one locked their doors.

Mobsters, well, they didn't have those, or as they would say, New York.

Forget about it.

As for murders, they were few and far between.

But tragically, that all changed in the last week of January of 2013.

And it's not an exaggeration to say that Kauffman County would never be the same again.

On the morning of January 31st, Mark Hassey was reporting to work at the Kauffman County Courthouse.

He was dressed for court, coughing one hand, briefcase in the other.

It was kind of a cold Texas morning.

Mark had volunteered to cover a misdemeanor docket for another prosecutor.

So he traveled to the courthouse there on the Kauffman Square, and there was a remote employee parking lot where Mark had parked.

And as as he was getting out of his truck that morning, we had a couple of eyewitnesses that told us Mark was approached by a person, most likely a man, dressed in black.

And there were words that were spoken.

What started as a routine morning suddenly went sideways.

Without warning, the masked man drew a handgun, pointed it directly at Mark, and fired.

The man in black had two pistols, two revolvers, and after he unloaded the first one into Mark, he reached down and there was just a massive contact wound to Mark's head.

So it really looked like from talking to the eyewitnesses and studying the scene, it looked like that last shot was kind of a coup de grace shot, and it looked like a very personally motivated murder.

According to one witness who was just a few feet away, Mark's last words sounded like, I'm sorry.

But the gunman had not responded with forgiveness or with mercy.

In fact, the witness said it looked like a murder of vengeance.

It was a brazen daylight shooting in the middle of a crowded town square, just steps away from the courthouse, the very center of law and justice in Kaufman County.

Many officers heard the gunshots.

They tried CPR, but it was kind of a lost cause.

The nature of Mark's wounds meant that he was not going to survive.

A lawyer who had witnessed the shooting performed chest compressions until paramedics were able to rush Mark to the nearby Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, but his wounds proved too severe.

The 57-year-old prosecutor who had faced down mobsters and drug dealers in court and had even once survived a single-engine plane crash had died at the hand of a masked gunman.

A gunman who witnesses saw flee the scene in what they believed was a light gray sedan that had been waiting nearby with the engine running.

They agreed that the shooter got back into that gray sedan.

Some said passenger side, some said driver's side.

Some said there was only the shooter in the car.

Some said there was a driver in the car.

But one thing was for certain, the gunman could not have gotten far.

Kaufman's a small town.

There's only several ways kind of to get in and out of Kaufman.

So officers immediately had that car description.

And in any murder case, especially the big ones, you know, we are always hoping to get that lucky traffic stop, that somehow in or out, getting away from the crime scene or out of Kaufman, that officers can pull over the gray car and find your suspect.

So that was the priority of many officers that morning.

Another priority was immediately scouring the crime scene for clues that could help identify Mark's killer.

Significantly, there were no spent or fired shell casings from the scene.

So that told us we were probably looking for a revolver or two revolvers as our murder weapon.

We did recover some projectiles from autopsy and one from the crime scene.

So we knew we were looking for a.38 caliber,.357 caliber type revolver.

Homicide detectives at the scene knew the importance of handling the crime scene in a careful and methodical manner.

But I'm sure as you can imagine, the news of one of their own had been gunned down, basically right on the courthouse steps, sent to panic throughout the community this was a town totally unaccustomed to violent crime especially one so brazen and public and mark was a very quiet guy he led a very private life he was not married mark's mom was alive at the time he was very devoted to her his mother so it just seemed like with the location courthouse the nature of the murder being very personal or vengeance driven, most of us kind of assumed that it was going to be work-related.

This really is every prosecutor's worst nightmare.

In the back of your mind, you are aware that your job comes with certain risks, but to see something like this really happen sent shockwaves through the law enforcement community.

The idea that a public servant could be targeted for doing their job was a terrifying thought.

It's just such a rare occurrence to have a prosecutor gunned down.

This one kind of really caught everyone kind of off guard and sent chills and panics through through prosecutors throughout Texas and throughout the nation.

Within hours of the shooting, the law enforcement community was out in full force.

Federal agents, Texas Rangers, and officers from the surrounding counties all descended on Kaufman to assist in the investigation.

And that included Bill Worski.

I had been out in Kaufman County as a special prosecutor trying a murder case the week before Mark's murder.

And in fact, I had got to spend a couple hours as I was waiting on my jury verdict talking with Mark and kind of what his plans were.

He was looking forward to retiring in a few years.

And then the very next week on a Thursday morning, I'm at my law office in Dallas and get a phone call from one of the appellate attorneys in Kauffman County telling me that Mark had been gunned down right outside the courthouse.

And as a prosecutor, Anna, you know that you always have that prosecutorial mindset.

So she immediately started talking to me about would I be able to come in and take over the case as a special prosecutor.

For Bill and his partner, Toby Shook, the murder of a colleague meant their answer was clear.

We had no idea ultimately what we were getting ourselves into, but of course we were going to say yes.

You know how important it is to have a prosecutor involved as early as possible.

So our goal was to kind of go from the crime scene to the courtroom.

A massive command post was set up almost instantly after Mark's murder, and Bill was tasked to coordinate the investigation and hunt for a suspect that he would be able to prosecute.

Right from the beginning, it was clear he was going to have his work cut out for him.

Now, obviously, in any murder, you have the normal suspect pools.

You look at friends, acquaintances, wives, girlfriends, wives, and girlfriends.

But when a prosecutor is murdered, you have that huge additional suspect pool, which is every case that prosecutor has ever prosecuted.

And with Mark's long trial record, that meant looking not just at cases prosecuted in Kaufman County, but also during his time in Dallas County as well.

And so Bill and all the investigators got to work reading and rereading the files on every case Mark had handled over the years.

The list of defendants he'd sent to prison was long and intimidating.

So one case in particular sparked a lot of speculation that Mark had been targeted for retaliation by a well-known prison gang.

Mark had been involved kind of in the background in an ongoing federal and state investigation against one of our white supremacist prison gangs, the Aryan Brotherhood.

And there had been some intel coming out of Texas prisons that the Aryan Brotherhood was going to wreak vengeance on judges and prosecutors and various people like that.

So a lot of people were trying to connect the dots that because Mark was in the background and had worked on that case that this could be an Aryan Brotherhood type murder.

And unfortunately, there are a lot of Aryan Brotherhood members that live up in North Texas and especially in Kaufman County.

In fact, the gang had recently been blamed for a similar assassination of a prison chief in another state.

But in Mark's case, any actual evidence linking the gang to his murder was thin to non-existent.

None of the witnesses could give us a race of the shooter.

So we didn't know if we were looking for white, African-American, Hispanic, and we just had a man in black.

One irony of criminal investigations is that sometimes the less evidence you have, the more possibilities you need to consider.

And in this case, there was no shortage of tips coming in from a scared and highly motivated public.

This case was virtually unprecedented, the murder of a prosecutor on the courthouse steps.

The amount of law enforcement that flooded in and the amount of tips we were getting in the investigation was just massive.

So even though we had a massive law enforcement presence, we were having a hard time keeping up with all the tips that came in.

One of those Crime Stoppers tips claimed two men in a local bar had bragged about killing Mark.

Another that it was a hit carried out by local drug dealers.

Yeah, we had just numerous Crime Stoppers tips, people bragging about the case, giving us street names.

It seemed like every aggrieved ex-wife in Texas would call the tip line and throw her ex under the bus.

I think he might have had something to do with it.

So just running down tips was a full-time job for 100-plus law enforcement loots on the ground.

But eventually those leads, they began to dry up.

And with very little physical evidence or other clues to the identity or motive of Mark's killer, the investigation began to stall.

After the first few weeks, those resources that come in disappear.

So after about the first month or six weeks, everybody kind of dreads it, but the case starts to go cold.

So the leads kind of drop off, resources disappear.

So about two months in, the case had cooled off quite a bit, and the investigation was kind of down to a core group.

But there was one man in particular that had refused to let up until Mark's killer faced justice, and that was Mark's boss, 63-year-old district attorney Mike McClelland.

At a press conference following his colleague's murder, McClelland had spoken directly to the camera and said he had hoped the killer was watching and promised that, quote, the people of Kaufman County will find you and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.

Some people in Kaufman worried that McClelland may be risking his own life in provoking such a brazen and dangerous killer, but Mike McClelland was undeterred.

Mike was an interesting guy.

He had a degree in psychology.

He had been in the military.

He ran for DA kind of late in life.

I think the itch to get in the courtroom got him.

And like Mark Hassey, he was a fearless Texas lawman who was unrelenting in his mission to pursue justice at any cost.

Little did he know, his dedication to the law and to justice would come with dire consequences.

And when you walk into the crime scene, you could tell immediately that this was nothing other than kind of a double cold-blooded murder.

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Mark Hassey was a veteran prosecutor in Kaufman County, Texas, and his murder on the courthouse steps sent shockwaves through the town and the law enforcement community.

Three months later, another brazen crime made it clear that Mark's murder was not an isolated event.

It was an all-out assault on the entire justice system.

So this is the Saturday night before Easter 2013.

I've been home with my family and I get a phone call from the chief of the Kauffman Police Department and basically telling me that Mark Hassey's boss, Mike McClellan, and Mike's wife, Cynthia, had been found that day gunned down in their home in Kaufman County.

The news kind of struck me dumb, to be honest with you.

All I could really ask was, was it, you know, murder, suicide?

Because that scenario made sense to me more than having another prosecutor killed.

Police have been called to the McClelland home in Forney, Texas, after a relative of Mike and Cynthia's had made the grim discovery.

Husband and wife shot to death multiple times, their bodies lying lying just inside the unlocked front door.

Investigators would later determine that Cynthia had been shot four times at close range, and Mike as many as 16 times with what was likely an AR-15 automatic rifle.

Just like Mark Hassey's crime scene, you kind of got a sense that it was very personal and vengeance-driven, just based on the amount of overkill.

There were 20 rounds fired.

Mike was just pumped full of lead.

His wife, Cynthia, it's a contact wound on the top of her head.

Again, that kind of looked like the coup de grace shot.

So just a massive amount of overkill at that crime scene.

An alarm system indicated that the door opened at 6.30 a.m.

And it appeared that the shooting began the moment the door opened, suggesting that this was a deliberate early morning ambush.

The way those sensors work on that system, we were able to determine that the shooter was in and out of that house in basically under two minutes as for witnesses you would think that 20 rounds of an automatic rifle would draw attention but incredibly not in this case it's a little bit of a remote subdivision but there were plenty of neighbors and you know some thunderstorms had come through the night before but none of our neighbors reported hearing these shots which kind of puzzled us at the time because there were 20 rounds from 223 caliber kind of what we assumed was an AR-15 platform type weapon, but none of the neighbors heard it.

Now, whether it was because of the distance between the house or the Texas thunderstorms that had rolled in the night before, we don't know.

But ultimately, it took, it was about 12 hours after the murders that the bodies were discovered.

And in those 12 hours, there's no telling how far the shooter could have gone.

For the second time in just three months, investigators were investigating the murder murder of one of their own.

And immediately they found evidence that both shootings might be connected.

After the McClellan murders, we were able to develop some video footage that showed what was likely our suspect car.

And it was a white Crown Victoria.

And you probably know that Crown Victorias, especially white ones, are closely associated with law enforcement.

And it was also a close match with the description of the sedan seen fleeing the scene of Mark's murder on the courthouse steps.

It was the first clue that all three murders may have been carried out by the same person.

Even though everyone sensed that Mike and Cynthia's murder was connected to Mark's, you still have to be disciplined and kind of zoom out and go through all the, for lack of a better term, the usual suspects like we do in any murder case.

So let's talk a little bit about who Mike and Cynthia McClelland were.

As we said before, Mike was a dedicated prosecutor.

He was also a former Army Ranger who was not afraid to speak his mind.

He approached the law the way he sang in the choir with conviction and gusto.

As the DA, he also had a fairly high profile in the community, especially in the wake of Mark Hassey's murder.

So, in some ways, it was not hard to imagine how he may have become a target of violence from someone seeking attention or revenge.

But his wife, Cynthia, that was a different story.

Cynthia was a lovely lovely person.

She liked to bake.

She liked to quilt.

Several times she would bake cookies and treats and bring him down to the office to try to cheer up the staff after Mark Hassie's murder.

Just a sweet lady.

The fact that she wasn't spared by whoever was so intent on killing her husband was the first clue that investigators might be dealing with a different breed of killer.

Obviously, we thought the murders were linked.

But there's absolutely no reason to kill Cynthia McClellan.

If they were going to kill Mike McClellan, they could have found a way where Mike McClellan was by himself.

Instead, they went to the McClellan house and Cynthia was just kind of that.

I hate to say the phrase because it sounds impersonal, but she was really collateral damaged.

She did not have to die.

And if there was any doubt that all three murders were committed by the same deranged individual, it was erased just hours after securing the McClelland crime scene.

Right after we all left the command post, an online tip came in through an online Crime Stoppers program we have.

And the tip

claimed credit for the Hassey and McClellan murders and promised more murders would happen if a Kauffman County judge did not step down in a week.

Now, investigators had gotten lots of bogus tips over the last few months, but this time they had reason to believe that this threatening email, it was legit and it was coming from the real killer.

One of the reasons the tip really got our attention is because the person that gave us the tip said, just to let you know that you're dealing with the real killer, I used a very specific type of ammunition,.38 caliber ammunition, to kill Mark Hassey.

And that got our attention because we had not released the caliber we were looking for in the Hassie case.

And the fact that this online tipster who's claiming credit for the murders and promising more murders actually put this very specific type of caliber loading in it just all struck us this is probably our guy whoever we're engaging with this is probably our guy so let me first point out that 38 caliber rounds are much less common in modern day shootings so someone tossing out specific details gives the tip more weight and in an era dominated by nine millimeter and other semi-automatic calibers claiming a 38 suggests the tipster had knowledge of an older revolver or firearm style that you just wouldn't expect that type of detail on a segue.

And to me alone, that makes this message feel far more credible to me.

And we think about this case.

I mean, look, this is a case that every prosecutor who was practicing at the time remembers.

And being a prosecutor, yes, there's always risk, but fortunately, rarely actually an issue.

And I hate to say it, but we are somewhat dispensable career-wise.

If something happens to a prosecutor, sick, we leave the office or worse, well, the next one comes to take our place.

I think that's almost part of the the safety to it.

But when everyone heard this, it was a reminder that unfortunately, sometimes the stakes are all too real.

I think it's a targeted attack to a specific type or a specific community.

So it happens to one member of law enforcement.

It puts all other law enforcement on alert.

And so the fact that the crime itself spreads that fear through a specific community, that's the telltale sign of terrorism.

And I think, you know, look, as a prosecutor, you keep your head down and you do your job.

If we worried about these type of threats or the reality of this type of a case, like none of us would go to work ever again.

But obviously, when we all heard this, like it does put that in a different lens that, oh my gosh, sometimes these things really do happen.

It's a terrifying feeling.

Who's next?

What are we dealing with?

I mean, it's always urgent when you have a serial killer, but now you feel like you're up against the clock because more people are going to die in a very specific, very short time frame and as you can imagine police immediately tried to track the source of that email but they found out pretty quickly that it was sent using something called the tour network which is designed to enable anonymous online communications by obscuring user identities and i o addresses through a process called onion routing there's obviously someone on the other end of this tip that's pretty smart has done some planning and is taking great satisfaction out of the fear and the reaction that he's causing from law enforcement in this county, and indeed all over Texas and all over the country.

But it was pretty definitive proof that Mark and Mike's murders were linked and that the threat to anyone who was part of the Kaufman justice system was real and ongoing.

You know, what's rare about this case, too, is law enforcement was a victim because Mark and Mike were so well known.

And these crimes struck at the very heart of who police and and prosecutors are.

These people had lost their life for just doing their jobs.

That threat resonated throughout the law enforcement community as the mystery of these assassinations continued to draw national attention.

Everybody was terrified.

Prosecutors around Texas, around the country, everybody in Kauffman was terrified.

After the McClellan murders, I think we had at least 130 to 140 law enforcement boots on the ground following leads.

But we also had a huge protective detail too.

So we'd have 20 to 30 people that were under 24-7 armed guard.

So Kaufman County was just crawling with armed law enforcement, either investigating the murder or kind of protecting local officials because, you know, everybody was wondering the question that everybody was talking about is who's next.

In this line of work, you always have situational awareness and what we call keeping your head on a swivel.

Constantly aware of your surroundings.

It's just the nature of the job.

And if there's a confirmed pattern of attacks on law enforcement on duty or off, like we're dealing with here, your baseline vigilance just jumps.

And in turn, you know, an already stressful job turns into something even heavier because every routine moment suddenly carries that extra edge.

And with the murder of Cynthia McClelland, it was a threat, not just to law enforcement, but their families as well.

You hear about it, you see it in movies, but you think it never could happen to me.

After the McClellan murders, though, it became a very real part of our lives.

We were really worried about the safety of our families.

And remember, this is Texas, where there's already no shortage of citizens with guns and a license to carry them openly.

But after the McClelland murders, the town went on high alert.

The Monday morning after the Easter murders, I went to downtown Kaufman to get a warrant signed, and it looked like a third world country.

The amount of people, law enforcement, you know, they weren't wearing uniforms.

They were in tactical garb.

There were snipers on the roof.

Everybody that worked at the courthouse was coming and going with armed guard.

I mean, it didn't look like America, certainly not small-town Kaufman, America.

But despite it all, the gears of justice, they had to keep turning.

Police had to keep doing their jobs.

Cases had to keep being prosecuted.

It was very important to us that that courthouse and that DA's office stay functional.

You never want to let the bad guys win.

I knew how important that was.

We can't let a person or a group of people shut down the criminal justice system.

You can't let them win.

And to their credit, that office pulled together and kept the courthouse open and the wheels of justice continued to move forward despite this attack.

So let's just review the state of the investigation so far.

You had two crime scenes and three victims.

You didn't have a whole lot of forensic evidence besides some ballistics that could identify the types of guns that had been used.

And investigators did have a description of the getaway car, but no other clues to the identity of the shooter or any potential accomplice.

Yeah, and let's talk about what investigators did have, which was confirmation from that anonymous email that the murders were linked, which means the key to solving all three murders was to find the common thread between the victims.

The suspect pool was completely open with Mark.

You didn't want to rule anyone in or out.

You had to look at people he prosecuted.

But because it's so rare to have two prosecutors from the same office gunned down within two months, you had to think it was work related.

And then Mark and Mike had only tried one case together.

And Eric Williams, the one case they tried together, I mean, he was the common denominator.

And there it was.

The common thread between Mike Hassey and Mark McClelland and their work was another local lawyer named Eric Williams.

So what did law enforcement already know about this guy?

Well, it turns out quite a lot.

Eric Williams was kind of a prominent local attorney and judge in Kauffman County.

He had a little bit of military National Guard background.

He was a certified law enforcement officer in Texas.

He went to law school, had a pretty good law practice, and he ran for Justice of the Peace and was elected.

Which means Williams was actually another elected public servant.

But in 2012, just a year before Mark's murder, he had been embroiled in a scandal that made front page news in Kaufman.

According to police, Williams was caught by security cameras removing monitors from a county library.

He claimed it was just a big misunderstanding as he was in charge of updating the library's tech.

But the police and the DA's office, they saw it differently.

Even though the case wasn't violent, it was a kind of a high-profile case in Kaufman County that one of their justices of the peace was being prosecuted for burglary and theft.

And that prosecution was led personally by the DA, Mike McClellan, and his basic first assistant, who was Mark Hassey.

And they were successful.

They convicted Eric Williams of burglary and theft.

And Eric Williams lost his bench, lost his law practice.

The new DA, Mike McClellan, had asked for jail time.

Williams received two years' probation, but his career and reputation were in ruins.

So if Eric Williams had a grudge against the men who prosecuted him, it certainly gave him a motive for revenge.

But was this former lawyer and justice of the peace really capable of murder?

And if so, would investigators be able to catch him before he struck again?

As unprecedented as it is to have one prosecutor murdered, it is completely unprecedented to have two prosecutors murdered from the same office within two months.

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According to folks around town, Eric Williams was a bit of an eccentric.

His neighbors said he could often be seen riding a Segway to work at the courthouse dressed in full combat fatigues.

He and his wife were also frequently spotted at the gun range taking target practice with one of the many guns he owned, including an assault rifle and handguns of all kind.

But all that changed after his arrest for felony theft, a case prosecuted by Mark Hassey and Mike McClelland.

Williams, who was a former Justice of the Peace, was no stranger to local law enforcement, and he had actually been questioned after Mark's murder, along with many other potential suspects that the prosecutor had faced in court.

But he had been cleared in that investigation after offering a solid alibi and even passing a GSR or gunshot residue test.

But with the murder of Mike McClelland and his wife Cynthia, Williams was back on the radar in a really big way.

And as they dug into his recent activity, the evidence against him was starting to pile up.

We had a team of investigators that were searching through Eric Williams' online LexisNexis records.

So what they determined is that Eric Williams had been on LexisNexis searching addresses related to Mark Hassey and Mark Hasse's neighbors and was actually running license plate numbers of Mark Hasse's neighbors.

LexisNexis, if you don't know, is an enormous searchable database that is a critical research tool for lawyers and law enforcement alike.

And for Williams' search history, it looked like he had been doing surveillance of the house and neighborhood.

He's set up on Mark's house.

He's determined where he's living.

He's looking at neighbors.

He's trying to get a pattern of life in that neighborhood.

So he's running license plates to neighbors' cars.

So obviously very, very suspicious.

Now, these records, they are supposed to be restricted to authorized members of law enforcement, but somehow Williams was using his former credentials to gain access.

Which shows that if he was the killer, these murders were not hot-headed spur-of-the-moment decisions.

They were carefully planned and executed.

The case at that point gained momentum.

We all thought we were on the right track and it was only going to be a matter of time before we had Eric Williams in jail.

But that didn't mean they were going to rush into it.

Despite the pressure from the public to get a suspect in custody, investigators knew they were dealing with someone not only familiar with police methods, but also the ways to evade them.

So working with the profilers, knowing Eric Williams, whether he's our guy or not, he's got a huge ego.

This is a guy that's in Mensa.

He was an Eagle Scout.

He wants all this kind of trappings of a smart intellectual person.

So we got a Texas Ranger major and a chief deputy from Kauffman County, what we call in Texas gold badges.

They have enough rank that their badges are gold.

The Texas Ranger and the Kauffman deputy approached Eric Williams at his home without a search warrant or an arrest warrant.

Williams didn't have to let them in, but something told them he wouldn't be able to resist.

They're asking him, Eric, can we come in and talk about this?

And he said, well, you know, I know I shouldn't, but come on in, guys, let's talk.

So once they got in the house, they saw some components that were compatible with an AR-type weapon.

And again, at this point, Eric Williams is a convicted felon from the burglary and the theft.

So he shouldn't have any gun or gun parts.

The recovery of those gun parts was the first crack in the foundation that gave investigators probable cause for a deeper search of Williams' home.

And we kind of got lucky when we hit Eric Williams' house.

Number one, we found a track or a burner phone that we were ultimately able to get some good information from.

But more importantly, we found the title to a white crown Victoria.

And recall, we had been looking for that car after the McClellan murders.

It was also suspected of being the getaway car spotted fleeing the courthouse after Mark's murder.

Which is a huge piece of evidence, as long as they can find that car.

But it wasn't actually the most significant thing police found in that search.

One of the FBI agents noticed a little post-it note in the kitchen area of the Williams residence, and it had what looked like a password.

And that really alert FBI agent was able to say, I think this is an online Crime Stoppers login password.

And we were able to take that password and link it to the account that had taken credit for the murders and threatened more murders.

So we knew right then Eric Williams was the person that had been engaging with us in Crime Stoppers, taking credit for the murders and promising more murders.

Which is a crime in itself and a serious one.

And all investigators needed to get their prime suspect into police custody.

We were feeling really good that he was our murderer, but we didn't have quite enough yet to walk a warrant on capital murder.

So we took the easy route.

To get him off the street, we put him in jail for terroristic threat.

With the media still camped out around town waiting for any updates on this high-profile case, the news of Williams' arrest spread like wildfire.

But as Bill told us, there was still a way to go before they could tie him directly to any of the murders.

A big break was in order, and that's exactly what he got.

The next day, Bill was catching a few innings at a local Little League game when his phone rang.

I got a call from several friends of Eric Williams who had seen the media coverage of the searches the day before.

And one of his friends told me, Mr.

Worski, I don't know if this is important, but I recently rented a storage unit for Eric Williams under my name.

Do you think that might be important to your investigation?

A storage unit being rented by the murder suspect?

I should say so.

But by the way, don't forget to bring your forensics team along.

Within minutes, police had a search warrant, popped the lock, and were ready to make a big reveal.

We popped the door on the storage unit.

There's the White Crown Victoria that we had been looking for since the McClellan murders.

And there are just all sorts of tactical law enforcement gear in there and a number of guns that kind of were what we were looking for.

The 38357 class revolver and the 223 kind of 556 AR platform rifles.

I mean, it was like, you know, Christmas morning.

It was like, okay, we finally got this guy.

All the evidence was taken into custody to be examined by forensic experts.

It would take some time to determine if one of the recovered guns was the the murder weapon.

But Williams' secret stash was all part of now a mountain of circumstantial evidence pointing to him as the killer.

Eric Williams was smart in the sense that he knew a little bit about law enforcement and he took some precautions, did a little bit of planning, but ultimately he wasn't nearly as smart as he thought he was.

And once we got that first break in the case, the case became just kind of an overwhelmingly strong circumstantial case.

And so what about a possible accomplice?

Investigators still suspected that there was a second person who had driven the getaway car in Mark's murder, which is what led police to start looking at Williams' wife, Kim.

And if she was involved, I would think that another question police had was whether she was a willing participant or she had possibly been coerced.

And we had been led to believe that she was very ill and was very frail.

And what we found out that day is she wasn't as ill and frail as we had been led to believe.

She was angry.

She was angry we were searching her house.

She was angry we were searching her parents' house.

And then she was especially angry when we put her husband, Eric Williams, in jail for terroristic threat.

She was, however, open to being interviewed by police and less inclined to come to her husband's defense than he may have hoped.

So after we were able to hit the storage storage unit, we went back to do kind of a non-custodial consensual interview with Kim Williams.

She never lawyered up, she was never in custody, but she finally confessed.

And she told us what we

knew was that Eric Williams was the trigger man on this and she was the driver in both murders.

Her statements would still need to be corroborated with other evidence, but her explanation behind her husband's motive was right in line with police theories.

She told us that after the conviction in 2012 that Mark Hassie and Mike McClellan had got against Eric, that Eric just started kind of obsessing about getting even with Mark and Mike.

So where we thought the motive was vengeance, we were exactly right.

Kim Williams admitted to driving the getaway car during Mark Hassey's murder and described some of the elaborate planning that she and her husband had been doing in the months leading up to the murders.

Eric had kind of a very private ad hoc, like firing range where he would go practice his weapons.

She would practice driving in and out as kind of the getaway car driver.

According to Kim, her husband had disguised himself as a SWAT officer and fabricated a story about an active shooter to gain access to the McClellan's home.

She even admitted to helping him dispose of the murder weapons.

Even though we had lots of guns in the storage unit, it turned out that we didn't have either of our murder weapons.

But what Kim Williams told us is the day of the McClellan murders, when we had been told they were coming back from Lake Tewakonie, at some point as they're driving across that two-mile bridge, Eric pulled over the car and tossed something into that lake.

Presumably, it would have been the pistols used with Mark Cassie.

So we were able to send out a dive team.

And strangely enough, on the very last day, the very last hour, where we had decided, okay, today's the day.

If we don't find him,

we can't keep putting resources into the dive team.

But the last day, the last hours, the divers came up with a sack that had two pistols in it.

And those turned out to be the two pistols that were our Hassie murder weapons.

And the black sack containing those guns, it turned out to be a Grim Reaper mask.

that Eric Williams was wearing when he gunned down Mark Hassie.

That was the type of corroboration we needed to feel good about what Kim Williams was telling us about these murders.

But that wasn't the only disturbing revelation from Kim Williams' confession.

According to her, she and her husband had actually celebrated the McClellans' deaths with a steak dinner and described their murders as an act of shared joy and vengeance.

Before his arrest, Eric Williams was given a chance to come clean.

A couple of our best interrogators went in the interview room with him.

But again, he's a lawyer, he's a judge, he's a cop, he's military.

So even though he never invoked his right to an attorney, he would just kind of invoke his right to silence.

He would say, I don't want to speak right now.

You know, we had to kind of prosecute the old-fashioned way without a confession from our defendant.

On April 18th, 2013, both Eric and Kim Williams were charged with capital murder and were held on bond at the Kauffman County Jail.

Kim Williams would ultimately agree to testify against her husband in the trial.

And despite her admission that she was complicit in her husband's plans, it was clear that Eric Williams was the dark driving force behind all three murders.

As she told us and she testified in the trial, his anger back then was my anger.

I believe Eric Williams is a stone-cold psychopath.

I don't think Kim Williams' wife is quite that bad.

I don't think left to her own devices, she would ever kill anyone.

And indeed, she didn't pull a trigger in these cases.

But, you know, as she kind of self-described, she was Eric's biggest cheerleader during, you know, his reign of vengeance.

She also provided testimony that suggested that if he had not been arrested, Eric Williams was a dangerous, ongoing threat to the public.

Another thing she told us importantly, especially from a prosecutor's point of view, is they did have a hit list and more people were going to die.

And plans were already underway to murder more officials.

It was a terrifying revelation, but one investigators were actually able to corroborate.

She was telling us about the next person to die, another local judge.

She had told us a rather bizarre story that they were going to go out to his ranch, cut the chain at the front gate with bolt cutters, and then Eric was going to lie in wait with a crossbow.

When he saw the judge, he was going to shoot him and disable him, but not kill him.

Then he was going to take a machete and open up his stomach, pour in napalm, and light him on fire and watch him die.

Now, she's describing that to us, and you always kind of assume they're going to lie to you.

And this didn't make a whole lot of sense when we heard this kind of bizarre graphic plan for murder.

But then we remembered that in the storage unit, we had pulled out a tactical bag, and in that bag were bolt cutters, a crossbow, pickle jars filled with homemade napalm, a machete, and you know, cigarette lighters.

So, even though she's telling this bizarre story, we were able to corroborate it with Eric Williams' go bag that he had already assembled for the next murder.

Which was not just proof of future danger.

It was evidence that Eric Williams was more than just angry or unstable.

He was a cold-blooded killer.

Eric Williams,

when we were able to go into his background, had a history of setting fires.

He had a history of cruelty to animals.

He had attempted an armed kidnapping of an ex-girlfriend.

A telltale sign of a ticking time bomb.

Kim Williams received a 40-year prison sentence after pleading guilty and cooperating with the state's prosecution.

We're dealing with families when we get down to the trial.

And as you can well imagine, the families wanted the death penalty for both of them.

But one of the things that happened is when we called Kim Williams to testify against her husband, Eric, the families in the courtroom got to see the value that Kim Williams added to the case.

And I think they believed at least a little bit that there was some small amount of remorse on the part of Kim Williams.

So, you know, they were perfectly agreeable to let her plead guilty in the murders and receive 40 years.

After finding him guilty, there was considerably less sympathy for Eric Williams, who refused to accept responsibility for the murders of three innocent people or his threats to kill more.

This was kind of an unprecedented assault on the criminal justice system.

If there's a poster child for the death penalty, it's Eric Williams.

In Texas, if we ask a jury to answer two questions, is the person a future danger?

If the answer is yes, and they all 12 agree, then we ask ask him, is there anything sufficiently mitigating such that his life should be spared?

And if all 12 answer that no,

then a death sentence is automatic.

And that's what happened in this case.

After serving 10 years in prison, Kim Williams is currently eligible for parole.

Eric Williams remains on death row.

One of the ways I think about the case and what I argue to the jury is Mark and Mike were the first people to kind of of get a true glimpse into who Eric Williams was.

And they kind of pulled back his mask in that 2012 trial and saw him for the psychopath he was.

This story reminds us in brutal fashion that when you choose a life of public service, you accept the risks the average person can't even imagine.

But letting fear drive the narrative, that's the slippery slope.

The work we do day in and day out must be guided by duty, empathy, and the relentless relentless commitment to victims.

Mark, Mike, and Cynthia paid the ultimate price doing what they believed in.

We owe it to them and to every family waiting for answers to stay sharp, stay humble, and double down on the details and to leave no stone unturned.

And of course, cross every T and dot every I so justice doesn't falter under threat.

There were three people murdered in today's story.

They were all killed because of the job two of them held as prosecutors.

It's the type of crime that strikes at the very heart of our system.

As a former prosecutor who remembers this case very, very well, of course I could say a lot.

But I think most of you know what I'd say about the stark reminder it was for prosecutors that our jobs held very real risk and also the stance to not let it impact the work we were there to do.

But we should leave today's episode not with generalities, but focus on the three people who lost their lives.

Mark Cassie, amazing prosecutor, described as having the energy of two men, Mike and Cynthia McClelland.

If Cynthia was all warmth and motherhood, it was said, Mike was a warrior.

They loved each other deeply.

All three are gone from the lives of the many who loved them.

People lost forever before their natural time, nothing to bring them back.

The grief of their loss felt forever by family and friends, all of which are reminders that murder remains the ultimate cruelty.

There is no ability to recover, and it impacts not only the victims, but countless people left behind.

Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.

Anatomy of Murder is an audio chuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media.

Ashley Flowers is executive producer.

This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Ali Sirwa and Phil Jean-Grande.

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