She Butchered Her Sons And Took A Nap. She Was Freed To Kill.

For many years Texas had a law and order image.

Politicians campaigned for office about getting tough on crime.

A gubernatorial candidate’s TV ads featured actors wearing black and white overalls swinging sledgehammers in the prison yard. His voice-over pledged to teach youthful criminals “the joy of busing rocks.”

In fact, Texas ran a revolving door prison system.

Lawmakers passed tougher laws but refused to spend money to build prisons to hold more convicted criminals.

The public did not know about this until I exposed how serial killer Kenneth McDuff was released on parole with hundreds more violent offenders.

You can learn more about McDuff by listening to our recent episode titled The Broomstick Killer or you can watch our Freed To Kill streaming television documentary on Fox Nation.

The episode you are about to hear illustrates how Texas turned loose monsters. And I mean monsters.

I warn you it is a graphic story about a mother who dismembered her two boys and later walked out of that revolving door.

The Ghastly Story Of A Mother Who Dismembered Her Children

33-year old Annie Laurie Williams flashed a big smile for a newspaper photographer.

In the frame, her famous criminal defense attorney Percy Foreman of Houston held her plea bargain agreement up to the camera. Williams had admitted to murdering her two little boys.

Williams’ expression gave no hint of the gruesome crime she had committed in February of 1955 in Pasadena, Texas.

The prim and proper-looking dime-store clerk appeared to beam with joy.

Williams wore a modest sweater buttoned to her neck. Her short banged auburn hairstyle resembled the pixie cut that Audrey Hepburn debuted in the 1953 movie Roman Holiday.

Since her arrest on February 22nd of 1955, Mrs. Ann Williams had made frontpage headlines across the country for the murders of her 8-year-old son Conrad and 9-year-old son Calvin.

Boldface type on the front page of Williams’ hometown newspaper in Hammond, Indiana screamed, “Mom Butchers 2 Sons”

The home edition of the Baytown Sun in Texas exclaimed “Mother Admits Cutting Up Two Sons. Their Bikes Still There...Trailer Was Home To Dead Boys.”

Baytown was home to one of the largest oil refineries in the world. Baytown and the neighboring community of Pasadena where Williams lived were located on the southeast side of Houston.

Newspapers featured photos of the boys with big grins on their faces dressed in striped shirts and solid color shorts climbing on a jungle gym . Centered between them, a photo of their mom Ann Williams wearing horn-rimmed glasses, hands politely folded with a pensive expression on her face, looking like a librarian.

So now. brace yourselves. We are about to get into the gory details of her murders.

It is not for the faint of heart.

Here’s Louis Fawcett, a fugitive hunter for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, who was assigned to an FBI Violent Crime Task Force in Dallas.

Louis Fawcett

Her boys, I think, were eight and nine years old. She told them they could go to the movies. She had an argument with her husband who was in federal prison, somehow I guess through correspondence. She was upset and she told the boys they could go to a movie. Well, when they came home, she told him that they needed to take something for their cold and she gave him a big dose of cold medicine. They said we don't feel bad. But she insisted. She gave him an overdose and put them to sleep. Once she got them to sleep, she tied bandanas I believe it was around their necks and tighten it up and then drove the nail into the bandana into the board of the bed to hold them there. When she was convinced that they were dead. She took them and put them in a bathtub full of lime and lye. Their whole bodies, hoping to dissolve the body. And when that didn't work, she went back to the store and bought a big sheet of plastic and fabricated herself some bags. And she dismembered these boy's bodies completely and put them into these makeshift bags.

According to Texas Prison records Williams was born Annie Laurie Havill in Hammond, Indiana in 1922. Williams was the third of four children. Her father, a mechanical engineer, died when she was eleven.

At the time of the murders, her oldest brother, a civil engineer, said he had not heard from his sister for 16-years except for a phone call shortly before she was arrested.

“For my part I want nothing to do with her in any way or fashion,” he added.

Williams, sister stated, “We of course love her very much and can’t understand how all of this trouble could have happened. Anything I could do to help I would be more than happy to.”

But, Williams' younger brother wrote that she was, “a very selfish personality as a child. Self centered. Would prefer no contact between myself and this member of my family. We wish to protect our small children and guard against the emotional disturbance of knowledge of this terrible crime.”

BRING IN 1940s STYLE MUSIC UP AND UNDER

Williams was married and divorced in 1940.

She graduated from high school in Smithville, Tennessee as an honor roll student in 1941.

Teachers recommended Williams for business school but she could not afford it.

After graduation, she worked for a year and a half in a pants factory.

Then became a clerk at Piggly Wiggly grocery store where she also became a manager trainee. She quit because the manager quote, “kept bothering me.”

Williams spent the next year and half working at a Ford Motor Company plant building B-24 Bombers for World War II.

It was here that she met and later married Hoyt J. Williams who was attending an Air Force school near the plant.

A feature story dated back in December of 1936 in The Tampa Daily Times described how then teenager Hoyt Williams of Mulberry, Florida had won a model airplane contest for the longest flight of the day.

The newspaper stated that “his plane thrilled the spectators by staying up two minutes and eight seconds and going a distance of nearly a half-mile.”

We will have more on Hoyt Williams later when he crashes his stunt plane into a crowd of spectators at an air show.

26-year old Hoyt and 22-year old Annie married in Tampa, Florida on February 19th of 1945.

During the next year, the couple moved to Army Air Force bases in Denver, West Palm Beach, Nashville, and Manchester, New Hampshire.

Their first child, Calvin was born in Manchester on October 22nd of 1945. Two weeks later her husband Hoyt went AWOL, absent without leave. This was shortly after Japan had surrendered ending World War II.

The couple and their newborn fled to Smithville, Tennessee where Annie’s mother lived.

Nine months later on August 10th of 1946 FBI agents and state police officers showed up at Williams trailer home to arrest her husband for desertion.

Annie who was pregnant at the time with their second son, Conrad, fired 50 shots at the officers. Her husband was imprisoned for 15 months and released in February of 1947.

In September of 1950, back in Smithville, Tennessee, Hoyt Williams crashed a biplane into five cars injuring 15 people while performing stunts at an air show.

He suffered a fractured skull among other injuries and was charged with reckless flying.

After his recovery, the couple and their two boys bounced around every two to six weeks drilling irrigation wells. Hoyt now worked as a welder.

Annie Williams told investigators that she began using Seconal (seck-ah-noll), widely abused prescription sleeping pills from Mexico to relieve pain from a cesarean section during the birth of her second son.

Williams claimed she never became addicted and used them for rest when needed.

But in the 1950s and 60s, Seconal (seck-ah-noll) was known on the street as “red devils” or “reds”.

People abused it to feel a mild euphoria, lack of inhibition, and relief of anxiety.

The 1967 movie Valley of the Dolls featured three women navigating the perils of the entertainment industry who end up addicted to Seconal (seck-ah-noll). Known then as “Dolls”.

After her arrest for the murders, Williams claimed she gave her sons an overdose of Seconal (seck-ah-noll) sleeping capsules.

The family moved into a house trailer near Galveston, Texas in the summer of 1954. A few months later the FBI arrested Hoyt Williams for transporting a stolen car across state lines in West Virginia four years earlier.

He was sentenced to three years and sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia.

Williams and her two boys then moved into a trailer home in Pasadena. She later told investigators, “My life with my husband was not a happy one and had not been for the last nine years.”

She said her husband kept sending letters from prison that blamed her for their problems and that she was quote, “no good”.

Williams said she decided to “take her kids and leave and just disappear.”

She rented an apartment in Houston and paid a month’s rent of $50 in advance on Sunday, February 13th, 1955.

Three days later, upset after receiving two letters from her husband, Williams said, “I decided to kill my two children and myself.”

She put her plans in motion at 8PM on February 16th.

Williams claimed she substituted an overdose of Seconal (seck-ah-noll) sleeping capsules for cold medicine, gave it to the boys, and went to bed.

However, an autopsy revealed fractured skulls. Williams had bludgeoned her sons to death.

Williams gave a lengthy confession to a Texas Ranger and a Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy.

In a detached, matter-of-fact tone, Williams never referred to her sons by their names.

They were in their beds.

The oldest one was lying on his stomach and the youngest one on his back and the youngest one was partly uncovered.

and I thought he was dead, but I wasn't sure, but I didn't want to do anything with them unless I was sure.

I looked at the youngest one and I felt of him and he felt cool and I couldn't feel his heart beating and the bed was wet.

When I thought I saw his stomach move, but I couldn't be sure and I got a man's handkerchief and tied it around his neck and put a nail in it and twisted it.

While I was twisting on the nail, he never did move and I decided he was dead.

Then I went to examine the other boy, the older one, and I felt under his heart and I couldn't feel anything.

I put the same handkerchief around his neck, put the same nail in it, and twisted.

After I decided they were dead, I thought about taking some more pills myself, but I thought of the disgrace of it, and I decided not to kill myself.

I decided to take them over to the apartment that I had rented, I thought I would take them over and figure out some way to dispose of their bodies.

I put them in my Cadillac, took them over to the apartment before daylight.

I put them in the backseat of the Cadillac.

I took them from the backseat of the car and took them upstairs to the apartment myself.

I don't know which one I took up there first. They were not real stiff and they were not real limp, either.

When I took the first one up to the apartment, I put him in the bathtub. And then I went downstairs and got the other one and put him in the bathtub too.

At that time, each of them had t-shirts and jeans on.

After I got the second one upstairs. I took their clothes off while they were in the bathtub, and then I turned the water on.

I got an idea that I could put something on them to dissolve them.

The next morning Williams bought a ten-pound bag of lime at an agricultural feed store.

She poured the lime over the boy’s bodies in the bathtub but it did not dissolve them.

The next day she bought a can of lye at a grocery store.

I then took the can of lye back to my apartment and poured this over the bodies of my two boys. And I went to bed.

I took some sleeping capsules and slept for some time.

I woke up at about 11AM Saturday, I realized that the lye and the lime I had put on the bodies of my two children was not going to dissolve or destroy their bodies.

A bad odor was beginning to come from the bodies of my boys, and I knew that I was going to have to do something, or people would discover them by the odor.

I decided on Saturday to cut the bodies up and put them in the refrigerator to stop the odor. And so I would have more time to think.

I tried to use a butcher knife to cut up the two boys but it was too dull.

I then used two razor blades, which were double edge blades, (blue blades).

I worked at this for some time, two or three hours, and then I finished, I put the various parts of the bodies into plastic bags and then I put all of these plastic bags into the refrigerator.

About daylight. I took some more pills and went back to sleep and slept until almost dark on Sunday.

Willams awoke the next morning to a foul odor coming from her refrigerator.

Instead of using her Caddilac to move the decaying bodies, Williams went out and bought a 1948 Studebaker. She also purchased supplies to wrap the body parts in four packages.

After the above-mentioned stuff I went to the apartment, and then drank some buttermilk and went to bed, and listened to the radio for a while.

------------------- Stop Reading Confession------------

Williams awoke the next morning and put the four packages of body parts into the trunk of the Studebaker that she had bought.

She drove a half-hour in the stench-filled car to the Johnson Motor Service and Wrecking Yard in Algoa located south of Houston near Galveston.

Mr. and Mrs. Morris Johnson recognized Williams from an earlier visit when her husband had overhauled their 1950 Cadillac there before he went off to federal prison.

Williams told the couple she had some spoiled deer meat in the car. She claimed a friend’s deep freeze had gone on the blink. And needed to get rid of the venison because the deer had been shot illegally out of season.

Morris Johnson directed them to drive to a vacant lot behind his wrecking yard.

Mrs. Johnson remarked that there was an awful odor in the Studebaker and that she would walk because she had a weak stomach.

But Annie Williams insisted that Mrs. Johnson ride in the car.

When they arrived at a ditch Mr. Johnson opened the trunk lid.

Mrs. Johnson untied a large bundle wrapped in cloth inside the trunk.

It contained four other bundles.

Little did they know it was the mutilated bodies of William’s sons.

The first bundle contained the boy's legs with feet attached; arms, forearms, and hands; thighs, legs, and feet.

The second bundle in a cardboard box contained a woman’s black coat, slip, and panties.

A small boy’s shirts and socks which had been cut off.

A large boy’s shirts and socks which had been cut off.

Both boy’s pairs of blue jeans.

A matching pair of a child’s thighs that had been removed at the hip and knee joints, neatly wrapped in newspaper from the Houston Chronicle dated Sunday February 20, 1955.

The third bundle contained the red haired blue eyed head and trunk of one boy partially covered in lime. The left side of his head, face, and upper arms showed trauma.

An autopsy revealed that contrary to Williams' claim that she had killed the boys with sleeping capsules, both had been bludgeoned to death. They had suffered fractured skulls and broken jaws.

The fourth bundle contained the head and trunk of a smaller boy dusted in lime. His head and face were fractured and swollen.

Mrs. Johnson, unaware of what was in the bundles threw three of them into a ditch.

When she started to get the fourth bundle, Annie Williams intervened claiming it contained a box of bloody kotex feminine napkins. Williams herself placed the bundle into the ditch with the other three.

Mr. Johnson said he was busy and would cover up the bundles later.

Annie Williams drove Mrs. Johnson back to the house where they lived at the wrecking yard.

They left the doors of the Studebaker wide open to air out the foul odor. Williams said she was hungry and they went inside to eat.

During the meal, Morris Johnson came in and asked Williams about her husband. She claimed he was working in Florida and didn’t reveal that he was in prison.

Williams told Johnson her sons were home watching a new TV.

By late afternoon, Annie Williams insisted that they return to the vacant lot to bury the bundles that they had thrown into the ditch.

She said she wasn’t going to leave until the bundles were covered because she did not want dogs to scatter the contents all over the neighborhood.

Mrs. Johnson suggested that her 19-year old grandson Clayton and his seven year old brother, Butch, get shovels and help Williams cover the bundles with dirt.

When the seven year old kept asking what was inside the bundles, Williams became irritated and told him to go home.

After covering up the bundles, Williams ate dinner with the Johnsons and their grandson Clayton.

And after dinner, Williams dropped Clayton off at a movie theater in nearby Alvin.

When Clayton came out of the theater at 9PM he saw a story on the frontpage of the Houston Press newspaper that Williams and her two sons had been reported missing from Pasadena five days earlier.

A fellow employee at a Krutes Five and Dime store had told Pasadena police that she became worried when Annie Williams didn’t show up for work. Williams had given her a letter with instructions to open it if anything ever happened to her. Inside, Williams co worker found a blank check with a note to look after the boys, and keys to her Cadillac and house trailer.

Clayton Johnson said when he saw the newspaper story about Williams missing “put two and two together”. He and a friend drove back to his grandparents’ wrecker yard and dug up the bundles.

Shining their flashlight into the ditch, they discovered the boy's arms and legs. And called the police.

Nats breaking down door

At 4AM on Wednesday, February 23rd Harris County Sheriff C.V. “Buster” Kern and his deputies broke down the door of Williams' apartment.

Kern said she had a loaded pistol but made no attempt to use it.

The Sheriff found her apartment littered with dozens of books and magazines about astrology and many horoscopes cast by Mrs. Williams on her own life.

The latest horoscope, found on top of her dresser, included the notation: “Extra caution. Steady and slow until the 27th.”

When her murder trial opened on November 7th of 1955, Williams was pictured smiling and holding hands with a woman identified as her spiritual advisor.

In her confession, Williams stated,

-------WILLIAMS Confession------

I realized that I had done a terrible thing--made a terrible mistake. But after I had done it. I had to go through with it.

When I say, I had to go through with it. I mean that I had to dispose of those two bodies.

The handkerchief that I used to strangle my two boys with, I flushed down the toilet in the trailer courts, after I had cut it up.

I put the nail back in the drawer, and as far as I know it is still there in the trailer at Pasadena.

I put the razor blades in the garbage can at my apartment on Clay Street.

There was nobody that had anything to do with it, nobody helped me, and nobody knew anything about it as far as I know.

I don't feel sorry for myself, but I feel sorry for all the people I have hurt.

-------End Reading Confession-------

Sheriff Kern told the press that after confessing Williams broke down and sobbed, “take me to the electric chair! I don’t care anymore now!”

Annie Williams, arrest and confession, was front-page news across the nation.

From federal prison, Hoyt J. Williams defended his wife stating, “I have always loved my wife and children and I still love my wife. I understand she has made a statement but if she did anything wrong, she was not responsible. My desire is to stand by her and assist her in any way possible.”

A reporter for The Baytown Sun went to a dimly-lighted trailer camp where he found two small bicycles leaning against the aluminum trailer home where they had lived with Annie Williams.

In a tiny room, he found two small bunk beds like ship bunks attached to each side of the trailer wall. It looked like boys had just crawled out from beneath the covers.

Book satchels with each boy’s name Calvin and Conrad were penciled on each.

A storage compartment above one bed held toy cowboy gloves, pistols, and holsters.

A bookshelf held copies of “Young Readers Horse Stories” and “Young Readers Mystery Stories.”

The owner of the trailer camp said the boys played cowboys all of the time with his 8-year old son.

His impression of Annie Williams was, “She was just as nice. You couldn’t ask for a better mother or lady.”

A county psychiatrist found Williams legally sane to stand trial.

The doctor said he asked Mrs. Williams if she wanted to attend funeral services for her sons and she said no, telling him, “People will go to that funeral like people go to the zoo--to see something curious. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

She told the psychiatrist that she killed her children because her sons were always being taunted about having a convict for a father. “People would say things about us and the other kids would taunt the children. I couldn’t stand to see them suffer anymore.”

On November 8th of 1955, Annie Laurie Williams, flanked by famed criminal defense attorney Percy Forman pleaded guilty to killing and dismembering her boys, Conrad 8 and Calvin 9.

Mrs. Williams replied she had no comment “whatever” after the judge asked her if she had anything to say before being sentenced.

She was sentenced to serve not less than two years and not more than life on each charge.

The District Attorney told the press Williams would not become eligible for parole for 34 years.

But Williams would receive parole 25-years later.

After the trial, the 33-year old convicted killer in a jail house interview claimed her attorney Percy Foreman had sold her down the river.

Williams now claimed an unidentified man had killed her sons and forced her to bury their mutilated remains.

Williams had found God while she was in jail there. She was baptized in the Baptist faith.

As she departed the Harris County Jail for the Texas Prison System, she cheerfully wished the jailers good bye and good luck.

Interviewed on her arrival at the Texas Prison System in Huntsville in November of 1955, Williams claimed her husband Hoyt had hired a hitman who killed the boys and forced her to bury their mutilated bodies.

During the interview, Williams was described as anxious and wanted to know, “What’s the shortest time I could make parole.”

A prison doctor stated during two interviews, “the subject is shy, and would answer only the questions asked. She would not refer to her children by name--referring to them only as “my boys” or the “oldest boy”. She seems shy. Not at all guilty laden, he concluded.

The prison system gave Williams a rehabilitative rating of Fair to Very Poor.

Nine years later, Williams husband, the man who defended his wife from the federal penitentiary, the man Williams later claimed had hired a hitman to kill their children, the man she tried to protect in a gun battle to keep FBI agents from arresting him for desertion, the man who crashed a stunt plane into a crowd of spectators at an airshow, was back in the cockpit of an airplane being pursued by fighter jets from the Egyptian Air Force.

In 1964, at the controls of a Texas oilman’s twin-engine transport plane, Williams ignored repeated orders to land according to the Egyptian government.

Williams and a Swiss mechanic had been making mysterious flights from Jordan to Libya for some time.

As Williams was about to leave the country’s airspace, a burst of machine-gun fire ripped through his aircraft.

A few days later, searchers recovered his body from the mud of the Nile Delta.

Unbeknownst to Annie Williams sitting in prison back in Texas, Hoyt Williams had remarried three months before the deadly crash and his new wife was pregnant.

In 1980 after serving only 25 years of the life sentences for the murder and mutilation of her young sons, the Texas Parole Board released Annie Williams.

It was a time of revolving door justice when the Texas prison system was more interested in relieving overcrowding than protecting the public.

Williams moved to the Path Seekers Halfway House in Houston located near the Astrodome.

She earned $379.63 a month as an office aide on a work-release program.

In September of 1981 with less than 9 months left to serve on parole, 59-year old Annie Williams left on a date with a man for dinner and never returned.

During three earlier outings, she had withdrawn a total of $2,225 from her bank account.

Three wigs were missing from her room. The halfway house supervisor stated, “Annie was a very private person during her stay with us and she did not let us know any more than she wanted us to know.

Williams vanished for 16-years.

Until her case landed on the desk of Louis Fawcett, known as one of Texas' most tenacious and persistent fugitive hunters.

Fawcett’s phone rang on March 26th, 1997.

Louis Fawcett

I got a telephone call from the Department of Public Safety, their fugitive unit. And they told me that this fugitive, an elderly woman, by now, most wanted for murder and her two little boys back in the 50s. And told me the gruesome story, how she'd cut them up, put them to sleep and what she actually did to them. And that's how I got on the case.

State police told Fawcett that a woman named Annie Laurie Williams with the same birthdate as their fugitive had renewed her driver’s license in Garland, a suburb of Dallas.

Louis Fawcett

I immediately got together, went over there to talk to her and arrest her and found out it It wasn't the right lady, although she had the same name and same date of birth and all. We asked her if she would go with us down to the police department to get fingerprinted. She said this is not the first time this has happened to me. I'd be happy to go down there. She was very cooperative, went down and fingerprinted her and compared the prints and it wasn't her. That’s when I really cranked it up. I got a hold of the records, prison records, and saw the offense and what she'd done to those children. And I made it a priority to get her. Find out where she was and get her back in prison.

As we've said before, they go back to what they know when they start, you know, trying to re-establish a life. But at this point in her life, she's getting up in age.

Butt to:

I ran her social security number and found out that that social security number was linked to another social security number and that individual was a female. And that she was drawing benefits from a man who and he was deceased also. So I knew then that she was apparently drawing benefits and living off for somebody else’s Social Security check.

In April of 1985, four years after absconding from parole in Texas, Williams married James Allen in Riggins, Idaho.

Allen had recently lost his leg, his wife, and oldest son. Residents of the small town of 600 remembered Williams, known as Laurie Allen as a quiet person. She was especially fond of her dog, who she walked several times a day.

Williams' husband died of an apparent heart attack shortly after they married.

After Williams was apprehended, her late husband’s sister questioned the cause of his death. She told the Associated Press that her brother “was in his mid-60s and considered himself a very healthy man until then. Williams was hard to get acquainted with. She didn’t make friends easily.”

U.S. Marshals found Williams living at the Irwin Retirement Center in Riggins.

She was fraudulently collecting her late husband’s Social Security benefits.

Louis Fawcett

She’s doing it in Riggins,Idaho, I believe it was. She was in a nursing home. So apparently she married a gentleman there. And about two weeks after that, after that, he got married, he died. So she applied for his benefits rights, thinking that she was clear because she wasn't using our own social security number.

Riggs: Mysteriously died?

Fawcett: Mysteriously died. Right.

Riggs: You think she did him in?

Fawcett: I think she did. She was totally capable of it. She had already shown that.

Riggs: What was her medical condition at this time?

When I found out later after we got arrested that she was in bad health, you know, she was going blind and her She was, I would describe it as mentally ill, you know by now.

U.S. Marshals arrested the 75-year old fugitive and brought her back to Texas

In news interviews after her capture, Williams claimed she fled the Houston halfway because fellow parolees called her a “baby killer.”

Louis Fawcett

They were interviewing her and of course, she denied anything to do with killing the kids. She thinks it was, you know, aliens or whatever. She had some excuse. She had no part in it.

Robert Riggs

So how did she get away for so long?

Louis Fawcett

Well, she just got furloughed. I mean, basically, nobody was looking for all these years. We didn't have a fugitive unit for the state inspector general's offices at that time, because it was years and years ago and nobody was actively trying to find this woman.

Robert Riggs

And is it only by kind of almost luck that another woman is mistaken for her identity and that puts you on the trail?

Louis Fawcett

l yes, I think it was I mean, I would have never gotten the call had she not went down the lady that had the same identifiers. I would have never known about the case.

Three years after U.S. Marshals returned Williams to prison, the Texas Parole Board released her on December 6th of 2000.

Twelve years later, Williams died in a nursing home in Central Texas at 90 years of age.

Louis Fawcett retired from hunting fugitives in 2018.

Fawcett, a baby boomer and child of the fifties, says this case was personal.

He identified with the young victims.

Saturday morning TV westerns featured the adventures of The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, and Davy Crockett at the Alamo.

Boys in rural Texas idolized cowboy heroes.

Residents remembered the Williams brothers, in cowboy hats and holstered six-shooters, pedaling around the trailer court.

Their bikes were their horses in an imaginary posse on the trail of bad guys.

Unfortunately, there were no heroes to protect them from a mother with murder and malice in her heart.

In 1955, the shocked and grief-stricken community took up a collection to bury the murdered brothers in Alvin.

Police recovered their mutilated body parts in the Johnson wrecking yard a short drive from here.

A pair of large ornate pink granite headstones mark their graves in the Oak Park Cemetery.

8-year old Conrad S. Williams. 9-year Calvin H. Williams laid to rest side by side.

Green mold grows on Calvin’s headstone. Vandals tipped over Conrad’s headstone. It lies flat on the ground.

Piles of scattered brown leaves and broken tree limbs cover the boy’s graves.

Few remember the terrible end to their short lives that made frontpage headlines.

But veteran Texas lawman Louis Fawcett, the fugitive hunter who always got his man or woman, says it is the one case out of hundreds that will never fade from his memory.