Stiff stiffy stiff
Charges against Michael Montel Williams grow out of the June 17, 2006, discovery of the body of 26-year-old Sherry Lynn Smith at the Hampton Inn on Shallowford Road.
In addition to the body, detectives searching Room 128 discovered Williams – who had suffered minor cuts – and a tape detailing an alleged murder-suicide pact. According to the tape, which Williams narrated, the defendant smothered Ms. Smith and then committed a sex act on her after she was dead.
Detectives found Ms. Smith’s nude body on a bed, concealed under a pile of covers. Williams was sprawled on the floor between the two beds in the motel room, but, although one arm was cut, he was not seriously hurt.
According to police, Williams indicated on the cassette tape that he and Mrs. Smith had made a murder-suicide pact which required him to kill her and then take his own life.
Tuesday, Travis Smith testified that his wife would never have participated willingly in such an arrangement.
“Sherry didn’t believe in suicide,” he said. “She was dead against suicide.”
An over-the-road truck driver, Mr. Smith said he left on a trip to Florida on June 11, 2006, and received a strange telephone message the next day from his wife.
“I had to listen to it five or six times before I could make it out,” he testified. “It kept breaking up . . . She said she had to be gone a few days.”
Worried because he knew his wife, “a real homebody,” had no plans to go anywhere, Mr. Smith said he decided to return home immediately and arrived late that night.
Waiting for him, he said, was a note written in pencil – but signed in ink – in which his wife said she needed “some time alone . . . (and would) come back in a couple days or sooner.”
His wife’s car was missing, he noted, and her glasses were gone. But her contacts, makeup and numerous other personal items had been left behind.
He immediately began trying to find out what had happened, he said. Before long, he said, his wife’s mother told him she had “got hold of a guy who dropped (Williams) off” near the home Mr. Smith shared with his wife in Cowan.
He was familiar with Williams, Mr. Smith explaiined. His wife had dated Williams prior to their marriage in 1999, he said, and started seeing Williams again in 2005 when the Smiths separated and subsequently divorced.
Mr. Smith said he met his wife in 1999 and married her in 2002. They separated and divorced in 2005, he explained, but had reconciled and were living together again at the time of her death in June 2006. “We were going to get married again on Aug. 3, the same date we got married the first time,” he said.
After he and his wife got back together, he said, they had to change their phone number because Williams kept calling and leaving obscene messages about Mrs. Smith. Williams also mailed his wife a package containing “an open box of condoms, some lubricant, things like that,” Mr. Smith recalled.
After learning from his mother-in-law that Williams had been near his house, he said, he contacted police and reported the car stolen and his wife kidnapped. Then he started searching for her everywhere he could think of, he said.
On June 13, 2006, he said, “Sherry called my cell phone around noon . . . She said she loved me and asked me to tell her I loved her.”
He pleaded with her to tell him where she was, he testified, but she said she couldn’t.
Suddenly, he said, “I heard a man holler, ‘Hey!’ Then the phone went dead.”
That was the last time he ever heard from his wife, he said.
Another witness, Gruetli-Lager resident David Scissom, said he was a friend of Williams and received a call from him on June 12, 2006.
“He wanted me to take him to see a girl,” Mr. Scissom explained. “I dropped him off (not far from the Smith home, which is located near a wastewater treatment plant) . . . He had a backpack with him. He told me to come back for him in two or three hours, and took off walking.”
When he returned as requested, Mr. Scissom said, “(Williams) wasn’t there so I went home.”
Over the next few days, he said, he received a number of calls from Williams saying he was with a woman and was going to remaiin for a while.
“He left messages on the phone saying her family was crazy and they were going to run off together,” Mr. Scissom said.
Under cross examination, he said Williams never identified the woman he was with as Sherry Smith.
In opening arguments, District Attorney Bill Cox told the jury that Williams smothered Ms. Smith at the Hampton Inn, then had sex with her after she was dead.
He said the jury in the courtroom of Judge Rebecca Stern should find Williams guilty of murder and abuse of a corpse.
However, Jonathan Turner of the public defender’s office said the couple had a suicide pact. He said Williams tried to carry out his end of the bargain but survived.
He said there was a faulty autopsy in the case, and he said it is more likely that the victim died of taking an overdose of a heart medicine than from being smothered.
In what the assistant public defender called a “very bizarre case,” Williams made a tape while in the motel room with the dead woman. He said on the tape they agreed to commit suicide together. He said Ms. Smith wanted him to kill her first, saying she might not be able to follow through on her own suicide.
Williams said Ms. Smith agreed before she died that he could have anal sex with her, noting that she did not like that type sex while she was alive but gave him permission to do it after she was dead.
DA Cox said the tape recording also includes two hours of “small talk” between the couple – apparently just before she died. He said there was no indication she was planning to kill herself. He said she left no suicide note or recording.
On the tape, Williams said, “The pills weren’t working right. She picked the no-breathing way. I didn’t like it.”
He also said, “She tried liquor. She decided to have me do it this way (smothering).”
Williams said on the tape about having sex with her after she died, “I know it sounds sick and weird.”
Assistant Public Defender Turner said the case is about “two people in love who made a tragic decision.”
He said they loved each other, “but could not find a way to be together.”
Attorney Turner said the first officer at Room 128 found items scattered all over the place, though nothing was broken. He said there was vomit all over the room.
He said the couple had arrived at the motel four days earlier and appeared happy and in love to a desk clerk that day and two days later.
He said there were a number of empty pill bottles in the room, and he said Williams had bought 72 sleeping pills the night before at Walgreen’s.
Courtesy the Chattanoogan
Tags: Crimes, Kinks & Fetishes, Necrophilia, Sex, The Horror