Kathy Smith


July 7, 2014

Greenville mom fights parole of daughter's killer

By Lyn Riddle
The Greenville News

The newspaper is yellowed now, tattered around the edges from years and years of unfolding and folding up again.

"Convicted Reedy River murderer appeal turned down," the headline says. Beside it is a large photo of Charles Williams, known on the streets as Goldie McCrary.

Clemilee Smith has held onto that paper for decades. She has but a few pieces left of her daughter Kathy, who was murdered by Williams in August 1975. She was 16. A photo taken at her older sister's wedding remains on a living room table. In the bottom drawer of her dresser, Smith keeps the nightgown her daughter so loved, a lock from her casket.

The things don't matter so much. What does is her dedication to opposing parole for Williams, an inmate at the S.C. Department of Corrections for 37 years. Smith and usually her children — now in their 50s — drive to Columbia every time for a hearing that takes minutes. At first, it was every year, then every two. Since 1984.

Wednesday, Williams will ask for the 17th time to be released.

"The first time we went he was standing outside," Smith said. "He said 'How you doing?' I didn't say nothing."

She hadn't seen him since the trial, eight years earlier. She hasn't seen him since because the Pardon and Parole Board changed its policy to hear from the inmate first, then the family in separate sessions. Now, the inmate appears via video conferencing from the prison.

Smith finds the trip nerve-racking, something she thinks about almost continuously for the month between the time she gets the letter announcing the hearing date to the day she walks into the state office on Devine Street.

"You really don't know whether you're coming out with a smile or coming out feeling sad," she said.

August 1975

It was a football Friday when Kathy Smith and her best friend Cynthia Jones went missing. Cynthia and Kathy did everything together. In fact, Cynthia was living with Kathy and her family in their home on Green Avenue in the shadow of Greenville High School, where the girls went to school.

Kathy's father had died the year before. Clemilee Smith made salads down the street at Greenville General Hospital.

The girls often joked that when one went down, the other would go as well, Smith said.

Kathy and Cynthia went to the game at Sirrine Stadium. Kathy was wearing red, white and blue, the Red Raiders colors, her mother remembered. After the game, they walked over to a juke joint on Anderson Road everyone called the Drive-In. It was run by Tom Morton, who was known in the community as Big Daddy.

The hours passed. The girls didn't return home. Late in the evening, Smith heard screams from a car rushing down the street. She woke her son, Heyward. He told his mother not to worry.

"Cynthia will take care of her," he said.

When the hours passed and her daughter didn't come home, Smith called the police. The feeling in the community was that the girls had run away. Smith knew differently and so did Dot Butler, a Greenville police detective who worked with juveniles.

Kathy was the kind of girl who called her mother when she arrived at someone's house and called to say she was on the way home. She went to Tabernacle Baptist Church and was a good student. Her long-held dream was to open a restaurant with Cynthia and her mother, renowned for her fried chicken and candied yams.

Kathy also felt she had found her true love, Todd. They asked Smith to give permission to marry. She refused.

"Finish school first," she said. She wishes she had signed the paperwork.

September 1975

Nothing about the case of the missing girls was easy, Butler recalls.

The bodies weren't found for weeks and the discovery was fraught with missteps.

It began on an afternoon when a man fishing from a boat on the Reedy River off Anderson Road noticed something bobbing in the water. When he got close enough, he could see it was a body.

He called the Sheriff's Office. It was a young girl. She was identified as another missing girl, coincidentally the stepdaughter of Butler's niece. Heartbroken, the family held the funeral. A few weeks later, the girl walked into her grandmother's house, Butler said.

They exhumed the body and discovered it was Rhonda Adams, a white girl who went missing about the same time as Kathy and Cynthia. Investigators went back to the scene. Eventually they found two more bodies.

Smith was called and asked to come to Greenville General. They wouldn't tell her why. Fearing the worst, she walked the short distance and was asked to go into the morgue to identify her daughter.

They had the funeral at Tabernacle. Kathy was buried at Resthaven Memorial Gardens in Piedmont.

Butler set out to find the killer. Heavy rain and the passing of time stripped away any forensic evidence that might have been found on the girls' bodies. She had little to go on. Nothing but what people were talking about in the community.

"I can't imagine how many people I talked to," she said.

Big Daddy told her about a fellow who he had heard was taking young girls outside the state for prostitution. His name was Goldie. He drove a gray Cadillac with the name Goldie emblazoned on the side. He had a beard and bushy eyebrows. He often wore a hat cocked on his head just so.

Little by little Butler gathered string on this Goldie. Ultimately it lead her to another name, Charles Williams. He worked for his father as a mechanic in Spartanburg,

Shortly after Christmas, Butler and another officer drove over to Spartanburg and spoke with the father, who said he had a son named Charles, not Goldie. Butler asked if they could search the property. He agreed. Hidden in a clump of trees was a gray Cadillac. On the driver's side door, an emblem had been scratched off.

Charles Williams was taken into custody for taking minors across the state line for prostitution, Butler said. She had 30 days to get enough evidence to charge him with the murders.

Through a woman who lived with Williams in Greenville and two others who worked for him, Butler pieced together the story.

Williams was living a double life. A mechanic and dutiful son in Spartanburg, and another — what he called the nightlife — in Greenville, a life based on the work of writer Iceberg Slim, whose real name was Robert Maupin and eventually Robert Beck. In 1967, he published an autobiography called "Pimp."

Police found a copy of one of Beck's books in Williams' motel room.

One of the women Williams employed came forward and told what had happened on that late summer night. When she got in the front seat of the Cadillac, she saw three girls slumped over in the back. He said he had given them something to drink and they became unconscious. He drove to Conestee and down an alley beside a creek.

The woman said she helped him get the girls out of the car. They took the girls' pants off, shaved their heads, and he told the woman to get back to the car.

Williams was alone when he got back in.

The aftermath

Smith later learned that a man in a Cadillac had been parked near her house before her daughter disappeared. And Williams often stood outside the hospital, listening to what people were saying about the murders. She feels sure she walked right passed him a time or two. She also believes he was the one who approached her daughter about a modeling contract, which her mother forbade.

Billy Wilkins, who eventually would become the chief justice of the 4th Circuit Court of appeals, prosecuted Williams, who did not testify. He did not admit to authorities that he had killed the girls. The women he knew were instrumental in the conviction, Butler said.

Clemilee Smith was there every day. She could not believe he wore a cross to the trial.

In April 1976, jurors found him guilty of three murders. He was sentenced to die.

This was four years after the U.S. Supreme Court had abolished the death penalty because the way in which sentences were handed out was arbitrary and therefore cruel and unusual. South Carolina fine-tuned its law and made the death penalty legal again in 1974. Then came another challenge, and from 1976 until 1977, South Carolina's death penalty statute was again considered unconstitutional.

Williams' sentence was set aside in April 1977 by the South Carolina Supreme Court, and he was sentenced by a Greenville court to three life sentences to be served consecutively, records with the Department of Probation, Pardon and Parole indicate.

Williams was 25 when he murdered the three girls. In his almost four decades in the Department of Corrections, he's been held in most of the state's maximum security prisons and a few medium security. For a time he was working outside the prison on a cleanup detail, but Butler said she protested and he was been held ever since in maximum security.

He's worked as an assistant for a wardkeeper, chaplain, librarian, brickmason and teacher. He's been a cook, a machine operator and a custodian.

Last time he was up for parole he said he wanted to return to Spartanburg and live with his mother. His sister was going to get him a job at a convenience store. This time, a report by a parole officer says he wants to move to Las Vegas. He has said in past hearings he didn't mean to kill the girls. He didn't know how potent the drugs were that he gave them.

Butler has written a letter opposing parole, as has former Chief Harold Jennings. The Solicitor's Office policy is to oppose every parole, Marcia Barker, a spokeswoman, said.

Clemilee Smith will be there despite the problems she has walking these days. Her two daughters will be there, a son-in-law, her son and his wife, possibly her grandson, who came into the world so many years after his aunt died.

Charles Williams turned 64 on Friday, the 4th of July. Kathy would have been 55 at the end of the month.

"It's hard to forgive him," Smith said. "He's getting three hot meals a day and don't have nothing to worry about. My baby's in the ground."

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