In the middle of November, 2020, Kat Dahl, a federal prosecutor in Johnson City, Tennessee, received an unusual assignment. Dahl had been appointed by the Department of Justice to work with the Johnson City police. Almost all her cases involved “run-of-the-mill” federal charges related to the possession of drugs or firearms, Dahl told me. She had little experience with the detectives in the Criminal Investigations Division who usually handled state charges related to crimes like robbery and assault.
That day, Investigator Toma Sparks summoned her into the four-desk bullpen of C.I.D. Sparks and another officer, David Hilton, told Dahl that they wanted her to look into the case of a local businessman named Sean Williams. Williams, who was forty-nine, owned Glass & Concrete Contracting, which specialized in restoring historical buildings; he and his workers rappelled down their façades, limiting the need for scaffolding and earning him the nickname Spider-Man. Williams was well known in Johnson City, a community of some seventy-five thousand people in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. On a busy street downtown, he had a glass-fronted garage that housed a red Ultima GTR sports car and a rope swing. On one wall was a neon-hued mural showing Williams surrounded by gigantic cartoon breasts. Johnson City is a college town, home to East Tennessee State University, and many locals told me that they knew Williams as the host of wild parties at his fifth-story, three-thousand-square-foot condo, a block from the garage. After nearby bars closed, people would head to Williams’s apartment, where he kept such curiosities as drones and exotic reptiles, as well as a seemingly endless supply of alcohol and cocaine, which he served from a large pepper grinder.
The detectives told Dahl about an incident that had taken place at the apartment two months earlier. That night, a thirty-two-year-old woman named MiKayla Evans had gone with a friend of hers to Williams’s garage, where Williams was drinking with several people, including his best friend and occasional roommate, Alvaro Diaz. At one point, Williams began pushing Evans on the swing. She later told me that, although she’d had only a few beers and a single shot earlier in the evening, she began to feel woozy, and her memories of the night abruptly ended. “I don’t remember walking back down the street,” she said. “I don’t remember going up the elevator, or being in his apartment.” In the end, Evans fell five stories from Williams’s window. The impact was so loud that people in a restaurant around the corner thought it was a gunshot. Evans’s next memory was of waking up from a coma in a hospital bed more than a week later. She had fractured more than a dozen bones, including in her skull and back, and had dislocated her elbow. Hours after the fall, police officers had searched Williams’s apartment and seized more than two hundred rounds of ammunition. Williams had a felony conviction from the nineteen-nineties, for growing marijuana, and it was illegal for him to possess firearms or ammunition.
Dahl, who was twenty-nine and a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, had been in her job for just over a year. She had found that federal authorities typically showed little interest in ammunition cases in which the suspect lacked a significant criminal record and no firearm was recovered. So she was surprised when the officers asked her to pursue an indictment. When she asked for more information, Sparks said, of Williams, “We think he’s a rapist.” During the search, officers had photographed a long strip of paper with a handwritten list: twenty-two first names, one of which was accompanied by the word “baby,” along with an entry that read “no name girl.” At the top of the list was an underlined word: “Raped.” In a safe, according to photos the police took of its contents, they found a baby doll that appeared to have been turned into a makeshift sex toy. Sparks also told Dahl about two previous police reports filed by women who said that Williams had sexually assaulted them. The reports, he said, accorded with a reputation Williams had in Johnson City as a predatory “dirtbag.”
Dahl was “gobsmacked,” she told me. “I just immediately had this gut feeling that this was big.” Yet the officers didn’t seem inclined to pursue the rape allegations. “I remember asking things like ‘Have you made contact with any other victims? Have you identified any of the women on the list?’ ” Dahl said. “There just seemed to be zero interest in that. They would answer no, and hem and haw when I suggested possible tactics.” Nor did the officers exhibit much sympathy for the women involved. Hilton described the black tube dress Evans had been wearing when she fell from Williams’s window, saying, “She’s dressed like a real—well, I won’t say it.” (A lawyer for Sparks declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation. Hilton did not respond to repeated inquiries.) Dahl told the officers that she would look into the case, as long as her investigation was not limited to the ammunition charge.
Dahl, who has platinum hair and large, gentle eyes, often breaks into nervous laughter at her own remarks. But when talking about legal matters she has a confidence that borders on intensity. By the end of her conversation with the detectives, she told me, the case had become her “top priority.” In the following weeks, she stayed up late in her two-bedroom rental house, twenty minutes’ drive from Johnson City, scrutinizing Williams’s social-media accounts and financial and property records. She combed through the names on the list, and identified several of the women. But when she urged the police to interview them they seemed to resist. “It fell on deaf ears,” she said. “They just ignored me.”
Dahl requested the police reports containing the two sexual-assault allegations against Williams, but received no reply. She asked for the reports three more times before Sparks finally provided them, weeks later. He told her that the allegations had not been followed up on because the women were unwilling to coöperate. When Dahl read the reports, however, she had a different impression.
In November, 2019, Briana Pack, who was twenty-two, was drinking at a bar near Williams’s apartment when she and a friend ran into Diaz, Williams’s close confidant, who brought them back to the apartment. After she accepted a beer from Williams, she began to feel groggy. She tried to leave, but Williams and Diaz blocked her exit. Her last memory was of sitting on a barstool. She told police that she woke up in Williams’s bed the next morning, unsure of how she got there. A friend drove her to an urgent-care clinic to obtain a drug test; it came back positive for benzodiazepines, which she hadn’t knowingly taken. Then she went to a hospital for a rape kit. (Williams has denied giving women date-rape drugs, and says that any encounters with his accusers were consensual. Diaz did not respond to repeated requests for comment and has not been charged with any crimes related to Williams.)
When Pack contacted the Johnson City police, she recalled, an officer told her, “Other women have reported similar things there. We know exactly who this guy is.” A police report filed that day refers to prior calls about Williams and asks that the case be forwarded to C.I.D. Pack said that she was eager to coöperate with an investigation, but the police failed to follow up, or to respond to calls from her, for the next year and a half. After Dahl began investigating Williams, Sparks called Pack to tell her that her rape kit had tested positive for DNA that was not hers. (Rape-kit results are often subject to extreme delays.) Pack says that Sparks also asked her what she was wearing the night of the alleged assault. She was afraid that Williams might retaliate against her for going to the police, but when she asked if officers could provide her with protection Sparks refused, calling Williams “untouchable.” Pack nevertheless wanted to press charges, but Sparks stopped returning her calls. “I felt like they related more with him than they did with me,” she told me. “I tried to do the right thing. I wanted to protect other girls. They didn’t want to make any effort, in any way, shape, or form.”
The second sexual-assault allegation had been made by another twenty-two-year-old. In June, 2020, she had been out drinking in Johnson City when she encountered Diaz, who was a friend, and went with him to Williams’s apartment. According to the initial police report, at around three-thirty that morning she woke up with Williams on top of her. She jumped up and immediately called 911, screaming for help. When the police arrived, minutes later, she was running from the building, crying. (Williams denies having a sexual encounter with her.) Officers helped her get home and offered her a rape kit, which she declined.
Later that month, she went to the police station and gave a statement. An officer’s summary of the statement said that the incident had merely been an “attempted” rape, and that she was declining to pursue charges because she had “learned her lesson.” When Dahl read the file, she was puzzled by how meagre it was, and by how little detectives had done to investigate the allegations. “A screaming, shoeless woman runs into the arms of a cop,” Dahl said. “They don’t go up and interview Williams. They know it’s him. They never follow up. On what planet does that make any sense?” She called the woman. “I had this increasing suspicion that sexual-assault victims were being either scared off or treated in a way that made it unlikely for them to pursue charges,” Dahl told me. The woman sounded surprised to hear from law enforcement again, but she agreed to give an additional statement about the incident. Dahl accompanied her to her meeting with the police. After hearing the new details, she said, “I just remember being stunned, because the context was more harrowing than the one brief paragraph in the report.”
Dahl was born in Kansas, to an Army-veteran father and a devoutly Catholic homemaker mother, and she told me that her childhood observations of military and Church bureaucracy taught her that “institutional rot can be really toxic.” She studied musical theatre in high school, and felt drawn to stories of rebellion. (“Les Misérables” was a favorite.) In 2016, after attending college and law school in Tennessee, she moved to Washington, D.C., to work as a policy assistant for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Her first week on the job, she went for drinks with a friend, and emerged from being blackout drunk to find that he was assaulting her. She went to the police in nearby Arlington, Virginia, to report that she’d been raped. She says that an investigator assigned to her case was dismissive, at one point telling her, “It’s not rape if he’s drunk, too.” The interview was so caustic that a higher-ranking officer who reviewed footage of it invited Dahl back and apologized, telling her that he was “appalled.” Nevertheless, she was so discouraged that she decided not to try to press charges. The experience galvanized her desire to work in criminal justice, and, when she was offered the role in Johnson City, she leaped at it. The Williams case had a personal dimension. “It was so deeply familiar to me, the way these victims were being questioned and dismissed,” she told me. “It brought back everything I went through when I reported my assault, and I couldn’t stand to see it happening again.”
Inaction, incompetence, and bias are hardly novel in such cases. The Department of Justice has conducted several recent investigations into systematic failures in the handling of sex crimes by police departments. In 2023, the D.O.J. published a report indicating that the Louisville Metro Police had neglected to adequately gather evidence in response to claims of sexual assault and often relied on “sex-based assumptions” and “stereotyping.” An investigation into gender bias in the New York Police Department’s approach to sex crimes is ongoing. Criminologists say that police are often skeptical of women who report sexual assault if they were drinking, were at a party, or knew the assailant.
But the Johnson City Police Department’s handling of the Williams case was hard to explain through these elements alone. Dahl was especially perplexed by the response to Evans’s fall. Sparks and an officer named Justin Jenkins, who arrived at Williams’s apartment soon after the incident, agreed to a demand from Williams that they leave and come back with a warrant, even though there is an exception to warrant requirements when evidence might be tampered with. The officers had photographed security cameras pointing at the window that Evans had fallen from, but did not secure them. They returned to the station with Williams, leaving the scene in the care of Diaz. They saw Williams accessing footage from the cameras on his phone, which they didn’t confiscate until he left the station.
The police allowed Williams to return home for several hours unsupervised. During that time, Williams told me, he received a call from an employee with law-enforcement connections, who warned him that the officers were coming back. He and Diaz frantically cleaned up the apartment, hiding cameras in a closet and gathering drugs and firearms in a metal ammunition box that Williams threw out a window.
Sparks, Hilton, and Jenkins spent much of the day at the apartment. They didn’t recover the ammo box or its contents. They and their colleagues never attempted to examine the contents of some of the devices they did seize, including computers, memory cards, and phones. When Dahl read the records of the search, she asked Sparks for a warrant to access the remaining devices. Two months later, Sparks submitted a draft warrant that Dahl found so vague and incomplete that she considered it “not even usable”—she believed that either a judge would reject it or any evidence gathered under it could be challenged in court. “It felt like the definition of insanity, trying to get J.C.P.D. to do more on this,” she told me. “They didn’t want to pursue the rape cases, because a slew of mistakes had already been made. And, if they were to fully dive in and investigate, I think some of those mistakes would have come to light. I think you would have had a whole bunch of people say, ‘Well, why wasn’t anything done sooner?’ ”
Other women continued to come forward with allegations against Williams. The month that Dahl took on the case, Kaleigh Murray, at the time a single mother of three, reported Williams to the F.B.I. In October, 2019, she had gone to a Halloween party at Williams’s apartment, where she took a drink from him. Shortly afterward, she blacked out. Her next memory was of finding him passed out on top of her, naked. She later told me that the incident contributed to a mental-health crisis during which she surrendered custody of her children. In early 2020, during what Murray called “the darkest period of my life,” Williams contacted her, and they struck up a friendship. He expressed regret about his life style and told her that he wanted to reform. Their friendship ended that November, when, she says, she snorted a line of cocaine Williams offered her and blacked out. The next thing she remembered was him holding her down and trying to manually penetrate her, first vaginally and then, when she pushed him away, anally. She told me that she waited until she thought Williams had passed out, then fled.
Murray contacted the F.B.I., rather than local police, “because I did not trust the Johnson City Police Department,” she told me. She said that she’d previously experienced sexist treatment from the department, including a frisking that she found humiliating and intrusive. Nevertheless, the F.B.I. referred the matter to a J.C.P.D. officer, who immediately informed Sparks. Though Sparks was off duty at the time, he went to the F.B.I. field office to assume control of the case. Later that day, when Sparks interviewed her, he said, inaccurately, that no other woman had wanted to pursue charges against Williams, because, as she remembered the remark, “everyone else had been too fearful.” Murray, who interpreted the comment as an effort to dissuade her, replied that she wanted to press charges. She didn’t hear from the police again for five months, at which point she went to talk to Sparks. He told her not to expect further follow-up until her rape-kit results were returned. More than four years later, she still has not received the results.
Sparks and the other detectives seemed to have no plan for pursuing Williams. Dahl suggested avenues for investigation, to little avail. “I was going home and researching and combing through social media until, like, one in the morning, and coming back to them, like, ‘I found a possible lead,’ or ‘I think you should check this out.’ I was always given the side-eye and told, ‘Kat, we’re tired of hearing about Williams,’ ” she said. “And meanwhile more victims were coming in.” At least six assaults are now alleged to have taken place between October, 2020, and the following April, as Dahl struggled to advance the case.
Dahl had been investigating for almost a month when she decided that she was at an impasse. In December, she reached out to her supervisor at the D.O.J., Wayne Taylor, who scheduled a meeting between Dahl and officials with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, a state organization that Dahl hoped might provide oversight. When Karl Turner, the chief of the Johnson City Police Department, found out about the meeting, he called Taylor, furious that it had been planned without his consent. The meeting was cancelled, and Turner called Dahl into his office. Dahl recorded their meeting, in which Turner seemed indifferent to the case and rejected her suggestion that they contact women whose names matched those on the list that officers had seen at the apartment. “I don’t know if that’s girls he’s raped or girls he’s had consensual sex with and he calls it whatever he calls it,” Turner said. Instead, he proposed merely that they place cameras outside Williams’s garage. Increasingly distressed, Dahl warned Turner that, based on the baby-doll sex toy, she believed that Williams might be preying on children. (Taylor and Turner, through representatives, declined to comment. Turner has denied any wrongdoing.)
Dahl’s relationship with the police department was deteriorating. Turner contacted Taylor, Dahl’s supervisor, and told him that she had exhibited poor communication skills. In the following months, Turner continued to complain to Taylor about Dahl. Her focus on the Williams case became a running joke in the department. Once, Dahl recalls, a colleague jokingly suggested that she serve as bait, telling her, “If you’re so obsessed with this case, why don’t you go have a drink at Label”—a bar where Williams was rumored to prey upon women—“and let him take you up to his apartment, then give us a call?”
It’s not clear why officers told Dahl about the rape allegations while discouraging her from pursuing them. Dahl believes that they wanted to eliminate the increasingly visible problems Williams was creating while avoiding scrutiny of their errors in policing his more serious crimes. “A simple weapons charge was the way to do that,” she told me. Dahl was reluctant to pursue an indictment only on the ammunition case, which was not a particularly serious offense. “I was very keen to avoid anything that I thought could fail and let him get away,” she said. “But the flip side of the coin is the longer I wait, the more opportunities he has to hurt people.” She finally decided that she could wait no longer. Grand-jury hearings were limited, owing to COVID precautions, but eventually, in April, 2021, she secured an indictment on the ammunition charge.
The arrest warrant was placed under seal, to reduce the risk that Williams might flee. During the next three weeks, Dahl lodged more than thirty requests with Sparks and other Johnson City police officers, asking them to arrest him. She was offered various excuses—the officers were busy, or had conflicting training schedules, or, as one officer, Jeff Legault, told her, Williams simply wasn’t a priority. (Through a lawyer, Legault said that he was aware only of the minor ammunition charge, which was not his primary responsibility.) At one point, an officer told Dahl that they couldn’t execute the warrant because they lacked the code to the front door of Williams’s building. Dahl recalled asking, “Are you law enforcement?”
Finally, in mid-May, an officer was sent to knock on Williams’s door. Williams, who was hosting a party, didn’t answer. “I could see through the peephole. It was one single cop by himself,” Williams later told me. “I called 911. I was, like, ‘What the fuck is this cop outside of my door for?’ ” During the call, an officer at the station disclosed the existence of the warrant. Williams fled the apartment, evading the officer by rappelling out of a window.
After the botched arrest, Turner pressed Dahl to focus on other cases. In a meeting that month which Dahl recorded, Turner referred to Williams as a nuisance who had already been dealt with. “He just needs to calm down,” Turner said. “He’ll get over it.” Captain Kevin Peters, who was also at the meeting, said, “I think we’ve achieved our desired outcome.” (A representative for Peters denied any wrongdoing.) But Dahl was convinced that Williams still posed a danger. “I was obsessed with Williams,” she told me. “I was, like, I don’t care. I am going to work on this as much as I want. What are they going to do? Fire me?”
A month later, Turner told Dahl that her contract would not be renewed, and that her job would be terminated in less than a week. It was an unusually blunt firing for a prosecutor in the midst of several cases, including one, unrelated to Williams, with a trial date two months away. The department later argued that Dahl had brought an insufficient number of indictments before grand juries. But Dahl’s productivity appears to have been roughly on par with that of her colleagues. From the start of the pandemic until her firing, she secured nineteen indictments; in the same period, five colleagues working in the same courthouse brought between ten and twenty each. Dahl told me that her job performance was being judged by the uniquely harsh standards reserved for institutional whistle-blowers. “Everything that I’ve done within this job is now under a microscope,” she said.
In July, 2021, during her final days at the J.C.P.D., Dahl wrote to me using an encrypted e-mail account and a pseudonym. She told me that she was a federal prosecutor who was desperate to apprehend a serial rapist and encountering obstruction. “Worst case scenario, I believe there is a possibility that this person is being protected by local law enforcement,” she wrote. “All I want is some accountability in this case.”
Even after Dahl was fired, the Williams case dominated her life. Living in a community where she was at odds with the police took a toll. “I had joked with several friends, ‘If I get mugged downtown, congratulations to the mugger, because I’m not calling the cops,’ ” she said. She bought a .22-calibre mini-revolver, “just in case.” She supported herself with freelance legal-drafting work, and continued to investigate. Ultimately, she connected with several of the women on the list from Williams’s apartment, all of whom told her similar stories of being drugged and assaulted; they recalled feeling discouraged when they went to the police.
Even her social life was consumed by the case. Drinks and meals often became opportunities to gather leads. “It was usually met with something along the lines of ‘Oh, are you talking about the drug-dealing rapist?’ ” she said. “It became apparent pretty quickly that this was an open secret.” The day after her firing, she went on a date with a man she had met on Hinge. She mentioned the garage, and the man instantly identified Williams. “ ‘Oh, yeah, that guy is a creep,’ ” she recalled him saying. “ ‘There was a girl who got into an accident and died after she left the apartment.’ ”
This was news to Dahl. She found an obituary for Laura Shea Trent, who had died in a car crash in November, 2020. Dahl reached out to Trent’s sister Sarah, who told her that, on the night she died, Trent and her boyfriend, Noah Sedam, who was an acquaintance of Williams’s, had briefly stopped by the garage after drinks at a brewery. After they left, Sedam realized that his phone was missing and returned to the brewery to look for it. When he came back, five minutes later, he told me, “she was just gone, disappeared, vanished.” The garage was closed. Trent’s car was nearby.
Sedam told me that, when he left Trent, she was drunk but walking and talking competently. But soon afterward she began placing frantic calls to family members, sounding incoherent and inconsolable. “She was just in such distress that she didn’t even know who she had called,” her sister Stacy told me. She drove around looking for Trent while she and Sarah tried to get their sister to describe where she was. Eventually, Trent stopped responding.
Minutes after her last call to her sisters, Trent crashed her car into a concrete traffic island, dying at the scene. Sarah told me that both Diaz and Williams later told her that Trent had gone with them and had more to drink. When I spoke to Williams, he didn’t deny that Trent may have been in his apartment. He asked, “Didn’t they do a toxicology report? Was there any sign of downers?” (Trent’s blood showed a high level of alcohol, but exhaustive testing for date-rape drugs was not carried out.)
Two days after Trent’s death, Sarah called the Johnson City police, telling them that she believed Williams had been with her sister before she died. After she named Williams, an officer told her that Johnson City lacked jurisdiction in this case, and advised her to call law enforcement in nearby Elizabethton, where the crash had happened. Elizabethton sent her back to the Johnson City police, whom she eventually again asked to look into Williams, telling them that she feared Trent had been drugged. She never heard back. But Dahl realized that Sparks had assigned her the Williams case within a day of Sarah’s first phone call. “The fact that they gave me the case a day later, without mentioning any of this—it’s not a coincidence,” Dahl said.
By the time she learned about Laura Trent, Dahl had pieced together much of Williams’s history. “I had a picture in my head of what he was like,” she said. Williams had been brought up in a modest suburban home in Largo, Florida, where a slab of concrete in the back yard still bears his child-size footprints. His sister Auburn Shapiro told me that their mother, who died in 2020, was “a hustler” who “worked her ass off” to support the family, taking jobs as a notary and at the reservations line at Delta, and eventually doing clerical work for Williams’s business. When Williams was nine, his parents divorced. A few years later, his mother remarried and moved with Williams to what he described as “redneck fucking hillbilly-town North Carolina,” where his stepfather owned property. “It was almost doomed from the start,” Shapiro said. “There was no house. We lived in trailers, on welfare.” Williams’s stepfather, a lawyer who was later disbarred for billing clients for work he didn’t perform, was an alcoholic who also struggled with heroin addiction. He was, Shapiro told me, physically and emotionally abusive. “He would make Sean sleep outside on an unheated porch in the cold, or punch him in the stomach,” she said. “Sean doesn’t call what he went through ‘abuse.’ But I think it shaped how he sees boundaries and consent.”
After the move to North Carolina, Williams, still in his early teens, fathered a daughter. When he was fourteen, child-protective services took him into custody. For the rest of his teens, he was sent to a series of foster homes and juvenile-justice programs, often running away soon after he arrived. At one point, he fled a disciplinary camp with several other students he’d persuaded to join him. At one of his placements, a woman whom Williams described as his foster mother began a sexual relationship with him, leading to the end of her marriage.
At eighteen, Williams started a relationship with a thirty-five-year-old woman which lasted seven years. While they lived together, Williams grew marijuana and launched a business, first cleaning high-rise windows and then expanding into waterproofing, pressure washing, and historical-building restoration. The company grew as he netted contracts on large buildings in Greensboro and other cities in the area. In the mid-two-thousands, Williams got a contract to restore a building in Johnson City and began renting the first of several apartments he would ultimately own there, including the condo where much of his alleged criminal activity took place. Those years were also marked by increasingly heavy drug use—eventually, Williams was buying large quantities from out of state. “I was a collector,” he said. “Any kinds of drugs that came in, I would buy it.” Williams told me that he only occasionally sold drugs, preferring to give them to friends and acquaintances, but several of his associates said that they believed he had ties to traffickers.
While Williams was evading arrest, Dahl tried to track him down herself. She drove past his garage and his apartment, to see if the lights were on. His attempts to stay out of sight were halfhearted. He continued to post on social media, sometimes revealing his location. Dahl followed information in one post to a construction site operated by his company in Asheville, North Carolina. At a nearby hotel, she spoke to a manager who told her that Williams had recently been kicked out for being too rowdy and for keeping drugs in his room. The manager also feared for the safety of a young woman Williams had with him. Dahl repeatedly called the U.S. Marshals with leads about where Williams might be. She told them to search the area surrounding a house she had visited in Cullowhee, North Carolina. His mother had once lived there, and Dahl believed that the location was significant to Williams—and that the surrounding woods might provide a hiding place. An official with the U.S. Marshals said that Dahl’s tips were taken seriously. Nevertheless, Dahl told me, for nearly two years, “it just never went anywhere.”
The authorities need not have looked very far. For more than a year after the arrest attempt, Williams spent the majority of his time in Johnson City, often staying with a neighbor in the same building as his condo. He seemed to have little concern about the police. “I mean, they fucking knew where I was,” he later told me. “They didn’t want to find me at all.” He continued to conduct business openly. In April, 2022, Johnson City’s manager, Cathy Ball, who is responsible for overseeing the police department, even entered into a contract to buy his apartment. According to text messages later disclosed during a lawsuit, Ball’s real-estate agent, Shannon Castillo, spoke with Williams on the phone, and at one point left documents at his condo for his signature. Ball told Castillo that she had chosen to withhold information about Williams from a home inspector, writing, “I did not tell him the story behind Sean.” Williams said that Ball was aware of his fugitive status: “Everyone knew.” (Before the texts were disclosed, Ball said that Williams’s name “did not mean anything” to her, and Castillo, according to a person familiar with her thinking, claimed that she was never involved in the matter. Both declined requests for comment after the texts surfaced. A spokesperson for Johnson City said that Ball “did not know Sean Williams, she never paid Sean Williams any money, and she did not purchase any property from Sean Williams.”) Williams eventually pulled out of the deal and sold the apartment to a company owned by a local businessman.
But Williams didn’t think that his impunity could last. “So I took off,” he said. He stayed away from Johnson City, occasionally sleeping in his car, for nearly a year. At around 2 A.M. on April 29, 2023, a security guard for Western Carolina University, in Cullowhee, found Williams in his car. He was carrying twelve ounces of cocaine, fourteen ounces of methamphetamine, a hundred thousand dollars in cash, and a slew of hard drives. The drives contained thousands of videos and images that, federal prosecutors say, depict sex crimes against some sixty-seven victims, many of them drugged and unconscious, including multiple minors. Investigators later also found child pornography and evidence of sex crimes on the devices that the Johnson City police had failed to search. The number of allegations against Williams may make him one of the most prolific serial rapists in American history. Many of the photographs and videos on the drives had file names consistent with the names on the list that Dahl had sought to investigate. (Williams initially claimed that the files were fabricated with artificial intelligence. He recently acknowledged to me that he routinely had sex with women while they were unconscious or asleep, saying that he believed this to be permissible because of prior consensual sexual encounters.) After two years on the run, Williams had been found in the town that Dahl had told the U.S. Marshals to search.
Williams was charged with multiple counts related to child pornography, and with possession and intent to distribute methamphetamine and cocaine. More than twenty charges involving child sexual abuse would eventually follow. Dahl, who was alerted to the news by a text from MiKayla Evans, was taken aback by the scale of his predation. “If he hadn’t been caught at that moment in time, when he had those hard drives on him, I don’t think we would be having this conversation,” she said.
But Williams’s prosecution was soon delayed by improbable difficulties in keeping him confined. In July, 2023, he was accused of attempting to dig out of his cell in a county jail in Jonesborough, Tennessee, where he was awaiting trial on some of the child-pornography charges. (It was later determined that Williams had been digging a hole to exchange items with a neighboring cell.) That October, while being transferred in a van to a court appearance, Williams lifted a loose portion of the vehicle’s wall panelling and snapped off a narrow metal clip underneath. He used the clip to pick the locks on his belly chain and handcuffs, then kicked out a window, which was missing its metal security bars. He squeezed through the window and jumped onto the road, breaking his wrist but successfully escaping.
A camera in the van was out of service. “We had to initially wonder, Did some correctional officer help him, or were they negligent, or was he just really slick and got out without their notice? How did that happen?” David Jolley, a U.S. marshal who worked on the case, asked. (Williams declined to answer my questions about whether he was helped, saying he didn’t want to “get anybody else in trouble.”)
Local outlets, including the television station WJHL and the Tennessean, began covering Williams’s case and his Houdini-like escape, intensifying pressure on state and federal authorities. The marshals, working with the F.B.I. and the T.B.I., assigned more than a hundred people to search for him. As helicopters circled overhead and sniffer dogs patrolled, Williams sheltered in an abandoned house just a few blocks from the courthouse where he had been scheduled to appear. He constructed a pulley system to get himself in and out of the house’s attic and scavenged for food, including walnuts from a nearby tree. He was able to siphon power from a neighboring house. “I watched old VCR tapes of ‘The Fugitive’ and ‘U.S. Marshals,’ ” he told me.
In Williams’s telling, he survived through an almost unbelievable ingenuity. He claims that he began collecting tools, including a serrated knife and sockets, and used them to work on an abandoned truck he found near the house. “That truck was my ticket out,” he told me. Williams said that he found a stash of thirty pounds of marijuana and saw an opportunity to sell it to sustain himself on the run—though a close associate of his cast doubt on that claim, saying that Williams had previously boasted about a buried cache of money.
Williams drove to North Carolina and visited his daughter, Kari Dills, who was in her thirties. Dills described her father as an alternately absent and abusive figure in her life. “I was six when I found out who my dad was,” she told me. “I visited him a few times. I was then sexually abused by him.” (Williams and Dills’s maternal grandmother, who raised her, both denied these allegations, saying that he had no contact with her until her late teens.) When he arrived, wearing a mask, at the discount department store where Dills worked, she didn’t recognize him. “It’s me,” Williams recalled telling her, pulling down the mask. Panicked, Dills told him she would get a pen to write down his phone number, then told her manager, who called the police. “I was crying and didn’t know what to do,” she told me. As he waited for her to return, Williams “felt something wasn’t right,” he said, and left.
Williams followed I-75 to Florida. He says that he sold the marijuana for six hundred dollars in cash, and holed up for several days in Largo. He turned wistful. He knocked on the door of his childhood home, and its owners let him into the back yard, to see the concrete with his footprints in it. On November 20, 2023, Williams’s truck was found by a local police officer. As a manhunt began, Williams hid under a canoe overnight.
The next evening, Williams walked barefoot into a 7-Eleven and bought a hot dog. He asked for ketchup, and to purchase masks. Tasha Bumgarner, a clerk at the store, recognized him from a police photo. “I had goosebumps when I turned and looked at him,” she said. She told a co-worker, “I’m gonna go catch a criminal,” and after Williams departed she called the police. Williams was walking on a trail nearby when a police S.U.V. swerved into his path. As he tried to hide under a tarp, a police dog named Voodoo sank its teeth into his leg, drawing blood, and an officer punched him in the face before subduing him. Williams was taken to Blount County Detention Facility, in Maryville, Tennessee, and prosecutors brought an additional charge against him for escaping federal custody.
As news that Williams had been apprehended spread, Dahl’s phone started vibrating with texts from friends. She still felt confused about how Williams could have spent years evading arrest. As she said to me, “How did this go on for so long?”
After Williams was recaptured, I contacted him in jail. “I’m interested in talking with you,” he wrote, through the detention facility’s messaging system. “There are some facts about my case that are being kept from public ears.” In numerous video calls I had with him, Williams looked thin and older than his years, his curly hair graying, but he still had an agitated, even manic affect. He made a surprising claim: that his criminal activity had been made possible because, for years, he had been paying off Johnson City police officers through Alunda Rutherford, an ex-girlfriend who was involved in his businesses. He also accused the officers of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from his safe during their searches after Evans’s fall. Many key elements of Williams’s story remain impossible to confirm, but subsequent lawsuits and investigations have lent credence to the idea that one of the most prolific and notorious rapists in American history operated unchecked because of police corruption.
The J.C.P.D. and Rutherford both deny any wrongdoing, and Rutherford has not been charged with a crime. In a statement, a city spokesperson said, “To claim that the Johnson City Police Department was complicit in any sex-trafficking venture or that its officers benefitted financially from such abhorrent activity is specious.” Rutherford told me that the allegations about her were “completely fabricated” and that there were “never any payments made.” She also said that she had had minimal contact with Williams in recent years, and few financial interactions with his company, though these claims were contradicted by multiple people who knew them, as well as by financial records reviewed by The New Yorker. She initially told me she had never had any contact with police, but subsequently claimed that she had been told of Williams’s flight by them, and had later contacted them to offer to entrap him.
One thing that is certain is that Williams dated Rutherford, who is thirty-nine, for the better part of a decade. During that time, he says, he granted her one-per-cent ownership in his construction company. “She was the smoother-over—a problem solver,” he told me. “She’d smooth over I.R.S. problems and insurance audits and things like that.”
People who knew Williams and Rutherford during their relationship claim that both of them were selling cocaine. According to Williams, about eight years ago, as Rutherford was turning in to her driveway, a Johnson City officer pulled up behind her. The officer said that he knew she was carrying drugs and cash. He made her hand over five thousand dollars and the cocaine, and then left. (Williams says that Rutherford told him about the incident at the time, and that he saw security-camera footage of it.) “No charges, no paperwork,” Williams said. “That was the beginning. After that, they knew they had her. They were holding charges over her head. They were extorting her.” He says that Rutherford, at his direction and using money she was provided by his company, began periodically giving officers large sums of cash, starting at two thousand dollars and eventually climbing to as high as eight thousand dollars—though Williams claims he did not keep close track of the amounts or frequency. He said that he was making five hundred thousand dollars a year and considered it a modest business cost. “This went on for years,” he told me. “It wasn’t just once or twice.”
In 2021, the police apprehended a ring of more than twenty-one local drug traffickers. According to Williams, Rutherford had been telling him that officers were threatening action against him. Now Rutherford warned him that officers were closing in on him. Allegations of assault against Williams were multiplying. “She gave me the impression that they had a bunch of dirt on me,” Williams recalled. “She indicated that she was holding them at bay for my benefit.” For a while, he believed the scheme to be successful. “I felt protected,” he told me. “I figured it was because of the payments.”
Williams says that he kept five hundred thousand dollars in his home safe, and that Rutherford was aware of this money. Johnson City police “wanted my safe, because they knew about the cash in it,” he told me. After Evans’s fall, the police took the safe. When they eventually returned it, Williams alleges, only eighty-one thousand dollars remained, and the other four hundred and nineteen thousand dollars had been stolen. He said that the police department’s apparent reluctance to pursue a full investigation stemmed from the theft. He also said that police had planted evidence, including the baby-doll sex toy photographed among the safe’s contents. (Rutherford said, “There wasn’t cash.” Other eyewitnesses told me that Williams’s safe typically held stacks of hundred-dollar bills—potentially in line with an amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars.) Williams claims that the scheme involved several Johnson City police officers, including Sparks. “Alunda and Sparks were, like, buddy-buddy,” he told me. “They teamed up to extort me.” But several people close to Williams said that they believed he was trying to deflect focus from his role in any corruption. (Johnson City said in its statement, “The city did not seize any money from Sean Williams.”)
Rutherford denied selling drugs, and told me that she did not believe officers were protecting Williams. “I don’t think that they were being too serious about things,” she said. “But, no, I don’t believe anyone was paid off.” She said, of the alleged encounter in her driveway and the ongoing bribery scheme, “None of that is true.” She also denied making withdrawals from Williams’s company accounts while he was on the run, though numerous bank statements seem to contradict this claim. Rutherford, whose name appeared on the list from Williams’s apartment, said that she had been part of his pattern of assault, but she declined to provide details. Williams’s allegations about her, she said, were a continuation of his abuse. “I am a victim of his,” she said.
A civil lawsuit was initially brought against the police department by a group of nine plaintiffs with accusations about Williams, and it eventually grew into a proposed class-action suit encompassing all of his accusers. The suit, which raised similar claims about police corruption, and forced Johnson City officers to produce private financial records, contended that the records show Jenkins and Sparks had access to funds that didn’t accord with their incomes. The picture they present is not conclusive, however. Between 2018 and 2022—a period in which Rutherford was seemingly making regular withdrawals—the two officers’ bank accounts show a pattern of cash deposits; in Jenkins’s case, they were generally in increments of between a thousand and five thousand dollars. During that time, he paid off a portfolio of auto, construction, and home loans totalling more than four hundred thousand dollars, significantly more than his total police-department income. In a filing submitted as part of the lawsuit, though, Jenkins’s attorney said that the deposits and loans highlighted in the suit came from vehicle trade-ins, refinancing, the sale of vehicles and property, and other innocuous sources, and provided a detailed accounting.
The suit also alleged that, early last year, a necklace that Williams claims was stolen from his safe was consigned by Rutherford, in what it described as a form of payment by Sparks to insure her silence as investigations mounted. Rutherford said that Williams gave her the necklace. In an early filing in the case, Sparks broadly denied any allegations.
When Williams fled Johnson City, in 2022, he took seven boxes of financial records with him. He hoped that they might serve as an insurance policy, should he ever need to prove that the police were being paid off. He later gave the records to a friend, Shelby Moody, asking her to keep them safe. Moody, who was set up on a blind date with Williams in 2018, told me that they never became romantically involved but that she came to consider him a close friend.
Soon after she accepted the files, Moody was contacted by officials at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. She defended Williams against allegations of rape, she said, explaining that “there were definitely girls that went up there to get fucked up, and, you know, shit happens when you’re fucked up.” They interrupted her. “They were, like, ‘Well, do you wanna see your pictures?’ ” she told me. The investigators then showed her photos and videos of Williams raping her while she was incapacitated. She had no memory of the incident. In one file, she said, “he was holding my eyes open, like I’m a dead body.” Williams had arranged the files on his hard drives systematically, with folders named for individual women, often bearing head shots that he had taken from their social-media accounts. “This was somebody I considered my friend,” Moody said. “And I was somebody he raped and then pretended like it didn’t happen.”
Moody ultimately turned over the boxes of financial records to state authorities, but she now regrets her decision, because she believes that there has been little effort to pursue the corruption allegations. She was one of several people close to Williams who recalled seeing officers visit him without any official or social explanation. “Sean is telling the truth about the police-accountability part, and how there is multilevel corruption,” she told me. “The police absolutely did allow him to continue what he was doing.” She was one of several people who said that they had witnessed a rapport between Williams and Johnson City officers, which they believe may suggest that he was giving information to the police about drug activity.
In the nineteen-twenties, the era of Prohibition, locals started to refer to Johnson City as Little Chicago, owing to a thriving criminal underworld in the city and in a surrounding swath of Appalachia. Moody was one of numerous residents who said that they believed the Williams case was part of a wider phenomenon in which the police in the region turn a blind eye to, and at times protect, drug and human trafficking. “This is like a spider web,” she told me. The area is connected to multiple major highways, making for easy transportation, and its rugged, mountainous terrain has historically made law enforcement challenging and allowed criminal groups to flourish. In 1969, in nearby Cocke County, a series of news reports prompted the arrest of numerous law-enforcement officials on charges including extortion and bribery. Further probes in the following decades uncovered the involvement of law-enforcement officers in drug-related crimes, including cocaine distribution and smuggling drug money.
After Kat Dahl was fired, the Johnson City police officers David Hilton and Jeff Legault were both promoted from sergeant to lieutenant. Keith Sexton, who served the search warrant after Evans’s fall, is now the county sheriff. Captain Kevin Peters and Police Chief Karl Turner have both retired. Toma Sparks and Justin Jenkins are still employed by the Johnson City Police Department.
In June, 2022, while Williams was on the run, Dahl sued Turner and the Johnson City Police Department for retaliation and wrongful termination, alleging that she was punished because she reported their handling of sexual-assault cases and raised allegations of corruption, including to the F.B.I. Although friends and family had urged her to move on rather than endure a bruising legal battle, she told me she wanted to hold accountable a police department that she believed was endangering the community. “To go through the rest of my life and be questioning, Well, should I have done something? Are more people being hurt because I didn’t say something? I couldn’t live with that,” she told me. Though a trial date has not been set, the suit has already had significant repercussions. Soon after it was filed, Johnson City hired a law firm to investigate the police department’s approach to sexual crimes. The resulting report identified systematic deficiencies, including “practices that discourage female victims of sexual assault from collaborating with law enforcement,” such as conducting interviews in a manner “more appropriate for an interrogation of a suspect.” Of a hundred and five recent reports of rape with an identified suspect, police had interviewed the suspect in only thirty-six cases. The department commonly closed sexual-violence cases quickly, sometimes because a victim expressed reservations about pressing charges; officers often cited uncoöperative victims as a reason for closing cases, even when they had in fact been unable to make contact with the victims.
The report raised other questions about Johnson City officers’ handling of cases involving Williams. It made pointed reference to “police corruption” allegations, though the subject was beyond its formal purview. The report stated that “the Department should have moved forward with an internal investigation to address the misconduct allegations.”
In June, 2023, the group of Williams’s accusers, inspired by Dahl’s case, filed its federal suit. Among the accusers, who were labelled Jane Does in legal filings but who gave me permission to use their names, were Pack, Murray, and Laura Trent’s parents. The suit says that Johnson City officers, including Sparks, took money from Rutherford and from the safe, “with either the implied or explicit understanding that, in exchange, they would shield Williams.” It argues that Williams—who had allegedly given money, drugs, and housing to Diaz and Rutherford, in exchange for their recruitment of women he raped—had been involved in sex trafficking, and that his payments to officers made them parties to a trafficking conspiracy. (Rutherford told me that she had not helped Williams recruit other women.)
Last month, Johnson City agreed to a twenty-eight-million-dollar settlement with victims of sexual violence, an enormous sum for a small city. “The amount will likely prompt skepticism about their denials,” Kelly Puente, who has written about the case for the Tennessean, told me. A lawyer connected to the case told me that the sum “is far more than the cost of defense—perhaps this victims’ settlement will finally get the agencies’ attention.” The confidential settlement, a version of which was obtained by The New Yorker, includes strict provisions that the victim should “not discuss this settlement or disparage the JCPD, its officers, or any investigation of her sexual assault.” A statement from the plaintiffs’ lawyers, released at the city’s behest, cited a “substantial risk of not meeting the applicable burdens of proof” in their decision to dismiss their claims and settle. In response to questions about the allegations, a city spokesperson referred to the statement. People involved in the case told me they stood by its strength and feared that the city had paid its way out of accountability. One plaintiff told me, “Unanswered questions remain, and the circumstances uncovered during discovery deserve to be acknowledged rather than buried.”
If a deeper investigation is ever undertaken, Williams said, “there’s a big, wide trail of money that’s gonna be easy to find.” But federal and state officials have mostly refused to say whether the corruption allegations are still being pursued. The F.B.I. and the T.B.I. initiated investigations, but an official involved in the Williams case told me that he was aware of no ongoing inquiries by either agency. Dahl believes that a culture of mutual protection and deference among law-enforcement agencies may have contributed to the apparently limited efforts. “The fact that the Johnson City community is no closer to transparency about what happened and who enabled Williams to operate as long as he did is a disgrace,” she said. Vanessa Baehr-Jones, an attorney for Williams’s accusers, told me that the F.B.I. interviews with officers accused of corruption were “in some cases only three minutes long, and consisted of the F.B.I. and T.B.I. agents asking the officers whether or not they stole money. When the answer was no, they closed up the file and went on home. None of the officers were confronted with evidence, which suggests that the F.B.I. never bothered to subpoena important documents like bank records.” A T.B.I. spokesperson said, “As with every case, T.B.I. agents investigated this one fully and to the best of our ability.” The F.B.I. declined to comment. The Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, the office responsible for investigating police-corruption allegations like the ones in the Williams case, is being reduced by the Trump Administration to just a handful of employees.
On the morning of February 24th, Williams walked into a hearing room in a courthouse in Greeneville, Tennessee, with his hands cuffed and chained at his waist, to be sentenced for production of child pornography and for his escape. He wore a baggy brown T-shirt, and had a beard and wild hair. As he was transferred to court that morning, U.S. marshals had discovered him hiding razor blades in his shoe. A jury had found him guilty of escaping from the van, a conviction with a potential five-year sentence. In that case, after volatile relationships with four different attorneys, he had defended himself. At the sentencing, he was represented by his fifth lawyer, a court-appointed attorney named Mark Brown.
Dahl’s warnings that Williams might be a pedophile had proved prescient. Two weeks after she brought the sex doll to Turner’s attention, Williams had victimized a boy of less than a year old. At the hearing, Meghan Gomez, a prosecutor, described reams of evidence gathered from Williams’s devices that showed he had assaulted mothers and gained access to their children, whom he then recorded in pornographic photos and videos. Among the victims were the infant boy, a four-year-old, and a seven-year-old girl. In court, the mother of the infant boy, Alexa Anderson, sat a few feet from Williams and quietly wept through the proceedings. “I just needed to see him walk out of the room for the last time, and know he wouldn’t come back,” she told me. In 2020, Anderson, at the time a twenty-one-year-old new mother working at a restaurant and financially struggling, met Williams through a friend who knew Diaz. Williams struck her as charismatic and flashy, and at one point she saw the stacks of hundred-dollar bills that filled his safe. He told her that, because of his connections with law enforcement, “the police aren’t going to come up here.” He offered her a job as his housekeeper, but within weeks he told her she was “too pretty to clean,” and asked her to be his informal personal assistant. She rebuffed frequent sexual advances. A few months after she started working for him, she looked at his phone and saw sexual images of children. She threw the phone down and fled, returning only to collect her belongings.
In July, 2022, during Williams’s initial time on the run, Anderson told the Johnson City police about the images of children. She said that the detective she spoke to, Brady Higgins, adopted an accusing tone, asking about her history of substance abuse “like he was speaking to a criminal, not a victim.” (Higgins disputes using an accusatory tone.) In his report, Higgins did not make clear that the images of children were pornographic. Last year, federal and state officials showed Anderson images of Williams assaulting her, along with sexually explicit photographs of her then nine-month-old son. “He was a baby,” she told me. “It’s devastating. It’s enough to kill somebody.” (Williams said that the relationship with Anderson was consensual and denied the allegations about her son. “I’m not into boys,” he said.) Anderson, who was among the plaintiffs in the civil suit, was one of several women who told me they felt that police made an effort to intimidate them during proceedings. When Higgins was deposed, she said, a group of police officers lined up opposite her. “He had all of his police friends on the back wall of the room,” she said. “They didn’t break eye contact with me the whole time.”
J. Ronnie Greer, the judge in the child-pornography case, called Williams a “psychopath” and a “dangerous predator.” Williams seemed to thumb his nose at the proceedings. He laughed, shook his head, and snorted derisively. When Greer said, of Williams’s crimes, that “with the exception possibly of a serial killer, these offenses are among the most serious offenses that can be committed,” Williams blurted out that it was “shocking” that “taking a picture of a young girl would be compared to murder.” Greer alluded to Williams’s history of abuse during his childhood. “What abuse?” Williams interjected, though his own attorney, seeking leniency, had cited research indicating that victims of abuse are predisposed to become abusers themselves. In our interviews, Williams at times seemed to have a distorted understanding of what constitutes abuse. “I was fucking my foster mom. I woke up with this guy, a babysitter, touching me. That’s not a big deal. Who gives a shit?” he said. “Maybe I’m just a monster.” Greer sentenced Williams to ninety-five years in prison, the maximum allowable sentence. The judge appeared to refer to the unresolved questions of police corruption, saying, “I do not know with any certainty how Mr. Williams was able, for nearly two decades, maybe more than that, to engage in the conduct he has engaged in without detection, without prosecution, but that’s an issue for a different forum, a different day.”
Williams has appealed, and has pleaded not guilty to the additional charges he faces related to child pornography and drugs. Steve Finney, a Tennessee district attorney, said that he plans to bring more charges related to Williams’s alleged assaults. A further civil suit has been filed by Evans against Johnson City police. “They cared more about money than the people they were supposed to serve and protect,” she told me on her way out of the sentencing hearing. Williams claims that he fears for his safety, because he represents a loose end in the corruption case. “I’ve been a liability ever since MiKayla’s fall,” he told me. “It’s starting to look like a possible Epstein ending.”
Dahl was also at the sentencing, wearing a neat black suit that she’d purchased at Macy’s. After her firing, she told me, she spent time “grieving over the job that I thought would have maybe been my dream job.” In early 2022, amid mounting financial strain, she had moved in with her parents in Alabama. Later, she moved to Atlanta, for better career prospects. She felt “hollow” after seeing Williams’s sentencing, she said, despite her indispensable role in the case. “I’m not done, and this story’s not done,” she added. “Way back in 2021, I told some of the victims I was going to try and find them answers and find them accountability for what happened. I still intend to keep that promise.” ♦
