The murder of Neal Williams...
Another murder—this one in California a few miles from my parent's home—had an impact on our case, although I was unaware of it at the time because I was in Bali trying to prevent my own murder.
It happened on August 8, 2007. A few days earlier, while on vacation with the children in California, I had received an email with a death threat to our family. I immediately left the boys with their grandparents and flew back to Bali to discuss our spiralling family issues with Made.
She refused to speak to me and denied any knowledge of a death threat. Neither was she interested in talking about it. Clearly this was an odd response from any wife and mother hearing of danger to her children or herself, even if she did not care about me. Her answer left me little doubt that she was involved—she just hadn't expected me to return to Bali.
So on the afternoon of August 7 in Bali I was at Polsek Sanur seeking assistance from the police to help contact my wife and supervise a meeting.
And apparently at that exact moment in California, Manling Tsang Williams had just finished suffocating her two sons and was preparing, after partying with friends, to murder her husband, Neal Williams, by slashing him over 90 times with a samurai sword.
Her actions would eventually influence the fate of my children.
Like Noor Ellis, Manling at first claimed no knowledge of how this terrible thing had happened.
from LAist.com
The details of the killings are grim: Williams, 29 at the time, "put on a pair of gloves, took a pillow and held it over her 3-year-old son's mouth and nose until he lost consciousness," described prosecutors. She "then climbed the bunk bed stairs to her oldest son's bed and put the pillow over his nose and mouth" and ended the 7-year-old's life.
Before killing her husband, however, Williams took the time to pause to sign on to MySpace to check her boyfriend's profile page, then went out with friends, and returned home and "chose the heaviest, sharpest sword in the house to attack her sleeping husband." During Williams' trial, testimony from the medical examiner indicated her husband, Neal, "had been slashed and stabbed more than 90 times with a Samurai sword."
The next morning, she called police to tell them she'd come home from grocery shopping to find her family dead. Williams was taken into custody the next day.
Unlike Noor Ellis and Made Jati, it was not about assets; it was about just being tired of children and marriage.
Defense attorney admits Manling Williams killed her husband and two young children
By Daniel.Tedfod@SGVN.com
In opening statements, Deputy District Attorney Pak Kouch laid out the reasons for premeditated murder of the boys and their father, Neal, who grew up in Whittier.
Manling Williams had tired of being a mother and wife, had become distant from her children, and wanted to start a new life with a former high school classmate with whom she had vacationed in Santa Barbara one month before her family’s death, Kouch said.
“The evidence will show they had a torrid affair,” she said. “She didn’t want to be married anymore. She didn’t want to be the boys’ mother anymore.” Four days prior to her family’s slayings, Manling sent a single rose to the man with the message “thinking of you” signed from a secret admirer.
Manling also described dreams to friends in the months prior to the slayings that depicted her family being murdered, Kouch said.
Prosecutors showed a suicide note from Neal Williams they believe to be forged by Manling Williams. The letter said Neal Williams was having an affair and hinted at killing the children before having someone assist him in killing himself.
“Please for give (sic) me for being a coward and not being there for you,” the letter said.
But prosecutors said evidence at the crime scene contradicted the letter. In addition to Manling’s confession, the letter helps prove the premeditated murder, Kouch said. “She is trying to set up Neal for killing the boys. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
At 7:30 a.m. Aug. 8, 2007, Manling Williams ran out of the house screaming about her husband and children, according to testimony.
That is when James Brown, a neighbor from across the street, heard the screaming and came over to help, he said in court Thursday. Brown spoke with Manling briefly outside before he went into the home and discovered Neal at the top of the apartment’s stairs, he said.
“I seen Neal laying there, stabbed up,” he said. “I looked into his eyes and blood was just dripping and dripping.”
He panicked and went to a local sheriff’s station. He brought back an officer and the pair eventually went looking for the children.
“He was checking the little boys and we looked at each other and we both shed a tear,” Brown said. “I shook the little blanket but there was no movement, nothing, no movement.”
Prosecutors said it takes more than a minute to suffocate a child to death using a pillow. “A couple minutes is a long time ladies and gentlemen. She knew what she was doing. These boys died at the hands of their mother.”
During her confession to police, Manling Williams told police she dumped her bloody clothes in a Dumpster at Otterbein Road in Rowland Heights. Police later found the clothes with Neal Williams’ blood on them.
When she was in custody, police also found Neal’s blood on her bra on the same spot blood was found on the clothes. Neal’s blood was also on Manling’s feet, prosecutors said.
Neal’s blood was also found on a pack of Camel cigarettes, which prosecutors said was the major piece of evidence that contradicted Manling’s story.
Prosecutors said coroner’s officials could not determine a time of death using standard scientific methods. Instead, upon autopsy, pineapple was found in the children’s stomach. Using the time a Domino’s pizza was delivered, prosecutors said coroner’s determined the time of death was within two hours of the 8 p.m. delivery.
At 10:22 p.m., Manling went to a TGI Friday’s restaurant to eat dinner with her Marie Callender’s co-workers, Kouch said. “She killed Neal and the boys before she went out to party with her friends,” she said.
A former co-worker, Angela Bermudo, who went to TGIF with Manling on the night in question, said she often spoke lovingly of her children.
Synchronicities
California, 10:22 PM. Bali 1:22 PM. I was in Polsek Sanur asking for police help in meeting Made Jati. But in the ten days I was in Bali she refused to see me even on the request of the police. So on the advice of the U.S. Embassy I returned to California.
I was too busy with our own family safety and other needs to pay attention to the news on my return, but I would not have paid any particular attention to it anyway because it had nothing to do with us.
But a year later when Made Jati finally came to Los Angeles—running from an arrest warrant in Tabanan—Judge Susan Lopez-Giss of the Pomona Superior Court - Family Division - was fully aware of the Manling Williams case. It was being handled by Pomona Superior Court Judge Robert Martinez in the next courtroom.
Made’s behavior clearly raised red flags. The Manling Williams case would certainly not be the first time the judges of Pomona Superior Court had seen such worrying behavior. There are many family murders. But the Manling Williams case made conciousness of family annihillator mothers more acute.
Made Jati's' entire demeanor was sullen, scowling, uncooperative. She refused mediation or cooperation with the court, refused any contact with me, refused even to see her children unless she could see them alone without supervision. Coupled with the fact that she had waited nine months while denying all my attempts to communicate before finally showing up in California, that she had only come to California while fleeing a warrant for arrest, that she was conducting an obvious marriage fraud in Bali, and that she submitted to the court whole volumes of Made’s Angels threats and hate mail, this was clearly not a loving mother longing only for reunion with her dear children.
Why would a mother ignore her children for nine months, then refuse to meet them unless in a private place? The consequences of ignoring warning signs could be disasterous, one had only to look at the courtroom next door. The judge ordered psychological examinations for all members of the family. Made immeduately fled the country. The judge ordered Made Jati to return to the court and to meet her children, but now under the supervision of a police officer. Made Jati never returned. Judge Susan Lopez-Giss ruled she had abandoned her children.
Two years later Manling Williams brushed by my life again. I had become familiar with her case by then because it was frequently in the news as the trial approached
I received a summons for jury duty and reported on the appointed day to Pomona Superior Court. At about 11 AM, I and about twenty other prospective jurors were ushered into the courtroom of Judge Robert Martinez. The judge asked a series of questions.
When he got to me he asked "have you ever been involved in a family law case?"
"I have," I said.
"Is their any reason you cannot commit to an approximately six week trial?" he asked.
I knew then what the trial was. There could not have been any other case as complex. "I am scheduled to go back to Indonesia in about six weeks to take part in a legal proceeding," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment, then said "does it have to do with the family law case?"
"It does."
"You're dismissed."
I was mostly glad, but not entirely. No one wants six weeks of jury duty. But I had feelings about the case.
Nevertheless, it would not have taken long for the judge to dismiss me anyway if they had questioned me more deeply about my family law case.
The sentence
Murder in California turns out to be more serious than murder in Bali
Manling Williams sentenced to death for murder of husband, sons in Rowland Heights
From the Whittier Daily News
POMONA – A judge sentenced Manling Tsang Williams to death Thursday for smothering her two young children with a pillow and slashing her husband to death with a sword in the family’s Rowland Heights home in 2007.
The 32-year-old woman sobbed and shook as Pomona Superior Court Judge Robert Martinez handed down the sentence for the Aug. 7, 2007 murders of her husband, Neal Williams, 27, and their sons Devon, 7, and Ian, 3, at the family’s condominium in the 18200 block of Camino Bello.
A jury convicted Manling Williams of three counts of first-degree murder in 2010, along with the special allegations of using weapons and lying in wait. After one jury was unable to agree on whether to sentence her to death or life imprisonment, a second penalty phase jury recommended last year that she be put to death.
Judge Martinez followed that recommendation.
Williams, who was dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit and glasses and had her hands shackled at the waist during the proceeding, kept her eyes fixed on the table in front of her throughout.
Jan Williams of Whittier, mother of Neal Williams and grandmother to Devon and Ian Williams, said she was glad to see the trial, now in its fourth year, draw to a close at last. “I’m relieved that this chapter is over,” she said. “I couldn’t take another trial.”
She added, “This has had a terrible impact, not just on me and my family, on the Tsang family, but everyone involved.”
The judge reflected on the crime at the sentencing hearing. “The evidence is compelling that the defendant, for selfish reasons, murdered her own two children,” Martinez said. "Her motivation was a narcissistic, selfish and adolescent desire to start a new life with another man, free from the hindrances of family life."
In the months before the murders, Manling Williams had reconnected through the Internet with an old friend and began a relationship with him.
The judge pointed out that Manling Williams had numerous family members who would have taken in the children, should she have decided to abandon them.
After smothering Devon and Ian in their bunk bed, “The defendant savagely, brutally and viciously attacked her husband with a katana sword,” Martinez said.
Neal Williams was stabbed and slashed more than 97 times in the attack, investigators said.
“In the final moments of life, Neal begged the defendant for help,” the judge said.
The case was prosecuted by Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorneys Stacy Okun-Wiese and Pak Kouch.
Defense attorneys Tom Althaus and Haydeh Takasugi argued for their client’s life to be spared.
Althaus told the court that the killings were not calculated executions, but a sudden mistake. “There’s no basis for the prosecution’s contention that these murders were planned,” Althaus said, adding that Manling Williams was in a state of “extreme mental and emotional disturbance” when she killed her husband and sons.
Mitigating factors also included a difficult upbringing and no previous history of violence, he said.
Althaus acknowledged that his client had had an extra-marital affair, but disputed the prosecution’s assertion that the affair formed a motive for the crime. “There’s no good explanation why it happened,” Althaus said. Prior to the killings, Manling Williams was “a kind, generous, troubled woman who loved her husband and children.”
Martinez said that the evidence showed that Manling Williams had planned the killings two months in advance, and immediately began trying to conceal her guilt afterward. She wore latex gloves as she attacked her husband, he said.
Testimony indicated it takes five to 10 minutes for a person to die by suffocation, meaning that Manling Williams had at least five minutes to contemplate her actions while killing one of her children before killing her other son in the same manner, Martinez said.
“She clearly had time to reflect on what she was doing,” he said.
Following the killings, the judge said, Manling Williams typed up a note indicating that Neal Williams had killed the children and himself, she disposed of bloody clothing and returned home before screaming to neighbors that someone had killed her family.
“Ms. Williams, I will probably never see you again,” the judge added. Each of the three killings, Martinez said, were “deliberate, premeditated and committed by lying in wait.”
“It is the order of this court that you should suffer the penalty of death,” he told Williams.