Jimmy walked out of the room and disappeared into another section of the house.
Anne stood and watched him leave.
This is my only chance, she thought, then made a dash for the phone.
She picked it up and dialed 911.
Shaking, she held the phone up to her ear. Her eyes were on the doorway into the living room, anticipating that Jimmy would come back and catch her. Dispatch answered her call.
“I’ve been shot . . . ,” Anne said frantically.
As she spoke, Anne turned her back to the living room’s entryway.
Just then, as she was about to say something else, Jimmy grabbed the phone receiver from her hand and hung it up.
“Damn it all,” he said, his intimidating shotgun now back in the picture. “What have you done?”
The phone rang.
It was the 911 dispatcher asking if everything was okay. Jimmy said yes. The call had been a mistake.
“And no one ever came,” Anne commented later. “I thought they’d trace the number and come, but they did not.”
Jimmy grabbed Anne by her injured shoulder and dragged her toward the bathroom. She could hardly stand, let alone walk.
The bathroom? Anne thought. What is he thinking?
“Get into the shower,” Jimmy said.
“What . . .”
“Take your clothes off and get into the shower.”
Anne did as she was told.
Jimmy made Anne turn and face her back in the direction of the water flow. He’d turned the water on piping hot and made Anne stand still as the water splashed onto her back.
That water hitting those fresh, open wounds on my back was excruciating. Like nothing I could ever explain in terms of words. Nothing but terror in my body at this time.
I do not know what his reasoning for doing this was—maybe for merely torturing me or what? But the water beating on those wounds, like when you have a cut and you put peroxide on it, that incredible burning, well, this was ten times that pain.
“Please stop the water,” Anne begged through tears and screams.
“Shut up.”
“Please, Jimmy . . . please stop this.”
“Shut up, Anne. Don’t be a sissy.”
Done torturing Anne in the shower, Jimmy turned off the water and told her to get out.
“Go into my bedroom.”
Jimmy’s shotgun was never far out of his reach and he routinely reminded Anne that he could finish her off at any time. He had a plan, that much was clear to Anne, but she had no idea what it was.
Anne sat on Jimmy’s bed. He gave her a pair of his shorts and a T-shirt. He told her to get dressed.
Just putting the clothes on was difficult and painful.
“Please, Jimmy, don’t kill me,” Anne pleaded.
As she sat on the bed, whimpering in agony, shaking from the throbbing of her wounds, in shock, Jimmy must have felt he could contain her without the weapons. He did not keep any weapons in the living portion of the house. He kept all of his weapons out of sight in the attic, because he was not supposed to be in possession of them.
“Don’t you try to go anywhere,” Jimmy said as he walked out of the bedroom with his shotgun.
Knowingly or not, he left a pistol on the bed, to Anne’s right side. As he walked out of the room, Anne took a glance at it.
Leave, she thought. Leave so I can grab that gun . . .
“You be a good girl now, Anne,” Jimmy said.
Anne faced another problem: her breathing. She noticed how shallow and slow it had become. She could feel something in her lungs was terribly wrong.
My breathing was getting more and more difficult. I had a hard time catching my breath. I prayed and prayed, and all I could think of was my son. Myself and my mother were the only constant people in his life, and I was so worried about what would happen to him if I died.
Jimmy had left the room.
Anne could hear him pull down the attic stairs in another section of the house. She assumed he was putting the shotgun away.
Certain Jimmy was not going to catch her, Anne scooted over and picked up the pistol. Then she turned off the safety. Checked and saw that it was loaded.
Was this some sort of sick test or plan on Jimmy’s part? Had he left that pistol there on purpose?
Anne cocked the hammer back and trained the weapon on the door into the bedroom. As soon as Jimmy walked back into the room, Anne was going to get the hell out of that house or blow the son of a bitch away.
CHAPTER 13
As time passed and Anne became more aware of what was happening to her, she knew there was only one way through PTSD: realizing you suffer from it and getting treatment.
Anne thanks her loving family and friends for caring for her. (Photos courtesy of Tom Johnson)
After about six weeks home, Anne went back to work. She took a job at a private school. It was nothing too stressful and would help her stay busy while dealing with the trauma and long-term damage the hell she had gone through had brought on.
“My home life with my son and my mom, who was now living with us, was ‘dysfunctional,’” Anne said with a laugh, “but it was also great. They helped me so much.”
A major factor in her healing was Anne’s tremendous faith in God.
I don’t like to say I am part of a denomination. I am just a Christian who puts all her faith in God’s hands. My church-going was not that great at that time, but God had plans for me. I got involved in mission work with teenage girls and was the sponsor for a student religious organization for two years at a local school. I found that teens were my calling. They helped me more than I helped them.
“Prayer,” Anne added, “all the time.”
* * *
As the months passed, it bothered Anne that she had never heard from the prosecutor or anyone responsible for arresting or jailing Jimmy. She had no idea about the judicial end of her case.
“I never heard from the DA. I received a call from . . . my good friend, the chief of police in Linden, at the time. But that was about it.”
And that was in January 1999, almost ten months after the incident.
“The Feds are all done with this case,” Anne’s friend told her.
“Done?” Anne was confused. How could they be done? Jimmy had violated his parole by possessing weapons. He’d kidnapped Anne. Held her against her will at gunpoint. Shot her. One could argue the guy had even tortured Anne by placing her in the hot shower. Attempted murder, as she saw it.
Jimmy had been arrested without incident the day after the ordeal. Anne had given his name and address during those first few tenuous hours after arriving at the ER. Local law enforcement surrounded Jimmy’s house. Knowing he was armed and dangerous, they were able to bring him into custody without any problems.
Once Jimmy was arrested, he did not see the light of day until 2011. He now lives about twenty minutes from me . . . and has been told by law enforcement that he is not to be seen back in the county I live in. I do have plenty of security at my house, including an eighty-pound boxer, who is very loyal to me. I will not move and run from him, be intimidated by him, or be his victim any longer.
As he had done after the previous, similar incident, Jimmy claimed that it was all a misunderstanding. Still, the fact that he had weapons in his house was enough to hold him. Jimmy, it turned out, had been under house arrest since December 1997, months before the April incident with Anne. (Anne had noticed an ankle monitor when she first stopped by to see him.)
Anne got sick of waiting. She called the DA’s office to find out what was going on—she assumed that she would have to testify against Jimmy. No way am I going to back down, Anne decided. Jimmy might have convinced the woman before her to drop all the charges, but that was not the case this time around.
“So I contacted them and they acted like they didn’t know anything about my case,” Anne said later. “After [I held] for a while, they came back on the line and told me they would get right on
it.”
By March 1999, a preliminary hearing was scheduled.
Anne showed up and had a sit-down with the assistant DA before proceedings began.
“This was the first time I met with them.”
They talked for a short time. The ADA “asked me to refine the charge to Assault One, instead of Assault Two, which is what the deputies filed at the time it happened,” Anne said. “Assault Two is a more serious crime, almost as serious as attempted murder.”
Nobody involved thought a jury would go for the Assault II charge and convict.
Anne’s case was postponed until April, a year after the incident.
Of course I was thrilled that charges were filed and Jimmy was going to face a grand jury. Not about the lesser charge of Assault One . . . I really felt Jimmy would place someone on the jury to vote against Assault Two. I know him and his (now-deceased) mother were crooked, and I just had that feeling, you know, that they were going to do something to see that Jimmy never paid a price for what he’d done to me.
Just before that April court date, Anne took a call.
“Can you meet me for lunch?” the woman asked.
It was Jimmy’s mother. She wanted to “discuss” something with Anne.
“I’ll get back to you,” Anne said. She was at work. She hung up the phone and sat and stared at the receiver. The call almost felt like an intimidation tactic.
Anne called the ADA. Told him about the call.
“I think it’ll be okay, but we’ll just make sure you record the conversation.”
Anne called Jimmy’s mother back and agreed to meet the following afternoon.
The police chief and the ADA met Anne at her work that next day to let her know that everything would be okay. They were meeting in a public place. She would wear a wire. Someone would be watching.
Anne went to the designated location; she sat and waited.
An hour passed, but Jimmy’s mother never showed up.
As Anne returned to her place of work, and was walking down the hallway toward her office, she heard a woman call out her name.
It was Jimmy’s mother.
“I had the chance, but I didn’t turn around,” Anne said. “I really didn’t want to meet her in the first place, and she had her opportunity. I really think she was going to either threaten or bribe me, anyway.”
As that April court date came closer, it was postponed. Anne was left to wonder if Jimmy Williams would ever be punished for what he’d done. Would she ever receive justice? It felt to Anne as if nobody cared. As if Jimmy, once again, was going to get away with a horribly violent crime.
“I only held one man responsible,” Anne concluded, thinking how part of her PTSD might force her into hating men in general, seeing how males were letting her down over and over again. “My feelings about men did not change after the incident. I didn’t start to hate men because of what happened to me. Still, I was very cautious.”
Then word came that Jimmy Williams was going to be indicted for Assault I—and for the first time since it had all happened, Anne felt as if someone was finally listening.
Justice, perhaps, was going to find its way.
CHAPTER 14
Jimmy walked back into the bedroom. As he came around the corner and through the threshold of the doorway, Anne had one of his own pistols pointed at him.
Jimmy had another pistol pointed back at her.
Showdown.
Anne thought about it.
If she wanted to survive, was there anything else left for her to do?
“I just laid the weapon I had in my hand down, because I knew I would be dead if I did not.”
Jimmy’s plan was made clear to Anne after she placed the weapon on the floor and sat down on the bed.
“We are both going to die tonight, Anne . . . and if my mother was here, she would die, too.”
Anne’s insides clenched. She felt an air of finality in his words. If Jimmy was saying this was it, why shouldn’t she believe him? The guy was desperate, he’d committed a serious crime already, why not take it all to another level?
Some time passed and it was clear that Jimmy had changed his mind about murder-suicide.
“If the authorities come after me this time, bet your ass I will be ready for them,” he said.
Some would argue later that Jimmy Williams was out of his mind—that he had mental problems. His mother told one reporter that she had “begged the state for help for Jimmy” after that December incident, but no one did anything. She also said her son never kept weapons at his house. Instead, “a friend” must have brought them over.
“Jimmy Williams was not insane or mentally incapacitated—he knew exactly what he was doing,” Anne said. “Trust me on that.”
Jimmy stood, gun pointed at her, didn’t say anything.
Anne did not move from where she sat on the bed.
They stared at each other.
After about a half hour Anne could not sit any longer and had to lie down on her side. Her blood pressure was dropping. The external bleeding came and went according to her movements. When the wounds opened up, they bled; when she stayed still, and the blood inside the small holes coagulated, the bleeding stopped. Any movement, however, was beyond painful.
Anne prayed. It was all she could do, she’d decided. Everything else was out of her hands. She could not fight Jimmy. No one was coming to save her. Her life was in Jimmy’s hands and he knew that. He got an exhilarating high from letting her know. So praying became the only way for Anne to handle the intense emotions and not knowing what was to come.
As I lay there constantly praying, whatever he was drunk or high from began to wear off. He started calling around to find his mother so she could take me to the hospital. Either that, or he was going to fulfill that earlier promise of killing her, me, and then himself.
Three hours went by. Jimmy paced. Talked to himself. Waved his pistol around. Walked in and out of the room. The entire time Anne sat as still as she could and only said what she needed to. She knew that if she didn’t get to a hospital soon, she was going to die. Her body was shutting down. Her muscles trembled. She would break into a cold sweat and then it would stop.
Jimmy couldn’t find his mother, so he called Steve Cochran.
“Hey,” Anne heard Jimmy say, “someone is here and she’s been shot while helping a stranded motorist. I need you to come here and pick her up and take her to the hospital.”
Anne could see Jimmy listening to whatever was being said by the person on the other end of the line. She had no idea he was talking to Steve.
“Okay . . .”
They hung up.
Jimmy walked over to Anne. He pointed his weapon down at her and waved it. “Get up,” he said. “Right now.”
Anne slowly got out of bed. She was concerned Jimmy was not going to be able to wait until his friend arrived. All it took was one wrong word, a gesture he didn’t like, and he could sink a bullet into her head and then take his own life.
“Outside,” Jimmy said, butting the barrel of the weapon up against her back, beckoning Anne to get moving. “Let’s go. Get outside.”
Jimmy made Anne sit in her car. He sat in the passenger’s seat, his pistol trained on her the entire time.
It was getting more difficult to breathe every minute. I really didn’t think I would make it. Finally a car pulled up. Jimmy and I were both a bit startled when the lights from Steve’s car illuminated the inside of my car and we realized he was there.
Before Steve walked over to the car, Jimmy whispered into Anne’s ear: “If you tell any other story other than the one I explained on the phone about the stranded motorist, Steve will finish the job. You understand me?”
“Yes,” Anne responded.
What a relief when Anne saw Steve. She opened the door and got out.
“And nothing but peace came over me. . . .”
I had known Steve all my life and he was definitely a nice person. I hoped I was in good hands, but t
o be on the safe side, I told him the story I was supposed to. Thank the Lord he didn’t believe me, and he knew who did it.
He was totally shocked when I got into the car. He asked which hospital I wanted to go to and I could barely breathe anymore, so I told him the nearest one. Despite what Jimmy had told him about taking me to Montgomery, Steve took me to the one in town. I told him that I did not want him to get involved and just leave. He did not want to, but I insisted.
Law enforcement surrounded Jimmy’s house that night and waited until he fell asleep before barging in and arresting him without incident. Beyond the plethora of weapons, as well as illegal drugs and fraudulently obtained prescription ones they found inside his house, Jimmy also had hand grenades and shotgun tracer shells. Apparently, the guy had been preparing for some sort of war.
CHAPTER 15
Anne had soured on the idea of the dating game: the notion that some guy took you out to eat, maybe to a movie and a romantic walk, and because of that, he deserved a romp in the sack. Anne was not into that sort of hookup culture. She wanted to meet a nice guy, and she wanted to believe that true love existed in the world. Only problem was, she had little evidence to back it up.
After my previous husband and the incident with Jimmy, I was divorced for fifteen years and had not dated for eleven. I got so sick of that same old crap. So I just stayed away from the dating game.
One day I was thinking about my college years and I was looking for one of my friends on Facebook. Well, I was friends with her brother, so I decided to reach out to him, even though I barely remembered him. I did, however, recall that every time I saw him, he always spoke to me honestly and humbly and nicely, and that he had the sweetest smile. Anyway, I contacted Tom Johnson and we wound up talking for hours and hours. I knew he was a good man before I ever talked to him because his reputation preceded him.
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