It’s a situation every parent dreads. Larry and Lois Williams hadn’t heard from their son, Danny, in nearly two days. So Larry decided to drive over to Danny’s house to see what he could find. After he let himself in with his own key:
“I kept calling Danny’s name, saying, ‘Danny! This is your dad, this is me coming in!’ Because he did have a gun in the house for protection, and I didn’t want to be in a situation where he was asleep and shot his own dad.”
Danny holding a pitstol on his lap
A gun was found in Danny’s lap
As he entered the den, it was clear to Larry that Danny was dead:
“He was sitting on the couch in an upright position with a bullet in his head and a gun in his lap. So the comment that I made as I went through the door was, ‘Oooh, Dan, don’t let this be what it looks like.”
Twenty-three year-old Danny Williams was Larry and Lois’s youngest son. He managed distribution for the family’s multi-million-dollar apparel manufacturing company.
Larry Williams called the Galesburg Police. Chief John Schlaf described the police’s appraisal of the scene:
“The position of the body, the type of wound, the absence of any specific evidence of foul play indicated to us that the gunshot wound could have been self-inflicted and caused us to classify the case as a suicide.”
A bullet hole in the wall behind Danny
Blood should have been on wall
Larry Williams hired private detective, Mike Turnquist, to investigate. Soon, he had something to report; the police said Danny died very early Saturday morning. But a neighbor named Darlene Sayrs told Turnquist that she had seen Danny alive a full eight hours after the time of death:
“I shouldn’t admit it, but I watch everybody’s business. It was Saturday morning that I saw Danny get in the car with this woman. So naturally, being nosy as I am, I looked her over real good. She had dark hair; she would’ve been between 25 and 30.”
The police dismissed the account, saying Mrs. Sayrs had her days mixed up. It was already established that Danny had been picked up by his mother on Friday, the day before he died. But Darlene did not change her account:
“No. It was not Friday, it was Saturday. And the lady in the blue car was too young to have been his mother.”
Police investigators lifting up the couch Danny was found on
A second gun shell was found under the couch
Other witnesses noticed activity at Danny’s house on Sunday, 24 hours after he died. According to Chief Schlaf, at least one person reported seeing a young man with curly brown hair, approximately five feet, four inches tall. But Schlaf thinks the witness got something wrong:
“Eyewitness testimony can easily be mistaken, it’s as simple as that. They may have seen some activity there, but it’s a distinct possibility that the days may have been confused as to when they had seen that movement.”
Danny’s father claims that some of the physical evidence turned up by police argued against suicide. The bullet that supposedly killed Danny exited through his head and lodged in the wall. When the police removed the bullet, there was only one small spot, which appeared to be blood, on the paneling. Private investigator Michael Turnquist finds this suspicious:
“With the head being that close to the wall, you most certainly would expect to find larger, massive amounts of blood splatter, either at or near the back of the couch, and most certainly on the back wall.”
By now, Larry Williams was convinced his son had been murdered. He brought in independent forensic scientist, Mark Boese:
“I had this feeling that I was gonna go out, see the house, see a typical messy scene, and tell Larry that, ‘I think your son committed suicide.’ But we get to the house, and there’s a lack of evidence to support the suicide.”