Crime has lighter side Former KBI agent recalls humorous events from 20-year career

It’s a good bet that no one in the business of law enforcement takes it any more seriously than Tom Williams during his 36 years.
Williams told Iola Rotarians Thursday during his 20 years as a Kansas Bureau of Investigation special agent he investigated 200 homicides. He was one of 23 agents in the state during his tenure and was responsible for response in 16 counties.
“An agent can’t just go into a city or county, we have to be invited by the chief of police, sheriff or county attorney,” Williams said.
The lone crime that can lead to the KBI initiating an investigation is grain theft, Williams added, an apparent holdover from when the agency came onto the Kansas law enforcement scene in 1939.
Today the KBI has many more agents than when Williams was active; he retired about 10 years ago.
He said the emergence of cyber crimes, associated with and perpetuated by computer systems and the Internet, had led to expansion of the force.
While Williams would never make light of the serious nature of crime, he had many humorous experiences in his investigations.
He shared some with Rotarians.
A crime of passion led to a husband sneaking into a home one night where he found his wife involved with another man. Even though he had just one leg, the jilted and infuriated husband prevailed. He hit the guy in the head with his fist and left.
The victim suffered from a condition known as egg-shell skull and was struck with such force that his skull was broken in several places, which led to his death.
The suspect confessed and prior to a court hearing, Williams was visiting with the defense attorney, who referred his client’s chances for a favorable outcome as grim.
“The attorney said, ‘He doesn’t have a leg to stand on,’” Williams said.
Williams said in 1994 when O.J. Simpson was facing murder charges in California, he had a role in a stabbing involving O.J., though it was in southeast Kansas and the man’s last name wasn’t Simpson.
A murder victim was found lying on his front porch with a chalk outline drawn around the body. When he arrived, Williams questioned why on earth would investigators draw a chalk around the body without removing the corpse.
The explanation was that two days earlier, as a prank, the victim has pretended to have been murdered and had the lines drawn around himself on the porch.
While that was strange, it wasn’t the only oddity in the case.
The man had been stabbed 21 times and kicked multiple times in the head — and his name was Whetstone, as in a stone used to sharpen knives.
The next day news people arrived and Williams asked what lead they intended for the story.
“O.J. takes another stab at it,” one proposed.

ALLEN COUNTY hasn’t been immune from stranger than fiction occurrences.
Williams talked about attending an in-service session in Topeka, and when an hour-long discussion of the Clutter case began, “I started doing a crossword puzzle. Most everyone in that case had been dead for years.”
Two days later, in Iola, a friend called to “ask if I knew where the headstones for Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were,” Williams said, and continued by reporting that the stones were missing from the Clutter family murderers’ graves and were in Allen County.
Williams checked and found no record of any theft, then learned from another KBI agent that they indeed were missing from the graves but that no report had been made. Information about the headstones was mentioned at the in-service while Williams’ attention was on the crossword puzzle.
They were being used for steps for a building in rural Allen County.
The resolve of law enforcement agents isn’t to share information about a case with anyone other than those having a need to know. When his wife, Margo, asked what he was up to, Williams said it was a theft but that he couldn’t tell her anything, which led to a retort, “Oh, the gravestones?”
She had heard about the stones from a woman with whom she was riding with to classes at Pittsburg State University.
Later, Williams and Ron Moore, then county sheriff, retrieved the headstones, but since there had been no report of their theft, there wasn’t a case to investigate. The stones were relegated to a corner of Williams’ office.
Enter District Court Judge John White. White proposed a hearing to dispose of the grave markers and had a representative of the Kansas Historical Society present when it convened.
The person who carried the stones to Allen County no longer was here — he had moved to California — and as the hearing concluded, White asked if the historical society would like the headstones.
Today they are in the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka, and at one time were part of an exhibit recalling the Clutter case, complete with the gallows used in the hanging of Hickock and Smith.