The New Yorker:

When a prosecutor began chasing an accused serial rapist, she lost her job but unravelled a scandal. Why were the police refusing to investigate Sean Williams?

By Ronan Farrow

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.

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