The Long Nightmare

Until one balmy afternoon last April, Robert Snead Williams Jr., a 46-year-old widower, led an inconspicuous life in Washington, D.C. He had a good job with a woodworking company, was a trustee of All Souls' Unitarian Church.

Then, as he was driving home from work, a traffic cop arrested him, hauled him to the station. At first, the cops told Williams that there was something wrong with his automobile registration. "Then," said Williams, "I looked over my shoulder and a girl was standing there, looking me up and down." Finally, a police sergeant told Williams that the girl and one of her friends, both 14, had positively identified him as the man who had exposed his person to them a short time before his arrest.

Wrong Man. Williams blurted: "You have the wrong man, buddy." For almost four hours after that the cops held Williams incommunicado, paraded in people who had been victims of sexual exhibitionists to see if they could identify him.

Williams' lawyers told him quite bluntly that he didn't have a chance to beat the case as long as his teen-age accusers stuck to their story, advised him to plead guilty and get off with a light fine or probation. Said Williams stubbornly: "I just can't go in and plead guilty to something I didn't do." Williams' sordid little police-court case made the front page of Washington papers. He was found guilty.

Williams became a gadfly in the ear of Washington's officialdom, demanding and pleading for a new trial. He got a break. The prosecutor received two anonymous letters from a man who said that he, and not Williams, was guilty. Assistant Corporation Counsel Clark F. King denounced the letters as a hoax and the work of a crackpot, but on the strength of them, Williams' lawyers got a new hearing for him. But still Defendant Williams' troubles multiplied. Prosecutor King produced a police handwriting expert who solemnly testified that Williams' 18-year-old daughter Evangeline had written the letters, just to protect her father. When he heard his daughter falsely accused, for the first time Williams seemed to lose his assurance that he would finally be vindicated; he sat down and wept. But two other handwriting experts said that Evangeline could not have written the letters; the judge agreed to give Williams a new trial.

Chastened Prosecutor. It wasn't necessary. That night the man who had written the letters--a war veteran who had been discharged as a psychoneurotic--telephoned Prosecutor King. Conscience-ridden, he had been to see his priest, confessed the crime for which Williams had been convicted, offered to give himself up if he got immunity and was not publicly identified. Chastened Prosecutor King agreed.

Last week innocent Bob Williams walked out of his six-month-long nightmare. The charges against him were dropped.

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