Morris Johnson didn’t think twice when Ann Williams drove her light tan car up to his garage in Algoa on Feb. 22, 1955, and asked him to bury four packages of spoiled venison. The mechanic met the young mother and her husband, Hoyt, when he worked on their car the previous fall. When Williams learned Johnson’s wife was sick, she stayed with the woman for three days, tenderly nursing her back to health.

So, Johnson was only too happy to help Williams dispose of the ruined meat. She backed her car into the field behind his shop, stopped at a hollow depression, and opened the trunk. One of the packages had started to leak, and Williams quickly threw her jacket over it, scooping it up and placing it in the hole herself. Johnson and his son, Clayton, carried the other packages. Williams asked them to leave her coat covering the package she had carried, saying it was old and she no longer needed it. Once the men had covered the parcels with a layer of dirt, Johnson and his wife asked Williams to stay for dinner. It wasn’t until the family sat down to eat that they thought to ask about Williams’ two young sons—9-year-old Calvin and 8-year-old Conrad. They were at home in Pasadena, she said, and no trouble at all because they could fix their own supper.

The Johnsons accepted her explanation, although they later admitted it was a little strange. During dinner, Williams talked about the children and how they loved watching television. She gave no indication anything was wrong. But after she left, one of Johnson’s mechanics, Gene Wetmore, came in the house with a copy of the evening newspaper. It contained a story about a missing five-and-dime store clerk and her two young children. They looked at each other with wide eyes when they read her name—Ann Williams.

“I told him right off, ‘I bet you buried that woman’s kids,’” Wetmore told Galveston Daily News reporter George Belk the next day. “We went out to look and then called the police.”

Sheriffs deputies arrested Williams a few hours later. After five hours of questioning, she confessed to murdering the boys. They had suffered unbearable teasing from their classmates because their father was serving a three-year term in an Atlanta prison for transporting a stolen car across state lines, Williams claimed. She said she planned to kill the boys to put them out of their misery, then take her own life. She measured out three doses of sleeping pills she had purchased in Mexico, never expecting to wake up. When she did, she discovered the boys were still breathing. So, she took a handkerchief, wrapped it around their slender necks and twisted it with a nail, tourniquet-style, until the rise and fall of their little chests stopped.

Then she had a problem: how to dispose of the bodies? She told investigators she took the bodies to an apartment she had rented in Houston. She filled the bathtub with water, lime, and lye and let the bodies sit for three days. When they didn’t disintegrate, she claimed she used a safety razor blade to cut them into pieces, wrapping them in plastic, and storing them in her “electric ice box.” Three days after that, she drove them to Algoa.

“I had to hide them,” she explained in a jailhouse interview. “I didn’t want people to think I was a bad mother.”

Investigators, led by Galveston County Deputy Sheriff Curt Monceaux, to whom Williams confessed, immediately began searching for a possible male accomplice. She denied having help to kill the boys, but the county pathologist determined they died from repeated blows to the head. He found no evidence of sleeping pills in their stomaches. Williams denied ever striking her children.

“I believe Mrs. Williams is protecting someone,” Monceaux said.

Investigators didn’t name the possible accomplice, but Williams admitted to having a boyfriend and planning to leave her husband. She insisted her lover was not involved in the murders.

“If he were mixed up in this, I wouldn’t love him,” she said. “I couldn’t love anybody that would get mixed up in something like this.”

Police interviewed two men who knew Williams, but they released both without charges. One, a 27-year-old truck driver, said he met Williams at a Christmas dance and had visited her home several times. She told him she was going to send the boys to a private school in Illinois and when she returned from dropping them off, he said she planned to use a different name. Investigators believed she hatched the murder plan after meeting the man, hoping to start a new life free from her children.

Monceaux, an experienced lawman and former intelligence officer during World War II, described the Williams murders as “the most grotesque case in my career as a law officer.”

During her jailhouse interview with The Daily News, Williams said she could justify the murders at the time but not any longer.

“I’ve prayed for forgiveness,” she sobbed. “But I doubt if He can forgive me. Will I ever forget this? Why, oh why, did I do it? Why did I turn on my children?”

The Harris County psychiatrist who interviewed Williams shortly after her arrest said her statements proved her sanity: “She realizes her guilt and expects to be punished.”

“I don’t know why I killed them. I loved them,” Williams said, growing hysterical as she recounted to the reporter what happened. “Take me to the electric chair! I don’t mind any more.”

No woman had ever been executed in Texas at the time. Would Ann Williams be the first? Check back next week to find out!

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