(Editor’s note: The following article contains details about rape and murder.)
The state Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously affirmed the death penalty sentence of convicted serial killer William Lewis Reece today in a precedential ruling that says sexual propensity evidence may be admitted during some murder trials in Oklahoma. In his appeal, Reece raised more than a dozen propositions of error during the investigation and trial that his attorneys claimed warranted a new prosecution, but the five appellate judges disagreed.
“We find no grounds for reversal or modification of the verdict of guilt or sentence of death,” Judge David Lewis wrote for the majority. “The judgement and sentence is affirmed, and Reece’s application for an evidentiary hearing is denied.”
Reece, 66, is associated with at least nine different rapes or killings in Oklahoma and Texas between 1986 and 1997. In 1986, he was convicted and sentenced for two rapes in Oklahoma and served a 10-year sentence before being released in October 1996. The following year, he is accused of kidnapping and assaulting three women and killing four others, before he was convicted for one of the kidnappings in Texas in 1998. While detained in Texas, his DNA was matched to a murder in Oklahoma, and Reece confessed to four murders: one in Oklahoma and three in Texas.
Vice Chief Judge William Musseman wrote separately in this week’s decision to distance himself from some of the majority’s comments on Reece and to signal his willingness to reconsider the court’s prior precedent on juror qualifications.
“However, I retreat from this court’s commentary, and wholly unnecessary dicta, that it is simply appellant’s nature to kill others and derive sexual pleasure or gratification from the act. Rather, this court should restrain itself to our standard of review and go no further,” Musseman wrote in his concurrence. “We should simply state our holding that there was sufficient evidence in the record for the trial court to find appellant killed the victim in this case, as he killed others, in an effort to derive sexual pleasure or gratification.”
Musseman possibly found a personal comment about Reece on Page 50 of the majority opinion slightly injudicious.
“The propensity evidence, however, was relevant to show that he killed her, as he killed others, in an effort to derive sexual pleasure or gratification,” Lewis wrote for the majority. “It is simply his nature.”
In the ninth proposition of Reece’s appeal, attorneys argued several specific comments from jurors about the death penalty meant they should have been excluded. Defense attorneys believed the jurors in question seemed to be set on giving murder defendants the death penalty without even considering other sentencing. The court disagreed with the argument, as the jurors later walked back their stances. However, Musseman seemed to want to go even farther than his colleagues and revisit the court’s precedent on the subject entirely.
“Turning to proposition IX, the court squarely and appropriately addresses appellant’s claim regarding life and death qualification of the jury according to this court’s precedent. I, however, write separately to question that precedent,” he wrote. “I have grown to question this court’s precedent that capital jurors must be willing to consider both sentences of life and life without parole. (…) More than the questionable foundation supporting our precedent regarding life and death qualification, it is my belief this precedent surrounding life and death qualifying a jury in Oklahoma leads to confusion identifying juror impairment.”
In his fifth proposition of error, Reece argued that the admission of testimony of prior rapes in his murder trial violated rules of evidence that prevent past bad acts from being introduced. The evidence was allowed by the trial court under an exception that allowed prior sexual acts — or legally speaking “sexual propensity evidence” — to be admitted. Reece’s attorney’s requested that the appellate judges officially adopt a judge-made rule from California which requires that “a person must be charged with an offense which contains an adjudicative element of ‘sexual assault’ in order for ‘sexual assault’ propensity evidence to be admissible.” Under Reece’s proposed interpretation, the evidence of his past rapes would have been inadmissible during his trial for murder since sexual assault is not an element of a murder charge.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals declined to adopt the California rule and instead held “that sexual propensity evidence is admissible in a malice murder case where the evidence points to a sexual component or motive of the murder, or where an uncharged sex crime is inextricably intertwined with the murder so as to be res gestae of the homicide offense.” The holding becomes the first on the admissibility of sexual propensity evidence during murder trials in Oklahoma, and it makes it easier for prosecutors to introduce evidence of prior sexual misconduct during murder trials in state courts.
Justice Scott Rowland recused from the case because he worked for the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office when it prosecuted Reece. Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Richard Darby served in Rowland’s stead during the case.
A one-year murder spree, left cold for nearly two decades
Reece grew up near Yukon and worked various construction, horseshoeing and trucking jobs to make ends meet, according to the Dallas Morning News. He spent his youth in foster care, and his attorney’s filings indicate Reece scored just above intellectually disabled on tests showing he had an IQ in the 70s.
After going through three divorces with two wives and having two children, Reece was convicted for two separate rapes from 1986. That April, he raped a 19-year-old in Norman, and in May he raped a 20-year-old in Anadarko. According to the court’s reported facts in Thursday’s decision, Reece was arrested for the rapes, convicted of first-degree rape for the Anadarko assault, and served 10 years in Oklahoma prisons before being released in October 1996.
In March 1997, 12-year-old Laura Smither was killed near Friendswood, Texas, and Reece would later confess to accidentally hitting her with his car and then intentionally snapping her neck. That May, he kidnapped a 19-year-old woman from a Waffle House in Webster, Texas, but she escaped after jumping from his in-motion truck on the highway. He would later be arrested and convicted for this kidnapping in 1998, but he continued to abduct women and girls in the meantime.
In early July 1997, he kidnapped a 16-year-old and 17-year-old from a cafe in Pearland, Texas, and he raped them at his apartment in Houston. The pair escaped and did not report the incident until after Reece’s arrest. Later that month, he encountered 20-year-old Kelli Cox at a convenience store in Texas and killed her in the parking lot before burying her in a rice field in Brazoria County, Texas. Cox’s disappearance was unsolved until Reece’s confession in 2016.
Nine days later, Reece met 19-year-old Tiffany Johnston at the Sunshine Car Wash in Bethany. He claimed he sprayed her with water, causing a verbal altercation which quickly escalated when he physically assaulted her, “drug her into [his] horse trailer” and raped her. After Reece ceased his sexual assault, Johnston hit him with a horseshoe before he killed her and dumped her body in a field off a gravel road west of Yukon.
In August 1997, Reece killed 17-year-old Jessica Cain. He claimed the two met after she hit his truck with her car door at a Bennigan’s in Clear Lake, Texas. Reece maintained that Cain followed him after the altercation and confronted him on the side of the road where he killed her before burying her “near a gas line on a property in Houston, Texas,” according to the court’s issued facts. Cain was his last known victim before he was convicted for the Webster, Texas, kidnapping in May 1998.
Toward the end of 2013, while Reece was imprisoned in Texas, “traditional DNA testing revealed that [Reece] could not be excluded as the contributor” of a DNA sample obtained from Johnston’s body. About one in 11,200 individuals have the same partial DNA profile, or about 366 of the 4.1 million Oklahomans alive today. Reece was charged with her murder by former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater in 2015.
In February 2016, Texas Ranger James Holland went to interview Reece about the deaths of Cain and Cox, and he agreed to provide information in exchange for a “deal.” At their next meeting, Holland provided Reece with documents from the district attorneys of Denton and Galveston counties (both in Texas) that promised not to seek the death penalty in exchange for information, but he noted neither Harris County, Texas, nor Oklahoma County agreed to forgo seeking the death penalty.
According to the first proposition of Reece’s appeal, “Ranger Holland told Mr. Reece he wanted him to help him solve cases and in exchange, Mr. Reece would control his own destiny and be ‘treated like a rockstar.’”
Reece then showed Holland and Friendswood Police Department Detective Doug Bacon where Cox was buried. While being interviewed that month, he confessed to the killings of Cox, Cain, Johnston and Smither. He also revealed Cain’s burial place to investigators.
In June 2021, after a 17-day jury trial, Reece was convicted for the first-degree murder of Johnston and sentenced to death in Oklahoma. The following June, two Texas courts gave him three life sentences for the murders of Cox, Cain and Smither. He plead guilty to the three Texas murders.
‘Treat you like a king’: Texas Ranger’s rhetoric draws objection
Reece’s defense attorneys spent much of their brief criticizing the conduct of Holland and Bacon. While the Court of Criminal Appeals ultimately found Reece’s arguments unpersuasive, transcripts produced by the defense do reveal odd statements from Holland during his interrogation of Reece, including a promise to treat Reece “like a king” in exchange for cooperation — a fact he promised Reece would not appear “in the paper.”
Holland repeatedly emphasized to Reece his power and status as a Texas Ranger during his interrogation, going as far as to offer Reece a personal helicopter ride to McDonalds.
“You wanna super star status, I’ll tell you what, I’ll personally drive you or if you wanna take a helicopter, we’ll take you on a helicopter… We got the best helicopter, us rangers do. We can drive. We can go and get coffee. McDonalds,” Holland offered, according to court records. “I like to dip. We can have a little dip.”
Reece’s attorney’s argued that Holland’s show of power, combined with Reece’s allegedly low intelligence, improperly induced his confessions. The judges were unconvinced of the defense attorney’s argument, but court documents include illuminative moments of Holland’s braggadocio.
“Me being the smartest son of a bitch, because I know all about science and I’ve got a master degree. They don’t call me and the governor don’t call me because I’m a dumbass, he call me because I’m a stud! I’m the shit. You want something done on a case, call me. Call Jimmy,” Holland said to Reece during one interrogation. “The colonel of DPS calls me and tells me, ‘Jimmy, did you just get a phone call from the governor?’ ‘Yes, sir, he did.’ ‘He tell you he wants you on it?’ ‘Yes, sir, he did.'”
Holland presented himself as a master of controlling narratives and avoiding procedural mistakes during the interviews.
“I make everything very neat. I document it, I lab test it. I write really good reports, I get on the stand and wear my nice shirt and I testify. And I tell the story, I write history, okay?” Holland told Reece. “I will do anything that I can to accomplish my goal, and my goal is to provide families closure and solve the cases because that’s what I do. I’m very fucking good at it… I’m the best at this ever. Alright? And that’s why I get the phone calls. I’m so fucking good at it, Bill, I did shit that no one else could do.”
Police interrogation tactics vary widely, and courts generally give officers wide discretion to determine interrogation techniques. Criticism of providing benefits to prisoners in exchange for confessions or information on other inmates has drawn scrutiny in recent years for potentially incentivizing false information or confessions.
Reece’s execution date has not been set, and he could appeal his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Read the Court of Criminal Appeals majority opinion
Read William Lewis Reece’s appeal
