MARIANNA — Whether a Jackson County man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and her three children will receive a new trial has not yet been determined, but a circuit judge took the matter under advisement this week during a hearing, according to court records.
Wesley Jonathan Williams, 31, was convicted of four counts of murder in 2009 for the 2005 deaths of ex-girlfriend Danielle Baker and her three young sons and sentenced to four consecutive life terms. Williams now claims his defense attorney in the case, Walter Smith, advised him not to testify in the trial, a decision that cost him his freedom, he said.
Both Williams and Smith took the stand Tuesday to disclose their versions of the private, attorney-client conversations from the 2009 trial.
Williams claimed Smith told him testifying would open him up to cross-examination, which could disclose potentially damaging information to the jury from a previous felony conviction. Under the advisement, Williams did not testify, he said.
However, Smith testified he actually told Williams that he would be convicted whether he testified or not. He said he left the decision to Williams and that it would not make a difference either way, since DNA evidence connected him to the crime scene.
Baker, 19, was found shot to death in her Cottonwood Village apartment in Marianna on March 17, 2005. The children — Amad, 3, Amarion, 1, and Aarron, 3 weeks — were bound with duct tape and suffocated. Prosecutors sought to prove Williams, father to two of the children, killed Baker to avoid paying child support, but Smith argued Williams had nothing to do with the murder and could easily not pay child support.
Smith presented jurors with multiple alternate scenarios that led to Baker’s death, including a theory that drug dealers from Miami came across Baker’s home while searching for another man.
One woman testified Williams was at her home that night.
In addition, a man named Skylar Keys, who was videotaped buying duct tape that night and seen at the apartment just before the crimes, testified during the trial that he’d been there, but, after it became apparent the sexual encounter he expected was not going to happen, he left.
While the duct tape Keys purchased did not match the duct tape from the crime scene, Williams was linked to the crimes by a single hair found on the tape used to bind the children. Williams faced the death penalty but received four consecutive life terms in prison.
If Circuit Court Judge Shona Young Gay does not grant a new trial, a second ground upon which the appeal is based will be heard later. It involves an alleged jailhouse confession by an inmate claiming responsibility.