An ‘old hoodlum’ gets his dying wish

Early this year, I wrote an anniversary article about the kidnapping but could not find him. Sketchy folks with common last names are hard to trace. Add 40 years, and you’re chasing a phantom.

My story was written and pre-printed for the Sunday paper when an AJC editor got a strange call on Thursday, Feb. 20. The man said he had kidnapped the editor long ago, and that calling the paper on the anniversary of the event just seemed, well, fitting.

He talked about ordering Murphy into the trunk of his car and releasing him 48 hours later. That was after the paper paid a ransom that made Williams $700,000 richer — for about five hours, that is. The FBI then barged into his home.

But now he was 73, living in a cramped Las Vegas apartment with his cat, Miss Molly. He tended a balcony garden, had become a Muslim and had aggressive Stage IV melanoma.

We spoke over the following weeks and each call brought an increasingly grim prognosis.

I enjoyed chatting with the one-time desperado, who preferred “Bill.” He was old and lonely and funny. Dying of cancer, he was also reflective.

He said wanted to find his daughter, Janet, who was two years old when he last saw her.

Then, on March 31, I got an email from Janet Scarbary. She had been looking for her father her whole life and saw my story. “Please let my father know I am looking for him,” she wrote.

I called Bill, and he said, sure, pass my number along. Then, the always suspicious ex-jail bird asked, “How do you know she’s my daughter?”

Because middle-aged women wouldn’t be lining up to claim a broken-down ex-kidnapper as their dad unless it was so, I ventured.

“Fair ‘nuf,” he reasoned.

Janet, nervous to the point of hyperventilating, called him. That night, on April Fools Day, she posted on Facebook, “Wow!! After 40 years I finally found my father. Best birthday present.”

I called her the next day to ask how it went. She was still excited.

“I told him how much I had missed him,” she said. “According to him, he’s mailed letters to me, but I never saw them.”

These days she lives in a rural area south of Macon, has three teen-aged daughters and a son in the Navy, just like her father once was. The daughter of the hoodlum calls herself an “outcast.”

“I’ve been searching for so long but always came up with roadblocks,” she said. “I had no cooperation from my family. I was flying solo. I’d get frustrated and give up.”

Janet’s mother, the second of Williams’ four or five wives (he contended he couldn’t remember the exact figure), did not want to say much but said Williams “knew where she was.”

In early April, Janet was almost giddy about visiting her long-lost dad. “Time is of the essence,” she realized. “I have so many questions for him.”

Williams, also, was tickled by it all. “She sounds just like me,” he said.

I told him I’d love to be on hand when Janet came out to see him. The story was a can’t-miss: Woman Meets Long-lost Kidnapper Dad. “Come on out, we’ll have a party,” he said.

Then Janet vanished. Williams tried to reach her. I tried to find her. Nothing. “I haven’t heard hide nor hair of her,” Williams said a couple weeks later, clearly disappointed. “It’s so weird.”

On April, 28, Janet resurfaced by email: “Sorry that I haven’t been in touch with you or my father. It’s been more than I could handle at the time. I really want to meet my father and I think that I am now ready for that.”

But time had run out. A day earlier, Williams had called to say: “The cancer’s all over.” The old Navy man said he’d head to hospice through the V.A. “I don’t want any chemo,” he said. “Taxpayers shouldn’t be prolonging my life.

“If I knew when I was gonna die, I’d be completely ready,” he added, then pausing for comic effect. “If they told me where I was gonna die, I wouldn’t go there.”

Two days later, he texted saying he didn’t want anyone coming out to Vegas. He was too sick. “You will be contacted upon my demise,” he wrote. “I have no regrets or ill feelings toward anyone.”

Two weeks later, I got an email from a Louis Oviedo Williams: “This is to inform you that my Father has passed away. Let’s not talk about the man he was or the mistakes he made in his life. After all we are all human and some men are created just angry at the world and want to watch it burn. Let’s talk about the apologies he never got to say to my lost sister Janet Williams or his ex-wife, Betty.”

Louis, who was with his father at the end, was digging through his father’s possessions to unravel the puzzle that was William A.H. Williams’ life. He said it read like a country song. Bill had sold cars in El Paso, time shares in New Mexico, newspaper subscriptions and insurance in Las Vegas. He worked in a meatpacking plant and a funeral home.

“I ask you, sir, to help me fulfill his final wish to find my sister Janet Williams,” Louis wrote. “My father died without saying goodbye to his daughter and died with that regret.”

Then Louis added, “I have been waiting forever to meet or even talk to her.”

Louis, who speaks with a Spanglish twang, was born almost 30 years ago, not long after his father was paroled to El Paso. “I’m redneckexican,” he said, showing his father’s humor. Louis also has a younger brother and sister.

By day’s end, Louis had contacted Janet and the two had talked by phone for hours and were sharing family photos on Facebook.

“Thank you from the bottom of my heart you couldn’t write this kinda stuff as our father died and a family is coming together,” Louis said in an email. “I’m sure the old man approves. Now, if somehow we could get her here for the funeral it would be storybook my friend.”

Janet is trying to sell her truck and a camper to raise money to get to Vegas. And, at press time, William Williams still hadn’t been buried, because his family was waiting on insurance money.

As Louis said, like a real-life country song.