On the evening of April 13, 1993, Shawn Marie Williams, a 22-year-old mother of four, left her home in Catoosa, Oklahoma, for a quick trip to a nearby convenience store. She never made it back. Her pickup truck was discovered later that night, abandoned and out of gas on U.S. Route 412, less than a mile from her house. There was no trace of Shawn.
An intensive search began immediately, but it wasn't until three days later, on April 16, 1993, that her body was found.
An aerial search located her remains in a marshy area known as Rocky Point. The scene told a story of a violent struggle. Shawn had sustained multiple injuries, including wounds on her knees and lacerations on the back of her head. Her shorts were on backward, and an autopsy would later reveal that she had been sexually assaulted. The cause of her death was a fatal gunshot wound to the chest that had ruptured her aorta.
For three years, the case remained cold. Investigators had DNA evidence from the scene, but no suspect to match it to. A break finally came in 1996 when a police officer's intuition led them to Karl Myers, a man with a history of violent and sexual crimes. At the time, Myers was a suspect in the March 1996 rape and murder of another woman, Cindy Michelle Marzano. DNA evidence ultimately linked Myers to both crimes.
Karl Myers had a lengthy criminal record, including a 1976 conviction for assault with intent to rape. Authorities also suspected his involvement in several other homicides in Oklahoma. In January 2000, Myers went on trial for the murder of Shawn Marie Williams. His defense attorneys argued that a low IQ and a childhood brain injury affected his cognitive abilities. Despite this, a jury found him guilty on February 14, 2000. He was subsequently sentenced to death, his second death sentence, as he had already been condemned for the murder of Cindy Marzano. Karl Myers remained on death row until December 28, 2012, when he died of natural causes at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
