The life of Laron Williams, a 36-year-old male, ended not at the hands of the state that had condemned him, but in a sudden, brutal encounter with fellow inmates on death row. On July 8, 1985, inside the walls of the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville, Williams was beaten to death by two other convicted killers, reportedly during a heated dispute over the use of a prison telephone.
His death was a violent conclusion to a life that had been marked by a string of horrific crimes.
Laron Williams was himself a serial killer. Born in Louisiana, much of his early life remains a mystery. By the late 1970s, he was in Nashville, where he murdered a 19-year-old woman named Terra Wedlaw in October 1977. He pleaded guilty to her murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Williams was also a suspect in the similar slayings of at least two other young women in the Nashville area. In April 1981, he escaped from the Memphis Correctional Center, triggering a statewide manhunt. In the days following his escape, Williams murdered two more people: Memphis Police Lieutenant Clarence P. Cox and the Reverend John Jay Jackson, a Catholic priest in Jackson, Tennessee. He was recaptured on May 18, 1981. For these killings, Williams was convicted and received two separate death sentences, sending him to Tennessee's death row.
It was on that same death row that Williams met his end. During an exercise period, he was attacked by Cecil C. Johnson Jr. and another inmate, Tony Bobo, both of whom were also convicted murderers awaiting execution. The assailants used their fists and exercise weights in the attack. Though the fight was broken up, Williams sustained severe blunt force trauma and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died from his injuries. Prison authorities reported that the motive for the deadly assault was anger over Williams spending too much time on the telephone.
The man primarily responsible for Williams' death, Cecil C. Johnson Jr., was a multiple murderer with a history of extreme violence. In July 1980, Johnson had committed a triple homicide during the armed robbery of a Nashville convenience store, killing 12-year-old Robert "Bobby" Bell III, James Moore, and Charles House. For these crimes, Johnson was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and, in January 1981, became the first person sentenced to death under Tennessee's newly reinstated capital punishment laws.
Following the killing of Laron Williams, both Johnson and Bobo were charged with first-degree murder. In 1987, a jury found them guilty of the lesser charge of second-degree murder, and they were sentenced to life imprisonment. However, this conviction was not the final word. On appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned their convictions in 1991 and ordered a new trial. At their retrial in February 1994, both men were convicted of voluntary manslaughter and received eight-year prison sentences for the prison yard killing.
Cecil C. Johnson Jr. remained on death row for the 1980 triple murder that had originally sent him there. After decades of appeals, his death warrant was signed. He was executed by lethal injection on December 2, 2009, at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He was 53 years old. Before his execution, he received a message of forgiveness from his own son, who was also incarcerated. The father of his youngest victim, Bobby Bell, witnessed the execution. Tony Bobo, the other inmate involved in Williams' death, remained on death row for his own capital murder conviction. Laron Williams' death, carried out by fellow condemned men, was a final, violent chapter in a story of multiple, interconnected tragedies.
