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NARRATOR: Sheila Williams had a bright future, a boyfriend she
adored, and a strong faith in God.
So why did she commit suicide?
Several bobby pins on the floor and some gold
under her fingernails help provide the answer.
[theme music]
19-year-old Josiah Ward lived a life of luxury
in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
He was a millionaire many times over,
and seemingly had everything a man could want.
But he paid a very steep price for his fortune.
Six years earlier, Josiah's aunt and was
driving him to his 13th birthday party.
On the way, she lost control of her car
and crashed into a tree.
-Joey was in the front seat.
He went through the windshield and impaled
himself onto the tree.
Josiah's aunt survived the crash.
But Josiah's eight-year-old brother,
who was riding in the backseat, was killed instantly.
Josiah was badly disfigured.
-That is the reason why he had the severe facial lacerations,
a head injury, and multiple fractures to his face.
NARRATOR: The insurance settlement
made him an instant millionaire.
KEN KOLKER: He got a judgment of $3.5 million dollars,
and it was to be paid in installments.
The money just could not-- was not
enough to-- to undo the damage that was done, because kids
in school were calling him Scarface.
And he had a hot temper.
NARRATOR: After high school, Josiah
started dating 20-year-old Sheila
Williams, an unemployed hairdresser.
Soon, Sheila became pregnant with Josiah's baby.
-Well, he had told her anyway at one point
he was going to marry her, because she told me.
And I said, you just met him.
NARRATOR: Sheila had also experienced
a spiritual awakening.
She started to attend church again and sang in the choir.
[singing] I'm climbing up.
I'm climbing on up.
On the rough side of the mountain.
-I was so happy to see her just come back
and renew her faith in Christ.
So she came back, and pastor asked
her where are you going to be?
She said, from now on, right back there
in the choir along with my mom and dad, where I belong.
[singing] Climbing on up, on the rough side.
NARRATOR: On Labor Day in 1998, Josiah
called police to report an emergency.
[phone rings]
-911 Emergency.
JOSIAH (ON PHONE): She's laying here in a pile of blood.
OPERATOR (ON PHONE): OK. All right.
Are there any weapons nearby? JOSIAH (ON PHONE): Yes.
She's holding a gun in her hand.
NARRATOR: According to Josiah, Sheila had killed herself.
JOSIAH (ON PHONE): Man, I ain't never seen nothing like this
before. OPERATOR (ON PHONE): OK.
Where did she shoot herself?
JOSIAH (ON PHONE): It's in the head.
OPERATOR (ON PHONE): Is she breathing right now?
JOSIAH (ON PHONE): Shelia?
No, she's not bleeding-- or, she's not breathing no more.
NARRATOR: When police arrived, they
found Sheila dead on the kitchen floor
with a single gunshot wound to her head.
The gun was next to her body.
Josiah told police they argued about Sheila's pregnancy.
Josiah wanted her to have an abortion,
but Sheila wanted to have the baby.
Josiah said he left the house to buy cigarettes.
When he returned, he saw Sheila kill herself.
-He said she did not say anything
at that point, just shot herself.
-And I was like, what? Oh my God.
I was like, no. What happened?
What?
And I was just speechless.
-I didn't want to believe it was true until I got all the way
here, you know, and I see all my family members and everybody
here and I just knew it was true.
I just knew it was true then.
NARRATOR: Studies show that suicide is extremely
rare among African American women.
As a group, they comprise less than 1% of all suicides.
-It doesn't mean an African American female
can't commit suicide.
It just means that it's an unusual event, quite rare,
and certainly would warrant additional consideration
of other possibilities.
NARRATOR: And Sheila's autopsy revealed
some surprising news about her pregnancy.
Josiah Ward and Sheila Williams were
a classic example of how opposites attract.
Josiah was lonely and withdrawn.
Sheila, warm and outgoing.
ESTELLA JONES: She was the center of everything.
Fun, energetic, warm.
And she was the type if you came to the door,
she would greet you with a hug and a smile and a big embrace.
Welcome you in and make you comfortable as she could
the whole time you was there.
NARRATOR: Sheila and Josiah did have
a common bond, a troubled past.
Sheila was a high school dropout struggling to find work.
She had been pregnant twice before and lost both due
to miscarriage.
Josiah's problems included his disfiguring car accident
and his inability to handle the multimillion
dollar financial settlement.
He spent lavishly on luxury items
and often loaned money to his friends.
He was paying child support for two children
he fathered with two different women.
-There's an old saying, you know, song, women, and drink.
And that's pretty much what he spent it on.
-The money was corrupting him.
He was already an angry kid, and the money was corrupting him
and drawing certain kinds of people to him.
-I think that he gave money to a lot of people,
and probably did not get the love or respect
or whatever it was he was looking for in return.
NARRATOR: At Sheila's autopsy, the medical examiner
confirmed she was killed by a single shot that
entered the left side of her head.
-The trajectory actually appeared
to go into her left cheek, lower left cheek just above the jaw
and actually went in an upward motion
into the left side of her brain.
NARRATOR: The preliminary lab tests showed gunshot residue
on Sheila's hands, a finding consistent with suicide.
Toxicology tests revealed Sheila's blood alcohol level
was 0.09, which in some states is considered intoxicated.
And Sheila's autopsy revealed a surprise.
Despite her previous claims, Sheila Williams
was not pregnant.
KEN KOLKER: I don't know whether she was just claiming she was
pregnant and she knew otherwise, or she just--
if-- if she really thought she was.
NARRATOR: Josiah's lawyer claims the pregnancy was a scam
and Josiah was the target.
-Sheila Williams was part of a group,
I would say five to six people, that were-- set out
to victimize Joey Ward for his money.
And they would use whatever means they could do it,
befriending him, having sex with him,
making false claims of pregnancy.
NARRATOR: The man who alleged the scam was a prison inmate
who claimed he overheard Sheila discussing it with his cell
mate, who was Sheila's former boyfriend.
Yet, Sheila's family insists she was pregnant.
-Yeah, she told me that she thought she was.
-A lot of thoughts start running through my head, like did
she have an abortion, did she have a miscarriage
and she didn't tell anybody?
You know, I didn't know what to think.
-She could miscarry at a very early stage in pregnancy
and may not have even been aware of it, yes.
NARRATOR: To fully understand the shooting,
investigators asked Josiah to explain in detail
exactly what happened when Sheila died.
-We asked him to portray or reenact
how she was with the weapon.
And so we asked him to stand up and we took a photograph
of him doing that in just the way
that-- that he said that the angle of the gun was at.
NARRATOR: Almost immediately, investigators
saw inconsistencies.
Josiah denied there had been any physical altercation.
Yet, investigators found evidence to the contrary.
-We saw that Ms. Williams had a weave that
was forcibly pulled out of her hair.
And we observed several bobby pins that were strewn about.
NARRATOR: Investigators also found blood spatter
on the kitchen floor that wasn't from the gunshot.
It happened when the gun hit the floor.
-And that spatter would not have been created if she had shot
herself and dropped the gun immediately
after shooting herself.
NARRATOR: That's because they're shouldn't have been
a pool of blood on the floor when the gun dropped.
To recreate the blood spatter at the scene,
forensic experts dropped a gun into varying amounts
of horse blood from different heights.
The only way they could reproduce it
was by pouring almost a gallon of blood on the floor.
And tests revealed the gun fell only a short distance
into the blood, not from head level.
-The reenactment of the blood spatter test
did prove that the gun was actually
dropped at a height of between 18 and 24 inches.
And that it was actually dropped into a rather large pool
of blood, which disputed Mr. Ward's claim.
NARRATOR: This proved that Sheila was bleeding
long before the gun hit the floor.
Photographs taken just after police arrived
showed the blood was not fresh.
-It was coagulating almost.
It was darker and coagulating.
It was starting to pool and to get darker.
That doesn't happen right away.
NARRATOR: And a neighbor came forward saying
he heard a gunshot several hours before the ambulance arrived.
-They thought they heard something similar to a gunshot
at about 2:30 or 2:45 AM.
The police 911 call didn't come until about 4:47 AM.
So there was a span of about two hours
that are really unaccounted for.
NARRATOR: But if Josiah Ward murdered Sheila Williams, why
was gunshot residue found on her hands?
20-year-old Sheila Williams lay dead in Josiah Ward's kitchen
from what he said was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Forensic evidence collected at the scene
contradicted several aspects of Josiah's story.
Josiah claimed Sheila held the gun with her left hand,
but investigators didn't believe it.
-We discovered that she was right-handed,
and she wasn't familiar with the weapon.
So for her to shoot herself with her left hand, first of all
was-- would' have been quite odd.
NARRATOR: The bullet had entered her left cheek
and traveled upward, lodging in her skull.
The medical examiner confirmed what Josiah had claimed,
that the gun was several inches away from Sheila's face
when it went off.
-This gunshot wound had gun powder stippling, stippling
being the unburned grains of powder that come out
the end of the barrel when the shot is fired,
indicating that the-- that the barrel was not in contact
with the skin and was probably several dent-- several inches
away from the skin when the shot was fired.
NARRATOR: But Dr. Start said this seldom,
if ever happens in a suicide.
-So physically it may be possible.
But when one considers all the circumstances surrounding
the case, certainly to a reasonable degree
of medical certainty, this case is
best classified as a homicide.
NARRATOR: Using a plastic gun, Dr. David Start
demonstrated the kind of wound he would expect from a suicide.
DAVID START, MD: Most are in the temple, intraoral in the mouth,
underneath the chin.
Occasionally, the center of the forehead.
Very unusual for other locations of the face.
NARRATOR: Assistant prosecutor Kellee Koncki
was convinced Josiah Ward murdered Sheila Williams.
But she knew his defense would argue it was suicide and point
to the gunshot residue on Sheila's hand as proof.
-It's a good defense, you know.
Especially when you have one gunshot wound and someone who's
saying that they are pregnant and they're a teenager.
I mean, all those things kind of point at,
well, maybe she killed herself.
NARRATOR: As a matter of routine,
crime scene technicians swabbed both Sheila
and Josiah's hands after the shooting.
Prosecutors sent those swabs to Skip Schwoeble, a nationally
recognized expert in gunshot residue analysis.
-When a gun is fired, the burn of the primer
escapes the firearm through any available opening
in the form of a cloud or a plume.
The vapors or gases solidify into tiny particles, which
are deposited on the hands, clothing,
and the immediate proximity of the firearm.
NARRATOR: Schwoeble used a scanning electron microscope
to analyze the particles on the swabs.
The bright particles are gunshot residue.
-Overall, the gunshot residue related particles
on Sheila Williams' hands was approximately five.
NARRATOR: This was significant.
But Schwoeble says a person firing
a gun would have much more residue on the hands.
The amount on Sheila's hands could
have come because she was near the gun.
Schwoeble next analyzed Josiah's hand swab.
-Josiah Ward denied handling the gun, shooting the gun.
Obviously if we find a large concentration of gunshot
residue or particles, it's going to show us
that he was in proximity to the shooting of a gun, or, in fact,
did shoot the gun.
NARRATOR: And that's exactly what Schwoeble found.
-Overall, the particle population on Mr. Ward's hands
was larger than the particle population
on Ms. Williams' hands.
-He was the one that actually handled the weapon
and discharged it during the commission of the crime.
NARRATOR: But Schwoeble found something on Sheila's hands
besides the gunshot residue, something
completely unexpected.
He found gold particles.
Lots of them.
-There were over 3,000 particles on one of the hand samples.
Several on the other hand, getting
close up to around 5,000 particles.
NARRATOR: Handling a gold watch might leave 100 gold particles,
so 5,000 particles was significant.
-We ran it by a lot of people and no one could pinpoint it.
We thought, well maybe it's something specific
to the gun or the ammo.
We just weren't sure.
NARRATOR: If the particles on Sheila's hands
were from the gun or ammunition, it would give weight
to the argument that Sheila pulled the trigger
and killed herself.
Needless to say, prosecutors and Josiah's lawyers
all wanted to know where they came from.
Skip Schwoeble wanted to know the origin of the thousands
of gold particles on Sheila Williams' hands.
Investigators naturally asked if she worked in a jewelry store
or wore expensive jewelry.
The answers were all no.
-He wanted to know from us where this could have come from.
You know, what did she do?
What was she wearing?
Anything else in the house, in the area that
could have left off these particles.
NARRATOR: Investigators were stumped
and were about to add this to their list
of unanswered questions when they looked again
at the photos of Josiah Ward taken
on the night of the ***.
-We realized the shirt Josiah Ward was wearing had
gold threading or gold embroidered into the shirt.
NARRATOR: Armed with a search warrant,
police found the shirt in Josiah's home
and sent it off to the lab.
Schwoeble compared the gold from the shirt
to that on Sheila's hands.
-You see an incredible amount of detail.
We're looking at the size, the shape, the morphology
or surface texture of the particle.
NARRATOR: The microscope magnified the particles
from Josiah's shirt 7,000 times.
And they were identical to the gold particles
on Sheila's hands.
-It showed us that Josiah had had physical contact with her
at the time of the ***, which he had flatly denied.
-I always like the saying, a picture's
worth a thousand words.
And I think in this case, it really was.
NARRATOR: Prosecutors think Josiah believed Sheila was
pregnant, since he had already given
her money for an abortion.
And on the night of the crime, Sheila
admitted she didn't use his money for that purpose.
-Have an abortion if I don't want one.
-Where's the money?
NARRATOR: Since he didn't want to support another child,
there was an argument that got physical.
Sheila's hair piece and bobby pins flew to the floor.
The gold on Sheila's hands from Josiah's shirt
proved there was a fight.
During the struggle, Josiah fired a single shot
from a foot or two away killing Sheila instantly.
Over the next few hours, Josiah tried to stage the scene
to make it appear to be a suicide.
He had to drop the gun on the same side
as Sheila's head wound, even know she was right-handed.
And by the time he dropped it, he did so into a pool of blood
from only a foot or two away.
Proof of yet another lie.
By the time police arrived, the condition of the blood
proved the deception.
Just hours before Josiah Ward's *** trial was to begin,
he confessed.
-He indicated that she initially consented
to getting the abortion, but then later indicated
that she did not want to go through with it.
Which probably increased the tension
that led to the initial confrontation
that led to her death.
-I certainly believe the forensic evidence was
a large part of why Josiah confessed to the crime,
and why he subsequently plead guilty without a trial.
NARRATOR: Josiah said he sincerely
believed Sheila was pregnant.
If he had known the truth that Sheila wasn't pregnant,
quite possibly, there wouldn't have been the altercation.
In August of 1999, Josiah Ward was sentenced to 25 years
in prison for second degree ***.
-Makes me feel better just knowing
that he didn't kill her and get away scot-free.
Because you watch the news all the time and you see it,
a lot of people, they-- you know,
I don't think they get what they deserve
and I was actually surprised.
-With this forensic evidence, this strong forensic evidence,
we got a confession and a conviction and a murderer
is in jail.