A St. Louis County judge has rejected an attempt to free a man who prosecutors now believe is innocent of a 1998 murder.
Circuit Judge Bruce Hilton on Thursday declined to throw out the conviction of Marcellus Williams, who was sentenced to death for the killing of Felicia Gayle. Without intervention from a higher state court, Gov. Mike Parson or the U.S. Supreme Court, Williams will be executed Sept. 24.
“There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent, and no court has made such a finding,” Hilton wrote in his opinion. “Williams is guilty of first-degree murder and has been sentenced to death.”
St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, whose office filed the motion to vacate the conviction in January, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Williams had always denied that he played any role in the stabbing death of Gayle, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. Although police would later find some of Gayle’s belongings in a car belonging to Williams, and he pawned a laptop of her husband’s, there was no forensic evidence like DNA, hair or fingerprints linking him to the scene.
Bell’s motion cited that lack of forensic evidence, questions about the two witnesses who linked Williams to the crime and the performance of Williams’ attorneys at trial. Williams had made similar arguments in state and federal appeals, all of which had been rejected.
Bell’s office also argued that DNA testing of the murder weapon would completely exclude Williams as the suspect. But just days before an initial evidentiary hearing, testing revealed that what was thought to be unknown male DNA on the knife was consistent with the profile of Edward Magee, an investigator in the prosecutor’s office at the time. Keith Larner, who tried the case at trial, also could not be excluded.
Bell’s office said this represented a “bad-faith failure to preserve evidence,” in violation of Williams’ rights. But Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office disagreed, saying that back in 2001, no one knew that simply touching an item could leave enough DNA to be tested.
Hilton rejected all those arguments, noting that all other courts had done the same.
Williams’ case marked the first time Bell had used a 2021 law that gave prosecutors a mechanism to correct what they saw as wrongful convictions. It was also the first time the process had been used for an inmate on death row.
The law says a judge must grant a motion to vacate if the court finds that there is “clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence or constitutional error at the original trial or plea that undermines the confidence in the judgment.”
Williams had twice avoided execution as he fought to prove his innocence.
The state Supreme Court first set Williams’ execution date for Jan. 28, 2015. But on Jan. 22, 2015, it granted a motion for a stay. It later appointed a special master to look into the DNA evidence on the murder weapon.
After rejecting Williams’ efforts to review that DNA evidence in 2017, the judges again set an execution date, this time for Aug. 22 of that year. Just hours before Williams was set to die, then-Gov. Eric Greitens issued a stay and appointed a Board of Inquiry to look into whether Williams deserved clemency.
The board held a closed hearing in 2018. One member told St. Louis Public Radio in 2022 that its members met for the last time on July 21, 2021, and made oral recommendations to Parson.
Parson dissolved the board on June 29, 2023, seemingly without taking action on those recommendations. Williams’ attorneys sued, arguing that Parson did not have the authority to take that step. The Supreme Court disagreed in a unanimous ruling issued June 4 and promptly set a third execution date — Sept. 24.
That ruling kicked the proceedings in Bell’s motion to vacate into gear. Hilton initially scheduled an evidentiary hearing for Aug. 21. That afternoon, prosecutors and attorneys for Williams announced they had reached a deal that would have seen him plead no contest to Gayle’s murder in exchange for a sentence of life in prison. Hilton accepted the offer at first but withdrew it after the Missouri Supreme Court halted it temporarily, leading to the hearing a week later.
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