By  Seamus McGraw   

March 10, 2006

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MONROE, N.C. (Crime Library) — He was, by all accounts, the most unassuming of men, a 42-year-old highway worker from North Carolina with no criminal record who lived in a mobile home virtually in his mother's back yard.

He was also, police say, a serial killer, who kidnapped and murdered three women over a nine-year period, including Sharon Tucker Stone, whose mutilated and beheaded body was found in a pile of trash last month on a South Carolina roadside.

Authorities arrested Scott Wilson Williams Thursday afternoon at his Union County, N.C., home after a lengthy interrogation. He was charged with three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Stone, as well as the 1997 slaying of Sharon Pressley and the killing in 2004 of Christy Parker. The bodies of Pressley and Parker were found close together in a remote area of Union County just a few miles from Williams' home. Stone was found some 25 miles away in South Carolina, prompting authorities to speculate that the killer may have changed his pattern to avoid detection. Sheriff's officers have said that all three women lived and worked on the streets and that all had been in minor scrapes with the law. All three were mutilated, authorities have said.

Though the Pressley and Parker cases had remained open, authorities had not formally linked them until Stone's body was discovered last month, leading authorities to suspect that a serial killer might have been at work, preying on women who lived on the margins of southern society.

The first break in the case came several days ago when a tipster told investigators that Williams had been involved with Stone. "I wouldn't say it was a relationship," Union County sheriff's spokesman Brett Vines said. "Let's just say there was contact."

As authorities probed deeper, they found a second woman, whose name is being withheld, who told police that Williams had sexually assaulted her, though she had not referred the matter to police.

Investigators confronted Williams at his home, a trailer parked on the same piece of property his mother owns and where the 42-year-old had spent his entire life.

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Contact Seamus McGraw at seamusm@ptd.net

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