Willis is sitting in a New York City jail cell, guarded around the clock by federal marshals. It’s a long way from Lookout Mountain, a long way from the hills of Tennessee and Georgia. But federal and local authorities say they are convinced that the road between the Willises’ rundown home and this jail cell is direct and fast, with stories of drug smuggling and murder – one, two, three, possibly as many as four – set like mile-markers along the way. Authorities say Willis recruited his family – his aged mother and his aunt -- to help him dispose of the bodies and the evidence. It is, said Joe Crumley, the attorney general in Washington County, Tenn., “one of the most brutal murders I’ve been involved in.”

The story begins, according to federal prosecutors, with a chance encounter at a New Jersey truck stop.

Willis, now 51, had never really amounted to much, authorities say. He had never been particularly successful in business or in life. His first marriage had ended badly – his wife had left him. At least that’s what he had always said. His second marriage wasn’t faring much better.

The endless days he spent on the road as an owner-operator of long-haul trucks might have been one factor in his tumultuous home life, authorities speculate. Another might have been his taste for younger women. Although authorities don’t know for certain, they believe that Willis might have been searching for someone who could help him locate a willing young woman to provide him with late-night companionship when he first crossed paths in the spring of 1999 with Kenneth Hart Adams.

Adams, according to those who know him, was one of a breed of men who haunt the shadowy corners at the edge of truck stops, procurers who earn their living by providing itinerant truckers with the kind of goods and services you can’t buy over the counter at Truck Stops of America. Sometimes they provide drugs to keep the truckers alert – or at least conscious – during their long hours on the road. Sometimes they provide girls. And sometimes they provide truckers with connections to people who can add a little more fat to the 30 cents a mile truckers earn carrying legitimate goods.

According to a federal indictment filed in the U.S. Court for the Eastern District in Brooklyn, N.Y., Adams and Willis had fallen in together and Adams offered to broker a deal that would earn Willis a small fortune. A few months later they met again and the deal was sealed. All Willis had to do was drive his rig to south Texas to pick up a load of limes – a cover for more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine – drive it to a loading dock in a remote corner of Brooklyn and leave it there.

In exchange, Adams’ connection -- a mysterious man known only as “Jake” -- would pay Willis $90,000. As a sign of good faith, Adams gave Willis $20,000 up front.

On October 16, 1999, Willis did as he had been told. Two days later, he arrived at the pre-arranged meeting spot in Brooklyn. But, Willis would later tell authorities, his contact failed to show up. He called the number Adams had given him, but there was no answer. For three days, Willis slept in his truck with 786 kilos of cocaine and several tons of citrus fruit for company. At long last, on October 21, Willis’ cellphone rang.

The voice on the other end of the line told him to drive his rig to the New Jersey Turnpike, to the Vince Lombardi Service Area, an island in the swamps just west of New York, which over the years, has earned notoriety among truckers and cops as a Barbary Coast for road pirates.

A contact met him there, took the keys to the truck and then put him up in a local trucker’s motel. Willis had been told that someone would call him the next day. But the call never came. It would never come.

In one of those absurdly prosaic missteps that so often lead to major drug busts, Willis’ contact had gotten careless. He had absent-mindedly parked the truckload of cocaine a little too close to someone else’s loading dock at a Bronx warehouse. The warehouse owners complained to the police, and the police, realizing that there might be more to the scene than met the eye, contacted the New York City Drug Task Force.

While Willis was pacing back and forth in a Meadowlands motel, detectives from the task force had already traced the truck to him and were on the phone with his wife, Wilda.

All Wilda knew was that Howard had been carrying limes, and when the detectives told her that they’d found the truck but not her husband, her first concern was the welfare of the citrus fruit. She was afraid that, locked in that container for days on end, the fruit would spoil, authorities later said, and rather than risk that, she gave the authorities permission to open the truck.

There is, in the federal documents, no official record of the conversation Willis had with his wife after she had given the authorities permission to search Willis’ trailer containing 27 pallets of packed limes and 656 bricks of cocaine.

With characteristic understatement, the indictment says only “on or about October 23, 1999, having spoken to his wife and after learning that she had been contacted by members of the Task Force, the defendant took a train back to his home.”

It was a short visit home. Three days later, Willis stepped off a plane in Newark Airport into the arms of waiting detectives. He had already made up his mind. He wasn’t going to take the fall for this alone. Hell, he wasn’t going to take the fall for it at all if he could help it.

He was ready to cut a deal. He would tell the feds anything they wanted to know. He would become their chief witness against Adams and he would plead guilty to conspiracy charges. In exchange the feds would grant him two things. The first was a promise that they would go easy on him and not seek to send him away for life. The second was that they would grant him bail.

Kenneth Hart Adams’ attorney had tried to talk the feds out of it. Howard Hawk Willis, he argued in court, was not the kind of man you wanted to base an entire federal case on. After all, Donald DuBoulay told the court, there were those nagging questions about the disappearance of his first wife. He had told people that she had gone out one day with $900, saying she wanted to buy groceries and never came back. No one ever heard from her again. The jury, DuBoulay said, should hear about that.

“If foul play was reasonably suspected in his wife’s disappearance, this is a matter of legitimate inquiry into the credibility of the witness,” DuBoulay said.

In the end, it didn’t matter. Willis never got to testify. On the first day of his trial, in April 2002, Adams pleaded guilty. District Court Judge Marilyn Go released Willis – a confessed drug smuggler and suspected wife killer – on $200,000 bond. He gave the judge his word that he would report regularly to federal authorities back home and that he would return to New York in the fall for sentencing.

Of course, authorities now say, Willis had no intention of keeping his word.

The way he had it planned, authorities say, before the ice settled on the streams in the mountains, Willis would be long gone.