[narrator] Single mom Wilda Gadd
has always put family first.
It was a perfect country life with all your family
right there around you.
[narrator] So when she finally meets a man
who shares her values, she's sure he's the one.
Being the way he was with my kids,
our whole relationship just kind of blossomed.
[narrator] But their marriage will be haunted
by the mystery surrounding his family.
There was a lot of rumors.
There's no way she would have walked off
and left that child.
Sam never showed up.
Never heard from him.
[Regina] Sam ain't never take no vacations.
Sam Thomas was really missing.
We've got a problem.
Both of them were murdered.
His body was found without his head.
Now they are also realizing that the kids are missing.
And it made me sick to my stomach.
[narrator] To stop a killing streak,
Wilda has to put her own life at risk.
My mom is the only living witness.
If he found out that she turned on him,
she'd have been as dead as the rest of 'em.
I grew up out in the country,
Chickamauga, Georgia, is about 10 miles outside
of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
It's a little small country town.
[narrator] From the youngest age,
family is everything to Wilda Gadd.
My grandfather owns several acres, so we grew up
with more family for neighbors than anything else.
And we were able to run the streets and woods
and fields without any harm to come to us.
Wilda is my sister.
We had a pretty much normal childhood
as far as getting out, playing and grandparents
down the street.
Wilda was very smart.
She still is.
Book smart.
Common sense smart.
Her whole dream in life was to be a doctor.
Shortly after I finished high school,
I actually went to college.
I was a pre-med major.
I let a high school sweetheart get in my way.
So I did drop out of college for a while, and I did join
the United States Air Force in '83.
Due to a heart condition I was shortly
discharged on medical.
I then married my first husband
on New Year's Day in '84.
Her whole life she wanted children.
They had a little boy, which was Bradley,
and they had a daughter.
I was actually born in Okinawa, Japan,
on Kadena Air Base.
And my dad was an MP with the Air Force.
Closer to the end of our stay there
my husband's mentality changed.
Our marriage ended in '88.
And around that time me and my kids
returned to Chickamauga.
When we did get back to Georgia,
we were all kind of hanging out at my grandparents house
and Sam was there.
Sam was mom's brother.
He's probably our favorite uncle.
[chuckles]
We always stood outside, peeking out to see
when Sam was like coming, you know, up the drive.
It was like Santa Claus coming.
[narrator] Sam Thomas had been at all the family
dinners with his wife, Betty, and stepson, Howard,
when Wilda and Regina were growing up.
About the time I was in middle school,
I learned that Sam and Betty had split up.
To me as a kid it was shocking to find out
that her and Howard were no longer
gonna be part of our family.
[narrator] And now it's like old times
when Howard returns to visit as an adult.
Wilda, she thought he was charming.
She... she thought he was handsome.
He seemed to be a fun-loving guy.
He was always laughing and cutting up.
[narrator] Like Wilda, Howard is navigating
the new challenges of being a single parent.
Howard had a child that he was taking care of by himself, Kelli.
She was four or five-years-old.
She was Howard's daughter by his first wife,
Debbie Winegar.
This is just what I know of the story.
Debbie ran off and left and abandoned the child.
You know, it was just a heartbreaking situation.
The love of his life just walked off and left him for no reason.
Don't know whether she's dead or alive.
And now he's got a child that he doesn't know
how to explain what's happened to her mom.
One of the things that really attracted me to Howard
was the fact he wanted to be a family man.
Howard was such a loving, kind, gentle person
and knowing that Sam helped raise him,
I think she felt safe.
[narrator] Wilda and her kids are about to head off
on a Disneyland vacation.
The timing couldn't be better.
Kelli was having such a good time with my kids
that I was approached by Howard and Sam
about maybe her going with me to Disney.
We took her with us.
Watching Kelli interact with my kids,
you wouldn't have known that they were not true brother and sister.
Once our visit was over at Disney, Howard's intentions
originally was to come out there and he was gonna take
Kelli back to Chattanooga with him.
But she kind of clung to me and got attached to me.
I wanted to take her and, you know,
kind of be that step-in for her as long as I could.
[narrator] The next step seems only logical to Howard and Wilda.
Join forces as two single parents
raising their children together.
All of us, Howard, Kelli, my kids,
we all moved in together.
And so me and Howard, you know,
we started more as friends.
I don't exactly remember the moment it became romantic.
We just kind of gravitated towards each other.
I knew with my uncle's, you know,
him helping upbringing that he was a decent guy,
it just kind of blossomed.
It was what I wanted.
They just seemed to bond real quickly.
It seemed to go real fast.
He was very cuddly, no matter where you were at.
You know, he made you feel loved and wanted.
It seemed like he was the perfect person
to fit in with the family, and wanted to be with that family.
[narrator] But there are those who would break this happy family up,
and they've got lawyers.
I was beginning to learn more about Howard's custody battle at the time.
The court battle started after Debbie disappeared.
Her sister and her mother filed for custody of Kelli.
Howard got Debbie pregnant when she was married to someone else.
So with Howard not having his name on Kelli's birth certificate,
he was not considered her legitimate father.
Their view was Howard was the bad guy.
Howard broke up the marriage.
The judge pretty much made the decision to remove Kelli
from Howard's custody without ever hearing Howard's side of the story.
Our whole family, you know, felt for Howard and felt
that he was being done wrong by the justice system in Bradley County.
[narrator] Wilda doesn't have the knowledge
or training to take on a court battle, at least not yet.
The law always interested me, so I returned
to junior college to study paralegal.
She was always smiling and happy and going along.
But there was a lot of rumors.
I had heard rumors that Howard had killed Debbie Winegar
and buried her in the basement.
And then I had heard other rumors that he had killed her and hauled her off,
because supposedly there's no way she would have walked off
and left that child.
So I don't know.
[narrator] The rumors had started
when Debbie Winegar went missing in the fall of '87,
just a few months before Wilda and Howard remet.
Debbie's family reported her missing all in 1987.
When they tried to talk with her
she was never available to talk.
You haven't talked to your sister in over a month
because she's been sick or headache
or couldn't come to the phone.
They got highly suspicious and that's when Howard
told them that she had left.
And so Debbie's family felt like he had done
something with her.
[Erica] He had filed to get divorced from Debbie,
and it was stayed hung up in court
because she was still considered a missing person
and he was listed as a person of interest.
I felt really bad for Howard because from the side
that I was hearing, he was totally in the right.
[narrator] After months of researching legal options,
Wilda and Howard are able to put the malicious rumors to rest
when Debbie supposedly shows up at Howard's lawyer's office.
His receptionist said the girl looked like Debbie,
brought the papers in here and says,
"Here, I've signed 'em. I want a divorce."
And there was also a document signed giving Howard custody of Kelli.
[narrator] It's hard to imagine a happier ending
to all Wilda's worries.
That sounded great to me.
Debbie's back, his supposedly dead ex-wife.
Here she is. She showed up.
She's alive. She's not dead.
[narrator] The fact is, it's only the beginning of Wilda's nightmare.
The worst is yet to come.
It's just sometimes just the gut feeling
you get about a person's sometimes not right.
It had become a mission in my mind to solve this case,
and I wish that I could have, because three people would still be alive today.
[narrator] Wilda Gadd and Howard Hawk Willis
are thrilled to learn that Howard's wife
has reappeared at Howard's lawyer's office
just long enough to serve divorce papers.
Debbie looks to be alive and well
despite all of her family's unproven accusations.
It was a relief.
Legal battles would be over.
[narrator] But Howard's lawyer is not so certain.
The lawyer asked about it because the signature
didn't match who they had on file.
The lawyer questioned it being true,
he made the comment that maybe someone had come in there
portraying to be Debbie.
He wasn't going to put a document that he was sure was falsified in court.
Of course, Howard denied knowing anything about it to the lawyer.
I asked Howard what he knew.
Finally, Howard admitted he had someone dress up
like Debbie and take the divorce papers
to Willis Jackson's office.
Someone he knew in Oklahoma who matched
her description, who was willing to go
in there and portray to be Debbie
so he could get his divorce without any more issues.
Knowing that he was willing to have someone
impersonate his ex-wife kind of was off-nerving.
It kind of throws up red flags.
But, you know, he smooths it out.
He was so charming and smooth-talking.
You didn't wanna think he was wrong.
I really wanted to believe that Howard was a 100 percent truthful.
[narrator] Once Howard is caught in one lie,
everything starts unraveling.
After Debbie went missing two years earlier,
custody of her and Howard's daughter had been granted
to Debbie's family, not to Howard.
I honestly didn't know that Howard had lost custody,
but apparently he didn't have custody
and he was wanted for kidnapping.
I learned Howard was arrested for federal kidnapping,
actually on the news.
[narrator] Wilda and Sam come to Howard's rescue.
He walked in courtroom.
We signed bond papers and walked back out.
But in the meantime, Kelli was placed in the custody of her aunt, Gertrude Clark.
At the time I didn't realize a grandmother and an aunt
would wanna take the child away from her only parent that she knew.
It was horrifying.
Kelli is in Virginia, away from the one person
that was her solid support for all the years.
[narrator] It's the beginning of a long, dark chapter
for Howard and Wilda.
But during that time, they do get a little good news.
[Wilda] Finally, Howard was granted a divorce from Debbie
on unreconciled differences and abandonment.
[narrator] Howard is once again an eligible bachelor.
[Wilda] We just, on the spur of the moment,
walked into a judge's chamber and got married.
You can really see what Wilda saw in him.
A charming, handsome man who loves children.
He loved her. He was good to her.
We went out and had a nice dinner.
We spent one night away and then we returned home.
Being husband and wife, it kind of gave me some relief
knowing that, you know, we still had had our relationship
no matter what happened.
[narrator] There is still one downside to Wilda's married life,
and that's Howard's mother, Betty, who takes a strong dislike
to her new daughter-in-law because she is the niece of her ex-husband, Sam.
Betty, his mother, always hated me.
She didn't want me around.
So there was always a conflict of struggle there.
Betty Willis did threaten her daughter-in-law, Wilda, several times.
She threatened to shoot her with a long gun at some point.
She definitely threatened to cut her up into pieces.
We like to call her crazy, but she was evil.
It's not just me.
She was against Howard being involved with anybody
other than doing what she wanted
when she wanted to.
[narrator] Wilda and Howard never stopped their fight to win Kelli back.
And finally, Wilda's ongoing law studies pay off,
when she files charges against the judge in Howard's custody case.
The judge admitted to having ex parte hearings,
which means he was meeting one on one
with a lawyer, not with the whole group of lawyers, and making decisions.
And they forced him to refuse himself from Howard's case.
[narrator] And after two long years of legal battles,
a DNA test yields a breakthrough.
It proves with 99 percent certainty
Howard is Kelli's natural father.
[Wilda] So Howard was able to regain custody of Kelli
because we were able to get him recognized as her father.
That was one of the best victories we honestly had against Bradley County Courts.
By then the kids were almost middle school.
We were given custody of Kelli the first part of December,
and we drove to Virginia to pick her up
on Christmas Eve and bring her home.
Sam was with us.
It made for a great Christmas.
That was like a dream come true.
I finally had my happy ever after.
After we got custody of Kelli, we decided that we wanted to build our own house.
We didn't pick a plan out of a book and hand it to a contractor and say, "do it".
The house we built was 100 percent built out of love.
[narrator] But now they have to pay for the mortgage.
Howard had been a long haul truck driver
prior to us getting together years back,
so he decided the best way,
you know, to make money, he was wanting to drive an 18 wheeler.
So Sam and me went in halves and bought an 18 wheeler.
We titled it SH&W Trucking, Sam, Howard and Wilda.
We had an operating authority,
which meant I could book our loads.
I would reach out to different companies to see
if they had loads in our area.
I did that for several years and then Howard come across
a guy in Brownsville, Texas.
Howard started letting this guy book his loads
to and from wherever he chose to go.
He was making regular trips from Mexico to New York,
hauling citrus.
When Howard started doing long hauls all the time,
wanting to be gone more than he was home, things changed.
Family wasn't as important to him as him going
and making money or doing whatever he was doing.
[narrator] In fact, Howard's plans for a nest egg
are about to explode spectacularly.
When the police first called me and told me
that they had found our truck, it has been abandoned
on a side road, it's been here overnight.
And they said, "Who was driving?"
I said, "Howard Willis. He's my husband. Where is he?"
And they said, "The truck's been sitting here.
We've not seen anybody."
And they wanted to know if I knew where he was.
So I'm in shock not knowing what's going on.
I have no way of calling Howard,
because cell phones then were limited
and they questioned me.
I really feel they were trying to see if I knew what was in the truck.
My first thing is, is what happened to my husband?
"Where's my truck?
And where is Howard?"
[narrator] Police in New York State
have found SH&W's 18 wheeler apparently abandoned
with Howard's whereabouts unknown.
Howard calls me and he tells me he's at a motel
and I ask him where the truck is.
"They took it to unload it.
I'm waiting on him to bring it back."
I called him out and I said,
"No, the police have your truck."
And so he starts kind of backpedaling
like, "the guy picked the truck up,
he was supposed to be bringing it back.
It should be here any minute.
There's no way."
So between the police calling and Howard calling,
I'm kind of in limbo of who am I believing.
Finally, the police asked me if they could search my truck.
"Of course you can search my truck."
[narrator] All Wilda thinks they'll find is citrus fruits,
but that's not the case.
Howard hauled approximately 700 kilos of cocaine
into the state of New York.
That really blew my mind.
I was shocked because that's not something
I would have ever thought he would have done.
Why on earth would you put everything we had at risk
for a drug charge?
[narrator] Knowing he has no option,
Howard turns himself in.
And he's charged with one of the largest
pure cocaine hauls into the United States.
Once we found out there were drugs on the truck,
Sam had a hard time believing that Howard didn't know it.
"What do you doing hauling drugs.
What did you get involved in?
You're totally against drugs,
but yet you're gonna haul cocaine in to the United States
that even your own kids could get a hold of."
But Howard's able to convince everybody
that he wasn't really a part of it and he don't know what happened.
And in all honesty, to think back, he never gave us a satisfactory answer.
[narrator] Wilda is livid about Howard's situation,
but her mother-in-law is even angrier,
and she blames Wilda for Howard's arrest.
Betty starts sending death threats to us, start talking
about how I'd be shot long range
and I'd be chopped up in little pieces the way you couldn't identify me.
So between the drug charges and Betty threatening us,
you know, it's a lot.
New York DEA offered a closed deal if he testified
and gave names of where the cocaine came from,
that he would just receive parole.
"You give us the information, you get 20 years probation and walk."
Howard turned on a gentleman named Kenneth Adams.
Supposedly, he's the one that actually arranged
the deal with Howard to haul the drugs.
I believe Sam had the bond posted for him.
I think the bond was 200,000.
Sam believed in Howard.
No matter what Howard did wrong,
Sam always looked for the best in Howard.
Sam thought Howard was a good son, but he wasn't.
He may have been a good son to his mother.
That's another story.
After Howard posts bail and comes home,
he realizes his world is kind of closing in on him.
So now the truck is gone.
Howard's home at the time.
I'm the only one working.
It's wearing on me because I'm doing it all.
We're still acting husband and wife to an extent,
but there's a great distance between us.
Things really went sour between my mom and Howard
when Kelli started going a little teenage crazy.
I know that Wilda had a lot of struggles with her,
and I don't think Howard backed Wilda.
[narrator] In fact, Howard is openly defiant of Wilda
and starts acting like a teenager himself.
Wilda arrives home from work to discove a surprising scene.
I start coming home with kids in my family room
and in my dining room.
Boys and girls, sleeping bags, blankets, beds,
whatever, you know, just wall to wall with kids.
Howard's story was, "I'm trying to get along with Kelli.
She's a teenager and I'm trying to let her
have some space and have her friends over."
I questioned him about it and Howard admitted
the kids were drinking.
It was very hurtful because that was against everything we believed.
I said, "That's not appropriate.
This doesn't happen again."
New Year's Eve, I got off at midnight.
My two children, they told me Howard and Kelli
went out with some of Kelli's friends.
So Howard tells me that him and the kids
were out later than they meant to, and they had got a room.
And so he decided to stay in the motel with, I think
there was eight teenagers at least.
I wondered if there was more of a sexual relationship
with some of the teenage girls.
It's not normal.
And it really... And that's what broke... that's what broke my marriage.
The only choice I can make was for me and Howard
to split up, and me to protect what I had the most, my kids.
Wilda gets an apartment and she works
and takes care of her kids.
[Wilda] I walked away from the house 'cause I knew
I couldn't afford the mortgage by myself at that point.
And I do know that she cried a lot.
It really broke her heart.
[Wilda] Once I moved out of the house,
most of his group moved into the house
and was staying there.
[narrator] But Howard is not working and can't make the mortgage payments.
He and the teens are essentially squatters intent on partying.
It's like he had to be a 16-year-old himself
and fit with the 16-year-olds.
Kelli had mentioned that her daddy was the one buying the beer.
He was the one buying the drugs,
and he was letting 'em use it.
He said he would rather then use it at home
than be on the streets.
Eventually, the bank had foreclosed on the house,
so he was forced to move out of the house we had built.
Him and the kids all moved to a house in Roseville
late July, 1st of August.
So he's living up there with them.
He was getting money somehow to pay for their place.
I'm assuming Betty was paying for it.
In August of 2002, Howard called me.
He's... "I'm just leaving the wedding chapel.
Kelli got married, and Adam and Samantha got married."
And I'm like, "uh..."
[narrator] Adam Chrismer and Samantha Leming Chrismer
and Kelli's new husband, Brandon,
are all 16 and 17-year-olds.
A grown man taking two teenaged couples to get married.
Why? Why would he do that?
I don't know whether he was trying to keep 'em under his thumb.
That's the only thing I can think of.
It was a way to keep 'em close.
It did appear that Howard controlled these kids.
When Howard and me first split up,
Sam kind of faded a little bit out of our life
because he thought it was all me.
But Sam didn't realize that it was actually Howard
encouraging this and it was going on.
But Sam himself actually went to the house one day and saw
for himself the house was piled up
with a bunch of teenagers and Howard.
Sam very much voiced his opinion to Howard
that he did not approve of it.
[narrator] This is when Sam finally washes his hands
of the stepson he had once doted on.
Sam started coming back around and he had pretty much washed
his hands of Howard.
Sam was hurt.
Kelli was Sam's really first grandchild.
Kelli meant everything to him, and he, you know,
always felt Howard would do right.
Howard and me divorced July of 2002.
It's about me and my kids now.
And them having the relationship with Sam
that they still deserve, 'cause that is their grandfather.
Sam was very important.
I mean, he was there through a lot of things that went on with my grandparents.
And then when Howard started having issues,
he was there for Howard.
And then when Howard and me split up,
he was still there for me and my kids until one day he wasn't.
In September, my mom was having to have surgery.
So Sam was gonna come down and help take care of the cattle.
He never showed up.
Never heard from him.
And that's not Sam.
He was always very prompt.
If he called and said, "I'm gonna be there at 9:00,"
he's gonna be there at 9:00.
Big red flag.
Yeah, big red flag. Something wasn't right.
We called periodically on that day
trying to reach him.
"Hey, give me a call back."
So by Monday, after not hearing
from him for several days, I decided to drive up there.
Howard said he would go with me.
It scared me.
That was the first time I had honestly been
scared to death of what else I was gonna learn.
[narrator] And what Wilda is about to learn
will change her life forever.
Something happened in that house.
She was crying, just hysterical crying.
And we were like, "Why would he do that?"
He's not capable of doing that.
There's no way.
[narrator] Wilda Gadd is concerned
when her Uncle Sam Thomas stops answering his phone.
Although Wilda and Howard are still estranged,
she asks him to come with her to check on Sam.
[Wilda] We walk around the outside of the house.
The house is locked.
You know, tried to look in the windows.
My mom and my uncle, we had all talked
and they said, "Whatever you have to do, enter the house."
So I use a credit card and enter the house.
They found some pamphlets where he had been looking
about taking a trip, it looked like.
And then Howard says, "Oh, I forgot to tell you.
Sam told me a... you know,
the first of the month he was gonna buy
a camper and he was gonna be out of town a while."
Well, Sam ain't never take no trips.
The only thing he did was drive a truck.
He wasn't taking no trip vacations.
So I believe those were posed.
The overnight bag he always carried, we didn't see it.
It was gone.
We saw his medicine in the cabinet.
He had some high blood pressure
and his carotid arteries were partially blocked.
So that didn't make sense because Sam took care of himself.
So even though the truck's gone, we're still concerned.
You know, maybe something's happened.
My mom and my uncle drove to Bradley County
and filed a missing person.
And Bradley County told 'em he was 73-year-old.
He could go and come as he pleases.
Bradley County didn't take us seriously.
We were going on a second week and no contact.
And that's definitely not Sam.
[narrator] Now, with more family and Sam's friends from church,
Wilda mounts an intensive search.
We walked my uncle's farmland.
We weren't even five feet apart, we walked it.
We searched the chicken houses.
There were some small like grain silos.
I mean, if we could move it, we moved it
and turned it upside down.
We searched the house again.
Where then we found his overnight bag had been stuffed under stuff.
So what he normally carried that we thought was gone is there.
One of his church members says
"Hey, that's the wrong chair.
That chair belongs there. There's a chair missing."
The chair that was in the house,
Sam's had it sitting in a certain spot,
and you could see the marks on the carpet, you know, where he had it at.
And when we moved it back there was a stain on the floor,
like, a big stain.
Like a blood stain.
[Wilda] We found a really good picture of Sam
and I had fliers made up to put on cars
or in buildings to look for Sam ourselves.
We have hundreds of fliers made.
Going to restaurants, going to stores.
We're just basically hoping each day
that we'd hear something.
Wilda decides she's gonna call a psychic in.
Well, I don't believe in psychics. Never have.
[chuckles]
But he comes in and he tells her that,
"Sam is hunting for his arms."
He says he can't find his arms.
Sam's truck's missing.
I have a cousin that starts getting on the phone, too.
She locates Sam's truck at Chattanooga airport.
[narrator] But none of the airlines have any record
of a Sam Thomas flying anywhere.
So the brochures were in the house
and the truck was left at the Chattanooga airport.
We figured that was like a decoy.
One of the family members talked
to the parking lot guard and he said,
"Yeah, I remember when that truck come in."
He said, "A gentleman drove the truck in and he got
in a blue Jeep with two kids and they drove back out."
[narrator] More worried than ever,
Sam's brother decides to follow the money.
My uncle managed to get a hold of credit card statements
which showed his credit card being used at midnight on the fifth.
My uncle contacted the local Walmart and somehow
my uncle managed to review the tapes.
[narrator] And what they find is devastating
in its implications.
They showed Howard and Adam Chrismer
using my uncle's credit cards.
[narrator] 17-year-old Adam Chrismer,
one of Howard's entourage, the one who recently married
his 16-year-old girlfriend, Samantha.
Finally, the police were in it enough between the tapes
and the truck that they were ready to talk to Howard.
The Bradley County sheriff called him in for an interview on October 4th.
[narrator] Howard promises to come in and meet.
He did not show up on October 4th.
At the last minute, he called and asked
for the interview to be moved to October 8th.
And in between October 4th and October 8th,
a lot of terrible things happened.
A few days later, I get a letter in the mail saying
that, "Adam..." I can't remember,
there were several names in the letter.
"We're setting Howard up for murder."
And the letter was from Samantha Chrismer.
[narrator] Wilda turns the letter over to the police.
And now they take an active interest in Sam's disappearance.
And they wanted to talk to Adam and Samantha both,
because it was enough then to know something was wrong.
[narrator] They can't find Samantha or Adam,
but they do find Howard.
He does eventually come in to the sheriff's office
for the October 8th interview, and he's held.
Howard was being arraigned on federal charges
'cause they was caught using Sam's credit cards.
So that was a violation of his parole.
Now he is stuck in jail and about to make a bunch of mistakes.
[narrator] Howard is allowed phone calls,
which the authorities monitor.
One of the calls is to his mother, Betty.
Betty Willis is talking to him and they're trying
to use code words and he's saying, you know,
you need to move that furniture.
She mentions a storage unit.
She can't even fully get the sentence out.
And he was like, "Shut up." But she said just enough
that the police caught it.
And they were like, "Oh."
So the police started calling around different storage units,
and they found that Betty Willis had rented
a unit in Johnson City, Tennessee.
Basically, they could tell from the outside of the storage unit
that it was really bad.
There is the smell of death.
[narrator] The Johnson City Sheriff's Office have found
human remains in Betty Willis's storage locker
but news of their discovery has been kept from the media.
Betty doesn't know. Howard doesn't know.
And Wilda doesn't know a thing.
The Johnson City Police Department pretty much
told me I had to come up there and talk to them
if I wanted not to be associated or involved
in what was going on.
[narrator] The detectives are undecided
as to whether Wilda is a possible witness
or a suspect, so they tell her as little as possible.
They said, "We need you to do us a favor."
They fixed it where I can go in the jail to see Howard.
Wilda agreed to wear a wire, to go visit Howard in jail.
[narrator] When Wilda tells Howard she's coming,
he has a surprising request.
He said, "I need you to bring a tape recorder,
a notepad and a pencil."
He actually requested himself being taped.
I think he figured he could tell me he needed certain things done
and I would have a tape recording of it,
and that way I could follow exactly what he wanted done
without missing a step.
[narrator] Howard is unaware that Wilda is cooperating with the police.
So they wired me up.
We go over to the jail.
I have the wire on.
The tape recorder that Howard asked me to bring was turned on.
They brought Howard in, and as soon as he hits the door,
he says, "You're too late."
He said, "I blew their brains out."
And I said, "What do you mean?"
He said, "I blew their brains out."
And it's not making sense.
[narrator] The detectives know exactly who Howard is talking about
because of what they discovered inside Betty's storage locker.
[man speaking]
They found 250 gallon storage containers inside
where the bodies of Adam and Samantha Chrismer.
[woman speaking]
Adam had been dismembered.
[woman speaking]
His head was missing. His hands were missing.
[Wilda] He proceeds to tell me that he shot the kids.
-[officer speaking] -[Howard speaking]
And that he dismembered Adam, because that's what Adam did to Sam.
[officer speaking]
[Howard speaking]
[officer speaking]
[Howard speaking]
He said, "I know the family would want me to do the same thing to them
as they did to Sam."
[narrator] Detectives know about Adam and Samantha.
They've not seen any proof Uncle Sam is dead.
Wilda wants to believe he is still alive,
but has a sick feeling that he's not.
And so I ask him then to give me details, you know,
where I can find Sam's body.
And he gives me four or five locations.
But, you know, Howard keeps talking about,
"Don't worry about Sam.
Y'all gotta help me."
They arrested him just minutes later.
The police department asked me to make one more phone call that night.
We went to a payphone across from the jail
and we called Howard's aunt, Marie Holmes and Betty.
They said, you know... you know, "Let them know what happened."
So I tell Marie and Betty that Howard told me that he killed the kids.
And the first words out of Marie and Betty is "destroy the tape."
Within minutes Betty and Marie were arrested
for asking me to tamper with evidence.
I continued to see Howard many times
because I wanted to know where to find Sam.
Howard was still talking to me, even though he knew
that his confession to me got him arrested.
Finally he told me to go back down the road
from the fire department,
that there would be mobile homes sitting up
way off the road with a carport.
Within less than 30 minutes, they had found Sam's body.
I called my family so that we could all meet
and I could tell them that my uncle was gone...
because we still hoped he was alive.
She told us all that Howard had killed Sam.
We couldn't even shed a tear.
We would just... You know, there's no way.
They've got this messed up.
There is no way we... Howard was out there searching with us.
Why would he do that?
[narrator] After almost a decade of delays,
Howard goes to trial for the murders of Adam and Samantha Chrismer,
the first of his victims to be located.
They played the tape recording that I had made in the jail
that night, and within less than two days they came back with a guilty verdict.
[man] We, the jury, find the defendant, Howard Hawk Willis
guilty of first degree murder.
And he was given a death sentence on both kids.
[narrator] Howard's death sentence for killing Adam and Samantha
means Sam's murder case will probably never go to trial.
As for Howard's first wife, Debbie,
hers is still officially a missing person's case.
I just couldn't help but think that if we could have brought
him to justice earlier, got the investigation concluded on Debbie,
three people probably alive today,
but it never got solved.
And so these people had to suffer, too.
[Wilda] I think Betty should have been convicted of murder right alongside Howard.
[narrator] Betty and her sister Marie both die
before they can be tried for their involvement,
that is, if Betty died.
You know, there was rumors Betty had passed away
in a motel in Oklahoma.
I honestly don't believe that Betty died.
She had a lot of police friends
and things like that that would help her.
Nobody seemed to see her in a casket.
Nobody's seen her dead.
Nobody.
It has been quite a journey to a world I never dreamed I'd be involved in.
I really shared my story because there's gotta be more people
that probably are living the same life I lived.
That does not hide all the signs they see,
because you really don't wanna think the person
that you built a life with, that's parent to your kids
or that you're... you're in love with,
could ever do so much behind your back.
Because the bottom line is, no matter how well you know them,
you don't know who they are.
I couldn't let Howard destroy my life totally,
because, you know, if I did, he won.
Once Howard was convicted and sentenced,
then it kind of gave me permission to move on with my life.
I did marry again, and I love my husband to death today.
Yeah, I still deal with the aftereffects
of what Howard did and the aftereffects
of still not knowing the truth about Sam.
But I can't dwell on the past. I've gotta move on.
I've got a family. I've got grandkids.
So now we get to support our grandkids together.
And that's what my life is about now.