Did police refuse to investigate a serial rapist? Inside the case rocking a Tennessee city

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. — Mikayla Evans doesn’t remember the events before she fell 68 feet from the window of a Johnson City condo on the night of Sept. 19, 2020.

She tumbled five stories, landing on her feet. The impact shattered her legs and pelvis, and broke all of her fingers and toes. Her punctured lung made a high-pitched wheezing sound as she lay on the ground.

“They told me if I lived I’d be paralyzed for the rest of my life,” said Evans, 35. “But I proved them wrong.”

Over the past three years, Evans, a single mom from Kingsport in East Tennessee, has fought to rebuild her life and body, often in agonizing pain.

She spent weeks in the hospital and struggled to learn how to walk again through multiple surgeries and physical therapy. She now walks with a cane, but pain is a constant battle.

It’s not her only battle.

An escape from custody and allegations of police corruption in Johnson City

Evans is fighting to have her voice heard in the case of an alleged serial rapist that has rocked Johnson City with allegations of police corruption, two federal lawsuits and a scathing audit that exposed systemic failures in the way police investigated sexual assaults.

The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network, conducted interviews and reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents and police affidavits for the details of this story.

The suspect, Sean Williams, 52, is accused of drugging and sexually assaulting more than 50 unconscious women in incidents he allegedly captured in photos and videos. He’s also accused of sexually assaulting two children, including a baby under 2 years old.

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On Oct. 18, Williams escaped from custody by smashing out the back window of a police transport van as guards were shuffling him to a federal court appearance in Greeneville on child rape charges.

He remains a fugitive on the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s “Most Wanted” list.

Two lawsuits with allegations of failure to investigate

As the manhunt continues, Johnson City is facing a whirlwind of allegations in lawsuits.

One is a whistle-blower suit from a former federal prosecutor who alleges that police ignored her repeated pleas to investigate and arrest Williams and then fired her after she complained to others outside of the department.

A second lawsuit comes from nearly a dozen Jane Does who allege that police knowingly failed to investigate multiple complaints from victims and dissuaded them from pursuing criminal charges as Williams went on to commit more crimes.

“For years, Sean Williams drugged and raped women in Johnson City, Tennessee, and for years, officers of the Johnson City Police Department let him get away with it,” the suit begins.

Evans believes she was drugged by Williams before she plummeted from the window of his fifth-floor condo, but with little evidence, her case was deemed accidental.

Still, her bone-shattering fall that night was the catalyst for the investigation into Williams, and Evans wants her voice to be heard.

She fears that Williams could come after her and her family, but it doesn’t stop her from speaking out.

“I feel like God brought me back to help bring at least one monster to justice,” she said.

The party man of Johnson City

Just west of the Blue Ridge Mountains in East Tennessee, Johnson City, a town of about 70,000, appears on a number of lists for best places to live and visit. But it also has its share of crime in a region hard hit by the opioid epidemic.

Most everyone who hung out in the small downtown core knew of Sean Williams.

A popular entrepreneur who owned a glass and concrete business, he was also a convicted felon known to law enforcement as an alleged cocaine dealer.

With a garage full of sports cars and ample amounts of cash and cocaine, acquaintances said he enjoyed rockstar status in town.

He was known for frequenting the bars and restaurants and inviting people up to his condo for late-night parties fueled with drugs and alcohol.

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As one Jane Doe said in her lawsuit, it was the “cool thing” to be invited to a party at Williams’s place.

But according to lawsuits, Johnson City police since around 2018 have been aware of multiple women who had reported that Williams had drugged and sexually assaulted them in his condo.

On the night Evans fell from the window in 2020, she said she was with a male friend at a bar in town when she met Williams for the first time. Evans and her friend agreed to go up to Williams’s place for a drink, and it’s the last thing she remembers.

Suspicious of the fall, police investigated the case as a possible attempted homicide and seized electronic devices and surveillance video from Williams's condo.

They also took a safe containing firearm ammunition and recovered a handwritten list on Williams’s nightstand, according to a search affidavit.

At the top of the list was the word “Raped,” followed by the first names of 21 females, plus another listed as “no name girl.”

A U.S. prosecutor's lawsuit against Johnson City

Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Kateri Dahl was on contract in Johnson City to prosecute gun and drug crimes when a detective brought her a case against Williams for an illegal ammunition charge, nearly two months after police found the ammunition in his safe.

Williams as a convicted felon was prohibited from having ammunition. Dahl thought it was unusual for police to present the case since the charge brought minimal prison time, but she pursued it.

What she uncovered was much worse.

In her lawsuit against the city, Dahl said she found evidence that Williams was not only dealing drugs but had been credibly accused of sexually assaulting multiple women.

As she dug deeper, Dahl discovered that Williams had a pattern — he would meet young women and bring them up to his condo, where they would pass out and later awaken to find that he had sexually assaulted them.

Dahl urged police to investigate. Instead, she said, she met roadblocks and a department culture that doubted the credibility of rape victims.

Dahl in her lawsuit said then-Police Chief Karl Turner questioned the handwritten “Raped” list found on Williams’s nightstand, wondering if it was simply “girls he’s had consensual sex with and calls it whatever he calls it.”

At one point, a detective quipped: “In my 20 years on the force, I’ve only encountered one real rape,” while another said about a Jane Doe: “You can see her in the security footage, and she’s dressed like a real ... well I won’t say it,” according to the suit.

As Dahl grew more concerned about the department’s failure to investigate, she said officers dismissed her as being “obsessed.”

She said one investigator told her that if she was so invested in pursuing the case, she should go have a drink at a local bar that Williams frequents and let him pick her up and take her back to his place.

“We’ll come get you in an hour,” he joked.

Around this time, two more Jane Does came forward accusing Williams of sexual assault.

Eventually, Dahl in April 2021 was able to obtain a federal arrest warrant for Williams for being a felon in possession of ammunition. She said she spent the next several weeks urging police to arrest Williams about 30 times but was given various excuses.

About a month later in early May, officers went to serve the federal arrest warrant for Williams at his home, but they left when nobody answered the door.

In calls he made to 911, Williams can be heard demanding to know why police are standing outside his door and giving conflicting answers as to whether he’s home. He fled soon after.

The city in its response in court documents said a supervisor told the officers to leave when they couldn’t verify that Williams was home.

After the failed arrest, Dahl said she wondered whether the department’s actions “went beyond plain incompetence and into deliberate conspiracy to protect Williams.”

Her city contract was later terminated due to performance issues, according to the department, but Dahl said she believes it was retaliation for her pushing the investigation.

She filed her whistle-blower lawsuit against the city in June 2022. Her lawyer, Hugh Eastwood, declined comment citing federal court rules in East Tennessee that prohibit lawyers from talking publicly about their cases.

Search affidavit: Williams found with images and videos

For nearly two years Williams remained on the lam, until one night this past April, a campus police officer at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, was checking on a suspicious vehicle in the parking lot when he found Williams asleep in his car.

Also in the car: 12 ounces of cocaine, 14 ounces of methamphetamine, about $100,000 in cash, multiple electronic and digital storage devices, and two thumb drives containing more than 5,000 images of child porn and images and videos of 52 women in obvious states of unconsciousness being sexually assaulted by Williams, according to a search affidavit filed by a district attorney investigator in Tennessee's First Judicial District.

From the videos, investigators were able to identify some women who had previously filed police reports. They identified half a dozen women whose first names were consistent the names on Williams’s “Raped” list, according to the affidavit.

The search affidavit sought the other digital devices that Johnson City police had recovered from Williams’s condo after Evans fell from the window, noting the likelihood of more images on those devices.

The devices had been sitting in the department’s evidence storage since 2020.

A scathing audit of Johnson City police

Johnson City knew it had a problem on its hands.

Dahl’s lawsuit had hit the news and a growing number of outraged community members were showing up at city council meetings demanding change in the police department.

One of those activists, resident Ben Putland, said the case exposed systemic issues in how police handle sex crimes and female victims in general.

“If you live here and have interacted with the police, particularly if you’re a woman, it’s not great,” he said. “It’s a very good ol’ boy attitude about women and their place in the world.”

In response to the concern, the city hired an outside auditing firm that specializes in policing practices. The report, released in July, scrutinized sexual assault investigations from 2018 through 2022.

The results were scathing.

Overall, the report found that Johnson City officers failed to adequately investigate sexual assault cases, collect evidence, interview suspects and make arrests due in part to "misconceptions and stereotypes about women and victims of sexual assault."

Moreover, police should have opened an internal affairs investigation due to the seriousness of Dahl's allegations in the Williams case, the report noted. To date, there has been no investigation.

Turner, the police chief, and two other top officers took an early retirement this year before the audit was released, but the city in its response said new leadership is making changes.

“We first want to acknowledge that victims of sexual assault have not always received the best possible treatment and care from our police department,” City Manager Cathy Ball said at the time.

Among the changes, the city said it has invested $100,000 for sexual assault training for its officers and was reviewing its investigative policies and procedures.

But with the challenges that come from shifting an internal culture, Putland said he’s skeptical.

“I think they’ll do the bare minimum,” he said. “A few hours of training and that’s it.”

Jane Does file suit against Johnson City

When the audit came out, the Jane Does took note.

The report, they said, confirmed what some women in town had known for years — police routinely mishandled rape investigations.

In June, nearly a dozen Jane Does sued the city alleging that officers treated Williams as though he was “untouchable,” while they failed to respond to victims and follow up on cases.

The suit is seeking class-action status and looks to represent not only victims of Williams but others who say their cases were botched. Their lawyer, Vanessa Baehr-Jones, declined comment due to the court rules.

The suit alleges that police could have prevented more crimes and possibly a woman’s death had they properly investigated Williams.

The woman, called Jane Doe 6, was celebrating her sister’s birthday at a brewery in downtown Johnson City in November 2020 when, at some point, she stopped by Williams’s place and he served her a drink.

She later called her sister, crying hysterically while driving. She sounded confused and disoriented.

“Despite driving in the town in which she had lived her whole life, Jane Doe 6 did not know where she was and could not recall any locations or street names,” the suit said.

At about 2:30 a.m., she crashed into a light pole and died on impact.

Her sister called Johnson City police, concerned that something may have happened while Jane Doe 6 was with Williams. But the detective, she said, asked no follow-up questions and failed to tell her that other women had reported being drugged and raped by Williams.

Detectives failed to return the sister’s follow-up calls, the suit said.

In a response to a request from The Tennessean, the city declined to comment on both lawsuits and pointed to its responses to the allegations in federal court filings.

In court documents, the city denies that officers made errors in sexual assault investigations and said that complaints were properly investigated. The city denies any deliberate misconduct.

Williams has not yet been charged with the alleged sexual assaults of dozens of women, as the investigation is ongoing, officials said.

He is currently facing child sex abuse charges for the two young children he allegedly assaulted.

But as the manhunt stretches into its fourth week, victims wonder if they’ll ever see justice.

Searching for Sean Williams

Williams had already had one escape attempt in July before he was transferred to a Kentucky correctional facility this summer.

He was being transported from Kentucky to Greeneville for a court appearance on the child assault charges and, ironically, a charge for the previous escape attempt, when he vanished from the van.

Authorities said he may have used a paper clip to get out of his restraints and then used the van’s headrest to pry off the protective screening and bust through a back window.

It remains a mystery as to how guards didn’t hear or see this.

“How he was able to escape undetected by transport officers, we certainly have many questions of our own," David Jolley, U.S. Marshal for the Eastern District of Tennessee, told reporters last month.

Leads have so far been cold.

As for Evans, she said she’s frustrated that Williams has been able to escape justice multiple times now due to law enforcement failures.

On a recent fall day at a Johnson City park, Evans walked slowly down stone steps using her black cane for balance. Every step is careful with her fragile legs.

An advocate for victims of domestic violence, she plans to start a nonprofit called Speak Up Speak Out to raise awareness. She talks about her experience and help for victims on her TikTok account.

She hopes they catch Williams soon, but Evans said she’s been through worse and come out the other side. She’s been called a bionic woman with the steel rods in her legs, and a cat because she landed on her feet.

"I joke with everyone and tell them I’m a cat and I got nine lives,” she said. “I’m on my last one.”

Reach Kelly Puente at kpuente@tennessean.com or @KellyPuenteTN

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Did Tennessee police refuse to investigate a serial rapist case?