Image: A garage in downtown Johnson City owned by Sean Williams, suspected in dozens of sexual assaults, was vandalized, captured in a photo that has been introduced in a federal lawsuit against the city.
This story contains allegations of sexual violence involving child and adult victims. If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, resources are available through the National Sexual Abuse Hotline: 800-656-4673
By Anita Wadhwani [The Tennessee Lookout -CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] –
Disturbing allegations continue to emerge in an ongoing civil lawsuit that claims members of the Johnson City Police Department, for years, conspired to protect a prominent business owner implicated in dozens of sexual crimes against women and children.
The businessman, Sean Williams, is now in federal custody awaiting trial on federal child pornography production charges.
But for years, Williams was a fixture in downtown Johnson City’s nightlife scene.
Williams, 53, operated a glass and concrete contracting business, lived in a downtown penthouse and partied in his nearby garage, often drawing in passersby — including women who later accused Williams of spiking their drinks and then assaulting them while unconscious, according to court records filed in a class action federal lawsuit against Johnson City and its police department.
Other women reported their last memory before waking up in Williams’ bed after having been sexually assaulted was taking a sip of a drink.
Yet reports from multiple women who stepped forward over a four-year-period to tell Johnson City police that Williams had raped them went nowhere. Police closed their files and made no arrests, according to court records.
Video and still images later recovered from Williams’ electronic devices last year show him sexually assaulting 67 women and children inside his Johnson City apartment, according to an affidavit by an investigator with the First Judicial District Attorney General’s Office filed in federal court.
The electronic devices were discovered by campus police who happened upon Williams napping in his car at a rural North Carolina university in Aug. 2023, not Johnson City police who — by then — were aware of at least 20 women whom Williams had allegedly sexually assaulted, court records said.
Williams’ alleged victims filed a federal lawsuit last year, accusing Johnson City Police of failing to protect them. Since its filing in July 2023, the class action lawsuit has surfaced allegations that Johnson City police officers collected, extorted or stole money from Williams and turned a blind eye to his crimes.
“This case involves grave allegations of sex trafficking, the sexual assaults of dozens of women and children, and perhaps most disturbing, public corruption at the hands of Johnson City police department that enabled the perpetrator, Sean Williams, to terrorize his victims for years,” read an Oct. 16 filing by attorneys in the class action suit.
Attorneys for the victims have also alleged Williams engaged in a sex trafficking scheme by which he would provide drugs or other inducements for women to continuously recruit new victims.
The recent legal filing makes even further allegations of public corruption on the part of Johnson City police. Among the allegations:
• JCPD knew as early as July 2020 of specific allegations Williams had sexually abused children — including the existence of photographs of the abuse described in detail by a woman who came forward to report she had been raped by Williams. JCPD did not investigate the woman’s child sex abuse allegations nor include it in the resulting police report summarizing their interview with the woman. Williams went on to sexually abuse another child in December 2020, according to legal filings.
• JCPD failed to gather, test, investigate and disclose evidence of Williams’ crimes — in some instances altering police reports and destroying evidence, according to computer audit trails obtained by attorneys bringing the class action lawsuit.
• Details of a web of financial transactions involving individual Johnson City police officers show hundreds of thousands of dollars in unaccounted-for income for some officers. The lawsuit also alleges one officer may have tried to pay off a witness to an ongoing public corruption investigation.
The women accuse police of “unconstitutional conduct that shocks the conscience.”
The women are represented by attorneys Vanessa Baeher-Jones, with California-based Advocates for Survivors of Abuse, Heather Moore Collins with Brentwood, Tenn.-based HMC Civil Rights Law and San Francisco attorney Elizabeth Kramer.
A spokesperson for Johnson City Manager Cathy Ball did not respond to a request for comment left Thursday and Friday about the new allegations. Ball, who speaks on behalf of the JCPD, has previously denied wrongdoing on the part of the Johnson City Police Department.
An attorney for Williams did not respond to an emailed request for comment left last week.
Attorneys for the women said in legal filings they are cooperating with the U.S. Department of Justice in a federal public corruption probe related to its handling of the Williams case that began in 2023. The DOJ has declined to confirm the probe citing department policy that prohibits them from discussing open investigations.
A woman falls five stories
In September 2020, police responded to Williams’ condominium after a woman fell from his fifth-story window onto the sidewalk below, suffering grievous and permanent injuries.
The woman, who has since filed her own lawsuit against the Johnson City Police Department, alleged she was drugged then pushed from Williams apartment during an attempted sexual assault.
When JCPD investigator Toma Sparks and another investigator arrived at Williams’ door to investigate, Williams’ hands were covered in blood, the new filings allege, citing photographs police took of Williams’ hands filed under seal in the case.
The officers left without arranging for the blood on Williams’ hands to be tested, did not secure video cameras visible around Williams’ home nor a large rifle, court filings said. The officers also left Williams with his phone, which was wiped of its data when police later sought to retrieve it. The lawsuit alleges that before wiping his phone of data, Williams was also able to access his in-home video cameras, deleting footage.
A search warrant obtained later that day by Sparks failed to mention the existence of the rifle in the threat assessment portion of the document. Williams, who has a previous felony conviction, was not permitted to own one.
When Sparks and three other JCPD officers showed up at Williams home to do the search, they found a list entitled “raped” with 23 female names listed below, “including names that reference babies or children,” the lawsuit said.
The list of names, along with the rifle, were neither seized nor included in a police inventory list of items in the apartment, court records said.
Instead, police collected Williams’ safe, five computers, three cell phones and six video cameras.
The electronic devices wouldn’t be forensically examined for more than two years, only after allegations of multiple sexual assaults emerged in evidence seized by North Carolina campus police.
Days later, JCPD videotaped the opening of the safe at the police department. The video footage show large amounts of cash, along with a gold Cartier necklace, two dildos and a “baby doll with a hole in her genitals” — items that were not inventoried, according to copies of police inventory records submitted in court, according to the lawsuit.
Williams later claimed in a social media post that JCPD stole more than $500,000 in cash from the safe, returning just $81,000, court records said. The cash was “never counted nor inventoried” before the safe was returned, legal filings allege. The Cartier necklace also was not returned, court filings claim.
The existence of the doll should have been a red flag for police, the women’s attorneys said in their legal filing.
“Had JCPD acted on the evidence that Williams was sexually exploiting children in September 2020, they could have prevented the sexual exploitation of an unnamed child victim in December 2020, among the horrific crimes Williams perpetrated with impunity,” the Oct. 16 filing said.
Legal filings in the case also cite audit trails of police computer systems that uncovered numerous instances in which individual officers accessed and edited sexual assault police reports involving Wiliams’ alleged victims, even if they had no role in the case and, in some instances, months after the report had been filed.
Some of the computer activity by police occurred after litigation had begun and JCPD officers were removed from any involvement in investigating Williams.
Sparks, for example — the officer who investigated the woman’s fall from Williams fifth story condo — edited the sexual assault reports of three alleged Williams’ victims two months after he was instructed to stop working on Williams’ cases, attorneys allege.
U.S. District Judge Travis McDonough in August dismissed claims against certain of the responding officers in the civil suit, but not Sparks.
In his ruling, McDonough noted that the allegations contained in the women’s suit are “replete with conduct by Sparks that shocks the conscience” and declined a request by Sparks to be dismissed from the lawsuit.
Other allegations contained in the suit say Sparks solicited bribes from Williams “in exchange for insulating his criminal activities” and intimidated and lied to victims and concealed evidence of Wiliams’ crimes.
McDonough also ruled against Sparks’ and other JCPD officers’ claims they were protected from litigation by qualified immunity.
Laura Beth Rufolo, a Chattanooga attorney who represents one of the officers named in the lawsuit — two other officers have since been dismissed as defendants — cited court rules and pending litigation in declining to comment. She noted that a legal response to the allegations would be filed soon and that “our clients categorically deny the allegations made against them.”
Former federal prosecutor pursues evidence
The existence of the doll did give pause to former Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Kateri Dahl.
At the time, Dahl was working on contract as liaison between the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Johnson City Police Department to prosecute drug crimes. Dahl, however, had begun examinging sexual assault crimes reported by Williams’ alleged victims.
And in a secret recording she made in December 2020 of a conversation with Karl Turner, who was the then-JCPD chief of police, she explained why.
“That’s (the doll) actually a theme in pretty disturbing cases,” Dahl said as she pressed Turner to authorize a search warrant of Williams electronic devices for evidence of child sex abuse, according to a transcript of the conversation filed as evidence in the case.
Turner, who is also named as a defendant in the class action lawsuit, questioned whether the so called “raped” list found in Williams’s condo was simply “girls he’s had consensual sex with and calls it whatever he calls it,” before bringing in JCPD Captain Kevin Peters to “look into” getting a warrant to examine the digital devices.
Dahl’s contract with the police department was terminated about six months later.
She has since filed a federal whistleblower lawsuit alleging Turner killed the funding for her job as she pressed the agency to build a case against a felon she believed was a serial rapist.
“Dahl gathered substantial evidence that a well-known individual … had not just been dealing drugs but was credibly accused of raping multiple women and had possibly caused the death of one of his alleged victims,” Dahl’s lawsuit, filed in June 2022, claimed. “Dahl urged Johnson City and its Police Chief Karl Turner to investigate further. But Chief Karl Turner intentionally and recklessly failed to investigate (the felon) despite Dahl’s repeated urging.”
Turner has since retired from the department. He has previously filed a response in Dahl’s whistleblower lawsuit that said Dahl’s contract was ended for “performance issues,” not retaliation.
An attorney for Turner did not respond to an emailed request for comment last week about the allegations.
Altered police reports, missing evidence
Two years after Dahl’s 2020 conversation with Turner, another woman turned to JCPD police to report she had been sexually assaulted by Williams.
Referred to in court documents as “Female 8,” the woman was taken to an interrogation room by a JCPD officer while two other JCPD officers, including officer Sparks, observed from another room.
The woman was asked to repeat the account of her sexual assault multiple times during the course of the interview.
She also told the officer interviewing her that she had seen graphic photographs of Williams sexually abusing children on his phone.
She identified specific children she suspected Williams was targeting.
“Inexplicably, none of this material information ended up in (the) report” of the victim interview, the lawsuit said
The resulting police report, filed under seal in the federal court case, says only that the victim saw photographs of Williams “‘with children,’” the court filing said. The police report “omitted the fact that Female 8 told Higgins she saw photographs” of Williams sexually abusing children, it said.
Johnson City Police closed the woman’s case in March 2023 with no arrests or further action.
Weeks later, Williams was arrested by Western Carolina State University campus police on a routine patrol who spied Williams unconscious in his car. The officers’ discovery of drugs, cash and digital devices in the car helped launch the broader investigation into Williams.
Female 8’s sexual assault was recorded on these devices, court records said.
Alleged payoffs
Attorneys for the women have previously alleged that Williams’ business partner funneled $2,000 in weekly extortion payments to certain Johnson City Police officers, using a complicated scheme of shell companies disguised as subcontractors in order to cover her tracks.
Some of the transactions took place in 2022 while Williams was a fugitive and Johnson City police were supposed to be monitoring his companies’ transactions for suspicious activity as part of their formal investigation into his disappearance, legal filings alleged.
Instead, according to the legal filings, some officers continued to cash in on Williams through his business partner, identified in court papers as “Female 4.”
Financial records for certain JCPD officers show “deposits into their accounts for amounts which appear to be above any sources of legitimate income,” new allegations filed in court said.
One officer received $400,000 in unexplained income, the filing alleges, citing financial records obtained through subpoenas.
Now, new allegations claim that at least one JCPD officer made payments to Williams’ business partner in January this year – after she was a witness in a potential federal corruption investigation into JCPD police – in a complicated scheme involving the Cartier gold necklace recovered from Williams’ safe.
Bank records submitted in the legal case show one officer in January making $21,200 in outgoing payments during the same week that Williams’ business partner received $14,000 to her account.
The transaction is alleged to have been part of a complicated scheme in which the gold necklace was placed for sale at a Nashville jewelry consignment shop by an unidentified seller.
The necklace was sold to an unidentified buyer, court records said.
The consignment shop then wired $14,000 to Williams’ business partner.
