客服电话：13904310313 佛罗里达州那不勒斯19年前的一个早晨,玛西娅·威廉姆斯醒来为儿子祈祷。特伦斯做两份工作,喜欢阅读关于苏格拉底,和有一个伤疤在他的右手,拇指附近,从一个时间当他玩火 柴是一个小男孩。他是玛西亚的唯一的孩子。她祈祷,祈祷,对抗这莫名其妙的感觉,可怕的事情将要发生。
几个小时后,特伦斯和副警长交叉路径。他得到了副的巡逻警车。然后他就消失了。
副说他给了特伦斯骑一圈K便利店。但没有证据,特伦斯到达圆k和他的母亲再也没有见过他。
最后,玛西娅学会了一些惊人的副警长。
三个月前,另一个人也骑在他的巡逻警车。
特伦斯-威廉姆斯一样,费利佩·桑托斯已经非法驾驶。
就像威廉姆斯,他遇到了市科利尔县警长办公室的史蒂文·卡尔金斯。
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那不勒斯纪念花园,卡尔金斯特伦斯·威廉姆斯。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什)
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“我相信他们被杀害,因为他们的颜色,”道格·莫雷说,2004年是美国的律师助理,领导多个工作组调查失踪作为潜在的仇恨犯罪。
治安调查人员调查证据和认定卡尔金斯不说实话对他遇到特伦斯威廉姆斯。一个侦探列了一个清单,近24个不真实的或不一致的语句,卡尔金斯一天他遇到了威廉姆斯。威廉姆斯在2004年8月,大约七个月后消失,then-Sheriff猎人发射卡尔金斯。他后来写道,“我已经失去了信任在卡尔金斯和他详细描述事件和回忆的能力。”
与此同时,调查人员开始工作。他们搜查了树林和附近海域失踪的人最后一次看到。他们给卡尔金斯的车一个追踪装置。他们做了一个完整的法医检查车,特别关注。没有一丝桑托斯和威廉姆斯。
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玛西娅·威廉姆斯她家在那不勒斯的望着窗外。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什
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2019年,CNN记者开始一个新的调查失踪费利佩•桑托斯和特伦斯-威廉姆斯。最终,两个记者加入了这个项目。近70人接受了采访。记者们提出许多档案公开请求与政府机构、收益率超过10000页的文件,许多小时的录音。
使用电话记录、调度日志和采访记录,CNN建立分秒必争的时间表的日子每个人都消失了。CNN也获得每一个可用的事件和逮捕报告卡尔金斯与科利尔县警长办公室的职业生涯,从1987年到2004年超过2000报告。这个故事是CNN的结果努力解开神秘未解之谜的一个最令人不安的在最近的美国执法部门的历史。
这里是最引人注目的发现之一的卡尔金斯文档:2001年的一天,近14年到执法生涯,卡尔金斯停止逮捕。8月,他带人去监狱misd
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卡尔金斯(前排右二)在1987年完成了他的警察学院培训。(从西南佛罗里达刑事司法学院)
科利尔县在佛罗里达半岛西南角,大沼泽地的锯齿草草原之间,沿墨西哥湾的白色沙滩。富人和退休住在海岸附近,在高档城市那不勒斯。内陆,平均收入下降。卡尔金斯的第一任务是Immokalee巡逻,那不勒斯东北约40英里,农民工的番茄在广阔的领域。
卢卡斯贝尼特斯,一个联盟的创始人Immokalee工人,警察在Immokalee比作美军占领伊拉克。
“它不知道它的传统,文化,”他说。“他们基本上是种植。在伊拉克军队去一个小镇,不会说英语。军队自动攻击的感觉。它做什么?目标的步枪。Immokalee是这样的。”
报告从卡尔金斯描述几紧张对峙代表和居民。但在很多人看来,卡尔金斯处理压力。上司和同事与他相处,
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尽管近二十年的努力寻找真相,威廉姆斯和桑托斯的失踪仍未解之迷。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什)
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几分钟后,他放弃了这个声明,澄清,让卡尔金斯生气”是这些墨西哥人或黑人没有保险,或无证驾驶。”然后他说它不是特别黑或墨西哥司机激怒了卡尔金斯,但“任何人没有驾照或没有保险把他惹毛了。”
皮特森被问到两个司机——一个墨西哥人,一个黑人,两个无有效驾驶执照或保险——会议卡尔金斯后消失。
“我认为他们活着吗?”彼得森说。“没有。我认为他们死了。我认为史蒂夫可能参与过吗?好的可能性。有证据吗?不。为什么?因为他们从未逮捕了他。”
“他是一个隐藏的怪物在里面吗?是的,他会。”
“我告诉你,如果史蒂夫能和这样做,他肯定会确保身体永远不会被发现。”
费利佩•桑托斯23岁时,他消失了。他来自墨西哥的一个小镇,他经常叫他的父母。他是已知的
几分钟后,他放弃了这个声明,澄清,让卡尔金斯生气”是这些墨西哥人或黑人没有保险,或无证驾驶。”然后他说它不是特别黑或墨西哥司机激怒了卡尔金斯,但“任何人没有驾照或没有保险把他惹毛了。”
皮特森被问到两个司机——一个墨西哥人,一个黑人,两个无有效驾驶执照或保险——会议卡尔金斯后消失。
“我认为他们活着吗?”彼得森说。“没有。我认为他们死了。我认为史蒂夫可能参与过吗?好的可能性。有证据吗?不。为什么?因为他们从未逮捕了他。”
“他是一个隐藏的怪物在里面吗?是的,他会。”
“我告诉你,如果史蒂夫能和这样做,他肯定会确保身体永远不会被发现。”
费利佩•桑托斯23岁时,他消失了。他来自墨西哥的一个小镇,他经常叫他的父母。他是已知的
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美孚站在那不勒斯的绿树购物中心,马休史蒂文·卡尔金斯费利佩·桑托斯在他的巡逻警车的后面。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什The Mobil station at Green Tree Shopping Center in Naples, where Cpl.
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在他的那天早上,卡尔金斯并没有说他和桑托斯很生气。他赞赏桑托斯被“礼貌和合作”。他说他给桑托斯休息。
“我决定问题他引用的犯罪而不是带他去监狱,”卡尔金斯告诉一名调查员。“…我不想离开他,他的车,“因为我怕他会赶走,我已经看到在过去的。嗯,所以我走就在几个街区之外的圆K商店位于Immokalee道路和Winterview开车。外,我让司机和我们交谈,我发布了他的引用,我给了他一份事故报告和我的车钥匙还给他,我向他解释不再驾驶他的车,直到他能得到一个有效的驾照。”
没有证据表明桑托斯到达圆K,治安官Kevin O ' neill说侦探调查桑托斯和威廉姆斯的失踪。除此之外,奥尼尔永远无法理解为什么卡尔金斯会推动他
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的三个交通引用卡尔金斯发给桑托斯。没有签名似乎他的中间名,“Maximino”,拼写正确。
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很难确定卡尔金斯离开事故现场后做了什么。巡警不密切监控,然后像他们现在,并且每分钟都没有记录他的行踪——除了卡尔金斯自己报调度。
“当你有一个目标,”莫雷说,“你不认为他说的是真的。”
35点。卡尔金斯清算报道,称,这意味着他不再处理桑托斯崩溃。他写道,他去了一个早晨简报警长变电站之后,但尚不清楚是否有人看见他当日有记录。
从七59到车,根据调度记录,卡尔金斯称,他正在做一个额外的巡逻在123网站,或那不勒斯公园小学。凯西Maurchie,调度员曾与卡尔金斯,回顾了调度日志在CNN的要求。她对这种说法持怀疑态度。
“你可以走了,只要你想要的,没有人会质疑它,没有人会试图派遣你,”Maurchie赛
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道格·特纳,一位前副巡逻与史蒂文•卡尔金斯构成肖像在那不勒斯的家中。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什
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特纳翻阅老警长目录的家中。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什)
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没有办法知道什么时候卡尔金斯第一次看到威廉姆斯1月12日,2004年,因为卡尔金斯不报告交通停止派遣,因为它发生了。一个完整的星期后,当卡尔金斯终于写他的报告,他说他看到的白色凯迪拉克下午12:15分左右。但这可能是不正确的。它甚至可能不会关闭。特伦斯-威廉姆斯是27岁,他已经学到了一些东西作为一个黑人在美国。朋友说威廉姆斯遇到警察的次数足够多有一个政策:当一个官把你拉过去,尽力确保有证人。有目击者——至少三个。他们都告诉调查人员交通停止10点之前发生。大约三个小时,也许早9日早于卡尔金斯后来索赔。进一步的矛盾提出的时间表卡尔金斯,威廉姆斯原定上午10点开始他在必胜客的转变。与卡尔金斯在尾巴和巡洋舰的灯光闪烁,威廉姆斯在那不勒斯备忘录开进停车位
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雕像站在墓地,最后一位目击者看到特伦斯威廉姆斯活着。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什
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接下来发生的事情是未知的,因为调查人员发现卡尔金斯的帐户不可靠。他带一个测谎仪与不确定的结果,一个显示没有欺骗的迹象,和第三个测试也表明欺骗。无论如何,他的一些言论反驳可证实的事实。这里有三个从卡尔金斯别人争议或声称发现难以置信的:
1。“车辆似乎有问题…司机说他刚买了这辆车,它不是跑步吧。”
卡尔金斯在他的报告说,这就是为什么他把威廉姆斯——凯迪拉克不正常运行。但是后来,在法律上的沉积,威廉姆斯的母亲,玛西娅说,“那辆车没有毛病。”威廉姆斯的继父告诉CNN:恢复后的凯迪拉克拖院子,玛西娅开始起来开车回家。
2。卡尔金斯称威廉姆斯告诉他”,他现在是上班迟到了…他问我如果我可以请载他一程。”
在她的沉积,玛西娅·威廉姆斯这样说她
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玛西娅·威廉姆斯认为她儿子的头发和牙齿痕迹。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什
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那天中午后的某个时候,卡尔金斯回到墓地凯迪拉克拖走。在49,他把电话记录进行调度。由马休戴夫回答班•乔林科尔,巡逻副曾与卡尔金斯北那不勒斯。班•乔林科尔是填写派遣的桌子上,有时代表了额外的支付。
“是的,这是一个α30北那不勒斯,”卡尔金斯说,“你能帮我运行一个VIN吗?”
“30美元,”班•乔林科尔回答。“你得先给我30块钱。”
“如何约20,”卡尔金斯说,随着笑话。两人开怀大笑,说事情难以破译的录音。然后卡尔金斯改变了他的口音和开始使用一个内部审查后所谓“非专业人士”人造非裔美国人的术语。
“我有一个舒适的凯迪拉克在路边,”卡尔金斯说,“信号11日,52岁的信号没有人。”
信号11意味着它被遗弃了,因为和信号52意味着这是禁用的。没有描述是真的。
“标签都不会回来,
一个十字架在那不勒斯纪念花园。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什)
圆K在那不勒斯卡尔金斯声称已经下降了威廉姆斯。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什
一个十字架在那不勒斯纪念花园。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什)
圆K在那不勒斯卡尔金斯声称已经下降了威廉姆斯。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什
一个十字架在那不勒斯纪念花园
A cross is seen at Naples Memorial Gardens. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
The Circle K in Naples where Calkins claimed to have dropped off Williams. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
圆K在那不勒斯卡尔金斯声称已经下降了威廉姆斯。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什
威廉姆斯被报失踪后,调查人员听到这个调用的磁带,科利尔县警长办公室训斥两代表进行不适当的执法官员。在接受CNN采访时,猎人,前警长被问到电话。“这进一步引起怀疑,”亨特说。
之后,卡尔金斯在一封给警长承认他的话“在可怜的味道。“卡尔金斯在2004年提交给心理评估之后,看他还适合作为副手,一名调查员的报告说:“卡尔金斯似乎没有一个强大的种族偏见。”
班•乔林科尔采访时他说的电话,他说这是“不适当的俚语,”和“令人遗憾的是,我用可怜的判断。”
班•乔林科尔拒绝来自CNN的采访请求。他告诉一个侦探,他的一些玩笑与卡尔金斯来自在1983年的电影“突然我一个场景
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特伦斯威廉姆斯的ID和格卡在他母亲的家里。(CNN)悉尼沃尔什
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调查人员会考虑另一种可能性:卡尔金斯确实发现威廉姆斯再次。
下午1点后不久。与一些新的信息,卡尔金斯称调度。在之前调用的凯迪拉克在墓地,他没有提到特伦斯威廉姆斯的名字。但下午1:12。,他打电话来问认股权证检查特伦斯·d·威廉姆斯。他说,出生日期是4月1日,1975年。
调查人员发现这意义重大,因为它不是威廉姆斯的实际出生日期。这是一个虚假的威廉姆斯有时给警察当他陷入困境。出生日期不写在卡尔金斯能找到的任何官方文件。中士的迈克Koval科利尔县警长办公室写道,他对卡尔金斯说,“看来他与特伦斯威廉姆斯第二次。”
卡尔金斯对此予以否认。根据Koval的报告,卡尔金斯说,“整个事件和威廉姆斯已经习以为常了,所以微不足道;他只是不记得的东西我们不断地问。“因此,卡尔金斯有麻烦
“哦,兄弟,”他说,“我完全迷惑了。”
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邮箱在圆K卡尔金斯声称已经下降了威廉姆斯。调查人员发现没有证据表明威廉姆斯到达圆K。(Sydney Walsh for CNN)
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Dispatch records show a gap of 53 minutes, from 1:01 to 1:54 p.m., in which Calkins did not respond to any calls. He called for the warrants check on Williams during that time. Later, when Calkins failed a polygraph test from internal affairs, the question that elicited the strongest reaction indicating deception was, “Was Terrance with you when you ran his 4/1/75 DOB over your Nextel?” The second-strongest reaction came after the question, “After you dropped Terrance at the Circle K, did you have any further contact with him?”
The gap of unaccounted time that afternoon may be much longer than 53 minutes. At 1:54, Calkins reported to dispatchers that he was conducting a traffic stop, and at 2:18 he reported having written a citation. Dispatch records indicate that Calkins called in license plate numbers both times he claimed to be making a stop that day. But investigators never found the citation he supposedly wrote that afternoon. Nor did they find another one he supposedly wrote that morning. A CNN search of court records showed that Calkins issued ticket number 9661-CNA five days before Williams disappeared, and he issued ticket number 9663-CNA the day after Williams disappeared. According to an investigator’s report, “Citation number 9662-CNA is unaccounted for and was never turned in by Calkins.”
Sheriff’s spokesperson Karie Partington said, “Detectives did check to see if he had issued a verbal or written warning but no documentation could be located.”
In other words, there is no definitive proof that either traffic stop was real.
Calkins did not write many tickets — an average of about one per month the previous year — but he claimed to have written two the day Williams disappeared. Both of these questionable traffic stops occurred during time windows in which he could have encountered Williams: the first at 9:50 a.m., around the time the cemetery workers said they first saw Calkins and Williams; and the second at 1:54, not long after he called dispatch with the secret false date of birth.
“I have an idea why he’d do that,” said Molloy, the former federal prosecutor. “Because he was up to no good.”
“When you’re doing something that you shouldn’t, you make sure that somebody sees you in a way that would help cover it.”
If Calkins faked the second traffic stop, and if he actually responded to the residential-alarm call that appears in dispatch records at 2:51, it means he had an unbroken span of an hour and 50 minutes that afternoon during which his whereabouts and activities were unknown.
After Williams disappeared, his mother called jails, hospitals, morgues and mental institutions. No one at any of those places had seen him. She also called junkyards, and eventually found the one that had the Cadillac. At the junkyard she was told it had been towed from the cemetery, and at the cemetery the employees said they’d seen a deputy sheriff taking Terrance away.
So Marcia Williams called the sheriff’s office and spoke with Kathy Maurchie, who looked up the towing records. They showed that Cpl. Steven Calkins had a Cadillac towed from the cemetery on the day in question. On January 16, 2004, four days after Williams was seen with Calkins, Maurchie called Calkins on a recorded line.
Later, an investigator would review this tape and write that Calkins’ statements to Maurchie were “inconsistent with the known facts.”
In an interview with CNN, Maurchie would go a step further.
“I think he’s guilty,” she said. “Guilty as sin.”
One by one, deputies who knew Calkins were interviewed by state investigators. And one by one, those deputies said they believed Calkins had done nothing wrong. Their statements were striking in their similarity. They said Calkins had not privately admitted to misleading investigators. And most of them mentioned rumors that Terrance Williams had been seen alive, in East Naples, days after his encounter with Calkins.
Their statements mirrored one from Calkins himself, who also told an investigator that Williams was probably alive in East Naples.
“I think he’s down there, sneaking around in drag or something,” Calkins said.
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Doug Turner, a former deputy who patrolled with Steven Calkins, has a framed photo of them with other officers. Calkins is in the center. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
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One source for these rumors was a gas-station clerk who claimed to have seen Williams a week after his ride with Calkins. The clerk told a deputy sheriff that Williams regularly came into the Sunoco to buy prepaid phone cards, and said Williams came in again on January 19. According to a deputy’s report, the clerk said he and Williams “spoke for a while and Terrance said that he had to lay low the heat was on. Terrance left the Sunoco in a brown early 70’s Cadillac.”
An investigator followed up and reviewed the surveillance video with the clerk. The investigator saw the clerk on the tape but did not see Terrance Williams.
CNN asked Kevin O’Neill, the longtime case detective, and Doug Molloy, the former federal prosecutor, about this and other supposed Terrance Williams sightings. Both said there was no evidence Williams had been seen after he met Calkins.
“If he did something with them, why haven’t they found them?”
Nevertheless, about six months after Williams disappeared, Sheriff Don Hunter circulated a “position statement” about the “apparent disappearances” of Santos and Williams. It alluded to legal trouble both men had. Santos was an undocumented immigrant who would have to answer for driving without a license. Williams faced no local charges, because Calkins hadn’t arrested or ticketed him, but a judge in Tennessee had issued a warrant for Williams in connection with unpaid child support.
“These men may therefore be purposely avoiding being found by law enforcement,” the sheriff’s statement said.
Julia Perkins, who knew Santos through the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, did not like what the sheriff was implying.
“That just seemed like an excuse,” she said. “And honestly, it was a slap in the face to the families.” Like others who knew Santos, she found it implausible that he would have willingly left behind his common-law wife and their three-month-old daughter. A picture showed him cradling the baby in his arms.
“He was not a person who was going to abandon her,” Lucas Benitez said. “He loved Apolonia and he was very happy about his girl’s arrival. They didn’t have any problems between them. They were two young people starting a life. They had dreams and plans together.”
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The Coalition of Immokalee Workers building is seen in Immokalee, Florida. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
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Likewise, Terrance Williams had reasons not to disappear. Terrance’s young son Tarik lived nearby with Terrance’s mother, Marcia. Terrance and Tarik played video games and went to the mall together, and Terrance regularly cut Tarik’s hair. He was a skilled barber who dreamed of opening his own shop. His mother was sure Terrance would have called her if he could. She said he used to call her two or three times a day.
Marcia Williams did not trust Sheriff Don Hunter. She was not the only one who believed that someone in the sheriff’s office was hiding the truth. A former sheriff’s office employee who spoke with CNN on condition of anonymity said people of color had a lot of trouble with the deputies of North Naples in the early 2000s, and that Black youths had been unfairly followed and harassed. The former employee — who worked there while Calkins did — said Calkins was merely “the scapegoat” in Williams’s disappearance.
“I do not think one deputy did all this by himself,” the former employee said.
When a CNN reporter mentioned how hard it was to persuade other deputies to talk about Calkins, the former employee said, “Blue don’t tell on blue.”
Hunter, the former sheriff, said he and his investigators did all they could to find the truth. He said the position statement was reasonable given the uncertainty about what happened to Santos and Williams. He recalled meeting with Marcia Williams, and said, “She seemed to understand that we were making an extraordinary effort to try to locate her son.”
Hunter said he didn’t remember any complaints about deputies harassing Black youths in North Naples, and he wouldn’t have tolerated such conduct from his employees. He said no other deputies were suspected of involvement in the disappearances of Santos and Williams. And he described meetings around a conference table with state and federal law-enforcement officials in which they all racked their brains for a strategy that might answer their questions about Calkins.
“Let’s go right now and raid the house,” Hunter said he heard someone say at one of the closed-door meetings. “Raid his house.”
But they never did, because they didn’t have a warrant. The investigators were “on the edge of violating rights,” Hunter said, but they held back.
“The Constitution does not permit us to dispense with rights,” he said, “even on a law enforcement officer, even if you might hold a suspicion, which of course I did.”
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A flag that reads “Human Rights” is seen in the window of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Officials there tried unsuccessfully to help the family of Felipe Santos find out what happened to him. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
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Hunter served as sheriff until 2009. These days he spends much of his time in North Carolina, but he can’t leave the Calkins mystery behind.
“It’s not haunting me,” he said, “but it’s never too far from my mind.”
Sometime after he was fired from the sheriff’s office, Calkins took a job at a local UPS facility. He worked there until 2013.
“Just wanted to let you know that (Calkins) quit his job at UPS yesterday,” a sheriff’s investigator wrote to Chief Jim Williams on March 29, 2013, in an internal email obtained by CNN through an open-records request. “Apparently he caused a minor scene and was escorted out.”
According to an investigator’s report, a UPS supervisor noticed that packages were getting jammed on one of the conveyor belts where Calkins was working. When the supervisor talked to Calkins about it, Calkins refused to do what he was told. Instead he started yelling curses, including “f**k you,” at various coworkers. When he was escorted to an office, he tendered his resignation by writing, “I Quit.”
After getting the report on Calkins’ departure from UPS, Chief Williams emailed one of the investigators to ask what kind of vehicle Calkins was currently driving.
“Without employment he potentially represents a threat to anyone he blames for his circumstances,” Williams wrote.
Investigators kept tabs on Calkins and learned in 2016 that he and his wife had sold their house and moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. With permission from the new owners of the former Calkins home, investigators conducted a search of the Florida property.
They brought in cadaver dogs. They used ground-penetrating radar. They consulted with Heather Walsh-Haney, a forensic anthropologist who analyzes skeletal remains. They identified an area near a concrete slab in the backyard where the soil appeared to have settled in an unusual way. A contractor removed the concrete and noticed that it was of a lesser grade than the concrete elsewhere on the property. Investigators found “several pieces of black plastic and a piece of electrical cord,” a report said.
The plastic and the cord were sent to an FBI lab for testing. But the FBI said the items couldn’t be tested because they’d been underground too long and their texture wasn’t conducive to retaining DNA.
The search of the yard was one more dead end.
“There were no human remains discovered,” the report said.
In 2018, with representation from the civil-rights lawyer Benjamin Crump, Marcia Williams filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Calkins. The complaint said “the facts circumstantially establish” that Calkins “intentionally murdered or otherwise caused the death of Terrance D. Williams.” In 2020, Calkins’ attorney, John Hooley, took Marcia Williams’ deposition.
He asked her about Terrance’s Cadillac: when he bought it, what condition it was in, when he took it to a mechanic, and so forth. She wasn’t quite sure of the dates.
Old plastic flowers are seen at the cemetery where employees reported seeing Calkins put Terrance Williams in his patrol car. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
Marcia Williams poses for a portrait at her home in Naples. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
Old plastic flowers are seen at the cemetery where employees reported seeing Calkins put Terrance Williams in his patrol car. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
Marcia Williams poses for a portrait at her home in Naples. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
Old plastic flowers are seen at the cemetery where employees reported seeing Calkins put Terrance Williams in his patrol car. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
Old plastic flowers are seen at the cemetery where employees reported seeing Calkins put Terrance Williams in his patrol car. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
Marcia Williams poses for a portrait at her home in Naples. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
Marcia Williams poses for a portrait at her home in Naples. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
“If I had everything here, then I could show you,” Marcia said, trying to gather her thoughts, “but I don’t have everything here.”
“What don’t you have that you need in order to answer your questions?” Hooley asked.
“My son,” she said.
Hooley asked about the incident report that Calkins wrote regarding his encounter with Terrance Williams.
“Did you — when you read the report,” the attorney asked Marcia Williams, “was there anything in the report that indicated that Steve Calkins had killed Terrance Williams?”
“I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t put that in the incident report,” she said.
Later in the deposition, during a back-and-forth about Calkins and the tow truck, Marcia said,
“Steve Calkins had evil intent that day.”
“This man did something to my child and he’s the only one that can answer.”
“How do you know?” Hooley asked.
“I know, because a mother — a mother knows and you can’t take that out of a mother’s gut.”
“But you don’t have any evidence that he did anything?”
“I don’t have to,” she said, “but God does.”
Later in 2020, the case entered non-binding arbitration. The court-appointed arbitrator, Robert E. Doyle Jr., wrote, “The evidence presented does not show Defendant Calkins in a good light. He has told more than one story about what happened with some contradictions. His version of the interaction with Terrance Williams is not believable … Further, the information he related about the disappearance of Felipe Santos is eerily similar to what he said about Terrance.”
But unlike the investigators, Doyle determined it was possible that Williams had been seen alive after the day he encountered Calkins — even though the State of Florida declared Williams legally dead in 2009. The arbitrator wrote, “Being an uncredible witness or even a liar does not make Calkins a murderer or guilty of manslaughter.” He entered a nonbinding judgment in favor of Calkins.
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A note Terrance Williams’ son wrote to him is seen at his mother’s home. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
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At that point, the wrongful-death suit could still have gone to a jury. But after the Crump legal team missed a filing deadline to ask for a trial, a judge dismissed the case. The Crump team said the Covid-19 pandemic had caused interoffice confusion that led to the missed deadline, but a Florida appeals court upheld the dismissal. And a judge ruled that Marcia Williams and her son’s estate had to pay Calkins about $5,600 for costs related to the lawsuit.
Sometimes, when former deputies get together in Naples, they talk about Steven Calkins.
“And it’s like, ‘Do you think Steve did it?’ You know, that’s the big lingering question,” said Doug Turner, who patrolled North Naples with Calkins in the ‘90s. “And, you know, whenever I'm asked, I’m like, ‘I don’t know. And I’m always like, ‘Well, you know, if he did, where’s the bodies?”
Dennis Damschroder, another deputy who worked with Calkins, told CNN he thought Calkins was innocent. One reason he believed that, he said, was the logistical challenge of secretly killing someone during a patrol shift.
“If you wanted to kill me at 12 o’clock in the afternoon, what are you going to do with my body?” Damschroder said. “If he did something with them, why haven’t they found them?”
While questioning Calkins in 2004, Cpl. Scott Walters complained about the inconsistencies in Calkins’ statements. CNN obtained a recording of the conversation. Walters said, “Every time we ask you a question, we have to go back and get clarification. And every time we have to go back and get clarification, it makes it look like you’re trying to hide something. And if you’re trying to hide this, what else are you trying to hide? Do we got a body laying around in the sticks somewhere that we don’t know about?”
Calkins said nothing, but he laughed.
“I mean,” Walters said, “are we gonna be clearing, are we gonna be widening Immokalee Road down through Wiggins Pass some day and all of a sudden find out that we got a dead body out there like they keep digging all these dead bodies up out there?”
Calkins said nothing, but laughed again.
In the woods along Immokalee Road, which ran from his patrol zone in North Naples all the way to Immokalee, three sets of human remains had been discovered in the previous ten months. Two were unidentified, and remain so today. One was Sergio Guerrero, a man with no known connection to Calkins.
Guerrero was an undocumented Mexican immigrant who began appearing in sheriff’s reports from North Naples in 1995. He worked as a dishwasher and a tile setter, among other jobs. In many of the reports, Guerrero is described as “drunk” or “intoxicated.” Often he was on foot, staggering in the road, but sometimes he drove a truck or rode a bike.
Among the documents provided to CNN by the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, none show a direct encounter between Calkins and Guerrero. In 1998, Calkins was listed as the “editing supervisor” on another deputy’s report that described Guerrero drunkenly crashing a bicycle into a motor vehicle.
In January 2003, deputies arrested Guerrero on a probation-violation warrant. While he was in jail, federal immigration authorities took custody of him. On March 20, Guerrero was deported. But he quickly returned to the United States, and to North Naples.
A friend said Guerrero’s wife had reported seeing him on a Sunday, “at Easter time,” according to a sheriff’s report. Easter fell on April 20 that year. There were no reported sightings of Guerrero after that.
“This guy is more Andy Griffith than he is a guy who would take Terrance Williams on a one-way trip to the Everglades.”
On June 3, 2003, a worker from an excavation company found human bones in the woods south of Immokalee Road. The remains included a skull in two pieces, scattered vertebrae, and a broken pelvic bone. An investigator wrote that “no flesh was visible” on the bones. The skull showed evidence of a gunshot wound, possibly from a .32-caliber bullet. Subsequent DNA testing identified the remains. This was Sergio Guerrero.
A sheriff’s report said Guerrero’s former employer and friend had wired him some money to help return to the United States. The employer later tried to collect the debt and admitted to a detective that he threatened to report Guerrero to immigration authorities if he didn’t pay it back. Guerrero told his family he was worried for his safety. CNN reached the employer, Nick LaGrasta, and asked what he thought had become of Guerrero.
“I think he was at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and got picked up by the wrong person,” LaGrasta said.
Guerrero’s bones were found about a mile away from the Circle K where Calkins claimed to have dropped off Felipe Santos.
Molloy, the former federal prosecutor, was asked if the FBI looked for connections between the cases.
“It is my understanding that they did,” he said. “We were not able to find any connection between Calkins and other bodies we may have investigated.”
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The Circle K where Calkins claimed to have dropped off Felipe Santos. Investigators found no proof that Santos was ever seen there. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
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Steven Henry Calkins was born in 1954 in Ottawa, Illinois. His father was a timber broker and a deacon in the Baptist church. His family raised corn and soybeans. Calkins lived in Illinois for 33 years and did not leave much of a footprint. He rarely appeared in his 1972 high school yearbook. The local law-enforcement authorities said they had nothing about him in their files. He worked on the family farm for 14 years after high school. In 1983, he served as a groomsman in a friend’s wedding. That friend, Jeff Gleim, remembered Calkins as a good man.
“Well, the last I knew about Mr. Calkins was he was an upstanding farmer up by Grand Ridge. And he did an excellent job farming. And he was a friend for a long time, and then he was a police officer somewhere down South,” Gleim said. “If he is the same caliber of a police officer as he was a farmer, the state of Florida has the best officer that they ever could hope to have.”
Many people did see Calkins as a good officer. He saved at least two lives as a deputy sheriff. In 1996, he and a colleague found a man unconscious in a chair in his living room after an apparent heart attack. They administered CPR until other rescue workers arrived, and the man survived. That same year, after a vehicle crash, Calkins found another man pinned beneath a pickup truck. Marshaling bystanders to help, Calkins led an effort to lift the truck and set the man free.
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A collage of documents relating to Calkins' service, including his signed oath of office, a commendation from Sheriff Don Hunter, and a news clipping.
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There were smaller things he did, too, acts of kindness that led citizens to write letters of thanks to the sheriff. They said he was courteous and professional. They said he went above and beyond. Calkins “made a very tense situation calm,” one woman wrote, and another said he “did more than he had to,” and once, on a cold, windy night just after Christmas, he saw an elderly couple with car trouble and he drove them home.
One day in 1991, a woman was driving on Interstate 75 with her four-year-old son when her Dodge Caravan broke down. Calkins wasn’t even on duty; he was driving home after having his cruiser serviced on his day off. But he helped get the broken-down minivan off the highway and then put the woman and the boy in the cruiser. They were on their way to pick up the woman’s 6-year-old son from school, so Calkins drove them to pick up the boy. Then he drove all three of them home.
“To say the least, my sons had a great time riding in the back seat cage of the marked, police vehicle and were the envy of all their friends at the community school,” the boys’ father, Patrick O’Mara, wrote to the sheriff.
To Calkins’ attorney, John Hooley, these incidents are evidence that Calkins is innocent.
“If you look at his personnel file, you’ll see the type of guy he is,” Hooley said. “This guy is more Andy Griffith than he is a guy who would take Terrance Williams on a one-way trip to the Everglades.”
This leads to the conflicting questions at the heart of the story. If Calkins really is a guy who would make people disappear, how did he keep his badge for 16 years? Why wasn’t he linked to other disappearances before that? Why did he have so few citizen complaints, and so many letters of commendation?
And if he really is Andy Griffith, why did two men disappear after riding in his patrol car? And why did he lie so much about it?
CNN made numerous efforts to reach Calkins and ask him about his life, his career, and the two disappearances. Hooley, his attorney, said Calkins declined to be interviewed. CNN sent a list of questions to Hooley and asked him to share them with Calkins, but Hooley said he wouldn’t do it.
“He said don’t forward any of your emails to him anymore,” Hooley told a reporter.
Finally, CNN sent the list of questions to Calkins’ last known address in Iowa, requesting a signature confirming delivery. But on April 5, a FedEx employee called to say that after repeated attempts to deliver the package, “we made contact with the recipient, and he refused it.”
To investigators, Calkins is a cipher. An unsolved puzzle. Detective Kevin O’Neill investigated the disappearances for 13 years. He was asked if he understood Calkins at all.
“No,” he said. “No I don’t.”
Doug Molloy, the former federal prosecutor, was asked who Calkins is.
“Nobody I’ve ever encountered before,” Molloy said.
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After Terrance Williams disappeared, authorities searched for him in various wooded areas and bodies of water near the cemetery. (Sydney Walsh for CNN)
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In interviews with sheriff’s investigators, Calkins said nice things about the men who disappeared. Santos was “very courteous and polite and very cooperative,” and “very, very nice.” Williams was a “clean-cut looking young man. Very soft spoken and very, very mannerly and very respectful of me and very well-spoken.”
CNN obtained recordings of some of the Calkins interviews. They include a moment in which he apparently did not know he was being recorded. And in that moment, his description of the two men was entirely different.
In his deep, authoritative voice, Calkins was complaining about the investigation. He said he’d already given too much information. He said he wouldn’t talk anymore without representation. He said he might have broken some rules, but he hadn’t broken any laws. Finally, he said,
“I’m not gonna get drug through the mud no more because a couple of scumbags are missing.”
But these two men had names, and souls, and heartbeats, and fingerprints. They loved, and they were loved, and they were gone too soon.
