Olisa Williams’s dad charged with murder

I’ve been pretty sure Olisa Williams‘s dad killed her for a decade and a half now. Like, since before the Charley Project was ever even a thing. I never expected the case to actually get solved, though.

Well, 39 years after the fact, Isiah Williams has finally been charged with one count of open murder. “Open murder” doesn’t mean he committed the crime in public or anything. It just means they aren’t picking a specific degree of murder, like first- or second-degree murder.

The Michigan Attorney General did a press conference about the case and another, unrelated case, an hour ago, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot that’s publicly available about the case against Isiah. It does say Olisa’s body has not been recovered. I’m not sure there’d be anything left of the poor baby by this point. (The comments at the bottom of the press conference link aren’t about Olisa’s case but about the other one being discussed. Plus some bonus homophobia thrown in.)

I hope the case processes through the system quickly. Isiah is not getting any younger.

Olisa Williams

I have been unable to go to my college classes these last two days because the weather, and hence the roads, have been so bad. I tried to make it yesterday, but the roads were like a skating rink. I wound up sliding into a ditch at 45 mph, missing a telephone pole by about half a foot. I’m lucky I wasn’t killed. I couldn’t get out of the ditch on my own and my brother had to come rescue me. I didn’t even go out today — the roads are a lot worse than they were yesterday. So I am staying in to write updates instead.

I noticed that the NCMEC has, in addition to adding a new (badly needed) AP to Olisa Williams‘s poster, changed her date of disappearance from February 8, 1983 to July 8, 1982. I have NO IDEA where the 1983 date came from, but back when the poster had that date the case always struck me as very suspicious. I mean: “She was taken from her father, as he slept on a park bench.” Nobody just randomly falls asleep on a park bench in Ann Arbor, Michigan in February. It is February now, and Weather.com says it is presently 11 degrees in Ann Arbor — quite a typical temperature for this time of year. To fall asleep in that kind of cold is to freeze to death.

Mr. Williams’s falling asleep in on the park bench the middle of July makes a great deal more sense, though as you can see from Olisa’s casefile that’s probably not what happened either.

There’s a fair-to-middling chance that Olisa is alive today. Who knows, we could have another Carlina White story, someday. She would be thirty years old this year.