How an Innocent Man Dies in Missouri

The Marcellus Williams Story

Grant Katz

July 22, 2024

On August 11, 1998, Felicia Gayle was home alone. It was a Tuesday, and the 42-year-old woman’s husband, a radiologist, was away at work, leaving Felicia to relax in her early retirement. They were a St. Louis couple, living inside of a gated community that fellow residents later described to police as being “one of the best neighborhoods in the area.” Yet, that day, in broad daylight, someone broke through the front window of Gayle’s home, murdered her with a butcher’s knife, and left with a stolen purse and Macbook.

Gayle’s husband came home at around 8 P.M. to find his wife’s body lying on the stairwell. Police reports said she was stabbed 43 times. The murder weapon was still lodged above her collarbone.  “We’ve got some promising leads,” the police captain told a local newspaper in an article published two days later,  yet nothing came of these statements. Nor, somehow, did any revelations come from a crime scene that was apparently overflowing with evidence, bearing the killer’s bloody footprints, fingerprints, and hair. 

Over 700 friends and family attended Felicia Gayle’s memorial service, but she was left unavenged, and her family with no answers.

In May of the next year, Henry Cole was serving time in a St. Louis medium security jailhouse, when, Cole later reported, a news program covering the Gayle murder came on the television. Shortly after it aired, Cole’s cellmate, Marcellus Williams, reportedly confessed to Cole that he was the murderer of Felicia Gayle. Over the following weeks, Cole and Williams had several conversations concerning the details of the crime, and when Cole was released from prison in June of that year, he promptly informed city police of what he had heard. With no other credible suspects having risen in the past year, and Gayle’s family becoming increasingly desperate, police began a swift investigation.

Officials soon approached one Laura Asaro, a brief girlfriend of Williams’s. She corroborated Cole’s story, with claims that Williams, his neck lined with scratch marks, had picked her up the day of the murder in a bloodied shirt, and that afterwards she had found Gayle’s purse in the trunk of his car. He later disposed of much of the evidence, she said, and sold Gayle’s laptop to an acquaintance. Sure enough, when police searched the back of his Buick LeSabre, they found items purportedly belonging to Gayle’s purse, and when they questioned the buyer of Gayle’s laptop, he admitted that Williams sold it to him. 

Williams, already in prison on separate charges, was ruled guilty of first-degree robbery, first-degree burglary, and first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death by lethal injection. 

The verdict, though, was contested. Despite two unrelated witness accounts of his guilt,  a history of armed robbery, and evidence of the crime confirmed to have been in his possession, Marcellus Williams’s lawyers held that there was not enough evidence to convict him. In 2003 they appealed the case to the Missouri Supreme Court, resting much of their objection on the unreliability of the witnesses Henry Cole and Laura Asaro. 

Both, they claimed, acted under incentive. In May of 1999, Felicia Gayle’s family offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who could bring her murderer to justice. Cole was likely swayed by either this offer or another $5000 reward promised by the prosecution,  stating in a 2001 deposition that he wouldn’t have come forward at all if not for the money. Furthermore, his own family testified to his being a habitual liar and opportunist. “Everyone in the family knew that Henry made up the story about Marcellus committing the Felicia Gayle homicide,” told Durwin Cole, a nephew, going on to say that his uncle just wanted the money to get out of town. This penchant for falsehood, viewed together with Cole’s apparent gain from talking to police (on top of the reward money, his parole has been broken six times since Williams’s trial, without any consequence), makes suspicion unavoidable.

Laura, too, had motivation to wrongfully inform. She had a similarly unclean record, having previously lied under oath about her own arrests, and was reported to have bragged to a neighbor that she was receiving money in return for her testimony against Williams. Even more troubling, there have been several noted counts of her story conflicting with known evidence. Asaro described Williams as having scratch marks on his neck the day of the murder, yet inspection under Gayle’s fingernails provided no trace of such.  Asaro testified that Williams said he washed the knife after he used it, yet it was found bloody in the victim’s neck. The laptop, possibly the most damning of all the evidence, was claimed by Williams’s defense team to have been left in his possession by Laura Asaro herself, though, in all fairness, this is unconfirmed.

Evidently, the suspect nature of these two primary witnesses was not taken into much consideration in the original trial, and though this may be the fault of simple oversight, or perhaps the weak defense of state-provided lawyers, it should be noted what was the nature of the courtroom itself.

Marcellus Williams, an African-American, was convicted of murdering white Felicia Gayle by a jury of 11 white men and one black man. The prosecution apparently fought for this demographic spread, using 6 of its 9 peremptory challenges to exclude black jurors. In one case they rejected a potential black juror for his station as a post office worker, alleging that such people were “very liberal,” yet later admitted a white post office employee to the jury. Another was struck down because he “looked very similar” to Williams. The jury themselves proved no more scrupulous, deciding to condemn Williams to his death in just under two hours. And in what would prove to be the most contentious, and morally dubious, act by the court, the trial judge refused to have Williams’s DNA tested against that left at the crime scene.

Missouri’s Supreme Court, however, took that final point into more thought. They placed a stay on Williams’s execution, ordering that the DNA found on the murder weapon be tested and compared against his own. But it wasn’t until 2015, after 15 years on death row, that test reports came back concluding that Marcellus Williams was in fact not the source of the unknown DNA found on the butcher’s knife. 

Still, in spite of this qualified proof to his innocence, Missouri courts would not exonerate Williams. Officials ignored the findings of the DNA tests, and proceeded to expedite his execution to a close date. On August 27, 2017, Marcellus Williams ate his last meal, and prepared to die for a crime he did not commit. 

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Just hours before his execution, as he was awaiting transport to the death chamber, Williams was informed that his sentence had again been postponed. Missouri Governor Eric Greitens had abruptly convened a board of inquiry to investigate Williams’s conviction in light of the new evidence. There was hope again for Williams’s freedom.

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It has now been 7 years since that inquiry began. Williams is still on death row, where he has lived the last 25 years of his life. The inquiry board did not produce anything of substance, and was officially dissolved in June 2023 by Governor Mike Parson, Greitens’s replacement, who himself has denied clemency requests from two other black men who were both later proved to be wrongly convicted of murder. This is the status quo for Missouri, whose Attorney General’s office routinely refuses to consider DNA evidence in cases where the death penalty has already been imposed, rendering justice in their state not only blind, but deaf and dumb as well.

Marcellus Williams is scheduled to be executed on September 24 of this year, 2024. One of Williams’s attorney’s, Tricia Bushnell, told reporters on July 12, just after the Missouri Supreme Court denied an appeal to have Williams’s execution indefinitely postponed, that “no one wants to see Missouri execute an innocent man,” but, given the very actions of the Missouri legal system, that does not appear to be true. Marcellus Williams deserves to be exonerated and freed from a sentence that’s kept him at death’s door for 25 years, that was dealt him not under the auspices of truth and justice but through the machinations of deceit and racism. Sign this petition to help stop this injustice.