Williams found guilty on all counts

Jurors found Wesley Jonathan Williams guilty of four counts of first degree murder and three counts of aggravated child abuse Friday.
The 12-member panel delivered the verdict after a little more than two hours of deliberation.
Williams was convicted of killing ex-girlfriend Danielle Baker and her three young sons, three-week-old Aaron, one-year-old Amarion and nearly four-year-old Ahmaad. He fathered the two older children.
The 12-member panel retired to consider the case around 9 a.m. and emerged with a verdict around 11:15 a.m.
Sentencing will be set at a later date. Circuit Judge Bill Wright will make that decision without any recommendation from the jury. Before the trial, Williams waived his right to a jury in the penalty phase.
Williams is expected to be held at the Jackson County jail to await sentencing.
Baker’s father, Lavon Baker and his wife Stephanie embraced and cried after the verdicts were read.
They’re convinced the jurors made the right decision, and their hopes soared when the panel returned in roughly two hours.
“I was telling my wife that it had to be in our favor, with them coming back so quickly,” Baker said. “We just prayed hard.”
Asked what the verdict means to them, Stephanie Baker said simply, “Peace of mind.”
Emotions also ran high for some of the local law enforcement officers involved in the investigation.
Case agent Virgil Watson wept as the verdicts were read. He was assigned to the lead role while still working for the Marianna Police Department. He continued in that capacity even after he went to work for Jackson County Sheriff Lou Roberts, his old boss with the Marianna police.
His wife, Karen, said her husband had been “eating, sleeping and drinking the case” since the start. In fact, both worked for the Marianna police when the killings occurred on March 17, 2005, and they supported each other as the ensuing four years of their lives were focused on the case.
The two said they’d be spending some quiet time together over the next few days to process what happened Friday morning.
“The fact that we got the killer of three babies, it’s a burden off my shoulders, and more importantly, it’s justice for those children,” Virgil Watson said.
Roberts, Marianna’s chief of police when the killings occurred, praised Watson and all the other officers involved, both inside and outside the department. Many agencies assisted in the case, he said, and helped lead to its successful conclusion.
Roberts said he wasn’t sure what to expect when the jury retired to deliberate.
“I didn’t know which way it would go,” he said. “I felt it could go either way. I felt we’d done the best we could do, but the rest was in the hands of the jury.
He said he is relieved now that it is over.
“I certainly feel that now the family, the community and the officers can have a certain amount of closure,” Roberts said. “Those of us who worked on the case put a lot of our heart and soul into it, and this means a lot to us. Those children did not deserve what happened to them. They were innocents.”
Roberts said he has some hope Williams’ conviction may make it possible for law enforcement to gather more information in the case.
“I wouldn’t say I’m 100 percent convinced that someone else was involved, but we know there was some evidence that suggests that it’s very possible,” he said. “This may lead us to getting more information and if it does, we’ll pursue it.”
Roberts also said prosecutor Larry Basford’s exacting methods throughout his involvement in the case were key to obtaining a guilty verdict.
“He was very demanding on what he wanted us to check out, very exacting It’s very complex case, not something you can just look at a grasp,” roberts said. “It’s something you have to really work on and he was very aware of that. It took a lot of people, and a lot of cooperation from the community. I want to thank the community, too, for its patience. It took some time, a lot of work, and I know some people might have thought we were too slow, or even too fast, but the community hung in there with us.”
Basford, too, had words of praise. He said the law enforcement community could be proud of working as a team to bring Williams to justice. Asked Friday whether he felt, at the end of the trial, that he would prevail, Basford said “I was confident that God’s will would be done.”