One of the most tragic and shocking murder cases I've ever seen is this one -- Manling Williams murdered her children in their beds, and then attacked her husband 97 times with a sword...but she took a break between murdering her kids and killing her husband to go our for drinks with some friends!
Frank GIrardot, award winning journalist, was on this case from day one, and when I proposed writing a mini-book about this case, he was eager to have this story reach a broader audience. We suggested this case to the producers of DEADLY SINS on Investigation Discovery, and on February 1st, 2014, this story will be portrayed and discussed on national TV thanks to Darren Kavinoky and the entire DEADLY SINS production team.
Yes, Frank and I provide commentary for the episode, and yes, we have put together a special true crime ebook for those of you who want to know even more about this shocking story. Both the ebook and the TV episode will debut Saturday February 1st, the same day that Frank is our guest on True Crime Uncensored on Outlaw Radio!
and guess what --CAITLIN ROTHER is also on Deadly Sins this season - check out the preview video
Here is what the website HELLBEAST wrote about the Manling Williams crime:
There are no excuses for Man-ling Tsang Williams’ actions. There are no good reasons either. Man-ling Tsang Williams defies understanding and logic. Unless of course one considers Man-ling Tsang Williams as a heartless, soulless and inhuman hellbeast. That is the only explanation I can come up with for the story I’m about to tell.
There once was a darling little family in Rowland Heights, California. The loving father was Neal Willliams, a sweet guy who met and fell in love with his Subway coworker Man-ling Tsang in 1999. He thought she was beautiful. On July 26, 2000 Neal and Man-ling’s baby boy Devon was born.
In 2001 Neal and Man-ling got married and the happy trio moved into a condo in Rowland Heights. In 2003 their second son Ian was born. And the family was now complete.
Devon and Ian were a delight to their grandmother, Jan Williams. She described Devon as silly, sociable and tolerant. He was going to study monkeys when he grew up.
Ian was the typical younger brother, pestering Devon and getting into mischief. “He threw himself into life with great abandon, and lived totally in the moment,” said grandma Jan.
Jan Williams said of her son Neal, “He was a great father who treated every child he met as though it was one of his own boys.” She continued, “Devon and Ian were his treasure, and he had no need of fancy cars or a big house. I am proud of that. Neal was a man of heart and integrity, and that means more to me than if he had become the world’s youngest millionaire.”
And as for Man-ling Tsang Williams, the wife and mother, well… everyone thought she was a good woman but for a few months in 2007 she’d begun to act “differently”.
What nobody knew, not Neal, not his mom, was that Man-ling had gotten back together with an old boyfriend — a fellow she’d had the hots for since high school. They had reconnected through the Internet (big surprise). Man-ling Tsang Williams, married mother of two, began an illicit affair with this man.
I guess she was thinking happily ever after, but the boyfriend was thinking not with a husband and kids hanging about. He wanted her to get a divorce. Fair enough. He probably urged Man-ling to leave the boys, then 7 and 3, with their daddy so he could have her all to himself.
So did Man-ling do the decent thing? Any decent thing? Like split up with her boyfriend and return to being a good wife and mom? Or asking Neal for a divorce? Hell no! Those things would be rational, logical, human.
Man-ling Tsang Williams chose instead the most evil course of action. Murder. Why? Because she’s a selfish, soulless, heartless hellbeast I guess.
In June 2007 Man-ling began to tell friends she had nightmares of Neal suffocating her sons and then killing himself. Why would she do that? She was planting the seeds.
On August 7, 2007, this bitch from the depths of hell put her two boys to bed. Ian was in the bottom bunk with the teddy bear blanket and Devon was on the top with the SpongeBob blanket. They were tucked up for the night, all snug as a bug in a rug.
When the boys were asleep, Man-ling the monster mom donned a pair of latex gloves and crept into the bedroom. She quietly took a pillow and held it over little Ian’s face. Did the poor little guy thrash about? Did he put up a fight? Only Man-ling knows.
Apparently, Ian hadn’t made sufficient noise in his death throes to awaken his brother. When the 3-year-old was finally suffocated to death, monster mom obviously felt no remorse, no grief. Instead, as planned, she stood on the rungs of the bunk bed ladder and coldly and calculatingly did the exact same thing to Devon.
Why? Why, why why? What was this evil bitch thinking that made her kill those precious boys? If she wanted her boyfriend she did not have to murder them!
And of course Man-ling wasn’t done. With the boys dead in their beds, she checked out her boyfriend’s profile page on MySpace. And then Man-ling the monstrous POS left the house to have fun with some friends.
It takes a beast with a heart of stone to have a celebratory evening out after having murdered her babies. That is so cold.
And then Man-ling returned home. Neal, being a good dad, had probably been checking periodically on the boys and thought they were sound asleep. Neal himself was asleep in bed.
Man-ling decided to use the katana (samurai) sword Neal’s mother gave him as a gift. It was long and heavy and damned sharp. It was one hell of a weapon.
But hey! Wait a minute! Wasn’t the scenario supposed to be Neal killed the boys and then himself? Who the hell uses a sword to kill themselves, aside from samurai presumably? But hey, Man-ling had it all figured out I guess.
I don’t know if Neal woke up as she approached but what transpired was horrific. Man-ling Tsang Williams survived it and Neal alas did not.
The evil bitch managed to stab and slash her loving husband 97 times. Neal did not die in bed — he made it as far as the top of the stairs in his bid to escape this frenzied fatal attack. Ninety-seven wounds. That’s a lot of hate.
Neal begged for his life to no avail. The hellbeast had no mercy. Neal’s hands were mangled as he tried to fend off the blows. There was a huge X slashed on his torso. His blood saturated the carpet.
Monster Man-ling, now that the worst was over, got busy covering her tracks. She typed up a “suicide” note indicating Neal killed the boys and then himself. She posted the note on MySpace.
WTF? She still went with the murder-suicide crap? How the hell does somebody inflict 97 wounds upon their person when trying to commit suicide? There is absolutely no way that that could happen! After, say, the 14th jab a suicidal person would likely give up, acknowledge defeat. But no, Man-ling had her plan and so what if it went a little awry?
The bloody beast then cleaned herself up, gathered up the bloody clothing and left the house to dispose of it.
At 7:30 in the morning, August 8, 2007, Man-ling Tsang Williams ran outside her condominium screaming hysterically for help. Her neighbours could not help but notice. They came out to investigate the commotion.
Man-ling had her story ready. She told neighbour Francine Cerda she couldn’t sleep, she took a drive to “cool off her head”, she came home and everybody was dead!
The Los Angeles county sheriffs arrived soon after the neighbours called 9-1-1 and headed into the house of horrors. It was filthy btw. There were clothes and trash strewn about the living room, and unwashed dishes and more trash on the kitchen counters. I guess Man-ling had abandoned cleanliness along with faithfulness, compassion and love.
And there, at the top of the stairs, lay Neal Williams. And then the sheriffs found the boys. It must’ve ripped their hearts out.
Man-ling agreed to accompany the sheriffs to the police station. By the time she got there her story had changed a bit. She told the detectives that she’d been out doing some grocery shopping. She asked them, “Does anyone know if my husband is OK? … I want my babies. Please let them be OK.”
That fake show of concern was a mistake. She’d supposedly come screaming out of her house after finding Neal sliced and diced and she’s asking if he was OK?
But Man-ling carried on for hours feigning grief, sadness, bewilderment for the deputies’ benefit. They didn’t buy it.
See, telling a different story to the detectives than she told to the neighbour was proving to be a big honking mistake.
“She provided some statements that proved incriminating,” said Sgt. Bill Marsh, lead homicide detective in the case for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
The investigators had also found something very interesting — a bloody cigarette box in her car. Betcha $10,000 that was Neal’s blood. And if she found the bodies after she’d been driving around/grocery shopping, why was anything bloody in her car?
The homicide detectives confronted Man-ling the monster with their discovery, and at that point she broke down and confessed.
Los Angeles County sheriff’s Detective Donald Walls said the killer was arrogant during her confession and even joked about being on CSI, the TV show. He said for the most part she was relaxed as if they were friends and having a lunch date.
Like I said, she was heartless.
Man-ling Hellbeast Tsang Williams was arrested and charged with three counts of 1st-degree murder. All well and good.
She went to trail in November 2010 with Pomona Superior Court Judge Robert M. Martinez presiding.
The prosecutor Deputy District Attorney, Stacy Okun-Wiese and Deputy District Attorney, Pak Kouch successfully argued that the murder of the boys and the husband was a ploy for Man-ling Tsang Williams to get back together with her former boyfriend.
The jury deliberated for 8 hours before coming back and finding her guilty on all three counts of murder in the 1st. The jury also found her guilty of the special circumstances of lying in wait and multiple murders.
Lying in wait is a new one for me, but upon reflection it certainly suited the crime. She waited until the boys and her husband were asleep and totally vulnerable before she killed them.
The jury, however, was hung regarding the death penalty versus life imprisonment. They were split 8-4 with more in favor of the death penalty.
Man-ling Tsang Williams had to go back to court on April 18, 2011 for a second penalty phase jury. Her defense attorneys Haydeh Takasugi and Tom Althaus did their very best to portray their client as worthy of being spared the death penalty.
Althaus told the court that the murders were not calculated executions, but a “sudden mistake.” *snort*
“There’s no basis for the prosecution’s contention that these murders were planned,” Althaus said. He went on to portray Man-ling Tsang Williams as being in a state of “extreme mental and emotional disturbance” when she killed her husband and sons.
“There’s no good explanation why it happened,” Althaus said. That is true. But then he continued to say that prior to the killings, Man-ling Tsang Williams was “a kind, generous, troubled woman who loved her husband and children.
I am sorry, but I simply cannot believe that a creature that smothered her boys to death and slashed her husband to death was kind, generous and loving. Can you? I can believe she acted kind, generous and loving, but it was all fake, just like her crocodile tears during her initial police interview.
The defense had called on friends and family to portray the murderer’s upbringing as full of “pain, heartache, and diminished dreams.” Man-ling’s father Kai Tai Tsang took the stand and heroically took the blame and apologized to Jan Williams.
“I feel really sorry. Please forgive me. As a father, I didn’t do good. That is why it happened. I am sorry,” he said, and then bowed with respect to Neal’s grieving mother.
Man-ling’s sister Shunling Tsang testified though that her memories of her own childhood included no mistreatment from her parents. She also stated that Man-ling had changed in the months prior to the murders, and she would call in the middle of the night just to talk.
The prosecutor scorned the defense’s strategy of using a bad childhood as an excuse. Okum-Wiese said, “When did it become OK in our society to commit three heinous crimes, kill your children and your husband and to blame it on your mom?”
Okun-Wiese added, “This case screams for the maximum punishment.”
The second penalty phase jury recommended that Man-ling Tsang Williams be put to death. Judge Robert Martinez concurred.
“It is the order of this court that you should suffer the penalty of death,” he told the monstrous killer.
Judge Martinez further said in court, “The evidence is compelling that the defendant, for selfish reasons, murdered her own two children.”
Her motivation, Judge Martinez said, was a “narcissistic, selfish and adolescent,” desire to start a new life with another man, free from the hindrances of family life.
The judge rightly pointed out that Man-ling Williams had plenty of willing family members who would have taken in the children had she decided to abandon them.
“It is not for me to forgive, because the ones in the position to forgive are not with us,” Martinez told Man-ling Tsang the POS hellbitch Williams. “I hope your families find peace.”
And I hope they find peace too. Jan Williams lost her whole family. And for the Tsang family’s grief, Shunling Tsang summed it up so well. “When (the boys) died, it was like the joy left the world,” she said. “Those kids meant the world to a lot of people.”
Man-ling the monster can whine all she wants about her “diminished dreams”. Those innocent boys’ dreams were snuffed out when she decided her potential life with her lover had more value than her boys’ lives. And poor Neal, a good man going about his life with real kindness, real generosity, real love — he and the boys deserved so much better.
So now Man-ling Tsang Williams is awaiting death. She and her lawyers will be fighting it, no doubt. But meantime she has lots of time to think, and I wish I could ask her, “Where’s the boyfriend now, bitch?”
Selfish, soulless, heartless creatures like this make me sick. She was blessed with the greatest of blessings but she wanted something else. And wanting it made it OK for her to kill to get it.
Whittier Daily News article
CBS Los Angeles News article
Huffington Post article
