It used to be that every now and then Ed Williams would sit in the old truck he and his children used to ride in. Inside the truck, Ed remembers the pepperoni and cheese smell from the pizza run, the sound of the two children laughing -- it all comes back with crushing heartache to haunt him.

“I just can’t bring myself to it, it still makes me cry,” Williams said. “It’s bad when you’ve got to go to the graveyard to wish her happy birthday. You’re doing all the talking and, and ... she doesn’t talk back.”

Tuesday marks 10 years since the horrific day when an enraged Elloree man broke into a Cordova home armed with a shotgun.

It was Sept. 8, 1999.

“With three gunshots, he took out three generations of this family. My family hurts.”

In an Orangeburg cemetery, Ed’s former wife and mother-in-law were laid to rest in a dual funeral service held just three hours after his daughter Stacy’s service.

And for the past decade, each March, the grief-stricken father has driven from his home the three blocks that seem like three years to the Bowman Baptist Church where rests his daughter.

Ed has never spoken publicly about the day multiple pages were so brutally ripped from his family’s lives.

“It dawned on me, it’s been 10 years,” Ed said. “He took the initiative to kill somebody. I just left it in the court’s hands. I just felt here lately I needed to speak up, and say it isn’t fair.”

Ten years ago this week, Charles Shuler, 53, was charged with the shooting deaths of 38-year-old Linda Williams; her mother, Dorothy Gates, 63; and Williams’ 13-year-old daughter.

Two years later, two weeks after what would have been Stacy’s 15th birthday, a jury found Shuler guilty of breaking into Linda Williams’ Cordova residence and murdering the three women.

In a somewhat surreal moment during Shuler’s trial, Stacy’s frightened voice, recorded during a 911 call, was played for the jury.

“I’ve been shot!” the 13-year-old is heard to say on the recording.

“Who shot you?” the 911 dispatcher asks.

“Charles Shuler,” Stacy replied.

Shuler now awaits execution on the state’s Death Row.

In December 2002, Shuler argued before the state Supreme Court that the 911 tape was exploited by the prosecution, making the tape prejudicial to jurors.

However, two months later, the Supreme Court disagreed, saying the state had not overstepped its bounds by playing the tape.

“We conclude the death sentence was not the result of passion,” the decision states. “The jury’s finding of statutory aggravating circumstances for each of the three murders is supported by the evidence.”

In 2006, Shuler had a post-conviction-relief hearing before Circuit Court Judge Casey Manning.

On Aug. 12 of this year, Manning ordered Shuler’s defense and the state attorney general’s office to prepare written orders, one ordering a new hearing or one denying the motion. Manning will sign the one that reflects his decision.

“He’s currently in his PCR process; there have been arguments before the judge,” said Mark Plowden, spokesman for the S.C. attorney general’s office in Columbia. “The judge has asked both sides for written orders.”

Terry Gates, whose mother, sister and niece died that day in 1999, said he was contacted by the attorney general’s office this past week and told a decision in the relief hearing for Shuler could come by the first of the year.

But the family still waits.

The family has no ill will for the judge or prosecutors, but still believes the appeals process in South Carolina favors the defendant more than the victims.

In all likelihood, Shuler will have lived on Death Row longer than Stacy’s life of 13 years.

“We’re hurting, we’ve got to have some type of closure,” said Lori Edens, who also lost her sister, mother and niece in the attack.

Edens said the memories for her family are double-edged. While she wants to remember them, it hurts to do so.

Edens said “Dot,” as Dorothy Gates was known, was also known for her awfully good homemade vegetable soup. On the other hand, Linda’s rice and chicken supper was right up there with her mom’s soup.

“Linda was a chef,” Terry Gates said of his sister.

The family said Stacy hadn’t yet shown the culinary skills of her mother and grandmother. But she displayed an uncommonly kind heart for children.

“Stacy, she would have grown up to be a pediatric doctor,” Edens said. “She loved children.”

Court documents recording Shuler’s trial indicate Stacy’s last words to medical personnel were her concern for her younger brother, Buster.

During that last week, five police reports were filed.

Linda Williams had ended a two-year relationship with Shuler on the Friday before. Then from Saturday to that fatal Wednesday, the escalating violence began with profanity-laced threats on Williams’ life and the life of her mother, Dot Gates.

Cassandra Gates, Terry’s wife, said she was at the home earlier that final, fatal evening. She recalls Stacy asking her mom for tacos. Before leaving, she told her niece goodbye.

“I walked out the door and said, ‘I love you,’ and she said, ‘I love you’ back,” Gates said. “We were listening to a scanner when I got home and I heard them call out Linda’s address. I knew what had happened.”

Just a child at the time, Buster Williams, now 18, watched as Shuler’s red car circled the block around the house while his mom cooked supper.

A few minutes later, Buster saw it was a deranged Shuler crashing his way through a window of their home, yelling at his mother.

“And Charles Shuler said, ‘Put the m-----f------ phone down.’” Buster testified in court. “He was cussing to my mama. He said, ‘I got you now, you b----.’ I ran out the back door.”

Then, as he made his way to safety, the 8-year-old heard the blast of a shotgun behind him.

In an interview this past week, Buster Williams remembers the plans he and his sister made in the event Shuler came.

“We knew he was coming in there to kill us,” he said. “We’d planned it, to go out of a window. That was our escape route.”

Tragically, warrants for Shuler’s arrest related to the threatening phone calls had been issued charging him with illegal use of a telephone just hours before the 7 p.m. rampage.

Gates and Williams were transported to the hospital but never regained consciousness. Stacy survived a few hours but eventually succumbed to her injuries. All three women had suffered a shotgun blast to the back.

When police arrived, Shuler was found inside the home. He had turned the weapon on himself in an unsuccessful attempt at suicide.

Ed said he was in Lumberton, N.C., when he got the call. Cindy Williams, Ed’s wife, told him he needed to come home, something had happened. She didn’t have to say what.

Ed said he knew what the call was about.

“It was the most gut-wrenching feeling of my life, I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,” he said. “It still comes back in the blink of an eye.”

Ed says he believes the reason Shuler’s sentence hasn’t been carried out is because society has lost its sense of duty.

“A murderer, he knows he’s going to get taken care of” in prison, Ed says. “I don’t know, we’ve turned soft.”

Today, Ed still sees his daughter. It can be something in particular or nothing at all that triggers memories of Stacy. She laughs and plays in the memories he’s kept to himself for years.

Stacy is 10 years old again, then she’s 7, wearing a birthday hat or holding a pizza as her dad drives home.

“We had good times, different things you remember,” Ed said.

If there’s any consolation Ed takes from a decade of heartache, it comes from Stacy herself. It’s not a real memory of her, he says, but it brings a moment of comfort just the same.

“I have this dream where she’s walking toward me, she’s wearing the same mint green dress she was buried in,” he said. “(The dream) was like real life, I woke up shaking. She’s limping as she walks, and she says, ‘He fixed me.’ She had a limp, but she looked good.

“I know who fixed her.”

T&D Staff Writer Richard Walker can be reached by e-mail at rwalker@timesanddemocrat.com or by telephone at 803-533-5516. Discuss this and other stories on-line at TheTandD.com.

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