CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Megan Williams thought she was going to a party. That's why she tagged along with a woman she hardly knew, up a remote southern West Virginia hollow to a run-down trailer surrounded by beer cans and broken-down furniture. "But there wasn't no party," Williams said. "I realized I'd made a bad mistake."
For at least a week, authorities say, the 20-year-old black woman was kept captive in a shed, tortured, beaten, forced to eat rat, dog and human feces, and raped by six white men and women who taunted her with racial slurs. "They just kept saying 'This is what we do to niggers down here,'" Williams recently said in an interview.
Seated in a rocking chair in her mother's living room, about 50 miles from that shed, the slight woman with cocoa-colored skin says she was hopelessly outnumbered by people who just wanted to hurt a black person. "I just hope they fry for what they did to me. That's really all I got to say," she said. "I hope they fry."
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West Virginia does not have a death penalty, but the six suspects could spend the rest of their lives in prison if convicted of rape and kidnapping charges. Still, Williams and her family want more. Prosecutors have backed off state hate-crime charges, saying they only carry an additional 10-year maximum penalty and could complicate their case.
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For one, hate crimes typically involve strangers, and Williams knew one of the suspects. She filed a charge of domestic assault against him in July. Williams has been advised not to discuss anything about her prior dealings with the suspects, or the more graphic details of her experience.
But when Williams does detail her alleged torture, it comes in fits. Horrifying, disjointed memories of all that she allegedly endured spill forth while she fidgets and frowns. "They braided some switches together and beat me across the back," she said. "They tore my clothes off of me and everything, and then they took me up to the lake and they said that was the place they were going to cut my throat and throw me in," she said.
Williams looks off into the distance at the end of each recollection. She often falls quiet, reverting to yes and no answers, each response softly punctuated with "ma'am." At times, she reaches up to touch her scalp, where her hair was cut off and yanked out during her ordeal.
Megan's adoptive mother, Carmen Williams, said her daughter is "not at full capacity" mentally and easily trusted others. "She's a little slow, so it's kinda hard for her to comprehend sometimes," she said. "So I think that played a big part in it."