Female recants kidnapping and abuse story

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The young woman who was found in 2007 in a backwoods trailer in West Virginia, where she said she had been held captive and raped, recanted her story on Wednesday.

“Megan Williams was 20 years old in September 2007 when she reported that she had been kidnapped, raped and tortured in an allegedly racist attack by six white residents from Logan County, West Va.,” Byron L. Potts, Ms. Williams’s lawyer said Wednesday in a brief statement. “Megan Williams is now recanting her story.”

The turn of events represents a shocking reversal in a racially charged case that led to the conviction of seven people, all but one of whom are serving lengthy prison sentences. It also raises questions about whether the prosecutor, who resisted strong pressure to pursue hate-crime charges based on race, should have gone further in checking Ms. Williams’s credibility.

But Brian Abraham, the former prosecutor for Logan County, W.Va., who handled the cases, said the seven people charged with the crimes relating to Ms. Williams’s abuse had been convicted based on physical evidence and their own corroborating statements, not on Ms. Williams’s testimony.

“The ironic part of this whole thing is that we were criticized by Ms. Williams and her supporters for allowing the defendants to take plea agreements,” Mr. Abraham said. “The whole reason we offered those plea agreements was because we had skepticism about Ms. Williams.”

Mr. Abraham added that the defendants were free to file postconviction redress, but because all of them pleaded guilty under oath and provided corroborating versions about what had happened at the trailer, he said he doubted that the convictions or sentences would change.

“Her initial report to police corresponded with the physical evidence and crime scene,” he said. “But then Ms. Williams began talking to the media and her story grew and changed, and that is when we stopped relying on anything she said.”

Ms. Williams, who is black, said her beatings sometimes involved racial epithets. Many civil rights leaders expressed outrage when the prosecutor offered plea agreements to the defendants, all of whom are white, and only pursued hate-crime charges against one of them.

Among those critics was the Rev. Al Sharpton, who addressed a 2007 rally against hate crimes in Charleston, the state capital, and gave $1,000 to Ms. Williams’s family as a Christmas gift.

Mr. Sharpton said Wednesday that he sent a letter to the current Logan County prosecutor, John Bennett, asking him to look into Ms. Williams’s new statement.

“If Ms. Williams has, in fact, fabricated her story, then I urge your office to vindicate any wrongfully convicted individuals,” Mr. Sharpton wrote.

Those charged with the crimes against Ms. Williams may have been easy targets for such accusations because they had a history of violent crime.

At the time of the alleged assaults, Ms. Williams was staying at a ramshackle trailer owned by Bobby Brewster and his mother, Frankie Brewster, in a rural area of Logan County, about 50 miles from Charleston.

Mr. Brewster had killed his stepfather at the trailer when he was 12, the authorities said, and served time at a juvenile correction facility. In July 1994, Mrs. Brewster shot and killed an 84-year-old woman she was looking after, also in the trailer, according to court records. She served six years at a state correctional facility and was paroled in 2000.

The police discovered Ms. Williams at the trailer in September 2007 after receiving an anonymous tip that she was being held captive there. Ms. Williams later told the police she had been stabbed, sexually assaulted, beaten with sticks, forced to eat human feces, sexually assaulted and doused with hot water.

But in correspondence with The New York Times starting in February 2008, one of the accused offered a more complicated picture of life at the trailer.

In a letter in March 2008, that person, Alisha Burton, wrote that Ms. Williams was indeed held captive at the trailer but only after a romantic relationship she had with Mr. Brewster took a turn for the worse.

“At the end, Frankie and her son, Bobby, would take turns pushing the chair by the door and sleeping there at night,” Ms. Burton wrote. “They made sure she wouldn’t go get the help she needed when she was cut by Bobby. She was held there for a week after she was cut by Bobby and Frankie B. b/c they was scared someone would get the law.”

Ms. Burton rejected the notion that the abuse was a hate crime, since Ms. Williams and Mr. Brewster had dated for months.

I remember when this happened I was shocked...and this chick recants her story? Hell they should charge her a** with an hate crime....