CAREER CRIMINAL/KILLER TO BE EXECUTED 27th APRIL,2017

 KENNETH WILLIAMS

Convicted of fatally shooting a farmer after escaping from prison in October 1999

Scheduled for execution on April 27, 2017
Date of original condemnation: Aug. 30, 2000
County in which crime occurred: Lincoln
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Kenneth Williams was already set to spend his life in prison before he shot 57-year-old Cecil Boren to death.

The 20-year-old Williams was sentenced to life without parole Sept. 15, 1999, for killing Dominique Hurd, a 19-year-old University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff cheerleader. Williams kidnapped Hurd and her boyfriend, Peter Robertson, from a restaurant, robbed them, then shot them both, Robertson testified.

After Williams was convicted, he taunted Hurd’s relatives at his sentencing hearing, saying, “You thought I was going to die, didn’t you?”

He spent less than a month in the Cummins Unit before escaping Oct. 3, 1999, in a hog slop tank, a tank used to carry kitchen scraps.


Buddy Boren addresses the Arkansas Parole Board at a clemency hearing in Little Rock. Boren’s brother, Cecil Boren, was killed by Kenneth Williams in September 1999.

Prison officials said Williams climbed into the tank, where he hid, then jumped out of the tank once it had left the prison. From there, he ran to the highway. Williams made his way northwest, eventually reaching Boren’s farm, about 4 miles away.

Williams shot Boren seven times, dressed himself in his clothes and stole his truck, then drove north to Missouri. Authorities caught up with Williams near Urbana, Mo., after he led them on a high-speed chase that ended in a crash with another vehicle. The collision killed Michael Greenwood, 24, a delivery driver. Authorities said Williams spat on the man’s body after the wreck.

Within a year of being sentenced for Hurd’s slaying and her boyfriend’s kidnapping, Williams was sentenced to death for Boren’s killing.

In addition to the deaths of Hurd, Boren and Greenwood, Williams wrote in a 2005 letter to the Pine Bluff Commercial that he had killed Jerrell Jenkins, 36, of Pine Bluff.

Before the killings, Williams had already been incarcerated for much of his life.


KENNETH WILLIAMS

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported in 1999 that Williams had spent “more time in prison and youthful-offender facilities” than he had in society.

Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney Stevan Dalrymple told the newspaper that Williams' first criminal act was stealing bicycles at age 8. As a teenager, Williams attacked a guard at a juvenile center and stole his keys.

He was released from prison at age 19. At age 20, he robbed and kidnapped Sharon Hence, who was 39 at the time, eight days before he kidnapped and shot Hurd and her boyfriend.
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CECIL 
BOREN

On the Sunday morning he was killed, Boren, a farmer, was doing yard work while his wife was at church. Grady residents called him a pillar of the community of about 500 people.

Boren had worked at the Cummins Unit as an assistant warden in the '70s, and he was a retired IRS worker.

“He was just good people. This is just a real sad thing.” 

— Phillip Green, deputy prosecuting attorney of Lincoln County at the time of the killing