An abusive tenant who murdered his landlady tried to convince police she had committed suicide by handing them an unfulfilled suicide note she had written years earlier after the death of her two-year-old son.
Terri Jo Williams, 65, had been trying to evict James Hicks from his Florida home and was in court the day he died, where Hicks, 63, was due to stand trial for assaulting her.
Hicks told police she was his “best friend” and that he had found the grandmother drowned in a fountain outside the Pensacola bungalow they had shared for eight years.
But he was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday after a pathologist told a court there was no water in her lungs and she had been severely beaten before being suffocated.
“I will always love you baby girl. Rest in paradise,” her friend Melanie Wright wrote on her obituary page. “You finally have Jason in your arms again.”
James Edward Hicks claimed he found Terri Jo Williams dead after she drowned in a small pond outside the home they shared in Pensacola, Florida.
The beloved grandmother had been suffocated by the tenant she was trying to evict.
Police, responding to a 911 call from a neighbor, found the mother of three face down in the small water fountain next to her front door on August 12, 2022.
Hicks told police he found her there and “insisted” they look in her car, where they found alcohol on the passenger floorboard and a single pill on the driver’s seat.
She was pronounced dead at the scene and pathologist Deanna Oleske ruled her death a homicide by asphyxiation, noting two broken ribs, abrasions on her arms and bruising on the back of her head.
During a police interview a week later, Hicks gave officers a “suicide note” that he claimed to have found in the laundry room of the home two days after her death.
“He presented the letter as being handwritten by (Williams) and containing suicidal statements,” the court learned from the Pensacola Police Department’s affidavit.
‘When (Hicks) submitted the letter, only half the page was there and the bottom portion was missing, as if it had been torn out.’
But investigators had already photographed the letter after finding it among her papers during a search of her bedroom on the day of her death.
The photo revealed the bottom half of the note missing, in which Williams had written: “It doesn’t help that Jason died yesterday,” referring to Williams’ two-year-old son who had died in 1985.
Williams was found dead in a “decorative restaurant” outside the front door of her home.
Hicks gave police what she claimed was a suicide note, but they discovered she had written it decades earlier, after the death of her two-year-old son, Jason.
“James Hicks had intentionally removed part of the note that proved when Terri Williams had written it,” Assistant State Attorney Matt Gordon told jurors in Escambia County Court.
“He did this to corroborate his claim that she had committed suicide.”
The court heard that Williams had met her killer when they were co-workers at Florida-based supermarket chain Publix and she had invited him to sublet a room in her home.
Immediately after her death, Hicks texted her asking, “Where are you? Are you okay? Text me,” and told police they “communicated almost every day.”
But Williams had been trying to evict Hicks from the home, and police found a diary she had kept documenting a series of physical attacks by her tenant.
A forensic investigation of her phone found only two other messages between the couple.
Neighbors told investigators they often heard arguments coming from inside the single-story home and that Williams had described Hicks as abusive.
“The most telling injuries were bruising to the neck muscles, wounds to her arms and four fractured ribs on the left side of her chest, ribs which had been broken while she was still alive,” Gordon told the court.
‘Dr. Oleske discovered that Terri Jo Williams had been murdered.
‘She found that she had been physically asphyxiated, meaning that airflow had been blocked by an event that put enough pressure on her throat and/or chest to the point that she could not breathe.’
Williams left behind two surviving children and five grandchildren, and his family wrote that his “proudest accomplishments, without a doubt, were his children.”
‘The pride he radiated when he spoke about them was insurmountable.
Williams left behind two surviving children and five grandchildren, and his family wrote that his “proudest accomplishments, without a doubt, were his children.”
‘Throughout her life, Terri valued her role as mother to Kevin and Bryan, and by extension, to their families and her five grandchildren.’
In her obituary, she was described as “strong, funny, hard-working and extremely caring and loving.”
‘As evidenced by her lifelong collection of Native American memorabilia, Terri shared the cultural sanctity of nature and animals. Terri was a compassionate lover of animals, large and small.
‘Any stray dog that crossed her path found a loving home.’