A DeKalb County man on trial for the murder of his 78-year-old grandmother decided to plead guilty but mentally ill Wednesday morning.
Both the prosecution and defense attorneys told jurors from the start that Gregory A. Williams, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, killed Millicent Williams with a machete in July 2017 and hid her body. Investigators found her remains about a month later in some woods off I-20. Jurors could have returned verdicts ranging from guilty to not guilty by reason of insanity
Superior Court Judge Gregory A. Adams sentenced Williams to life in prison with the possibility of parole, which means he’ll have to wait 30 years before asking for parole. In the meantime, he’ll get mental health treatment in prison, rather than a hospital, as would have been the case if the jury ruled him insane at the time of the murder.
Prosecutor Lance Cross said he approved of the plea, as does the family.
“They really wanted this to be over,” Cross said.
Before the killing, Williams had caused trouble at his grandmother’s South DeKalb home, where he lived, for years. He threatened her, locked her out and kept begging his way back in when she’d tell him to leave, Cross said.
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Once, she went to court asking for a temporary protective order, noting on the form that her only grandson, a U.S. Army veteran, suffered from PTSD. She believed he'd served in Iraq in the early 2000s, but the Army has said he never deployed.
Cross said Gregory Williams had been living at the home in July 2017 when he learned she planned to move — without him. He then killed her. Queen, for his part, said Williams was under the delusion that the home actually belonged to him.
Defense attorney Daryl Queen said Millicent Williams and her son, Milton, who is the defendant’s father, tried for five years to get him adequate help from various organizations, but the level of help he needed was hard to find.
“It is a sad end to a long tragic story,” he said of the plea in an email. “On behalf of Mr. Williams and myself, we pray that his family members can find peace with his acceptance of responsibility and maybe one day forgive him.”
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