At about 9 a.m. on Monday, September 10, 2007, 50-year-old Dell Crawford called police in Detroit, Michigan to report finding the body of 35-year-old Tatanisha “Joy” Williams in the home she rented from Crawford at 8921 Charlevoix Street.
Williams was lying on her bed with one leg dangling over the side. She had six deep gashes on her head. She also had what appeared to be defensive wounds on the fingers of both hands.
Crawford told police that he had been trying to contact Williams that morning while driving his cab, but got no answer. He discovered that a key to the deadbolt on the front door had been broken off, leaving the lock jammed. Crawford happened to see James Short, whom he knew from the neighborhood as a handyman, and asked if he had needle-nosed pliers. Short said he did, and so Crawford drove him two blocks to Short’s home to retrieve them and then returned to Williams’s house.
Short was unable to remove the broken key. Crawford gave him keys to a side door to enter while Crawford remained in his cab in the hope of catching a fare. However, when Short came out and said Williams was on her bed, Crawford went inside and discovered that she was dead.
Crawford called 911 and took Williams’s twin toddlers to their grandmother’s house. He told Short to wait for the police. Crawford then returned to the house on Charlevoix Street.
Police searched the house and found no blood anywhere. There were no blood spatters in the bedroom and no blood on the bedding, including a blanket that was draped over Williams from the waist down. Some blood was found on the inside of one of her hands.
Dr. Lokman Sung, an assistant medical examiner at the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, performed an autopsy. He would later testify that Williams suffered six deep wounds from a blunt instrument. Dr. Sung opined that the wounds on her left hand were caused when a blunt instrument struck her as she was holding her left hand up to her temple in a defensive position. The instrument struck her hand so hard the ring she was wearing left an imprint on her head.
Later that day, Crawford went to the Detroit police station where he gave a statement. In the statement, he explained about the broken key and the discovery of Williams’s body. When asked if Williams was having problems with anyone, Crawford said she had been carjacked on the Friday or Saturday before. On Sunday, according to Crawford, she had gone out because someone had told her the carjacker was seen on Crane Street. However, when she saw the man, she had decided not to do anything.
Crawford also said that Charles Rainer, who did plumbing work for him, had stayed with Williams the day before her body was found. Crawford said Rainer had told him that he left at 1:30 a.m. and had awakened Williams so that she could unlock the deadbolt to let him out. Crawford said Rainer came by the house regularly to smoke crack cocaine, which he obtained from Williams.
That same day, police interviewed Rainer at the police station. He was given his Miranda warnings and detectives would later say he was suspected of the murder.
Rainer said he was a regular visitor to Williams’s home and that she supplied him with cocaine. The Saturday before Williams was murdered, Rainer said he visited her and they spent the day watching movies. He said he fell asleep in her bed, and woke up and left about 1:30 a.m. Rainer said Williams let him out of the front door.
Four days later, on September 14, 2007, Rainer gave a second, dramatically different statement. After the police told him he had failed a polygraph examination, Rainer said that he spent the entire night with Williams. He said he was up at 7:30 a.m. to go to work when Crawford came to the house.
Rainer said Crawford came in, and after asking, “Are you still here?” to Rainer, picked up a crescent wrench and went to the bedroom where he confronted Williams. Rainer said he heard Crawford ask Williams for money she owed, followed by two “thumps.”
On September 17, 2007, based on Rainer’s statement, Crawford was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder.
In December 2008, Crawford went to trial in Wayne County Circuit Court.
The prosecution’s case relied almost solely on Rainer’s shifting and contradictory testimony.
Rainer told the jury that he heard Crawford arguing with Williams, and that Crawford said, “Do you have the money you owe me?”
Rainer said he went to the bedroom door and saw Crawford take “a couple of swings at her.” He said Williams was pleading with him to stop.
Asked during cross-examination by defense attorney Craig Daly if he saw Williams being hit, Rainer said that Crawford blocked his view. When Daly confronted Rainer with his preliminary hearing testimony that he saw Williams sitting on the bed, Rainer said he couldn’t recall. Daly pointed out numerous inconsistencies and Rainer replied that he couldn’t remember. Rainer insisted he heard a “couple of thumps.”
Rainer claimed that Crawford told him to tell the police that he had left at 1:30 a.m. He said that he came forward with his second statement after he felt assured that he would be safe. Rainer denied that his second statement was false.
Police officers and evidence technicians testified that no blood was found on the walls, the bed, the surrounding furniture, or the mattress itself. A damp mop was found in the kitchen and there was an odor of bleach and disinfectant cleaner, officers said. Damp clothing also was found in the dryer in the basement. But no blood was found. Officers testified that no fingerprints were found.
Three days after Williams’s body was discovered, officers returned to the scene and collected swabs of blood found in the basement of the home. DNA testing conducted on the swabs before trial revealed the blood to be from an unknown female, but not Williams.
The prosecution contended that Crawford had beaten Williams to death in the bedroom and managed to clean it up before the police arrived—a theory that the defense ridiculed as physically impossible, in particular because no blood was found in the bedroom.
Dr. Sung, the pathologist who performed the autopsy, testified that the wounds inflicted on Williams would have caused massive bleeding.
The defense and prosecution stipulated that Bode Technology, a DNA testing laboratory, had conducted DNA testing of material from one of Williams’s fingernails. The only profile detected was Williams’s DNA profile.
By the time of closing arguments, the prosecution had veered from its initial theory that Williams had been murdered in the bedroom.
Assistant Wayne County prosecutor Carin Goldfarb told the jury, “And [Crawford] told [Ranier] to get out. So the answer to the question is, no I can’t tell you exactly where he beat her to death. I don’t know for sure. Because I wasn’t there. And nobody was there, ‘cause [Crawford] … didn’t put every single hole in her head in front of [Ranier].”
In the defense closing argument, Daly portrayed Rainer, who was married, as a liar, a thief, and an addict who spent weekends with a sex worker or with Williams smoking crack.
“[E]verybody who is here, every one of you, everybody in this audience, all the police officers in this case, everybody here knows this one undeniable fact that proves beyond any question that Charles Rainer is a liar,” Daly said. “He can’t change the fact that there was no blood there. Where he claims that he saw this man brutally murder a woman in her bed.”
“That’s the beginning and end of this case,” Daly argued. “You really don’t have to think about much more other than that. And the police knew this from day one.”
Daly further argued that Rainer had killed Williams, that he killed her elsewhere, and that he brought her back and propped her up in bed.
On December 22, 2008, the jury acquitted Crawford of first-degree murder and convicted him of second-degree murder. Judge David Breck sentenced Crawford to 20 years and 10 months to 45 years in prison.
On January 11, 2011, the Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the conviction and sentence by a 2-1 vote. Appeals Judge William Whitbeck dissented and said he would have vacated the conviction, noting that the prosecution had “circled almost 180 degrees in terms of its theory.”
Judge Whitbeck noted that to accept the prosecution’s theory, the jury had to believe that although Crawford began the attack on Williams in the bedroom, “he left not a trace of blood anywhere on the bed or on the walls.”
“Second, we must accept that, after Crawford commenced his attack on Williams, she fled the bedroom silently, without making any contact with Rainer,” the judge wrote. “Third, we must accept that Crawford killed Williams elsewhere in the house, dragged her into the bedroom, placed her on the bed, and then, using only cleaning fluid and a mop, cleaning the crime so thoroughly that the police found no traces of blood whatsoever.”
“Individually, each of these propositions might be conceivable,” Judge Whitbeck said. “Collectively, they are simply not believable.”
In July 2011, the Michigan Supreme Court denied leave to appeal. Two justices said they would have granted leave for the reasons cited by Judge Whitbeck in his dissent.
In 2020, Crawford’s case was referred to the Cooley Law School Innocence Project by the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) as part of a post-conviction DNA testing grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Cooley Innocence Project and the CIU agreed to DNA testing of the swabs of blood that had been collected from the basement and had been determined to be from an unknown female. When the laboratory received and opened the evidence packages from the Detroit Police Department, there were no samples inside.
The fingernail clippings from Williams were sent out for DNA testing that was more sophisticated and discriminatory than what was available at the time of Crawford’s trial.
In June 2025, Bode Technology conducted testing on Williams’s fingernails. The lab found a mixture of at least two males, including a major profile and limited minor profile under both the left and right fingernails. Since more genetic information was obtained from the left side, comparisons were conducted on that sample that excluded Crawford as a contributor to the major male profile from the victim’s left-hand fingernail sample. In January 2026, Bode Technology also excluded Rainer as a contributor to Williams’s left-hand fingernail sample.
On March 24, 2026, a joint motion by the defense and prosecution to vacate Crawford’s conviction was granted by Judge Tracy E. Green, who then dismissed the case.
Judge Green said in the order: “Post-conviction DNA testing establishes that the left-hand fingernail clippings contain a male DNA mixture in which the major contributor is neither Crawford nor Rainer.”
The judge said, “Combined with the lack of corroborating physical evidence and the prosecution’s reliance on Rainer’s disputed account, the exclusion of Crawford as the major male contributor to DNA from the victim’s left-hand fingernails—an area consistent with a defensive struggle—materially undermines confidence in the verdict.”
“We can’t give you back that time, but we can certainly try to do the best that we can to right [a] wrong,” Judge Green said. “Your conviction was not the only tragedy here. There is perhaps someone out there who has gotten away with the murder of Miss Williams and that is almost [as] disturbing as the amount of time you have spent in prison as an innocent man.”
Crawford was released after spending more than 17 years in prison since he was convicted.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 04-08-2026
