Most of the murder victims you read about are described as sunny, upbeat people who “really lit up the room” or similar such things. But these things are not said about Lana Williamson. In fact, papers describe her as having a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. Lana was a transient woman who did not get along well with others. She may have suffered from antisocial personality disorder.
Lana Williamson was from Cushing, TX. She was 26 when she found herself in Albuquerque. She often slept under an underpass near Coal Avenue or at the Salvation Army Hotel. People who knew her apparently did not like her much.
June 12, 1982, police received a call from the Salvation Army about a body. Amid a pool of blood, Lana Williamson lay dead under the Coal Bridge overpass. Police were surprised by the violence by which she had been killed. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the face, neck, and chest. The hilt of the knife even left imprints on her body, and blood splattered the bridge supports. The crime was described as “overkill.”
Williamson had last been seen in a maroon and gray van with two other women and two men, drinking for two hours. She then got into an altercation with some of the people and stormed away from the van. Later, she got into an argument with two unidentified men elsewhere.
A man named Robert Johnson eventually came forward, claiming that Williamson had been murdered by two transient men, 20-year-old Marcel Frechette and 22-year-old Anthony Joseph Terrebonne. These men were thought to be the two men she had been arguing with shortly before her death. Terrebonne and Frechette were already in jail in Las Cruces for kidnapping a convenience store worker at gunpoint. They were questioned about Williamson while in jail, and both were indicted. But the charges were soon dropped due to contradictory evidence.
The thing that stands out to me is that Robert Johnson had scratches on his face. Police said they looked like defensive wounds from fingernails when he came to the station. Johnson claimed he had simply cut himself while shaving but usually people don’t scratch themselves that excessively. Why did this man get so involved in the investigation of Lana Williamson’s death and lead the authorities down a false path? Furthermore, he gave away the fact that he had been with Lana WIlliamson in the early morning hours of June 12, shortly before she died. He sounds like a likely suspect.
Few resources were dedicated to Lana Williamson’s death. Her murder appears to be forgotten as she is a transient woman with few people who miss her. But even if she was a sour and unpleasant person on a bad path in life, she didn’t deserve what happened to her.
http://nmsoh.org/williamson_lana_us.htm