In 1992 I lived with my then girlfriend Melinda in Ruskin Heights, a lower middle class neighborhood of crackerbox houses in SouthEast Kansas City. It was during the runup toward the zenith of my hair-band heyday and I was in the middle of producing the first and unfortunately only, release by my band SingSing.
Having returned from Hollywood several months earlier and without a record deal, despite some serious help from the notoriously eccentric music mogul, Kim Fowley, the band decided to simply do it ourselves. We formed an independent label and set up an office in my house to be the headquarters and which would mainly be manned by myself, my girlfriend and sometimes her friend Karen.
At this point you might be thinking this is a story about the music business. Nope - This story is about a phone number. It’s a phone number I remember well, but not one I’ll print here out of courtesy for whomever owns the number now.
The newly formed vanity record label needed a phone of course and the Southwestern Bell man came and hooked us up. As I was arranging some things on the desk after the phone technician left the new phone rang. My excitement that our new record label phone was ringing nose-dived a split second later when I realized that no one relevant to the music business could possibly know this number yet. I figured I could use the practice so I answered professionally anyway “Lexic Recording and Distribution Company, how may I direct your call?” Sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it?
The voice on the other end was woman. “May I speak to Delesha Williams Please?” I told her there was no Delesha Williams here and she must have the wrong number. “Is this 765-XXXX?” I confirmed that it was the correct number and reiterated that I knew no one by that name. She thanked me and hung up.
Unfortunately, that was only the first of over one hundred phone calls we received on the record label phone line for Ms. Delesha Williams. It was a name I would hear over and over again for the next few years. Most of the calls were from retail establishments. Best Buy, Sears, Dollar General Store, but mostly clothing stores. Some of the callers were clearly angry. Many accused me of lying to protect this woman. Apparently the woman ( or possibly someone using her name) was passing bad checks as fast as she could write ‘em & rip ‘em and she had imprinted OUR phone number on the check. My guess is that she perhaps owned the number prior to it being assigned to our line.
The calls became more frequent as time went on and more annoying after the release of the SingSing album as the line became extremely important to our career. I had nailed down a distribution deal with Relativity Records. Our first single was getting a modest amount of airplay coast to coast in medium and small markets. I had calls coming in and going out to and from radio promoters and a new deal with Infinity Records in Great Britain for distribution in Europe and Asia. There was just no way we could be letting any call go to the answering machine so every time that line rang, somebody, usually myself or Melinda had to make a dash for it and answer sounding like a professional. It seemed like every third call was from a retail store calling the number on Delesha Williams’ bounced check. It was too late to try to change the number lest we miss a life changing business call.
At some point I began asking more detailed questions of each new call. I got a vague description of the woman as an early twenties African-American woman, usually alone, sometimes accompanied by an African-American man. I got the address from the check. At the time, there was no Google but being something of a computer geek I got a copy of a street mapping software and a complete listing of US phone numbers on CD.
I tracked the listed address but found it to be bogus as well. I searched the phone database but found no Delesha Williams. So I started searching for any WIlliams in Kansas City with the same exchange. Then I spotted it. A “D Williams” with a phone number almost identical to ours with only the last two digits transposed. I called the number, a woman answered and I asked for Delesha Williams. She hesitated and then asked who I was. I simply said “my name is Bryan” and she hung up. I was pretty certain I had found the real Ms. Williams. With a little more detective work I got a real address. The calls for her to my phone line continued so I gave each bad check victim a short explanation of the situation and the real phone number and address of who I believed to be the perpetrator.
I also called the Kansas City Missouri Police Department. They told me that since I was not actually a recipient of a bad check and that the calls were coming from stores who were legitimately trying to collect on a bad check, there was nothing they could do for me but would pass the address and phone number I gave them to the check fraud unit.
I made one more call to the real phone number and I believe it was the same young woman answered. I said “If you are Delesha Williams, would you please get new bogus checks with a different bogus phone number imprinted on it because I’ve been dealing with phone calls from irate retailers looking for you for over a year”. At some point during that sentence the woman had hung up the phone.
SIngSing’s near stardom burned out shortly thereafter. A deal with Atlantic Records fell through. Tensions escalated between members and after being forced back to playing cover songs in smokey bars we disbanded in April 1995. I kept the phone number on and used it for my own short lived record label, BPM. I released two records by artists Motherlode and London Drive. Those records sold pretty well but after little airplay in the US and losing a lot of money I retired completely from the music business in 1996. The calls about Ms. Williams bad checks continued, although with less regularity on the record company line until it was disconnected. Melinda and I split in 1997.
Jump ahead five years. It's June 2001. The music business was a distant memory and the name Delesha Williams had not popped into my head for years. I’m married to a different woman and living in Blue Springs Missouri. I had done fairly well after starting my own Apple Computer consulting company. As I’m sitting in my recliner, writing some database software and listening to the local news on television something caught my ear. There had been a brutal murder in Kansas City. The police spokesman said it was one of the most brutal murders he had ever investigated. The victim?.... a Miss Delesha Williams of South Kansas City.
The murderers were apprehended and went to prison. News of the legal proceedings were all but buried following the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001. I believe this murder likely would have gained national attention otherwise because of the sheer heinousness of the crime. As it turns out, the murderers were either friends or acquaintances of hers that she had actually invited into her home. She was kidnapped, bludgeoned with a hammer and stabbed. The men who attacked her then tried to strangle her with a lamp cord, inject her by hypodermic with cleaning fluid and when she still wouldn't die, they ran over her multiple times with the U-Haul truck they used to load up the television and furniture that they had stolen from her home.
I can only assume this is the same Delesha Williams. I suppose it’s possible that she was simply a victim of identity theft by some other person. After all, the phone number and address were bogus. Her demise did seem to be a direct result of the company that she kept. Either way, for all of the aggravation this woman caused by transposing two digits of her phone number on her bogus checks, she didn’t deserve what happened to her in her last hour on Earth.
The following is the only information about the murder I could find currently online. It is a document for an unsuccessful appeal for one of the murderers.
http://www.kscourts.org/cases-and-opinions/opinions/supct/2005/20050909/89706.htm
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