Appellate court rejects Springfield killer's appeal

The Missouri Southern District Court of Appeals rejected convicted killer Lonnie Leroy Williams' appeal and request for a new trial.

Williams, 34, was convicted in 2021 of the December 2019 stabbing death of MacKenna Milton, 19, Springfield (pictured left). Milton, who was only two days from her 20th birthday when she died, was the first Springfield baby born during the new millennium.

The judges rejected Williams' assertions that the judge should have tossed out his confession and should have declared a mistrial after the Greene County prosecutor mentioned to one panel of potential jurors during jury selection that the case was not a death penalty case.

In the opinion, the judges said neither point was properly brought up during the trial to preserve it for appeal.

Williams' crime is described in the opinion:

Surveillance cameras showed Defendant with Victim at various gas stations in Springfield on the evening of December 19, 2019. Victim’s mother (“Mother”) last spoke to Victim by phone at around 2:15 a.m. the next morning. 

After that one phone call, Mother called the police when she was unable to reach Victim again. Defendant lived with his girlfriend, Olivia Vega (“Girlfriend”), and they had argued earlier in the evening of December 19, 2019. 

Defendant left the house and would not answer Girlfriend’s calls or texts. When Defendant returned home, he was upset and had blood on his hands. He told Girlfriend that he had killed someone, and he started crying. 

Defendant then told Girlfriend that he had killed “Kenna” during “a robbery gone wrong[.]” Defendant also motioned to his throat and said that “all of this was gone.”Girlfriend also saw blood stains in Defendant’s car, a set of Defendant’s clothes in its trunk, including boots that had blood on them, and that Defendant had a knife inside his backpack. 

Within a couple of weeks, police located Victim’s body outside the city limits in an area cluttered with a lot of trash and other debris. GPS data showed that around 2:30 a.m. on December 20, 2019, Defendant’s car had been near the area in which Victim’s body had been found, and the police interviewed Defendant on January 2, 2020.

The approximately five-hour interview was videotaped, and it took place at the jail in which Defendant was being held on an unrelated matter. 

During that interview, Defendant eventually confessed to taking part in Victim’s murder.