Three years after his conviction, much of the evidence used against Williams began to fall apart.
In 1998, his appellate lawyer requested testing of Guevara’s .22 Derringer. Prosecutors asked the same ballistics expert who testified at trial to test-fire the gun — something he’d never done.
The analyst, Robert Baldwin, wrote a 1998 letter to the prosecutor with his results. He said he’d been wrong. The bullet taken from Collier’s head had, in fact, been fired from Guevara’s .22 Derringer, not Williams’ gun.
In 1999, the prosecutor wrote a letter opposing Guevara’s parole. In it, he made a stunning admission about his star witness: “At trial Guevara was very evasive and apparently not at all truthful,” he wrote. The additional evidence, the prosecutor said, indicates that Guevara, “rather than merely being a witness, likely participated in Collier’s murder.” Guevara didn’t respond to messages from NBC News.
A juror from Williams’ trial later signed an affidavit filed in Williams’ case saying the new evidence could have changed her verdict; another said definitively she would have voted to acquit.
In 2001, a state judge held post-conviction hearings and concluded Williams deserved a new trial. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected her recommendation.
Williams remained in prison, awaiting his turn to die.
The story of how a legendary Hollywood director and his wife became like family to a man convicted of murder began with letters and a poem.
In 2003, from death row, Williams learned about a “60 Minutes” segment on a Harvard Law School student who was swept into the criminal justice system simply for being Black.
Bryonn Bain had been walking past a crime scene in New York with his brother and cousin when all three were arrested; they were ultimately cleared.
Inspired, Williams wrote Bain letters about his own plight. Then he sent a poem called “Parallel Universe.”
What if Bain had grown up in Los Angeles as Williams had, instead of on the East Coast? What if Williams had Bain’s parents and opportunities? In a parallel universe, Williams wrote, maybe he’d be the one at Harvard. Maybe Bain would be the one facing execution.
Bain, who also wrote poetry, began conceiving a stage show where he would weave his lived experience and Williams’ writings into a spoken-word, multimedia performance.
The result was “Lyrics From Lockdown,” which premiered at the National Black Theatre in 2013, with singer and activist Harry Belafonte and his daughter Gina executive producing.
Bryonn Bain incorporated Nanon Williams’ letters from prison in “Lyrics From Lockdown.”Lyrics From Lockdown
By then, Williams was no longer on death row. After the U.S. Supreme Court banned executions in 2005 for crimes committed by juveniles, his sentence had been reduced to life without parole.
In 2016, Rob and Michele Reiner saw “Lyrics From Lockdown” in Los Angeles. They were struck by Bain’s performance and asked him to introduce them to Williams. They sent a letter, then arranged a phone call.
Williams had gone decades with little access to movies or television. “I didn’t really know who Rob was,” he recalled.
He came to know Rob and Michele as kind voices on the phone. They asked questions, offered advice and showed genuine interest in getting to know him. Only gradually did it sink in that Rob was the filmmaker behind some of Hollywood’s most beloved movies, including “A Few Good Men” and “When Harry Met Sally…”
Billy Crystal, Rob Reiner and Meg Ryan on the set of “When Harry Met Sally…” in 1989. Columbia Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
None of that mattered to Williams. What mattered, he said, was that they were listening.
“The more they learned,” Williams said, “the more pissed off Rob became, and the more loving Michele became.”
The Reiners’ initial interest in helping him wasn’t surprising. Rob had spent decades opposing the death penalty; Michele, whose mother survived Auschwitz, carried a lifelong sensitivity to dehumanization and state violence.
But what followed would go far beyond advocacy.
Rob signed on as an executive producer of “Lyrics From Lockdown.” The show traveled across the country, into prisons and revered public spaces: Carnegie Hall. The Apollo Theater. Lincoln Center.
Each performance carried Williams’ story further — and drew more people in.
In October 2018, Georgetown professor Marc Howard, founder of the university’s Prisons and Justice Initiative, saw the show at the Kennedy Center.
“What was screaming out at me was, this man has something special,” Howard said of Williams. “The letters that he’s written, they hit home. They give me the chills.”
Soon, Howard joined a tight circle of supporters who held regular Zoom calls about Williams’ case. He found himself on screens with Rob and Michele Reiner.
What began with poetry had become a movement for freedom.
