Alabama is scheduled to execute Jeremy Williams by lethal injection tonight for the 2021 rape and murder of 5-year-old Kamarie Holland, a crime he recorded on his mobile phone.
Williams, 41, pleaded guilty to the charges. Although the death penalty case still proceeded to trial, he instructed his lawyers not to introduce evidence that might have persuaded the court to spare his life.
The execution is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore.
Update 11:45 a.m.: Kamarie’s father, Corey Holland, told the Associated Press that his daughter was an energetic 5-year-old who enjoyed princesses and making people laugh.
“She loved playing dress-up, all her little Halloween costumes and her princess stuff I got her. She liked anything girly,” Corey Holland said.
Update 11:50 a.m.: Holland told WTVM TV News in Columbus, Georgia, that he has been prevented from witnessing Williams’ execution because he was charged in 2022 with violating a custody order after allowing Kamarie to go with her mother, who did not have custody at the time.
A prison spokesperson told AL.com that the Alabama Attorney General’s Office determines who may witness executions. The attorney general’s office has not responded to a request for comment.
Tennessee and Oklahoma are also scheduled to execute inmates on Thursday. According to the Associated Press, this will be the first time since 2010 that three people are executed on the same day in the United States.
Williams’ conviction and death sentence were automatically reviewed on appeal, but the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld both.
An evaluation of his competency concluded that, “he knew his life was at stake,” according to the appeals court judges.
Williams has spent two years on death row and has requested that his execution proceed quickly. According to the United States Department of Justice, Alabama death row inmates spend an average of 16 years awaiting execution or exoneration.
Beginning in 2025, Williams wrote to the Alabama Attorney General’s Office and Governor Kay Ivey, asking that further appeals be waived and that an execution date be established. Ivey set the date on June 18.
Rick Chancey, the district attorney for Russell County, previously told AL.com that he was “doing everything I can to move this along to the end.”
“This is a terrible human being, and he did a tremendous amount of damage over the years,” Chancey said. “What he did to this little girl, and he’s raped others, killed her on video and then raped her dead body is one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen.”
The Crime
Kamarie, 5, was reported missing from her home in Columbus, Georgia, by her mother, Kristy Marie Siple, in December 2021.
Siple told authorities that she went to bed around midnight and later discovered that Kamarie was missing and the front door was open.
Columbus police soon identified Williams as a possible suspect. Court records show that Williams and Siple had a sexual relationship, and that Siple sometimes left her children in his care.
Investigators in Alabama later obtained a search warrant for Williams’ residence in Phenix City, a vacant property where they found Kamarie’s naked body in the basement beneath a tarp.
Investigators also established a connection between Kamarie’s mother and the crime.
According to prosecutors, Siple agreed to allow Williams to sexually abuse her daughter in exchange for $2,500, although the amount was later negotiated down to $1,300. She pleaded guilty to sex trafficking in March 2024 and received a 20-year prison sentence. A murder charge against her was dismissed under the plea agreement.
Williams never paid Siple the agreed amount. He told investigators that he had smoked methamphetamine and had also forced Kamarie to use the drug.
He then sexually assaulted the child before strangling her to death.
The appeals court said Williams used his mobile phone to record the sexual assault both before and after Kamarie’s death.
Williams had previously faced allegations involving children.
In 2009, an Alabama jury acquitted him of charges alleging that he placed a boy he was babysitting in scalding water, causing severe burns, according to the charging document.
While police were questioning Williams about Kamarie’s murder, he also confessed to killing his 1-month-old daughter, Naudia Trenice Williams, in Alaska in 2005.
His confession led Alaskan authorities to reopen Naudia’s case. An earlier autopsy had listed her cause of death as “undetermined”, but Williams told investigators that he killed her by striking her and throwing her down stairs because she was crying.
Alaska authorities charged him with second-degree murder in 2022.
Execution Record
Williams’ execution would be the 26th carried out under Governor Kay Ivey, giving her the highest number of executions overseen by an Alabama governor since the state officially lifted its moratorium on capital punishment in 1977.
