Defendant testifies about shooting, burying roommate

Murder defendant Michael Williams testified Thursday about why and how he shot his roommate, Sean “Chris” Putnam, in the head and buried his body.

Williams said he shot Putnam — a 41-year-old former cop who had become a methamphetamine user — after waking up to screaming and finding that Putnam was holding Williams’ naked wife by her hair.

Williams, 38, said he was trying to protect her from Putnam when he fired one shot from a handgun at their rental house on South Waco in December 2010. About two months later, authorities found Putnam’s nude body in a shallow grave behind a house in the Oaklawn neighborhood.

But it was clear that the prosecutor, Chief Deputy District Attorney Kim Parker, wasn’t buying Williams’ version of the shooting. Williams told plenty of people, except the police, that he had shot Putnam. But according to those witnesses, Williams never said anything about the shooting coming in response to his wife being grabbed by Putnam, Parker noted.

Williams, on trial on a charge of first-degree murder in Sedgwick County District Court, said he and Putnam had been arguing earlier that night, Dec. 21, 2010. He said Putnam had lunged at him, so he called 911 but that police wouldn’t remove Putnam from the house.

Later that night, Williams said he had his handgun with him when he fell asleep in a chair, then awakened around 11 p.m. to screaming from his wife, Deborah Weiss.

Williams said he got up and “I see he’s got a hold of her by the hair. She’s screaming, and he’s screaming. … I pulled the gun from my waist and tell him to let go. … He’s not listening to me.

“I fired a shot at him,” Williams continued, and Putnam “fell backwards into the room he was staying in.”

When Williams checked on his wife, he said, she was naked. He said he asked her why she was naked, and on the witness stand Williams choked back tears as he recounted it.

She told him she had been taking a shower and forgot a towel or dropped a towel in the toilet and came out of the bathroom naked, that Putnam said something to her and she said something back, and that Putnam grabbed her.

When Williams’ attorney, Steve Mank, asked him what he did next after the shooting, Williams said, “At some point, I just sat down and cried.”

“I told her I didn’t know what to do with this,” Williams said. He left the house, and when he returned, a bag had been put over Putnam’s bleeding head, he said.

When he asked Weiss about it, “she told me to contain the blood.”

According to other testimony, Putnam was still gurgling blood when Weiss put a bungee cord around his neck and bag over his head. Weiss, who is about 48, has pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Putnam’s death.

Williams testified that after the shooting he tried to think about what had happened, “and what’s going to be the fallout from all this.”

“I just made the decision” not to call police and started cleaning up, he said. He bagged up everything with blood on it.

The bullet that went through Putnam’s head ended up partly stuck into the wall. “All I did was paint over it,” Williams said.

He took the clothes off of the body. He said he thought he might later be caught, that he had already asked officers to remove Putnam from the home and police had said they couldn’t.

He didn’t go to sleep that night but went to work at a guttering business the next morning. “I value my job very, very much. It’s my life,” he said.

He put the body in the dining room and turned off the gas heating in the small home, to slow the body’s decomposition. He had no idea what he would do with the body.

The body had been in the home “almost two days, and it was almost Christmas,” Williams said. Around that time, he met a man at a friend’s home who worked for a business that had an auger that could burrow 7 feet deep. “When he said ‘seven feet,’ that caught my attention. … I asked him … how hard it would be for him to get that machine,” Williams said. They weren’t able to get the machine.

Williams said he initially told the man that he needed to bury a pet, and the man agreed to help him. The two loaded the body onto Williams’ work truck, then went to a job site where the man had been working in west Wichita. But Williams was uncomfortable about the location because of nearby houses.

They drove around for no more than an hour trying to find a place to put the body, then went to the man’s mother’s home in the Oaklawn neighborhood, where Williams said he buried the body in the backyard, using a shovel and an ax to chop roots out of the way.

Under questioning from his defense attorney, Williams said Putnam had told him that he had been a law enforcement officer in Cherokee County and had worked on a task force with the FBI and DEA.

At one point, Putnam said he had killed three people and Williams said he believed it.

Williams said he “absolutely did not” plan to shoot Putnam.

Parker, the prosecutor, noted that his story was different from the one that he told others after the shooting.

Williams said he didn’t tell the whole story to everyone.

On Tuesday, during opening statement to jurors, the prosecution said the shooting occurred after Williams went from room to room to get a gun, retraced his steps, and then shot Putnam with premeditation.

According to other testimony brought out by the prosecution, Williams had been telling people he wanted to get rid of his roommate.

Thursday was the third day of testimony in the trial, which is likely to conclude with closing statements to the jury this morning.

This story was originally published March 8, 2012 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Defendant testifies about shooting, burying roommate."