On the morning of November 15, 1994, passers-by found the body of Francis Williams, a female who worked in Fort Worth’s street-level sex trade, lying face-down in a shallow drainage ditch on the city’s north side. She had no purse or identification at the scene, investigators believed she had been killed elsewhere and dumped, and evidence of sexual assault was preserved. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide.

At the time, Williams’s age and ethnicity were not released; court filings later described her simply as an adult woman with prior misdemeanor prostitution arrests. Initial forensic technology could not produce a DNA match, and the case went cold until April 2005, when long-archived evidence entered CODIS and linked DNA from her rape kit to Juan Ramon Segundo Meza. Prosecutors later used the Williams homicide as an extraneous offense in Segundo’s 2006 capital-murder trial for an unrelated earlier killing. Segundo’s case was later resentenced to life without parole in May 2022, and the Fort Worth Police Department lists Williams’s file as cleared by exception.

Many details about Williams’s final hours remain unknown. Did anyone who knew her or saw her on the north side of Fort Worth in November 1994 ever notice something out of the ordinary?