Rebecca Williams always dreamed of fighting crime like her father, who was a cop and a Baptist minister. But in her early 20s, she found herself dancing at a rundown strip club. The downward slide started when her parents divorced, when she was just a toddler. She moved with her mother from rural Willits, California, to the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. It was a rough area and violence often exploded on the school bus.
When she stood up to bullies, students elected her sergeant-at-arms. At 15 Rebecca fell in love with Rodney, an year-old grocery store manager. They moved in together and adopted a boa constrictor named Rufus.
She spent her profits on a glamorous Farrah Fawcett hairstyle. When she was 19, Rebecca gave birth to a daughter via emergency C-section. Amanda was deaf, autistic and unable to talk. Rebecca discovered bigger tips working as a cocktail waitress at various nightclubs.
One paid for four dances at a time, just to talk to her. Between dances, she made her bosses nervous by scribbling in a notebookβshe liked to theorize about local unsolved murders. She bought a Magnum. But soon she was hanging drywall to pay the bills. In , after 14 years together, she and Rodney separated.
Fearful that the school system was failing Amanda, Rebecca enrolled her in a residential home for deaf children, seeing her only on weekends. She lived with her teen-aged son in a double-wide trailer. Her brother Phillip lived in a smaller trailer in her backyard. One day federal agents came to visit Phillip and noticed Rebecca. She would not wait long for her first assignment.
