A detective recalls the frantic search for Kamarie Holland, the horrific discovery of her body and the role that the girl’s own mother played in her death. Kamarie’s killer is to be executed next week
‘He got what he wanted.’ Man pleads guilty in Kamarie Holland case
Jeremy Tremaine Williams entered a “blind” or cold plea to the charges he is facing in the 2021 rape and murder of Kamarie Holland.
McClatchy – Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
It was just after 6 a.m. on a Monday and the Columbus Police Department in Georgia got the kind of call that sends an entire agency scrambling.
A local mother reported that when she woke up that morning, her 5-year-old daughter was not in her bed. Every available officer dropped what they were doing to help look for 5-year-old Kamarie Holland, including Jane Edenfield, a sergeant in the department’s property crimes unit.
By the end of the day and following a gut feeling, Edenfield and another property crime detective found the worst crime scene of their careers: Kamarie’s brutalized and strangled body, dumped outside of an abandoned home across the state line in Phenix City, Alabama.
Police arrested her killer, then-37-year-old Jeremy Tremaine Williams, that same day. To everyone’s added horror, he wasn’t the only one to blame. They later arrested Kamarie’s own mother, Kristy Siple, on charges that she had agreed to let Williams rape the child for $2,500.
That was less than two weeks before Christmas in 2021.
Now five years later, Alabama is set to execute Williams by lethal injection on Thursday, Aug. 13, a day that Edenfield said she hopes will bring some measure of closure in the case that still haunts her. Meanwhile Siple is serving 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to the human sex trafficking of her daughter.
“I think she should probably be right there next to him,” Edenfield told USA TODAY this week. “It’s just sickening.”
As the execution approaches, here’s what you need to know about the case and who Kamarie was in the short time she was alive.
What happened to Kamarie Williams?
On Dec. 13, 2021, Williams took Kamarie from her home in Columbus City, Georgia, after agreeing to pay Siple to sexually abuse the 5-year-old, police say. They believe Siple wanted the money for drugs.
From there, Williams put Kamarie through unimaginable hell, including making her smoke meth, raping her while filming it, strangling her and then continuing to sexually abuse her after she was dead, according to police.
Police arrested Williams before they knew what had happened to the little girl but he wasn’t talking. The entire department was working to find her and desperately hoped that she was alive somewhere.
Edenfield and another property crime detective, Braden Dobbins, were interviewing people who knew Williams. A comment one of them made to Dobbins stuck with him, Edenfield told USA TODAY. “If something happened to that little girl, she’s going to be at this house in Phenix City” that was owned by Williams’ family but sitting empty, Edenfield recalled.
It was 10 p.m., the abandoned house was in another jurisdiction and it felt like a longshot, but Dobbins had one of those feelings about the tip.
“Braden looked at me and he says, ‘Sarge, I tell ya, if you seen the look on this lady’s face,'” Edenfield said. “Everyone else was tied up. His heart felt it, and me knowing and trusting in him, the two of us said, ‘Let’s go.'”
Edenfield said they were driven by a sense of urgency because they thought Kamarie might still be alive.
“You see TV shows and movies where it’s, ‘We’ve got him in custody. What if she’s tied up somewhere and locked in a room or a cage and can’t get out?'” she said.
Edenfield and Dobbins arrived at the abandoned house, which was owned by Williams’ family. But it was nothing like the movies. They didn’t find her alive.
Kamarie had been dumped in an outdoor cellar, her battered body left up against a wall in such a way that Edenfield at first thought she was a doll. It’s an image that will never leave Edenfield or Dobbins, who at the time had a 5-year-old daughter himself.
“For a long time it just ate Braden and I up,” she said. “Could we have done more? Could we have gotten there sooner? The assistant district attorney told me that by the time we got to the house she had already passed but it’s still in your mind. You ‘What if?’ yourself to death.”
Jeremy Williams pleads guilty, says ‘I’m just sick’
Unlike the vast majority of criminal defendants, Williams directed his attorneys to provide no defense for him at his trial in 2024, Edenfield said. When the judge in the case handed down a death sentence, Williams also ordered his attorneys not to appeal.
That’s why Williams is being executed five years after the crime. Most death row inmates are only executed after many years or decades of drawn-out appeals.
Edenfield said Williams has never expressed remorse for what he did or offered much in the way of an explanation.
“His words were that he was just sick, and that’s it,” she said “He didn’t elaborate.”
Jurors found Williams guilty of murder, sodomy, sexual abuse of a child, production of obscene material involving a child, human trafficking and abuse of a corpse.
At the time of his arrest, police said Williams had been charged but not convicted in a 2009 child sex abuse case in Phenix City, Alabama, faced another child abuse charge in Columbus, Georgia, and was the suspect in the death of a 1-year-old in Alaska. USA TODAY wasn’t immediately able to find out more information about those cases.
Who was Kamarie Williams?
Though she was born to a mother who did an unspeakable thing to her, Kamarie Williams had a large, loving family with many siblings and a devoted dad who always called her Princess, according to police and archived news reports.
Her dad, Corey Holland, had full custody of Kamarie but sometimes let her stay with her mom, Edenfield said. It’s the biggest regret of his life, she said he testified at Williams’ trial.
She said Holland was sobbing on the witness stand as he recalled how much he loved Kamarie.
“You took my little girl from me,” she remembers him telling Williams, who she said sat emotionless and stone-faced the entire trial.
Kamarie’s older sister, who was roughly 9 at the time, had many in the courtroom in tears as she talked about how sweet her little sister was and how much she loved and missed her, Edenfield said.
Kamarie’s dad has posted about his grief often on Facebook.
“You made life seem so much better with all your charisma and love you showed for me and everyone else around you,” he wrote in 2022. And just last month: “I miss you painfully PRINCESS.”
Kamarie was only 5, but she made a big impact on the world around her, Kamarie’s aunt, Tamrah Holland, told the Montgomery Advertiser, part of the USA TODAY Network.
She liked dancing in the living room, going down slides on the playground, had a larger-than-life personality and always commandeered family video chats, she told the newspaper.
“Kamarie was special, and especially to her father, to my brother,” she said. “My niece didn’t deserve what happened to her. She didn’t deserve for her life to be cut short as it did.”
When is the execution?
Jeremy Williams is set to be executed at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, on Thursday, Aug. 13. If the execution moves forward he’ll be the first inmate executed in Alabama this year and the 22nd in the U.S.
Williams also is among three men set to be executed on the same day in the U.S. Earlier in the day, Tennessee is set to put Anthony Hines to death for the 1985 robbery and murder of a motel maid named Catherine Jean Jenkins, though there are growing calls for Gov. Bill Lee to call it off in the wake of a botched execution in the state in May.
About three hours later, Oklahoma plans to execute Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez for the 2003 murder of his common-law wife, Olimpia Fisher.
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers cold case investigations and the death penalty for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.