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And he's figured out how to put some kind of container around it, like a radioactive and very toxic part of his life, but something that he can put on a shelf, and deal with it on terms of a history he's comfortable with," Welner said. "He couldn't deny his history if he wanted to. No matter how hard he's tried to distance himself from his father's actions, Williams won't deny that he wishes he had a chance to know his dad. "I haven't had time to actually get an urn yet, but my father's ashes sit in my house," Williams said. All he has now are three tokens from his father: two photos taken when Williams was a baby, and a simple white box with his father's name on it. "I'm a firm believer that your environment doesn't make the person or make the man."Īside from a summer Williams spent with Muhammad as a boy, he says he barely knew his father. I might as well go in the ring and continue the legacy,'" he said. You do not touch the face of the Earth and say, 'OK, my mother was a pitbull.
"You don't come into the world with bad intentions. Williams, who raises pitbulls, doesn't believe in the old adage "like father, like son," and doesn't believe his beloved dogs are predestined to hurt people. Williams lives in the same trailer that his father did when he was a young man - a strange place to call home for someone trying to escape his father's shadow. "When I walk to the corner stores, I get 'Hey, Little John.' I get it all the time," he said. Williams doesn't share his father's name, but he's known, around the Baton Rouge neighborhood where he lives and where his father grew up, as "Little John." "He can't help looking the way he looks, he can't help being associated with his father, so he has to go through life knowing that as hard as he tries to detach himself from John Muhammad, he's always going to be challenged," said Welner. Welner says the relationship Williams shares with his father is complex. Michael Welner, who is a consultant for ABC News. Imagine having never asked to be born, and then knowing that 50 percent of your DNA is from someone that probably never should have been born," said forensic psychiatrist Dr.
Williams is part of a tiny fraternity of children, including the offspring of Charles Manson and the "BTK killer" in Kansas, who are forever marked by their infamous fathers. Is there anything you want to tell me? Is there a story that happened to you when you were my age that you want to tell me? Any questions like that? Is there anything that you just need to get off your chest? If you just want to sit here and cry for two hours, that's why I came here." 'Little John' in Dad's Shadow
"We only have a couple more hours before I would never be able to talk to you again," he recalled saying to Muhammad. Williams said it was his last chance to connect with his father. "I think we both were doing the same thing like, 'That's my nose.' 'You have my ears.' So, we were both checking each other out," he said. Williams said his two-hour meeting with his father was like two strangers looking in the mirror. After multiple appeals, Muhammad was executed by the state of Virginia. Muhammad carried out a weeks-long shooting spree that terrorized Washington, D.C., in October 2002. "It was weird," Williams told " Nightline." "We stood there and just looked at each other for about - I want to say a good three minutes.