Taylor Rose Williams was 5 years old when her mother reported her missing from their Ivy Street home in Jacksonville on Nov. 6, 2019, telling officers she had last seen the girl there late the night before. Brianna Shontae Williams showed responding officers the open back door of the home as she reported her daughter gone, and investigators soon fanned out across the city searching for the girl, including a dive team that checked a retention pond outside the Southside Villas apartment complex where mother and daughter had lived before moving to Ivy Street.
A new photo file from the Florida Times-Union features Brianna Williams and Taylor Rose Williams. Williams was 27 at the time the case broke. The file contains photographs related to the case.
Cellphone Data Pointed to Alabama
As the search stretched on, investigators with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office tracked Williams's cellphone leaving Florida three times, with records showing she traveled to Demopolis, Alabama — her mother's hometown — on Nov. 2, 2019, during what turned out to be her third tracked trip there. Investigators found Taylor's body near the end of that third trip to Demopolis, in a wooded area near Williams's family hometown about a week after the girl was reported missing.
After discrepancies arose, Brianna Williams stopped cooperating with investigators. A jacksonville.com photo gallery from that period documented the search.
Taylor's remains were discovered on Nov. 12, 2019, in a shallow grave in Alabama. Investigators ultimately said Williams had taken Taylor's body to Alabama and buried it in woods off a dirt road.
Evidence From Inside the Homes
Crime-scene detectives searched Williams's Southside apartment for clues as investigators assembled a broader evidence trail. Detectives found blood on a door handle inside Taylor's home, a young girl's clothing and toys discarded in a dumpster, and three guns inside Williams's Brentwood home.
The scope of the investigation grew substantial in the months that followed. A March 2020 report from eu.jacksonville.com noted that the list of witness interviews and depositions alone ran 22 pages long, part of a larger collection of photographs, videos, documents and records gathered in the case.
Williams was hospitalized on Nov. 12, 2019. She was booked while hospitalized on charges of child neglect and giving false information to police, and later faced multiple charges connected to Taylor's 2019 death.
Guilty Plea and Undetermined Cause of Death
An autopsy conducted after Taylor's remains were recovered in Alabama was unable to pin down how she died. Jacksonville.com reported that the autopsy listed her cause of death as undetermined.
Williams's case moved through the courts over the following years. She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in her daughter's death, with Circuit Judge Kevin Blazs accepting the plea, according to jacksonville.com's report on the March 2022 hearing. She also faced a child-neglect charge.
Williams was sentenced to life in prison.
