Tiffany Hall Nursing and Rehab Center, is in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Photo / via Twitter.
Just after midnight on Jan. 5, a scream echoed off the muted beige walls at Tiffany Hall Nursing & Rehab Centre in, Florida, US.
A man in a dark jacket had speed-walked past the orderlies and nurses, making a beeline for 95-year-old Robert Morell's room. Visiting hours were long over, so one nurse went to find out what was going on. When she saw an intruder sitting on Morell's chest and covering his face with a pillow, she yelled for someone to call 911.
But according to a criminal complaint filed Friday, it was already too late. The man rushed from the room, and Morell, who had been on a feeding tube, couldn't be revived with CPR.
Police now say that the intruder was William Eugene Hawkins, 47, who is accused of killing his ex-girlfriend's lover. According to authorities, he confessed to his sister during a recorded conversation in the St. Lucie County jail, claiming that he had spent years preparing to commit a crime that he likened to climbing Mount Everest.
"I accomplished my life goal, OK?" he allegedly said. "Whatever happens to me after, that's fine."
Hawkins, who faces first-degree murder charges and is being held without bond, has yet to enter a plea or be assigned a public defender. Although police haven't speculated about a possible motive, his sister told authorities that she thinks the crime was financially motivated.
The day before the killing, the nursing home received a call from Morell's girlfriend. Saying that she was in a rush, she told them not to allow Hawkins into her boyfriend's room but didn't explain why. Later, she would tell police that she had a "gut feeling" that Hawkins planned to kill Morrell.
The 57-year-old divorcée, who is not facing criminal charges, had what she described as an open relationship with Morell. The two had known each other for about 15 years, and she had moved into his oceanfront condo in Fort Pierce, Florida, accepting power of attorney over his affairs while declining his marriage proposals, she told police. Then, in September 2019, she noticed that he had trouble standing and took him to the emergency room.
Doctors determined that Morell had problems with his esophagus and would need a feeding tube, the criminal complaint says.
The woman told police that even before Morell went into the nursing home, she had openly dated Hawkins, and occasionally brought him over to the Fort Pierce condo. They broke up, but months later, on the morning of Jan. 4, she awoke to find Hawkins crawling in through her bedroom window. She said his suddenly aggressive behaviour scared her.
Two friends were staying at the condo, and she ran to them for help. In the meantime, she said, Hawkins disappeared with the keys to her black 2014 Cadillac.
Hours later, Hawkins returned and let himself in through the unlocked front door. The woman told police that he noticed the needles that she used to give her cat insulin shots and the feeding tube that she was using for practice so that she could eventually take care of Morell. He allegedly suggested that she could kill Morell by injecting the insulin into his feeding tube.
The woman rejected the idea, she told police. Because she was scared of her ex-boyfriend, she allowed him to stick around and shower at the condo. Once he had dried off, he drove off in her Cadillac once again, and she dialled the nursing home staff to warn them.
Early on the morning of Jan. 5, a nursing home worker saw an intruder heading for the Morell's room. But because she was on the phone with another patient, she couldn't intercede. Moments later, she heard the nurse assigned to Morell's wing shouting for someone to call 911.
According to the affidavit, the suspect left through a fire exit door amid the chaos.
Later that day, police found the Cadillac abandoned and partly submerged in a canal. But Hawkins didn't turn up until the following morning, when the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office responded to a call about a suspicious person who had broken into a shed. Hawkins, who was initially arrested on theft and trespassing charges, reportedly said that he had been blacking out a lot lately and remembered only waking up cold in the woods and looking for shelter.
According to Treasure Coast Newspapers, Hawkins had visited Morell in the nursing home at least five times before the homicide. When police asked his ex-girlfriend why he would want to kill Morell, she said nothing, the court affidavit says. But Hawkins's sister had an explanation: money.
On Jan. 7, the day after Hawkins's arrest, his sister called the police and said that she thought she could get him to confess to murder. Her brother was estranged from the rest of the family, she said, but as soon as she read about the homicide, she immediately suspected that there was a financial factor. Both she and her brother had expected to receive a large inheritance when their father died, but that hadn't panned out, she explained.
Hawkins's sister told police that the last time she saw her brother was in the summer of 2018, when he asked for money to start a plumbing business in Missouri. The plan hadn't made sense to her, because the town where he wanted to go into business only had 400 residents, and there was already one plumber. When she turned him down, he became irate and she had to ask him to leave her property, she said. She worried that he might be using methamphetamine or "pills."
Investigators gave Hawkins's sister a recorder, and left the two alone in an interview room. According to the affidavit, he told her that he had planned to inject Morell with a "cocktail" of drugs, but the 95-year-old had resisted.
"No one would have known," he allegedly said. "But he struggled. He fought me."
Saying that Morell was "the reason my life's messed up," Hawkins told his sister that he had placed a pillow over the man's face. But he didn't confirm her theory about the financial motive, according to the affidavit. Instead, he claimed that Morell had written a book about him years ago, and that it had angered him.
"This sounds so premeditated," he allegedly told her. "So bad."
There is no evidence that Morell ever published such a book. But Hawkins allegedly claimed that for the better part of a decade, he had been planning revenge, even engineering a relationship with the man's girlfriend as a way to get closer to him.
"Let's say in your life you wanted to climb Mount Everest, okay?" he asked, according to the affidavit. "And all your life you trained and trained and trained to climb Mount Everest. OK? All right? And finally you climbed it, in all your life, finally you made it to the top, when you made it to the top, how would you feel?"
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