After solving the Billy Newton case, Clark Williams turned to his husband and said, “I guess I’m done now.” He couldn’t have been more wrong.

On February 7, 2023, The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page article about the case, where Detective Lamberti named Clark a “savant” of cold case investigation.

“I was humbled and embarrassed, because I’m a real introvert,” said Clark. “I don’t like attention at all. It really makes me uncomfortable and causes great anxiety for me. As soon as that article came out, I started getting calls and emails from survivors of murder victims, as well as law enforcement agencies, asking if I’d look at their cases.”

“I looked at my husband Jim, and I said, ‘Hey, maybe I’m good at this. Maybe I should lean into it for a while and see where it takes me,’” said Clark.

Since then, Clark has worked on 12 cases nationwide, applying the same methods that he used in the Newton case.

“It’s very much a victim-centered investigation,” he said. “I go back to the streets where the victim walked, and go to the places where the victim lived, worked, learned, and played. I work with surviving families and friends to uncover who the victim was. My goal is to rehabilitate the victim, remembering them for something more than the worst day of their life.”

Clark always chooses the cases that aren’t getting attention. But he never, ever promises to solve them.

“I look for cases like Billy Newton’s,” said Clark, “where the victims may have been marginalized by the justice system. People of color, people involved with sex work, people with substance abuse issues, and particularly, because of my own lived experience, gay and bisexual men who died violent deaths in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Half my work is devoted to those cases.”

“So much of my work is family therapy,” said Clark. “These survivors have never found peace for their loved ones. They’ve never gotten the answers they’ve long been looking for. They may feel the crime was never sufficiently investigated, or that their loved one was judged for the life they lived instead of vindicated for the violence they suffered. The family bears the brunt when victims are ‘dirtied up’ by the legal system. And that’s unfair.”

The Path to Here 

“My favorite place in the world has always been the basement of a dusty old library,” said Clark. “Throughout my life, I’ve spent countless hours alone.”

As a gay teenager, he didn’t know a single gay person in the world.

“It was awful,” said Clark. “Eau Claire was a painful experience that I still carry scars from. When I was 14 years old, I was the victim of a hate crime, but I lied to the police about it because I didn’t want anyone to suspect I was gay. Being gay was the worst thing you could ever be in the 1970s.”

Clark repressed that incident very deeply for a long time. In fact, it didn’t resurface for decades until he was in the middle of the Billy Newton investigation.

“I’d found a letter from Billy’s mother, where she mentions him being the victim of a sex crime at a local skating rink,” said Clark. “I knew the skating rink well, and I wanted to know what happened.”

“So, I was at the library trying to find any reports of this crime in the Eau Claire newspapers, when I found an April 1979 mention of a boy who’d been beaten and hospitalized after an attempted robbery. I thought I’d found Billy,” remembered Clark. “But then I gasped because it wasn’t Billy. It was me. That was me. I was the victim of that hate crime. I was the person in that article. I was beaten up. I was hospitalized. I made up the story about the robbery so nobody would find out the truth.”

“And that incident deeply, deeply affected me, inside out, for years,” Clark said.

Almost Famous 

In 1991 Clark responded to a Wisconsin Light newspaper ad. That response led him to meet author Will Fellows, who wanted to interview him for a potential book project. Clark sat for the interview, and then lost touch with Fellows. Little did he know, that decision would come back to him in unexpected ways years later.

After leaving Wisconsin, Clark moved to New York City, where he attended graduate school for social work. As he was building a whole new life, he discovered a Village Voice review of the book featuring his old way of life. Will Fellows’ book, Farm Boys, had become a queer sensation.

“I had a panic attack. I couldn’t remember what I’d said in my interview, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be associated with it. I went down to Barnes & Noble in Union Square immediately. I found myself on page 292, read my chapter, and reconnected with who I used to be.”

With no access to gay community, Clark’s “coming of age” was made up of sexual encounters at rural rest stops. And now, Farm Boys was telling the whole world about it.

“If I could have bought every book and destroyed it, I would have,” said Clark.

“So, I did what every good little gay boy did back then,” said Clark. “I repressed those memories so hard. I pretended it never happened. That’s the power of gay men of a certain age. Things happen to you, and you just compartmentalize it for decades. This wasn’t healthy. It was survival.”

But it wasn’t quite that easy. For the past 25 years, when people learned Clark came from a farm, their first question was: Have you ever read Farm Boys? There was even a Broadway play adaptation.

“I totally distanced myself from it,” said Clark. “Until last year, when I got an email from a stranger, who asked if I was THE Clark Williams from Farm Boys. They pointed out the irony: As a youngster, I was taking these incredible risks in rest areas, and now, 30 years later, I’m solving murders of young men who were killed in rest areas.”

“I decided it was time to stop running from this interview and start acknowledging it. I hadn’t even told my husband of 28 years. So, I went out and got the book again, and I read it with a separate set of eyes. And now, I realize that it’s a diary entry of what I was feeling and thinking in 1991, and I felt a lot of empathy for that version of myself,” Clark said.

“Ironically, there’s a line at the end of the chapter, where I talk about how nice it would have been to meet someone my own age, because that’s what I really wanted,” he said. “And I realized I was looking for someone like Billy, if we’d been able to be ourselves in Eau Claire. It was really a full circle moment, and coming to terms with my childhood helped me become a more integrated and healthier person.”

Clark’s Third Act 

After the Newton case, the LAPD invited him to attend homicide school training as a volunteer.

“I was the only person in the room who wasn’t a law enforcement officer,” said Clark. “Just me, the gay social worker, sitting alongside 25 homicide detectives. I had to earn my place and prove that I belonged at the table.”

“I am motivated to find justice for every victim,” he said. “That’s my motivation.”

Clark’s philosophy is to “never, ever give up” because new tools and technologies can help solve cases that happened decades ago.

“Know that every case remains open until it’s solved. We are not ‘reopening’ these cases, because cold cases were never closed to begin with,” he said.

Lighting Candles in the Darkness 

Clark understands he can’t change the world, but he’s committed to creating peace and justice for one person at a time.

“I get a lot of people reaching out to me, and I respond to every single one of them. Every single one,” he said. “I believe that every survivor, every grieving family member, deserves to have someone hear them. I know the painful path they have traveled.”

Why did Clark choose this path? He’s not entirely sure himself.

“I just turned 60,” he said, “and I’m closer to the end of my life than the beginning. It’s a natural thing to engage in life review, to reclaim parts of your life, and try to make sense of your life choices. As an aging gay man, who felt long ago put out to pasture, I’m grateful for this third act. Not everyone gets one.”

At the same time, Clark recognizes the risks of his new case work.

“Investigation has an impact on the investigators themselves,” said Clark, “and I really feel that sometimes. It can be very triggering. There are old wounds I’m reopening along the way, and new wounds I’m accumulating too. If you’re serious about this work, you have to recognize what you might be doing to yourself.”

He may live 2000 miles away from his small-town family farm, but Clark is still a Wisconsin boy at heart.

“I still wear my overalls in Los Angeles,” said Clark, “and my daughter and her friends call me Farmer Clark. Wisconsin is where I feel most myself. I love going to games at Camp Randall and Lambeau. When my husband and I retire, we are heading back to Wisconsin.”