MOBILE, Ala. — A Mobile man is standing trial a second time for the 1980 rape and murder of a 19-year-old woman, more than four decades after her body was found in the Toulminville community.
Sandra Williams, 19, was discovered dead on Sept. 11, 1980, at the end of Clementine Court in Toulminville, roughly eight miles from her apartment on Azalea Road. Investigators said she had been raped and stabbed to death.
The case went cold for nearly 40 years. According to investigators, DNA recovered from the jeans Williams was wearing was eventually linked to Alvin Ray Allen and not to other men previously suspected. Allen was arrested and charged in September 2019 and was released on a $100,000 bond hours after he was booked into jail.
A first trial in March 2020 ended in a mistrial after a jury deliberated for three days without reaching a verdict. Circuit Judge Brooks ordered Allen fitted with an ankle monitor and barred him from contacting the victim’s family, limiting his movements to church and three rental properties he owned.
Opening statements in the retrial began Tuesday. Prosecutors told the new jury that Allen had a history of harassing Williams, making her uncomfortable during family visits and damaging her property after she rejected him. Defense attorneys challenged the DNA evidence, arguing the two had a casual relationship and suggesting the genetic material could have come from an earlier encounter.
Four witnesses testified Tuesday, including a friend of Williams and the construction worker who found her body. Two additional accounts were read from transcripts of the first trial: both Richard Michael Barton and James Gill, officers who responded to the 1980 scene, have since died.
The trial is set to resume Wednesday morning.
Jury Begins Deliberating
Update (Oct. 31, 2023): The second trial has now gone to the jury. In closing arguments, prosecutors said the state had proven motive, intent, opportunity, consciousness of guilt and DNA evidence linking Allen to Williams’ killing.
Defense attorneys countered that the evidence was insufficient, noting that Allen’s DNA was found on the crotch of Williams’s pants and arguing the two had been in a casual relationship, so the genetic material could have dated from an earlier encounter. The defense also highlighted a rape kit collected in 1980 that was lost by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences — a loss prosecutors acknowledged, saying they too wished they had access to it.
During closings, defense attorneys invoked “To Kill a Mockingbird,” arguing the case echoed the novel’s themes because a Black man stood accused of raping and murdering a white woman. Prosecutors rejected the comparison as unrelated to the facts of this case.