Michelle Williams, the Keller woman dubbed the "Black Widow" who pleaded guilty to deadly conduct and tampering with physical evidence in connection with the 2011 death of her husband, withdrew her guilty plea Monday.
Crying and on the stand, Williams, 44, told the court Monday afternoon that she couldn't admit to what she already admitted to doing and said that poor representation led to her striking a plea deal in Oct. 2013 in hopes that she would get less jail time.
"Your Honor, I am not guilty," Williams said.
According to the district attorney's office, Williams pleaded guilty to knowingly discharging a firearm at her husband — the deadly conduct charge — and also pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence by moving and cleaning her husband's body.
Before that, Williams had first told investigators that someone entered the family's home, hit hear and killed her husband. She later said that her husband had committed suicide and that she staged the break-in to hid the suicide from her child. Investigators determined both stories were false.
Williams was expected to be sentenced to 18 years Monday. With the guilty plea withdrawn, Williams will now face trial for murder with a new judge and new defense attorneys.
Before the end of the hearing Monday, the Judge Scott Wisch reinstated a gag order in the case.
Wisch told Williams that she may have perjured herself by her previous admissions of guilt in making the plea deal, and that he must remove himself from the now pending homicide trial because he is now a witness to the potentially false statements he made.
"Lady Justice may be blind, but she is neither deaf nor stupid," Wisch said, in reference to Williams' reversal.
In court documents obtained by NBC DFW, prosecutors sought to have the guilty pleas withdrawn because of an interview Williams gave to several news organizations on Feb. 5, during which she claimed, "to have been falsely accused, that she only pleaded guilty because she wished to decrease her exposure to a potentially more severe punishment, that she has suspicions about who the real killer is, that she hopes by talking to the media that the person responsible for her husband's murderer will come forward and stop her from taking the fall, that poor attorney representation was part of the reason for taking the plea deal and that she was struck by an intruder."
Before her own withdrawn guilty pleas, due to the interview, the prosecution filed a motion with the court on Friday to effect the same result.
NBC 5's Ken Kalthoff, Frank Heinz and Greg Janda contributed to this report.
