Before their tragic deaths in December, Rob and Michele Reiner were working diligently to see that a one-time death row inmate convicted on now-refuted evidence would be exonerated and freed after developing a bond with the man so strong that the couple planned to invite him to live in their home if he were to be freed.
Nanon Williams has been in prison in Texas for 34 years after being convicted as a juvenile offender of the 1992 murder of a Texas teenager, which he says he didn’t commit. The bond that he developed with the Reiners, who were both liberal activists on multiple social fronts, grew to the point that the famous couple considered him to be a part of their family.
“[They were] an integral part of my life,” Williams said in an interview with NBC News from W.F. Ramsey Unit, a maximum-security prison about 40 miles south of Houston, about the slain couple. “They became a part of me.”
On Dec. 14, Rob and Michele were found dead inside their Brentwood home, with multiple sharp knife wounds. Their 32-year-old son, Nick, was arrested hours later on suspicion of murder and was subsequently charged with two counts of first-degree murder with a special circumstance of multiple murders. A court appearance where he is expected to be arraigned will take place on Wednesday.
Williams, 51, was a 17-year-old in Los Angeles when he was involved in a scuffle involving multiple men in a local park while he was visiting his grandparents. Shots rang out, and in the end, 19-year-old Adonius Collier was dead. Williams had already witnessed the murder of his uncle in the doorway of his home when he was 7, according to NBC News, and his parents had both been sent to jail on drug-related charges. While still a juvenile, he was headed down the same path.
His trial was apparently beset with junk evidence and a lackluster defense, with faulty ballistics evidence going unchallenged by his attorney. Even worse, the other defendant, Vaal Guevara, took a plea deal to testify against him, and a ballistics expert told the court that the bullet recovered from Collier’s skull came from Williams’ .25-caliber handgun and not from Guevara’s .22 Derringer.
Both Guevara and Williams admitted to firing their guns that day in the park. Given the evidence weighted against Williams and his deal with prosecutors, Guevara was given a more lenient sentence of 10 years. Williams was told by the court that he would be put to death for the murder of Collier.
On death row, Williams has lived the bulk of his life in a small, dark cell with other men the state intends to put to their deaths. Soon, he began to etch other inmates’ assigned numbers into his arm with a needle and ink; he reached 466 numbers of men set to be executed.
“I used to feel guilty about living,” Williams told NBC News. “I used to wonder why I was still here.”
The despair he felt is channeled into the one-man show, called “Lyrics From Lockdown,” which combines the themes of race, justice and America’s prison system. Williams’ story is the focus of the play, which was written by Bryonn Bain after he was contacted by Williams from prison after the Harvard-educated writer appeared on 60 Minutes. Williams’ writings and Bain’s personal experiences are melded with spoken-word in the multimedia performance. An L.A. performance of “Lyrics From Lockdown” on a double date with Billy Crystal and his wife, Romy, was one of the last events the Reiners attended; after the show, they spoke with Williams’ family and other activists about the progression of his case, and the hope they felt for his exoneration.
Rob and Michele were staunch opponents of the death penalty and seeing “Lyrics From Lockdown” for the first time in 2016 led them to Williams’ story. Over the past decade, Williams slowly became a part of their lives, as all three shared the stories of their lives and asked each other questions that the other party found helpful in parsing out their difficulties. Michele, in particular, was a frequent writer and became a crucial part of his survival.
“Michele was my heart,” Williams told the network.
As his support network and the details of his story spread — partially because Rob signed on as executive producer of “Lyrics From Lockdown” and helped usher performances of the show across the country, in theaters and in prisons — a break came in the case that is now providing hope for his freedom. In 2024, the University of Colorado Law School’s Criminal Defense Clinic filed a complaint that led the Texas Forensic Science Commission to issue a lengthy report confirming what Williams knew all along: the ballistics testimony used to convict Williams was wrong. Following this bombshell, Williams’ legal team sought a new trial under a Texas law that allows the challenging of convictions based on “junk science.” Prosecutors are fighting back and his team are awaiting a judge’s ruling on whether he can move forward with his appeal.
Williams was speaking with other incarcerated men about health, trauma and survival before he returned to his cell and learned of the Reiners’ deaths in Los Angeles. He told NBC News that he immediately typed a message to Michele.
“Please, this can’t be true. Please tell me the news is lying,” he wrote. In return, he only received messages from the Reiners written prior to their deaths, as communication with inmates can take days to pass through security. Their final messages told him of the great performance of the show about his life they’d just seen. It was timestamped Saturday, Dec. 13 at 8:26 p.m.
Learning that Nick Reiner was charged with the murders, Williams says the lingering question is one that haunted the couple for decades as they struggled to care for their troubled son, who spent years in and out of drug rehabilitation facilities and apparently had schizophrenia.
“I was judged to be a killer, a monster beyond redemption,” he told NBC News. “The question I ask myself is, ‘What would they want for their son?’ What love and compassion and understanding would they want for him? If they would have it for me, why not him?”
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