# The Hired Gun: Inside Philadelphia's Contract Murder Case

## Part One: The Underworld's Currency

In Philadelphia's criminal underworld, wealth and violence exist in an intricate dance. Money buys muscle, and muscle enforces silence. But beneath these simple transactions lies a more sinister economy—one where human life becomes a commodity, traded across neighborhood lines with the same casual efficiency as narcotics. This is the world in which Steven "Stainman" Williams allegedly operated, a world where a young man could become a professional instrument of death, where contracts were drawn up not in offices but on street corners, and where the cost of settling debts was measured in gunfire.

When Philadelphia police arrested Steven Williams in June 2020, he was twenty-five years old—still young enough that his life might have taken a different trajectory, yet old enough to have become something far darker. The charges that followed were staggering: four counts of murder, conspiracy, hindering apprehension, possession of instruments of crime, and a constellation of weapons offenses that stretched across the paperwork like a criminal alphabet. But these were not charges born from passion or circumstance. These were accusations of calculated, premeditated murder for hire—the allegation that Williams had become a paid executioner in a city that had seen far too many of them.

The neighborhood that raised him was West Oak Lane, a section of North Philadelphia where block identity meant everything. On those corners, the local designation "6900 O guys" carried weight. In places like this, your reputation is currency more valuable than cash, your neighborhood your nation. Street nicknames stick harder than legal ones. Williams had several. Some called him "Scheezy," others "White Boy." The latter reference to his light complexion, a distinguishing feature that would later place him at murder scenes in eyewitness accounts. He moved through a world structured by the heavyweights—the major narcotics dealers who accumulated wealth and used it to move through the criminal landscape like chess masters moving pieces. These were the men with money and ambitions that sometimes required the elimination of obstacles. And according to prosecutors, Steven Williams was the tool they employed to remove those obstacles.

The theory the state would eventually present wasn't haphazard or emotional. It was systematic. It was business. The framework was elegantly simple: the heavyweights identified the target, offered compensation, and Williams pulled the trigger. No complicated loyalties muddied the transaction. No personal disputes clouded the arrangement. It was pure commerce, the kind of killing that could be repeated, refined, perfected. Between May 2018 and September 2019, authorities alleged that Williams executed four separate murder contracts, each one fatal, each one methodical.

Yet even as the charges mounted against him, Williams offered a different narrative. He acknowledged awareness of the murders, yes. He knew the streets whispered about these deaths. But according to reports of his statements to police, he insisted that something else was at play—that he was being positioned as the scapegoat, that bigger players with deeper pockets were protecting themselves by pushing his name forward. Whether this was the truth or a survival instinct, it would become the central tension of his case: Was Steven Williams a professional killer with no moral boundary, or was he a young man from the neighborhood being sacrificed to shield the true architects of violence?

## Part Two: The Pattern of Silence

The first killing attributed to Williams occurred on September 8th, 2018, at 9:00 in the morning on the 1900 block of Hartley Avenue. This timing is important because it reveals something about the alleged contract killer's methods. He did not operate in darkness. He did not wait for nightfall to provide cover. Instead, he walked into daylight with a loaded gun and executed his target with the casual confidence of someone who believed himself untouchable—or someone following orders so explicit that the risk seemed negotiable.

William Crawford was the victim. The medical examiner would find two bullet wounds to the head, two more to the torso. Forty-caliber shell casings scattered across the pavement told a story of controlled gunfire—not wild panic shooting, but measured, deliberate rounds. Crawford was pronounced dead at the hospital, becoming the first name prosecutors would attach to Steven Williams.

A witness had been driving through the area that morning and saw the shooting unfold with the kind of clarity that lingers in memory. He described a skinny, light-skinned Black man in a faded hoodie walking up behind Crawford. Then the gunfire cracked through the September morning like punctuation marks in a sentence of violence. The victim dropped. The shooter disappeared into the same anonymity that had cloaked his arrival.

On the streets, whispers attached the name "White Boy" to the shooting. Detectives, following these whispers and the institutional memory that circulates through police departments, began pulling together threads. They identified Instagram accounts and cross-referenced them to faces. One account, with identifying information linked to Stephen Williams, contained posts and conversations that prosecutors would later argue connected him directly to the murder. More significantly, Williams had repeatedly posted a specific cell phone number across his social media presence—a number that would become crucial to the state's case.

With a search warrant, detectives obtained the cell phone's call detail records. Technology, unlike eyewitnesses, does not forget or embellish. Nor does it lie about location. On the morning of William Crawford was shot, the records showed, Williams' phone pinged off a cell tower near his home. But then it moved. The pattern of pings created a map, a digital footprint of movement across the city, a trajectory that, according to prosecutors' analysis, placed the phone—and therefore the man carrying it—near the location of the shooting at precisely the moment gunfire erupted.

This was the template that would repeat itself three more times, prosecutors would later argue. Not random violence bleeding across Philadelphia's streets, but a pattern. A pattern suggested calculation.

## Part Three: The Architecture of Murder

What made the case against Steven Williams potentially powerful, from a prosecutorial standpoint, was this very evidence of pattern and structure. Individual murders, especially in a city like Philadelphia, can be attributed to the friction of street life—disputes, betrayals, passionate violence. Four murders, committed by the same person across sixteen months, with evidence suggesting financial motivation, suggests something else entirely. It suggests a business model.

The heavyweights who allegedly hired Williams existed in that elevated stratum of criminal enterprise where insulation becomes paramount. A successful drug operation requires distance between the decision-makers and the violence that protects that operation. The ideal scenario for such men is never having to touch the instrument of death themselves. Better to have someone else's name attached to the murder, someone else's fingerprints on the gun, someone else facing the courtroom and the inevitable life sentence. Better to pay a young man from the neighborhood, someone without significant resources to mount a sophisticated legal defense, someone whose name is already known on the street as someone dangerous.

According to the theory that emerged as the investigation progressed, targets were positioned not randomly but deliberately. Someone they trusted would set them up—arrange a meeting, suggest a location, create the moment when they would be vulnerable in a parked car or walking through a known location. Then Williams would appear, and the transaction would be completed. Three of the four alleged victims were found either inside parked vehicles or in the act of emerging from them when the bullets found them. This was not happenstance. This was tactical knowledge of when victims would be most exposed, least able to respond, most certainly unable to escape.

The second murder prosecutors attributed to Williams occurred months after Crawford's death. Another victim, another location, another set of shell casings and witness statements building toward a portrait of a man who had become comfortable with murder, who had refined his tradecraft, who had moved from taking one contract to taking many. Each success, presumably, led to the next job. Each body laid the foundation for another. It was a grim accumulation, a killer growing more efficient, his reputation on the street growing darker.

## Part Four: The Reckoning

On June 12th, 2020, District Attorney Larry Krasner stepped to a podium and announced what he framed as the conclusion of what he termed "a complex homicide investigation." Stephen Williams, known on the streets as Stainman, was being charged with four murders committed between May 2018 and September 2019. The DA made clear that this was not a case of street violence, of passion crimes, of disputes between rivals. This was calculated contract killing, a young man collecting thousands of dollars to execute other human beings.

Interestingly, Williams was not arrested on the street. He was already incarcerated in Pennsylvania state prison on unrelated charges when the city connected him to the four homicides. In a sense, the prison had made him easier to find, easier to hold, easier to charge. The connection came through ballistics analysis, through phone records, through the digital footprints that modern killers leave despite their best efforts to remain invisible.

At trial, the state would lay out its case with the methodical precision of prosecutors building a structure of evidence. They would present the cell phone records, the witness testimony, the accounts of conversations relating to the murders. They would show how Williams was allegedly aligned with a figure the prosecutors referred to as "Hammer," a man whom they claimed had orchestrated the targets, identified the victims, and ensured that compensation flowed to the triggerman.

But Williams maintained his version of events. Yes, he had been on those corners. Yes, he knew about the murders. But according to reports of his claims to police, he was being set up to take the weight for something he hadn't done—or at least, something larger than his own culpability. He was the scapegoat, the convenient name to attach to murders that would otherwise remain unsolved, the young man from West Oak Lane whose life was expendable in the larger calculus of Philadelphia's criminal ecosystem.

## Epilogue: The Questions That Remain

Whether Steven Williams was the professional killer the state alleged, or whether he was a young man trapped in a narrative constructed by forces more powerful than himself, remains a question that only those closest to the case can answer with certainty. What is clear is this: in Philadelphia's underworld, where money talks louder than morality and silence is the most valuable currency, young men from neighborhoods like West Oak Lane often find themselves transformed from people into tools.

And sometimes, those tools are made to disappear not just from the streets, but into the prison system, serving sentences while the true architects of violence remain in the shadows, their hands bloodless, their bank accounts untouched, their role in the contracts unproven.