Twenty-one years ago, Marcia Williams woke with a knot in her stomach and a prayer on her lips. Her only child, Terrance, worked two jobs, read philosophy for fun, and carried a thin scar near his right thumb from a childhood accident with matches. That morning the dread felt new and heavy, as if something was closing in. She asked for protection she could not name.
A few hours later, Terrance met a deputy sheriff. He climbed into the patrol car. He never came home.
The deputy later said he dropped Terrance at a Circle K convenience store. There is no evidence he ever arrived. His mother has waited for a knock that never came.
Only later did the family learn what still shocks people in Collier County. Three months earlier, another man had also ridden in the same deputy’s patrol car and had also vanished. That man was Felipe Santos.
Like Terrance, Felipe had been driving without a valid license. Like Terrance, he crossed paths with Cpl. Steven Calkins of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. And like Terrance, he disappeared immediately afterward.
Calkins is White. Santos was Latino. Williams was Black.
“It is my belief that they were killed because of their color,” said Doug Molloy, who as an assistant United States attorney in 2004 led a task force that examined the disappearances as possible hate crimes.
Sheriff’s investigators sifted what they had and concluded that Calkins had not told the truth about his dealings with Terrance Williams. One investigator listed nearly two dozen statements by Calkins that were false or inconsistent. In August 2004, seven months after Terrance vanished, Sheriff Don Hunter fired Calkins, writing, “I have lost trust in Calkins and his ability to describe incidents in detail and to recall them.”
Search teams combed woods and water where the men were last seen. They attached a tracker to Calkins’ patrol car. Forensics scrutinized the trunk. There was no trace of either man.
The FBI delivered a target letter to Calkins and sought his testimony before a federal grand jury. He declined. Suspicion never ripened into probable cause. No prosecutor could prove hate crimes or any crime at all. Time rolled on. Children grew up without fathers. Calkins denied harming anyone and never faced a criminal charge.
Now in his late sixties, he was last known to live in Iowa. Through counsel, he declined new interviews.
Marcia Williams saved a lock of hair and a photo of her son in a navy T-shirt, his gaze following her as she passed. Across the Gulf in Oaxaca, friends and relatives kept Felipe alive in memory. “He did not deserve to be disappeared like this,” said his friend Francisca Cortés. “We still do not know what happened. His parents want remains to bury so there is a place to cry and pray. We have nothing. Everything is limbo.”
In 2019, CNN began a fresh inquiry. Three reporters interviewed nearly 70 people and filed dozens of requests for public records, gathering more than 10,000 pages and hours of audio. They reconstructed minute by minute timelines from phone records, dispatch logs, and interviews. They also pulled every available document from Calkins’ seventeen years with the sheriff’s office, more than two thousand reports. The result is a disturbing portrait of two disappearances that have haunted Collier County for two decades.
A veteran deputy stops hauling people to jail
The files reveal a striking pattern. In August 2001, about fourteen years into his career, Calkins made a misdemeanor domestic battery arrest. Then he never took another person to jail during nearly three more years on patrol. He authored roughly four hundred incident reports with no accompanying arrests.
This was not flagged in real time. In June 2003, a supervisor wrote that Calkins met standards in many categories, including apprehending and booking suspects. That was almost two years after his last arrest.
Why does this matter. Both Santos and Williams were unlicensed or uninsured drivers. Both could have been arrested. Calkins chose not to take either man to jail.
Charles Peterson, who went through the academy with Calkins in 1987, remembered Calkins complaining that arrests were a revolving door. “They would be back out before we finished the paperwork,” Peterson said. He also remembered Calkins as older than many recruits, with farm strength that filled his sleeves. Calkins grew up in Illinois farmland, worked there after high school, took a security job at a nuclear plant, and moved to Florida in 1987.
Collier County stretches between Everglades sawgrass and Gulf beaches. Wealth concentrates near coastal Naples. Inland, incomes dip, and farm towns like Immokalee depend on migrant labor. Lucas Benitez, a founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, said officers often felt like outsiders in Immokalee. “It does not know the language or traditions,” he said of policing there. “People feel occupied.”
Calkins’ reports describe tense confrontations. By many accounts, he stayed steady under pressure and got along with coworkers of different backgrounds. Walter Solomon, a six foot nine Black deputy from the Bronx, recalled target practice sessions and long conversations. “He took care of his job,” Solomon said. “I never remember him being in trouble.”
Peterson told stories of danger, like a man swinging a machete during a disturbance call, when Calkins could have used deadly force but did not. In the same breath, Peterson wrestled with a darker possibility. Asked if he thought Santos and Williams were alive, he answered no, adding that there was a good chance Calkins was involved but that there was no evidence because, in his words, “they never arrested him.” He added that if Calkins had done something, “he would definitely make sure that the body would never be found.”
Felipe Santos disappears on a weekday morning
Felipe Santos was twenty three. He was quiet and polite, a young father with a braided strand of hair and a habit of calling his parents in Mexico. He worked long hours, saved money, and kept to predictable paths between home, work, and the laundromat. His brother Salvador wrote that Felipe dreamed of a home for his family.
On October 14, 2003, driving to a masonry job, Felipe’s white Ford Tempo collided with a Mazda Protege. The drivers pulled into a gas station lot. Two of Felipe’s brothers were with him. The Mazda driver, Camille Lach, later told an investigator that one brother offered her money if she would not call police. She called anyway. Cpl. Steven Calkins arrived at 6:55 a.m.
Calkins decided Felipe caused the crash, and that he had no license or insurance. Months later, Lach said the deputy seemed frustrated with that kind of situation. She said he raised his voice a bit.
In his account, Calkins did not show anger. He described Felipe as polite and cooperative. He said he gave him a break by writing citations rather than taking him to jail, and that he drove Felipe a few blocks to a Circle K where he issued the tickets and told him to stop driving until he got a license.
Detective Kevin O’Neill said there is no evidence Felipe was ever at that Circle K. He also never understood why a deputy would take Felipe there. The foreman was already on the way to pick up the crew and take them to work. Felipe did not show up. His foreman kept calling the jail and never found him.
Family and friends checked hospitals. Since Felipe was undocumented, they checked with immigration. Everything pointed back to the deputy who placed him in a patrol car and drove away.
Troubling signatures that do not match
Another puzzle sat on the paper itself. Calkins issued three citations that morning. In the space where Felipe’s signature should be, the middle name was written as Maximo on two tickets and Medino on the third. Felipe’s actual middle name is Maximino. The signatures looked nothing like his earlier school ID.
A handwriting expert concluded the signatures were not written by Calkins. If Felipe did not sign and Calkins did not forge, then who signed. Investigators considered whether someone else helped the deputy. They found no evidence of an accomplice.
The trail is foggy because patrol officers were not closely tracked then. There are no minute by minute records of Calkins’ movements that morning except his own dispatch updates. “When you have a target, you do not assume anything he says is true,” Molloy said.
Calkins said he cleared the crash at 7:35 a.m. He wrote that he attended a morning briefing after that, although it is not clear anyone saw him there. From 7:59 to 8:19 a.m., dispatch logs show him doing extra patrol at Naples Park Elementary School. A veteran dispatcher, Kathy Maurchie, who later reviewed the log, said extra patrol was a convenient way to be off the grid since no one would be trying to dispatch you.
At 8:53 a.m., records place him at North Collier Hospital taking a report about an underage girl giving birth. Investigators believe he was there in person.
If he left the crash at 7:35, he had 78 minutes before the hospital. Lach, however, believed he left with Felipe soon after 7 a.m., and Felipe’s brother gave a similar timeline. That would leave about 108 minutes before the hospital stop. Molloy called that window the most crucial period to examine. They canvassed his patrol area and reachable places, dragged lakes, and followed all paths the timing allowed. They did not find Felipe.
There is no location data preserved from Calkins’ Nextel phone. Dispatch logs for that day cover only 6:45 to 11:19 a.m., not a full shift. What Calkins did after 11:19 a.m. that day remains unknown.
Two weeks later, Felipe’s brother filed a complaint against Badge 235. Internal affairs assigned Sgt. Doug Turner, who had patrolled with Calkins. Turner said the interview felt odd. Calkins read from his memo rather than speaking freely. Turner wondered why he did not take Felipe to jail and why he would deliver him to a Circle K. He chalked it up, at the time, to burnout or avoiding paperwork. A judge issued a bench warrant on November 27 when Felipe missed court. The same day, a captain exonerated Calkins on carelessness. On December 2, internal affairs cleared him. Forty one days later, Calkins encountered Terrance Williams.
Terrance Williams and a morning stop at the cemetery
There is no official record of the time Calkins first saw Terrance on January 12, 2004, because the deputy did not radio the stop. A week later, he wrote that the stop happened around 12:15 p.m. Witnesses say otherwise.
Terrance was twenty seven and careful about police interactions. Friends said he preferred to create witnesses whenever he was pulled over. Three cemetery employees told investigators the stop occurred before 10 a.m., as early as 9. Terrance was due at Pizza Hut at 10 a.m.
With the cruiser lights flashing, Terrance turned into a parking space at Naples Memorial Gardens where staff on an office porch had a clear view. One of them, Jeff Cross, said the deputy patted Terrance down while Terrance raised his hands and patted his pockets, trying to show he had no license. Calkins placed him in the back seat and drove away.
Investigators later rejected parts of the deputy’s account as unreliable. He took several polygraphs that produced mixed results, and several claims did not match verifiable facts.
First, he wrote that the Cadillac appeared to have mechanical trouble and that Terrance said he had just bought it and it was running poorly. Terrance’s mother and stepfather said the car ran fine. After the tow, Marcia Williams drove it home.
Second, he claimed Terrance said he was late for work and asked for a ride. Marcia said her son would not ask an officer for a ride. He did not trust police.
Third, Calkins wrote that Terrance asked to be dropped at the Circle K on Wiggins Pass Road. That is not where Terrance worked. Pizza Hut was more than two miles away. There is no evidence Terrance was at that Circle K.
Cross watched the patrol car leave and assumed Terrance would be arrested for no license and invalid registration. Eight days later, a detective asked about a missing person. Cross said it still bothers him because he feels the deputy “got away with something.”
A recorded call that sounds like a joke and something worse
Around lunchtime that day, Calkins returned to the cemetery and arranged for the Cadillac to be towed. At 12:49 p.m., he called dispatch. Cpl. Dave Jolicoeur, a fellow North Naples deputy working the dispatch desk for extra pay, answered.
They joked about money for a VIN search. Then Calkins used a caricatured accent and slang that an internal review later called unprofessional attempts to mimic African American speech. He described the Cadillac as abandoned and disabled, which was not true, and called it a big White piece of junk. Jolicoeur played along. At one point Calkins said, still in caricature, that the VIN would come back to “one of the brothers up in Fort Myers.” Laughter followed.
They tossed lines back and forth about not following rules and “just driving it.” When Jolicoeur asked where the car was, Calkins said the cemetery at Vanderbilt and 111th. “Maybe he is out there in the cemetery,” he added. “He will come back and his car will be gone.”
After the missing person report and the discovery of this tape, the sheriff’s office reprimanded both men for conduct unbecoming. Sheriff Hunter said the call increased suspicion. Calkins later wrote that his words were in poor taste. A psychological assessment concluded he did not appear to have strong racial bias. Jolicoeur called his remarks poor judgment and said some of the banter came from the movie Sudden Impact, a vigilante story about a detective who uses extreme force. He declined a fresh interview.
Did the deputy meet Terrance twice
In his written report, Calkins said he dropped Terrance at the Circle K, warned him about the tag, and then called the store and asked for a Terrance. A clerk said no one by that name worked there. He then called a tow truck for an abandoned vehicle and went back to search for Terrance but could not find him. Phone records do not show a call to the Circle K.
Shortly after 1 p.m., Calkins called dispatch to run a warrants check for Terrance D. Williams with a date of birth of April 1, 1975. That date is not Terrance’s real birthday. It is a false one he sometimes gave police when he was in trouble, and it does not appear on official papers in the car. Sgt. Mike Koval concluded this suggested Calkins had contact with Terrance a second time.
When asked, Calkins said the incident was routine and trivial and he could not remember details. Koval pressed him. If the car had no documents and you only knew the driver as Terrance, where did you get his full name and the false date of birth that only Terrance would know. “Oh brother,” Calkins said, “I am all confused again.”
There is a 53 minute gap between 1:01 and 1:54 p.m. when Calkins did not respond to calls. He ran the warrants check during that gap. Polygraph results showed the strongest reaction indicating deception when he was asked whether Terrance was with him when he ran that false date and whether he had contact with Terrance after dropping him at the Circle K.
The unaccounted time may be longer. At 1:54 p.m., Calkins told dispatch he was making a traffic stop and at 2:18 he said he had written a citation. Investigators never found the afternoon ticket he claimed, nor another he supposedly wrote that morning. Court records show he issued ticket number 9661 five days before Terrance disappeared, and ticket 9663 the day after. Ticket 9662 was never turned in. The agency could not find a warning slip either. There is no proof either stop took place.
Calkins averaged about one citation per month the previous year. On the day Terrance vanished, he claimed two. Both fit neatly inside windows when he could have been with Terrance. Molloy offered a blunt explanation. “If you are up to no good,” he said, “you create sightings that can cover you.”
If the second stop was fiction and if he answered a residential alarm at 2:51 p.m., then he had a stretch of roughly an hour and fifty minutes in the afternoon with no confirmed activity.
A dispatcher follows the tow receipt back to the deputy
Marcia Williams did what mothers do. She called jails, hospitals, morgues, and psychiatric facilities. She heard no yes. She called junkyards and found the Cadillac. The yard told her it had been towed from the cemetery. Staff at the cemetery said a deputy had taken Terrance away.
She contacted the sheriff’s office and reached dispatcher Kathy Maurchie, who checked the tow records. They showed that Cpl. Steven Calkins ordered the tow. On January 16, four days after the cemetery encounter, Maurchie called Calkins on a recorded line. An investigator later wrote that what Calkins told her did not align with the facts. Maurchie would later say she believes he is guilty.
Rumors, loyalty, and a thin official line
One by one, deputies who knew Calkins spoke to state investigators. One by one, they said they believed he had done nothing wrong. Many repeated a rumor that Terrance was seen alive in East Naples days later. Calkins floated a similar idea, saying Terrance might be hiding in drag to avoid trouble.
A gas station clerk said Terrance regularly bought prepaid phone cards there and claimed to have seen him on January 19. The clerk said Terrance told him he had to lay low and left in a brown seventies Cadillac. An investigator reviewed the surveillance footage and did not see Terrance, only the clerk.
O’Neill and Molloy both said there is no credible evidence of Terrance after the day of the stop.
Six months after Terrance disappeared, Sheriff Hunter released a statement about the “apparent disappearances.” It noted that both men faced legal issues. Felipe was undocumented and had tickets for no license. A Tennessee judge had issued a child support warrant for Terrance. The statement suggested both might be avoiding law enforcement.
Julia Perkins, who knew Felipe through the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, said it felt like an excuse and a slap to the family. Friends said Felipe was not going to abandon his baby girl and common law wife. He loved them. He had plans for a home together.
Terrance, likewise, had reasons to stay. His young son, Tarik, lived nearby with Marcia. Terrance cut the boy’s hair, took him to the mall, and dreamed of opening a barbershop. He called his mother two or three times a day. Marcia did not trust Sheriff Hunter’s office to police its own. A former employee, who requested anonymity, said people of color had trouble with deputies in North Naples in the early 2000s and described Calkins as a scapegoat rather than the lone actor. The same person said, “Blue do not tell on blue.”
Hunter said his office pursued every lead within the law, that the statement was reasonable amid uncertainty, and that he would not have tolerated harassment of Black youths. He said other deputies were not suspected. He remembered tense meetings with state and federal partners where someone argued for raiding Calkins’ home. They did not do it because they did not have a warrant. Rights apply to officers too. Suspicion alone did not justify a raid.
After the badge
After his firing, Calkins worked for UPS until 2013. An internal email documented a scene where he allegedly argued on the floor about a jammed conveyor, cursed at colleagues, and wrote “I Quit” when escorted to an office. A sheriff’s chief emailed that an unemployed Calkins might be a threat to those he blamed.
Investigators later learned that in 2016 he sold his Florida home and moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. With permission from the new owners, the sheriff’s office searched the old property. Cadaver dogs alerted. Ground penetrating radar flagged an unusual depression near a backyard slab. A contractor pulled up the concrete. Investigators found lower quality concrete than elsewhere on the lot, along with pieces of black plastic and an electrical cord.
The FBI lab said the items were not suitable for DNA analysis. No human remains were found.
A mother sues and an arbitrator doubts but does not convict
In 2018, Marcia Williams, represented by civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, filed a wrongful death suit against Calkins. The complaint argued that the circumstantial record showed he intentionally murdered or otherwise caused Terrance’s death. In 2020, Calkins’ attorney, John Hooley, deposed Marcia.
He asked about the Cadillac’s condition and timeline. She lacked some precise dates. “If I had everything here,” she said, “I could show you. But I do not. I do not have my son.” When asked whether the incident report contained anything saying Calkins killed Terrance, she replied that he would not write that in his own report. She said he had evil intent that day. “This man did something to my child and he is the only one who can answer.” Hooley asked how she knew. “A mother knows,” she said. “You cannot take that out of a mother’s gut.”
That year the case went to nonbinding arbitration. Arbitrator Robert E. Doyle Jr. wrote that Calkins’ shifting stories were not believable and that his account of Felipe mirrored his account of Terrance in troubling ways. Yet Doyle concluded that being a liar did not make him a murderer and suggested it was possible Terrance was seen alive later despite the state having declared him legally dead in 2009. He ruled in favor of Calkins.
The family could still have taken the case to trial, but Crump’s team missed a filing deadline amid pandemic disruption. A judge dismissed the suit, a decision later upheld on appeal. The court ordered Marcia Williams and the estate to pay about 5,600 dollars in costs.
Bones in the woods and unanswered questions
Former deputies still debate the case. “If he did it, where are the bodies,” Doug Turner asked, echoing a question others raised. Dennis Damschroder said he believes Calkins is innocent and pointed to the difficulty of secretly killing someone during a day shift without leaving a trace.
In 2004, Cpl. Scott Walters confronted Calkins about inconsistencies. On tape, Walters asked whether there might be a body out in the sticks that investigators did not know about. Calkins laughed. Walters mused about roadwork unearthing remains years later. Calkins laughed again.
In the months before Terrance’s disappearance, three sets of human remains were found along Immokalee Road, which runs from North Naples to Immokalee. Two remain unidentified. One was Sergio Guerrero, who had no known connection to Calkins. Guerrero, an undocumented Mexican worker, appeared often in sheriff’s reports as intoxicated. Sometimes he was on foot, sometimes on a bike or in a truck. There is no report of direct contact between him and Calkins, though in 1998 Calkins signed as editing supervisor on a report about Guerrero crashing a bicycle into a vehicle.
Deputies arrested Guerrero on a probation violation in January 2003. Immigration authorities deported him in March. He apparently came back and was seen near Easter. After that, no one reported seeing him.
On June 3, workers found bones in the woods south of Immokalee Road, including a skull with a probable gunshot wound from a small caliber bullet. DNA identified Guerrero. A friend had wired him money to return to the United States, and that man later admitted threatening to report him to immigration if he did not repay. Guerrero told family he feared for his safety. The friend told reporters he thinks Guerrero was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person. The bones turned up about a mile from the Circle K where Calkins said he left Felipe. Molloy said the FBI looked for links and found none tying Calkins to those remains.
Who is Steven Calkins
Steven Henry Calkins was born in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1954. His father sold timber and served as a Baptist deacon. The family farmed corn and soybeans. He kept a low profile in high school records. Local law enforcement in Illinois had nothing of note in his name. He farmed fourteen years, stood as a groomsman in a friend’s 1983 wedding, and impressed people as an able farmhand. That friend said if he policed like he farmed, Florida had a top officer.
Calkins did good work as a deputy at times. In 1996, he and a colleague performed CPR on a man in a living room and saved him. He helped lift a truck off a crash victim. Citizens wrote letters praising his courtesy and professionalism. One woman said he calmed a tense situation. On a cold night after Christmas, he drove an elderly couple home. In 1991, off duty after getting his cruiser serviced, he helped a mother whose minivan died on the interstate, got her sons from school, and drove the family home. The boys rode in the back cage and bragged to friends.
To his attorney, Hooley, these are the acts of a helpful small town officer, not a murderer. “He is more Andy Griffith than someone who would take Terrance Williams on a one way drive to the Everglades,” Hooley said.
That raises the cruel paradox. If he is the folksy helper from old television, why did two men vanish after riding in his car. If he is not that man, how did he keep a badge for sixteen years with so few complaints and so many commendations.
Reporters asked Calkins to answer basic questions about his life and the two disappearances. Through his lawyer, he declined. When reporters sent a list of questions to his last known address in Iowa, a courier reported that the recipient refused delivery after repeated attempts.
Detective O’Neill, who spent thirteen years on the case, said he still does not understand Calkins. Molloy called him unlike anyone he had ever encountered.
In interviews, Calkins sometimes described the missing men in gentle terms. He called Felipe very polite and cooperative. He said Terrance was clean cut, soft spoken, respectful, and well spoken. On a recording when he did not realize he was being taped, he used different words. Frustrated with the investigation, he said he would not talk without a lawyer, admitted he might have broken rules but not laws, and added, “I am not getting dragged through the mud anymore because a couple of scumbags are missing.”
Felipe and Terrance had names and lives that mattered. They loved and were loved. Their families still carry the weight of their absence.
