NOVATO, Calif. -- A burly, bearded Bible-quoting Sunday school teacher has confessed to raping a 13-year-old girl in a church library, strangling her with a cord and bashing her with a baseball bat, it was reported Friday.
'I murdered her. I raped her. I strangled her and I bludgeoned her,' Scott Williams told Novato police investigators in a tearful admission Wednesday night, the San Francisco Chronicle said.
Charles Brobeck, police chief in the affluent Marin County community of Novato, would only say Williams 'confessed to the murder and sexual assault of Jennifer Moore.'
Williams, 29, was charged Thursday in Marin Municipal Court in San Rafael with first-degree murder under special circumstances. If convicted, Williams could face the death penalty.
He remained in jail without bail pending his next court appearance April 28 to enter his plea.
Police say Williams lured the popular eighth-grader at Sinaloa Middle School into the Bethel Baptist Church as she was walking along a busy Novato street April 13.
Williams, manager of a self-service gas station and minimart, was a member of the church for about two years. He was a deacon, a Sunday school teacher, a youth group worker and a volunteer groundskeeper.
Police were led to the church by discarded religious booklets from the church found in a garbage bag used to dispose of the girl's nude body in a grassy field 2 miles away. A motorist found the corpse four days later.
Detectives said the garbage bag had been stripped from a church trash container and the killer apparently neglected to take out the discarded books.
A blood stain, covered with coffee, was on the floor of the church reading room and the girl's bomber jacket was in a trash bin.
Police searched the home Williams shares with his wife Heather Thursday while more than 1,000 people gathered in Pioneer Park at memorial services for the victim.
Melissa Olin, a clerk at the Chevron Food Mart managed by Williams, expressed disbelief at the arrest of Williams, who she said liked to talk about God and the Bible.
Williams had posted a picture of the missing girl on the counter of the store just above a stack of flyers asking for information about the missing teenager, she said.
