Deaths in the Family
Milton Reddick and Frances Sanders made the fatal decision of inviting a needy Sharon Williams into their homes.
Cover Story
Sharon Williams never got along with her father, Milton Reddick. Not that he was around all that much when she was a child. Reddick always seemed to have something more important to do than tend to Sharon or her half-siblings.
His absence may have been for the best. According to his daughter and grandson, Reddick enjoyed gambling more than he enjoyed working. He was never much for paternal guidance, either; the nieces and nephews who saw Reddick at family gatherings remember a quiet bachelor who rarely invited anyone into his thoughts. His greatest attempt at familial bonding was to give the children some change for candy on the holidays and send them off to the corner store.
His daughter has a hard time recalling even those occasional moments of kindness. To Sharon, her father was a street hustler and a short-tempered thug. When she played hooky one day during junior high, he caught wind of it and beat her with a clothes hanger until she could hardly sit down. For other indiscretions he would sometimes whip her with an electrical cord, she once told a psychiatrist. According to Sharon’s son, Theodore Williams, Reddick ran poker games out of his house with an unusual authority, demanding that everyone deposit all their money with the host up front. In case a dispute arose at the table, he kept a gun nearby to defuse it.
“The man wasn’t nothing but 5-foot-5, 130 pounds soaking wet,” says Theodore, “but everybody was scared of him.”... Continued 
Issue of May. 6 - 12, 2005
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