A Tennessee Tragedy: The Murder Of Emma Walker
Central High School, Knoxville, Tennessee. The football stadium lights up, and the energy is high as everyone turns up to support their home team, the Bobcats. The marching band and cheerleaders keep the entertainment going and the energy up for the crowd. Some say the school revolves around football and the community spirit is always strong when the team plays. In the autumn of 2014, there was a new cheerleader on the team. 14-year-old Emma Walker was the only freshman to make the team that year. Described as passionate, spirited, and fun with an infectious smile, Emma threw herself into cheerleading and took it very seriously. She adored being in that environment. She was kind, caring, and high-achieving with hopes of one day becoming a neonatal nurse caring for sick or premature newborn babies.
One evening while Emma was cheering, she caught the attention of Central High’s wide receiver, William Riley Gaul, known as Riley. He spotted her from the sidelines, and the attraction between the pair was instant. Riley, two years her senior, was also a top-performing and popular student. He was a member of the community church, loved video games, and his friends said he was a bit of a joker and not at all the stereotypical jock type. At the time, Riley was already in a relationship, but he soon broke it off to begin dating Emma. The football star and cheerleader became the quintessential popular high school couple. Riley clicked with Emma’s family. Her parents said, “He was like the boy next door, polite, well-mannered, and likable.” But their attitude quickly changed when they found out that Riley was keeping his promise to take his ex-girlfriend to the junior year prom and then he was taking Emma to the senior year prom. This didn’t sit well with Emma’s parents, and they were concerned that his priorities didn’t lie with their daughter.
But Emma wasn’t concerned. Her social media account was often flooded with pictures of the young couple. The pair would upload loving photos and silly selfies. Emma’s friends, however, said they didn’t find it easy to get to know Riley but thought this was down to him being shy and more reserved. But as time passed, friends of Emma said they stopped justifying his behavior and started to find it a bit more concerning. Many of Emma’s friends said it became obvious that Riley didn’t want Emma engaging with anyone that wasn’t him. He became controlling, possessive, and jealous. Emma’s friends voiced their concerns, but Emma brushed it off and told them, “They didn’t need to worry.” Emma’s parents took away her phone in a bid to stop the toxicity, but Riley gave Emma an iPod touch so she was able to secretly text him through the Wi-Fi without her parents suspecting anything.
For the next two years, Emma and Riley would be on and off numerous times, and the relationship was becoming more toxic and tumultuous. Each breakup was more dramatic than the last, and the young pair would frequently get into nasty arguments. Riley would send message after message and call her constantly. He was always bombarding her, waiting outside her work for hours until she finished. He once said to her, “You’re dead to me. I’ll check the obituary.” But for every nasty message, it would soon be followed by an apology. “I’m sorry for however I act. I love you more than words can describe,” he would say. Emma’s parents, Mark and Jill, said they tried to convince Emma to break off the relationship many times. Jill said, “He had a way of isolating her and making her think that he was the only one.” The more they told Emma to break it off, the more they all butted heads.
By the autumn of 2016, to everyone’s unease, Emma and Riley’s relationship was still the same. Riley had graduated and was a freshman at Maryville College, about 30 minutes away, and 16-year-old Emma was in her junior year of high school. Around Halloween that year, in a desperate bid to help their daughter, Emma’s parents decided to ground her, not allowing her to leave the house unless it was to go to school or cheerleading. They started monitoring everywhere she went and everyone she spoke to, and to their surprise, it seemed to have the positive effect they were hoping for. Mark said, “She was like her old self again.” She would spend time with the family, socializing and eating dinner with everyone. Emma had even texted her friend Keegan to say that she and Riley were done for good after she had seen pictures of him with other girls at college. Keegan and other friends breathed a sigh of relief, as everyone expected. Riley did not take the breakup well. Friday, November 18, 2016.
Emma was allowed out to go to a gathering at a friend’s house. At around 11:30 p.m., her friend Zach arrived at the house. He was met by Emma, who quickly pulled him inside. She told him she had been receiving strange text messages from a number she didn’t know. One of the messages said, “Come outside alone if you don’t want to see a loved one get hurt. Go to your car with your keys. If you don’t comply, I will hurt them.” Emma thought it was one of Riley’s friends playing a strange prank on her. She texted back, threatening to call the police. This didn’t deter anything, and the messages got more disturbing. Emma then got a message saying Riley had been dropped outside the house. Emma and Zach ran outside, and sure enough, they saw someone lying face down in a ditch near the house. It was Riley. When the pair reached him, he was holding his head and seemed confused. He said, “He had been kidnapped and didn’t know how he got there.” Emma was crying and told Riley, “They had broken up and he needed to leave her alone.” Dejected, Riley walked off down the street alone. He then called his friend Noah, telling him he had been kidnapped. Noah didn’t believe a word. Emma, feeling uneasy, stayed with her friends that night.
The following morning, just after 10 a.m., she drove home with her friend Haley, who lived close to the Walkers. While driving, they spotted a man dressed all in black walking around on Emma’s street. Emma dropped Haley at her house and drove back home herself. Emma was going to meet her mom, Jill, and started getting ready inside, but the mystery man soon came back and started ringing the doorbell and banging on the door. Emma was frantic and texted her friends. She also messaged the one person she believed would come to her rescue, Riley. She said, “I hate you but I need you right now.” He replied saying, “He was speeding over to help her.” When Riley arrived, the mystery man had disappeared. Emma’s friend Haley knew who the man was. She said, “There was no doubt it was Riley.” This was also confirmed when she saw his car parked nearby. She even texted Riley, asking what he was doing lurking around near Emma’s house, but Riley denied it was him.
Jill Walker returned home looking for Emma. She found her daughter and Riley talking in the front yard. Jill reminded him, “He wasn’t allowed to come near the house,” and told him to leave. Emma was visibly shaken and was worried it could have been a burglar. Jill wasn’t convinced and knew this wasn’t a coincidence, but Emma reassured Jill, “She knew Riley had nothing to do with what happened.” After this incident, Jill and Mark were so concerned for their daughter they took her to work on her Sunday morning shift. They waited until she’d finished and drove back home with her. Sunday night, November 20, 2016. Everything in the Walker household appeared quiet and calm. Emma spoke to her friend Keegan about an assignment that was due and then headed for bed around midnight.
A few minutes past midnight, Riley, who was back in Maryville, asked to borrow his roommate’s phone. Using this phone, he called Emma. Riley alleged that during this call, “Emma had told him she had no interest in getting back together with him,” and the conversation abruptly ended. After this, Riley sent her countless texts and called around 40 times, leaving numerous voicemails. Emma didn’t respond, and Riley eventually stopped trying to make contact. During the night, Emma’s dad woke up after hearing what sounded like someone in the house and a door slamming twice. He checked around, looking in Emma and her brother Evan’s bedrooms, but he couldn’t see or hear anything, and nothing seemed disturbed. Thinking he’d just imagined the sounds, he went back to bed.
Around 6 a.m., Jill went into Emma’s room to wake her up for school. Jill said her name, but Emma didn’t respond. She reached out and touched her leg, but Emma still didn’t move. When Jill looked at Emma’s face, she said, “She knew she needed to call an ambulance.” Emma was pale and her lips were blue. Jill checked for a pulse but felt nothing. “Where is your emergency? What’s going on there?” “I just had to wake up my daughter for school and she is…” Sixteen-year-old Emma Walker was dead. Police soon arrived at the Walker house. A small amount of blood was near Emma’s mouth, and it looked as though she may have vomited, possibly due to ingesting something. However, police noticed a small hole in the wall of Emma’s bedroom, which pointed them elsewhere. It was a bullet hole. Someone had shot Emma in the head through the wall while she was sleeping. Two shell casings were found outside the home, and police needed to work out where the second shot was fired. Walking around the outside of the house, police eventually found the second bullet hole at approximately the same height as the first.
This shot was also fired into Emma’s bedroom, just by her bed. The gunshots had been fired from as close as four or five feet from Emma’s bedroom window between 2:30 and 3 a.m. One bullet had hit her behind her left ear, likely killing her instantly, and the second bullet had lodged in her pillow. Whoever the shooter was knew the layout of the room and knew the position Emma would be lying in. Hundreds of tributes came flooding in, including many from Emma’s ex-boyfriend, Riley. A candlelight vigil was held at Central High, and her fellow cheerleaders released balloons in her memory at that week’s football game. When police started interviewing Emma Walker’s friends and family, the same name kept coming up over and over: Riley Gaul.
Some of Riley’s friends became concerned for his well-being after Emma’s passing. They told detectives a secret Riley had shared the day after he claimed he was kidnapped. Riley said, “He was now fearing for his life and had taken his grandfather’s gun for protection.” He then showed the gun to his friend, Alex. Another friend, Noah, told detectives that Riley had asked him, “How to remove fingerprints from a gun,” claiming he was asking for his roommate. Just a day before Emma was shot, Riley’s grandfather reported this very gun as stolen. Riley asked Noah and Alex if they would help him get rid of the gun in the Tennessee River as he feared it may implicate him in some way, even though he claimed he had absolutely nothing to do with Emma’s death. Detectives brought Riley in for questioning.
“I’m trying to questioning you because if I experience all of your timeline and rule out the fact that Alex and Noah and all these guys are saying all this stuff, I understand me thinking I’ve begun or anything, but I hope to God and I’m not a suspect in their death. I’m hoping because, okay so, you know…” Police talked to him for hours that day. The more Riley talked, the more holes appeared in his story. He was elusive and detached, and the way he spoke about Emma did not match with his previous words. He referred to Emma as “the girl” and wouldn’t use her name. Detectives said Riley was totally emotionless and disconnected, and his whole story seemed very rehearsed. “The girl, she uh, she texted me.” “Which group?” “The one that passed away.” “Okay, what’s your name?” Despite maintaining he’d been in Maryville at the time Emma had been killed, cell phone analysis proved this to be a lie. His phone placed him on the freeway around half past midnight, heading back to Knoxville from Maryville. It also put Riley in the vicinity of Emma’s address at around 3:45 a.m., and she had been killed between 2:30 and 3 a.m. Officers quizzed him on the gun and the information they had received from Noah and Alex, but Riley denied any of these conversations ever happened.
“If I told you someone told us that they saw you with a gun, what would you think about that?” “I would wonder he said that and where they saw him.” “Alex McCarty said that you showed him a handgun. Where is the gun?” “I did not know.” “You understand though, for us, Alex has no reason to lie about something like that.” “Yeah, but I’m telling you I don’t know where he’s at.” “He said that you showed him the gun. You told him that you had it and you told him that you got it from your granddad.” “Don’t have the gun. I don’t know why he would say that.” “Did you ever remember having a conversation with Noah about getting fingerprints off the gun?” “How do you get fingerprints off again?” “Yeah.” Riley was the police’s only suspect at this point, but they did not have enough to make an arrest. After he got out of the station, Riley sent Noah and Alex a text message and told them, “Not to talk to the police again,” and instructed them to delete the messages from him.
Little did Riley know, Alex and Noah were still talking with officers and had been the second they found out Emma had died. The pair wanted to support the investigation and knew they could retrieve the murder weapon. Police were initially hesitant and warned them about the safety risks of getting involved, but the pair were both adamant and determined to help. “I wasn’t fearful of my safety; I was just fearful that maybe justice couldn’t have been done if we made the wrong move,” Alex said. They hatched a plan with the police to catch Riley in his own lies. Noah and Alex spoke to Riley and agreed to help him dispose of his grandfather’s gun in the Tennessee River. The plan was the police would wait nearby, ready to arrest Riley as soon as he pulled the gun out. The boys would text the police a code word signaling them to move in. Officers gave Noah and Alex wires and body cameras, and an intricate undercover investigation began.
“I’m trusting you guys like with my life because, I mean, this is seven years in jail if I get convicted something I didn’t do, man.” “Are you guys, you’re already busy right now.” “His magazine had, he had bomb shells in total when I first got it. Still has options. I actually gave them that number, that’s like, yeah, maybe it’s 50/50. It may give them reason to say, okay, the favorite song is going in this, don’t match cool. But at the same time, they could never have fingerprints in the first place to be like, ‘Oh, and this is this one is stupid, this, this, this, or this is in this magazine.'” After this was filmed, the three made their way to the river with the gun that Riley had been hiding at his stepfather’s house. “Success. It’s a bag of trash. I just threw it in there. I don’t know what’s in there. I just want to throw it and be done. Oh my God, what? This is a real gun!” When they got there, Riley took out the gun, ready to throw it in, but thanks to Noah and Alex, the police were waiting. “Leave your hands out of the vehicle!” 48 hours after Emma had been found, her killer was in handcuffs. Riley Gaul was charged with the murder of Emma Walker. In the boot of Riley’s car, police found black clothing and shoes. The only conclusion they could draw was that it had definitely been Riley trying to get into Emma’s house a few days earlier.
Opening arguments began today in the first-degree murder trial. Our Anne Brock was there today. A lot of emotion surrounding this case, some tough talk though as well about evidence and patterns of behavior. You picked it all up in. “Absolutely emotional, of course, as a mother had to be the first witness to take the stand and describe so much surrounding her daughter’s death. But both sides in this case really dug in, trying to show behavior patterns. The defense trying to bring out details of how this teenage girl, you see pictured behind me, was defying her parents even when they didn’t want her around her boyfriend, trying to show that while he was, what the defense attorney even called obsessive in his behavior, he did not intend to harm her. Now, prosecutors are trying to show that Gaul was stalking his former girlfriend, even planning to harm her. They’re pointing to evidence from the gun they say Riley stole from his grandfather to having a bag full of black clothes and gloves in a garbage bag, police collecting these things when they arrested him.”
The trial of Riley Gaul began a year and a half later, and he pled not guilty. He chose not to testify, and his legal team called no witnesses to the stand. His team’s line of attack was not to argue that he didn’t fire the bullets but to argue that it was a total accident that the bullets had killed her. They claimed he was just trying to scare Emma by shooting near her without realizing the bullets would go through the wall. He wanted her to confide in him and ultimately resume the relationship. His lawyer said Emma saw Riley as her hero, and this was all part of his clumsy plan to pretend to save her, but it went horribly wrong when he accidentally killed her in the process. The defense asked the jury if they were to find him guilty of anything, it was reckless homicide, which carried a substantially lesser sentence.
“So I submit to you that after you’ve heard all the evidence, and as I told you in the very beginning of this trial, you will hear some bizarre, reckless conduct regarding my teenage client, that everything that they say about premeditation to kill Emma Walker is consistent with him trying to scare her, because if you scare her, maybe she’ll come have contact with you and therefore you can try to rehabilitate your relationship. I’m not saying it’s logical. Do not think that I submit to you that there’s any logic in any of this because it’s not possible, none of it is. But it is consistent with the facts as we know them from the witnesses, is consistent with the facts as we know them from the 18th, and is consistent with how Emma reached out to him on the night, asked him to rescue.”
But the prosecution said everything pointed to this being an intentional act, and it stemmed from his anger at her not wanting to get back together with him. “Well, she was their light and they’re blessed that they got 16 years with her and they can look at it that way and live the rest of their lives knowing at least we got that, but they’ll always be muted. You could sense that from them when they took the stand. Each one of them has suffered a loss at the hands of him. This guy, his personal responsibility, his actions, everything that he did caused them to suffer and every person in here who she touched in their lives will never be the same again because of him and his selfishness and his lies, his possessiveness and his manipulation and his obsessiveness of Emma Walker. She’s creating this fictitious, this bogus kidnapping story to upset her. When you think about the fact that 3 o’clock in the morning, dressed in black, he’s standing outside a 16-year-old girl’s bedroom, and you think of all the places he could have placed that all shot, things that he could have done, shoot up into the air, shooting them, shooting through the window, anywhere but where you shot. Shot placement shows you an attempt to kill.”
“Mr. Gilner, has the jury reached?” “The jury? Yes, sir, we have.” “Can we please stand? Mr. Gaul, please stand.” “Mr. Gilder, count one, the first defined offense, charging the defendant with first-degree murder, has the jury reached a verdict?” “Yes, we did.” “What is your verdict?” “Guilty.” “And for the lesser included defense of stalking, did the jury reach a verdict?” “Guilty.” The jury found William Riley Gaul guilty of the first-degree murder of Emma Walker, as well as stalking, theft, reckless endangerment, and being in possession of a firearm during a dangerous felony.
“I know that nothing I can do will ever bring her back or alleviate the pain that I caused. But what I can do is tell the truth of what happened that night. My intentions were not and never had been to cause Emma any physical harm. At times, I wasn’t a terrible boyfriend. I caused her emotional and psychological pain during the two years that we were together, but I never once even imagined it caused her any physical harm. My intentions that night were never to harm her, let alone take her life. I wanted to scare her, to frighten her so bad that she would have no choice but to talk to me again, to comply with me. I would be there to comfort her and win her back.”
In the state of Tennessee, a first-degree murder conviction carries an automatic life sentence. Riley was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 51 years before he could even be considered for parole. He will be in his 70s. In May 2021, it was announced that Riley Gaul was seeking an acquittal based on insufficient evidence. If the acquittal was not granted, he was seeking a new trial. A motion hearing was set for June 4, 2021; however, his request was denied. Riley’s attorney said he plans to appeal the ruling.
Emma should have graduated in May 2018. Her family accepted her diploma for her, and her cap and gown were laid out on the chair she would have been sat in. Since her death, Emma’s family and friends continue to work hard to keep her legacy alive. Her high school has a scholarship in her name. Jill said Emma’s love of animals and her dreams of becoming a neonatal nurse were such big parts of her character. The Walker family has since had a dog park and a neonatal intensive care unit patient room at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital named after her. Jill said that she hopes people remember Emma by channeling her energy and making sure they are always kind to others.
