Prosecution seeking death penalty
But Oklahoma County District Judge Susan Stallings is allowing prosecutors to put on evidence linking him to three other deaths in Texas.
In an opening statement, Assistant District Attorney Ryan Stephenson told jurors Reece admitted choking Johnston in his horse trailer at the car wash after she yelled at him for spraying her.
The prosecutor said Reece confessed to raping her, too, stopping because it was too hot. He confessed to choking her with his hands and a rope after she hit him with a horseshoe.
Johnston was 19.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
DNA links defendant to Oklahoma crime
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By: Brittany Toolis
Proceedings against a suspected serial killer began inside the Oklahoma County courthouse Monday.
William Reece is on trial accused of kidnapping and murder. Monday s proceedings focused solely on jury selection.
According to prosecutors, the defendant killed 19-year-old Tiffany Johnston almost 25 years ago.
Reports show in 1997 the 19-year-old went missing from a carwash in Bethany, only to be found raped and strangled near Yukon.
Johnston s death is just one in a slew of killings spanning Oklahoma to Texas Reece has either been implicated in or admitted to over the last quarter century.
Detectives believe Reece s killing spree began after he was released 8 years in to an almost 30-year rape sentence in Oklahoma.
Oklahoman
After being linked by DNA to a cold case in Oklahoma, Texas inmate William Lewis Reece began confessing.
By the time he was done, he had admitted to the killing in Oklahoma and three more in Texas, prosecutors say. All were in 1997, after he got out of an Oklahoma prison after serving time for rape.
He led investigators in Texas to two bodies after prosecutors there agreed not to seek the death penalty for his cooperation.
Texas Rangers pushed Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater to do the same. The district attorney refused.
Now almost six years after being charged Reece, 61, is going on trial in the Oklahoma murder case.