THE EXOTIC DANCER VS.THE TERRORISTS

USING HER WITS AND GUILE, SHE HELPED CAPTURE SOME OF THE MOST DANGEROUS MEN IN AMERICA

- Jeff Maysh

Rebecca Williams always dreamed of fighting crime like her father, who was a cop and a Baptist minister. Living in a rough suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, with her divorced mother, she spent much of her childhood bingeing true crime TV shows and confronting bullies. "I put myself in situations that most people wouldn't, just wanting to do the right thing," she said. Then things changed.

At 15, Williams fell in love with an 18-year-old grocery store manager. She dropped out of high school, and they moved in together. At 19, she gave birth to a daughter. Amanda (not her real name) was deaf, autistic, and unable to talk. The young parents scraped by with odd jobs until 13 months later, when they had a son, and money got even tighter.

Williams began working as a cocktail waitress at various nightclubs. With a glamorous Farrah Fawcett hairstyle, she looked like "a sailor's dream," said a neighbor. At Tiffany's Cabaret, she jumped on stage during amateur night and was quickly promoted to exotic dancer. She loved the thrill of transforming each night into Stevie (after Stevie Nicks, of course), a blond bombshell who whizzed around the pole to AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long." Men were obsessed.

She spent her tip money on batteries for her daughter's hearing aids, and still longed to fight crime. In 1999, after 14 years together, the couple separated.

Fearful that the school system was failing Amanda, Williams enrolled her in a residential home for deaf children, seeing her only on weekends. By 2003, she was cleaning toilets to pay the bills and living with her teenage son in a double-wide trailer. Her brother, known to all as Krusher, lived in a smaller trailer in her backyard.