Michele Reiner’s Final Email Reveals a Love Stronger Than Death
Some stories do not ask to be reported. They demand to be understood.
Just hours before Michele Reiner and her husband, legendary filmmaker Rob Reiner, were found brutally murdered in their Los Angeles home on December 14, Michele sent what would become her final email. It was not written to a family member, celebrity friend, or political ally—but to a man sitting on death row in Texas.
That man was Nanon Williams.
The email, sent on December 13 with the subject line “Ugly Side of Beautiful,” spoke of hope, family, and a future Michele believed was still possible. She described how deeply moved she was by Lyrics From Lockdown, a one-man stage production inspired by Williams’ letters from prison. The Reiners had attended the performance just two days earlier alongside Billy Crystal, their daughter Romy, and members of Williams’ own family.
“We all said that we can’t wait to watch it with you,” Michele wrote, signing off simply:
Love you — Michele.
Because prison emails are screened, Williams did not read her message until days later—after learning that Rob and Michele Reiner were dead, allegedly killed by their own son, Nick Reiner, who now faces two counts of first-degree murder.
The cruelty of that timing is impossible to ignore.
Williams, 51, has spent 34 years incarcerated for a 1992 murder he has always maintained he did not commit. Convicted at 17, sentenced to death at 19, his case rested on two pillars that later collapsed: faulty ballistics evidence and testimony from a co-defendant who received a plea deal. Years later, the same ballistics expert admitted he was wrong. Prosecutors themselves acknowledged that the key witness had not been truthful.
Yet Williams remains behind bars.
What makes this story extraordinary is not only the injustice—it is the bond that formed across it.
After seeing Lyrics From Lockdown in 2016, Rob and Michele Reiner reached out to Williams. What began as letters became phone calls, daily emails, and eventually family. They spoke not as activists seeking headlines, but as parents offering love. Michele became a maternal figure. Rob became a guide. Their children welcomed Williams as a brother.
They promised him something radical in America’s criminal justice system: belief in redemption.
The irony is devastating. Williams, once condemned as irredeemable, now watches from prison as the Reiners’ own son faces the same machinery of judgment—possibly even the death penalty.
Williams does not call for vengeance. He asks a question instead:
“What would they want for their son?”
It is a question that cuts through politics, punishment, and public outrage. Because if compassion was possible for a man convicted of murder, why should it disappear when the accused is someone else’s child?
Michele Reiner’s final email was not prophetic—but it was truthful. It revealed what survives even after unspeakable violence: love that refuses to harden, belief that justice can still be corrected, and humanity that does not choose sides.
“The greatest stories,” Rob Reiner once told Williams, “should be about love.”
Even when they break your heart.
0 comments