William "Willie" Walters, Jr. is a leapee character who appeared in the Season Five episode of Quantum Leap titled "Promised Land". the part of Willie the leapee is played in the episode by Daniel Engstrom.
About Willie[]
When Sam leaps into his hometown Oak Ridge, IN in 1971, he leaps into Willie, who's family are neighbors and acquaintances of the Beckett family. He then realizes he has landed in the middle of a bank robbery, with him as the robber. Or more precisely, one of three robbers, Willie and two of his brothers, as their father, a local dairy farmer, has recently died. Left foundering in substantial and increasing debts to the local bank, the brothers and their widowed mother now face threats of foreclosure by the bank's young and cold-hearted manager, who has sealed his ears to their pleas for more time to pay a recent loan. Thus, led by hotheaded older brother and new head of the family Neil (Dwier Brown), the three brothers, he, Neil and John (Chris Stacy) have stormed the bank to take by force the money they have no other way of getting what they need.
Sam, who more than connects with Willie and his family's plight concerning the forclosure on their land, confers with Al concerning his mission in his leap into the situation in his hometown bank in 1971.
Al reveals that the brothers were to be shot when they try to escape the bank, and tells Sam that Ziggy's nearly-certain estimate is that his mission is to lead the three in a safe surrender to the police, but Sam, who has become emontionally involved in the plight of Willie and his family, more than connects with his leapee as both had already gone to college and were unable to be there to support and aid their family during such critical times. Like Sam, Willie too is a bright, energetic young man who had been sent by his family to college, and was therefore, like Sam, absent when his own father died and the trouble began.
Sam manages to accomplish his goal in negotiating with his hometown's old police chief to achieve a peaceful solution of the hostage situation and prevent he and the brothers' deaths, and escape the bank himself in order to find prove that the bank's manager, on the bank's behalf, was intentionally pressuring people's lands with foreclosure in the attempt of the bank's deal with land developer investers to build a shopping mall in the area.