the Chattahoochee River. It appeared that he had been in the water for almost all that time. The cause of death could not be determined but it seemed probable that he had been suffocated and he was added to the list.
Seventeen-year-old juvenile delinquent William “Billy Star” Barrett went missing on 12 May. He was on his way to pay a bill for his mother. Found later that day not far from his home, he was another victim of asphyxiation, but he had also been stabbed after he had been strangled. At first he was not added to the list as the police had reports that he might have been the victim of a hit man. But then it transpired that he had been seen with paedophile John David Wilcoxen and had connections to the unnamed child molester in the Lubie Geter case. That man was seen at Barrett’s funeral.
As several of the victims’ bodies had been found in local rivers, the police began staking out the city’s waterways. Officer Freddie Jacobs was stationed at the south end of James Jackson Parkway Bridge over the Chattahoochee River. Before dawn on 22 May, he saw the headlights of a slow-moving car approaching. It was a 1970 Chevrolet station wagon. Then Officer Bob Campbell, who was stationed on the river bank under the north end of the bridge, heard a splash in the water, saw ripples in the water and radioed Jacobs, who kept the car under surveillance.
At the far side of the bridge, veteran Officer Carl Holden was stationed outside a liquor store, watching for anything suspicious. He saw the station wagon standing on the bridge. It then moved off, turned in front of the liquor store, then re-crossed the bridge. He followed. A mile the other side, the car was stopped by FBI Agent Greg Gilliland.
The driver was 23-year-old Wayne Bertram Williams. He said that he had crossed the river to visit a woman named Cheryl Johnson whom he planned to audition, with the aim of promoting her as a singer. But the address he gave did not exist. The phone number was also bogus and there was no Cheryl Johnson in the phone book. The police searched Williams’ car and spent two hours grilling him. Meanwhile the police dragged the river, but nothing was found. Nevertheless, the next day, Williams was interviewed again. He had been in trouble with the law once before. In 1976, he had been arrested for impersonating a police officer and illegally equipping his vehicle with red flashing lights, but he was not charged.
Released after the second interview, Williams and his father apparently undertook a major clean-up of the family house. Boxes were carted off in the station wagon and photographic prints and negatives were burnt.
Then, two days later, the naked body of 27-year-old convicted felon Nathaniel Cater was pulled out of the river downstream of James Jackson Parkway Bridge. He was the last victim to make it onto the list. An alcoholic, he supported himself by selling drugs, working as a homosexual prostitute and selling his blood to blood banks. He also lived in the same apartment block as Latonya Wilson and had connections to the Laundromat manager in the Clifford Jones case.
Although the cause of death could not be established, he had most certainly stopped breathing, so it was recorded as “probable asphyxia”. At first, medical examiners thought he had not been in the water long, but they were prevailed on to extend the limits of error in their estimate of the time of death to include the dawn of 22 May, when Officer Campbell heard his splash. Authorities now concluded they had their man.
Not only could Cheryl Johnson not be found, none of the rest of Wayne Williams’ alibi checked out. The FBI gave him three separate polygraph tests, all of which he failed. And Williams was his own worst enemy. Rather than keeping his own counsel, Williams held a huge press conference outside his house, during which he handed out a long and self-serving resume that was littered with exaggeration and falsehood.
The FBI lab then claimed they could match fibres and dog hair from Williams’ home and car to those found on the victims’ clothing. However, perhaps niggled by the intervention of the FBI, Fulton Country District Attorney Lewis Slaton refused to proceed on forensic evidence alone. Although witnesses had come forward saying that they had seen Williams with a number of the victims, they had kept this information to themselves as Wayne Williams had not emerged as a suspect before. Others even claimed they had seen scratches on Williams’ arms, implying that his alleged victims had fought back.
On 21 June, Wayne Williams was arrested and charged with the murder of Nathaniel Cater, despite testimony from four witnesses who had reported seeing Cater alive on 22 and 23 May, long after Officer Campbell had heard his splash. This information was not shared with the defence. On 17 July, Williams was indicted for killing Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Payne. Although they were both adults, the newspapers headlined the indictment of Atlanta’s infamous “child killer”. In the case of Payne it had not even been clearly established that his death was a homicide. The death certificate said that the cause of death was “undetermined” and was only later changed to “homicide”. The medical examiner had said that he had merely “checked the wrong box”—though there were no tick boxes on the certificate and the words “undetermined” or “homicide” had to be written in.
At Williams’ trial, which began in December 1981, the prosecution described the defendant as an aggressive homosexual and a bigot, so disgusted with himself and the black race that he aimed to annihilate future generations of African-Americans by killing black children before they could reproduce. A 15-year-old testified that Williams had paid him $2 to fondle his penis. Another witness told the court that he had seen Nathaniel Cater and Williams holding hands on the evening of 21 May a few hours before “the splash”. To counter this, a woman testified for the defence saying she had had “normal sex” with Williams. Others testified that Williams disliked homosexuals and his behaviour towards the boys whose singing careers he attempted to encourage was exemplary.
Prosecution turned the spotlight on the credibility and character of Wayne Williams, particularly when it came to his account of what had happened on the James Jackson Parkway Bridge. Williams was shown to be a liar and a fantasist. He had claimed to have flown jet fighters at Dobbins Air Force base, which was clearly ridiculous because of his defective eyesight. He also boasted that he could “knock out black street kids in a few minutes by putting his hands on their necks” and that, if enough evidence was gathered against him in the Atlanta child-killing case, he would confess. Despite his reputation for braggadocio, this was taken at face value.
The judge also allowed the prosecution to introduce testimony on ten other victims on the “child murder” list in an attempt to demonstrate a pattern in the killings. This was a problem for the defence. Although they knew that the prosecution would seek to introduce other cases, they did not know which ones they would choose and, consequently, did not know which to prepare for the defence. One of the cases admitted was that of Terry Pue, though no mention was made of the fingerprints thought to have been lifted from his corpse.
The other nine “pattern” cases were Alfred Evans, Eric Middlebrooks, Charles Stephens, Lubie Geter, Joseph Bell, Patrick Baltazar, William Barrett, Larry Rogers and John Porter. The pattern was that they were all black males, whom the defendant claimed not to know. They came from broken homes and poor families that did not own a car. They were street hustlers with no apparent motive for going missing. There was no evidence of forced abduction. All had died from asphyxiation by strangling. They had been transported, either before or after death, from where they had disappeared to where their bodies were dumped, which, the prosecution maintained, was usually near an expressway ramp or a major highway. Some of their clothing was missing and similar fibres were present in each case.
But on closer examination there was no pattern here at all. In only six of the ten cases was there evidence of strangulation. Not all these victims were found near expressway ramps or major highways. Indeed the pattern did not extend to the two murders that Williams was charged with. Nevertheless, the judge, a former prosecutor himself who had worked alongside District Attorney Lewis Slaton, accepted the DA’s contention and prosecution witnesses testified that Williams had been seen with various victims. Their testimony was countered by the police sketch artist called in to draw up likenesses of the suspects on the instructions of the various witnesses. She said that none of the suspects that she had drawn up looked anything like Williams.
The most damning evidence came from forensic scientists who testified that fibres from a brand of carpet in the Williams home had been found on some of the bodies. Furthermore, they said that the victims Cater, Jones, Middlebrooks, Stephens, Terrill and Wyche all carried fibres from the trunk of the Williams family’s 1979 Ford. Stephens’ clothes were also said to have been covered in fibres from the 1970 Chevrolet station wagon subsequently owned by Wayne’s parents. Twenty-eight matches were made with 19 items from Williams’ home and cars.
Again the defence was at a disadvantage. They did not have to resources to match the FBI laboratories in West Virginia and could not afford expert witnesses to match those put up by the state. It has since been established that the fibre evidence is flawed. The prosecution claimed that the trilobal fibres concerned were rare when, in fact, they were commonly found in carpets through the region. Indeed, they were so common, it would have been difficult for victims not to have come in contact with them. Even more tellingly, no hairs or fibres from the victims or the clothes were found in the Williamses’ home or cars.
