Wayne Williams | |
---|---|
Born | Wayne Bertram Williams May 27, 1958 Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. |
Other names |
|
Conviction(s) | Murder (x2) |
Criminal penalty | Life imprisonment |
Details | |
Victims | 2 convicted, 20-29 suspected |
Country | United States |
State(s) | Georgia |
Date apprehended | June 21, 1981 |
Wayne Bertram Williams (born May 27, 1958) is an American convicted murderer and suspected serial killer who is serving life imprisonment for the 1981 killings of two men in Atlanta, Georgia. [1] Although never tried for the additional murders, he is also believed to be responsible for at least 24 of the 30 Atlanta murders of 1979–1981, also known as the Atlanta Child Murders. [2]
Wayne Williams, son of Homer and Faye Williams, was born on May 27, 1958, and raised in the Dixie Hills neighborhood of southwest Atlanta, Georgia. Both of his parents were teachers. Williams graduated from Douglass High School and developed a keen interest in radio and journalism. He constructed his own carrier current radio station and began frequenting stations WIGO and WAOK, where he befriended a number of the announcing crew and began dabbling in becoming a pop music producer and manager. [3]
Williams first became a suspect in the Atlanta murders on the morning of May 22, 1981, when a police surveillance team, watching the James Jackson Parkway Bridge spanning the Chattahoochee River (a spot where multiple bodies had been discovered previously), heard a "big loud splash", suggesting that something had been thrown from the bridge into the river below. [4] [5] The first automobile to exit the bridge after the splash, at roughly 2:50 a.m., belonged to Williams. When stopped and questioned, he told police that he was on his way to check on an address in a neighboring town ahead of an audition the following morning with a young singer named Cheryl Johnson. However, both the phone number he gave police and Cheryl Johnson turned out to be fictitious. [6]
Two days later, on May 24, the nude body of 27-year-old Nathaniel Cater, who had been missing for four days and was last seen with Williams, was discovered in the river. The medical examiner ruled he had died of probable asphyxia but never specifically said he had been strangled. Police thought that Williams had killed Cater and that his body was the source of the sound they heard as his car crossed the bridge. [7]
Williams failed three polygraph tests. Hairs and fibers retrieved from the body of another victim, Jimmy Ray Payne, were found to be consistent with those from his home, car, and dog. Co-workers told police they had seen Williams with scratches on his face and arms around the time of the murders which, investigators surmised, could have been inflicted by victims during struggles. [7] Williams held a press conference outside his home to proclaim his innocence, volunteering that he had failed the polygraph tests, which would have been inadmissible in court. [8]
Williams was questioned again by police for 12 hours on June 3 and 4 at FBI headquarters and released without arrest or charge, but remained under surveillance. [9]
Williams was arrested on June 21, 1981, for the murders of Cater and Payne. [10] His trial began on January 6, 1982, in Fulton County. During the two-month trial, prosecutors matched to a number of victims 19 sources of fibers from Williams's home and car: his bedspread, bathroom, gloves, clothes, carpets, dog, and an unusual trilobal carpet fiber. Other evidence included witness testimony that placed Williams with several victims while they were alive, and inconsistencies in his accounts of his whereabouts. [11] Williams took the stand in his own defense but alienated the jury by becoming angry and combative. [11] After 12 hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty on February 27 of the murders of Cater and Payne. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. [12] After Williams became a suspect, the killings stopped. [2]
In the late 1990s, Williams filed a habeas corpus petition and requested a retrial. Butts County Superior Court judge Hal Craig denied his appeal. Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker said that "although this does not end the appeal process, I am pleased with the results in the habeas case" and that his office will "continue to do everything possible to uphold the conviction." [13] In early 2004, Williams sought a retrial again, with his attorneys arguing that law enforcement officials covered up evidence of involvement by the Ku Klux Klan, and that carpet fibers purportedly linking him to the crimes would not stand up to scientific scrutiny. [14] A federal judge rejected the request for retrial on October 17, 2006.
Williams was never tried for any of the Atlanta Child Murders. However, police attributed 22 other deaths, including those of 18 minors, to Williams. [7]
Williams is serving his sentence at Telfair State Prison. [15] On November 20, 2019, Williams was again denied parole. He will next be eligible for parole in November 2027. [16]
Williams has maintained his innocence from the beginning and claimed that Atlanta officials covered up evidence of KKK involvement in the killings to avoid a race war in the city. His lawyers have said the conviction was a "profound miscarriage of justice" that has kept an innocent man incarcerated for the majority of his adult life and allowed the real killers to go free. [17] In contrast, Joseph Drolet, who prosecuted Williams at trial, has stood by Williams's convictions. He has emphasized that, after Williams was arrested, "the murders stopped and there has been nothing since." [18]
Other observers have criticized the thoroughness of the investigation and the validity of its conclusions. [19] The author James Baldwin, in his essay The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), raised questions about Williams' guilt. Members of his community and several of the victims' parents did not believe that Williams, the son of two professional teachers, could have killed so many. [20]
On May 6, 2005, DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham ordered the reopening of the murder cases of four boys killed in that county between February and May 1981, whose deaths had been attributed to Williams. [20] [21] The announcement was welcomed by relatives of some victims, who said they believe the wrong man was blamed for many of the murders. [22]
Graham, who was serving as an assistant police chief in neighboring Fulton County at the time of the murders, said his decision to reopen the cases was driven solely by his belief in Williams's innocence. Former DeKalb County Sheriff and convicted murderer Sidney Dorsey, who was an Atlanta homicide detective at the time, also said he believed Williams was wrongly blamed for the murders. "If they arrested a white guy," he said, "there would have been riots across the U.S.." [23] [24] [25] [26] Dorsey is now serving a life sentence after being convicted of ordering the murder of his election opponent Derwin Brown. [27]
Fulton County authorities have not reopened any of the cases under their jurisdiction. [20]
According to an August 2005 report, Charles T. Sanders, a white supremacist affiliated with the KKK and an early suspect in the murders, once praised the crimes in secretly recorded conversations. Although Sanders did not publicly claim responsibility for any of the deaths, he told an informant for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in a 1981 recording that the killer had "wiped out a thousand future generations of niggers". [28] An anonymous alleged former friend of Sanders told documentarian Payne Lindsey ( Atlanta Monster ) that Sanders had taken credit for the murders mentioned in a 1986 Spin article, [29] claiming that his brothers were also involved.
Sanders did not directly implicate the KKK or lead his friend to believe that anyone else from the organization was involved. Sanders allegedly mused over how lucky he was that he and Williams had the same carpet and that they both owned a white German shepherd. The anonymous former friend went on to say that, "Once it was pinned on Wayne Williams, they were through. That was their way out." [30] Police dropped the probe into possible Klan involvement when Sanders and two of his brothers passed lie detector tests in which they denied their involvement. The case was once again closed on July 21, 2006. [31] [32]
Former FBI profiler John E. Douglas wrote in his book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit that, in his opinion, "forensic and behavioral evidence points conclusively to Wayne Williams as the killer of eleven young men in Atlanta." He added, however, that he believed there was "no strong evidence linking him to all or even most of the deaths and disappearances of children in that city between 1979 and 1981". [33]
In 2007, the FBI performed DNA tests on two human hairs found on one of the victims. The mitochondrial DNA sequence in the hairs would eliminate 99.5% of people, and 98% of African-Americans, by not matching their DNA; the sequence found matched Williams's DNA. [33]
DNA testing was performed in 2010 on scalp hairs found on the body of 11-year-old victim Patrick Baltazar. While the results were not firmly conclusive, the DNA sequence found appears in only 29 of 1,148 African-American hair samples in the FBI's database, including that of Williams. [34] The Baltazar case was included among 10 additional victims presented to the jury at Williams' trial, although he was never charged in any of those cases. [35]
Dog hairs found on Baltazar's body were tested in 2007 by the genetics laboratory at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, which found a DNA sequence also present in the Williams family's German Shepherd. However, the director of the laboratory, Elizabeth Wictum, said that, while the results were "fairly significant", they were not conclusive. Only mitochondrial DNA was tested; unlike nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA cannot be shown to be unique to an individual dog. The report said the hairs on the bodies contained the same DNA sequence as Williams's dog, a DNA sequence that occurs in about 1 in 100 dogs. [35] The FBI report stated that "Wayne Williams cannot be excluded" as a suspect in the case. [36]
A Department of Justice study, released in April 2015, concluded that numerous hair analyses conducted by FBI examiners during the 1980s and 1990s "may have failed to meet professional standards." Defense attorney Lynn Whatley immediately announced that the report would form the basis for a new appeal, but prosecutors responded that hair evidence played only a minor role in Williams's conviction. [37]
On March 21, 2019, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields announced that officials would re-test evidence from the murders, which will be gathered by the Atlanta Police Department, Fulton County District Attorney's Office, and Georgia Bureau of Investigation. In a news conference, Mayor Bottoms said, "It may be there is nothing left to be tested. But I do think history will judge us by our actions, and we will be able to say we tried." [38] [39]
In 2019, two Atlanta men, Derwin Davis & Isaac Rogers came out claiming that Williams had attempted to abduct them in 1979 & 1981 respectively. [40] [41]
Williams appears as the main antagonist in several media portrayals of the case. He was first depicted in the 1985 television miniseries The Atlanta Child Murders and was played by Calvin Levels. In 2000, Showtime released a drama film titled Who Killed Atlanta's Children? with Clé Bennett playing Williams. In 2018, Williams and the Atlanta Child Murders were the subject of the true crime podcast Atlanta Monster , hosted by Payne Lindsey and co-produced by Tenderfoot TV and HowStuffWorks. In 2019, Williams was featured in season 2 of the Netflix series Mindhunter alongside others such as Charles Manson and David Berkowitz; [42] Williams's character was portrayed by Christopher Livingston. [43]
General:
Gary Leon Ridgway is an American serial killer known as the Green River Killer. He was initially convicted of 48 separate murders committed between the early 1980s and late 1990s. As part of his plea bargain, another conviction was added, bringing the total number of convictions to 49, making him the second most prolific serial killer in United States history according to confirmed murders.
The Atlanta murders of 1979–1981, sometimes called the Atlanta child murders, was a series of murders committed in Atlanta, Georgia, between July 1979 and May 1981. Over the two-year period, at least 28 children, adolescents, and adults were killed. Wayne Williams, an Atlanta native who was 23 years old at the time of the last murder, was arrested, tried, and convicted of two of the adult murders and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
Dennis Lynn Rader, also known as BTK, is an American serial killer who murdered at least ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. Although Rader occasionally killed or attempted to kill men and children, he typically targeted women. His victims were often bound, sometimes with objects from their homes, and either suffocated with a plastic bag or manually strangled with a ligature.
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. is an American serial killer, serial rapist, burglar, former police officer, and former mechanic who committed at least 13 murders, 51 rapes, and 120 burglaries across California between 1974 and 1986. He is responsible for three known separate crime sprees throughout the state, each of which spawned a different nickname in the press, before it became evident that they were committed by the same person.
The Oakland County Child Killer (OCCK) is the name given to the perpetrator(s) responsible for the serial killings of at least four children in Oakland County, Michigan, United States, between 1976 and 1977. The victims were held captive before being killed, and forensic DNA testing has indirectly implicated two suspects, one of whom has since died, with the other serving life in prison for offenses against children. A DNA profile of the main perpetrator was created from samples taken from some of the victims' bodies, but does not match the DNA of anyone named in connection with the case; the perpetrator's identity is unknown.
Lee Chun-jae is a South Korean serial killer known for committing the Hwaseong serial murders. Between 1986 and 1994, Lee murdered fifteen women and girls in addition to committing numerous sexual assaults, predominantly in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, and the surrounding areas. The murders, which remained unsolved for thirty years, are considered to be the most infamous in modern South Korean history and were the inspiration for the 2003 film Memories of Murder.
Robert Tyrone Hayes is an American serial killer who has been convicted of three murders in the Daytona Beach, Florida, area between December 2005 and February 2006. DNA tests have also linked him to a fourth murder committed in March 2016. In addition, he remains the prime suspect in the murder of another woman in December 2007.
Timothy Wayne Krajcir is a convicted American serial killer from West Mahanoy Township, Pennsylvania who has confessed to killing nine women: five in Missouri and four others in Illinois and Pennsylvania.
Derrick Todd Lee, also known as The Baton Rouge Serial Killer, was an American serial killer. From 1992 to 2003, Lee murdered seven women in the Baton Rouge area.
David Joseph Carpenter, also known as The Trailside Killer, is an American serial killer and serial rapist known for stalking and murdering a variety of individuals on hiking trails in state parks near San Francisco, California. He attacked at least ten individuals and was convicted in seven murders and was confirmed to be the killer in an eighth murder; Carpenter is also suspected in two additional killings. Two victims, Steven Haertle and Lois Rinna, mother of television personality Lisa Rinna, survived. Carpenter used a .38 caliber handgun in all but one of the killings. A .44 caliber handgun was used in the killing of Edda Kane on Mount Tamalpais.
Lonnie David Franklin Jr., better known by the nickname Grim Sleeper, was an American serial killer who was responsible for at least ten murders and one attempted murder in Los Angeles, California from 1984 to 2007. He was also convicted for rape and sexual violence. Franklin earned his nickname when he appeared to have taken a 14-year break from his crimes, from 1988 to 2002.
Edward Wayne Edwards was an American serial killer and former fugitive. Edwards escaped from jail in Akron, Ohio, in 1955 and fled across the country, holding up gas stations. By 1961, he was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Terry Peder Rasmussen was an American serial killer who killed at least six people in a series of crimes that stretched across the contiguous United States from the late 1970s through the early 2000s. Due to his use of many aliases, most notably "Bob Evans", Rasmussen is known as "The Chameleon Killer".
April Marie Tinsley was an eight-year-old girl from Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States, who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in 1988. Her killer left several anonymous messages and notes in the Fort Wayne area between 1990 and 2004, openly boasting about April's murder and threatening to kill again.
Samuel Little was an American serial killer who confessed to murdering 93 women between 1970 and 2005. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) has confirmed Little's involvement in at least 60 of the 93 confessed murders, the largest number of confirmed victims for any serial killer in United States history.
Dr. No is the nickname given to a suspected American serial killer thought to be responsible for the murders of at least nine women and girls in Ohio, between 1981 and 1990. As victims, he primarily chose prostitutes working in parking lots and truck stops located alongside Interstate 71. There are suspicions that he committed three similar killings in New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, between 1986 and 1988. In 2019, Dr No was identified as Samuel Legg III using familial DNA to link him to the crime.
The Denver Prostitute Killer was an unidentified American serial killer responsible for the murder of at least 17 women and girls in Denver and its various suburbs between 1975 and 1995, however in 2005, based upon results from DNA Profiling, it was determined that the most likely killer was Billy Edwin Reid who was previously arrested and charged with the 1989 murder of Lannell Williams and Lisa Kelly. Reid was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for those specific murders, The killings were grouped together only in 2008 – until then, each of these crimes were considered to have been committed by different people.
Jack Harold Jones Jr. was an American serial killer who murdered at least three women in Florida and Arkansas between 1983 and 1995. Convicted of two murders during his lifetime and executed in 2017, he was posthumously linked via DNA to the third murder, for which another man was imprisoned.
Ronald Lee Moore was an American fugitive, murderer, rapist and suspected serial killer who murdered at least two women between 1996 and 1999. He was not connected to either murder until over a decade later. In November 2007, while incarcerated in Baltimore for burglary, Moore was accidentally released due to a clerical error. He was captured on December 24, 2007, but committed suicide by hanging in January 2008 at the Nelson Coleman Correctional Center in Louisiana. After his suicide, DNA testing linked him to other crimes and he was mentioned in the podcast Serial (2014) as a possible suspect in the killing of Hae Min Lee.
The Castration serial murders were a series of murders of young men committed in between two and at least five American states between August 1980 and November 1986. All the victims were kidnapped, shot in the back of the head and castrated post-mortem, from which the case got its namesake. They were initially considered unrelated due to the crime scenes' geographic remoteness until 1989, when forensic evidence concluded that two of the victims had been killed with the same revolver, with the other three likely being related as well.
{{cite news}}
: |author=
has generic name (help)