Was Wayne Williams just in the wrong place at the wrong time or was he one of the most heinous murderers that our society has ever produced?
A killer preyed on young black people in Atlanta during the years 1979 through 1981. He or she struck without the slightest provocation and the deaths of the children and young men involved caused shockwaves to race around the country and around the world. Was there just one killer? Was that killer Wayne Williams? Or were the killings part of a much more sinister plot…a plot with possible Klan involvement? These and similar questions were asked at the time the murders were being committed and are still being asked thirty years later.
Williams, a DJ with no previous criminal convictions, was stopped by the police on the Jackson Parkway Bridge in Atlanta in the early hours of the morning on May 22nd 1981. The officers wished to question him about the large bundle that they alleged he had just taken out of his trunk and thrown into the Chattahoochee River. Not having an explanation for what, if anything, he had thrown into the river, Williams became the prime suspect in the Atlanta Child Murders when, three days later, the nude body of one of the missing youths, Nathanial Cater, was found floating in the river just a few miles away from where Williams had been apprehended.
Cater’s body was examined and it was determined that he had died from ‘probable asphyxia’, just like the vast majority of the victims of the Child Killer before him. The police investigation then revealed similarities between fibers uplifted from Williams’ house, car and dog and fibers found on at least one of the victims. And on June 21st 1981, after failing a polygraph test, Williams was arrested for the murders of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne, an earlier Child Killer victim.
Circumstantial evidence was the flavor of the month in the Williams trial as there were no eye witness reports that linked Williams to either of the two victims. Williams also strongly maintained his innocence throughout the entire procedure. He did not, however, help his case by being argumentative and outspoken in court and all he succeeded in doing was alienating the jury. His defense team was also under funded and simply did not have the resources to compete with that of the FBI crime laboratory. Evidence that could possibly have exonerated him, like the testimony of four people who claimed to have seen Cater alive the day after Williams had supposedly dumped his body in the river, was simply never brought before the jury. Also, in a move that was highly controversial, the prosecuting team introduced evidence suggesting there was a recognizable pattern in the murders of Cater, Payne and ten other victims. This would mean that if Williams was found guilty of the Cater / Payne murders, then, purely by extension, he would be also guilty of the other ten murders. The defense team did not know, until extremely late in the trial, which ten murders were going to be on this ‘pattern list’, and this resulted in their not being able to prepare comprehensive defenses for each newly introduced case. All in all, this was not a very good example of an accused getting a fair trial…
Williams’ trial lasted almost two months but came to an end on February 27, 1982 when the jury, after deliberating for ten hours, found him guilty of the murders of both Cater and Payne. There had, however, been at least 29 slayings in Atlanta (with more possibly occurring after Williams was arrested) and the general feeling among the members of the local black community was that Williams was not the killer.
The police, however, decided that they had caught the perpetrator and proclaimed that Williams had been responsible for at least 23 of the 29 killings. It is a testament to the uncertainty surrounding the correctness of the Williams’ guilty verdict, however, that several of the 23 ‘closed’ cases have been reopened since the 1982 conviction. No evidence pointing to any other possible suspects has, as yet, come to light.
Wayne Williams continues to maintain his innocence and hopes that the actual killer will one day be identified.
Sources:
Wayne Williams Wikipedia
Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-1981 Wikipedia
Marilyn Bardsley & Rachael Bell The Atlanta Child Murders TruTV Crime Library
