The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (4 page)

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 résumé 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.

What’s more, Williams had no access to the Ford at the time Terrill, Stephens and Jones were killed. It had been taken into the shop for repairs at 9 am on 30 July 1980, nearly five hours before Terrill disappeared. It was only returned on 7 August long after Terrill was dead. The car refused to start the next morning and was taken back to the garage the next morning. The new estimate was so high that Wayne’s father balked and they never got the car back. The family had no car when Clifford Jones was abducted on 20 August 1980 and Charles Stephens was murdered on 9 October. It was only on 21 October, 12 days after Stephens’ death, that Wayne’s parents bought the Chevrolet.

Blood-typing was used to link the deaths of John Porter and William Barrett to droplets found in the Williamses’ car. However, there was controversy over how old the blood stains in the car were and they could easily have deposited there before Porter and Barrett had been murdered.

A hydrologist testified that, judging by where Cater’s body had been found, it was highly unlikely that he had been thrown off the James Jackson Parkway Bridge. The defence also contended that there was no evidence that either Cater or Payne had even been murdered. Cater was a known drug addict and alcoholic, while Payne was a depressive who had previously tried to kill himself. Both of them had been found in the river. They might have committed suicide by jumping in, or they could simply have slipped in and drowned.

Williams took the stand in an attempt to demonstrate that, as a small man, he could not have hauled the body of the considerably larger and heavier Cater out of the back of the station wagon and flung him over the shoulder-height parapet – certainly not in the short time that the police maintain that he was on the bridge. However, this proved to be a mistake. Taking the stand gave the prosecution the chance to cross-examine him. Prosecutor Jack Mallard managed to rattle Williams, making him angry, and goaded him into insulting the FBI agents in the case. This did not impress the jury.

On 27 February 1982 Wayne Williams was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment. Two days later, the Atlanta “child murder” task force was disbanded and the other cases consigned to the files. However, Williams had only been convicted of killing two adults. None of the child murders has ever been solved.

In November 1985, new attorneys unearthed declassified documents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. In the early 1980s, they had an informant inside the Ku Klux Klan who told them that Klansmen aimed to provoke a race war by “killing the children” in Atlanta. A Klansman named Charles T. Sanders boasted of killing Lubie Geter, after the 14-year-old had run into Sanders’ car with his go-cart. Sanders allegedly told a friend: “I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna choke the black bastard to death.” In early 1981, the spy in question warned the FBI that “after twenty black child killings, the Klan were going to start killing black women”. It was noted that there was a cluster of unsolved murders of numerous black women in Atlanta in 1980–82, almost all of whom had been strangled. However, repeated attempts to secure a new trial in the Wayne Williams case have failed.

Nevertheless Police Chief Louis Graham has not given up. In 2000, he visited Williams in prison. At the end of the visit, he told Williams to look him in the eye and say he was innocent.

“To God almighty, I swear . . . I didn’t do it,” Williams replied and Graham believes him.

Chet Dettlinger, who had been on the case since 1980, concurred. He told CNN: “I agree with Louis that Wayne Williams did not kill anybody.”

Three of the cases that fall within Graham’s jurisdiction and he has now reopened are among the ten “pattern cases” introduced in Williams’ trial. Williams’ new defence attorney Michael Lee Jackson, who is fighting the case in the Federal court, pointed out: “Wayne wasn’t defending himself against two murder charges. He really had to defend himself against 12. But the state only had to prove two of them.”

Jackson is confident that if Graham’s cold-case squad can show that any of the “pattern-case” victims was killed by someone else, he can win Williams a new trial.

Despite the doubts about Williams’ guilt, there are no protesters out on the streets demanding his release.
Los Angeles Times
journalist Jeff Prugh who co-wrote the book
The List
about the Williams case, says this is because the civil rights establishment that had taken over from the old white power structure around the time of the killings found it “politically expedient . . . to sit on their hands rather than to attack the black power structure that they helped put into office”.

The Reverend Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr Martin Luther King Jnr, blames Atlanta’s current black police commissioner and a black mayor for allowing Williams to suffer such injustice. Lowery himself did not believe Williams responsible for the child killings – indeed, he handed over to the FBI a letter from a reputed Ku Klux Klan member implicating the Klan in the murders. However, Lowery does feel that Williams was guilty of the two adult murders he was convicted of.

“I think the community settled into the position that if Wayne did not do it,” he says, “at least those who were doing it had stopped.”

Graham is worried that much of the physical evidence from the original cases no longer exists. Jackson says he would not be surprised to learn it had been destroyed, as were hours of surveillance tapes of Klan members. However, a judge has ordered that transcripts of the tapes, which still exist, should be handed over to the defence. But a review of the material says that the police dropped their investigation into Klan involvement in the murders after seven weeks. Although Klansman Charles T. Sanders voiced support for the killings, he denied involvement. He and two of his brothers passed lie-detector tests. However Williams has another ace up his sleeve. He says that he can prove that the witness who said he saw Williams and Nathaniel Cater holding hands on the night of the murder was, in fact, in jail at the time.