The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (5 page)

In a rare interview in 2005, Williams, then 46, told WVEE-FM that he was imprisoned with at least four relatives of his alleged victims, and that even they believe in his innocence.

“The Wayne Williams you see sitting right here today is just as much a victim of what happened as anybody else that was involved in this tragedy,” he said from Hancock State Prison. “None of us have really had closure in this thing – not the families, not Wayne and not the people of Atlanta.”

Williams claims that, as a black man, he was railroaded in order to prevent the race war the Klan sought to ignite. However, Janie Glenn, mother of victim Billy Barrett, is not convinced Williams is a victim. Twenty-four years before, on the day after Mother’s Day, her 17-year-old son had cooked her breakfast, then he took the bus to go and pay a family friend for some guttering work he had done on the house.

“Be careful,” she had said as he left.

Later that day, his body was found dumped on a road a few miles from home – some witnesses say by a uniformed man in a squad car. He had been stabbed and smothered. Glenn says that Williams knew her son and had cruelly encouraged the smallish boy with a painful stutter into believing he could make it as a singer. A relative also told her that Williams had attended her son’s funeral.

“I’m not going to say that his hands killed him, but I believe that he knows something,” she says. “If Wayne knows who killed my son and the rest of the kids, then he needs to open his big mouth and let somebody else pay for what they did.”

Catherine Leach, mother of 13-year-old victim Curtis Walker, shares Graham’s belief in Williams’ innocence but, to her, this is not about Williams.

“I don’t know if he’s innocent or not on those other crimes,” she says. “All I want is justice for mine.”

For her, the issue is her son, the boy who said he was going to Hollywood one day and make his momma rich. And she believes that her boy’s killer is, almost certainly, still at large along with the murderer of the other Atlanta child victims.

Atlanta’s Prostitute Killers

In Atlanta, Georgia, more than ten African-American prostitutes have been murdered by a serial killer who likes to display their bodies in theatrical positions at the crime scene. Law enforcement personnel believe that this “lust killer” has been at large in Atlanta for the last 15 years.

Convicted killer Jeremy Bryan Jones confessed to killing eight women in metropolitan Atlanta, including five prostitutes. He talked of picking them up on streets lined with strip joints, murdering them and dumping their bodies in wooded areas and, in one case, dropping the body off a bridge in a river. Although he passed a polygraph test, he has since retracted his confession. His court-appointed lawyer, Habib Yazdi, said that he would confess to anything if he was allowed to talk to his mother and girlfriend.

Jones is certainly guilty of other killings. On 26 October 2005, Jones was convicted of burglary, sexual assault, rape, kidnapping and the homicide of 45-year-old Lisa Nichols. During the trial he blamed Nichols’ neighbour for her death, but he had earlier confessed to killing Lisa and burning her body while high on crystal meth.

On 18 September 2004, Lisa Nichols, the divorced mother of two daughters from Mobile County, Alabama, had been found in her bathroom. She had been raped, shot in the head three times and her body set on fire. However, while the body and the room were scorched, the fire did not destroy the house as intended – and with it vital forensic evidence.

Neighbours recalled seeing a vehicle parked outside Nichols’ home and one recalled part of the licence plate number. This lead to a itinerant labourer known locally as “Oklahoma”. His employer gave the police his birth date and social security number. This identified him as John Paul Chapman, an alias used by Jeremy Bryan Jones.

Four days later, Chapman called Detective Paul Burch of the Mobile Country Police Department who was investigating the Nichols murder. The call was traced and Chapman was arrested, still on the phone, in a house not far from where Lisa Nichols lived.

Chapman was already known to the police as a small-time drug user. However, fingerprints had failed to link him to Jeremy Bryan Jones of Miami, Oklahoma, who had been in trouble with police since, at the age of 16, he had been charged assault of a boy and his mother. He was also suspected of murdering 20-year-old Jennifer Judd, the wife of a former schoolmate and next-door neighbour Justin Judd. She had been stabbed to death in the kitchen of her own home. Her body was discovered by her husband. They had been married just ten days. Justin Judd had regularly reported Jones to the police after hearing women’s screams issuing from Jones’ house.

Jones was charged with rape on 5 November 1995, and again on 10 January 1996. On the second occasion he was found in possession of methamphetamine – crystal meth. Out on bail the next day, he pointed a loaded gun at a woman’s vulva and threatened to pull the trigger.

He pleaded guilty to three charges of sexual assault on 3 March 1997 and was sentenced to five years’ probation. Two rape victims were afraid to testify. He defied court orders requiring him to provide DNA samples and was kicked off his sexual-offender counselling sessions. Then on 19 October 2000 his probation was revoked and a warrant was issued for his arrest, citing probable cause. Rather than go to jail, Jones skipped the state.

In Joplin, Missouri, he met the mother of convicted criminal John Paul Chapman who was serving time in Missouri State Penitentiary. She took pity on him and gave him her son’s birth date and social security number. Equipped with a new identity, Jones headed for Atlanta.

As Chapman, he was picked up three times for minor offences in Georgia, but each time his fingerprints were run through, the FBI database in West Virginia failed to identify him as Jeremy Bryan Jones. Each time he was released, leaving him free to kill. He has been charged with three more murders during that period and remains a suspect in a fourth.

The first was that of 38-year-old Tina Mayberry in 2002. She was attending a Halloween fancy-dress party dressed as Betty Boop in Gipson’s restaurant in Douglasville, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Stepping outside for a breath of fresh of air, she staggered back into the party moments later, bleeding profusely from stab wounds. She died that night in an Atlanta hospital. She had not been robbed and there was no evidence of sexual assault. The murder appeared to be motiveless.

On 12 March 2003, 16-year-old Amanda Greenwell disappeared from a trailer park in Douglas County where Chapman also lived. She went to make a call from a local payphone and never returned home. In April, her badly decomposed body was found in a wooded area nearby. She had been stabbed and her neck had been broken “with great force”, according to the post mortem report. But again, there were no clues, no suspect and no apparent motive.

Jones has been charged with the murder of Katherine Collins, who was found stabbed to death in the Garden District of New Orleans on 14 February 2004. Police say Katherine worked as a prostitute in the city.

He is also a suspect in the murder of Patrice Endres, who had gone missing from her beauty parlour Tambers’ Trim-’n’-Tan in Chunchula, Alabama on 15 April 2004. Before leaving home that morning, she had left a billet-doux on her second husband’s car saying: “The best is yet to come.”

Although Endres’ early life had been scarred by drugs, she had turned her life around. She had gone to hairdressing school and had opened her own salon. She married Rob Endres and had a 16-year-old son from a previous relationship whom she doted on. The family planned to move to Flagler, Florida, where they intended to buy a bed-and-breakfast.

At work that morning, Patrice was seen smiling and joking with the clientele, but when a client turned up for her 12 o’clock appointment, she found the salon empty. The front door was unlocked and her keys were on the table. Patrice’s car was outside, though it was parked at an odd angle. Although the till was empty, her purse was on her desk and her lunch was in the microwave. The police were convinced she had run away. Family and friends protested that she had never been happier, but the offer of a $17,000 reward, a poster campaign and extensive search only elicited a witness who said they had seen a white utility van, that could have been Jones’, outside the salon, but no further leads.

After he was arrested, the police say that Jones confessed to killing her and dumping her body in Sweetwater Creek in Forsyth County, Georgia. But after an exhaustive search of the creek, police still have no body and no physical evidence to base a charge on.

Jones is also suspected in the murder of a young prostitute whose decomposed torso was found near Wright City, Missouri on 28 June 2004. Passers-by told investigators that they saw a white utility van at the rest stop off Interstate 70, near where the torso was found.

While in custody, Chapman made a number of phonecalls from the jail’s pay phone to a number in Miami, Oklahoma. This belonged to Jeanne Beard, Jeremy Bryan Jones’s mother. At last the police tied Chapman to the earlier outstanding warrants.

Awaiting trial, Jones confessed to numerous other murders including eight women in Atlanta. He even produced sketch maps of the places he had dumped bodies in Georgia, Oklahoma, Kansas and Alabama dating back to 1992. He confessed to murdering 19-year-old Justin Hutchings by “lethal injection” in Pitcher, Oklahoma. And police in Delaware County, Oklahoma, believe Jones was responsible for the murder of 38-year-old Daniel Oakley and 41-year-old Doris Harris in 1996. He is thought to have shot them, then set the trailer they lived in on fire to hide his crime.

However, before his trial, he recanted all his confessions. He has now been convicted in the Lisa Nichols’ case and has been sentenced to death by lethal injection. Before that he faces trial in Georgia for the killing of Amanda Greenwell of Douglas County. No doubt other trials will follow.

The problem is that the Atlanta prostitute killings do not seem to fit into the random MO of his other slayings. Even if his jailhouse confessions were not pure bravura, he did not admit all the current roster of prostitute killings in Atlanta, which means that, in all likelihood, there is at least one other killer at large in Atlanta.

Atlanta’s Ripper

In 1911, Atlanta, Georgia, got its own Jack the Ripper. The horrific murders began on 20 May 1911. That night and on the following six Saturdays, the killer subdued his victims by throttling them before cutting their throats. The victims were all attractive black women. None had been raped, but their sexual organs had been mutilated in a way reminiscent of the fiend of Whitechapel.

However, things went wrong for the killer on the night of 1 July, when a young woman was stabbed while out looking for her mother, who had just become the culprit’s seventh victim. The daughter survived and told the police that her assailant had been a well-dressed black man.

The killer then became more wary. He slowed his rate of killing, but did not stop. Over the next ten months, he would claim six more victims. After that he disappeared.

Atlanta’s Son of Sam

Then in 1977, Atlanta got its own “Son of Sam” – the killer who was blithely killing youngsters at random in New York at the time. The Atlanta shootings began on 16 January 1977, when the “Lovers’ Lane Killer” shot 26-year-old LaBrian Lovett and 20-year-old Veronica Hill.

The police were alerted when they were called accident. A vehicle had veered across an intersection, coming to a halt when it collided with a traffic sign. Inside, a naked man lay slumped behind the steering wheel, his face and body streaked with blood. He had been shot four times in the head, stomach, left arm and right leg. On the back seat was a naked woman covered by a coat. She had been shot twice in the abdomen and the left leg. Both died of their wounds in the hospital, but detectives determined they were shot while making love in nearby Adams Park. Somehow Lovett had survived long enough to drive from the scene.

The killer struck again this time on 12 February. At 2.45 a.m., he approached a teenage couple who were necking in their car in West Manor Park, three miles north-west of Adams Park. He fired six shots into the car before trying to open the doors. Finding them locked, he fled on foot, leaving both victims seriously injured with chest wounds. They survived to describe the attacker as a large black man. Ballistics tests showed that the same .38-caliber pistol had been used in the murder of LaBrian Lovett and Veronica Hill. As with the Son of Sam killings, there was a bewildering lack of motive. The gunman seemed to have no interest in robbing or raping his victims, who appeared to be unknown to him.

The third attack occurred on 12 March when 20-year-old Diane Collins was canoodling with her fiancé in Adams Park. They had announced their engagement just a few days before. That evening they had been to the movies before stopping for a little intimacy in the park. Intent on what they were doing, neither noticed the lethal stalker as he approached their car and unloaded his .38 through the passenger window. Diane died instantly, but her fiancé, though wounded badly in the head, survived. With blood nearly blinding him, he managed to drive home and then telephone an ambulance.

With only the vaguest of descriptions, the police had little to go on. However, they did notice that there had been 27 days between the first two attacks and 28 between the second and third. The gunman seemed to be working on a four-week cycle.

The following month, they staked out the local parks, but the phantom gunman did not appear. He did not strike again. On 10 August 1977, David Berkowitz was arrested for the Son of Sam killings. He had been terrorizing New York for two years. Two years after the Atlanta Lovers’ Lane killings the police admitted that they had no suspects and no leads in the case. Like the Atlanta Ripper of 1911, he remained at large.

Austin’s Servant Girl Annihilator

Over three years before headlines presented Jack the Ripper as the “world’s first serial killer”, another mad slayer was stalking the streets of Austin, Texas. Known as the “Texas Servant Girl Annihilator”, like his counterpart in London, he was never caught or identified with any certainty. It is plain that he was overshadowed in the historical record because most of his victims were poor and black.