Wayne Bertram Williams (born May 27, 1958) was an American serial killer who was tried, sentenced, and sentenced to life in prison in 1982 for killing two adult males. Following his conviction, the Atlanta Police Department announced that Williams was responsible for at least 23 of the Atlanta's 1979-1981 murders, also called "Atlanta Child Murders". However, he has never been punished for the murder of children, and continues to defend his innocence.
Video Wayne Williams
Biography
Wayne Bertram Williams was born on May 27, 1958 and grew up in the Dixie Hills neighborhood in southwest Atlanta, Georgia to Homer and Faye Williams. Both parents are teachers, and African-American heritage. Williams graduated from Douglass High School and developed an interest in radio and journalism. Finally he built his own radio station today. He also started hanging out at WIGO and WAOK radio stations, where he became friends with a number of crew members who announced and started working on producers and pop music managers.
Maps Wayne Williams
Trial and confidence
Williams was first suspected in the murder of the Atlanta children in May 1981, when a police surveillance team, watching over a bridge across the Chattahoochee River (a site where several bodies of victims were found), heard a "big voice", indicating that something had been removed from bridge to the river below. The first car that came out of the bridge after the spark was Williams around 2 am. When stopped and questioned, he told police he was on his way to check the address he would visit the next day for a 7 am appointment in the neighboring city to audition a young singer named Cheryl Johnson for his music business, but the phone number he gave fictitious - as it happened, it turns out later, Cheryl Johnson.
Two days later, on May 24, Nathaniel Cater's naked body, 27, who had been missing for three days, was found in the river. The medical examiner decides that he has died of "probable" asphyxia, but never specifically says he has been strangled. The police theorized that Williams had killed Cater, and that his body was the source of the "hard spark" they heard when his car crossed the bridge. Williams then failed three polygraph tests, and the hair and fibers extracted from the bodies of other victims found consistent with those of homes, cars, and dogs. Coworkers told police they had seen Williams with a scratch on his face and arms around the time of the murder which, according to the researchers, may have been inflicted by victims during the fight.
During a news conference held by Williams outside his home to claim that he was innocent, he volunteered to state that he had failed a polygraph test - an unacceptable fact in court. He was arrested on June 21, 1981, for the murder of Cater and 21-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne.
The Williams Assembly began on 6 January 1982 in Fulton County. During the two-month trial, the prosecutor rivaled nineteen different fiber sources from Williams's home and car surroundings - the sheets, unusual tri-lobal bathrooms, gloves, carpets, dogs and tri-global carpet fibers - to a number of casualties.. Other evidence includes eyewitness testimony that puts Williams with multiple victims while they are alive, and inconsistencies in his notes about his whereabouts. Williams took a position in his own defense, but alienated the jury by being angry and aggressive. After 12 hours of consideration, the jury found him guilty on February 27th from the murder of Cater and Payne. He was sentenced to life in prison.
In the late 1990s, Williams filed a request for habeas corpus and requested a retrial. County High Court Judge Hal Craig rejected his appeal. Attorney General Thurbert Baker said that "although this does not end the appeals process, I am happy with the results in the case of habeas," and that his office "will continue to do everything possible to uphold the beliefs."
In early 2004, Williams requested a retrial once again. In a 146 page federal court filing, his lawyer argued that Williams should be tried again as law enforcement officers covered evidence of Ku Klux Klan involvement, and that carpet fibers linking it to crime would not be in accord with scientific research. A federal judge rejected a request for a retrial on October 17, 2006.
Aftermath
Both Williams and others have been tried for the boy's murder, later identified as Curtis Walker, 13, whose corpse was dumped into the South Atlanta river in 1981. This is the same case that led to the reconnaissance of the Atlanta bridge by the Atlanta Police Department and the FBI which resulted in Williams becoming suspect in May 1981 and his fears the following month. Williams served his sentence at Hancock State Prison.
Controversy
Williams has defended his innocence from the start, and claims that Atlanta officials covered evidence of KKK involvement in murder to avoid a race war in the city. His lawyers have alleged that the belief was a "deep injustice" that has made an innocent man imprisoned for most of his adult life and leaving the killer completely free. In contrast, Joseph Drolet, who sued Williams at trial, has defended Williams's belief, noting that after Williams was arrested, "the killings were stopped and nothing has happened since."
Other observers criticized the accuracy of the investigation, and the validity of its conclusions. The author James Baldwin, in his essay of Invisible Reality (1985), raises questions about Williams's mistakes. Members of his community and some of the victims' parents did not believe that Williams, the son of two professional teachers, could kill so many. On May 6, 2005, DeKalb Police Chief Louis Graham ordered the reopening of the murder of four boys killed in the area between February and May 1981 attributed to Williams. The announcement was welcomed by relatives of some of the victims, who said they believed the wrong man was blamed for many murders.
Graham, the assistant police chief in neighboring Fulton at the time of the murder, said his decision to reopen the cases was driven solely by his belief in Williams's innocence. Former Sheriff DeKalb County Sidney Dorsey, who was a Atlanta-killing detective at the time, also said he believes Williams was wrongly blamed for the killing. "If they catch a white man," he said, "there will be unrest throughout the US" However, the Fulton County government has not reopened the cases under their jurisdiction.
According to an August 2005 report, Charles T. Sanders, a white supremacist affiliated with the KKK - and an early suspect in the murder - once praised the crime in a secretly recorded conversation. Although Sanders did not claim responsibility for the death, he told an informant to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on record 1981 that his killer had "wiped out thousands of generations of future niggers." The police dropped the investigation into the possible involvement of the Clan when Sanders and his two brothers passed a lie test. The case was once again closed on 21 July 2006.
Former FBI profiler John E. Douglas writes in his book Mindhunter that, in his opinion, "forensic and behavioral evidence shows definitely to Wayne Williams as a killer of eleven young men in Atlanta." He added, however, that he believes there is "no strong evidence linking it to all or even most of the city's deaths and disappearances between 1979 and 1981."
DNA tests were performed in 2010 on the hairs found in the body of 11-year-old Patrick Baltazar. While the results were not really conclusive, the FBI DNA lab recorded a 130-to-1 odds against hairs originating from someone other than Williams. The Baltazar case was among the ten additional victims filed to the jury at Williams's trial, although he was never prosecuted in those cases. The dog hair also found on Baltazar's body was tested in 2007 by the genetic laboratory at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, which found a 99 percent chance that the DNA sequence came from the Williams family's German shepherd. However, laboratory director Elizabeth Wictum points out that while the results are "significant enough", they are by no means conclusive. Only mitochondrial DNA tested, unlike nuclear DNA, can not be shown unique to one dog. This means that while the report says that body hair contains the same DNA sequence as the Williams dog, the same DNA sequence occurs in about 1 in 100 dogs. The FBI report only states that "Wayne Williams can not be excluded" as a suspect in this case.
A Department of Justice study, released in April 2015, concluded that many hair analyzes performed by FBI testers during the 1980s and 90s may have failed to meet professional standards. Defense counsel Lynn Whatley immediately announced that the report would be the basis for a new petition; but prosecutors assume that hair proof only plays a small role in Williams's beliefs.
References
External links
- The case details of the Crime Library
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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