Wayne Williams   Serial killer documentary
Channel: NightBreed78 TV
Date: 2019-02-20

Biography
Wayne Williams was born on May 27, 1958 and raised in the Dixie Hills neighborhood of southwest Atlanta, Georgia by Homer and Faye Williams. Both parents were teachers, and of African-American heritage. 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 hanging out at radio stations WIGO and WAOK, where he befriended a number of the announcing crew and began dabbling in becoming a pop music producer and manager.[2]

Trial and conviction
Williams first became a suspect in the Atlanta murders in May 1981, when a police surveillance team, watching a bridge spanning the Chattahoochee River (a site where several victims' bodies had been discovered), heard a "big loud splash", suggesting that something had been thrown from the bridge into the river below.[3] The first automobile to exit the bridge after the splash, at roughly 2 am, 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.[4]

Two days later, on May 24, the nude body of 27-year-old Nathaniel Cater, who had been missing for three days, was discovered in the river. The medical examiner ruled he had died of "probable" asphyxia, but never specifically said he had been strangled. Police theorized that Williams had killed Cater, and that his body was the source of the "loud splash" they heard as his car crossed the bridge. Williams subsequently failed three polygraph tests, and 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 a struggle.[5] Williams held a press conference outside his home to proclaim his innocence, volunteering that he had failed the polygraph tests — a fact that would have been inadmissible in court.[6] He was arrested on June 21, 1981, for the murders of Cater and Payne.[7]

Williams' trial began on January 6, 1982 in Fulton County. During the two-month trial, prosecutors matched nineteen different sources of fibers from Williams' home and car—his bedspread, bathroom, gloves, clothes, carpets, dog and an unusual tri-lobal carpet fiber—to a number of victims. Other evidence included eyewitness testimony placing Williams with several victims while they were alive, and inconsistencies in his accounts of his whereabouts. Williams took the stand in his own defense, but alienated the jury by becoming angry and combative.[8] After twelve hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty on February 27 of the murders of Cater and Payne. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.[9]

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".[10] In early 2004, Williams sought a retrial once again, with his attorneys arguing that law enforcement officials covered up evidence of involvement by the Ku Klux Klan, and that carpet fibers linking him to the crimes would not stand up to scientific scrutiny.[11] A federal judge rejected the request for retrial on October 17, 2006.

Aftermath
Neither Williams nor anyone else was ever tried for the murder of the boy, later identified as Curtis Walker, aged 13, whose body was dumped into Atlanta's South river in 1981. This was the same case which led to the stakeouts of Atlanta bridges by the Atlanta Police and the FBI that resulted in Williams becoming a suspect in May 1981 and his apprehension in the following month.[12] Williams is serving his sentence at Hancock State Prison.[13]

Controversy
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 charged that the conviction was a "profound miscarriage of justice" that has kept an innocent man incarcerated for a majority of his adult life and allowed the real killers to go free.[14] In contrast, Joseph Drolet, who prosecuted Williams at trial, has stood by Williams' convictions, noting that after Williams was arrested, "the murders stopped and there has been nothing since."