page_title: Atlanta murders of 1979–1981
section_title: Trial
hierarchical_section_title: Atlanta murders of 1979–1981 / Trial
caption_attribution_description: English: The Omni Coliseum in Atlanta, Georgia, USA (demolished). Scanned Kodachrome slide. Français&#160;: L'Omni, Atlanta, Georgie, Etats-Unis (demoli)
context_page_description: The Atlanta murders of 1979–1981, sometimes called the Atlanta child murders, were a series of murders committed in Atlanta, Georgia, between July 1979 and May 1981. Over the two-year period, at least 28 children, adolescents, and adults were killed.
  Wayne Williams, an Atlanta native who was 23 years old at the time of the last murder, was arrested, tried, and convicted of two of the adult murders and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Police subsequently have attributed a number of the child murders to Williams, although he has not been charged in any of those cases, and Williams himself maintains his innocence, although the killings ceased after his arrest. In March 2019, the Atlanta police, under the order of Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, reopened the cases in hopes that new technology will lead to a conviction for the murders that were never resolved.
context_section_description: Jury selection began on December 28, 1981, and it lasted six days. Nine women and three men composed the jury, among them were eight African Americans and four Caucasians.
  The trial officially began on January 6, 1982, with Judge Clarence Cooper presiding. The most important evidence against Williams was the fiber analysis between the victims who he was indicted for murdering, Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater, and the 12 pattern-murder cases in which circumstantial evidence culminated in numerous links between the crimes. This evidence included witnesses who testified that they had seen Williams with the victims, and some witnesses suggested that he had solicited sexual favors.
  The prosecution's presentation of the case has been criticized, to the extent that in some jurisdictions it might have resulted in a mistrial. In particular, two separate FBI special agents testified that the chances of the victims not having come into contact with Williams was "virtually impossible," based solely on the comparative rarity of the fibers which were found on the victims which seemed to match the fibers which were found in the suspect's car and home. After reviewing the case, Georgia Supreme Court Justice George T. Smith deemed the evidence, or the lack thereof, inadmissible.
  On February 27, 1982, after eleven hours of deliberation, the jury found Wayne Bertram Williams guilty of the two murders. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in Georgia's Hancock State Prison in Sparta.
caption: The Omni Coliseum in 1979
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "3600", "Image ImageLength": "5308", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "LZW", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "Nikon", "Image Model": "LS-5000", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "900", "Image YResolution": "900", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2017:05:28 21:37:17", "Image ExifOffset": "296", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "466", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4866", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2017:05:28 18:16:06", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "5281", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3600"}