Judge Clarence Cooper (left) & Lewis
Slaton (right)
On May 24,1981, the nude body of Nathaniel Cater, who had disappeared a few days earlier, was discovered in the Chattahoochee River. The medical examiner had once again documented the cause of death as being "probable asphyxia.” He was unable to establish the time frame in which Cater had expired. Therefore, it was not really known exactly how Cater had died or when, but only that he had stopped breathing for some unknown reason. The medical examiner obliged the police by stating that Cater had been dead just long enough for Wayne Williams to have thrown him off the bridge several days earlier.
Based on the discovery of the body and the “splash” from the bridge, police theorized that Williams had killed Nathaniel Cater and had thrown him off the bridge the night they had pulled him over. Interestingly, four witnesses would later come forward to the police saying that they saw Cater alive after Williams supposedly threw his body from the bridge. This critical information was not shared with Williams's lawyers.
The authorities monitored Williams' actions on a continuous basis while they got the necessary search warrants for his home and cars. Throughout the string of murders, a large number of fibers had been found on the various bodies of the victims. The FBI wanted to determine if any of the fibers from Wayne Williams' environment matched the fibers taken from the murder victims. Also, a few victims had dog hair on them. Samples of the hair from Williams' dog were taken for comparison.
When the FBI took Williams in for questioning, without a lawyer present, they grilled him about his activities on the night of the bridge incident. Williams told them he played basketball that afternoon at the Ben Hill Recreation Center and then went home. Later in the afternoon, Williams said he got a call from a woman who called herself Cheryl Johnson who wanted to audition for him. She supposedly gave him a phone number and address in Smyrna and arranged to meet Williams at her apartment at 7 A.M. the following morning. He said he stayed at home until he went to the Sans Souci Lounge after midnight to pick up his tape recorder from the manager. He said that he left the Sans Souci when the manager was too busy to see him. Then he told the FBI that he was going to look for Cheryl Johnson's apartment and drove around Smyrna looking for the Spanish Trace Apartments in which she said she lived. When he couldn't find the apartments, he said he stopped at a liquor store and called the phone number she gave him, but the number was busy. Later, he stopped again to call her, but that time the phone rang without answer.
Then Williams drove onto the Jackson Parkway bridge and went to a Starvin' Marvin to call Cheryl Johnson again. This time, Williams claimed, someone did answer but said that it was the wrong number. So then, Williams said he went back toward the bridge when the officers stopped him for questioning.
Some of the problems with Williams' story were that the Cheryl Johnson part was hard to believe and the claims to have been at the Ben Hill Recreation Center and the Sans Souci before the bridge incident were false. When the authorities checked, they could find no Cheryl Johnson and no Spanish Trace Apartments and the phone number for her was bogus.
The FBI gave Wayne Williams three separate polygraph tests, all of which indicated that Williams was being deceptive in his answers.
Williams surprised everybody when he suddenly called a news conference at his home and handed reporters a lengthy resume - much of which was exaggerated and some of which was false. He told the media that he was innocent and that the authorities were just trying to find a scapegoat. This was the beginning of a huge, continuous media event outside the Williams' home, which went on for quite some time.
During that time, FBI laboratories claimed that they were coming up with a number of matches between the fibers found on the victims and the fibers from Williams' home and cars. Also, the labs claimed similarity between the dog hairs on the victims and hair from Williams' dog.
The FBI was very excited about the fiber and dog hair evidence, but the district attorney of Fulton County, Lewis Slaton, was not so impressed. He did not want to prosecute a case on fiber evidence alone. This was such a major case and fiber evidence could be very confusing and unsatisfying to a jury. He wanted more traditional evidence, such as eyewitnesses, fingerprints, etc. It's entirely possible that Slaton may not have been thrilled to have the FBI telling him what to do in his own county. It was, after all, Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, who in desperation had brought in the Feds, not Slaton.
Several things helped persuade Slaton to finally go after Wayne Williams:
A number of witnesses materialized who swore they saw Williams with various victims. Hard to say why they had not come forward before, since none of the Task Force documents included a note on Wayne Williams. Williams had not been a suspect until the bridge incident.
A couple of recording studio people claimed to have seen serious-looking cuts and scratches on Williams' arms, suggesting the potential of a struggle with the boy victims
Pressure by Georgia Governor George Busbee to play ball with the Feds.
On June 21, William's lawyer, Mary Welcome and two county policemen went to Williams' home with the arrest warrant. Interestingly, Wayne Williams was indicted for the murder of two adults, Jimmy Payne and Nathaniel Cater. However, Georgia law allows that the prosecution can bring into court evidence from other cases if it could be proven that those other cases were part of a "pattern." That was how Slaton would tie in the murders of the children -- an activity that would create controversy for years to come.
Popular black attorney Mary Welcome, a former city solicitor, was the first lawyer on Wayne Williams' defense team. Initially she chose Tony Axam, an experienced attorney on major cases, to complement her skills. However, Williams fired Axam and Mary replaced him with Alvin Binder, a capable, but abrasive white lawyer from Mississippi.
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Judge Clarence Cooper (left) & Lewis Slaton (right) |
Judge Clarence Cooper, the first black judge elected to the Fulton County bench, had been an assistant district attorney for a number of years and was a protégé of District Attorney and prosecutor Lewis Slaton. Imaginatively, Fulton County announced that a computer program randomly selected a black judge who just happened to be pals with the prosecution to be the judge on the Wayne Williams trial. |
Jack Mallard was the most active member of Slaton's prosecution team. One very controversial situation was that in the case of Jimmy Payne, the Fulton County medical examiner had written that the cause of death was "undetermined." That is, it was not determined that Payne was, in fact, murdered. Recognizing the difficulty in prosecuting Williams for a death that was not clearly a homicide, the medical examiner conveniently changed his document to indicate "homicide." Dettlinger points out that when confronted with the change in the death certificate -- which subsequently allowed for Wayne Williams to be indicted in the Jimmy Payne case -- the medical examiner said he "checked the wrong box" on the death certificate." However, there is no box to check on the death certificate, only a place to type in the word "undetermined" or "homicide."
The trial began on December 28, 1981. The jury was composed of nine women and three men; eight jurors were black and four were white. They were sequestered for the duration of the trial. Opening arguments began in the first week of January 1982.
The defense team was severely handicapped by lack of funds and woefully insufficient time to interview hundreds of prosecution witnesses. They did not have the money to employ the quality of expert witnesses to rebut the vast laboratory findings of the FBI and Georgia crime bureau. Furthermore, the body of forensic evidence on fibers was an order of magnitude greater than what the defense had expected. The cornerstone of the prosecution's case was the fiber evidence, which was highly technical and carried with it the prestige of the FBI laboratories. To successfully cast doubt on the fiber evidence, expensive, very high caliber expert testimony would have been required. Williams' defense team simply didn't have that kind of money.
Also, even though the defense team knew that the prosecution was going to bring in other cases besides the deaths of Cater and Payne, they didn't know how many and which cases would be introduced. For a defense team short on time and short on money, this was a real problem. Dettlinger, who was on the defense team, states: "During the trial, we didn't know who the next witness presented by the state would be -- or what he or she would be testifying about."
The "Brady" files is the body of information collected by the police and other forensic experts that points towards the innocence of the accused. By law, the prosecution must turn those Brady files over to the defense before the trial begins. The arbiter of what would be included in the Brady files and when it would be turned over was Judge Clarence Cooper, the D.A.'s former protégé. Not surprisingly, the Brady files were withheld until the last possible minute.
For example, thirty-nine-year-old Jimmy Anthony was a neighbor who had known Nathaniel Cater and claimed to have seen him on the morning of May 23 -- the day after Williams was pulled over for supposedly throwing Cater's body off the bridge. Anthony said Cater told him that he had found a new job. One might suspect that Anthony was mistaken about the time that he had last seen Cater. Yet, three other witnesses, one, who had known Cater well, had also seen him after the bridge incident. Not one of these witnesses would later have a chance to testify in the Williams case. The jury would not be informed of the four witnesses who had seen Nathaniel Cater, as well as many other important suspects and witnesses connected with the case that would have cast doubt on Williams' guilt.
Regarding the time of death of Nathaniel Cater, the defense brought in its own expert who lost credibility when he announced that Cater had been in the water for at least two weeks. Cater had not even been missing for two weeks. A similar thing happened when the defense's expert estimated Jimmy Payne's death.
Atlanta’s Public Safety Commissioner Lee Brown had always maintained throughout the investigation that there was no pattern in the murders. Ironically, it was during Brown’s testimony that Jack Mallard introduced the "pattern" that would allow evidence in ten other cases to be introduced in addition to evidence in the Cater and Payne deaths. The “pattern” became the key enabler for evidence to be used by the state against Williams, especially when linking similar fibers. Furthermore, the Cater and Payne cases standing alone were extremely weak and the introduction of evidence from each of the ten “pattern” cases strengthened their case by providing, among many things, eyewitnesses and most importantly, fiber connections amongst some of the victims.
The ten "pattern" cases were:
The characteristics that formed the “pattern” amongst the victims were listed by the prosecution as being:
There was a great deal of controversy concerning the prosecution's “pattern.” Furthermore, if one looked closely into each of the cases, it would be noticeable that several of them did not fit the “pattern” invented by the prosecution. For example, not all of the victims were found near expressway ramps or major arteries, it is unknown whether all the victims were transported before of after they were killed based on lack of evidence and only six of the “pattern” cases showed evidence of strangulation. Therefore, the pattern the prosecution describes is inaccurate. But Judge Cooper, former prosecutor, accepted the "pattern" anyway.
The prosecution focused its efforts on four key areas:
While Wayne Williams did not have a criminal record, his character was not exactly unblemished in the eyes of those who knew him. Most people knew Wayne Williams as a person who either lied about or vastly exaggerated his accomplishments. As an example, Eustis Blakely, a successful black businessman and his wife were friends of Wayne. Wayne told Blakely that he flew fighter jets at Dobbins Air Force base. Blakely knew that was a lie because he had been in the Air Force and was not able to fly planes because he wore glasses. Wayne Williams eyes were much worse than Blakely's.
But the real showstopper during the trial was what his wife had to say about Wayne. She had asked Williams after he had become a suspect, "If they get enough evidence, will you confess before you get hurt? She said that he answered "yes." She then went on to say that Wayne told her "he could knock out black street kids in a few minutes by putting his hand on their necks."
On cross-examination, Binder asked her if she implied that Wayne had killed someone. She answered, "Yes, I do. I really feel that Wayne Williams did kill somebody, and I'm sorry."
Gino Jordon, who ran the San Souci club, was asked if Wayne Williams had been at his club before the bridge incident, as Williams had told authorities he had been. Jordon said it was not that night of the bridge incident, but the following night that Williams came by the club to pick up his tape recorder. The club cashier confirmed Jordon's statement.
When the man in charge of the Ben Hill Recreation Center was asked if Wayne Williams was playing basketball the evening of the bridge incident as Williams had claimed, the answer again was no.
These two testimonies reflected that Wayne Williams was lying about what he did before the incident on the bridge. This lack of an alibi played right into the prosecution's theory that Williams was with Cater that evening and dropped his body off the bridge.
What Williams was left with were a bunch of lies about what he did before the bridge incident and an explanation about what he was doing on the bridge that nobody believed. Attempts to find the mysterious Cheryl Johnson led most people to believe that she was nonexistent.
Then the prosecution presented a group of eyewitnesses who claimed they saw Wayne Williams with various victims or that the eyewitness verified that Cater was alive the afternoon of the bridge incident:
As examples of this eyewitness testimony, Lugene Laster saw Jo-Jo Bell get into a Chevrolet station wagon driven by a man he identified as Wayne Williams. Robert Henry, who knew Cater, saw Cater and Williams holding hands the evening of the bridge incident. A couple of youths claimed Williams made sexual advances to them.
One of the most significant and controversial moments of the trial occurred during arguments and testimony concerning the linkage of similar fibers amongst the ten “pattern” cases to Cater and Payne’s murder. Investigators found on the bodies of the murdered victims fibers that were similar in appearance to carpet fibers found in Williams home and automobile. In total, there were twenty-eight fiber types linked to nineteen items from the house, bedroom and vehicles of Wayne Williams. Of interest to the prosecution were trilobal fibers, which the state contended, were of a rare variety. Fiber analysts speculated that the fibers found on the victims were most likely transferred to the victims from contact with Williams’s environment, thus connecting him to the murders. The prosecution contended that there were so many fiber matches between the Williams' household and the victims that it was statistically impossible for the victims not to have been in Williams' home and cars.
Controversy arose when the state failed to tell the jury that most of the fibers found on the victims were not rare. In fact, such carpet fibers could be found in many apartment building complexes, businesses and residential homes throughout the Atlanta region. Therefore, it would not be that unusual for the victims to have come in contact with trilobal type fibers. There was more controversy over the transference of such fibers. The state argued that fibers were transferred directly from Williams’s environment to the victims. Therefore, one must assume that if fibers could be transferred from Williams’s environment to the victims, then fibers from the victims clothing or living environment would naturally be found on Williams or in his home or car, especially, if they had been killed in his house or transported in his car, which the state believed to have happened. Yet, absolutely no evidence of hair or fibers from the victims was found in Williams’s house or car.
Later in the trial, the state informed jurors that five bloodstains had been found in the station wagon driven by Williams. Prosecutors claimed that the blood droplets matched in type and enzyme to the blood of victims William Barrett and John Porter. There was controversy among analysts as to the exact age of the droplets of blood found in the car. If the droplets occurred within an eight-week period, which one analyst believed, then it could have been likely that the blood came from Barrett and Porter who had died within that period. However, another analyst testified that it was virtually impossible to date the stains and if by any chance they had occurred outside of the eight-week frame then it was highly unlikely that the blood came from either victim.
When it came to the issue of motive, in the absence of any definitive evidence of sexual assault of the victims, the prosecution claimed that Wayne Williams hated black youths. Of course, this does not explain the murder of Nathaniel Cater who was 27-years-old -- not really a youth -- and several years older than Williams. Various people testified to remarks that Williams allegedly made over the years that criticized the behavior of black people and black youngsters in particular.
The defense called quite a number of witnesses. For example, they put the hydrologist on the stand that determined that it was "highly unlikely" that the body of Nathaniel Cater had been thrown off the Parkway bridge, considering where Cater's body was found. The hydrologist was incensed that the county had pressured his colleague into changing his report to reflect just the opposite.
Also, the defense presented an expert witness who testified that there was no indication that either Cater or Payne had been murdered. One of the two victims had an enlarged heart and could have died of natural causes. Both or either men could have simply drowned. Cater was a known alcoholic and drug taker.
The defense also put on the stand a number of witnesses that either rebutted what prosecution witnesses had said about where Williams was at a particular time or testified that Williams behavior was strictly kosher with the boys who he tried to develop into musicians. Another witness was the police sketch artist who testified that none of the dozens of suspects that she was asked to sketch looked anything like Williams. A college student recruited by Williams for a singing job testified that Williams disliked homosexuals and expected that his client had a high standard of morals.
Williams was put on the stand to defend himself against the charges and some of the eyewitness accounts. Also, he wanted to point out to the jury that he couldn't have quickly stopped the car on the bridge, opened up the back of the car and hoisted Cater, who was much larger and heavier than Williams, over the shoulder-high guard railings on the side of the bridge.
The goal of William's testimony was to demonstrate to the jury that he did not have the temperament to commit the murders. However, Jack Mallard repeatedly succeeded in making Williams visibly angry and provoking Williams into verbally insulting the government agents on the case. His show of temper had a big negative impact on the jury.
Williams' defense team was unable to undo the damage that had been done, both by the state's case and the poor preparation of their own case. The prosecution had provided the jury with a mountain of evidence compared to what the defense team had. Even though the quality of the evidence presented by the prosecution was doubtful, the sheer quantity of it seemed to overwhelm the jurors. Furthermore, jurors never heard most of the exculpatory evidence from the Brady files that could have changed the outcome of the trial. Prosecutors withheld the files for as long as they legally could, which hardly allowed any time for the defense to prepare a strong case.
 Wayne Williams |
In January of 1982, Wayne Bertram Williams was found guilty for the murder of Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater. He is currently serving two life sentences. Consequent to the verdict, the Atlanta police announced that twenty-two of the twenty-nine murders were solved with the presumption that Wayne Williams was responsible. But that was not the end of the case by any means. |
From the time that Wayne Williams was convicted, doubts arose about his guilt. Many black Atlantans felt that the government had manufactured the evidence just to get the case closed. While there are a number of issues in the government's case that are controversial, the fact is that the prosecutors, especially the FBI, believed that Williams was guilty. Did the government play fair and square during the trial? No, but that does not seem to be unusual, because prosecution is about winning, not about justice or fairness in the abstract.
The facts are that no one ever witnessed Wayne Williams killing or abducting anyone. The most important evidence against him was highly technical fiber evidence that only experts could judge. Any jury presented with the huge amount of fiber evidence in the Williams case and the government's experts testifying to its veracity would be likely to give it credence.
Unfortunately, Wayne Williams was his own worst enemy. He never came up with a credible reason for being on the Jackson Parkway bridge in the early hours of the morning and his alibis were easily destroyed, but it didn't mean that he was guilty of murder.
During the appeals process, the Georgia Supreme Court assigned Justice Richard Bell to draft the opinion in the Williams case. Justice Bell, a former prosecutor, wrote that Wayne Williams did not get a fair trial and his murder conviction should have been reversed. When the full court reviewed Bell's opinion, it was voted down; Bell's draft was rewritten; Bell was pressured to change his vote, and the majority opinion -- to uphold the conviction -- came out under Bell's name in December of 1983.
Justice Bell's unpublished draft criticized Judge Clarence Cooper for allowing prosecutors to link Williams to the murders of Eric Middlebrooks, John Porter, Alfred Evans, Charles Stephens and Patrick Baltazar. The standards for linking those crimes to the two for which Williams was charged were not met, according to Bell.
Specifically, Justice Bell said, according to Benjamin Weiser, Washington Post writer (Feb. 3, 1985) that "there was no evidence placing Williams with those five victims before their murders, and as in all the murders linked to Williams, there were no eyewitnesses, no confession, no murder weapons and no established motive. Also, the five deaths, while somewhat similar to each other in technique, were unlike the two for which Williams was tried."
The linking of the other crimes with the deaths of Cater and Payne had the effect of eroding the presumption of innocence. Bell pointed out that "because the evidence of guilt as to the two charged offenses was wholly circumstantial, and because of the prejudicial impact of the five erroneously admitted (uncharged) homicides must have been substantial, we cannot say that it is highly probable that the error did not contribute to the jury's verdict…"
The other dissenter was Justice George Smith, who did not change his vote as Bell did. Justice Smith stated that admitting the other crimes "illustrates the basic unfairness of this trial and Williams' unenviable position as a defendant who, charged with two murders, was forced to defend himself as to 12 separate killings."
In 1985, a five-hour CBS docudrama severely ruffled the feathers of the Atlanta city government. The producer made it clear in the movie that he believes that there were "tremendous breaches of legal ethics" during the investigation and trial and that Williams' guilt was not proven.
Over the years, an increasing number of people connected with the case do not believe that Wayne Williams is guilty, including some of the relatives of the victims. DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey, who as an Atlanta homicide detective first searched Williams home, says, " Most people who are aware of the child murders believe as I do that Wayne Williams did not commit these crimes."
In July of 1999, the Augusta Chronicle reported:
"A divided Georgia Supreme Court ruled that a state judge wrongly dismissed two claims raised by Wayne Williams in his bid for a new trial in the slayings of two Atlanta blacks 18 years ago. The 4-3 ruling sends the case back to Judge Hal Craig to rule on Mr. Williams' claims that prosecutors were guilty of misconduct and that his own attorneys did not effectively represent him at his 1982 trial."
Williams and his lawyers are seeking DNA tests on the bloodstains found in his cars, which prosecutors claimed were consistent with the blood types of two victims who were stabbed.
Throughout the murder investigation there was a fear in the black community that the Ku Klux Klan was responsible for the murders of the children and young adults. There was also credence given to the theory that the CIA and/or FBI were responsible.
A police informant allegedly claimed that Klan member Charles Sanders tried to recruit him into the racist organization. Sanders allegedly told the man that the Klan was trying to begin a race war by killing black children.
Any group that can blow up churches can and does murder children. Explosives are a very efficient way of harming lots of people quickly with limited risk of exposure. We have learned this from Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing. However, individual murders are not a very effective way to eradicate a large number of people, especially considering the risks of being caught by a black community that was in a heightened state of alarm. It seems unlikely that any white person(s) could pull off all or most of these murders. He (or they) would have been too obvious to have escaped attention during a two-year period.
What seems more likely as the body of knowledge about serial killers has vastly expanded in the twenty years since the murder series began, is that all the murders were not done by one or even two people, but that multiple criminals were at work during that 2-year period. However, there does seem to be at least one prolific serial killer at work amongst young and teenage boys.
While there was little or no evidence of sexual assault, many of the victims were involved in homosexual activities, either to earn money or because it was their sexual preference. Just because there was no evidence of mutilation or sexual violence, it doesn't mean that the murders were not sexually motivated. In fact, they probably were sexually motivated.
The killer must have been very expert in gaining the confidence of these young victims. Successful serial killers become very expert at defusing any concerns that a potential victim may have. Pedophiles have made the control of young people into an art form. Whoever it was that was responsible for the deaths of these young people had to move and live and earn a living among them. And almost certainly this killer was a black man, so as not to have attracted undue attention or raised suspicions.
Is this person still operating today? Probably not. He may be dead. These crimes began at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and the killer may have been a victim of that dread disease. In fact, AIDS killed several of the suspects that were known pedophiles.
