In July 1979, two teenage boys went missing from Atlanta, Georgia. The whole city was nervous, and the pressure on the Atlanta Police Department was immense. One week later, the bodies of Edward Hope Smith and Alfred Evans were discovered. Both had been murdered.
Their deaths set off one of the biggest unsolved series of murders in American history. Over the next two years, around 29 children and young adults were kidnapped and murdered. They became known as the Atlanta child murders. The eyes of the world watched as investigators came to believe that one lone killer was responsible.
“This person’s living amongst you. You have no idea who it is, and you don’t know who’s next. ”
The city was on fire. Children were disappearing about every ten days.
It was an extraordinary and terrifying time in Atlanta. The killer’s story begins on May 27, 1958, in Atlanta, Georgia. Wayne Williams grew up in a middle-class, predominantly Black neighborhood. His parents were both school teachers, and they doted on him.
They bought him everything he wanted, even starting a little radio station for him in the house that only broadcast a couple of blocks. They indulged him very much and told everyone he was their wonder child. Throughout his teenage years, Williams tried many hobbies, like photography, but nothing seemed to take off. He was a good communicator and a good manipulator, and he loved being in the spotlight.
At 18 years old, Wayne Williams was still living in the family home. It was a little peculiar. He was a loner. He was interested in police activities, knew the police, and hung around the police station.
He was kind of an ambulance chaser, a person who would hear an emergency call on a scanner and chase it in hopes of getting photographs or recordings to sell to the media. This interest in law escalated. He got a car with lights on it and a badge. He wanted people to think he was a police officer.
In May 1976, 18-year-old Williams was arrested for impersonating a police officer and for unauthorized use of a vehicle. No charges were brought, and he was just given a warning. He then attempted to launch a career in the music industry. He had a musical group he was promoting and was distributing flyers to different neighborhoods.
He would tell young Black boys, “I’m a talent producer. I’m looking for the next Michael Jackson. If you could sing, if you could dance, if you have any talent, get in contact with me. ”
And who didn’t want to be Michael Jackson back then?
By 1979, Atlanta was a city in transition. It was full of life and energy. It was the norm for children to be playing on the streets and gathering at local parks. But in July of 1979, the innocence of the city was shattered.
Two teenage boys went missing just five days apart: 14-year-old Edward Hope Smith and 13-year-old Alfred Evans. On July 28, 1979, three days after he was last seen, Alfred Evans’s body was discovered face down in a wooded area. While conducting the crime scene, they came across Edward Hope Smith’s body. Smith had been shot in the back with a .
22 caliber bullet. Evans had been strangled. They were found in the same relative proximity to each other. The community was in shock.
On October 21, 1979, less than three months later, 9-year-old Yusuf Bell went to the store for a neighbor but never made it home. He had been strangled to death. His body was discovered on November 8 in an abandoned school. It slowly evolved where every few months another child would go missing.
Many of them were found along a roadside, posed in various different ways. But investigators were at a loss as to who was behind these murders. “Something like this creates incredible fear because you know this person’s living amongst you. You just can’t see them.
You have no idea who it is and you don’t know who’s next. Anybody’s son is a potential target. ”
Locals began to take extreme measures. The residents would walk around at night with bats.
They called it the bat patrol. If they caught anybody in the neighborhood that they didn’t think belonged there, there was a high probability they’d be swatted with bats. By the summer of 1980, 12 children had gone missing, but officials were still unsure if this was the work of just one killer. The mothers of many of these children thought the police were not doing enough.
They formed an organization and began pressing the police to investigate more. The case finally burst into the headlines when one of the mothers, Camille Bell, whose son Yusuf was missing, gave a newspaper interview and basically yelled at the cops, “Hey, you’ve got a serial killer out here. You guys have not connected the dots yet. ”
They originally thought it might be a white person because of the history of serial killings.
They were not looking at an African American. As more children were killed, the murders in Atlanta gripped the entire nation. On August 21, 1980, the body of 13-year-old Clifford Jones was discovered. He’d been visiting his grandmother in Atlanta.
Larry Peterson was a forensic scientist working for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He looked at bits of hairs and fibers and small things under a microscope to try to connect victims to suspects. He was called to Clifford Jones’s crime scene. “We started pulling microscopic fibers from the bodies.
We found a lot of dog hair on the victim. Certain particular fibers started linking cases together, for example, violet acetate fibers and dog hair became primary linkages that I started finding on bodies similar to one another. ”
By November of 1980, the situation was so serious that help was sought from the president. The mayor of Atlanta loudly proclaimed to the White House, “I have 14 Black missing and murdered children.
Send every living FBI agent that you have to Atlanta to solve this case. ”
On November 6, 1980, the US Attorney General authorized the FBI to participate in the investigation. Even with the FBI as part of the task force, the cases were still no closer to being solved. They had 30 agents assigned to the task force, and they had looked at all the cases and really came up with nothing.
Police in Atlanta had originally believed the killer was white, but FBI profilers thought it would be too difficult for a white person to be responsible. One profiler used the phrase, “Whoever is committing these crimes is invisible in the Black community. ”
Who is invisible in the Black community but another Black person? In this case, a male.
The FBI did a profile of what they thought the killer would be. He was a person who couldn’t hold a regular job, was probably self-employed, probably was a police buff, and might have even used a police vehicle. He was somewhat of a disappointment and a failure in so many things he did. On January 9, 1981, two bodies were found in the same area: 11-year-old Christopher Richardson and 10-year-old Earl Terrell.
By this time, Wayne Williams was 22 years old. Along with seeing himself as a promoter for music groups, he’d also continued with his childhood hobby of photography. He was a freelance photographer who would show up at scenes of homicides and fires, take film, and try to sell it to the stations. On January 23, 1981, Williams was seen by two police officers at the site where 15-year-old Terry Pue’s body had been discovered.
He presented some identification and asked if he could take some pictures. As the crimes continued, the parents became more and more vocal. They started to demonstrate in front of City Hall. In the background, Larry Peterson was still collecting fibers from the crime scenes, hoping to find enough connections to identify the killer forensically.
In February of 1981, there was an article in the newspaper about the laboratory linking cases together using fibers. Those involved in the case were upset that the information got out. The news leak could have jeopardized the entire investigation. The killer now knew what type of evidence the police were looking at.
It seemed that the killer became forensically aware and changed how they disposed of victims’ bodies. Many of the bodies started showing up in the South River. Young boys were found only in their underwear shorts, all their clothing having been removed. Usually dead of asphyxia.
On April 27, 1981, the body of 21-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne was discovered by two boys fishing. The earlier murders had mainly been children, but this adult killing had many of the same characteristics. Jimmy’s body had been disposed of in a river. He had been asphyxiated, but it wasn’t entirely clear how.
There were no stab wounds and no bullet wounds. The belief was that the body had been thrown off one of the bridges. The bodies were showing up in both the South River and the Chattahoochee River. Mike McCommas came up with an idea: set up surveillance on the two rivers.
“What if we start watching the bridges? ”
“How many bridges are there in the Atlanta area? There are hundreds. How do you know we’re going to get the right one?
”
The team decided to monitor a limited number of bridges based on the likelihood that a body might be thrown from there. It took 140 people, at least four on a bridge, from sundown to sunup, seven days a week. Jim Pople had given the team a maximum of four weeks to run their bridge surveillance, starting on April 26, 1981. As the end of the four weeks approached, the costly operation had yielded no results.
“We were told that Friday morning it was over as far as the surveillance goes. We hadn’t gotten anything, and we’re burning astronomical numbers as far as the logistics go. ”
On the evening of May 21 and the early morning hours of May 22, it was the last night of the bridge surveillance. At around 3:00 a.
m. , with one surveillance team stationed at the James Jackson Parkway bridge, investigators finally got the break they’d been waiting for. One of the officers on the riverbank heard something splash into the river and saw a car on the bridge. Police pulled the vehicle over.
The guy identified himself as Wayne Williams. One of the first things he said was, “I’ll bet this is about those boys. ”
Mike McCommas asked Wayne Williams what he was doing driving over the bridge in the middle of the night. Williams claimed he had an appointment at 9:00 a.
m. the next morning and was out looking for the address so he’d be able to drive straight there without being late. “I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but that just don’t make any sense. ”
He agreed to let them look in his car.
In the front seat there was a pair of suede gloves, and it was early summer and very hot. You wouldn’t be wearing gloves. There was a 24-inch long piece of ski rope, which would be something that one might use as a ligature. None of this was seized because at that time, nobody knew if there was a body.
All they’d heard was a splash. They didn’t really have enough evidence to detain him, so they let him go. At 6:00 a. m.
that morning, the final shift of the bridge surveillance ended as planned. If Wayne Williams had been at the bridge just one day later, he would not have come into contact with the police. On May 24, 1981, two days after investigators had heard the splash in the river, another body was found a mile downstream from the James Jackson Parkway bridge. It was the body of Nathaniel Cater, washed up on the shore on the Fulton County side of the Chattahoochee River.
Almost exactly the same place where another young man had been found 30 days earlier, Jimmy Ray Payne. Nathaniel Cater was 28 years old. The medical examination revealed the cause of death to be asphyxia. The search for evidence was painstaking.
On the silt from the clay in the river, fibers had become intertwined next to the scalp. The task force now had a body loosely linked to the bridge incident involving Wayne Williams. But there was still not enough evidence against him to make an arrest. “We were concerned because children and young adults were being killed every 10 days.
So, we put him on 24-hour, 7-day a week surveillance to make sure that while the investigation continued, he couldn’t commit any additional crimes. ”
Investigators spoke to the 23-year-old’s neighbors. They gave an account of seeing Wayne Williams at home shortly after he’d been stopped on the bridge. He went home, and according to some neighbors, he began loading boxes.
There was a fire in the barbecue pit in the backyard. The neighbors saw him carrying plastic trash bags to the family station wagon and leaving for what they assumed to be the dump. The murders had been taking place for two years. Their prime suspect may have just destroyed the evidence needed to prove it was him.
Although he wasn’t under arrest, in a surprising move, Wayne Williams agreed to take a polygraph test. The results were a shock to the chief polygraph examiner. “Testing shows that you’re actually the one that killed Nathaniel Cater, the last boy that was missing. ”
Williams didn’t move.
He was real calm. He simply said, “I don’t believe in polygraph. ”
They didn’t arrest him that night. The district attorney declined to authorize a warrant, and Williams was allowed to leave.
When he walked outside, he looked at the examiner and said, “You’re very good. You really know what you’re doing. ”
On June 4, 1981, Wayne Williams made another surprising decision by inviting the media into his home. He gave an impromptu press conference and said, “I’m innocent and what’s more, I’ve taken three lie detector tests.
I have got nothing to do with all these murders. ”
For serial killers, there is this need to be recognized for how clever they are or how frightening they are. Wayne Williams was this type of person who adored being looked at and having an audience. There was a lot of pressure on everybody to solve this case.
It was agreed there was enough circumstantial evidence to arrest Wayne Williams in relation to the last two murders, Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater. On June 21, 1981, officers arrived at Williams’ home. When they brought him into the office after they arrested him, one investigator said, “Get him the hell out of here. That’s not the killer.
Look at him. He’s about 5 foot six, not very imposing, wore horn-rimmed glasses, not your average serial killer. ”
Williams didn’t fit a lot of people’s vision of who the killer could have been. He was Black.
He was young. He had no record. He was, as far as anyone knows, extremely bright. After he was developed as a suspect, his home and car were searched, and the process of collecting fiber and hair evidence began.
Three common fibers found at crime scenes were hairs from a dog, violet acetate material, and a unique green carpet fiber. Investigators attempted to track down the carpet manufacturer. “My partner and I, we went from one rental space to another. We did all the carpet fibers in the state of Georgia.
”
The carpet was eventually located. It had a fiber structure in a color called English olive. Wayne Williams’ home had several rooms of this green carpeting that turned out to be an exact match to the English olive carpeting. They even had a receipt from Wayne Williams’ dad where he purchased it.
The carpet wasn’t the only forensic breakthrough from the house search. There was a bedspread that had a violet and green pattern, and they had a family dog that was a German Shepherd. “I was never at a scene that even had those three elements together. ”
They removed samples of evidence, returned them to the lab, and were able to confirm that the hairs and the fibers they had been finding on a number of the victims were consistent with the fibers and hairs in Williams’ home and environment.
“The Eureka moment was clearly at the point where I put the green carpet fiber from the Williams home under the microscope because I knew what I was looking for and it was exactly a match. Then when I put the violet part from the bedspread, it was a violet acetate just like the acetate fibers linking so many cases. Then the dog hairs looked like the dog hair again. This combination seemed overly strong to just be a random accident.
”
Further evidence came from examining the family vehicles. As Wayne Williams would get a vehicle, fibers from that vehicle would begin showing up on victims as well as fibers from the house. Eventually, the FBI and the Atlanta police accumulated sufficient forensic evidence, mostly fiber, to charge Williams with two of the murders: Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater. On July 17, 1981, Wayne Williams was indicted for the murders of Jimmy and Nathaniel.
“We knew we were preparing a case where we were going to have to prove that Wayne Williams was not just the killer of Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater, but was probably the serial killer that had been terrorizing Atlanta for the previous 2 years. ”
By late 1981, the district attorney knew they had enough evidence for the murders of Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater to prosecute 23-year-old Wayne Williams. The state also introduced evidence of 10 of the child murders in an attempt to show the consistencies between them all. The trial started on January 6, 1982, in Fulton County.
Williams was very cocky. You could call him a con man. Wayne Williams decided to take the stand. The jury started to see a violent streak in him.
He finally blew up on cross-examination when confronted with how illogical his explanation was of why he crossed the James Jackson Parkway bridge. Witnesses were called to testify that they had seen Wayne Williams with some of the victims before their deaths. Several had seen him with Jimmy Ray Payne. Two other witnesses had seen Williams with Nathaniel Cater.
One witness, who may have been the last person to see Cater alive, testified that they saw Williams and Cater leaving a theater together holding hands. “It’s those little things. You just keep throwing so many sticks on the fire and the fire gets bigger. ”
Another witness had seen Williams with 15-year-old Terry Pue.
Other witnesses testified to seeing him with 14-year-old Lubie Geter, 18-year-old Larry Rogers, 15-year-old Joseph Bell, and 16-year-old William Barrett. Williams had flyers specifically targeting young Black boys. “Let’s go down to the studio and we’ll talk about it and maybe we’ll make a demo. ” He was there to make them the next Jackson 5.
A lot of these young boys were looking for a way to get out of the low socioeconomic place in which they found themselves. It was enticing them with illusions of grandeur in the future. “That kind of answered our question as to how he was getting them in the car. That’s why he got away with it so long.
Nobody noticed him. ”
Wayne Williams had also been seen with scratches on his arms, consistent with those caused by victims when they’re being strangled. There were five witnesses who testified about the scratch marks. In court, fiber evidence was presented to the jury.
In many of the cases, fibers consistent with Williams’ environment were found on the victim’s bodies. At least nine of them had dog hairs consistent with those of the Williams family dog. “There were too many similarities, not only by race and sex, age, placement in a river, but similar fibers linking together. There was an overwhelming amount to show that those cases seemed to be linked to one another.
There’s tons of evidence that pointed to Wayne Williams and nothing identified anybody other than Wayne Williams. ”
One of the most important witnesses in the prosecution case was a close friend of Wayne Williams who gave a damning statement in court. She was running a talent business and became friends with Wayne. She was one of five or six witnesses who said the same thing: Wayne blamed his own failures on poor Black children who brought down the Black race.
“He thought that’s who he was going out and picking up off the street. ”
During cross-examination, the witness was asked a very poignant question: “Do you think Wayne Williams murdered anyone? ”
She sat there and couldn’t answer. Tears began rolling down her face.
As she did, you could see the jury leaning forward, wanting to know the answer. She said, “Yes, he did. ”
It was the most dramatic moment one investigator had ever seen in a courtroom. Right after that, they rested their case.
After a 7-week trial that captivated Atlanta, the jury went out to deliberate. 12 victims had been presented to the jury, and Wayne Williams had been on trial for the final two murders. On February 27, 1982, the jury returned their verdict. They took only 11 hours, a very short time, and found him guilty on both counts.
He was found guilty of two counts of murder and was sentenced to two life sentences to run consecutively. The verdict confirmed that Williams had killed Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater. Although it’s never been proven in court, many believe that Wayne Williams is the Atlanta child murderer who eluded investigators for so long. “It was the worst time in the history of modern Atlanta.
There is no worse time period where you lose 25 young children to a serial killer. When you weigh all the evidence, all the facts, there was no question that it was this guy. I’m convinced that Wayne Williams is the Atlanta child murderer and that he’s guilty of the two crimes that he committed and others that we believe he did, but there was just not enough evidence to present those cases to a jury. ”
Wayne Williams was sent to prison to serve out his sentences.
Although he was not taken to court for the murders of any children, he remains the prime and only suspect in many of the cases. Over the course of two years, some of the most vulnerable members of society in Atlanta were lured to their death with promises of success that never materialized. They wanted to better their lives but ended up being murdered.
Heavily linked to the infamous child deaths and guilty of the murder of two young men, Wayne Williams will forever be remembered as one of the world’s most evil killers.
