Wayne Williams

Wayne Bertram Williams (born May 27, 1958) is an American convicted murderer and suspected serial killer who is serving life imprisonment for the 1981 killings of two men in Atlanta, Georgia.

Wayne Williams, son of Homer and Faye Williams, was born on May 27, 1958, and raised in the Dixie Hills neighborhood of southwest Atlanta, Georgia.

Both of his parents were teachers.

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 frequenting stations WIGO and WAOK, where he befriended a number of the announcing crew and began dabbling in becoming a pop music producer and manager.

Although never tried for the additional murders, he is also believed to be responsible for at least 24 of the 30 Atlanta murders of 1979–1981, also known as the Atlanta Child Murders.

Williams first became a suspect in the Atlanta murders on the morning of May 22, 1981, when a police surveillance team, watching the James Jackson Parkway Bridge spanning the Chattahoochee River (a spot where multiple bodies had been discovered previously), heard a "big loud splash", suggesting that something had been thrown from the bridge into the river below.

The first automobile to exit the bridge after the splash, at roughly 2:50 a.m., 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.

Two days later, on May 24, the nude body of 27-year-old Nathaniel Cater, who had been missing for four days and was last seen with Williams, was discovered in the river.

The medical examiner ruled he had died of probable asphyxia but never specifically said he had been strangled.

Police thought that Williams had killed Cater and that his body was the source of the sound they heard as his car crossed the bridge.

Williams failed three polygraph tests.

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 struggles.

Williams held a press conference outside his home to proclaim his innocence, volunteering that he had failed the polygraph tests, which would have been inadmissible in court.

Williams was questioned again by police for 12 hours on June 3 and 4 at FBI headquarters and released without arrest or charge, but remained under surveillance.

Williams was arrested on June 21, 1981, for the murders of Cater and Payne.

His trial began on January 6, 1982, in Fulton County.

During the two-month trial, prosecutors matched to a number of victims 19 sources of fibers from Williams's home and car: his bedspread, bathroom, gloves, clothes, carpets, dog, and an unusual trilobal carpet fiber.

Other evidence included witness testimony that placed 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.

After 12 hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty on February 27 of the murders of Cater and Payne.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

After Williams became a suspect, the killings stopped.

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."

In early 2004, Williams sought a retrial again, with his attorneys arguing that law enforcement officials covered up evidence of involvement by the Ku Klux Klan, and that carpet fibers purportedly linking him to the crimes would not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

A federal judge rejected the request for retrial on October 17, 2006.

Williams was never tried for any of the Atlanta Child Murders.

However, police attributed 22 other deaths, including those of 18 minors, to Williams.

Williams is serving his sentence at Telfair State Prison.

On November 20, 2019, Williams was again denied parole.

He will next be eligible for parole in November 2027.

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 said the conviction was a "profound miscarriage of justice" that has kept an innocent man incarcerated for the majority of his adult life and allowed the real killers to go free.

In contrast, Joseph Drolet, who prosecuted Williams at trial, has stood by Williams's convictions.

He has emphasized that, after Williams was arrested, "the murders stopped and there has been nothing since."