Wayne Williams

What the record shows

Wayne Bertram Williams is an Atlanta man who was convicted in February 1982 of murdering two adult men, Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater, whose bodies were recovered from the Chattahoochee River in 1981. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms and remains in Georgia state custody. After the verdict, Atlanta authorities closed most of the city's missing and murdered children cases of 1979 to 1981 and attributed them to him, although he was never charged in any of those deaths. Williams has maintained his innocence throughout, and in 2019 the City of Atlanta announced a renewed review of the evidence.

The killings that became known as the Atlanta child murders began, by most accounts, in the summer of 1979. According to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution chronology, the bodies of Edward Hope Smith, 14, and Alfred Evans, 13, were found on Niskey Lake Road on August 7, 1979, the first of a series of young Black victims killed over roughly 22 months. Parents formed the Committee to Stop Children's Murders in April 1980, Atlanta police set up a special task force in July 1980 that later grew to dozens of officers, and the FBI was ordered into the case in November 1980. Contemporary reports put the number of deaths under task force investigation at 28.

According to the Supreme Court of Georgia's 1983 opinion, a police surveillance team stationed at the Jackson Parkway Bridge over the Chattahoochee heard a loud splash at about 3 a.m. on May 22, 1981, and then saw a white Chevrolet station wagon crossing the bridge. Officers stopped the car and found Williams, then 22, driving. Two days later, on May 24, Cater's body was found in the river downstream. A friend testified that he had seen Cater with Williams outside the Rialto Theatre on the evening of May 21. Payne, 21, had been last seen at home on April 21, 1981, and his body was recovered from the river on April 27. Williams was arrested on June 21, 1981, and a Fulton County grand jury indicted him on July 17, 1981, on two counts of murder.

The trial in Fulton County Superior Court, before Judge Clarence Cooper, opened in January 1982. The prosecution relied heavily on fiber and hair comparisons: state experts testified that fibers recovered from both victims were consistent with carpets, a bedspread and a rug from Williams's home and car, and that animal hairs were consistent with his German Shepherd. To help show identity and method, the state was also permitted to introduce evidence of ten other alleged homicides from the series. On February 27, 1982, after about 11 hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Williams of both murders and he was immediately sentenced to two consecutive life terms. The court records give Cater's age as 28; United Press International reported it as 27.

Within days the task force began closing its files. UPI reported on March 2, 1982, that investigators had attributed 23 slayings to Williams and left seven cases open. The Journal-Constitution chronology states that the task force announced on March 1, 1982, that it would close 21 other cases and later closed one more, for a total of 22 linked to Williams. The Wikipedia article likewise says police attributed 22 further deaths to him, 18 of them minors. None of these attributions was tested in court.

The Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the convictions on December 5, 1983, rejecting challenges to the fiber evidence and to defense access to crime laboratory material. In July 1998, the Georgia Attorney General's office announced that Butts County Superior Court Judge Hal Craig had denied Williams's habeas corpus petition in a 60-page order. Williams and his lawyers have argued over the years that the fiber evidence was unreliable and, according to the Wikipedia article, that authorities suppressed evidence pointing to Ku Klux Klan involvement; those bids for a new trial have been unsuccessful. DeKalb County police reopened several of the cases in May 2005, and later DNA and hair testing produced results that each side has cited.

On March 21, 2019, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced that the Atlanta Police Department, the Fulton County District Attorney's Office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation would re-examine stored evidence with modern techniques, while cautioning that there might be nothing left to test. At that time Williams, then 60, was held at Telfair State Prison in southeast Georgia. According to the Wikipedia article, he was denied parole in November 2019 and is next eligible for consideration in November 2027. No public results from the renewed testing had been reported in the sources reviewed for this profile.