Papers sought in Ga. child killings

Lawyers for convicted killer Wayne Williams, blamed for the murder of two dozen boys and young men in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, are seeking police documents about a child molester who lived in the area. The court papers made public Friday don‘t name the man, but they say he is a convicted multiple child molester currently serving time in a Georgia prison. They also allege that investigators knew the man was a viable suspect in the child murders but never told defense attorneys.

"A profound miscarriage of justice has occurred in this matter, which not only has kept (Williams) behind bars for a majority of his adult life, but also which kept a blind eye to bringing the real killers of these many victims to justice," the lawyers wrote in the motion.

Between 1979 and 1981, 29 black boys and young men were killed in the Atlanta area, sparking fear throughout the region. Williams, who is black, has contended that he was framed. He has maintained that Atlanta officials covered up evidence of Ku Klux Klan involvement in the killings to avoid a race war in the city, a claim investigators have denied. "I‘ll say this 100 times. It should be obvious right now of my innocence," he said.

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Background (*Excerpt)

Several bodies had, by now, been pulled from local rivers, and police were staking out the waterways by night. In the predawn hours of May 22, a rookie officer stationed under a bridge on the Chattahoochee River reported hearing "a splash" in the water nearby. Above him, a car rumbled past, and officers manning the bridge were alerted. Police and FBI agents halted a vehicle driven by Wayne Bertam Williams, a black man, and spent two hours grilling him and searching his car, before they let him go. On May 24, the corpse of Nathaniel Cater, a 27-year-old convicted felon, was fished out of the river downstream. Authorities put two and two together and focused their probe on Wayne Williams.

From the start, he made a most unlikely suspect. The only child of two Atlanta schoolteachers, Williams still lived with his parents at age 23. A college dropout, he cherished ambitions of earning fame and fortune as a music promoter. In younger days, he had constructed a working radio station in the basement of the family home.

On June 21, Williams was arrested and charged with the murder of Nathaniel Cater, despite testimony from four witnesses who reported seeing Cater alive on May 22 and 23, after the infamous "splash." On July 17, Williams was indicted for killing two adults - Cater and Payne - while newspapers trumpeted the capture of Atlanta's "child killer."

At his trial, beginning in December 1981, the prosecution painted Williams as a violent homosexual and bigot, so disgusted with his own race that he hoped to wipe out future generations by killing black children before they could breed. One witness testified that he saw Williams holding hands with Nathaniel Cater on May 21, a few hours before "the splash." Another, 15 years old, told the courts that Williams had paid him two dollars for the privilege of fondling his genitals. Along the way, authorities announced the addition of a final victim, 28-year-old John Porter, to the list of victims.

Defense attorney tried to balance the scales with testimony from a woman who admitted having "normal sex" with Williams, but the prosecution won a crucial point when the presiding judge admitted testimony on 10 other deaths from the "child murders" list, designed to prove a pattern in the slayings. One of those admitted was the case of Terry Pue, but neither side had anything to say about the fingerprints allegedly recovered from his corpse in January 1981.

The most impressive evidence of guilt was offered by a team of scientific experts, dealing with assorted hairs and fibers found on certain victims. Testimony indicated that some fibers from a brand of carpet found inside the Williams home (and many other homes, as well) had been identified on several bodies. Further, victims Middlebrooks, Wyche, Cater, Terrell, Jones, and Stephens all supposedly bore fibers from the trunk liner of 1979 Ford automobile owned by the Williams family. The clothes of victim Stephens also allegedly yielded fibers from a second car - a 1970 Chevrolet - owned by Wayne's parents. Curiously, jurors were not informed of multiple eyewitness testimony naming a different suspect in the Jones case, nor were they advised of a critical gap in the prosecution's fiber evidence.

Specifically, Wayne Williams had no access to the vehicles in question at the times when three of the six "fiber" victims were killed. Wayne's father took the Ford in for repairs at 9:00A.M. on July 30, 1980, nearly five hours before Earl Terrell vanished that afternoon. Terrell was long dead before Williams got the car back on August 7, and it was retuned to the shop the next morning (August 8), still refusing to start. A new estimate on repair costs was so expensive that Wayne's father refused to pay, and the family never again had access to the car. Meanwhile, Clifford Jones was kidnapped on August 20 and Charles Stephens on October 9, 1980. He defendant's family did not purchase the 1970 Chevrolet in question until October 21, 12 days after Stephen's death.

On February 27, 1982, Wayne Williams was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to a double term of life imprisonment. Two days later, the Atlanta "child murders" task force officially disbanded, announcing that 23 of 30 "list" cases were considered solved with his conviction, even though no charges had been filed. The other seven cases, still open, reverted to the normal homicide detail and remain unsolved to this day.

In November 1985, a new team of lawyers uncovered once-classified documents from an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, conducted during 1980 and 1981 by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A spy inside the Klan told GBI agents that Klansmen were "killing the children" in Atlanta, hoping to provoke a race war. One Klansman in particular, Charles Sanders, allegedly boasted of murdering "List" victim Lubie Geter, following a personal altercation. Geter reportedly struck Sanders's car with a go-cart, prompting the Klansman to tell his friend, "I'm gonna kill him. I'm gonna choke the black bastard to death." (Geter was, in fact, strangled, some three months after the incident in question.) In early 1981, the same informant told GBI agents that "after twenty black-child killings, they, the Klan, were going to start killing black women." Perhaps coincidentally, police records note the unsolved murders of numerous black women in Atlanta in 1980-82, with most of the victims strangled. On July 10, 1998, Butts County Superior Court Judge Hal Craig rejected the latest appeal for a new trial in Williams's case, based on suppression of critical evidence 15 years earlier.

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