The Atlanta Child Murders

The Atlanta Child Murders were a series of child killings occurred in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. Though a man named Wayne Williams was convicted of two of the murders and suspected of twenty-four of them (which were consequently closed), the rest remains unsolved and Williams' conviction has attracted controversy.

Case Background
From 1979 to 1981, 31 African-American youths were found murdered in Atlanta, Georgia. Almost all of them were minors and most were fatally asphyxiated (sometimes the cause of death was listed as "probable asphyxia" or was undetermined). The first official victims were Edward Hope Smith, who was shot with a .22 gun, and Alfred Evans, whose cause of death was listed as "probable asphyxia", who was found in the same wooded area. Over the following years, victims kept turning up, though there were several other deaths and disappearances before, during and after the time of the listed murders that were not added to the list. During 1981, many victims were over 20 years old. They were still added to the authorities' "list" of suspected victims, though changes in the list's criteria for which deaths fit a pattern were not uncommon. At one point, a 16-year-old-boy, Patrick Rogers, was found dead in circumstances similar to the then-official pattern of the killings after being missing for almost a month, but he was not added to the list when he was found in the Chattahoochee River, in or near which some other victims of the killings had been found, because he was a year too old. On May 24, the nude body of Nathaniel Cater, who had gone missing a few days earlier, was fished out of the Chattahoochee River. The cause of death was ruled as "probable asphyxia" caused by strangulation. This eventually led the authorities to the only man who to date has been convicted of any of the killings, Wayne Williams.

Wayne Williams
"Modeling is more important than the talking we do."

A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Wayne Bertram Williams was born on May 27, 1958. His parents, Homer and Faye Williams, were both schoolteachers. He attended and graduated from Fredrick Douglas High School with an honors degree and attended Georgia State University for a year before dropping out. He was fascinated with electronics and attempted several get-rich schemes which cost his parents a lot of money. Marketing his own radio station, WRAZ, which he started in his parents' basement when he was 13, he also dreamed of making it in the entertainment industry and was a self-employed talent scout. He also did some work at local radio stations. At the time of his arrest, he was managing a local aspiring band called Gemini. Unfortunately, he wasn't very good at spotting musical talent, often spending huge amounts of money on making demos of local singers with little skills. He made money doing various odd jobs and by taking photos of accidents or crime scenes and selling them to newspapers. Owning a police scanner made it possible for him to get to the scene before police or emergency workers did. He also often used the scanner to listen in on police conversations and proved skilled at impersonating a police officer. He was arrested for doing so in 1976, having put red and blue lights on his car, but no charges were filed.

Williams first came to the police's attention in the early hours of May 22, 1981, two days before the body of Nathaniel Cater was retrieved from the Chattahoochee River. Two police officers, Freddie Jacobs and Bob Campbell, were stationed near the James Jackson Parkway Bridge, which crossed the river, where some victims had been found, as well as the line between two counties. Just after Jacobs saw a car that he identified as a white 1970 Chevrolet station wagon cross the bridge, Campbell, who was beneath the bridge, heard a loud splash and saw the water ripple. Campbell then radioed an FBI agent, who pulled over the car, which was driven by Williams. He told the police he was on his way to a potential client named Cheryl Johnson, though she was nowhere to be found and the phone number and address at which Williams said she lived turned out to be fake. When Williams was asked about the incident in an interview for the Atlanta Monster podcast, he gave a number of inconsistent and contradictory stories to explain what happened; in one he said his mother had written down Johnson's address when she called their house, in another he said he himself had written down the address and misread his own handwriting, in some he said he was also going to a local club, the Sans Souci Lounge, and a record company, Hotlanta Records, on other errands as well in different orders. While Williams was questioned by the authorities, they searched the area near the bridge for bodies.

Though the medical examiner couldn't determine an exact time of death, he stated that Cater had been dead long enough to have been dropped from the bridge on the night in question; later, some witnesses claimed to have seen him alive in the days between May 21 and May 24, though their statements weren't made public. The investigators obtained search warrants for Williams' home, car and dog to get fiber samples to compare to fibers found on the victims and brought him in for questioning. When the police looked into his whereabouts for the afternoon of May 21, they couldn't confirm the story he gave them. They also put him through three polygraph tests, all of which he failed. Williams still maintained that he was innocent and even held a press conference outside his home. Over the following weeks, the FBI forensic labs matched fiber samples found on victims to samples from Williams' environment and witnesses who claimed to have seen Williams with various victims and who claimed to have seen cuts and scratches on his arms turned up. On June 21, Williams was arrested for the murders of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Payne, who had died in April. Williams's trial began on December 28 and has been criticized for treating Williams and his defense unfairly by not giving them the time to prepare properly. The prosecution connected Cater's and Payne's deaths to ten of the other Atlanta child murders, none of which Williams was charged with and many of which didn't even fit the proposed pattern. The defense had little chance against the FBI investigators who were called to testify but brought in some experts of their own. Some of their testimonies ended in abject failure; the one who reexamined the times of death for Payne and Cater stated that Cater had been dead in the water for at least two weeks even though he hadn't even been missing that long. Williams also lost a great deal of credibility when a number of lies he had spun to people around him as well as his false alibi came out; among them were a friend of Williams who had been told that he flew fighter jets in the U.S. Air Force even though he hadn't done so and couldn't because he wore glasses. The prosecution also brought in witnesses who claimed to have seen Williams with some of the victims. They also stated that the fibers found on the victims and compared to the abundance of fiber evidence collected from Williams' environment showed that it was statistically impossible for anyone other than Williams to be the killer, though it was later remarked that most of the fibers in question weren't that rare. Additionally, no hairs or fibers from the victims were found in Williams' home or car, which is unlikely if he had transported them.

The defense brought in more experts of their own. A hydrologist testified that it would have been impossible for Cater's body to turn up where it was found if it had been dropped from the bridge. Another stated that there was no indication that Cater or Payne had actually been murdered; Cater was a known alcohol and drug user and one of them had an enlarged heart who could easily have died of natural causes. They also brought in witnesses whose testimonies rebutted those made by the witnesses who implicated Williams; among them was a police sketch artist who testified that none of the many suspects she had been asked to sketch during the course of the investigations had looked like Williams. Unfortunately, the defense's case was damaged further when Williams himself was put on the stand and became hostile and angry during the questioning by the district attorney. In January of 1982, Williams was found guilty of killing Payne and Cater and received two life sentences. Not long afterward, the investigators announced that with him in prison, 23 of the 29 listed Atlanta child killings had been solved.

Aftermath
Still maintaining his innocence, Williams has spent the past decades fighting his conviction and trying to get a retrial while serving his sentence at Hancock State Prison. He has claimed that the investigators covered up evidence of Ku Klux Klan involvement in order to prevent a race war. The claim may have some credence since Charles T. Sanders, a white supremacist affiliated with the Klan, it was revealed in 2006, praised the killings in secretly recorded conversations. Sanders had also threatened to strangle one of the younger victims, Lubie Geter, because of a personal dispute; though Geter was indeed strangled, Sanders was not investigated as a suspect. Other theories include that there were multiple killers. In his book Mindhunter, which was published in 1995, profiler John Douglas stated that Williams probably committed eleven of the Atlanta child murders, but added that there was no strong evidence connecting him to most of the murders and disappearances. In 2007, attorneys for the State of Georgia allowed Williams' defense to reexamine dog hairs and human scalp hairs found on victim Patrick Baltazar (whose murder Williams was not actually convicted of) for DNA. The testing of the dog hairs was done by the University of California, Davis and weren't too conclusive; since they only had mitochondrial DNA to work with, they couldn't be used to identify a single, unique dog as the source. The testing of the human hairs, on the other hand, was carried out by the FBI's lab in Quantico, Virginia and bore more fruit. They contained a very rare sequence of DNA that's only present in 29 of the 1148 African-American hair samples in the FBI database and not present in any of the Caucasian and Hispanic samples. Since Williams carries the sequence himself, he remains a suspect.

Other Suspects

 * Jamie Brooks
 * Laundromat manager
 * A suspect in the murder of Clifford Jones in August of 1980.
 * Was reportedly seen raping and killing Jones by a witness and seen disposing of something large by other witnesses, though the statements were apparently ignored by investigators and were not made public before Williams' trial
 * Was arrested and convicted of aggravated assault and sodomy of a young boy in 1981 and later died in prison of AIDS
 * Charles T. Sanders
 * A suspect in the murder of Lubie Geter, found dead on February 5 of 1980
 * Implicated along with his brothers, Terry and Don Sanders
 * KKK member and white supremacist
 * Drug dealer
 * Confessed to the murder on a secret recording
 * The Sanders and his brothers were reportedly investigated for seven weeks, but were let go after passing polygraph tests

Modus Operandi
Twenty-four of the thirty-one victims of the Atlanta Child Murders, all young or adult males, were attributed to Wayne Williams, whose Modus Operandi (identified by the authorities as the killer's official) included: no forced abduction, either asphyxiation, strangulation, bludgeoning, stabbing, drowning (once) or neck-breaking (once), than dumping off the body in a secluded spot or into the Chattahoochee River.

For what concerns the other seven murders: in two cases, those of Angel Lenair and Faye Yearby, the victim was a young girl who was strangled (Lenair) or stabbed (Yearby), and than tied to a tree post-mortem. Lenair had a pair of underwear stuffed down her throat, and was also possibly sexually assaulted. In the remaining five cases, which involved four young males and another female victim, the boy/girl was either killed by unknown causes or shot, which did not fitted the pattern of the other murders, or a pattern overall.

Profile
The offender (for at least eleven of the murders than attributed to Williams, though he was later attributed more) was profiled by John Douglas as being an adult black male, between the age of 25 and 29, who was, in all likelihood, unmarried and single. He possessed a dog, and was familiar with the spots where he dumped his victims. He was probably pampered and spoiled by his parents during his childhood, and began killing while experiencing a period of intense and unbearable stress. He may have been assaulted as a child, and had a history of small crimes or violent demeanour. He favours dark colors, and the ruse he exploits to fool his young victims may be something related to the music industry.

The offender carves power, particularly power over others. This urge, when not satisfied legitimately, in the aspects of everyday life, drew him to murder. Although the murders seem to not have an explicit sexual connotation (as the victims who fit the pattern were not assaulted), the offender himself gains sexual excitement through the act of killing itself, which allows him to exercise power over his victims. His obsessive search for power and authority over others may have oriented the offender also in the choice of his profession (or at least of his aspirations). He may have (or had) impersonated a police officer because of his compulsion, and would always carry a weapon with him, also driving an official looking vehicle. He probably demonstrated an uncommon interest in the medias, by the time the murders began.

Williams fitted many of these characteristics. He was attributed eleven of the Atlanta Child Murders by Douglas, though in most of the other cases, he said, there wasn't enough evidence to identify Williams as the perpetrator. Despite this, the latter was later attributed a total of twenty-four murders.

Known Victims
Note: The dates in the following lists denote the date of the victim's disappearance.


 * 1979:
 * July 21: Edward Hope Smith, 14
 * July 25: Alfred Evans, 13
 * September 4: Milton Harvey, 14
 * October 21: Yusef Bell, 9
 * 1980:
 * March 4: Angel Lenair, 12
 * March 11: Jeffery Mathis, 10
 * May 18: Eric Middlebrooks, 14
 * June 9: Chris Richardson, 12
 * June 22: LaTonya Wilson, 7
 * June 23: Aaron Wyche, 10
 * July 6: Anthony Carter, 9
 * July 30: Earl Terell, 11
 * August 20: Clifford Jones, 13
 * September 14: Darron Glass, 10
 * October 9: Charles Stephens, 13
 * November 1: Aaron Jackson, 9
 * November 10: Patrick Rogers, 16
 * 1981:
 * January: Faye Yearby, 22
 * January 3: Lubie Geter, 14
 * January 22: Terry Pue, 15
 * February 6: Patrick Baltazar, 11
 * February 19: Curtis Walker, 15
 * March 2: Joseph Bell, 15
 * March 13: Timothy Hill, 13
 * March 20: Eddie Duncan, 21
 * March 25: Michael McIntosh, 23
 * May 11: William Barrett, 14
 * April 9: Larry Rogers, 20
 * April 12: John Porter, 28
 * April 21: Jimmy Ray Payne, 21
 * May 22: Nathaniel Cater, 27

On Criminal Minds

 * Season Two
 * "Profiler, Profiled" - While not directly mentioned or referenced in this episode, Wayne Williams appears to have been an inspiration for the episode's unsub, Carl Buford - Both were African-American serial killers who targeted African-American boys (though Williams also targeted young men), killed them via asphyxiation (though this was only one of the methods employed by Williams), and had some sexual element in their crimes (Buford was a pedophile, while Williams was a lust murderer). Buford also appeared in Season Eight.
 * "Fear and Loathing" - While not directly mentioned or referenced in this episode, Wayne Williams appears to have been an inspiration for the episode's unsub, Terrance Wakeland - Both were African-American serial killers who worked in music, were around the same age when they committed their crimes, targeted young African-Americans mainly of one gender (Wakeland targeted African-American teenage girls, while Williams mainly targeted African American boys and adults), and killed victims via various means (including strangling and stabbing).
 * Novels
 * Finishing School - Williams was mentioned when Rossi suggests that the unsub, who wrapped his victims in plastic to avoid leaving behind fiber evidence; Reid remarks that fact played a large part in convicting Williams.
 * Season Eleven
 * "Tribute" - While Williams or the Atlanta Child Murders weren't directly mentioned, a marker denoting to an infamous serial killer, seen on Reid's map of infamous serial killers by location, could be seen pointing to Atlanta's approximate location, possibly as a reference to either case.