Gisele Clardy spent the afternoon of May 28, 1981 doing the rounds of the Cherry Hill Apartments in DeKalb County, where she was assistant manager, posting notices and checking the vacant units. James Buffington, an auto mechanic who lived at the complex, was working on a customer's car outside building U when she drove in shortly after four o'clock. A car with two men in it pulled in behind her. The passenger got out, spoke to her briefly, and walked with her out of sight toward the building. Ten or fifteen minutes later, by Buffington's account, he came running back, got into the car and was driven off.
She did not come to work the next morning. She was found that day in apartment U-1, face down in three or four inches of bathwater, naked except for her blouse. She had been strangled. The autopsy found no semen, but bruising showed that she had been sexually assaulted.
James Samuel Walraven, born in 1949, was tried twice for her murder and convicted twice. It is the only killing he was ever convicted of. The rest of what became known as the bathtub murders reached a courtroom only as evidence against him in the Clardy case, offered by the prosecution to show a pattern.
The pattern began in March. On March 3, 1981 a man who said he was from maintenance and needed to check the water knocked at Margaret Finnerty's door at the Windermere Apartments on Roswell Road. When she let him in he choked her with a kerchief or bandana until she passed out. She later identified Walraven as the man.
On March 16 a man in a tan uniform and black gloves, a flower box under his arm, rang Constance Harrold's doorbell and said he had a delivery for a Mrs. Robinson. Then he tried to force his way in. She got the door shut, ran out the back and called the police from a neighbor's house. The box was still caught in the door and had nothing in it. On the porch the officers found a coil of rope. Her identification was not a clean one. She first picked out a man who jogged in the area and resembled her description; he was arrested and then released when she decided she had the wrong man. Later she named Walraven.
On April 15 Dario Dal Santo came home to the Woodcreek apartment he shared with his sister Louise and found her face down in the bathtub, naked. She had been manually strangled, and there was semen in her mouth and vagina. A pubic hair from the bath rug was similar enough to Walraven's that the two could have had a common origin. Tests on the semen excluded about twelve percent of men as its source, and he was not among them. Neither finding points to one man.
On June 5 Meredith Nelson passed a man in the hallway of her building at the Windermere complex. She followed him downstairs, and when she stopped at her mailbox he told her he had been in her apartment earlier that day, working on her pipes. She identified that man as Walraven. Ten days later Patricia Berry, who lived across the hall from Nelson, was found face down and partly submerged in her bath, naked above the waist and manually strangled. At about a quarter past two that afternoon a man named Joseph Gann had seen someone slipping around the corner of the building: six foot one or two, blondish, well tanned, very strong looking, a gold medallion at his neck. Gann put his certainty that it was Walraven at seventy to eighty percent.
Walraven was arrested on July 14, 1981. That day Buffington picked him out of a photographic array as the man he had seen with Gisele Clardy, and he later chose him again from a lineup. A county investigator searched Walraven's apartment the same day and found nothing tying him to Clardy's death or to any other crime. Under interrogation Walraven told detectives that the only person he had ever had sex with was his sister, some years before.
The most direct evidence came from a convicted forger, David Zorda, who spent about three days in the DeKalb County jail that July. He testified that on July 24 he and Walraven were the only white inmates at the jail store, that they talked briefly, and that Walraven told him he had "killed those goddamn bitches." The commander of the jail division, Robert Melton, confirmed that the two men were in the store together on that date and on no other. Wayne Krier, the house man of Walraven's cell block, said he had been present every time Walraven went to the store in his first six weeks inside, and had never seen him speak to Zorda or heard him confess to anyone.
The defense went at the identifications. Martha Delagarza, who lived in building U at Cherry Hill, said that about a week before the murder a big, muscular, straw-haired man in a telephone van had followed her home to her building, and that he was not Walraven. Helen Whitehead, working at a house up the street from Constance Harrold's on the day of that attack, said a blond man in his late twenties in a beige jumpsuit had come to her door asking for a coat hanger to open his car, with a long white box on the roof; he was not Walraven either. Peggy Brodsky, manager of the Glenlake Tennis Center, said Walraven had been answering its phones from four until ten on the day Louise Dal Santo died. Jonathan Linton said he had warmed up with Walraven at Blackburn Park between 4:15 and 4:30 on the day Patricia Berry died and that both of them played in a tournament that evening.
The strangest testimony concerned Buffington himself. At the request of the DeKalb police a clinical psychologist, Dr. Richard Rasche, had put him under hypnosis to sharpen his memory of the afternoon. Hypnotized, Buffington described the man with Gisele Clardy as only a couple of inches taller than she was, wearing his watch on his right wrist, and recalled a telephone company van parked nearby. Walraven took the stand and said he was right-handed and wore his watch on the left, owned no jewelry and no medallion, had no car, did not know where the Windermere Apartments were, had not been to Cherry Hill in more than three years, and had never seen Zorda before the trial. He denied killing Clardy, Dal Santo or Berry and denied attacking either woman who survived.
The trial ran from November 9 to November 16, 1981, and ended in a guilty verdict and a sentence of death. On November 23, 1982 the Supreme Court of Georgia reversed, finding four of his claims of error well founded, with only Justice Weltner dissenting. The trial judge had refused to hear his challenge to the makeup of the grand jury that indicted him, after first giving his lawyers extra time to prepare it. Zorda's account should have been excluded, because Walraven had asked in writing on September 16, 1981 for any statement he made in custody and the prosecution never gave it to him; in what the court called a primarily circumstantial case, that error could not be treated as harmless. The judge had never ruled clearly that his statements under interrogation were voluntary. And the remark about his sister, which the court noted described a felony, showed nothing but bad character and had no place in a murder trial. The court also faulted the sentencing charge for failing to tell the jury what mitigating circumstances were for.
The case was sent back with an order to hear the grand jury challenge, and venue was moved north to Whitfield County. A jury there convicted him of Clardy's murder a second time on September 1, 1983, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. His appeal from that verdict, decided by the Supreme Court of Georgia on December 3, 1985, turned heavily on Buffington. At a pretrial hearing the mechanic had said he may have suggested the hypnosis himself, that he had faith in it, and that he believed he was a suspect in the murder when he went under. At that point, the court observed, the police apparently had no solid lead beyond his descriptions. He also testified that he had seen the composite drawn from Gann's account of the Berry scene and did not think it a good likeness of the man he saw with Gisele Clardy.
No jury was ever asked to decide whether Walraven killed Louise Dal Santo or Patricia Berry, and no charge was brought for the attacks on Margaret Finnerty and Constance Harrold. The single conviction, reached twice, rests on a mechanic's identification made after police hypnosis and on the resemblance the prosecution drew between one death at Cherry Hill and two others across the county line.
1949: James Samuel Walraven is born.
March 3, 1981: a man posing as a maintenance worker chokes Margaret Finnerty until she passes out at the Windermere Apartments; she later identifies Walraven.
March 16, 1981: a man with an empty flower box tries to force his way into Constance Harrold's home; she later names Walraven.
April 15, 1981: Louise Dal Santo is found strangled in the bathtub of her Woodcreek apartment; Walraven is never tried for her death.
May 28, 1981: Gisele Clardy is seen walking toward building U at the Cherry Hill Apartments with a man; she is found strangled in the bathwater of apartment U-1 the next day.
June 5, 1981: Meredith Nelson passes a man in her building at Windermere whom she later identifies as Walraven.
June 1981: Patricia Berry is found strangled in her bath across the hall from Nelson; Walraven is never tried for her death.
July 14, 1981: Walraven is arrested, and a witness picks him out of a photographic array as the man seen with Clardy.
July 24, 1981: a jail inmate, David Zorda, later testifies that Walraven told him that day he had "killed those goddamn bitches"; another inmate disputes it.
November 16, 1981: his trial for Clardy's murder ends in a guilty verdict and a death sentence.
November 23, 1982: the Supreme Court of Georgia reverses the conviction.
September 1, 1983: a Whitfield County jury convicts him of Clardy's murder a second time, and he is sentenced to life imprisonment.
December 3, 1985: the Supreme Court of Georgia decides his appeal from the second verdict.