James Samuel Walraven was born in 1949 and was convicted of killing three women in the suburbs of Atlanta, across Fulton and DeKalb counties, between April and June 1981. All three were twenty-two.
Two women survived attacks earlier that spring, and both gave evidence. One, Mrs Finnerty, opened her door to a man who choked her with a kerchief or bandana until she lost consciousness. On March 16, 1981 a man in a tan uniform, wearing black gloves and carrying a flower box under his arm, rang Constance Harrold's doorbell and said he had a delivery for a Mrs Robinson. When she opened the door he tried to force his way in. She managed to shut it, ran out through the back of the house and telephoned the police from a neighbour's. The flower box was caught in the door and there were no flowers in it. On her front porch the police found a coil of rope. The Atlanta press called him the Bathtub Strangler.
Mrs Harrold's evidence cut both ways, and the entry should say so. She first identified a man who jogged in the area, and he was arrested and then released when she decided she had picked the wrong man. She later identified Walraven.
On April 15, 1981 Dario Dal Santo found his sister Louise face down in the bath of the flat at the Woodcreek apartments where they lived together. She was naked and had been manually strangled. A pubic hair from the bath rug was compared with a sample from Walraven and found similar enough that the two could have had a common origin; on the semen recovered from her body, the finding was that he could not be eliminated as its donor. Neither is an identification.
Gisele Clardy was killed on May 28, 1981. She had worked at the Cherry Hill apartments, and a mechanic named James Buffington said he had seen Walraven talking to her on the afternoon she died.
On June 5, Meredith Nelson met a man in the hallway of her building at the Windermere apartments who told her he had been inside her flat earlier that day, working on her pipes. On June 15 the body of Patricia Berry, who lived across the hall from Nelson, was found face down and partly submerged in her bath, naked above the waist, manually strangled. A witness named Joseph Gann had seen a man moving around the corner of the building that afternoon, tall, blond, tanned and strongly built, wearing a gold medallion. Gann said he was seventy to eighty per cent sure it was Walraven.
Walraven was arrested on July 14, 1981. A police search of his flat that day produced nothing connecting him to any of the killings. In interview he said the only person he had ever had sex with in his life was his sister, some years earlier.
The most direct evidence against him came from David Zorda, a convicted forger being held in the DeKalb County jail, who said Walraven had told him he had killed those women. Jail staff undercut it: the commander of the jail division put the two men in the same place on one day only, and 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 there, had never seen him speak to Zorda, and had never heard him confess to anyone.
The defence produced alibi and misidentification evidence. The manager of a tennis centre said Walraven had been manning its telephones from four until ten on the afternoon and evening Louise Dal Santo was killed; another witness said he had warmed up with Walraven at a park between quarter past and half past four on the day Patricia Berry died, and that the two of them played in a tournament that evening. Two women who had seen a man in the relevant places, one of them on the day of the Harrold attack, said it was not Walraven. Under hypnosis arranged by the police, Buffington described the man he had seen with Gisele Clardy as only a couple of inches taller than she was and wearing his watch on his right wrist. Walraven testified that he was right-handed and wore his watch on the left, that he owned no jewellery and no car, and denied all of it.
He was convicted and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court of Georgia reversed. It held first that the trial court had been wrong to refuse to hear his challenge to the composition of the grand jury that indicted him, and directed that the challenge be heard, with the indictment to be quashed if it succeeded. It held second that Zorda's account of the custodial statement should never have been admitted, because the prosecution had not given the defence a copy of that statement ten days before trial as the statute required.
He was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. The archive carries three convictions; what the evidence for them amounted to is set out above.