By Chris Bartholomew
Wayne Bertram Williams (born May 27, 1958) was identified as the key suspect in the Atlanta Child Murders that occurred between 1979 and 1981. In January 1982, he was found guilty of the murder of two adult men. After his conviction, the Atlanta police declared an additional 23 of the 29 child murders solved.
Williams was born and raised in Atlanta's Dixie Hills neighborhood, from which many of the Atlanta Child Murderer's victims would later disappear. An aspiring radio DJ, he ran an amateur radio station from his parents' house, and was well-known in the area for scouting local musicians, particularly teenagers. Williams' own personal beliefs made him a suspect in the murders. It was believed that Williams resented and even hated other African-Americans. He also had a reputation in his community as a liar who invented impressive stories about himself, the details of which were too outlandish to be true. His only encounter with the law prior to becoming a murder suspect was in 1976, when he was arrested, but never convicted, for impersonating a police officer.
On February 27, 1982, Wayne Williams was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to a double term of life imprisonment. On March 1, 1982, the Atlanta child murders task force officially disbanded, announcing that 23 of 30 List cases were considered solved with his conviction. The other seven cases, still open, reverted to the normal homicide detail. In November 1985, a new team of lawyers uncovered formerly classified FBI documents from 1980 and 1981, describing surveillance of a militant Ku Klux Klansman suspected of murdering several victims on The List. Despite that evidence and glaring flaws throughout the prosecution's case, all appeals filed on behalf of Wayne Williams have been rejected by the courts.
Edward Hope Smith, 14, left a skating rink where he had spent the evening with his girlfriend and began the long walk home. He never made it; he became the first victim of the Atlanta Child Murders on July 21, 1979. On July 28, 1979 they found the body. Edward was killed with a .22 caliber gun. Edward's socks and football shirt were missing.
Alfred Evans, 14, left home to see a karate movie in downtown Atlanta. His body was found at the same time as his friend Edward Hope Smith. The cause of death for Alfred was assumed to be asphyxia, possibly resulting from strangulation. Alfred was wearing a belt that wasn't his.
Milton Harvey disappeared September 4, 1979, while on an errand for his mother. His bike was found a week later in a remote area of Atlanta. His body wasn't found until November. Because the remains were skeletal and showed no signs of foul play, it would be a while before he was considered to be murdered.
October 21, 1979, Yusef Bell, 9 years old, disappears. His body was found on November 8, 1979. He was on his way to the store to buy snuff for a neighbor. After buying the snuff, a woman thought she saw him get into a blue car with a man she believed was the former husband of Yusef's mother Camille. The police later discounted this sighting. Yusef's disappearance received some media attention as Camille begged the abductor to release her well-loved boy. Her community was rallying around her for emotional support. A school custodian in the abandoned E.P. Johnson Elementary School discovered Yusef on November 8th. His body had been wedged into a concrete hole in the floor. He had been strangled to death, either by hand or ligature. The boy had been barefoot when he disappeared and was still barefoot when he was found, but the bottoms of his feet had been washed clean.
March 4, 1980, Angel Lenair didn't come home. Her body was discovered on March 10th. Police found Angel's body tied to a tree with an electrical cord around her neck and a pair of panties that did not belong to Angel stuffed into her mouth. Cause of death was asphyxiation by strangulation with the electrical cord. Although Angel's hymen had been broken and there were some minor abrasions in the genital area, the medical examiner did not interpret those facts to mean evidence of sexual assault. Those findings became controversial and did not mean that Angel was not the victim of some sexual abuse.
March 11, 1980, 10 year old Jeffrey Mathis disappears while going to the store. By the time his body was found 11 months later, it was not possible to find the cause of death. Jeffrey had last been seen by a friend getting into the backseat of a blue car, possibly a Buick.
May 18th 1980, Eric Middlebrooks vanished. His body was found the next day. Eric had gotten a phone call around 10:30 P.M. Sunday night, May 18, 1980. He immediately grabbed his tools and told his foster mother he was going out to repair his bike. Early the next morning, his body was found a few blocks away. His bicycle was nearby. Eric had been bludgeoned to death.
June 9, 1980, Chris Richardson, 12, disappeared, never returning after a trip to a nearby swimming pool.
June 22, 1980, Latonya Wilson was taken from her home. She was the second girl missing. A neighbor claimed that she saw a black man remove the windowpane in the Wilson apartment, climb into the apartment and leave with the little girl in his arms. He walked out the back door, leaving it ajar. Outside, he is said to have paused in the parking lot to speak to another black male, all the while holding the limp figure of LaTonya Wilson under his right arm. The skeletal remains of LaTonya Wilson were found in northwest Atlanta, not too far from her home. It was impossible to determine cause of death or whether she had been sexually abused given the state of her body's decomposition.
June 23, 1980, Aaron Wyche, 10, was added to the list of Atlanta Child Murders. His body was found beneath a six-lane highway bridge that passed over railroad tracks in DeKalb County. His death was caused by asphyxia, said the medical examiner, because he landed in a way that prevented him from breathing. This death was not initially considered a homicide even though Aaron was deathly afraid of heights and would not have voluntarily climbed that trestle. The assumption was that Aaron fell off the bridge, despite the fact that the guardrails on the bridge were almost as high as Aaron was.
July 6, 1980, Anthony Carter, 9, vanished while playing hide and seek with his cousin after 1 A.M. He was found stabbed to death the next day behind a warehouse less than a mile from his home.
August 14, Atlanta police form a task force to investigate and analyze evidence in the string of child murders that occurred in the city. Up to this point, the Atlanta police had maintained that the cases were separate and not connected.
August 20, 1980, Clifford Jones, 13, was strangled.
September 14, 1980, Darren Glass, 11, went missing. He had come to visit his grandmother in Atlanta and was found strangled by some unknown ligature on August 20. His body had been put in a dumpster wearing shorts and underwear that was not his. His foster mother received an emergency phone call from someone claiming to be Darron, but when she answered the phone, the line was dead. The police ignored the case however, because Darron had run away several times before.
October 9, 1980, Charles Stephens, 12, was strangled. He was found murdered the next morning on a hillside. Stephens had died from suffocation from an unknown object. At the crime scene, the evidence had been contaminated by a police officer when he threw a blanket over the corpse of the boy. The fibers from the blanket were mixed with the fibers already at the scene. The fibers found were thought to have come from the red interior of a Ford LTD.
November 1, 1980, Aaron Jackson, 9, was reported missing. His body was found the following day dead from asphyxiation. This friend of earlier victim Aaron Wyche was found dead beneath a bridge in the South River in November 1980, close to where Wyche's body had been discovered. Jackson's cause of death was documented as probable asphyxia. Like Charles Stephens, it was believed that Aaron Jackson had been smothered. At about the time Jackson was thought to have been killed, a woman had witnessed a man at the scene where the body was later discovered. The woman reported what she had seen to the Task Force who, in turn, failed to respond to the report.
November 6, 1980, the Attorney General directed the FBI to join the investigation of missing and murdered children in the Atlanta area.
November 10, 1980, 16-year-old Patrick 'Pat Man' Rogers disappeared. He was also connected to at least seventeen murdered victims, both on and off the List. He, like other victims including Darron Glass, was thought to have run away. Therefore he was not added to the List for quite some time. A week before his disappearance, he had told his mother that he had feared that the killer was close. His friend's mother told police that Rogers was looking for her son to tell him that he had found someone to manage their singing careers, a man named Wayne Williams. Rogers was found on December 21, 1980, face down in the Chattahoochee River. He died from a blow to his head.
January 3, 1981, Lubie Geter, 14, was found strangled. Even though he fit all the parameters required by the authorities at the time to make the List, it took two days before the police began their investigation of the crime scene. The body of Geter was extremely decomposed when happened upon by a man walking his dog through the woods. When he was found, he was only wearing his underwear. The medical examiner believed that Lubie died from asphyxiation from manual strangulation. Geter had been connected with two white male pedophiles: the child molester connected with earlier victim Earl Lee Terrell, and another unidentified man, who would be later connected to List victim William Barrett. An acquaintance of Geter had seen him with the molester linked with Terrell on several occasions. The convicted child molester that had been linked with Terrell was also never a suspect in the murder case of Geter.
January 22, 1981, Terry Pue, 15, was found strangled. He had been last seen at a hamburger restaurant on Memorial Drive and was a friend of List victim Lubie Geter who had gone missing the same month. An anonymous white caller had phoned the police and informed them where they could find the boy's body. Pue was found near interstate 20 on Sigman Road, in Atlanta. He had been strangled by some sort of ligature. The same caller had also indicated that the remains of another victim could be found on the same road. Years later, those remains were finally located but never identified. Some suggested they were the remains of still missing Darron Glass. The unidentified remains were never added to the List, even though Pue's were.
February 6, 1981, Patrick Baltazar, 12, was found strangled. A man cleaning up the grounds one week after he had gone missing found Baltazar's body in an office park. The boy had been strangled to death and the rope thought to have been the murder weapon lay close to the body. Before his death, the Task Force had received a call from the boy, saying that he believed the killer was coming after him. Unfortunately, the Task Force failed to respond. After Baltazar had gone missing, his teacher had claimed she had received a phone call from a boy she thought to be Baltazar. The boy never said who he was, he merely cried into the receiver of the phone.
February 19, 1981, Curtis Walker, 13, was strangled. Curtis had lived with his mother and uncle at the Bowen Homes housing project in Atlanta. Both he and his uncle, Stanley Murray, would be murdered. Curtis would make the now infamous List, but his uncle would not. His body was found on March 6, 1981 in the South River. His death, like many of the other List victims, would be documented as caused by asphyxia, probably strangulation with a cord or narrow rope. That same day, FBI agents found the remains of Jeffrey Mathis, missing almost a year. His funeral was captured on national news.
March 2, 1981, Jo-Jo Bell, 16, was strangled. Two days after he had gone missing a co-worker of his, who worked at a popular seafood restaurant named Cap'n Peg's, told his manager that Jo-Jo had called him and told him he was almost dead. The boy said Jo-Jo had pleaded for his co-worker to help him, before hanging up the phone. The manager reported the call to police. Several days later, Jo-Jo's mother received a call from a woman who said she had Jo-Jo. The same woman had called back and spoke with Mrs. Bell's two other children. Mrs. Bell immediately called the Task Force, who never contacted her back. Frustrated, she contacted the FBI, but it was too late. Jo-Jo was found on April 19, 1981 in the South River. His cause of death was probable asphyxia.
Jo-Jo was linked to several victims on and off the List. His mother had befriended a fellow inmate while serving time for murdering her husband. That woman happened to be the sister of Alfred Evans. Jo-Jo had gone to summer camp with Cynthia Montgomery, a murdered victim who had not made the List, but could be connected to many victims who had made the List. Jo-Jo was also good friends with Timothy Hill, a very troubled young man with violent tendencies, who disappeared eleven days after Jo-Jo. He and Timothy Hill were known to frequent a house on Gray Street known as Uncle Tom's. A sixty-three year-old homosexual man named Thomas Terrell, who was known to have a particular interest in young boys, owned the house.
March 11, 1981, Timothy Hill disappeared. His body was found on March 30th, he was strangled. Timothy was Jo-Jo's friend. He was found in the Chattahoochee River. He was the last child victim to be added to the List. His cause of death was also listed as asphyxia.
Twenty-three year old ex-convict Michael McIntosh was last seen on March 25, 1981, by a shop owner who said that the young man had been beaten up. The storeowner had said McIntosh told him two black men had roughed him up. He was never seen alive again. McIntosh had lived across the street from Cap'n Peg's Seafood Restaurant, where Jo-Jo had worked. He had, in fact, known Jo-Jo Bell. Like Jo-Jo, McIntosh had been known to hang around with homosexuals and it was believed he was one himself. He had been seen several times at Tom Terrell's house, a house that both Jo-Jo Bell and Timothy Hill had often frequented. McIntosh was pulled from the Chattahoochee River in April 1981. He too had died from probable asphyxia, according to the medical examiner. McIntosh had known another List victim named Nathaniel Cater, who would disappear a month later.
April 1981, John Porter, like McIntosh, was an ex-convict. He was twenty-eight when he was found dead. He had been stabbed six times and left on a sidewalk in an empty lot. Porter originally did not make the List, until the Wayne Williams trial when he and Williams were linked through fiber matches.
The second adult to make the infamous List was twenty-year-old Larry Rogers (no relation to Patrick Rogers). He turned up dead after missing for more than two weeks in April 1981. He was not found in a river, like the three victims before him, but in an abandoned apartment. His cause of death was documented as probable asphyxia, by strangulation. Rogers was mentally retarded.
Rogers was one of the few victims to be connected to Wayne Williams. Supposedly, Williams had hidden the younger brother of Larry Rogers from police. The younger Rogers had been involved in a violent fight in which he suffered a head injury. It was Wayne Williams, in fact, that had taken him to the hospital.
Twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne had also disappeared the same month as Porter. Police reports stated that his sister last saw Payne the day before his disappearance. Payne was found a week after his disappearance floating in the Chattahoochee River. His cause of death was reported as undetermined, according to the county medical examiner. It was believed that he had been in the water almost the entire length of time he had been missing.
William Barrett (Billy Star) was a seventeen-year-old juvenile delinquent when he had vanished in May of 1981. He vanished on his way to pay a bill for his mother. The following day, his body was found close to his home. He had been both strangled and stabbed. The medical examiner reported that the stabbing occurred after Billy died from strangulation.
Ex-convict Nathaniel Cater was twenty-seven years old when he became the last victim to make the List. He had lived in the same apartment building as LaTonya Wilson. It is unknown as to exactly when Cater had disappeared. What authorities did know was that he was an admitted homosexual prostitute, drug dealer and alcoholic. A witness, who had known the suspect in the death of Clifford Jones, said Cater had admitted to selling himself, his blood at the blood bank and dope, in exchange for money.
May 22, 1981, hearing a splash on the James Jackson Parkway Bridge, police stop a car driven by Wayne Williams and question him. Williams claimed that he was going out of town to audition a young singer. This alibi fell apart after police found that the address and phone number he gave them didn't exist.
May 24, 1981, the body of Nathaniel Cater, 27, was discovered on the banks of the Chattahoochee, downstream from the James Jackson Bridge. The medical examiner on the case ruled he had died of probable asphyxia, but never authoritatively said he had been strangled. Police theorized that Williams had killed Cater and had thrown him off the bridge the night they had pulled him over. Their suspicions about Williams increased after he failed a polygraph test, and hairs and fibers on one of the victims' bodies were found consistent with those from Williams' home, car, and dog. Throughout the course of the investigation, police staked out Williams' home for several weeks while he taunted them with insults and jokes. During this time, people working in Williams' studio also told police they had seen him with scratches on his face and arms around the time of the murders, which the police thought could have been inflicted by victims during a struggle.
Williams held a press conference outside his parents' home, proclaiming his innocence.
June 21, 1981, Wayne Williams is arrested, charged with the murders of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Payne.
Strange stuff
One controversial situation was that in the case of Jimmy Payne, the Fulton County medical examiner had written that the cause of death was undetermined. That is, it was not determined that Payne was, in fact, murdered. Recognizing the difficulty in prosecuting Williams for a death that was not clearly a homicide, the medical examiner changed his document to indicate homicide. When confronted with the change in the death certificate, which subsequently allowed for Wayne Williams to be indicted in the Jimmy Payne case, the medical examiner said he checked the wrong box on the death certificate. But there is no box to check, just a place to type in the word undetermined or homicide.
The Brady files are the body of information collected by the police and other forensic experts that point towards the innocence of the accused. By law, the prosecution must turn those Brady files over to the defense before the trial begins. The Brady files were withheld until the last possible minute.
Thirty-nine-year-old Jimmy Anthony was a neighbor who had known Nathaniel Cater and claimed to have seen him on the morning of May 23, the day after Williams was pulled over for supposedly throwing Cater's body off the bridge. Three other witnesses, one who had known Cater well, had also seen him after the bridge incident. Not one of these witnesses would later have a chance to testify in the Williams case. The jury would not be informed of the four witnesses who had seen Nathaniel Cater, as well as many other important suspects and witnesses connected with the case that would have cast doubt on Williams' guilt.
During the appeals process, the Georgia Supreme Court assigned Justice Richard Bell to draft the opinion in the Williams case. Justice Bell, a former prosecutor, wrote that Wayne Williams did not get a fair trial and his murder conviction should have been reversed. When the full court reviewed Bell's opinion, it was voted down; Bell's draft was rewritten; Bell was pressured to change his vote, and the majority opinion, to uphold the conviction, came out under Bell's name in December of 1983.
There were no eyewitnesses, no confession, no murder weapons and no established motive.
Over the years, an increasing number of people connected with the case do not believe that Wayne Williams is guilty, including some of the relatives of the victims. DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey, who as an Atlanta homicide detective first searched Williams' home, says, "Most people who are aware of the child murders believe as I do that Wayne Williams did not commit these crimes."
Throughout the murder investigation there was a fear in the black community that the Ku Klux Klan was responsible for the murders of the children and young adults. There was also credence given to the theory that the CIA or FBI were responsible.
A police informant allegedly claimed that Klan member Charles Sanders tried to recruit him into the racist organization. Sanders allegedly told the man that the Klan was trying to begin a race war by killing black children.
Jurors were not informed of eyewitness testimony naming a different suspect in the Jones case, nor were they advised of a critical gap in the prosecution's evidence, that Wayne Williams had no access to the vehicles in question at the times when three of the six fiber victims were killed.
About six months after he became DeKalb chief, Graham reopened the investigation into the deaths of the five DeKalb victims: Aaron Wyche, 10; Curtis Walker, 13; Joseph Bell, 15; William Barrett, 17; and Patrick Baltazar, 11. Graham, one of the original investigators in the case, said he never believed Wayne was guilty of any of them.
On June 21, 2006, DeKalb County police dropped their reinvestigation of the Atlanta child murders. Graham resigned the previous month and was replaced by acting Chief Nick Marinelli, who said, "We dredged up what we had, and nothing has panned out, so until something does or additional evidence comes our way, or there's forensic feedback from existing evidence, we will continue to pursue the other cold cases that are in our reach."
From FBI files: 'It should be noted at this point, that preliminary review of 15 files of children by Atlanta agents and experts from the Behavioral Science Unit, FBI Academy, Quantico, indicates all of the murders and disappearances are not related. Last three may very possibly be connected, but motives for the other twelve are unknown at this time.'
From FBI files: 'There have been 11 children that have been found, eight appear to be unrelated homicides. The other three initially appeared to be somewhat related. Further investigation, however, has suggested that they may also be unrelated.'
After his conviction, the Atlanta police declared an additional 23 of the 29 child murders solved. Question is how they closed all but six of the cases, when the FBI stated that they were not all related.
Williams has said he is innocent, in all these years he's sworn that he didn't do the murders. They say the murders stopped when Wayne was arrested. Did they? Some people think not. There are a lot of people who think there was a serial killer, perhaps a couple of them working Atlanta. They could have died, or more likely, they are still out there.
Editor's note: this article was written in 2009. In March 2019 the mayor of Atlanta and the city's police chief announced that the evidence in the case would be retested using methods unavailable in 1981. Wayne Williams remains in custody, still convicted of the two adult murders and still maintaining his innocence. No further charges have followed.