Wayne Williams was convicted in February 1982 of murdering two young men, Jimmy Ray Payne, 21, and Nathaniel Cater, 27, whose bodies were pulled from the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta in the spring of 1981. A Fulton County jury found him guilty after a trial of about nine weeks, and Judge Clarence Cooper sentenced him to two consecutive life terms. Both of the men he was convicted of killing were adults.
His case is known for something else. Between July 1979 and May 1981 a long series of Black children, teenagers and young men in Atlanta disappeared and were found dead. The city lived with the fear that one killer, or several, was taking its children. After Williams was convicted, the authorities closed 22 more of those cases and attributed them to him. He was never charged with any of those deaths, never tried for them and has always denied them. Prosecutors put evidence about ten of the other deaths before the jury that convicted him, to show a pattern, and that is as close as any court has come to examining them.
He has always maintained his innocence. His appeals and petitions have failed in the state and federal courts. Victims' families have never agreed among themselves about him: some believe he killed their children, some believe he did not, and many believe he was not the only killer. In 2019 Atlanta reopened the investigation of the child killings and sent evidence for modern DNA testing. As of December 2022, no results had been made public.
On August 7, 1979, the bodies of Edward Hope Smith, 14, and Alfred Evans, 13, were found in a vacant lot on Niskey Lake Road in southwest Atlanta, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's chronology of the case. They had vanished in July. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the city police at first found no common thread among the deaths and disappearances of children that followed, the New Georgia Encyclopedia records. Atlanta already had a high rate of violent crime.
The families did not wait. On April 15, 1980, Camille Bell, whose son Yusuf, 9, had been found dead in November 1979, and other parents of missing and slain children formed the Committee to Stop Children's Murders. They suspected a link between the cases and pressed the city to treat them as connected, using methods learned in the civil rights movement.
On July 17, 1980, after nine deaths, five Atlanta police investigators were assigned to a special task force; it later grew to more than 50 officers. The death of Clifford Jones, 13, in August 1980 led police to investigate the killings as linked, the AJC chronology says. The FBI's own history of the case says its involvement began after a 7-year-old girl was abducted on June 22, 1980, when local police and the GBI asked whether the federal kidnapping law applied. It did not appear to, but the Bureau's Atlanta office followed out-of-state leads, the FBI laboratory helped, and its Behavioral Sciences Unit drew up a profile. After pressure from politicians, the press and Senator Sam Nunn, Attorney General William French Smith authorized a preliminary federal investigation on November 6, 1980, and on November 17 the FBI opened a major case with more than two dozen agents and staff assigned full time.
The search reached far beyond the police. In January 1981 President Reagan sent two Justice Department officials to the city. In March 1981 the administration gave Atlanta 979,000 dollars for youth programs and a 24-hour tip and counseling line, and federal aid for the year came to 1.2 million dollars, not counting agents' time. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. performed at the Atlanta Civic Center on March 10, 1981, and raised 200,000 dollars, while the city was paying 150,000 dollars a month in police overtime. Volunteers, search dog teams, and Guardian Angels from New York in red berets joined the searches.
Mayor Maynard Jackson, the city's first Black mayor, and his public safety commissioner, Lee P. Brown, both said the tragedy went beyond race. Many residents did not accept that. Jackson was criticized for putting the city's image ahead of its poorest residents, and suspicion that the killings were racially motivated, or that something larger was being hidden, ran through Black Atlanta, the New Georgia Encyclopedia says.
The official list of missing and murdered children grew to 29 or 30 names, depending on the account. Most were boys from poor neighborhoods. A WSB-TV memorial gallery published in 2019 lists 30 people, with their ages and the dates they went missing or were found:
Edward Smith, 14, and Alfred Evans, 13, in July 1979; Milton Harvey, 14, in September 1979; Yusef Bell, 9, in October 1979; Angel Lenair, 12, in March 1980; Jeffery Mathis, 10, in March 1980; Eric Middlebrooks, 14, in May 1980; Christopher Richardson, 12, in June 1980; Latonya Wilson, 7, in June 1980; Aaron Wyche, 10, in June 1980; Anthony Carter, 9, and Earl Terrell, 11, in July 1980; Clifford Jones, 13, in August 1980; Darron Glass, 10, in September 1980; Charles Stephens, 12, in October 1980; Aaron Jackson, 9, in November 1980; Patrick Rogers, 16, in November 1980; Lubie Geter, 14, and Terry Pue, 15, in January 1981; Patrick Baltazar, 11, and Curtis Walker, 15 (13 in other reports), in February 1981; Joseph Bell, 15, Timothy Hill, 13, Eddie Duncan, 21, Larry Rogers, 20, and Michael McIntosh, 23, in March 1981; John Porter, 28, in April 1981; Jimmy Ray Payne, 21, in April 1981; William Barrett, 17, in May 1981; and Nathaniel Cater, 27, in May 1981.
Angel Lenair and Latonya Wilson were the only girls on the list. Darron Glass has never been found. The cases of Milton Harvey, Latonya Wilson and Darron Glass are recorded as unresolved. John Porter, WSB notes, was discussed in connection with the killings but was not on the original official list. Behind each name is a family that has waited decades. Catherine Leach, the mother of Curtis Walker, told reporters in 2019 that she wanted to know who had killed her son. June Thompson, the sister of Darron Glass, said at the 2023 unveiling of a memorial that she was grateful at last to have a place to remember him.
Williams was the only child of two schoolteachers and grew up in northwest Atlanta, the AJC reported in 2005. As a teenager he built a radio station in his parents' basement, which earned him a mention in Jet magazine. Teachers and friends described him as very bright and a superior student. He graduated from Douglass High School in 1976 and enrolled at Georgia State University, leaving after one year.
By 23 he had tried several careers. He worked as a freelance television cameraman, called himself a music talent scout and hoped to be a record producer, and he slept in the daytime, CNN reported in 2010. According to the AJC, he bought a police scanner and a dark car and passed himself off as a police officer, and he had been arrested earlier in 1981 for impersonating one, an AJC account published in 2019 says. As a talent scout, investigators said, he was in contact with many young people. Years later his father, speaking at 91, remembered him as "a fine kid."
Jimmy Ray Payne was 21. He was unemployed and had no car or driver's license. On April 21, 1981, he said he was going to the Omni, the downtown arena, and he was not seen at home again. According to the Supreme Court of Georgia's summary of the trial evidence, a witness saw Payne and Williams the next day talking to a taxi driver on Highway 78, about a mile from the Chattahoochee River, near a white station wagon. Payne's body was found in the Chattahoochee on April 27, 1981. The medical examiner gave the cause of death as asphyxia by an undetermined method.
Nathaniel Cater was 27, according to the newspapers; the state Supreme Court gave his age as 28. He lived in a downtown hotel and did not have a car. A witness, Robert Henry, testified that he saw Cater holding hands with Williams outside the Rialto Theatre between 9:00 and 9:15 p.m. on May 21, 1981. Cater's body was found in the river on May 24, about 200 yards downstream from Interstate 285. He had died of asphyxia, probably from a chokehold applied with something broad and soft, such as a forearm, the court summarized. He was the sixth victim found in the Chattahoochee; three others had been found in or near the South River, the Atlanta Constitution reported.
In late April 1981, the FBI says, bodies began to turn up in the Chattahoochee, and the task force put teams on 14 bridges across the metropolitan area. One of them watched the bridge that carries the road from Fulton County into Cobb County, called the South Cobb Drive bridge in Atlanta Constitution reports and the Jackson Parkway Bridge in the court's opinion.
Around 3 a.m. on May 22, 1981 (2:52 a.m. in the FBI account), the surveillance team heard a loud splash and saw rings spreading on the water. A white Chevrolet station wagon started up and crossed the bridge, turned and crossed back, and officers stopped it. The AJC's chronology names the recruit who heard the splash as Bob Campbell. The driver was Wayne Williams. He said he was looking for the location of an audition. With no body and no probable cause, the officers let him go.
The FBI agent who questioned him, Mike McComas, told CNN in 2010 that when he asked Williams why he thought police were there, Williams answered that it was about the missing children, and that he saw a nylon cord in the station wagon. Williams denied to CNN that there was any cord and said that nothing had happened on the bridge. He acknowledged saying something like "I know this is about those boys," which he said referred to the missing young men in general. Two days later Cater's body surfaced downstream.
In 1983 the Supreme Court of Georgia upheld the stop. It found that the brief stop on the bridge was lawful, that Williams had agreed to the further detention and the search of his car, and that even if the encounter had amounted to an arrest, the officers had probable cause in the recent body dump, the car's approach to the bridge and the splash.
Investigators found his alibi weak, and he failed several polygraph examinations, the FBI says. On June 3 and 4, 1981, FBI and task force agents questioned him for 12 hours at FBI headquarters in Atlanta and searched his home and the station wagon. He was released without charge. About four hours later he held a news conference at the house, handed out copies of his résumé, and said his interrogators had told him he had killed Cater and that he was a prime suspect. He denied any connection to the killings.
The AJC's chronology says that on June 7 the FBI believed it had enough evidence to arrest him, while local authorities limited themselves to questioning him and searching his home. He was followed day and night. On the night of Saturday, June 20, he led the surveillance team on a high-speed drive past the homes of Mayor Jackson and Commissioner Brown, which made investigators worry that he might flee.
The decision to arrest him was made at a meeting in the office of the Fulton County district attorney, Lewis Slaton. At about 5 p.m. on Sunday, June 21, 1981, Williams was arrested at his home, with his lawyer, Mary Welcome, present, and charged with murder in Cater's death. Commissioner Brown announced the arrest at a short news conference outside the Fulton County Jail. Williams was put in an isolation cell.
Officials told the Atlanta Constitution that fiber evidence from his home and from victims was a key factor; one called a fiber match "99 percent conclusive." Slaton had already linked Cater's death to 13 other cases by the way the body was left, the lack of clothing and the method of killing. On July 17, 1981, a Fulton County grand jury indicted Williams on two counts of murder, for Cater and Payne.
The trial opened on December 28, according to the Supreme Court of Georgia, and ran about nine weeks before Judge Clarence Cooper of Fulton County Superior Court. Testimony took 35 days, nearly 200 witnesses were called, and the Atlanta Constitution believed it to be the longest murder trial in Georgia's history. Slaton led the prosecution with Assistant District Attorneys Jack Mallard, Gordon Miller and Joseph Drolet. Alvin Binder led the defense, with Mary Welcome. The journalist Murray Kempton, who attended every session, later wrote that Williams was "cunningly prosecuted and ineptly defended."
The core of the state's case was fibers and hairs. Three experts, Harold Deadman of the FBI, Larry Peterson of the GBI and Barry Gaudette of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, compared fibers and animal hairs from the victims with material from Williams's home, the cars his family used and the family's German shepherd. They described violet acetate and green cotton fibers matching a bedspread, green nylon fibers matching the carpet in his bedroom, yellow fibers matching a blanket, fibers from the station wagon, and dog hairs consistent with the family dog. The bedroom carpet fiber was traced to a line made by West Point Pepperell. The experts found seven associations with Payne and six with Cater. Some fibers from the bodies were lighter in color than the samples from the Williams home, which the state explained as the effect of river water. Prosecutors were allowed to give the jury mathematical probabilities for the fiber matches. Gordon Miller called it "probably the greatest fiber case ever tried."
Judge Cooper let the state introduce evidence about ten other deaths on the task force list, under Georgia's rule allowing similar transactions to be used to prove identity. They were Alfred Evans, 14 (13 in other accounts); Eric Middlebrooks, 14; Charles Stephens, 12; Terry Pue, 15; Lubie Geter, 14; Patrick Baltazar, 11; Larry Rogers, 18 (20 in other accounts); John Porter, 28; Joseph Bell, 15; and William Barrett, 16 (17 in other accounts). Williams was not charged with any of them. The court recorded that eight of the ten had died by asphyxia, that witnesses had placed Williams with several of them, and that there was blood evidence in the Porter and Barrett cases.
Witnesses described hostility on his part toward poor Black children and "street kids." One acquaintance testified that Williams had told him he had compiled statistics on reducing the Black male population. Another, Kent Hindsman, testified that Williams had passed him a note reading, "I could be a President, I could be a mayor, or I could even be a killer."
The defense fought the fiber evidence. Its own fiber expert, Charles Morton, complained of poor access to the evidence; the Supreme Court later found that the defense experts had been offered the fibers at least twice and had not examined them. Williams testified in his own defense, and so did his parents. He told the jury he had been at home sick on the night Robert Henry placed him with Cater. Under Mallard's cross-examination he lost his temper and called the prosecutor a "fool," the AJC later reported. "I was probably my own worst enemy," he told CNN in 2010. In the same interview he gave a different account of that night, saying he had been at a record company, and he said he had lied on the stand about having the station wagon. Kempton judged his mother a weak witness whose testimony gave the prosecution easy rebuttals.
The jury of nine women and three men, eight Black and four white, deliberated for more than 11 hours over two days. On Saturday, February 27, 1982, it found Williams guilty of murdering Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne. Judge Cooper imposed two consecutive life sentences and set parole eligibility at seven years, the Atlanta Constitution reported.
Williams said he held no malice toward the jury, the prosecutors or the court and hoped the real killers would be caught. His father called the verdict "a railroad job." His mother, who was not in court, said on television that there had been no justice. "It was the fibers, that was all I saw," Binder said. "It sure wasn't the witnesses." He promised an appeal.
Slaton said he had not expected any more killings once Williams was locked up, and there had been none. Mallard said the other task force cases, apart from the girls, fit the same pattern, and he described Williams as a man with a hatred of lower-class street children and a warped personality. Mayor Andrew Young praised Judge Cooper for an "eminently fair" trial and said the investigation of the other killings would go on. City Council President Marvin Arrington said, "It has been resolved."
On March 1, 1982, the task force announced that it would close 21 more cases, with one more to follow; all 22 were linked to Williams, the AJC chronology records. The FBI's history says the task force concluded there was enough evidence to link him to 20 more of the 29 deaths. In 2022 Atlanta News First reported that police believe him responsible for at least 24 of the 30 deaths. None of these attributions has been tested in court. The cases of the two girls and of Darron Glass were never closed against him.
To many families, and to critics of the investigation, closing the cases without charges left their children's deaths unanswered. Camille Bell came to side with Williams; the New Georgia Encyclopedia records that she called him the "thirtieth victim" of the killings. Asked by CNN in 2010 for her own verdict on him, she answered, "Innocent but stupid." Sheila Baltazar, the stepmother of Patrick Baltazar, told CNN that she believed without a shadow of a doubt that Williams had killed him.
The motion for a new trial was denied on December 16, 1982. On December 5, 1983, the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the convictions in Williams v. State, 251 Ga. 749, in an opinion by Justice Bell. Lynn Whatley and John Thomas Chason represented Williams.
The court held that it was for the trial judge to decide whether the fiber comparisons were competent scientific evidence, and that he had not erred in admitting them. It held that the ten other deaths were admissible to show a pattern and identity, finding enough similarity between them and the charged murders and enough evidence connecting Williams to each. It found that the experts' undocumented experiments and notes were not scientific reports that had to be disclosed, that probability testimony was allowed, that the defense had not shown any withheld evidence was both material and favorable, that the bridge stop and the search warrants were lawful, and that the evidence was sufficient for a rational jury to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Justice George Smith dissented. In CNN's account of his opinion, he found that the fiber evidence fell short of scientific certainty and that the pattern evidence should never have been admitted, saying that the only similarity among the crimes was that all the victims were dead.
In February 1985 CBS broadcast The Atlanta Child Murders, a five-hour docudrama by Abby Mann that suggested Williams had been railroaded. Fifty civic leaders who previewed it mostly criticized its loose handling of the facts, the AJC recorded, and nearly a third of the national television audience watched. Murray Kempton, reviewing it in The New York Review of Books, called it invented in key scenes, but repeated his own view that the trial had been unfair.
In February 1981 the GBI had looked into a tip from an informant about four brothers with ties to the Ku Klux Klan. They were polygraphed and cleared, and detectives found no link to the killings, CNN reported. Williams later made the Klan material central to his claims, arguing that officials hid evidence of Klan involvement to avoid a race war in Atlanta. Investigators have denied any cover-up.
On November 10, 1985, his lawyers asked for a new trial, arguing that he had been sacrificed to racial peace in Atlanta, the AJC chronology says. On January 8, 1988, according to the same chronology, his claim that prosecutors had withheld evidence was rejected.
Williams then turned to habeas corpus. On July 10, 1998, Judge Hal Craig of the Butts County Superior Court denied his state petition in a 60-page order, the Georgia attorney general's office announced. According to AP reports, the state Supreme Court later rejected his appeal for a new trial.
In February 2004 he filed a 146-page petition in the federal court in Atlanta. It said that law enforcement had covered up evidence that the Klan might have been responsible, that he had been framed, and that the fibers were not identical to those in his home and would not stand up to scientific scrutiny. "We believe he's innocent," his lawyer Jack Martin said. A GBI spokesman, John Bankhead, called the claims nonsense: "They got the right guy."
The district court denied the petition in February 2006. Williams then asked it to reconsider. U.S. District Judge Beverly Martin refused, finding that he had offered no new evidence that anyone else had committed the two murders or the 22 others attributed to him, AP reported. His appeal was filed late. On November 8, 2007, in Williams v. Chatman, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that his remaining claims about withheld evidence, newly discovered evidence and the other-crimes evidence were in substance a second habeas petition, which the district court had no power to hear without the appeals court's permission, and it ordered them dismissed.
In May 2005 Louis Graham, the police chief of DeKalb County, reopened the investigation of four child killings from February to May 1981. Graham, a former member of the task force, said he had become interested after reading old news clippings and that he had "never believed that he did anything." One of Williams's lawyers, Michael Jackson of Buffalo, New York, called it a significant development. Joseph Drolet, who had helped prosecute Williams, welcomed the inquiry but stood by the convictions, saying that after the arrest "the murders stopped, and there has been nothing since." Graham resigned about a year later after an outburst was recorded, and he died in 2010; DeKalb police told the AJC in late 2017 that the cases there were inactive.
In February 2007 a Superior Court judge, at the request of Williams's lawyers, ordered DNA testing of hairs and other evidence, tests that had not existed at the time of the trial. A veterinary genetics laboratory at the University of California, Davis compared seven dog hairs from five of the murder cases with hairs collected about 25 years earlier from the Williams family's dog, Sheba. The samples lacked enough nuclear DNA for the most precise test, so the lab used mitochondrial DNA. All seven hairs carried the same sequence as Sheba's, a sequence found in about one dog in 100 in the lab's database of more than 1,200 dogs.
On June 26, 2007, the Fulton County district attorney, Paul Howard, called a news conference. "This testing finally settles the debate over whether Wayne Williams was the Atlanta child killer," he said. "He is." The lab's director, Elizabeth Wictum, described the results as "fairly significant" but said they did not identify Sheba as the source. "We didn't individualize," she said. Her database had been built over the previous 10 to 15 years and did not include dogs from Atlanta at the time. Lynn Whatley, still Williams's lawyer, told Howard: "Justice has not been done in this case."
On August 1, 2007, the Associated Press reported the FBI's results on human hair found on the body of Patrick Baltazar, 11. Mitochondrial tests on eight hair fragments matched a mouth swab from Williams at every position but one, and the report said he "cannot be excluded as the source" of the hair. The sequence occurs in 3.4 percent of the Black population in the FBI database. A microscopic comparison found similar features but reached no conclusion. Whatley said he was disappointed the tests were not more definite. Harold Deadman, a former head of the FBI's DNA laboratory, later told CNN the result would exclude about 98 percent of people. Williams told CNN he had not killed Patrick Baltazar "or anybody else."
In June 2010 CNN broadcast a prison interview with Williams. "The bottom line is, nobody ever testified or even claimed that they saw me strike another person," he said. He suggested that the fiber evidence "may well have been manipulated" and said there had never been a yellow blanket. Asked whether a person could be killed with a chokehold, he said, "You probably could under the right circumstances."
The program reported that Robert Henry, the witness who said he saw Williams with Cater, had later signed an affidavit saying he could not identify the man, and in 1990 took that back, saying Williams was the man he had seen and that he had been told what to write in the affidavit. Mary Welcome said the defense had been hampered by lack of money and resources. Mallard said of the night Cater disappeared: "He was out that night, no question in my mind."
In 2013 the Justice Department wrote to Lynn Whatley as part of a national review of FBI microscopic hair analysis in cases from before 1999, carried out with the FBI, the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The letter said one or more of 13 examiners whose work might not have met professional standards was believed to have been involved in the prosecution of Wayne Bertram Williams, 11Alive reported. Williams said the truth was finally coming out. District Attorney Howard said in a statement that the federal review had found no problems with the testing, that the evidence in question was not material to the verdict and was not used at trial, and that it would not affect any appeal. Jack Mallard said the hair evidence had played a minor role and the fibers alone would have convicted. Whatley said he planned a final appeal and, failing that, might seek a presidential pardon. No ruling from such an appeal was reported.
Williams was denied parole four times between 1988 and 2005, the AJC reported. Before one hearing he wrote to the parole board that he was innocent and had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a 1994 letter he described his life as having gone "from promise to the pits." In November 2019 the State Board of Pardons and Paroles denied him again. Its letter of November 20 said he had not served enough time given the "nature and circumstances" of his offenses, and it set his next consideration for November 2027, the Associated Press reported.
On March 21, 2019, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Police Chief Erika Shields announced that the Atlanta police, the Fulton County District Attorney's Office and the GBI would gather the old evidence and retest it with modern methods. Bottoms said she had been 9 years old when the killings began and had felt her childhood taken from her. She said she had decided after talking with Catherine Leach, the mother of Curtis Walker. "It may be there is nothing left to be tested," she said, but "history will judge us by our actions, and we will be able to say we tried." The AP report noted that some victims' relatives had questioned whether officials rushed to blame Williams for every death.
In May 2019 Paul Howard announced Georgia's first conviction integrity unit and said Williams's conviction would be the first it reviewed in depth. In 2021 local reports said Assistant District Attorney Shelia Ross was leading that review. No outcome of the review has been reported.
The Atlanta Police Department said the money for DNA testing was approved on June 21, 2021, the 40th anniversary of Williams's arrest. That October, officers took evidence to a private laboratory in Salt Lake City, Utah, that specializes in degraded DNA. A retired deputy chief who had worked the cases, Lou Arcangeli, told WABE that he believed Williams was guilty.
While still mayor, Bottoms said enough DNA had been collected to send at least two cases to a private genetic laboratory, that fibers in all 30 cases had been re-examined, and that the review had been widened to cover 1970 to 1985 to look for overlooked victims. In December 2022 relatives of several victims asked the city to release the results. "No lab results have ever been given to the families," said Jimmy Howard, a spokesman for some of them. The police said the investigation remained open. Williams's new lawyer, Janis Mann, said no official report was available and that she hoped the testing would clear him. Nicolas Burston, a cousin of Anthony Carter, told 11Alive he thought Williams was innocent; Catherine Leach said she had waited and waited for someone to come.
On June 27, 2023, the city unveiled a memorial with an eternal flame on the grounds of City Hall, created by a task force Bottoms had set up. Bottoms closed the ceremony by reading the victims' names.
Williams has been in custody since June 21, 1981. He was photographed at Valdosta State Prison in 1999. The AJC and WSB-TV reported in June 2021, and 11Alive in 2022, that he was held at Telfair State Prison. His next parole consideration is set for November 2027. In December 2022 he remained in prison, still saying he is innocent, and no DNA results had been released.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Jimmy Ray Payne and Nathaniel Cater, two adult men, killed in separate events in April and May 1981. The convictions were affirmed on direct appeal in 1983 and have survived state and federal habeas review.
Attributed but never charged or tried: 22 other deaths on the task force list, closed in 1982. Ten of them were put before the jury as similar transactions, which the Georgia Supreme Court held admissible; that ruling is not a conviction for any of them. Officials have given different totals over the years: 20 more (FBI history), 22 (task force, 1982), 23 (an AJC photo caption) and at least 24 of 30 (Atlanta News First, 2022). Williams denies all of them.
Contested evidence: the fiber and hair evidence has been challenged by his lawyers since 1982, and Justice Smith's dissent questioned both the fibers and the pattern evidence. The 2007 dog hair results were described by the prosecutor as settling the matter and by the testing laboratory as not individualizing. The 2007 human hair result did not exclude Williams but did not identify him. The 2013 federal hair review named his case; the district attorney said the hair testimony was not material.
Other theories: Williams says officials hid evidence of Ku Klux Klan involvement. Investigators say a 1981 Klan lead was checked and cleared. No court has accepted the claim.
Details that vary between sources: the number of victims on the list (28, 29 or 30); Cater's age (27 in newspapers, 28 in the court opinion); the ages of Alfred Evans, Larry Rogers, William Barrett and Curtis Walker; the name of the bridge (South Cobb Drive bridge or Jackson Parkway Bridge); and the date Payne went missing (April 21 in the court opinion, April 23 in the WSB-TV gallery).
July 1979: Edward Hope Smith, 14, and Alfred Evans, 13, disappear; their bodies are found on Niskey Lake Road on August 7.
November 1979: Yusuf Bell, 9, is found dead.
April 15, 1980: parents including Camille Bell form the Committee to Stop Children's Murders.
June 22, 1980: a 7-year-old girl is abducted; the FBI is asked about federal jurisdiction.
July 17, 1980: Atlanta police form a special task force.
November 6 and 17, 1980: the Attorney General authorizes an FBI investigation; the Bureau opens a major case.
March 1981: federal aid to Atlanta; benefit concert by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.
April 21, 1981: Jimmy Ray Payne, 21, is last seen; his body is found in the Chattahoochee on April 27.
May 21, 1981: Nathaniel Cater, 27, is seen outside the Rialto Theatre.
May 22, 1981, about 3 a.m.: a stakeout team hears a splash; Williams is stopped on the bridge and released.
May 24, 1981: Cater's body is found downstream.
June 3 and 4, 1981: Williams is questioned for 12 hours by the FBI and holds a news conference.
June 21, 1981: arrested at his home and charged with Cater's murder.
July 17, 1981: indicted for the murders of Cater and Payne.
December 28: the trial opens before Judge Clarence Cooper.
February 27, 1982: found guilty of both murders; two consecutive life sentences.
March 1, 1982: the task force announces it will close 22 more cases, all attributed to him.
December 16, 1982: motion for a new trial denied.
December 5, 1983: the Supreme Court of Georgia affirms; Justice Smith dissents.
February 1985: CBS broadcasts The Atlanta Child Murders.
November 10, 1985: new trial sought.
July 10, 1998: state habeas petition denied in Butts County.
February 2004: federal habeas petition filed.
May 2005: DeKalb County police reopen four cases.
February 2006: federal habeas petition denied.
February to August 2007: court-ordered DNA tests on dog and human hairs.
November 8, 2007: the Eleventh Circuit orders his remaining claims dismissed.
June 2010: CNN broadcasts his prison interview.
2013: a Justice Department hair review letter names his case.
March 21, 2019: Atlanta reopens the child murder investigations.
May 2019: the Fulton County conviction integrity unit says it will review his case first.
November 2019: parole denied; next consideration November 2027.
June 21, 2021: funding for DNA testing approved.
October 2021: evidence delivered to a laboratory in Utah.
December 2022: families ask the city to release the results.
June 27, 2023: memorial unveiled at Atlanta City Hall.