Wayne Bertram Williams was born in Atlanta on May 27, 1958, an only child of two schoolteachers. He was a bright, self-promoting young man who ran a radio station from his bedroom, worked as a freelance news photographer, and was trying to put together a music act.
Between July 1979 and May 1981 at least twenty-eight Black children, teenagers and young men were murdered in Atlanta. The city was in a state that is hard to overstate: curfews, search parties, a national fundraising campaign, and a widespread belief in the Black community that the killings were racially motivated and that the authorities were not trying.
On May 22, 1981, police watching a bridge over the Chattahoochee heard a splash and stopped Williams driving away. Two days later the body of Nathaniel Cater, twenty-seven, was recovered downstream. He was arrested in June and charged with the murders of Cater and of Jimmy Ray Payne, twenty-one. Both were adults.
The case rested on fibres. Carpet from the Williams family home and hairs from their dog were matched to fibres found on the two men and, crucially, on ten other victims, and the judge allowed evidence of those ten to be led as pattern. He was convicted on February 27, 1982, and given two life sentences. Within days the Atlanta task force administratively closed twenty-two of the child murder cases, attributing them to him, without charge or trial.
That is the difficulty with this entry, and it has not gone away. He is universally described as the Atlanta child murderer and was convicted of killing two grown men. The fibre evidence has been criticised, several victims' families have never accepted the closures, some of the killings continued after his arrest by some accounts, and in 2019 the City of Atlanta and the GBI reopened the evidence for modern DNA testing. He is serving life at Telfair and maintains his innocence.