A twenty-seventh and final body, that of 28-year-old Nathaniel Cater, was then found in the river, and Williams failed the FBI's polygraph three separate times. Williams was spotted on the final night and provided a questionable alibi, and though a nylon rope was spotted in his car, he was released on lack of evidence. When the police announced that fibers and hairs had been found on Baltazar's body, the next several boys were found in the Chattahoochee River, prompting FBI agent Mike McComas to suggest nighttime stakeouts of fourteen different bridges. and Frank Sinatra arrived in town to give a benefit concert – photographed by Williams' father, Homer. A witness observed Williams giving a ride to yet another victim, Jo-Jo Bell, though Williams denies it to O'Brien, and the murders soon received such widespread attention that Sammy Davis Jr. The telltale green fiber was found on his body as well, and Sheila requested an open casket to point out that he "could have been anybody's child." In February, the police received a tip that a family of brothers affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan may have been involved, though they managed to pass lie-detector tests about the killings. One boy, Patrick Baltazar, declared that he himself would catch the killer, and his stepmother Sheila suspected the worst when he too then went missing. Williams' co-worker Kathy Andrews recalls seeing disturbingly deep scratches on his arms, which he blamed on a bush, shortly before the discovery of another body bearing defensive wounds, and the killings began to increase in frequency, which FBI profiler Ray Hazelwood attributes to the murderer's reckless sense of confidence and invincibility. Kasim Reed, who became the mayor of Atlanta, recalls his childhood sense of fear as body count soon rose to fifteen.Ī reward was offered for information, and forensic scientist Larry Peterson tested endless pieces of physical evidence found on the bodies and eventually noticed a highly distinctive green fiber in January 1981.
Atlanta serial killer serial#
FBI officials speculated that the killer himself was black, as a white man would have stood out in the neighborhood, though black serial killers were almost unheard of at the time. Detective Bob Buffington explains that his observations of a "disturbing pattern" in the strangulation murders of several young black boys were dismissed, and Camille Bell states that she and other poor, black mothers of murdered children were told that they were "overreacting" and that the deaths were random, not the work of a serial killer. Now in his fifties, Williams asserts his innocence from prison and states that he was convicted because of "fear" and racism. Reporter Soledad O'Brien explains that in May 1981, twenty-two-year-old Williams was caught by police on the bridge from which many bodies had likely been dumped, and immediately mentioned the murders when questioned. This news report special explores the hunt for and prosecution of Wayne Williams, the Georgia man accused of murdering over two dozen boys and men in Atlantic in the 1980s.
ATLANTA CHILD MURDERS: REPORTED BY SOLEDAD O'BRIEN (TV) Summary
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