March 16, 2018 • 48 mins
Trial by trace evidence.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to episode nine of Atlanta Monster. There's one
episode left, episode ten. The season finale will come out
next Friday. Today's episode contains graphic content. Listener discretion is advised.
After writing Sidney Dorsey a letter in prison, he finally
got back to us.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
All right, Sidney Dorsey letter, Well, at least you know
what wasn't tampered with because the Georgia State Prison stam interesting.
This is handwritten, which is why it's hard to read.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Here's what he said.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I received your letter, and I truly apologize for my
delaym responding to you. Please forgive and charge it to
my head and not my heart. Accordingly, I believe that
there still remains public interest in the Atlanta child murders,
but I don't think that the evidence presented during the
WAYN Williams murder trial proved him guilty or innocent. Unfortunately,
(00:58):
I had no hard evidence there, and I have no
hard evidence now to prove him guilty or innocent. Truly,
if I knew anything that would help close the case.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
I would provide it, but I don't.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Finally, if you have specific questions about the case, you
want answered, provide them to me now. We'll do my
best to answer them. Best regards Sidney. Contrary to his
Dateline interview years ago, Dorsey claimed to have no evidence
to prove Wayne's innocence. But what he did say is
that he felt the evidence in trial did not prove
him innocent or guilty. So what exactly happened during the
(01:32):
trial what convinced a jury that Wayne Williams was a murderer?
Speaker 4 (01:37):
I must say, as kind of a preamble to what
I would tell you, is that I did not have
a lot of time for conspiracy theories or aliens with
pressure guns who were killing kids. I never really believed
there was one killer. Wayne couldn't kill anybody. Have you
seen Wayne? These one of those pudgy little guys whose
(02:01):
mom made him practice of piano every afternoon instead of
coming out and playing ball. One of those kids, and
you're telling me he's gonna kill a twenty seven year
old convict. Give me a break if you believe that
Wayne Williams killed thirty kids. I mean, I've got a
little piece of real estate, just a little west of
(02:22):
West Pismo Beach, California, that you might be interested in.
Sometimes in murder cases, common sense prevails it walks like
a duck. It's probably a duck, and it just didn't
walk like a duck. It was a media frenzy. If
(02:43):
we were to try the Wayne Williams case today, I
can't guarantee you I'd.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Walk that sucker in a heartbeating.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
But hindsight, it's always twenty.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Twenty and Atlanta. Another body was discovering today the twenty.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
Third the Police Task Force headquarters.
Speaker 5 (03:01):
There are twenty seven faces on the wall, twenty six murdered,
one missing.
Speaker 6 (03:05):
We do not know the person or persons that are responsible.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Therefore, we do not have the money.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
From Tenner for TV and howstuff works in Atlanta.
Speaker 7 (03:13):
Like eleven other recent victims in Atlanta, Rogers apparently was
a Sphexa victory Atlanta.
Speaker 5 (03:17):
It was unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps
on killing.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
This is Atlanta monster.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Apparently I had some sort of reputation among defense investigators.
In a period of three years, I had worked twenty
three cases and I lost one, which was Wayne Williams.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
This is William north Road, an investigator for will William's
defense team.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
You're Mary, Welcome called and Mary City. You know we
shook in Usua, Hell and so I went to Atlanta
and it was a zoo.
Speaker 5 (04:08):
Most of the preparations for the Wayne Williams trial have
already been completed in just a few hours. Hundreds of
reporters and others interested in the case, we'll be trying
to make their way up to the fourth floor to
get a glimpse of the first day's proceedings.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
In his eyes, the biggest obstacle was the sensation of
the trial itself.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
More than eight hundred perspective jurors have been summoned for
the trial. The unusually lodge number was ordered by Judge
Cooper to try to ensure that at least twelve impartial
jurors can be found in this city besieged by publicity
about the murder case. Already, Network made his cruise who
reserves based on the street outside the courthouse for their
motor homes loaded with electronic equipment and media from across
the country. It made similar plans for coverage of the trial,
(04:44):
which may last two months.
Speaker 8 (04:46):
It was the crime of the century before OJ it
was that kind of intense interest. My name is Dale Russell.
I'm the senior investigative reporter for Fox five News. Here
at Lane, I began my career as a reporter the
very same month of the first murders of the missing
(05:07):
murdered kids, so I have covered this story my entire career.
There were so many journalists that we could not all
get in. We were actually all put in a room
off to the side.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
On full side of the courtroom will be reserved for reporters.
The overflow. We'll be able to watch the trial from
a special press room down the hall, and they'll all
be waiting. A few minutes before nine tomorrow morning, when
under extremely tighted security, accused murderer Wayne Williams will be
brought to the Fulden County Courthouse for the first day
of what may prove to be the most celebrated trial
in Atlanta history.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
Our entire defense really rested on common sense. There was
no place for that in that courtroom.
Speaker 9 (05:50):
The state would like to introduce the evidence to show
the jury a pattern of killings that claims Wayne Williams committed.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Was there a murder is a turn out. There were
five out of thirty. The others were not legal medical murders.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
As a defense investigator, one of his main points was
that no one of authority could be one hundred percent
sure that these murders were actually murders.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
If you start with that premise, how you going to
try a guy for murder.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
In his investigation, he found that most causes of death
were unknown, undetermined, or in some other way vague.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
One of the counts that Wayne was convicted of, the
original death certificate said undetermined, and then when they charged
Wayne with that murder, the medical examiner went back and
changed it to homicide.
Speaker 10 (06:44):
It is not known yet whether pain was strangled or suffocated.
Speaker 5 (06:48):
In the absence of the injuries, there are some features
of us fixing it.
Speaker 8 (06:53):
Any external marks at all around the.
Speaker 5 (06:54):
Neck, no extending locks it on the neck.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
You may remember this story from episode of four. The
medical examiner changed the cause of death for Jimmy ray Payne.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Why because he had a problem. It wasn't a legal
medical murder. And the idea that all these murders quote
unquote stopped happening after Wayne was arrested is enough crap
to for the last c minut.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
According to Northrope, there were way too many cooks in
the kitchen and things were bound to get messy.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
So you got this conglomeration of police from God only
knows where, State, local, FBI. You know, they were walking
all over each other. There was no one person out
there killing everybody. You see, here's the problem. If you
(07:46):
take non legal medical murders and you call them murders,
then all of a sudden, you've got a massacre of
thirty children. These are the murder kids. And of course
the media did everything in their power to sell the
idea that somebody was murdering the children of Atlama. There
(08:09):
were murders five that I know of, but the rest
I don't know.
Speaker 9 (08:20):
Investigators the morning of May twenty second wanted to know
one thing. Why was Wayne Williams driving over a bridge
at three o'clock after stakeout officers heard a loud splash. Well,
according to Williams, he was out looking for the address
of a singer, Cheryl Johnson, who had called him several
days earlier about his talent agency.
Speaker 6 (08:38):
It starts off with the bridge.
Speaker 8 (08:39):
The bridge testimony was extremely strong.
Speaker 9 (08:43):
The state today tried to show the jury that Wayne
Williams frankly lied and that after telling his alibi to investigators,
he tried to.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Cover his tracks.
Speaker 9 (08:51):
The defense claims, there's an explanation for everything we heard
today and that the state didn't explore all the possibilities.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
Wayne would have to pick up Jimmy Ray Payne or
Cater and throw him over the bridge rail into the water.
To make that whole scenario come about. Wayne stops on
the bridge. Place is covered with police. Now, maybe some
of the cadets are asleep. I don't know.
Speaker 8 (09:19):
It's bushwa I've been on stakeouts and I can tell
you guys were asleep. I mean, it just happens. But
we don't know that he was asleep.
Speaker 9 (09:27):
Although prosecutors had most of the pieces that night in May,
it's still like the essential part of the puzzle. Someone
actually seen William's car stopped on the bridge, or better yet,
the suspect throwing a body from the structure. Attorney Welcome
appeared confident that the evidence against her client didn't amount
to much.
Speaker 11 (09:43):
The young man who saw the car that had never stopped.
I think what you'd have to pick here is a
man driving with one hand, opening a car without stopping,
and casting one hundred and fifty something pounds over a bridge.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
We ran tests on that bridge.
Speaker 9 (10:02):
That sound, the defense claims, is the key to their proof.
Police recruit Bob Campbell, part of the stakeout team, says
William's card did not make that sound, indicating the vehicle
was traveling.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
At a slow rate of speed.
Speaker 9 (10:13):
So on the stand was this sound expert who conducted
tests for the defense at the bridge this week.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
The conclusion of the expert was Wayne didn't stop, and
no one saw Wayne stop.
Speaker 9 (10:26):
Testimony about the clankety clank a metal expansion joint makes
when a car rolls over it.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
The reason he didn't.
Speaker 9 (10:32):
Hear the car attorney's claim is because the recruit was
fast asleep.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Pulling from his notes in his memory, Dale recounted the
bridge testimony.
Speaker 8 (10:40):
The bridge testimony alone was extremely powerful. I just think
a Wayne was stopped by the bridge, or you stopped
near the bridge. But when you go through that testimony
point by point, it's riveting. This is his testimony.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Campbell.
Speaker 8 (10:54):
Hears a splash. He grabs his flashlight and a baton
he grabs for self defense. He puts the flashlight on
the river and sees big waves coming up on the shore.
He flashes the light up to the bridge, nothing back
down to the river, watching the waves subside, flashes it
up a second time. Now, think of the timing that
(11:16):
we're talking about here. You hear the splash, you get up,
you get your flashlight, you're looking. This is what he
testified to The lights came on and the car began
to move.
Speaker 9 (11:27):
While looking up at the bridge, he saw lights go
on after the splash. Then they moved away slowly. That
testimony supported his partner's claim that the car Williams was
driving approached the bridge very slowly and without headlights simultaneously.
Speaker 8 (11:41):
I have the words simultaneously written in my trial notes.
So the lights were off when the splash hit the water.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
The Williams and his defense team refuted this version of
the story.
Speaker 9 (11:52):
Williams bluntly stated the police version of the now famous
bridge incident was wrong, a lie. He claimed he wasn't
driving slow, that he didn't turn around in a parking
lot next to the bridge, that he did not throw
anything into the river.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
But, according to Northrope.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Wrong place, wrong time, he was convenient, a cynical establishment
just scooped him right up and said you're our boy.
It all came down to fibers.
Speaker 12 (12:28):
These are called fiber scopes. Criminologists at the State Crime
Lab use them to compare and match fibers, rope or fabric,
for instance, from different sources. Now workers there have matched
fibers from task force evidence to make the first official
correlation between the murders of at least two of Atlanta's
fifteen murdered children.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
To tell you the truth, it scared me. I didn't
have any experience with fibers. I was afraid of it.
I was afraid of the evidence.
Speaker 13 (12:57):
We've come up with some physical evidence that's common to
at least two with the bodies, and it falls into
the fiber category.
Speaker 14 (13:04):
People in the world need to know where somebody has
been from the dust on their clothes, of the soil
on their shoe, and the geological mapp will have a regional,
say unconsolidated sediment, but we can point to one spot
and say this is what the soil was like at
that point. So, for example, back there is the entire Punjab,
for example in Pakistan.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
How'd y'all collect all that?
Speaker 13 (13:25):
How long?
Speaker 11 (13:25):
This day?
Speaker 14 (13:26):
My lifetime? This is a lifetime's work. This is sand
and soil from all over the world.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
We visited palin It at his lab micro Trace outside
of Chicago. The walls were covered with small shelves home
to hundreds of bottles holding sand, dirt and fibers from
all over the world, because.
Speaker 14 (13:43):
There are all fibers from their manufacture and the world. Practically,
I was eight years old and at my first microscope,
I had my own lamb. So I've been doing it
for sixty four years looking through microscopes, senior research microscopist,
(14:05):
I guess president of the company, Like, yeah, lawyers can't
say that, but it's microscopist and it comes from microscopy, chemistry, physics, biology,
those things are all fundamental. There would be no forensic
science if you didn't have those sciences. So forensic science
one of the basics of forensic science. One of our
(14:26):
laws that we can call our own is called Lekard's
exchange principle. Edwin Lecard was a French scientist. He formulated
a principle based on the analysis of dusk. He promulgated
this theory briefly, It states that whenever two objects come
in contact, there's always a transfer of material.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Always.
Speaker 14 (14:46):
So let's say, for example, all of a sudden, for
some reason, you make me mad and I jump on
you and start attacking you, and we're never in contact again.
But we were you file charges against me for attacking you,
and you've sai your sweater, so we get your sweater
and we get my sweer. So well, are both black
sweaters a big deal? Well, if you look at the
(15:08):
fibers from your sweater and my swear, they're going to
turn out to be different. Almost certainly. Almost every day
of my life I looked through microscope for one reason
or another. Every time I go somewhere, or friends of
mine go somewhere, colleagues or people I've had from places
(15:30):
in other parts of the world, I ask them where
they are, where they live, if they've gone there to
come back, that they vacuum their clothing for us. And
so there's one of those cabinets you saw on the lab.
It's just filled with these little vacuum cassettes with dust.
But those are mixtures of things for us to analyze
and do research on it. We have pure materials, so
we have almost all the known synthetic fibers from different manufacturers,
(15:54):
so we have reference material to work from. If your
business is like ours, is identifying unknown substances. Ultimate goal
or the ultimate proof of an identification is to compare
it to authentic material.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Skip explained the role of fiber analyst in legal cases.
Speaker 14 (16:11):
The police who are there to investigate materials. They feel
they've got enough evidence that somebody should be brought upon charges.
Someone's accused, you've got a defense attorney who's higher than
under the belief that his client is innocent in fact
under our system here, and the defense attorney should do
everything they can to help prove his case. So their
advocates to their clients, the district attorney as the state
(16:34):
as their client. They're an advocate for their position, the
position of the police. There is a jury in most trials.
Their job is to listen objectively to the evidence. That's
why a jury is selected carefully. In all this, the
forensic scientist comes that our job is supposed to be
to help get to the truth. We can, certainly in
most cases provide facts. If somebody thinks it's not a fact,
(16:58):
they can try and prove that wrong. We go to
great lengths to make sure that something we present as
a fact is though, so it can't be proven wrong
because we don't have an axe to grind. We're just
there trying to make sure that the jury hears us
and what the likely explanations are, and if it's not
like the explanation, there's something else, then we can comment
on it, you know, we will. You know, I don't
(17:18):
think much about the human players in these cases. It
probably sounds odd to people because if you watch detective
shows and things, they're always analyzing motives, and they're analyzing,
you know, going back in the person's past and so forth. Honestly,
I would be more interested in looking at the dust
vacuum from his clothing than I would be, you know,
(17:39):
and never talking to him. We're questioning him. If you
were to bring me here and ask me a look
and tell you everything I could, I would be able
to tell you some things. Then you might actually be
amazed about what you see. The Lanchell murders are a
great example of microscopic trace evidents.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Skip was involved in the Atlanta Chilo murders case. One
of his former students, Larry Peterson, was working on the
case and he called him up for assistance.
Speaker 14 (18:02):
I remember I got the first call from Larry asked
me if I could come down to Atlanta. He was
as enthusiastic, as intelligent as scientists, as a young man
as you would want to meet. She's He's also a
good person. Sometimes you meet people who are talented and
you know they're not nice people, and Larry's just one
of these easy going guys who's innate kindness. We could
(18:25):
lead people to believe that he's not as bright.
Speaker 6 (18:27):
As he is.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Larry Peterson was the key Micross Capis on the Wayne
Williams case, so we met him in person.
Speaker 7 (18:35):
When I graduated from college in December of seventy seven,
started with the GBI Crime Lab in January of seventy eight,
so in mid seventy nine I had a year and
a half experience. There were over two hundred something investigators
assigned full time to the task Force, Fullton County to
cab County, the City of Atlanta, East Point PD. You
(18:56):
had Comb County, Rockdale County Sheriff's Department. You had a
lot of agencies, all contributing people that let's just say,
have varied degrees of cooperativeness with one another. They were
collecting tips at the task Force. They were constantly being
barraged with tips and adding information about sightings and vehicles
and people and all kinds of things. Some of that
(19:19):
led to searches and collectives that they would send in
evidence for or that we were going to do crime
scenes are So I can't tell you how many homes
and cars and suspect residences and whatever during this whole
thing that I literally went to much less that investigators
went to and did collectives and sent in. So it
was a task Force crime Scene collective unit between myself
(19:41):
and then zerologists and a latent print and that was
the Task Force crime Scene Unit. So if there's something
they thought of significance, this group went there and did
the processing. Through the investigation. There were hundreds of fiber
samples being sent in. For a comparison, I don't have
the exact number, but there was a number of dog
hares being sent in.
Speaker 6 (20:02):
Also.
Speaker 7 (20:04):
They started putting together this conference and they were going
to bring in fiber or analysts from the Southeast, from
the State Labs and some other notable microscubis. So Walter
mccrolan and Skip Paynic were two.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
After working multiple crime scenes in the Atlanta child murders case,
Larry discovered a particular trend in the fiber evidence found
on the victims, most significantly an oddly shaped green carpet fiber.
Speaker 7 (20:26):
There's three principal things that I was looking for. There
was the green carpet, there was the violet acetate, and
the dog hare. Fifteen victims had the green fibers matching
the green carpet. Some of them only had one, some
of them had more than one, five six seven green
carpet fibers. One of the things I knew about the
green fiber was, as the others had pointed out also,
(20:47):
is that it was highly unique in its shape. I
certainly had never seen it. So when all of those,
including people in industry, had indicated they had never seen
a fiber like that, then that just made it more
intriguing as to how distinctive or where did the fiber
come from. When this gentleman from DuPont sketched the cross
(21:08):
sexual shape on this napkin at lunch, the woman who
categorizes these cross sections said she thought she had remembered
a fiber like that.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
It was a very rare fiber, one that all the
experts had never seen before, but they eventually identified it.
Speaker 7 (21:20):
This is the woman won a one B fiber. The
two very large lobes in this one short leg lob
on top. Wellman was a small company in Johnsonville, South Carolina,
and made very little fiber. That made that one fiber
just by its shape, highly unusual and rare. But they
didn't make carpet. They just made fibers. So they sold
(21:42):
fibers to several companies who then tufted it in the carpet.
So now we need to figure out who was making it.
So we had their distribution, and there were five or
six companies that Wellman was settling to. FBI field agents
went and collected green carpet samples from all of these
companies and sent them into the laboratory.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
So just how rare was this green carpet fiber? Larry
pinpointed that exactly.
Speaker 7 (22:04):
So there was like six hundred and eighty thousand square
yards total of that carpet made. If you kind of
looked at an average room twelve point fifteen or about
twenty square yards, and you roughly have six hundred and
eighty rooms total production of that carpet. And they distributed
that carpet in ten southeastern states. Now they didn't have
records of how much went where or who it was
(22:25):
sold to, but if it was an equal distribution, that's
eighty two rooms of that carpet for the whole State
of Georgia.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Eighty two rooms.
Speaker 7 (22:34):
This is not just distinctive, it's actually very rare. The
FBI had dug out there was six hundred something thousand
occupied housing units in Metro Atlanta, so even if all
eighty two rooms of that carpet was in the Metro
Atlanta area, still it would be highly unusual to find it.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Over the years, Larry developed a simple analogy to help
people understand the rarity of this fiber.
Speaker 7 (22:57):
Imagine that you're a witness of a getaway car to
bank robbery. The getaway car is a lime green Rolls
Royce with a purple racing stripe. So you're a gonna think, wow,
that is really a distinctive car. If I ever see
that car again, I'm going to recognize that car. And
if you describe it to others and they have a
(23:18):
recognition of generally what cars look like, they will also
recognize that that's a highly unusual car. And if I
ever see it again, I'll say that's the car. The
odds of another car being like that have to be
astronomically low, if at all. So this green carpet fiber
was something like that, except that you couldn't recognize it.
(23:38):
At first, it became over time align green rolls Royce
with a purple stripe in the guise of a fiber
that unique.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
In the trial Wayne's the fence investigator, William Northrop was
busy doing some testing of his own.
Speaker 4 (23:53):
I call Lee Bailey's office. They gave me they swore
up him down. He was the best fiber expert in
the world. Yeah, and how that goes. He came out
of Kansas, believe it or not. When I picked him
up the airport, took me out and he said, listen,
stop by a department store. So we went over to
Lenox Square and there was the riches over there in
(24:16):
those days. We bought two new pillowcases and we went
down to the river to actually the bridge where Wayne
was spotted that night. We put the pillowcases in the
water and let the water flow through it. Pulled them
out there with thousands of fibers in the pillow cases.
(24:37):
So so much for fiber evidence.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
We asked Larry about this.
Speaker 6 (24:42):
So here's what really happened.
Speaker 7 (24:44):
He had gone down to the river with a pillow
case and allowed riverwater to flow through it for some
period of time. I don't know how long and then
he had collected fibers from the pillar case and was
indicating that the river was full of fibers, with the
notion then that there are some many fibers in the river.
That's the logical source for where the fibers came from,
as opposed to the Williams home. Through discovery we able
(25:08):
to get the samples that random Berze actually looked at
the actual fiber samples from the pell case he collected.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Larry was able to test the fibers Wyne's defence found
in their pillowcase experiment and according to him.
Speaker 7 (25:21):
So there were not thousands of fibers, there was like
thirty fibers total. None of thirty fibers was any of
the fibers remotely close to any of the connecting fibers
that we had in the trial.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Northolk claimed that fibers could not be found on the
body submerged in water for days because the skin.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Dissolves within five days. If you're submerged in water, your
skin dissolved, peels all you have what they call skin slippage,
and what does that tell you about your fiber evidence.
No fibers who were picked up anywhere they washed away
if there were.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
We asked Larry about this too, so he opened his
laptop and pulled up a power point with graphic pictures
of Nathaniel Cater's body.
Speaker 7 (26:05):
That's Nathaniel Cater's body. Oh my, I mean you put
this presentation.
Speaker 6 (26:11):
Let's see it here.
Speaker 7 (26:13):
I am collecting fibers out of his hair, and you're
being placed into a ziploc bag.
Speaker 6 (26:20):
Of the decomposition and his skin slippage whatever.
Speaker 7 (26:23):
Now that you're right, you know you're not going to
find anything on the skin or whatever of the body.
Speaker 6 (26:28):
Most of the fibers probably did get lost.
Speaker 7 (26:30):
But next to the scalp below the hair, there was
a layer of silt like out of the river, like
like clay silt. So his hair was acting as a
filter and silt was depositing, you know, next to the
scalp under the hair.
Speaker 6 (26:47):
Because of this silt kind of in casing the fibers.
Speaker 7 (26:50):
Whatever was there was gonna So I'm actually going digging
through the silt next to the scalp and finding fibers
and putting.
Speaker 6 (26:57):
Him in that Zubblont bag.
Speaker 7 (26:59):
So there and fibers that I found were collected there.
Because it's the movement of the water fibers would have
been protected because the silk had get incased them.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Larry had collected countless fibers from the bodies of victims,
but they still hadn't made a match. But all of
that was about to change. He recalled the knight that
sent their investigation in a whole new direction.
Speaker 7 (27:21):
I was at a trial in Douglas County and I
got a call out there, Hey, when you get done,
you need to go to the FBI headquarters building. You know,
there's something going on there. So myself and a coworker
who had helped me, he and I went down to
the headquarters building and we're waiting and there's a lot
of hush talking and not getting a lot of information,
(27:41):
you know, So what are we doing? And then he
and I see the FBI crime scene team that they
had flown down on several occasions. And then we were
told that there was a car. There was a car
to be processed down at the base by the FBI building,
And so we go down there, he and I, and
there as a serologist from the FBI team down there
(28:03):
as well to process the car.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
It was Wayne William's car, and.
Speaker 7 (28:09):
I'm asking where did the others go and they said, well,
there's something about a house. It was like the house.
So I actually called the head of the task force.
I said, what's going on. FBI folks are here and
we got a cars being processed about a house. Well,
he had the address of the house. So I drove
to the house. The FBI team was already in processing
(28:30):
the house. I knew what I was looking for. I
was looking for green carpet, violet acetate, and dogcare. I
go in the house and there's wald of wall, green carpet,
and there's a bed spread in the suspects bedroom and
it's violet but also has green in it as well
the average German shepherd dog. And so I principally collected
(28:50):
those things. I went back to the FBI building and
I said, I'm going to the lab. And I got
these samples. I want to see what they look like.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
But the first time Larry's fiber evidence seemed to be
going somewhere, but it would all come down to what
the samples look like under a microscope.
Speaker 7 (29:09):
So when I get to the lab, so it's like
ten o'clock at night, and so I mount the samples
up first, the green carpet and put it on the
microscope and.
Speaker 6 (29:17):
It's like, there it is.
Speaker 7 (29:20):
I threw the purple fibers under their next and here's
the bolt acetate. It's like unbelievable. And at that point
I've been looking for them for months and months, no matches,
and then here's two matches from one source. Right then
I knew it was highly significant.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Again, Larry and Northrop differed on this.
Speaker 7 (29:41):
I actually was expecting it not to match. Now I'm
feeling this needs to be a deep dive search. This
is not another place where I've gone to where there's
no green carpet and there's nothing purple, and they don't
have a dog, or they've got a dog, but it's
a different breed dog. And you know, there was nothing
even on the surface of it that made it seem
like maybe this was a maybe. And keep in mind
(30:07):
that just because you find a fiber that's not of
the clothing doesn't mean it's important. Because you're picking up
fibers from your home, your car, a lot of places
that you would normally go to, so there's nothing going
to jump out and go, hey, I'm a fiber from
a killer. These comparisons happened before Wayne Williams's home was
(30:29):
ever searched, before we ever had a piece of green carpet.
These were individual cases examined over, you know, on an
almost two year period of time.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
I liked Wayne. He was nerdish.
Speaker 8 (30:52):
Pretty much everybody in the media knewing it's some level.
He worked at the radio station I worked at right
before I was hired. I knew kind of from a distance.
So when he was arrested, we were all talking about it.
Everybody's going, that's Wayne. He's cocky. He's a little nerdy,
very kind of unassuming, unassuming in cocky.
Speaker 4 (31:14):
At the same time, I called doctor Brad Bayless and
I asked him if he would come over and hang
out and interview Wayne, let me know whether or not
he was crazy.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
This is popcorn with the FBI.
Speaker 13 (31:29):
I was a bureau sex crimes instructor, and I should
have seen this right away. He's a sexual sadist. He
gets arousal from the act of murdering the act of killing.
He's the most dangerous of all sexual predatice. They will
plan their murders, they will carry them out meticulously, and
he is a sexual sadist. He's the most dangerous of
(31:51):
all sexual predators and.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Mike mccombas with the FBI.
Speaker 15 (31:55):
I think Wayne has some mental issues, some disorders that
would cause someone to be a compulsive liar. In my
layman's terms, I think is a sociopath. I think he
exhibits all the characteristics the compulsive liar, the inability to
love or know that you're hurting somebody, the illusions of grandeur.
Speaker 6 (32:15):
I was a hostage negotiator in the.
Speaker 15 (32:17):
FBI, and of course we had to know when we
were dealing with people that had mental issues. If you
don't believe me, look up sociopath and look at what
the five characteristics, the five biggies. The hair will pop
up on your arm. You'll go wow.
Speaker 16 (32:31):
The term sociopath is used very loosely and there's no
one meaning of it. It has five or six different
meanings in the literature, and we don't use it because
it's kind of a coloquial term.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
This is doctor Scott Lillienfeld, an author and psychology professor
at EMRI University. One of his fields of study is psychopathy.
Speaker 16 (32:48):
Most of the classic work on psychopathy goes back to
the work of a man named Hervey Cleckley actually was
from Georgia, wrote a classic book in nineteen forty one
that went through several editions called The Mask of Sanity.
Speaker 6 (33:00):
The Mask of.
Speaker 16 (33:01):
Sanity called psychopathy because he thought that they presented with
a kind of convincing facade of being quite normal and
quite healthy. So they often seem healthy, actually in some
cases even healthier than us, but deep down there was
something very wrong with them. Likely delineated sixteen criteria that
he thought were central to psychopathy. Psychopathic people tend to
(33:22):
be charming on the outside. They make a good first
depression of other people. They often see poised normal, often
seem to be largely immune to anxiety and kind of
neurotic quirks. They also seem to show a number of
interpersonal deficits. They often are very self centered, They often
are manipulative, and they also show a lot of affective
(33:43):
emotional deficits. They're often callous, they seem to lack empathy,
they don't seem to form very close emotional attachments to people,
they don't seem to fall in love very deeply with people.
Then you see a lot of behavioral abnormalities, a lot
of things that they do that's different for the rest
of us. They tend to lie a lot, they cheat
a lot, They're often sexually promiscuous, and they often see
(34:05):
themselves as the victims. They often see their problems as
everybody else's fault, but theirs. They seem to like insight
into the nature and extent of their problems, And my
take on it, in part is that they just have
very little capacity for introspection. I'm having all of these problems,
I keep getting caught, I'm doing all these things, and
so well, it's it's got to be my upbring or
(34:28):
the way that people have treated me, or the fact
I've had many bad breaks in life, or blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah. Rarely is it acknowledge that
it's their fault. They will often exhibit poor impulse control,
often explode unpredictably, though often have a short fuse. When
someone insults them or threatens them, they may explode very quickly.
(34:50):
They may have a very short fuse. So it's a
very complex picture. I think when you put all that together,
it's like, what is that beast? It's really hard to
sort of summarize it. But would colickily argue as again,
it's this mascul sanity. See this wolf in chef's clothing.
You see someone who superficially seems very healthy, well adjusted, charismatic, poised,
(35:10):
but then deep down there was something very wrong with him.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Even for the defense team, it was important to decide
whether or not Wayne was stable.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
I wanted to know if Wayne was sane, which he was.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
He arranged an interview between Wayne and a specialist. According
to their expert, Wayne was saying, but there was still
one major problem with their case.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Wayne fit the profile.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
Wayne fit the profile that the FBI had, but he
had a different take on that. Profiling to me is
an inexact science. Now people will argue with me, but
I'm not going to be dependent on profiling. He wanted
to make a breakthrough. He wanted to find his place,
(35:58):
and the closest he had was his connections to the media.
Wayne would call and tell me, you know, we need
to do this, We need to do that. Okay, fine, Wayne,
write me a check. You know we don't have any money. Wayne.
Speaker 8 (36:15):
It was two days of testimony.
Speaker 10 (36:18):
When the sun's first light at the County Courthouse, the
crowd was already here. They started gathering at four am.
Even though the doors didn't open till eight some four
hundred showed up hoping to watch Wayne Williams testify. And
when you get a crowd this size competing for about
fifty court room seats, you've got trouble.
Speaker 8 (36:35):
So he did. We fell a pretty good job in
the first day of testimony, kept his composure, answered the
questions that they had to break in. They had to
show the jury a different side of Wayne Williams. They
had to let the jury see that this unassuming guy
sitting in front of them had this other side to
(36:57):
his personality, and they got it.
Speaker 9 (37:01):
Wayne Williams was not the mild mannered witness we saw
the last two days.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
He was irritable, arrogant.
Speaker 9 (37:07):
Assistant Da Jack Mallard had him right where he wanted him.
Speaker 8 (37:11):
He finally broke and he snapped at the prosecutor.
Speaker 9 (37:15):
He called FBI agent's goons, didn't answer some of the
prosecutor's questions and said his own defense attorney Mary Welcome,
forced him to give an interview for money.
Speaker 8 (37:25):
You want the real Wayne Williams, Well, you got him
right here is an observer.
Speaker 15 (37:30):
He was electric.
Speaker 9 (37:31):
Mallard, Mister Williams, you've been eating up all this worldwide publicity,
haven't you, Williams, No, I haven't. I'm tired of sitting here,
you telling these folks I fit the profile. Mallard Wasn't
these murders your center stage? Williams, you must be a fool.
Speaker 8 (37:48):
I distinctly remember writing down I've got it here for you,
looking up at somebody I don't remember who, making eye
contact and looking at each other like, oh my gosh,
here we go. Wayne became combative and testing, calling the
prosecutor names. He was very, very combative.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
As an observer.
Speaker 8 (38:08):
As a juror, you saw a different sign to Wayne Williams.
They did what they set out to do.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
Yeah, they got Wayne's goat. Mary advised Wayne not to testify,
I mean, what are you going to do? But Wayne
viewed it as I'm just overwhelmed. Anyway, I want to
tell my story. They got his goat, they triggered him,
and he exploded. He was going to explain it.
Speaker 9 (38:37):
The defense may have recouped a little after Williams fought
back tears, later telling the jury he was just sick
and tired of jail, the murder charges, and the harassment
from police and the media. This was the star witness
for the state, Larry Peterson, who for months has slumped
over microscopes looking at fibers and hair taken from the
two bodies. In court, he showed the jury photographs for
(38:59):
the first time, pictures of fibers that he claims are
similar and in his words, they matchine every basic property.
Speaker 8 (39:06):
Nine weeks of testimony, the jury came back in what
was under ten hours, as I recall, which is a
very short period of time. They had an early verdict.
All in all, having watched what the jury watched, having
heard everything the jury heard, having talked to the drawers afterwards,
I'm not surprised by their verdict at all. I was
(39:29):
a very young reporter when this was going on. This
was was burned into my brain. It was so impressionable
for me as a young person. I mean, I can
recall the you know, wellman one eighty one b nylon
trilobal fiber made by West Point Pepperel that, according to
the testimony, was found in only I think it was
(39:50):
eighty two helms. This resonated in my head in a
way that a lot of other stories I've covered didn't.
The problem this case as it's complex, and it's lengthy,
and there are many moving parts and many pieces of
the puzzle, and no one piece blows you away. You
can't talk about the bridge and say, Okay, that's it.
(40:12):
You can't talk about the fibers and say that does
it for me. It was this long, slow unfolding of
circumstantial evidence.
Speaker 17 (40:21):
When the Williams trial is finally history, it will be
distinguished not only by the sheer bulk of scientific evidence
presented to the jury, but also in the methods that
scientific evidence was collected. Sophisticated new microscopes were brought in,
and controversial testing techniques like neutron activity analysis were used
to compare the fibers and dog here found on some
(40:42):
of the trial victims with those found in William's home.
Speaker 4 (40:49):
I remembered closing arguments basically where they use this deal,
you know, there have been no more murders since Wayne
was arrested. Its blooney.
Speaker 7 (41:04):
The fence and closing arguments placed a thimble on the
stand in front of the jury and had mentioned that
that all the evidence that literally there's just a thimble
full of evidence, that's all there is, you know, obviously
trying to infer that because it's so small, it has
minimal significance. But you know, I think that if you
take a jury today and you tell them that this
(41:27):
thimble is full of the Black plague and you set
it on the on the Banisher, I think people are
going to immediately recognize that this is not a place
I want to be in. That's something that small. You
think of microbes and viruses and things that are kind
of common today that people fear things that are small
can be very powerful. So really the only explanation is
(41:49):
that either you can say all of this is just
made up. And so we went to a great deal
during the trial to explain how the finders have significance
and why did these particular ones have significant it's.
Speaker 6 (42:02):
Government conspiracy.
Speaker 7 (42:03):
Well, if there's a government conspiracy, then I guess I'm
part of the government conspiracy because I worked for the
GBL in the crime lab and as a young forensic scientist,
you know, went to these crime scenes. Did these collections
be these comparisons? I think it would be extremely difficult
for anybody to come in and replace all of that
with some kind of contaminated evidence to make it all
match the Williams Home environment.
Speaker 6 (42:25):
There's just no way.
Speaker 7 (42:26):
So I haven't heard another viable explanation to how it
could be other than that. But I understand it's technical
in a lot of ways, and people who don't want
to believe things are just not going to believe.
Speaker 4 (42:39):
It had to be a black judge, had to be
had to be a black killer. All of racism, all
of our prejudices, all of them just came to the
surface in the middle of that, and it was just
a shame.
Speaker 7 (42:57):
You know, some people are just they're going to believe
what they want to believe, and nothing you can say
or do is going to dissuade them or convince them
that it's something different than that. But I know what
I know, and I think that if people are being
reasonable and were being level headed and are not being
biased about a preconceived notion of in route, when you
(43:18):
lay it out, you can see it.
Speaker 4 (43:22):
Among those kids had died. Could have been a great poet,
could have been a cured cancer, could have been a
Nobel Prize winner.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Who knows, but.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
They never had the opportunity.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Even though Wayne was in the hole and couldn't talk,
I didn't want to stop gathering stories. By this point
in time, I talked to so many people with all
different opinions. I felt that some things were finally cleared
up for me. What really happened to trial? What truly
were the lynch pins of William's case? And how exactly
trace evidence in fiber? And now aalysis stood up in
a court of law. After talking to Larry, the fiber
(44:04):
evidence seems stronger than ever. And right when things seem
to be making sense, I got a phone call.
Speaker 18 (44:11):
You may start the conversation. Now what here is a
womb killed all straighters. I'm finally onto all of everything.
I'm doing great. They let me out yesterday. You know
it was the craziest favorite book. How yesterday it happen?
Will be a separate podcast except but you would never believe.
(44:34):
Maybe it's a good thing that went down because a
lot of role blocks got out on the way and
a lot of wolves got overpay you never believe.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Next time when Atlanta Monster, I talked to Wayne Williams again,
but this time I have a whole new set of
questions for him. Next time on the season finale of
(45:04):
Atlanta Monster, that was the.
Speaker 7 (45:07):
Only hole that was ever knocked into the fiber evidence.
We have these records that clearly indicate the seventy nine
LGD was not available to the family. But yet we
have trunkliner fibers that match that trunkliner that had bugged
me through post trial.
Speaker 6 (45:24):
It always had bugged me.
Speaker 8 (45:28):
It was physical evidence, some of the strongest evidence that
was presented in the trial. And I would tell you
that ninety nine point nine percent of your audience has
never heard of it.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Blood Saints.
Speaker 19 (45:46):
And when he said I was looking at the car,
and I was looking at the person in the car,
and I was looking at the sketch. I was looking
at the sketch in the back of my man.
Speaker 4 (45:54):
They'll be on TV.
Speaker 19 (46:00):
I'm gonna get rid of going, he said, I get
you a rad I said, I don't eat no rat.
I heard some car tag, so I can get backed up.
And look, he whooped the car around in the middle
of the street.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week,
with new episodes every Friday, A joint production between How
Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup
and Vanity Set.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Audio archives courtesy.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Of WSB News Film and Videotape Collection, Brown Media Archives,
University of Georgia Libraries For the latest updates, please visit
atlantamonster dot com or follow us on social media. One
last thing we've set up in Atlanta Monster tip line.
Anyone with information, leads, or personal accounts pertaining to the
(47:05):
Atlanta child murders can call.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Us and leave a message.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
The number is one eight three three two eight five
six six sixty seven. Again, that's one eight three three
two eight five six six sixty seven.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 7 (47:47):
A Line Green Rules voice with a purple stripe in
the guise of a fiber that unique. Not knowing how
many Line Green Rolls voices might be out there with
a purple Rations tric, imagine you've seen one
You're listening to episode nine of Atlanta Monster. There's one
episode left, episode ten. The season finale will come out
next Friday. Today's episode contains graphic content. Listener discretion is advised.
After writing Sidney Dorsey a letter in prison, he finally
got back to us.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
All right, Sidney Dorsey letter, Well, at least you know
what wasn't tampered with because the Georgia State Prison stam interesting.
This is handwritten, which is why it's hard to read.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Here's what he said.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I received your letter, and I truly apologize for my
delaym responding to you. Please forgive and charge it to
my head and not my heart. Accordingly, I believe that
there still remains public interest in the Atlanta child murders,
but I don't think that the evidence presented during the
WAYN Williams murder trial proved him guilty or innocent. Unfortunately,
(00:58):
I had no hard evidence there, and I have no
hard evidence now to prove him guilty or innocent. Truly,
if I knew anything that would help close the case.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
I would provide it, but I don't.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Finally, if you have specific questions about the case, you
want answered, provide them to me now. We'll do my
best to answer them. Best regards Sidney. Contrary to his
Dateline interview years ago, Dorsey claimed to have no evidence
to prove Wayne's innocence. But what he did say is
that he felt the evidence in trial did not prove
him innocent or guilty. So what exactly happened during the
(01:32):
trial what convinced a jury that Wayne Williams was a murderer?
Speaker 4 (01:37):
I must say, as kind of a preamble to what
I would tell you, is that I did not have
a lot of time for conspiracy theories or aliens with
pressure guns who were killing kids. I never really believed
there was one killer. Wayne couldn't kill anybody. Have you
seen Wayne? These one of those pudgy little guys whose
(02:01):
mom made him practice of piano every afternoon instead of
coming out and playing ball. One of those kids, and
you're telling me he's gonna kill a twenty seven year
old convict. Give me a break if you believe that
Wayne Williams killed thirty kids. I mean, I've got a
little piece of real estate, just a little west of
(02:22):
West Pismo Beach, California, that you might be interested in.
Sometimes in murder cases, common sense prevails it walks like
a duck. It's probably a duck, and it just didn't
walk like a duck. It was a media frenzy. If
(02:43):
we were to try the Wayne Williams case today, I
can't guarantee you I'd.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Walk that sucker in a heartbeating.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
But hindsight, it's always twenty.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Twenty and Atlanta. Another body was discovering today the twenty.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
Third the Police Task Force headquarters.
Speaker 5 (03:01):
There are twenty seven faces on the wall, twenty six murdered,
one missing.
Speaker 6 (03:05):
We do not know the person or persons that are responsible.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Therefore, we do not have the money.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
From Tenner for TV and howstuff works in Atlanta.
Speaker 7 (03:13):
Like eleven other recent victims in Atlanta, Rogers apparently was
a Sphexa victory Atlanta.
Speaker 5 (03:17):
It was unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps
on killing.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
This is Atlanta monster.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Apparently I had some sort of reputation among defense investigators.
In a period of three years, I had worked twenty
three cases and I lost one, which was Wayne Williams.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
This is William north Road, an investigator for will William's
defense team.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
You're Mary, Welcome called and Mary City. You know we
shook in Usua, Hell and so I went to Atlanta
and it was a zoo.
Speaker 5 (04:08):
Most of the preparations for the Wayne Williams trial have
already been completed in just a few hours. Hundreds of
reporters and others interested in the case, we'll be trying
to make their way up to the fourth floor to
get a glimpse of the first day's proceedings.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
In his eyes, the biggest obstacle was the sensation of
the trial itself.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
More than eight hundred perspective jurors have been summoned for
the trial. The unusually lodge number was ordered by Judge
Cooper to try to ensure that at least twelve impartial
jurors can be found in this city besieged by publicity
about the murder case. Already, Network made his cruise who
reserves based on the street outside the courthouse for their
motor homes loaded with electronic equipment and media from across
the country. It made similar plans for coverage of the trial,
(04:44):
which may last two months.
Speaker 8 (04:46):
It was the crime of the century before OJ it
was that kind of intense interest. My name is Dale Russell.
I'm the senior investigative reporter for Fox five News. Here
at Lane, I began my career as a reporter the
very same month of the first murders of the missing
(05:07):
murdered kids, so I have covered this story my entire career.
There were so many journalists that we could not all
get in. We were actually all put in a room
off to the side.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
On full side of the courtroom will be reserved for reporters.
The overflow. We'll be able to watch the trial from
a special press room down the hall, and they'll all
be waiting. A few minutes before nine tomorrow morning, when
under extremely tighted security, accused murderer Wayne Williams will be
brought to the Fulden County Courthouse for the first day
of what may prove to be the most celebrated trial
in Atlanta history.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
Our entire defense really rested on common sense. There was
no place for that in that courtroom.
Speaker 9 (05:50):
The state would like to introduce the evidence to show
the jury a pattern of killings that claims Wayne Williams committed.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Was there a murder is a turn out. There were
five out of thirty. The others were not legal medical murders.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
As a defense investigator, one of his main points was
that no one of authority could be one hundred percent
sure that these murders were actually murders.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
If you start with that premise, how you going to
try a guy for murder.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
In his investigation, he found that most causes of death
were unknown, undetermined, or in some other way vague.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
One of the counts that Wayne was convicted of, the
original death certificate said undetermined, and then when they charged
Wayne with that murder, the medical examiner went back and
changed it to homicide.
Speaker 10 (06:44):
It is not known yet whether pain was strangled or suffocated.
Speaker 5 (06:48):
In the absence of the injuries, there are some features
of us fixing it.
Speaker 8 (06:53):
Any external marks at all around the.
Speaker 5 (06:54):
Neck, no extending locks it on the neck.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
You may remember this story from episode of four. The
medical examiner changed the cause of death for Jimmy ray Payne.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Why because he had a problem. It wasn't a legal
medical murder. And the idea that all these murders quote
unquote stopped happening after Wayne was arrested is enough crap
to for the last c minut.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
According to Northrope, there were way too many cooks in
the kitchen and things were bound to get messy.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
So you got this conglomeration of police from God only
knows where, State, local, FBI. You know, they were walking
all over each other. There was no one person out
there killing everybody. You see, here's the problem. If you
(07:46):
take non legal medical murders and you call them murders,
then all of a sudden, you've got a massacre of
thirty children. These are the murder kids. And of course
the media did everything in their power to sell the
idea that somebody was murdering the children of Atlama. There
(08:09):
were murders five that I know of, but the rest
I don't know.
Speaker 9 (08:20):
Investigators the morning of May twenty second wanted to know
one thing. Why was Wayne Williams driving over a bridge
at three o'clock after stakeout officers heard a loud splash. Well,
according to Williams, he was out looking for the address
of a singer, Cheryl Johnson, who had called him several
days earlier about his talent agency.
Speaker 6 (08:38):
It starts off with the bridge.
Speaker 8 (08:39):
The bridge testimony was extremely strong.
Speaker 9 (08:43):
The state today tried to show the jury that Wayne
Williams frankly lied and that after telling his alibi to investigators,
he tried to.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Cover his tracks.
Speaker 9 (08:51):
The defense claims, there's an explanation for everything we heard
today and that the state didn't explore all the possibilities.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
Wayne would have to pick up Jimmy Ray Payne or
Cater and throw him over the bridge rail into the water.
To make that whole scenario come about. Wayne stops on
the bridge. Place is covered with police. Now, maybe some
of the cadets are asleep. I don't know.
Speaker 8 (09:19):
It's bushwa I've been on stakeouts and I can tell
you guys were asleep. I mean, it just happens. But
we don't know that he was asleep.
Speaker 9 (09:27):
Although prosecutors had most of the pieces that night in May,
it's still like the essential part of the puzzle. Someone
actually seen William's car stopped on the bridge, or better yet,
the suspect throwing a body from the structure. Attorney Welcome
appeared confident that the evidence against her client didn't amount
to much.
Speaker 11 (09:43):
The young man who saw the car that had never stopped.
I think what you'd have to pick here is a
man driving with one hand, opening a car without stopping,
and casting one hundred and fifty something pounds over a bridge.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
We ran tests on that bridge.
Speaker 9 (10:02):
That sound, the defense claims, is the key to their proof.
Police recruit Bob Campbell, part of the stakeout team, says
William's card did not make that sound, indicating the vehicle
was traveling.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
At a slow rate of speed.
Speaker 9 (10:13):
So on the stand was this sound expert who conducted
tests for the defense at the bridge this week.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
The conclusion of the expert was Wayne didn't stop, and
no one saw Wayne stop.
Speaker 9 (10:26):
Testimony about the clankety clank a metal expansion joint makes
when a car rolls over it.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
The reason he didn't.
Speaker 9 (10:32):
Hear the car attorney's claim is because the recruit was
fast asleep.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Pulling from his notes in his memory, Dale recounted the
bridge testimony.
Speaker 8 (10:40):
The bridge testimony alone was extremely powerful. I just think
a Wayne was stopped by the bridge, or you stopped
near the bridge. But when you go through that testimony
point by point, it's riveting. This is his testimony.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Campbell.
Speaker 8 (10:54):
Hears a splash. He grabs his flashlight and a baton
he grabs for self defense. He puts the flashlight on
the river and sees big waves coming up on the shore.
He flashes the light up to the bridge, nothing back
down to the river, watching the waves subside, flashes it
up a second time. Now, think of the timing that
(11:16):
we're talking about here. You hear the splash, you get up,
you get your flashlight, you're looking. This is what he
testified to The lights came on and the car began
to move.
Speaker 9 (11:27):
While looking up at the bridge, he saw lights go
on after the splash. Then they moved away slowly. That
testimony supported his partner's claim that the car Williams was
driving approached the bridge very slowly and without headlights simultaneously.
Speaker 8 (11:41):
I have the words simultaneously written in my trial notes.
So the lights were off when the splash hit the water.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
The Williams and his defense team refuted this version of
the story.
Speaker 9 (11:52):
Williams bluntly stated the police version of the now famous
bridge incident was wrong, a lie. He claimed he wasn't
driving slow, that he didn't turn around in a parking
lot next to the bridge, that he did not throw
anything into the river.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
But, according to Northrope.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Wrong place, wrong time, he was convenient, a cynical establishment
just scooped him right up and said you're our boy.
It all came down to fibers.
Speaker 12 (12:28):
These are called fiber scopes. Criminologists at the State Crime
Lab use them to compare and match fibers, rope or fabric,
for instance, from different sources. Now workers there have matched
fibers from task force evidence to make the first official
correlation between the murders of at least two of Atlanta's
fifteen murdered children.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
To tell you the truth, it scared me. I didn't
have any experience with fibers. I was afraid of it.
I was afraid of the evidence.
Speaker 13 (12:57):
We've come up with some physical evidence that's common to
at least two with the bodies, and it falls into
the fiber category.
Speaker 14 (13:04):
People in the world need to know where somebody has
been from the dust on their clothes, of the soil
on their shoe, and the geological mapp will have a regional,
say unconsolidated sediment, but we can point to one spot
and say this is what the soil was like at
that point. So, for example, back there is the entire Punjab,
for example in Pakistan.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
How'd y'all collect all that?
Speaker 13 (13:25):
How long?
Speaker 11 (13:25):
This day?
Speaker 14 (13:26):
My lifetime? This is a lifetime's work. This is sand
and soil from all over the world.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
We visited palin It at his lab micro Trace outside
of Chicago. The walls were covered with small shelves home
to hundreds of bottles holding sand, dirt and fibers from
all over the world, because.
Speaker 14 (13:43):
There are all fibers from their manufacture and the world. Practically,
I was eight years old and at my first microscope,
I had my own lamb. So I've been doing it
for sixty four years looking through microscopes, senior research microscopist,
(14:05):
I guess president of the company, Like, yeah, lawyers can't
say that, but it's microscopist and it comes from microscopy, chemistry, physics, biology,
those things are all fundamental. There would be no forensic
science if you didn't have those sciences. So forensic science
one of the basics of forensic science. One of our
(14:26):
laws that we can call our own is called Lekard's
exchange principle. Edwin Lecard was a French scientist. He formulated
a principle based on the analysis of dusk. He promulgated
this theory briefly, It states that whenever two objects come
in contact, there's always a transfer of material.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Always.
Speaker 14 (14:46):
So let's say, for example, all of a sudden, for
some reason, you make me mad and I jump on
you and start attacking you, and we're never in contact again.
But we were you file charges against me for attacking you,
and you've sai your sweater, so we get your sweater
and we get my sweer. So well, are both black
sweaters a big deal? Well, if you look at the
(15:08):
fibers from your sweater and my swear, they're going to
turn out to be different. Almost certainly. Almost every day
of my life I looked through microscope for one reason
or another. Every time I go somewhere, or friends of
mine go somewhere, colleagues or people I've had from places
(15:30):
in other parts of the world, I ask them where
they are, where they live, if they've gone there to
come back, that they vacuum their clothing for us. And
so there's one of those cabinets you saw on the lab.
It's just filled with these little vacuum cassettes with dust.
But those are mixtures of things for us to analyze
and do research on it. We have pure materials, so
we have almost all the known synthetic fibers from different manufacturers,
(15:54):
so we have reference material to work from. If your
business is like ours, is identifying unknown substances. Ultimate goal
or the ultimate proof of an identification is to compare
it to authentic material.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Skip explained the role of fiber analyst in legal cases.
Speaker 14 (16:11):
The police who are there to investigate materials. They feel
they've got enough evidence that somebody should be brought upon charges.
Someone's accused, you've got a defense attorney who's higher than
under the belief that his client is innocent in fact
under our system here, and the defense attorney should do
everything they can to help prove his case. So their
advocates to their clients, the district attorney as the state
(16:34):
as their client. They're an advocate for their position, the
position of the police. There is a jury in most trials.
Their job is to listen objectively to the evidence. That's
why a jury is selected carefully. In all this, the
forensic scientist comes that our job is supposed to be
to help get to the truth. We can, certainly in
most cases provide facts. If somebody thinks it's not a fact,
(16:58):
they can try and prove that wrong. We go to
great lengths to make sure that something we present as
a fact is though, so it can't be proven wrong
because we don't have an axe to grind. We're just
there trying to make sure that the jury hears us
and what the likely explanations are, and if it's not
like the explanation, there's something else, then we can comment
on it, you know, we will. You know, I don't
(17:18):
think much about the human players in these cases. It
probably sounds odd to people because if you watch detective
shows and things, they're always analyzing motives, and they're analyzing,
you know, going back in the person's past and so forth. Honestly,
I would be more interested in looking at the dust
vacuum from his clothing than I would be, you know,
(17:39):
and never talking to him. We're questioning him. If you
were to bring me here and ask me a look
and tell you everything I could, I would be able
to tell you some things. Then you might actually be
amazed about what you see. The Lanchell murders are a
great example of microscopic trace evidents.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Skip was involved in the Atlanta Chilo murders case. One
of his former students, Larry Peterson, was working on the
case and he called him up for assistance.
Speaker 14 (18:02):
I remember I got the first call from Larry asked
me if I could come down to Atlanta. He was
as enthusiastic, as intelligent as scientists, as a young man
as you would want to meet. She's He's also a
good person. Sometimes you meet people who are talented and
you know they're not nice people, and Larry's just one
of these easy going guys who's innate kindness. We could
(18:25):
lead people to believe that he's not as bright.
Speaker 6 (18:27):
As he is.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Larry Peterson was the key Micross Capis on the Wayne
Williams case, so we met him in person.
Speaker 7 (18:35):
When I graduated from college in December of seventy seven,
started with the GBI Crime Lab in January of seventy eight,
so in mid seventy nine I had a year and
a half experience. There were over two hundred something investigators
assigned full time to the task Force, Fullton County to
cab County, the City of Atlanta, East Point PD. You
(18:56):
had Comb County, Rockdale County Sheriff's Department. You had a
lot of agencies, all contributing people that let's just say,
have varied degrees of cooperativeness with one another. They were
collecting tips at the task Force. They were constantly being
barraged with tips and adding information about sightings and vehicles
and people and all kinds of things. Some of that
(19:19):
led to searches and collectives that they would send in
evidence for or that we were going to do crime
scenes are So I can't tell you how many homes
and cars and suspect residences and whatever during this whole
thing that I literally went to much less that investigators
went to and did collectives and sent in. So it
was a task Force crime Scene collective unit between myself
(19:41):
and then zerologists and a latent print and that was
the Task Force crime Scene Unit. So if there's something
they thought of significance, this group went there and did
the processing. Through the investigation. There were hundreds of fiber
samples being sent in. For a comparison, I don't have
the exact number, but there was a number of dog
hares being sent in.
Speaker 6 (20:02):
Also.
Speaker 7 (20:04):
They started putting together this conference and they were going
to bring in fiber or analysts from the Southeast, from
the State Labs and some other notable microscubis. So Walter
mccrolan and Skip Paynic were two.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
After working multiple crime scenes in the Atlanta child murders case,
Larry discovered a particular trend in the fiber evidence found
on the victims, most significantly an oddly shaped green carpet fiber.
Speaker 7 (20:26):
There's three principal things that I was looking for. There
was the green carpet, there was the violet acetate, and
the dog hare. Fifteen victims had the green fibers matching
the green carpet. Some of them only had one, some
of them had more than one, five six seven green
carpet fibers. One of the things I knew about the
green fiber was, as the others had pointed out also,
(20:47):
is that it was highly unique in its shape. I
certainly had never seen it. So when all of those,
including people in industry, had indicated they had never seen
a fiber like that, then that just made it more
intriguing as to how distinctive or where did the fiber
come from. When this gentleman from DuPont sketched the cross
(21:08):
sexual shape on this napkin at lunch, the woman who
categorizes these cross sections said she thought she had remembered
a fiber like that.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
It was a very rare fiber, one that all the
experts had never seen before, but they eventually identified it.
Speaker 7 (21:20):
This is the woman won a one B fiber. The
two very large lobes in this one short leg lob
on top. Wellman was a small company in Johnsonville, South Carolina,
and made very little fiber. That made that one fiber
just by its shape, highly unusual and rare. But they
didn't make carpet. They just made fibers. So they sold
(21:42):
fibers to several companies who then tufted it in the carpet.
So now we need to figure out who was making it.
So we had their distribution, and there were five or
six companies that Wellman was settling to. FBI field agents
went and collected green carpet samples from all of these
companies and sent them into the laboratory.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
So just how rare was this green carpet fiber? Larry
pinpointed that exactly.
Speaker 7 (22:04):
So there was like six hundred and eighty thousand square
yards total of that carpet made. If you kind of
looked at an average room twelve point fifteen or about
twenty square yards, and you roughly have six hundred and
eighty rooms total production of that carpet. And they distributed
that carpet in ten southeastern states. Now they didn't have
records of how much went where or who it was
(22:25):
sold to, but if it was an equal distribution, that's
eighty two rooms of that carpet for the whole State
of Georgia.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Eighty two rooms.
Speaker 7 (22:34):
This is not just distinctive, it's actually very rare. The
FBI had dug out there was six hundred something thousand
occupied housing units in Metro Atlanta, so even if all
eighty two rooms of that carpet was in the Metro
Atlanta area, still it would be highly unusual to find it.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Over the years, Larry developed a simple analogy to help
people understand the rarity of this fiber.
Speaker 7 (22:57):
Imagine that you're a witness of a getaway car to
bank robbery. The getaway car is a lime green Rolls
Royce with a purple racing stripe. So you're a gonna think, wow,
that is really a distinctive car. If I ever see
that car again, I'm going to recognize that car. And
if you describe it to others and they have a
(23:18):
recognition of generally what cars look like, they will also
recognize that that's a highly unusual car. And if I
ever see it again, I'll say that's the car. The
odds of another car being like that have to be
astronomically low, if at all. So this green carpet fiber
was something like that, except that you couldn't recognize it.
(23:38):
At first, it became over time align green rolls Royce
with a purple stripe in the guise of a fiber
that unique.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
In the trial Wayne's the fence investigator, William Northrop was
busy doing some testing of his own.
Speaker 4 (23:53):
I call Lee Bailey's office. They gave me they swore
up him down. He was the best fiber expert in
the world. Yeah, and how that goes. He came out
of Kansas, believe it or not. When I picked him
up the airport, took me out and he said, listen,
stop by a department store. So we went over to
Lenox Square and there was the riches over there in
(24:16):
those days. We bought two new pillowcases and we went
down to the river to actually the bridge where Wayne
was spotted that night. We put the pillowcases in the
water and let the water flow through it. Pulled them
out there with thousands of fibers in the pillow cases.
(24:37):
So so much for fiber evidence.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
We asked Larry about this.
Speaker 6 (24:42):
So here's what really happened.
Speaker 7 (24:44):
He had gone down to the river with a pillow
case and allowed riverwater to flow through it for some
period of time. I don't know how long and then
he had collected fibers from the pillar case and was
indicating that the river was full of fibers, with the
notion then that there are some many fibers in the river.
That's the logical source for where the fibers came from,
as opposed to the Williams home. Through discovery we able
(25:08):
to get the samples that random Berze actually looked at
the actual fiber samples from the pell case he collected.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Larry was able to test the fibers Wyne's defence found
in their pillowcase experiment and according to him.
Speaker 7 (25:21):
So there were not thousands of fibers, there was like
thirty fibers total. None of thirty fibers was any of
the fibers remotely close to any of the connecting fibers
that we had in the trial.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Northolk claimed that fibers could not be found on the
body submerged in water for days because the skin.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Dissolves within five days. If you're submerged in water, your
skin dissolved, peels all you have what they call skin slippage,
and what does that tell you about your fiber evidence.
No fibers who were picked up anywhere they washed away
if there were.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
We asked Larry about this too, so he opened his
laptop and pulled up a power point with graphic pictures
of Nathaniel Cater's body.
Speaker 7 (26:05):
That's Nathaniel Cater's body. Oh my, I mean you put
this presentation.
Speaker 6 (26:11):
Let's see it here.
Speaker 7 (26:13):
I am collecting fibers out of his hair, and you're
being placed into a ziploc bag.
Speaker 6 (26:20):
Of the decomposition and his skin slippage whatever.
Speaker 7 (26:23):
Now that you're right, you know you're not going to
find anything on the skin or whatever of the body.
Speaker 6 (26:28):
Most of the fibers probably did get lost.
Speaker 7 (26:30):
But next to the scalp below the hair, there was
a layer of silt like out of the river, like
like clay silt. So his hair was acting as a
filter and silt was depositing, you know, next to the
scalp under the hair.
Speaker 6 (26:47):
Because of this silt kind of in casing the fibers.
Speaker 7 (26:50):
Whatever was there was gonna So I'm actually going digging
through the silt next to the scalp and finding fibers
and putting.
Speaker 6 (26:57):
Him in that Zubblont bag.
Speaker 7 (26:59):
So there and fibers that I found were collected there.
Because it's the movement of the water fibers would have
been protected because the silk had get incased them.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Larry had collected countless fibers from the bodies of victims,
but they still hadn't made a match. But all of
that was about to change. He recalled the knight that
sent their investigation in a whole new direction.
Speaker 7 (27:21):
I was at a trial in Douglas County and I
got a call out there, Hey, when you get done,
you need to go to the FBI headquarters building. You know,
there's something going on there. So myself and a coworker
who had helped me, he and I went down to
the headquarters building and we're waiting and there's a lot
of hush talking and not getting a lot of information,
(27:41):
you know, So what are we doing? And then he
and I see the FBI crime scene team that they
had flown down on several occasions. And then we were
told that there was a car. There was a car
to be processed down at the base by the FBI building,
And so we go down there, he and I, and
there as a serologist from the FBI team down there
(28:03):
as well to process the car.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
It was Wayne William's car, and.
Speaker 7 (28:09):
I'm asking where did the others go and they said, well,
there's something about a house. It was like the house.
So I actually called the head of the task force.
I said, what's going on. FBI folks are here and
we got a cars being processed about a house. Well,
he had the address of the house. So I drove
to the house. The FBI team was already in processing
(28:30):
the house. I knew what I was looking for. I
was looking for green carpet, violet acetate, and dogcare. I
go in the house and there's wald of wall, green carpet,
and there's a bed spread in the suspects bedroom and
it's violet but also has green in it as well
the average German shepherd dog. And so I principally collected
(28:50):
those things. I went back to the FBI building and
I said, I'm going to the lab. And I got
these samples. I want to see what they look like.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
But the first time Larry's fiber evidence seemed to be
going somewhere, but it would all come down to what
the samples look like under a microscope.
Speaker 7 (29:09):
So when I get to the lab, so it's like
ten o'clock at night, and so I mount the samples
up first, the green carpet and put it on the
microscope and.
Speaker 6 (29:17):
It's like, there it is.
Speaker 7 (29:20):
I threw the purple fibers under their next and here's
the bolt acetate. It's like unbelievable. And at that point
I've been looking for them for months and months, no matches,
and then here's two matches from one source. Right then
I knew it was highly significant.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Again, Larry and Northrop differed on this.
Speaker 7 (29:41):
I actually was expecting it not to match. Now I'm
feeling this needs to be a deep dive search. This
is not another place where I've gone to where there's
no green carpet and there's nothing purple, and they don't
have a dog, or they've got a dog, but it's
a different breed dog. And you know, there was nothing
even on the surface of it that made it seem
like maybe this was a maybe. And keep in mind
(30:07):
that just because you find a fiber that's not of
the clothing doesn't mean it's important. Because you're picking up
fibers from your home, your car, a lot of places
that you would normally go to, so there's nothing going
to jump out and go, hey, I'm a fiber from
a killer. These comparisons happened before Wayne Williams's home was
(30:29):
ever searched, before we ever had a piece of green carpet.
These were individual cases examined over, you know, on an
almost two year period of time.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
I liked Wayne. He was nerdish.
Speaker 8 (30:52):
Pretty much everybody in the media knewing it's some level.
He worked at the radio station I worked at right
before I was hired. I knew kind of from a distance.
So when he was arrested, we were all talking about it.
Everybody's going, that's Wayne. He's cocky. He's a little nerdy,
very kind of unassuming, unassuming in cocky.
Speaker 4 (31:14):
At the same time, I called doctor Brad Bayless and
I asked him if he would come over and hang
out and interview Wayne, let me know whether or not
he was crazy.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
This is popcorn with the FBI.
Speaker 13 (31:29):
I was a bureau sex crimes instructor, and I should
have seen this right away. He's a sexual sadist. He
gets arousal from the act of murdering the act of killing.
He's the most dangerous of all sexual predatice. They will
plan their murders, they will carry them out meticulously, and
he is a sexual sadist. He's the most dangerous of
(31:51):
all sexual predators and.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Mike mccombas with the FBI.
Speaker 15 (31:55):
I think Wayne has some mental issues, some disorders that
would cause someone to be a compulsive liar. In my
layman's terms, I think is a sociopath. I think he
exhibits all the characteristics the compulsive liar, the inability to
love or know that you're hurting somebody, the illusions of grandeur.
Speaker 6 (32:15):
I was a hostage negotiator in the.
Speaker 15 (32:17):
FBI, and of course we had to know when we
were dealing with people that had mental issues. If you
don't believe me, look up sociopath and look at what
the five characteristics, the five biggies. The hair will pop
up on your arm. You'll go wow.
Speaker 16 (32:31):
The term sociopath is used very loosely and there's no
one meaning of it. It has five or six different
meanings in the literature, and we don't use it because
it's kind of a coloquial term.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
This is doctor Scott Lillienfeld, an author and psychology professor
at EMRI University. One of his fields of study is psychopathy.
Speaker 16 (32:48):
Most of the classic work on psychopathy goes back to
the work of a man named Hervey Cleckley actually was
from Georgia, wrote a classic book in nineteen forty one
that went through several editions called The Mask of Sanity.
Speaker 6 (33:00):
The Mask of.
Speaker 16 (33:01):
Sanity called psychopathy because he thought that they presented with
a kind of convincing facade of being quite normal and
quite healthy. So they often seem healthy, actually in some
cases even healthier than us, but deep down there was
something very wrong with them. Likely delineated sixteen criteria that
he thought were central to psychopathy. Psychopathic people tend to
(33:22):
be charming on the outside. They make a good first
depression of other people. They often see poised normal, often
seem to be largely immune to anxiety and kind of
neurotic quirks. They also seem to show a number of
interpersonal deficits. They often are very self centered, They often
are manipulative, and they also show a lot of affective
(33:43):
emotional deficits. They're often callous, they seem to lack empathy,
they don't seem to form very close emotional attachments to people,
they don't seem to fall in love very deeply with people.
Then you see a lot of behavioral abnormalities, a lot
of things that they do that's different for the rest
of us. They tend to lie a lot, they cheat
a lot, They're often sexually promiscuous, and they often see
(34:05):
themselves as the victims. They often see their problems as
everybody else's fault, but theirs. They seem to like insight
into the nature and extent of their problems, And my
take on it, in part is that they just have
very little capacity for introspection. I'm having all of these problems,
I keep getting caught, I'm doing all these things, and
so well, it's it's got to be my upbring or
(34:28):
the way that people have treated me, or the fact
I've had many bad breaks in life, or blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah. Rarely is it acknowledge that
it's their fault. They will often exhibit poor impulse control,
often explode unpredictably, though often have a short fuse. When
someone insults them or threatens them, they may explode very quickly.
(34:50):
They may have a very short fuse. So it's a
very complex picture. I think when you put all that together,
it's like, what is that beast? It's really hard to
sort of summarize it. But would colickily argue as again,
it's this mascul sanity. See this wolf in chef's clothing.
You see someone who superficially seems very healthy, well adjusted, charismatic, poised,
(35:10):
but then deep down there was something very wrong with him.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Even for the defense team, it was important to decide
whether or not Wayne was stable.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
I wanted to know if Wayne was sane, which he was.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
He arranged an interview between Wayne and a specialist. According
to their expert, Wayne was saying, but there was still
one major problem with their case.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Wayne fit the profile.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
Wayne fit the profile that the FBI had, but he
had a different take on that. Profiling to me is
an inexact science. Now people will argue with me, but
I'm not going to be dependent on profiling. He wanted
to make a breakthrough. He wanted to find his place,
(35:58):
and the closest he had was his connections to the media.
Wayne would call and tell me, you know, we need
to do this, We need to do that. Okay, fine, Wayne,
write me a check. You know we don't have any money. Wayne.
Speaker 8 (36:15):
It was two days of testimony.
Speaker 10 (36:18):
When the sun's first light at the County Courthouse, the
crowd was already here. They started gathering at four am.
Even though the doors didn't open till eight some four
hundred showed up hoping to watch Wayne Williams testify. And
when you get a crowd this size competing for about
fifty court room seats, you've got trouble.
Speaker 8 (36:35):
So he did. We fell a pretty good job in
the first day of testimony, kept his composure, answered the
questions that they had to break in. They had to
show the jury a different side of Wayne Williams. They
had to let the jury see that this unassuming guy
sitting in front of them had this other side to
(36:57):
his personality, and they got it.
Speaker 9 (37:01):
Wayne Williams was not the mild mannered witness we saw
the last two days.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
He was irritable, arrogant.
Speaker 9 (37:07):
Assistant Da Jack Mallard had him right where he wanted him.
Speaker 8 (37:11):
He finally broke and he snapped at the prosecutor.
Speaker 9 (37:15):
He called FBI agent's goons, didn't answer some of the
prosecutor's questions and said his own defense attorney Mary Welcome,
forced him to give an interview for money.
Speaker 8 (37:25):
You want the real Wayne Williams, Well, you got him
right here is an observer.
Speaker 15 (37:30):
He was electric.
Speaker 9 (37:31):
Mallard, Mister Williams, you've been eating up all this worldwide publicity,
haven't you, Williams, No, I haven't. I'm tired of sitting here,
you telling these folks I fit the profile. Mallard Wasn't
these murders your center stage? Williams, you must be a fool.
Speaker 8 (37:48):
I distinctly remember writing down I've got it here for you,
looking up at somebody I don't remember who, making eye
contact and looking at each other like, oh my gosh,
here we go. Wayne became combative and testing, calling the
prosecutor names. He was very, very combative.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
As an observer.
Speaker 8 (38:08):
As a juror, you saw a different sign to Wayne Williams.
They did what they set out to do.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
Yeah, they got Wayne's goat. Mary advised Wayne not to testify,
I mean, what are you going to do? But Wayne
viewed it as I'm just overwhelmed. Anyway, I want to
tell my story. They got his goat, they triggered him,
and he exploded. He was going to explain it.
Speaker 9 (38:37):
The defense may have recouped a little after Williams fought
back tears, later telling the jury he was just sick
and tired of jail, the murder charges, and the harassment
from police and the media. This was the star witness
for the state, Larry Peterson, who for months has slumped
over microscopes looking at fibers and hair taken from the
two bodies. In court, he showed the jury photographs for
(38:59):
the first time, pictures of fibers that he claims are
similar and in his words, they matchine every basic property.
Speaker 8 (39:06):
Nine weeks of testimony, the jury came back in what
was under ten hours, as I recall, which is a
very short period of time. They had an early verdict.
All in all, having watched what the jury watched, having
heard everything the jury heard, having talked to the drawers afterwards,
I'm not surprised by their verdict at all. I was
(39:29):
a very young reporter when this was going on. This
was was burned into my brain. It was so impressionable
for me as a young person. I mean, I can
recall the you know, wellman one eighty one b nylon
trilobal fiber made by West Point Pepperel that, according to
the testimony, was found in only I think it was
(39:50):
eighty two helms. This resonated in my head in a
way that a lot of other stories I've covered didn't.
The problem this case as it's complex, and it's lengthy,
and there are many moving parts and many pieces of
the puzzle, and no one piece blows you away. You
can't talk about the bridge and say, Okay, that's it.
(40:12):
You can't talk about the fibers and say that does
it for me. It was this long, slow unfolding of
circumstantial evidence.
Speaker 17 (40:21):
When the Williams trial is finally history, it will be
distinguished not only by the sheer bulk of scientific evidence
presented to the jury, but also in the methods that
scientific evidence was collected. Sophisticated new microscopes were brought in,
and controversial testing techniques like neutron activity analysis were used
to compare the fibers and dog here found on some
(40:42):
of the trial victims with those found in William's home.
Speaker 4 (40:49):
I remembered closing arguments basically where they use this deal,
you know, there have been no more murders since Wayne
was arrested. Its blooney.
Speaker 7 (41:04):
The fence and closing arguments placed a thimble on the
stand in front of the jury and had mentioned that
that all the evidence that literally there's just a thimble
full of evidence, that's all there is, you know, obviously
trying to infer that because it's so small, it has
minimal significance. But you know, I think that if you
take a jury today and you tell them that this
(41:27):
thimble is full of the Black plague and you set
it on the on the Banisher, I think people are
going to immediately recognize that this is not a place
I want to be in. That's something that small. You
think of microbes and viruses and things that are kind
of common today that people fear things that are small
can be very powerful. So really the only explanation is
(41:49):
that either you can say all of this is just
made up. And so we went to a great deal
during the trial to explain how the finders have significance
and why did these particular ones have significant it's.
Speaker 6 (42:02):
Government conspiracy.
Speaker 7 (42:03):
Well, if there's a government conspiracy, then I guess I'm
part of the government conspiracy because I worked for the
GBL in the crime lab and as a young forensic scientist,
you know, went to these crime scenes. Did these collections
be these comparisons? I think it would be extremely difficult
for anybody to come in and replace all of that
with some kind of contaminated evidence to make it all
match the Williams Home environment.
Speaker 6 (42:25):
There's just no way.
Speaker 7 (42:26):
So I haven't heard another viable explanation to how it
could be other than that. But I understand it's technical
in a lot of ways, and people who don't want
to believe things are just not going to believe.
Speaker 4 (42:39):
It had to be a black judge, had to be
had to be a black killer. All of racism, all
of our prejudices, all of them just came to the
surface in the middle of that, and it was just
a shame.
Speaker 7 (42:57):
You know, some people are just they're going to believe
what they want to believe, and nothing you can say
or do is going to dissuade them or convince them
that it's something different than that. But I know what
I know, and I think that if people are being
reasonable and were being level headed and are not being
biased about a preconceived notion of in route, when you
(43:18):
lay it out, you can see it.
Speaker 4 (43:22):
Among those kids had died. Could have been a great poet,
could have been a cured cancer, could have been a
Nobel Prize winner.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Who knows, but.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
They never had the opportunity.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Even though Wayne was in the hole and couldn't talk,
I didn't want to stop gathering stories. By this point
in time, I talked to so many people with all
different opinions. I felt that some things were finally cleared
up for me. What really happened to trial? What truly
were the lynch pins of William's case? And how exactly
trace evidence in fiber? And now aalysis stood up in
a court of law. After talking to Larry, the fiber
(44:04):
evidence seems stronger than ever. And right when things seem
to be making sense, I got a phone call.
Speaker 18 (44:11):
You may start the conversation. Now what here is a
womb killed all straighters. I'm finally onto all of everything.
I'm doing great. They let me out yesterday. You know
it was the craziest favorite book. How yesterday it happen?
Will be a separate podcast except but you would never believe.
(44:34):
Maybe it's a good thing that went down because a
lot of role blocks got out on the way and
a lot of wolves got overpay you never believe.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Next time when Atlanta Monster, I talked to Wayne Williams again,
but this time I have a whole new set of
questions for him. Next time on the season finale of
(45:04):
Atlanta Monster, that was the.
Speaker 7 (45:07):
Only hole that was ever knocked into the fiber evidence.
We have these records that clearly indicate the seventy nine
LGD was not available to the family. But yet we
have trunkliner fibers that match that trunkliner that had bugged
me through post trial.
Speaker 6 (45:24):
It always had bugged me.
Speaker 8 (45:28):
It was physical evidence, some of the strongest evidence that
was presented in the trial. And I would tell you
that ninety nine point nine percent of your audience has
never heard of it.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Blood Saints.
Speaker 19 (45:46):
And when he said I was looking at the car,
and I was looking at the person in the car,
and I was looking at the sketch. I was looking
at the sketch in the back of my man.
Speaker 4 (45:54):
They'll be on TV.
Speaker 19 (46:00):
I'm gonna get rid of going, he said, I get
you a rad I said, I don't eat no rat.
I heard some car tag, so I can get backed up.
And look, he whooped the car around in the middle
of the street.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week,
with new episodes every Friday, A joint production between How
Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup
and Vanity Set.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Audio archives courtesy.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Of WSB News Film and Videotape Collection, Brown Media Archives,
University of Georgia Libraries For the latest updates, please visit
atlantamonster dot com or follow us on social media. One
last thing we've set up in Atlanta Monster tip line.
Anyone with information, leads, or personal accounts pertaining to the
(47:05):
Atlanta child murders can call.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Us and leave a message.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
The number is one eight three three two eight five
six six sixty seven. Again, that's one eight three three
two eight five six six sixty seven.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 7 (47:47):
A Line Green Rules voice with a purple stripe in
the guise of a fiber that unique. Not knowing how
many Line Green Rolls voices might be out there with
a purple Rations tric, imagine you've seen one
Atlanta Monster News
Host
Payne Lindsey
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