![]() After Williams became a suspect, the killings stopped. After 12 hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty on February 27 of the murders of Cater and Payne. Williams took the stand in his own defense but alienated the jury by becoming angry and combative. Other evidence included witness testimony that placed Williams with several victims while they were alive, and inconsistencies in his accounts of his whereabouts. During the two-month trial, prosecutors matched to a number of victims 19 sources of fibers from Williams's home and car: his bedspread, bathroom, gloves, clothes, carpets, dog, and an unusual trilobal carpet fiber. ATLANTA SERIAL KILLER TRIALHis trial began on January 6, 1982, in Fulton County. Williams was arrested on June 21, 1981, for the murders of Cater and Payne. ![]() Williams was questioned again by police for 12 hours on June 3 and 4 at FBI headquarters and released without arrest or charge, but remained under surveillance. Williams held a press conference outside his home to proclaim his innocence, volunteering that he had failed the polygraph tests, which would have been inadmissible in court. Co-workers told police they had seen Williams with scratches on his face and arms around the time of the murders which, investigators surmised, could have been inflicted by victims during struggles. Hairs and fibers retrieved from the body of another victim, Jimmy Ray Payne, were found to be consistent with those from his home, car, and dog. Police thought that Williams had killed Cater and that his body was the source of the sound they heard as his car crossed the bridge. The medical examiner ruled he had died of probable asphyxia but never specifically said he had been strangled. Two days later, on May 24, the nude body of 27-year-old Nathaniel Cater, who had been missing for four days and was last seen with Williams, was discovered in the river. However, both the phone number he gave police and Cheryl Johnson turned out to be fictitious. When stopped and questioned, he told police that he was on his way to check on an address in a neighboring town ahead of an audition the following morning with a young singer named Cheryl Johnson. The first automobile to exit the bridge after the splash, at roughly 2:50 a.m., belonged to Williams. Williams first became a suspect in the Atlanta murders on the morning of May 22, 1981, when a police surveillance team, watching the James Jackson Parkway bridge spanning the Chattahoochee River (a site where several victims' bodies had been discovered), heard a "big loud splash", suggesting that something had been thrown from the bridge into the river below. He constructed his own carrier current radio station and began frequenting stations WIGO and WAOK, where he befriended a number of the announcing crew and began dabbling in becoming a pop music producer and manager. Williams graduated from Douglass High School and developed a keen interest in radio and journalism. Wayne Williams, son of Homer and Faye Williams, was born on May 27, 1958, and raised in the Dixie Hills neighborhood of southwest Atlanta, Georgia. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |