Fibers and dog hair evidence: is it real evidence? An update on the Atlanta child murders.

• Date: 01 July 2007
• Author: Mallard, Jack

THE KILLING OF ATLANTA'S CHILDREN captured the attention of the nation and the world. A total of 30 murders were investigated over two years (1979-1981) as being similar and connected and occurring about three to four weeks apart. After this mysterious killing spree of Atlanta's children, teenagers and young adults, the murders stopped after Wayne Williams was identified at 3:00 a.m. on May 22, 1981. At that time, Williams was stopped at the James Jackson Parkway Bridge over the Chattahoochee River when police heard a splash in the river.

The police task force, which was headed by Atlanta police and included FBI and other federal and local police agencies, was unable to catch the killer so a decision was made to post guards on rivers where the killer had begun dumping bodies from bridges. The killer had begun removing clothing from the bodies and dumping them in rivers after it had been made known that the crime laboratory was finding unusual trace evidence consisting of fibers and dog hair on the bodies. (1) Six bodies were recovered from the Chattahoochee River and two from the South River within the six months leading up to Williams's arrest. Five of the bodies were pulled from the Chattahoochee river within the last two months of the investigation. Thus, the decision to have guards at the river the night of May 22, 1981, was a costly but good decision.

On that night, a rookie cop under the bridge heard a splash and saw ripples in the water, then looked up and saw the lights of a vehicle begin to move slowly across the bridge. He radioed to his fellow officers above, who saw the vehicle cross, turn around and re-cross the bridge. The vehicle belonging to Wayne Williams was stopped but because no body was seen, was allowed to proceed. Two days later, the body of the last victim of this murder spree, Nathaniel Cater, was recovered a mile downstream. A previous victim, Jimmy Ray Payne, was discovered about three weeks earlier at the same location in the river. These two victims were the subject of the later prosecution of Wayne Williams resulting in two life sentences after a nine-week trial in early 1982. Conviction was followed by 25 years of appeals and public cries of conspiracies and railroading being lobbed against the prosecutors by Williams, his attorneys and supporters, including some of the victims' mothers,: and two long-time police detectives (no longer in law enforcement--one in prison for life for hiring the murderer of his...