The Trial [9] - podcast episode cover

The Trial [9]

Mar 16, 201848 minSeason 1Ep. 9
--:--
--:--
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

Trial by trace evidence.

 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

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

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

Here's what he said.

Speaker 1

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, 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

I would provide it, but I don't.

Speaker 1

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 trial what convinced a jury that Wayne Williams was a murderer?

Speaker 4

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 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 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 we were to try the Wayne Williams case today, I can't guarantee you I'd.

Speaker 3

Walk that sucker in a heartbeating.

Speaker 4

But hindsight, it's always twenty.

Speaker 3

Twenty and Atlanta. Another body was discovering today the twenty.

Speaker 4

Third the Police Task Force headquarters.

Speaker 5

There are twenty seven faces on the wall, twenty six murdered, one missing.

Speaker 6

We do not know the person or persons that are responsible.

Speaker 3

Therefore, we do not have the money.

Speaker 1

From Tenner for TV and howstuff works in Atlanta.

Speaker 7

Like eleven other recent victims in Atlanta, Rogers apparently was a Sphexa victory Atlanta.

Speaker 5

It was unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps on killing.

Speaker 3

This is Atlanta monster.

Speaker 4

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

This is William north Road, an investigator for will William's defense team.

Speaker 4

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

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

In his eyes, the biggest obstacle was the sensation of the trial itself.

Speaker 5

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, which may last two months.

Speaker 8

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 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

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

Our entire defense really rested on common sense. There was no place for that in that courtroom.

Speaker 9

The state would like to introduce the evidence to show the jury a pattern of killings that claims Wayne Williams committed.

Speaker 4

Was there a murder is a turn out. There were five out of thirty. The others were not legal medical murders.

Speaker 1

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

If you start with that premise, how you going to try a guy for murder.

Speaker 1

In his investigation, he found that most causes of death were unknown, undetermined, or in some other way vague.

Speaker 4

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

It is not known yet whether pain was strangled or suffocated.

Speaker 5

In the absence of the injuries, there are some features of us fixing it.

Speaker 8

Any external marks at all around the.

Speaker 5

Neck, no extending locks it on the neck.

Speaker 1

You may remember this story from episode of four. The medical examiner changed the cause of death for Jimmy ray Payne.

Speaker 4

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

According to Northrope, there were way too many cooks in the kitchen and things were bound to get messy.

Speaker 4

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 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 were murders five that I know of, but the rest I don't know.

Speaker 9

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

It starts off with the bridge.

Speaker 8

The bridge testimony was extremely strong.

Speaker 9

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

Cover his tracks.

Speaker 9

The defense claims, there's an explanation for everything we heard today and that the state didn't explore all the possibilities.

Speaker 4

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

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

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

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

We ran tests on that bridge.

Speaker 9

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

At a slow rate of speed.

Speaker 9

So on the stand was this sound expert who conducted tests for the defense at the bridge this week.

Speaker 4

The conclusion of the expert was Wayne didn't stop, and no one saw Wayne stop.

Speaker 9

Testimony about the clankety clank a metal expansion joint makes when a car rolls over it.

Speaker 3

The reason he didn't.

Speaker 9

Hear the car attorney's claim is because the recruit was fast asleep.

Speaker 1

Pulling from his notes in his memory, Dale recounted the bridge testimony.

Speaker 8

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

Campbell.

Speaker 8

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 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

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

I have the words simultaneously written in my trial notes. So the lights were off when the splash hit the water.

Speaker 1

The Williams and his defense team refuted this version of the story.

Speaker 9

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

But, according to Northrope.

Speaker 4

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

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

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

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

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

How'd y'all collect all that?

Speaker 13

How long?

Speaker 11

This day?

Speaker 14

My lifetime? This is a lifetime's work. This is sand and soil from all over the world.

Speaker 1

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

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, 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 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

Always.

Speaker 14

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 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 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, 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

Skip explained the role of fiber analyst in legal cases.

Speaker 14

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 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, 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 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, 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

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

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 lead people to believe that he's not as bright.

Speaker 6

As he is.

Speaker 1

Larry Peterson was the key Micross Capis on the Wayne Williams case, so we met him in person.

Speaker 7

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 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 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 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

Also.

Speaker 7

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

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

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, 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 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

It was a very rare fiber, one that all the experts had never seen before, but they eventually identified it.

Speaker 7

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 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

So just how rare was this green carpet fiber? Larry pinpointed that exactly.

Speaker 7

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 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

Eighty two rooms.

Speaker 7

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

Over the years, Larry developed a simple analogy to help people understand the rarity of this fiber.

Speaker 7

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 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. At first, it became over time align green rolls Royce with a purple stripe in the guise of a fiber that unique.

Speaker 1

In the trial Wayne's the fence investigator, William Northrop was busy doing some testing of his own.

Speaker 4

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 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. So so much for fiber evidence.

Speaker 3

We asked Larry about this.

Speaker 6

So here's what really happened.

Speaker 7

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 to get the samples that random Berze actually looked at the actual fiber samples from the pell case he collected.

Speaker 1

Larry was able to test the fibers Wyne's defence found in their pillowcase experiment and according to him.

Speaker 7

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

Northolk claimed that fibers could not be found on the body submerged in water for days because the skin.

Speaker 4

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

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

That's Nathaniel Cater's body. Oh my, I mean you put this presentation.

Speaker 6

Let's see it here.

Speaker 7

I am collecting fibers out of his hair, and you're being placed into a ziploc bag.

Speaker 6

Of the decomposition and his skin slippage whatever.

Speaker 7

Now that you're right, you know you're not going to find anything on the skin or whatever of the body.

Speaker 6

Most of the fibers probably did get lost.

Speaker 7

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

Because of this silt kind of in casing the fibers.

Speaker 7

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

Him in that Zubblont bag.

Speaker 7

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

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

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, 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 as well to process the car.

Speaker 3

It was Wayne William's car, and.

Speaker 7

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 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 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

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

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

It's like, there it is.

Speaker 7

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

Again, Larry and Northrop differed on this.

Speaker 7

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 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 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

I liked Wayne. He was nerdish.

Speaker 8

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

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

This is popcorn with the FBI.

Speaker 13

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 all sexual predators and.

Speaker 3

Mike mccombas with the FBI.

Speaker 15

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

I was a hostage negotiator in the.

Speaker 15

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

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

This is doctor Scott Lillienfeld, an author and psychology professor at EMRI University. One of his fields of study is psychopathy.

Speaker 16

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

The Mask of.

Speaker 16

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 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 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 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 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. 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, but then deep down there was something very wrong with him.

Speaker 1

Even for the defense team, it was important to decide whether or not Wayne was stable.

Speaker 4

I wanted to know if Wayne was sane, which he was.

Speaker 1

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

Wayne fit the profile.

Speaker 4

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, 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

It was two days of testimony.

Speaker 10

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

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 his personality, and they got it.

Speaker 9

Wayne Williams was not the mild mannered witness we saw the last two days.

Speaker 3

He was irritable, arrogant.

Speaker 9

Assistant Da Jack Mallard had him right where he wanted him.

Speaker 8

He finally broke and he snapped at the prosecutor.

Speaker 9

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

You want the real Wayne Williams, Well, you got him right here is an observer.

Speaker 15

He was electric.

Speaker 9

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

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

As an observer.

Speaker 8

As a juror, you saw a different sign to Wayne Williams. They did what they set out to do.

Speaker 4

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

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 the first time, pictures of fibers that he claims are similar and in his words, they matchine every basic property.

Speaker 8

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 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 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. 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

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 of the trial victims with those found in William's home.

Speaker 4

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

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 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 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

Government conspiracy.

Speaker 7

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

There's just no way.

Speaker 7

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

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

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 lay it out, you can see it.

Speaker 4

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

Who knows, but.

Speaker 4

They never had the opportunity.

Speaker 1

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

evidence seems stronger than ever. And right when things seem to be making sense, I got a phone call.

Speaker 18

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. 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

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 Atlanta Monster, that was the.

Speaker 7

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

It always had bugged me.

Speaker 8

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

Blood Saints.

Speaker 19

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

They'll be on TV.

Speaker 19

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

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

Audio archives courtesy.

Speaker 1

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 Atlanta child murders can call.

Speaker 3

Us and leave a message.

Speaker 1

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

Thanks for listening.

Speaker 7

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

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android