I am looking forward to the Soledad O’Brian’s special, The Atlanta Child Murders, this Thursday night, June 10th, at 9 PM EST. The past few days I have been studying what’s on the internet, to get ready for Soledad’s special. Much of the anxiety, tension and confusion is returning to me, as I review what happened in Atlanta (1979-1981). As you might recall, nearly 30 young black men were murdered and their bodies then dumped randomly all over Atlanta.
At one time, a former police chief to Dekalb County, Louis Graham, tried to reopen the Atlanta Child Murder case, or at least three of the cases. I don’t believe anything ever came of this, but Louis Graham had been on the original task force, and he wasn’t convinced of Williams’ guilt. Graham questioned how such a small, nerdy guy such as Williams could overpower so many of these young men and not be seen by anyone.
The thing I don’t understand is that Wayne must have taken many of these boys back to his parent’s house and done it there. Remember, many of the fibers found on the bodies were carpet fibers from Wayne’s bedroom. Also, there often was dog hair present on the bodies that can be traced back to Sheba, WW’s family dog.
Just to point out one anomaly, and there seems to be thousands of them, is that at least four witnesses have testified that they saw Nathaniel Cater, 27, the day after WW supposedly threw his body off the bridge into the Chattahoochee River. I can understand one witness getting the time of the sighting wrong, but four getting it wrong? Come on! Also, how could Wayne have been strong enough to lift up Nathaniel’s body and throw it over the rail and into the river?
And when it comes to motive, the one most often given is that Williams’ had contempt for poor blacks because they tarnished the image of blacks, they were holding him back from upward social mobility. This motive is not very convincing to me. The core of this is that Wayne had an inferiority complex, and killing the kids purged society of the unwanted, who were curtailing talented blacks such as himself. Not too convincing, for me.
It seems to me, the Ku Klux Klan would have a much better motive to perpetuate these killings. The reason given is to start a race war. The incident with Charles Sanders is worth more probing. An informant once revealed that Sanders had threatened to strangle Lubie Geter, one of the ACM victims, when Geter ran into his car with a go-cart. The KKK has a much stronger motive for doing this. Investigation of the KKK by the Task Force was dropped, once Wayne Williams was arrested. And now I’ve learned that hours of the surveillance tape of KKK suspects has been destroyed.
The fiber evidence against WW is good, I don’t doubt that. And many witnesses actually saw WW with the victims, at various times and places. Oddly enough, none of these witnesses ever came forward to police at the time of the crimes. Rather, they surfaced with their accounts after WW’s was arrested. This is suspicious, but maybe they were just afraid?
You want to believe that WW is guilty, because this is an easier way to wrap up your simple little package. It’s an easy way out. The harder route is to go back through each case, yea, all 30 of them, and try to look at what exactly happened in each case. The so called ‘List’ was absurd, recognizable patterns never actually existed. A stronger possibility for me is that WW had confederates who he worked with. Would you buy this theory?
One thing I noticed, when studying a few of the cases, is that many of the bodies of the boys, when they were found, had on different clothes. This means that the killer or killers took off some of their old clothes and put on different ones. Why was this done? Why would WW do something like this? Isn’t it more conceivable that say, the KKK would perform such a warped ritual as this? But I don’t believe we will ever know what occurred in Atlanta, circa 1979-1981, nor do we really care to know.
