then we ll invite you to reach your own verdict, guilty, innocent, or a third choice, not proven. the first clue was found on a dead boy s tennis shoes. the victim was eric middlebrooks. his body left here in a rainy alley. a foster child who rode his bicycle away one night on an errand and was dead by dawn. detective bob buffington saw something red stuck to eric s tennis shoe. and i noticed in the flap of the edge of this shoe this tuft of what to me appeared to be wool. and that was it. we could find no other evidence. back at homicide, buffington showed the fibers to his superiors. the lieutenant made a big joke out of it and told the rest
be a black person because if it had been a white suspect, atlanta probably would have gone up in flames. it came very close to that. do you think you ll ever be free? no. that is not a matter of if to me, it s a matter of when. some 30 years after wayne williams trial and conviction, there is still debate and some doubt. this time you can be the judge and the jury. we ll lay out the evidence on both sides. you ll hear from wayne williams at length. then we ll invite you to reach your own verdict, guilty, innocent or a third choice, not proven. the first clue was found on a dead boy s dennis shoes. the victim was eric middlebrooks, his body left here in a rainy alley, a foster child who rode his bicycle away one night on an earned. and was dead by dawn. detective bob buffington saw
something red stuck to eric s tennis shoe. i noticed in the flap of the edge of this shoe this tuft of what to me appeared to be wool. that was it. we could find no other evidence. back at homicide, buffington showed the fibers to his superiors. the lieutenant made a big joke out of it and told the rest of the squad if i went over to the let s house and cleaned out the lint trap in his dryer, we could probably clear out all the cases in the city of atlanta. still, buffington sent the fibers to the state crime laboratory. a young forensic scientist larry peterson took a look. why was a fiber stuck in the crack of a shoe important? it was loosely there. people don t normally have tufts of carpet fibers loosely stuck
in their shoe. from those few thin threads, peterson would begin to build a case to try to catch a killer. how many fibers across the board did you look at every day in this case, when the case really started getting busy? 100, 500, 1,000? literally, there s going to be hundreds if not thousands of fibers there depending upon the case. in the spring of 1980, no one wanted to believe a serial killer was loose in the city. even when bob buffington spotted a disturbi inin ining pattern. there had been a sharp increase in the number of children under the age of 14 who had been killed. when he told his boss at homicide, the major threaten ed to move him, ji think they were afraid it would be a panic. it was this mother after the
tennis shoe. and i noticed in the flap of the edge of this shoe this tuft of what to me appeared to be wool. and that was it. we could find no other evidence. back at homicide, buffington showed the fibers to his superiors. the lieutenant made a big joke out of it and told the rest of the squad that if i went over to the lieutenant s house and cleaned out the lint trap in his dryer, we could probably clear out all the cases in the city of atlanta. still, buffington sent the fibers to the state crime laboratory. a young forensic scientist, larry peterson, took a look. why was that a fiber that was stuck in the crack of a shoe, why was that important? because it was somewhat loosely there. people normally don t have tufts of carpet fibers stuck loosely in their shoe.