him? a most unlikely killer. yeah? why? because he just didn t appear to be the kind of person that could strangle anyone or have the strength to. to her, wayne williams seemed gentle, child-like. one day i left him in jail. i said, wayne, is there anything i can bring? would you like anything? he said, would you bring me some bubble gum. williams was charged with and tried for only two murders nathaniel cater and jimmy payne, both adults found in the same area of the chattahoochee river. cater s body was nude, but his hair was caked with mud. digging through that silt, i was able to recover dog hair and fibers that were close to his scalp. the dog hair was consistent with sheba, the wayne williams family dog. in cater s hair was one of those
in these pages he said he spent his summer weekends in those woods learning how to handle plastic explosives, hand grenades and something even more chilling. so i ll do the talking part and you can answer what part of it you want. you write how you fired rifles, submachine guns, handled assault weapons, grenade launchers, c-4, learned unarmed combat techniques through this training group over weekends. is it true or is it false? we re not going to comment on that. when you re 19 years old. you re saying you worked for the cia, you ve been recruited. i ll let the document speak for itself. i m not going to comment on that. did you work for the cia? i cannot comment on that. copyright 1992 by wayne williams. is this an autobiography? i cannot comment on that.
murders have continued in atlanta. shootings of black men, stabbings of black women. but not strangulations like before, not black youth dumped far from where they were killed. detective welcome harris would stay on the police force another 25 years. we asked him how many more children were killed the way they were in the 80s. none that i can recall. none that i can recall. wayne williams appeals would drag on for years. he almost won the first one. georgia supreme court justice george smith helped a colleague write a ruling that would have reversed the verdict. he would have found the evidence didn t support a conviction. that s what he did find originally. but the five other justices resisted. when we met they pitched a royal fit. they were not going to overturn the conviction, the five of them wasn t.
back then a hotel complex with an indoor skating rink and a game room for kids. that s where he spent a lot of his time at, at the games arcade. wayne williams was known to frequent the omni, passing out these fliers as a talent scout to offer auditions to boys from age 11 on up. 15 kids are dead. two others are officially missing by early february, 1981, more than a dozen young african-american boys had been found dead, many dumped in the woods around atlanta. i was very fearful. my god. sheila baltazar pleaded to send patrick back home to the rest of his family in rural louisiana. if i had somewhere to send my son, i would have sent my son. one evening, a white man in a big car appeared to threaten patrick and a small friend. the little boy said that patrick said, man, that might be the killer. patrick used a pay phone to call police.
cater s body washed up downstream two days later. 30 years ago, there was no dna testing. now there is. and so new evidence. remember those two human hairs found inside 11-year-old patrick baltazar s shirt? in 2007, the hair fragments were sent to the fbi s dna laboratory in quantico, virginia. the result? the lab said it found this dna sequence in only 29 out of more than 1,100 samples of african-american hairs in its database. less than 3%. most important, wayne williams dna had the same sequence. i think i don t think they said it was a match. they said they could not rule out whomever the hairs were from as being the possible donor. the fbi s hal dedman, a dna expert, said this finding is as strong as it can get with this particular type of testing.