not much more than 5 1/2 feet tall now in his 50s, and growing bald. the bottom line is nobody ever testified or even claimed that they saw me strike another person, choke another person, stab, beat or kill or hurt anybody. because i didn t. this is the first time wayne williams has talked on tv in at least a decade. why do you think you were convicted? fear. what do you mean? atlanta at the time was in a panic. they wanted any suspect that they could find. and let s just be honest. it had to 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 doubt. it s not a matter of if to me. it s a matter of when. some 30 years after wayne williams trial and conviction,
these family members were under surveillance at that time, physical surveillance where we had an eyeball on them. in those two months, six more black youths would disappear and die. detectives saw nothing to link the klan to them. if somebody was in there with a van or two or three men to grab somebody and dump them in the back of the van, people would have noticed if they were white. the brothers were called in. they took lie detector tests and passed. they were polygraphed and cleared as to their involvement in the killing of atlanta s children. clearing the klan didn t stop the murders. jo-jo bell was one of the victims who vanished during the surveillance. he used to hang out at this seafood carry-out place. manager richard harp. he d come here and do anything. i d give him a dollar just long enough to get money to go to a
hazelwood decided the killer had to be black. the killer is someone who is invisible in the black community. and who is invisible in the black community but another black person? malcolm harris was one of the first task force detectives. he knew it had to be someone who went unnoticed. we felt like it was somebody who could come in the neighborhood and get these children and not draw attention to themselves. the question of which race struck a raw nerve. it had been only a dozen years since the murder of dr. martin luther king. on the surface, atlanta was a well integrated city. beneath the surface, it remained separate and unequal. my prayer and the prayers of everybody in there was we wanted the person to be black. and the reason why you wanted him to be black, i knew what it would do to this town if it had
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. so why was the 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. 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
in the spring of 1980, police were still reluctant to listen to camille bell. children were dying on the streets of atlanta in the daytime. among them, jefferey mathis, only 10. like yusef bell, he walked down the street on an errand to this gas station to buy cigarettes for his mother. she never saw him again. what we had here was a predator. and what he was looking for was somebody who was cut off from the herd. and if you don t realize you re in trouble until you re in trouble, then you have no way of getting out. it would be another year before jefferey mathis body was found in the woods, miles from his home. his mother would join camille bell in forming a committee to confront the city s leaders.