coin laundry operator kill clifford jones. detective welcome harris said the boy was not believable. he exaggerated stuff. he could in other words, he was open to suggestions. and if you said that mickey mouse was up there and if he sensed that you wanted him to say that, he d say yeah. wayne supporters point out the laundry manager failed two police lie detector tests. but few are aware of a third test given by the fbi examiner, richard radcliff. the result in layman s terms, he passed. he wasn t involved in killing jones. only days after wayne williams was convicted of killing two adults, atlanta s police commissioner closed the books on 21 other murder victims, declaring they too were killed by williams. most were children. among them, clifford jones and yusef bell.
the verdict, guilty on both counts of murdering the two adults, cater and payne. wayne williams was sentenced to serve two life terms. people only wanted to look at the negative side because they wanted in their heart for this case to be over and for wayne to be the atlanta monster. they wanted closure at any cost. leaving court, homer williams walked by the prosecutor s table. he looked at us and called us sons-of-bitches. still to come, no verdict in the deaths of any of the children. even if it takes 30 trials, i don t care, you know. prove it. wow. sweet new subaru, huh mitch?
car. john glover, who took over as fbi chief in atlanta that summer, said that s why he and 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.
home? oh, my god! that was the first thing popped in my head. missing. murdered. oh, my god! the atlanta missing persons bureau continue their hunt for this missing child. one day seemed like it was a week. that was the longest search in the world. it was almost 2:00 p.m. when maintenance man ishmael strickland found the lifeless body of a boy. on the seventh day a maintenance man spotted a body tossed down into the woods behind a parking lot at a suburban office complex. the bank was fairly steep. medical examiner joseph burton had to hold on to a rope to get down to the scene. he had a ligature mark on his neck like if somebody had a ligature and they were behind you or off to the side behind you and they closed their hands or fists together and pulled the ligature, basically. in other words, killed from behind.
during the trial, medical examiner robert stivers told the jury there had been very few strangulations of black males in the years before these murders began, and none at all with bodies left in rivers or by the roadside since that night wayne williams was stopped leaving this bridge. they were convinced that the crimes had stopped because wayne had been arrested. and i think what happened is people stopped looking and stopped counting. 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