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.
camille bell, yusef s mother, believed wayne to be innocent. she feels that last day on the witness stand convicted him. and then when he flared off, then they were ready to say, well, okay, so he does have fire. when you got angry with the prosecutor, you said, you re a drop shot. i called him a drop shot. what s a drop shot? what does that mean? quite simply in our vernacular, a drop shot is a guy who is not worth much of anything. just drop him and shoot him and get him out of the way. in other words, you re useless. we reminded wayne he also called poor black children on the streets the same thing, drop shots. that does not make me a murderer simply because i said somebody was a drop shot or because i called him a drop shot. that does not make wayne williams a murderer because i said somebody is a street urchin. come on, we re talking about murder. the fact is, i didn t kill
Buy snuff for an elderly lady downstairs. he went barefooted in a pair of brown shorts. he got to the store. he bought the snuff. he started back home. less than half a block from this store, yusef bell stepped off this curb and vanished. and nobody saw anybody do anything or anything. but they did see him come back across the street. and that s the last that we saw him. camille bell called the police. they came and said they d write a report. that s all. days went by. camille waited with two older children and yusef s 3-year-old sister. and so she is terrified. if he can go to the store and they can steal him, then she doesn t want to leave the house. she doesn t want to do anything.
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.
camille hid her own fear from her children. and you ve got to hold them together so you can t act as scared as you are. the body of yusef bell was found in an abandoned schoolhouse. his body would not turn up for another month. yusef bell had been strangled. all of the what could have been, should have been and probably would have been was taken away, and we ll never know now, because somebody decided that it was all right to just kill a little kid because they wanted to. for a long time, the 3-year-old would look for yusef every time it was a foggy day. and we d go out into the fog and she would go as far as she could into the fog. and i d say, come back here. and she d say, i got to go find my brother. and she said, the clouds came down, so yusef can come down.