Free The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schechter Page B

in September 1991, he was eventually convicted of six counts of first-degree murder, twenty counts of burglary, and one count of rape. He remains on San Quentin’s death row, awaiting execution.
CASE STUDY
    Wayne Williams and the Atlanta Child Murders
    More than twenty years after the accused perpetrator was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, questions continue to surround the case of the so-called Atlanta Child Murders. The story began in July 1979, when a woman scavenging the roadside for empties stumbled on the corpses of two African-American boys, one shot dead with a .22-caliber pistol, the other asphyxiated. Over the next two years, twenty-seven more victims would be added to the official list of homicides connected to the killer.
    During that fearful time, the case would spark panic and outrage in Atlanta’s black community, generate nationwide media attention (including an article in the New York Times Magazine that would feature the earliest documented use of the term “serial killer”), and bring help from the highest reaches of the government, up to and including the president himself. And not even the arrest and conviction of the
    prime suspect put an end to the controversy.
    Right from the start, the killings posed an enormous problem for law enforcement agents. There was no consistency—no identifiable signature— in terms of the killer’s MO. Most of the victims were strangled, but some were shot, others stabbed or bludgeoned to death. And though most of the victims were males, a few were young girls. On March 4, 1980, for example, twelve-year-old Angel Lenair left her house to play after completing her homework and never returned. Six days later, her body was found lashed to a tree, an electrical cord tied around her neck and someone else’s panties stuffed down her throat.
    As his reign of terror continued, moreover, the killer began to prey on older victims: twenty-year-old Larry Rogers, twenty-one-year-old Eddie Duncan, twenty-three-year-old Michael McIntosh, twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater.
    Wayne Williams
    (Bill Lignante—ABC News)
    By the spring of 1980, the city’s African-American community was in an uproar over the failure of the police to stop the killings. Rumors swirled that the Ku Klux Klan was on a campaign to annihilate the black youth of Atlanta, while Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality went public with a theory that the murders were the work of a Satanic cult. Dozens of bounty hunters—drawn by the prospect of a hundred-thousand-dollar reward—descended on the city. Celebrities from Burt Reynolds to Muhammad Ali offered financial assistance while President Reagan pledged federal funds to help track down the killer. A special task force—including thirty-five FBI agents—interviewed 20,000 people in person and another 150,000 over the phone.
    The case began to break in the early-morning hours of May 22, 1981, when officers on stakeout at a bridge over the Chattahoochee River heard a loud splash and halted the car that was crossing the span.
    Its driver was a twenty-three-year-old African-American named Wayne Williams.
    There was certainly nothing in Williams’s background that matched the typical profile of a serial killer.
    The son of schoolteacher parents, he grew up in a stable and loving household where he was encouraged to cultivate his talents. A radio enthusiast who dreamed of making it big in the music business, he showed a great deal of early promise. By the time he was sixteen, he was broadcasting music from a radio station he had set up in the basement of his home. Besides electronics, he had a keen interest in photography and became highly skilled with a camera.
    Still, there were definite signs that all was not right with the enterprising young Williams. Despite his intelligence and ambition, he couldn’t make it through college, dropping out of Georgia State after just one year. His dream of discovering the next Stevie Wonder came to