The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read Online Free PDF Page B

start, he made a most unlikely suspect. The five hours before Earl Terrell vanished that afternoon.
    only child of two Atlanta schoolteachers, Williams still Terrell was long dead before Williams got the car back lived with his parents at age 23. A college dropout, he on August 7, and it was returned to the shop next cherished ambitions of earning fame and fortune as a morning (August 8), still refusing to start. A new esti-music promoter. In younger days, he had constructed a mate on repair costs was so expensive that Wayne’s working radio station in the basement of the family father refused to pay, and the family never again had home.
    access to the car. Meanwhile, Clifford Jones was kid-On June 21, Williams was arrested and charged with napped on August 20 and Charles Stephens on October the murder of Nathaniel Cater, despite testimony from 9, 1980. The defendant’s family did not purchase the four witnesses who reported seeing Cater alive on May 1970 Chevrolet in question until October 21, 12 days 22 and 23, after the infamous “splash.” On July 17, after Stephen’s death.
    Williams was indicted for killing two adults—Cater and On February 27, 1982, Wayne Williams was con-Payne—while newspapers trumpeted the capture of victed on two counts of murder and sentenced to a Atlanta’s “child killer.”
    double term of life imprisonment. Two days later, the At his trial, beginning in December 1981, the prose-Atlanta “child murders” task force officially disbanded, cution painted Williams as a violent homosexual and announcing that 23 of 30 “List” cases were considered bigot, so disgusted with his own race that he hoped to solved with his conviction, even though no charges had wipe out future generations by killing black children been filed. The other seven cases, still open, reverted before they could breed. One witness testified that he to the normal homicide detail and remain unsolved to saw Williams holding hands with Nathaniel Cater on this day.
    May 21, a few hours before “the splash.” Another, 15
    In November 1985, a new team of lawyers uncov-
    years old, told the court that Williams had paid him ered once-classified documents from an investigation of two dollars for the privilege of fondling his genitals.
    the Ku Klux Klan, conducted during 1980 and ’81 by Along the way, authorities announced the addition of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A spy inside the a final victim, 28-year-old John Porter, to the list of Klan told GBI agents that Klansmen were “killing the victims.
    children” in Atlanta, hoping to provoke a race war.
    Defense attorneys tried to balance the scales with tes-One Klansman in particular, Charles Sanders, allegedly timony from a woman who admitted having “normal boasted of murdering “List” victim Lubie Geter, fol-sex” with Williams, but the prosecution won a crucial lowing a personal altercation. Geter reportedly struck point when the presiding judge admitted testimony on Sanders’s car with a go-cart, prompting the Klansman 10 other deaths from the “child murders” list, designed to tell his friend, “I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna choke to prove a pattern in the slayings. One of those admit-the black bastard to death.” (Geter was, in fact, stran-ted was the case of Terry Pue, but neither side had any-gled, some three months after the incident in question.) thing to say about the fingerprints allegedly recovered In early 1981, the same informant told GBI agents that from his corpse in January 1981.
    “after twenty black-child killings, they, the Klan, were The most impressive evidence of guilt was offered by going to start killing black women.” Perhaps coinci-a team of scientific experts, dealing with assorted hairs dentally, police records note the unsolved murders of and fibers found on certain victims. Testimony indi-numerous black women in Atlanta in 1980–82, with cated that some fibers from a brand of carpet found most of the victims