For more than 35 years , Wayne Bertram Williams has survive behind bar , close off for kidnapping and slay some 30 Atlantans between 1979 and 1981 . The victim were typically male , dim , miserable , and between 9 and 14 year of age , and the law-breaking terrified Atlanta ’s African - American community . But did police force nab the realmurderer ?
A luck of masses do n’t think so . Many believe Williams killed some , but not all , of the victims . And Williams has always proclaimed his artlessness regarding the tike victim . In hopes of excavate the truth , Payne Lindsey and Donald Albright create the 10 - installment podcastAtlanta Monster . The duo , founding father of Tenderfoot TV , already have had some succeeder in this wish . Their 2016 straight - crime podcast , Up and Vanished , elicit raw information about the 2005 inhuman - typeface murder of Tara Grinstead , a Georgia teacher , that led to two arrests . Lindsey and Albright hoped Atlanta Monster would be as successful in this other type .
And it looks like the first gradation to determining if Williams is the lone killer is now afoot . Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced in a insistence group discussion Thursday , March 21 , 2019 that the City of Atlanta , Fulton County and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation will be taking another smell at the decade - old child slaying in Bob Hope that new engineering breakthrough might allow for grounds to who killed the children . The destination she said , is not to vindicate Williams , but instead , " to give some peace — to the extent that ataraxis can be had in a situation like this — to the victim ' family . "
So what wee the Williams example murky ? When the murders began in July 1979 , son were vanishing during the day in public locales ; their bodies were later found dumped in remote areas . These vulgar threads pointed to a single in series killer . But by the bound of 1981 , the killer come out to change strategies and originate drop the victim ' bodies in the Chattahoochee River . Law enforcement officials commence staking out the 14 bridges in Atlanta ’s metro area .
One night in May 1981 , presently before 3 a.m. , a group on surveillanceheard a splash . Then a car sped back and away across the bridge . The machine driver was Williams , a 23 - year - old African - American freelance photographer . With no evidence , the officials could n’t detain him . But when the eubstance of a 27 - class - sure-enough man was get a line downstream two day later , Williams became the prime defendant in not only that slaying , but as the in series slayer terrorize enceinte Atlanta .
Williams had a shaky alibi , and investigator subsequently linked him to some of the victims through hair and vulcanized fiber depth psychology . finally Williams was convicted of killing two grownup work force . However , the court also allow for the prosecution to connect the slaying of 10 Atlanta boys to this cause , even though Williams was never officially charge with killing them . Williams was remand in 1982 and the murders of the untested pitch-black boy stop . Law enforcement official by and by join him to 20 more of the expiry , although the links were circumstantial .
sound pretty damnatory , but not everyone is convinced . Williams has unwaveringly take a firm stand he didn’tkill the kids . And there never was enough grounds to convict him of any of their deaths . Hair and fibre depth psychology , especially as the foundation of a murder conviction , has prove notoriously unreliable;according to a 2015 studyby the U.S. Department of Justice , FBI , the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers , at least 90 percentage of FBI testimony on hair analysis contained errors .
Perhaps most supercilium - raising , though , is information from a 1986 article in SPIN . The piece says that a secret probe by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in 1981 ensue in strong evidence that the Sanders family , who were part of the Ku Klux Klan , had kill as many as 15 young black boys in the hopes of starting a race war . The evidence include tape measure from a tap in which one syndicate phallus tell another he was going out to look for " another small boy . " But out of fear that this Apocalypse would spark off racial wildness in the metropolis , the mathematical group terminate its investigation and seal its finding . Thus , the Klan evidence was withheld from Williams ' defense team .
