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This story was published November 30, 2006 at biz.yahoo.com. By R. Robin McDonald.
Attorneys for convicted killer Wayne Williams, long reputed to be the man behind Atlanta's infamous child murders, are asking a Fulton County, Ga., judge for permission to perform DNA testing on 25-year-old evidence.
On Tuesday, Williams' defense lawyers John R. "Jack" Martin and Lynn H. Whatley filed a motion in Fulton County Superior Court seeking comparative DNA tests on samples of animal and human hair recovered from the bodies of 11 men and boys whose deaths were attributed to Williams.
Williams was convicted in 1982 of the murders of Jimmy Ray Payne, 21, and Nathaniel Cater, 28 -- two of 29 black men and children who were among what became known as "Atlanta's missing and murdered children" cases. (The list included one still-unsolved disappearance.) After Williams' convictions in the slayings of Payne and Cater, prosecutors closed the books on 22 other cases. For two years, from 1979 to 1981, the bodies of 29 victims -- all of them black and all but two of them men and boys -- were found dumped throughout metro Atlanta in vacant lots and buildings, on roadsides, in gullies, in wooded areas and in the South and Chattahoochee rivers. Fear gripped Atlanta during what many regard as one of the darkest periods in the city's history. With the discovery of each new body, authorities became increasingly desperate to identify the killer. Parents in black neighborhoods formed vigilante patrols, and many came to believe the Ku Klux Klan must be behind the killings since only blacks were slain. Mayor Maynard Jackson offered a $100,000 reward for information that might lead to an arrest. Finally, before dawn on May 22, 1981, police staking out a Chattahoochee River bridge near where one body had been found heard a splash. Seconds later, officers spotted Williams' station wagon driving slowly across the bridge. Williams was stopped, questioned, but released.
A month would pass before police finally arrested Williams, a 23-year-old self-styled talent recruiter and freelance photographer. Prosecutors would later argue that only after Williams' arrest did the string of serial slayings stop. Still, many were never satisfied that police arrested the right man. As recently as 2005, former DeKalb County police chief Louis Graham reopened an investigation into five of the deaths and declared his belief that Williams was not Atlanta's child killer. Williams always has maintained his innocence.
Attached to the motion filed Tuesday was a statement of verification signed by Williams, who, according to Martin, is certain that DNA tests will clear him of the crimes for which he has been imprisoned since his arrest in June 1981. "We hope to find that the DNA shows no matches," Martin said Tuesday. "Wayne's taking a risk. But he's all for it." "I'm really more excited about this than some of the appeals," said Whatley, who has been Williams' appellate lawyer for 25 years. "We're dealing with science now."
WEB OF CIRCUMSTANTIAL INFORMATION The human and dog hairs that Williams' defense hopes to test were part of a tightly woven web of circumstantial evidence that convicted Williams. Fabric fibers found on the victims' bodies that microscopically matched fibers found in Williams' car and home, as well as samples of human and animal hair recovered from the victims, were critical in securing Williams' conviction in what has become a landmark case in the annals of forensic science. Samples of bloodstains were recovered from the rear seat of Williams' station wagon that, according to state witnesses, matched the blood types and specific blood enzymes of two of Williams' suspected victims.
At the time Williams was tried, however, comparative DNA testing had never been used in a criminal case and the technology for testing of animal DNA did not exist. Forensic experts called by the prosecution testified that microscopic comparisons of animal hairs recovered from the bodies of Payne, Cater and nine other slaying victims were consistent with the characteristics of hairs obtained from Williams' mixed-breed German shepherd. Prosecutors argued that those comparisons strongly suggested that Williams' victims had been in close contact with him shortly before their deaths.
In addition, forensic experts testified that a microscopic comparison of two human scalp hairs recovered from 11-year-old slaying victim Patrick Baltazar were consistent with Williams' scalp hair.
"The evidence of dog hairs found either on the bodies or the clothing of both of the victims for whose murders [Williams] was convicted, as well as nine of the other alleged murders offered to prove [Williams'] identity as the person who perpetrated the murders of Mr. Payne and Mr. Cater, was powerful evidence of the defendant's guilt emphasized by the prosecution," Williams' motion acknowledged.
But, it continued, "Should DNA testing prove that the dog hairs did not come from [Williams'] dog, this circumstance would raise a reasonable probability that the defendant would have been acquitted if the results of DNA testing had been available at the time of the conviction."
"Indeed," the motion said, "if the testing shows that the animal hairs did not come from the defendant's dog but all came from the same, but some other dog or animal, then this would be powerful evidence that these terrible crimes were committed by a single perpetrator who is not Wayne Williams and who has never been brought to justice."
If DNA tests of the foreign scalp hair recovered from Baltazar's body fail to match DNA extracted from Williams' scalp hair, "this evidence would further undermine the state's case for guilt and would at least raise a reasonable probability that [Williams] would have been acquitted if the results of DNA testing had been available at the time of trial," Williams' motion said.
On Tuesday, Lyn Vaughn, a spokeswoman for Fulton County District Attorney Paul L. Howard, said Howard and his staff will review the motion "and make a determination following that review."
Russell D. Willard, a spokesman for Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, said the attorney general's office will work with the Fulton DA "to assure that an appropriate response is filed."
Williams first began calling for DNA tests in 1999. That year, Whatley told The Associated Press that he was considering whether to seek a court order to run DNA tests on the bloodstains found in Williams' car. Williams told the AP, "If you want to prove Wayne Williams did this conclusively, then let's get the DNA tests."
It wasn't until Tuesday, however, that Williams' defense team initiated the legal steps required to conduct the DNA tests.
OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION In 2005, after Graham announced he was reopening an investigation into five of the slayings that were administratively closed with Williams' 1982 conviction, the Daily Report embarked on a yearlong search for the forensic evidence in the case.
The newspaper spent months locating and then combing through trial testimony and lists of exhibits, filed numerous public records requests to confirm that evidence still existed and, eventually, determined where it was stored. The Daily Report recruited two of the top fiber experts in the country to examine magnified photographic images of fiber recovered in the investigation. Those experts concluded that, 25 years later, the fiber evidence against Williams remains compelling and credible. (Daily Report, June 30, 2006.) The newspaper also enlisted the help of the Georgia Innocence Project and, in April, formally asked Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Doris L. Downs to permit the Innocence Project to conduct comparative DNA tests of the blood and hair evidence admitted during Williams' trial. Downs rejected that request, explaining that Georgia's open records law did not permit the newspaper to remove evidence from the courthouse to have it tested at a forensic lab, even under the supervision of the Innocence Project. As chief judge, Downs handled the public records request because Williams' trial judge, Clarence Cooper, is now a U.S. District Court judge.
However, Downs allowed a supervised inspection of the evidence by the Daily Report. On May 22 -- accompanied by Williams' defense attorneys, lawyers representing the Fulton County district attorney and the state attorney general -- the newspaper, under court supervision, located and inspected numerous forensic slides on which the animal and human hair evidence had been preserved. Blood evidence collected in the investigation, including a blood-stained seat taken from Williams' car, couldn't be located. After that inspection, Martin and Whatley vowed to ask for DNA tests on Williams' behalf and sought the advice of the Innocence Project in finding a qualified laboratory. At the time, Williams had a motion for reconsideration of his habeas corpus appeal pending before U.S. District Judge Beverly B. Martin (who is no relation to Jack Martin). The federal judge already had rejected Williams' appeal in a 251-page order she handed down in February. Last month, she turned down Williams' motion for reconsideration of her earlier ruling. Williams' lawyers are appealing that decision to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
If the DNA tests produce no matches between Williams, his dog and evidence recovered from the victims that prosecutors directly linked to Williams at his trial, defense lawyers say they will file an extraordinary motion for a new trial based on the newly discovered evidence. "Much of the case [against Williams] was circumstantial," Jack Martin said Tuesday. "They built the case on fibers and hairs." However, if comparative DNA tests "prove he [Williams] is not guilty but innocent, then the circumstantial case starts to unravel."
State forensic experts testified that more than 100 animal hairs recovered from 11 victims were consistent with hair taken from Williams' dog. Williams' motion proposes that a representative sample of dog hairs taken from the victims, as well as samples of hairs from Williams' dog that were preserved, be tested by the forensic laboratory at the University of California at Davis, which pioneered the study of animal DNA. The forensic laboratory at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation currently does not have the capability to perform such tests, according to Williams' motion.
Williams' motion also asks the state to pay for the tests, which will cost from $150-$500 per animal hair, depending on the test. Williams' motion also seeks a court order to locate the missing blood evidence and bloodstained car seat that were shown to jurors. According to Williams' motion, his lawyers have "endeavored without success" to locate the blood evidence and speculated that it may still be in the custody of either the Fulton County district attorney or Atlanta police.
In response to a 2005 public records request by the Daily Report, the GBI acknowledged that its forensic laboratory disposed of dated biological evidence years ago and transferred the majority of evidence attached to the Atlanta child murders to the Atlanta Police Department. Atlanta police never responded to several public records requests made by the Daily Report to document the existence of forensic evidence in the Williams case.
Defense lawyers acknowledged a risk in asking for the DNA tests. "If the dog hairs found on the victims truly match [Williams'] dog or if the scalp hair found on victim Baltazar truly matches [Williams'] hair, doubts about [Williams'] guilt would obviously vanish. However, [Williams] is so confident in his innocence that he urgently asks that this testing be done."
"Why would the state oppose this?" Martin asked Tuesday. "It seems they would be as interested in finding out the truth as anyone else."
Said Whatley: "This cloud has been on the city too long."
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