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| Case file: Wayne Williams During the two years between mid-1979 and mid-1981, Atlanta was plagued by a brutal serial killer who was strangling young black men and boys. In their serach for the murderer, police had little to go on apart from some forensic evidence in the form of a particular type of carpet fiber found on the bodies. When the news of this evidence leaked out, however, the strangler began stripping his victims and dumping them in rivers so that any fibers would be washed away. The police immediately began patrolling the rivers, and in the early hours of May 22, 1981, officers by the Chattahoochee River heard a splash and saw a car stopped on the Jackson Parkway bridge. They questioned the driver, 23-year-old Wayne Williams, but had no concrete reason to detain him, so he was allowed to leave. Two days later, the naked body of 27-year-old Nathaniel Cater was recovered from the river. Williams was arrested, and when the carpets in his home were subjected to forensic examination, fibers matching those taken from the victims were found. Additional samples of the same fiber were retrieved from the trunk of his car. When police traced the manufacturer, they got their big break. They learned that less than 16,500 square yards of carpet had been made in the same color, and the odds of it being in another house in Atlanta were almost 7,800 to one. Furthermore, other fibers discovered on the bodies matched those of the carpets in Williams' car, and fewer than one in 3,800 cars in the city would have had the same carpets. It was estimated that the chances of anyone else in Atlanta area having the same combination of carpets in their home and their car as Williams would have been 30 million to one. Williams was tried for the murder of Cater and one other victim. He was found guilty on both counts and received two consecutive life sentences. |