New DNA Report Another Blow to Defense in Atlanta Child Murder Case

A national forensic expert calls the newest round of DNA testing in the 25-year-old murder conviction of Wayne Williams "another nail in his coffin" that reinforces the credibility of the jury's 1982 guilty verdict against Williams.

Recently completed tests of eight human hairs recovered in 1981 from the body of one of the slaying victims represented Williams' last chance to secure new evidence that might have discredited forensic links tying him to 12 slaying victims at his 1982 murder trial. The Fulton County district attorney released the report of the DNA test results Wednesday.

Combined with previously released DNA tests of animal hair taken from the bodies of the victims that were compared with hairs from Williams' dog and an independent examination of forensic fiber evidence made last year at the request of the Daily Report, the latest DNA tests strongly suggest that the jury in the Williams case got it right.

"Any sane, independently thinking person would ... come up with the same conclusion," said Nicholas Petraco, owner of Petraco Forensic Consulting in New York and a longtime forensic consultant for the New York Police Department. "Wayne Williams has been given just about every opportunity for it to go the other way. It hasn't gone the other way."

DNA testing was not used in criminal investigations at the time of Williams' murder trial. Using the tests available at the time, the prosecution wove a web of forensic evidence linking Williams to his victims through bloodstains, human and dog hairs and hundreds of fibers from carpets, clothing and bed linens in Williams' home and cars.

On Thursday, Williams' defense attorney John R. "Jack" Martin, called the DNA report by analysts at the FBI crime laboratory in Washington "pretty much inconclusive." Martin reserved further comment on DNA tests of human hairs recovered from the body of 11-year-old slaying victim Patrick Baltazar until the defense's own DNA expert can review the results.

Martin and longtime Williams defense attorney Lynn H. Whatley had hoped that the tests would definitively exclude Williams as the source of the hairs recovered from Baltazar. They would have used the information as the basis for an extraordinary motion for a new trial.

Martin also lamented the disappearance of blood evidence that was used to convict Williams. Samples of bloodstains taken from the rear seat of Williams' car were compared to blood recovered from the clothing of two of Williams' suspected victims. The bloodstains matched the blood and enzyme types of two suspected victims who had been stabbed.

Martin said that the blood evidence, unlike the DNA tests, could have provided definitive answers as to whether the slaying victims were ever in Williams' car. The one piece of evidence that could provide the most reliable DNA tests, Martin said, "is missing."

Although Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore has ordered the district attorney to search for the blood evidence and make it available for testing, Fulton County District Attorney Paul L. Howard Jr. said last month, "It's gone."

Williams, long considered guilty of the child murder cases that terrorized Atlanta from 1979 to 1981, was convicted of the murders of two men -- Nathaniel Cater, 28, and Jimmy Ray Payne, 21. But the jury that convicted him of the adult slayings found cause to believe that Williams had also killed 10 other victims ranging in age from 11 to 28. Those slayings were introduced at Williams' trial, although Williams was never charged with the deaths.

Following Williams' conviction, law enforcement authorities closed the books on 24 homicides of black boys, teens and young men. Those closed cases were among 29 slayings and the unsolved 1981 disappearance of a black child that authorities considered to be the work of a single serial killer.

Williams, now serving a life sentence in state prison in Georgia, has always maintained that he is innocent of all the Atlanta child murder cases.

The DNA tests of human hair recovered from one of Williams' suspected victims completes a re-examination begun by the Daily Report in 2005 of the forensic evidence remaining from the Williams case.

In 2005, shortly after then-DeKalb County Police Chief Louis Graham proclaimed his belief in Williams' innocence and reopened the investigation into five homicides attributed to Williams, the Daily Report reconstructed the forensic case against Williams and had it reviewed by some of the country's top forensic experts. The newspaper hoped to lay to rest some of the haunting questions about Williams' guilt.

INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION

After months of investigation, the Daily Report succeeded in locating the fiber evidence from Williams' trial. The paper then persuaded two of the country's top fiber experts, one of them Petraco, to conduct their own independent analysis of the fiber evidence. Those experts concluded that the forensic fiber case against Williams -- now a landmark case in the annals of modern forensic science -- remained compelling.

The Daily Report then joined with the Georgia Innocence Project and petitioned the Fulton County Superior Court for an independent DNA examination of animal and human hairs that, at Williams' trial, had been used to tie 11 slaying victims to Williams, his home, his car and his dog. While the court denied the newspaper's request, the Daily Report's actions prompted Williams' defense lawyers -- in concert with the Innocence Project -- to secure their own tests of preserved hairs that the Daily Report had located.

In June, the results of independent tests by one of the foremost laboratories for genetic animal testing in the country concluded that mitochondrial DNA extracted from animal hairs retrieved from Williams' dog and from five of Williams' suspected victims were a match. Those tests could have eliminated Williams' dog as the source of the evidentiary hairs. Instead, the tests found that the hair matched that of Williams' dog and that of about 1 percent of all dogs.

The human hair samples that underwent comparative DNA tests at the FBI laboratory were recovered from the body of 11-year-old Patrick Baltazar. Baltazar's body was found Feb. 13, 1981 in a creek that crossed a DeKalb County office park near Interstate 85. He had been strangled.

Williams was never charged with Baltazar's murder, but the boy's death was linked to Williams at trial through three human hairs recovered from Baltazar's body that were a microscopic match to Williams' own head and body hair; through dog hairs recovered from the body that microscopically matched those of Williams' dog Sheba; and through nine fabric fibers that had clung to Baltazar's body that matched fibers, some of them considered unusual or rare, taken from Williams' house or car.

The FBI's DNA report on the human hairs recovered from Baltazar noted that he couldn't be identified as the only possible match, but that "cannot be excluded as a source" of the recovered hairs. According to the report, an estimated 3.5 percent of African-Americans will have the same mitochondrial DNA sequence as those found in the recovered and known Williams hairs.

Petraco said that mitochondrial DNA analysis "can't say for certain that it did come from someone. ... The most you can ever say is the person can't be eliminated [as a source]." But, he added, FBI analysts' discovery of so many closely related DNA sequences in the samples they analyzed offers "a fairly powerful statement statistically" that Williams was the source of the hairs found on Baltazar's body.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation forensic analyst Larry Peterson -- who testified as one of the prosecution's forensic experts at Williams' trial -- said Thursday that DNA tests on the human and animal hairs have provided additional proof "that goes beyond the microscopic level" of an already strong forensic association between Williams and the slaying victims. Peterson testified at Williams' trial that the human and dog hairs recovered from the victims were a microscopic match to those of Williams and his dog.

"It's another layer of evidence tying a victim and the defendant together," Peterson said. "It strengthens the trace evidence" and -- coupled with the fiber evidence in the case -- virtually eliminates any possibility that the victims were not exposed to Williams, his home or his car. "I feel certain that if it had been available at trial, it would have been used."

But Joseph L. Burton, now a private forensic consultant who performed Baltazar's autopsy as DeKalb County's medical examiner, reviewed the FBI report and noted that the DNA comparison "is not an exact match."

"What that means," he said, "is that there could be something that's caused the sample from Baltazar to deteriorate. .. There could be reasons there is not a match, but the bottom line is, if you are going to electrocute someone or give them a lethal injection based on this test, you wouldn't do it.

"Is the glass half-full or half-empty? It depends on who writes the report. It could have been written, ‘This is not an exact match. But there are reasons that it may not be an exact match so we could not exclude Wayne Williams.'"

Jack E. Mallard, who as then-chief assistant district attorney in Fulton County headed the team that prosecuted Williams, said Thursday that if he had the results of the DNA tests on the animal and human hair evidence at Williams' murder trial, he would have showed them to the jury. "We would have used it, just as we would if the trial were going on now," he said.