Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.
Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.
Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all-new podcast There and Gone. It's a real-life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. But which victim was the intended target and why?
Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the new summer series of Atlanta Monster, where we will uncover new stories around the Atlanta child murders. I'm your host, Jason Hoke. And in our first episode, we talked to the men and women that reported on the case that gripped Atlanta and the nation nearly 40 years ago.
Though time has healed old wounds, one thing is clear. The nightmare of that traumatic time sticks with many, even to this day. You don't want to believe that you've given anybody an opportunity to do anything to harm anybody because it means that you could have been a part of fueling what may have happened. In other words, if he wasn't an overnight photographer, maybe he wouldn't have had the opportunity to do this.
To think that you've come face to face with someone who could potentially kill that many people and be that close to where you shake their hand, you've hugged them, you have laughed with them. That's the hard part. You don't want to think that you were so wrong in judging somebody. I don't want to believe that he did that.
Because somehow I feel that I may have had some role in helping. In Atlanta, another body was discovered today, the 23rd. At police task force headquarters, there are 27 faces on the wall, 26 murdered, one missing. We do not know the person or persons that are responsible, therefore we do not have the motive. From Tenderfoot TV and How Stuff Works in Atlanta. Like 11 other recent victims in Atlanta, Roger
Rogers apparently was asphyxiated. Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps on killing. This is Atlanta Monster.
I'm Jocelyn Dorsey. I'm director of editorials and public affairs at WSB-TV, which is now Cox Media Group Atlanta. And I've been there for 45 years. I started out as a street reporter in 1973 and worked in the newsroom from 1973 to 1983, and after that became the director. Jocelyn Dorsey was the first African American television news anchor in Atlanta, arriving from Ohio in 1973.
During her career, she has reported on numerous happenings in and around Atlanta, including the Atlanta child murders, with reporting on the psychics and community efforts to help local kids who were highly distressed at the time.
Through the central character Artie, the Art Institute and Atlanta Police hope to teach children about safety in a way that can be fun. The four primary messages are: Don't get into a car with strangers. Don't take candy, money or gifts from strangers. Play in groups. And if you need help, go to a police officer, firefighter or bus driver. They're your friends.
Art Institute Community Relations Director Liz Goetz says besides the basic themes, teachers can use the book as a teaching tool. The coloring book produced by students of the Art Institute on a volunteer basis is being donated to the Atlanta Police Bureau later this week. The printing costs for the 50,000 copies were donated by Dittler Brothers, a local firm. And officials say you'll be seeing a lot more of Artie in public service announcements soon. Jocelyn Dorsey, Action News.
But that's not the only part of her involvement with this story. Jocelyn was one of the first to discover Wayne in his teen years, where he was already hard at work at the radio station he had built in his house. I first met
Wayne Williams as a street reporter. We got the story of this young whiz kid who had started a radio station in his basement. So I covered the story. He was fascinated with media and normally I mentor young people who are interested in the business and he was very interested and wanted to come and see the station.
From there, we maintained a relationship because he asked questions and wanted to shadow me and all of that. Paul Policelli worked in the newsroom at WSB also. He saw firsthand, and for the first time in his life, a new world, one he wasn't entirely prepared for.
I went to WSB in 1978 as the executive producer and assistant news director. Atlanta was a very aggressive news community. It was a hot growing city at the time. We were calling these kids street kids. The Omni is a complex of amusement arcades, theaters, restaurants, shops in the heart of Atlanta. It's a meeting place for the city's footloose young blacks, a place which many of the missing and murdered children used to visit.
Most of them were what the locals call "street wise". Coming often from broken homes, they hustled for money, did odd jobs, sometimes had trouble with the law. They were tough. I mean, I remember my father said, "What in the world is going on down there?" And I said to him, "Dad, I gotta tell you something. I would have known more about what was on the surface of the moon
than I knew about how people lived in public housing in Atlanta, Georgia. I was totally unprepared for the world that I walked into. I didn't know that there were children who had no one with primary responsibility for those children. I didn't know that there were children who would be out at 2 and 3 o'clock in the morning being a mule for a drug dealer or selling homosexual favors.
It was a world that was totally separate and apart from the coddled world that I grew up in. I had no concept that people lived like that. I had no concept that there was that level of child abuse in society. And Atlanta was having an epidemic of child abuse at the time.
And it was particularly impactful and harmful to the minority kids at the time. And that was the big subject that never got addressed out of this. You know, they wanted to get this problem out of the way as fast as they could. And I'm not sure that Atlanta ever looked into that. Talk about a child being vulnerable, a nine-year-old out on the street at three o'clock in the morning. And then you've got people prowling those streets looking for God knows what.
Back in those days, we had what we called stringers. We were shooting 16mm film, and we would give a camera to a freelancer, especially on the overnight crew, and he decided he wanted to be a photographer.
He kept shadowing them, would come in all the time, volunteer. And I told him, I said, you know, we can't pay people to volunteer, but if you want to try out to be a stringer, you can be a stringer. And that's what he did. He was freelancing for us as a photographer. Wayne's world, his world was the world of the stringer. His world was the world of going around looking for trouble at night and taking pictures of it.
He was a component of that very world. He was just a young kid. And I mean, he was right out of high school, I think, when he first started working with us. I didn't know much about his home life. I knew his parents.
He was a child that was born later in their lives because they had had problems having a child. And I remember his mom telling me that he was a very special child because she thought she wouldn't be able to have children. His father was in the business. I think he was a freelancer. He may have actually worked for a newspaper, but he was a photographer. So I imagine his interest came from his dad.
Jocelyn got to know Wayne and Wayne's family. But what was Wayne really like? He wasn't charming. And a lot of people didn't like him. He was kind of what people would call a nerd. You know, he's very nerdy, very bright. So I never thought that there was anything strange because I knew a lot of nerdy kids growing up. And, you know, I just thought that he was different.
He did have a way about him that rubbed some people the wrong way. We heard this over and over again. Wayne was nerdy, pudgy, highly intelligent.
He is a highly intelligent young man, a good student when he was in school. He was a very intelligent young man. Just an ideal student. I said, you're very intelligent. I said, what's your IQ? And he said, I don't believe in IQs. And I said, well, you must have done well in school. They just seemed to be educated and articulate or whatever. As a student, he was extremely bright. He was a pretty intelligent guy, too. He had a very high IQ. Very intelligent young man. Brilliant asshole. Ha ha ha ha ha.
Unassuming and cocky at the same time. He comes across as a nerd. He's a nerd. He's a little nerdy. He is so mild-mannered, he couldn't hurt a fly.
Small, not very threatening at all. Pudgy little kid with the glasses. One of those pudgy little guys whose mom made him practice the piano. Little fat 5'7 Wayne Williams. Very quick mind. Mentally, he could just run over the average person. Wayne Williams was quiet, didn't say much, and he got his job done and left. ♪
In our newsroom, there are quite a few guys who would tease him because of the way he looked. And this is back in the 70s, too, so the times were very different. But we don't know what impact it had on Wayne. You really didn't have a lot of involvement with people because you were so busy trying to get that story on the air. I didn't know him enough to know what was inside of his head. I knew it was different from most people.
I guess I defended him because I have known people like him. I felt sorry for them because I know that they've been bullied or people have said unkind things to them. So I have a soft spot in my heart for people like that. And so I got to be a bit more defensive because I felt as if they thought he was nerdy or something was wrong with him. He kept to himself a lot because of that.
But he worked a different shift, too. That's maybe the other reason he decided to work overnight, so he wouldn't have to come in contact with people all the time. When the time came, Jocelyn Dorsey ended up having to fire Wayne because he was taking footage and selling it to the other stations on the side. You'll recall that Monica Kaufman also said that strange things were happening. This man was a freelancer for WSB-TV.
And that's not something you hide. So the part of the story was, yes, someone has been arrested in connection with this case, but this person also has worked here as a freelance photographer. So that put us in a different vein from the other stations. Then there was still the question, is he guilty or is he not?
I can remember Don McClellan, who was the reporter then and since has retired, he had a huge file on the missing and murdered children. Don did that story that night. And I can remember him being as a good reporter should be. I'm just going to give you the facts, but this still is alleged. Wayne's departure from WSB did not end well.
I distanced myself from him after he left the station. We did not leave on great terms. So I think he knew that he had done something wrong and regretted it, but it was not something that could be repaired easily. And then he left and decided that he was going to go into the music business.
And he would call me and ask me if I knew any young people or if I could help him in this music business. And I told him I really didn't know anything about it. And so I really felt that this was not my place to give him any advice and suggested, you know, maybe he talked to somebody else. And after that, our relationship kind of drifted. The city struggled to find the killer, and the body count only grew larger.
How would they know when they found him? Dr. Alvin Toussaint was an African-American psychiatrist with Harvard, and he became a regular that we touched with because the story had all of these racial overtones to it that, again, puzzled us. Why is this happening? Why are all these kids minority kids? It became this gigantic crossword puzzle that just engrossed all of us.
I've been doing interviews since 1968, and of all of them, that was the most chilling one I ever did. We were sitting in the snack room of WSB, and I was doing an interview with him because his contention was that this perpetrator had to be African-American because where these crimes were committed and at the times that they were committed, a white man would have stood out like a sore thumb.
So the question then became, why would an African-American male be doing this to young African-American, primarily males? And he had a theory on that, that he wanted to cleanse the race. He was embarrassed by these guys. And while we were doing the interview, I looked up at the camera and I pointed to the lens and I said,
I remember getting a call. Mark Picard, 2:30 in the morning.
And Mark called me and said, "You will never believe what has just happened." He said, "They just arrested Wayne Williams." And I dropped the phone. I couldn't believe it. I was in such a state of shock. I just could not believe what I was hearing. And then, of course, all the events started to unfold with him being arrested on the fiber evidence and then going to trial.
Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down.
From unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal. This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me.
Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask.
I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs. From the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy.
So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?
Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions.
Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all-new podcast There and Gone.
It's a real-life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything. Did they run away? Was it an accident? Or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle, not for Richard. He's your son, and in your eyes, he's innocent.
But in my eyes, he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle. Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The home of the man taken into custody by the FBI has from time to time this evening taken on the aspect of a reporter's convention. His mother maintains her vigil inside, waiting by the phone, waiting to hear from her son, who is down at FBI headquarters, and his father, who has now joined them. To say that the police actions of the past several hours were a shock to the family that lives here and the neighborhood is an understatement.
The neighbors I spoke with say that the family more or less kept to themselves and that the young man who was being questioned by the FBI was friendly, but only friendly enough to say hi. They really didn't know much more about him. This episode began on Thursday, May the 20th, when the man was stopped by the task force at the Chattahoochee River. He was questioned about the possibility of dropping something into the river, which he was denied. And then he was let go for any lack of reason to hold him.
But surveillance on him continued until he was taken into custody by the FBI around 3 o'clock Wednesday.
The man was most recently involved in a company which he formed to search out talented local youngsters singing, dancing, acting and so forth. It is reported that he told his family that he was trying to set up an audition on the night that he was questioned by the task force at the Chattahoochee River and that he had a friend in his car supposedly also for an audition when he was taken into custody on Wednesday.
The FBI apparently had a pretty good idea of what they were looking for when they executed the search warrant here at the home. Among the things that it removed, it took pieces of blankets, robes, human hair, and dog hair. We understand that this material has been taken to the state crime lab, where it is either being processed now or will be processed first thing in the morning. That should determine whether the people here can finally rest in peace
or whether their nightmare and a possible solution to some of the murders is at hand. Mark Picard, Action News. Mark Picard was also a reporter at WSB TV on the front lines during the case. In fact, he was there the night Wayne was taken downtown. Much to the surprise of the rest of the media, Picard was inside the house with Wayne and his parents that night when he returned from his interview with authorities.
I got a phone call from a police source who said that the task force were searching Wayne's house and I should get over there with the crew. And I got there and for a while we were the only crew there reporting on what was going on. I guess Wayne either saw us outside or was watching television and he did ask me to come inside.
He put in a cassette in an old cassette recorder and recorded our conversation. The rationale behind it, I think, was to offer a defense for himself. At the end of the conversation, he gave me the cassette and said, hold on to this. This is going to be valuable. It was a crazy night. I went back to the station and immediately turned over the cassette to my news director. And that was the last I ever saw of it.
Early that next morning, Picard was inside the house again, this time at the hastily called press conference thrown together by a still unnamed suspect in Wayne Williams. You will hear him, but you will see reporters and photographers. Did they ever call you a suspect? Did they ever use the word suspect? They did, strongly a suspect. They openly said, you killed Nathaniel Cater, and you know it, and you're lying to us. I just remember it was a circus.
It was the center ring in a three-wing circus. All of it was surreal. In my reporting career, I was relatively young and fresh, and this was crazy to me. I was trying to keep perspective and not let the events overtake me. At that press conference, Wayne passed out his resume to the media. The FBI kept a copy of this resume, and we found it in their case file.
Despite Wayne being a mere 22 years old, the resume was already five pages long. FBI records indicated that this resume was also one of the items found in the White Station wagon when they searched the vehicle on June 3rd, 1981. Though he worked as a stringer and freelancer at WSB for approximately three years, Wayne's resume indicated he was employed at WSB from January 1979 to March 1979.
The murders began in June of 1979. The resume listed an extensive set of positions and accomplishments and personal and professional references from NBC News, CNN, Arista Records, the City of Atlanta Public Safety, and Jocelyn Dorsey.
His resume's list of professional references includes many familiar names in the local media. Most of those references say they knew Williams only briefly and not very well. But it is clear Wayne Williams is a bright and ambitious person. He started a radio station in his parents' home when he was only 12. In his teens, he spent time hanging around many of the city's radio stations, doing odd jobs, mostly as an unpaid volunteer, and talking to the people he met about broadcasting.
This was a surprise to Jocelyn. Why would he list her as a professional reference when she had been the one to fire him from WSB? Shockingly, the defense team from Wayne Williams even reached out to Dorsey before the murder trial.
His lawyers had called and asked if I would testify in his defense. And of course, our lawyers said, no, we're not doing that. Because there had been some personnel issues that we had had with him. And, you know, we told them that that would not be something that they would want us to have to reveal. You know, they wouldn't want me to because we had to dismiss him. And it may not look good.
I mean, that's certainly not a great character reference to say you got fired. I actually had to go down to the courtroom, and it was very awkward because our lawyers were arguing right up to the point where they thought I might have to testify. And so it was really awkward because I was down at the courtroom, and some of my peers were wondering what I was doing there, and I couldn't say anything.
So they took me off into a room and made me sit and just wait until they could figure out what the lawyers were going to do. His lawyer decided not to call me to the stand. It was pretty nerve-wracking. You can imagine what I was going through during that time period of us wondering, you know, who could have done this? I was reporting a lot of the homicides at the time, and
There were so many rumors that were going on. That was probably the worst thing. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind.
Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal.
This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.
I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil,
They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?
Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all-new podcast, There and Gone.
It's a real-life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything. Did they run away? Was it an accident? Or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle, not for Richard. He's your son, and in your eyes, he's innocent.
But in my eyes, he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle. Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Newsrooms were hearing rumors and stories constantly. Questions arose in many of the reporters' heads, including Captain Dave Folk.
who wondered what was happening at the Williams home. Captain Dave and others questioned the role of Homer Williams, Wayne's father, a topic that came up over and over. At the time, both the news media and officials investigating the case were also curious as to the role of Homer and his wife, Faye. I'd like to know more from him. It seemed like his mother was a shock hauler. She was the spokesperson for it all when it was happening. See, he has been tried.
and may as well say has virtually been convicted long before by the media. The Williams claim that police, desperate for a break in the case, set up their son's arrest. He didn't have and don't have enough evidence not only to indict him but to arrest him. I'd just like to give them a warning that whether they believe it or not, the killer is still at large. He's out there.
person in atlanta got a 14 year old german shepherd dog are you the only person the only person in atlanta got green carpet on my floor my house is not the scene of a murder i have faith i have faith in this and and all this homosexual stuff they're talking about came from those street children what they call street children
Fay Williams made the call to WGST News Radio last night during a live interview with Dr. Joseph Lowry, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We've got some high officials that are doing a lot of cover-ups, and we are going to expose a lot of it tomorrow morning. But when tomorrow came, a very subdued Homer Williams and his attorney, Len Whatley, had little to say. It is our conclusion at this time that no...
statements will be made. I think that's conspiracy. I definitely feel that we have the wrong person. And I say again that Wayne is being used as a scapegoat. I don't know about his ties. I don't know about who he knew or what he knew. He's very quiet and would not talk. And if so many victims were linked to the fiber evidence originated from the carpet and blankets in the Williams house, how did this all tie together?
What happened at the house? And if they were killed at that house and loaded in the car, who helped kill them? Who helped load them up? Is that not a logical question? Penelope wrote, yeah, because that's where the carpets were. That's where the dog was. You don't take your dog to kill somebody. What was going on in that house? Fiber here, fiber there. It's, you know, not enough questions asked, but enough to honestly send him to prison.
But who else needs to be in prison? Wayne Williams' parents. They wouldn't talk. If somebody was killed in your house, don't you think you'd know? The carpet's been messed up, the floor, and there was some hollering or something. I didn't see it. But I heard that the police found some burned film in the backyard of the house. I'd like to know what was on that film. Maybe it was snuff film or pornography.
Maybe he did take some photographic evidence that was destroyed. Mrs. Williams was outspoken in the defense of her son. I wanted to hear more from Homer. He was an accomplished photographer, but what did he know about that case? The FBI noted changes in the house from the time they visited on May 22, 1981, and when they executed a search warrant on June 3, 1981.
When they went back to the house, FBI special agents observed a number of changes. Furniture from Wayne's bedroom had moved to other rooms. Business papers and unidentified documents previously observed had been removed. New indoor/outdoor carpeting had been added to a room since the May visit. What exactly was happening in the Williams house as investigators were closing in on their suspect? Was the Williams family removing items from the house? And if so, why?
I'd like to know what they found that didn't burn. Wouldn't you like to go to the evidence locker and just have everybody lay these pieces out? Lay out the autopsy report, the crime scene information. How were the bodies placed? Why was that such a secret? Captain Dave wasn't the only one that wanted to know more. I heard from people on the task force and my police sources who didn't believe Wayne or his dad were responsible.
That was one of the threads that was out there, a suspicion that he may have been involved, but he's not around for anybody to pursue that, and I'm not sure anything was done in that regard. Many reporters continued to hear from Wayne during, but also after, the trial. I would hear through people from him occasionally when he was in jail, and it was just quite shocking.
The first time he reached out, I was in the radio station and he called me. We had this long talk on a tape that, of course, I don't have anymore. We write. I haven't written to him in a while, but he used to write me. He'd write and criticize stories and tell me problems in the prison, that kind of thing. The story is headlined on the cover, but it's what is inside that is bound to raise a few hackles. In the article, Williams again said he is innocent.
and even says he did not know the two he is charged with killing, Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne. The magazine promises a second installment in the interview they say was conducted at the jail. But how did that interview happen? Fulton County Sheriff Leroy Stinchcomb told me tonight no jail personnel let anyone interview Williams, and he wants to know how it happened too.
He told me he isn't pointing fingers, but says the only people allowed to see Williams are the DA's office, Williams' parents, Williams' attorneys, and people working on the defense who were approved by Williams' attorneys. Stinchcomb says there are about six of them, and he's giving those names to Judge Clarence Cooper this morning. Cooper is hearing the case, and he told me he'll have no comment until later, if then. Attorney Mary Welcome would only say she knew about the article, but she wouldn't say anything.
The impact of this case still sticks with those who covered it, triggering a surprising range of emotions then and now. There was a certain exhilaration, actually, to be honest, not to in any way see any advantage in the suffering of the families who've lost their children. Just as a news story, it was probably the biggest that I'd ever been involved with. And so I felt an exhilaration at that point. But I also felt an obligation to be fair and to get it right.
literally wake up in the middle of the night and just flash awake. And I remember seeing in my mind the nightmares that I would have. I would be in one of those projects and a killer would be stalking me. It affected me to that level. Becky Leak was the ABC reporter at the time who had reported on Ted Bundy. She had the exact same experience reporting on Ted Bundy. She said, I would wake up in the middle of the night and I would see Bundy in my room. And it was that kind of thing with the Atlanta child murders for me.
I'm glad that I never had to deal that much with that kind of story again. The incarnate evil that can live in men. The only thing that I really felt was why he was working an overnight shift. And I always wondered why he was so interested in covering homicides or breaking news. I guess the hard thing for me is to think that I would have been such a poor judge of character.
We'd had enough. I mean, it was very tense. And I think people breathed a collective sigh of relief and buried it. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed the first of our special summer series of Atlanta Monster. Be on the lookout for more new episodes in the coming weeks. Atlanta Monster is a joint production between HowStuffWorks and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set.
Audio Archives, courtesy of WSB News Film and Video Tape Collection. Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries. For the latest updates, please visit atlantamonster.com or follow us on social media.
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