The Trial [09]
48:02 Share

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. You're listening to Episode 9 of Atlanta Monster. There's one episode left. Episode 10, the season finale, will come out next Friday. Today's episode contains graphic content. Listener discretion is advised. After writing Sidney Dorsey a letter in prison, he finally got back to us. All right. Sidney Dorsey letter. Well, at least we know it wasn't tampered with. Because of the Georgia State Prison stamp.

Interesting. This is handwritten, which is why it's hard to read. Okay. Here's what he said. I received your letter, and I truly apologize for my delay in responding to you. Please forgive and charge it to my head and not my heart. Accordingly, I believe that there still remains public interest in the Atlanta child murders, but I don't think that the evidence presented during the Wayne Williams murder trial proved him guilty or innocent. Unfortunately, I had no hard evidence then,

and I have no hard evidence now to prove him guilty or innocent. Truly, if I knew anything that would help close the case, I would provide it, but I don't. Finally, if you have specific questions about the case you want answered, provide them to me and I will do my best to answer them. Best regards, Sydney." Contrary to his Dateline interview years ago, Dorsey claimed to have no evidence to prove Wayne's innocence. But what he did say is that he felt that evidence in trial did not prove him innocent or guilty.

So what exactly happened during the trial? What convinced a jury that Wayne Williams was a murderer? I must say, as kind of a preamble to what I would tell you, is that I did not have a lot of time for conspiracy theories or aliens with pressure guns who were killing kids. I never really believed there was one killer.

Wayne couldn't kill anybody. Have you seen Wayne? He's one of those pudgy little guys whose mom made him practice a piano every afternoon instead of coming out and playing ball.

You're one of those kids. And you're telling me he's going to kill a 27-year-old convict? Give me a break. If you believe that Wayne Williams killed 30 kids, I mean, I've got a little piece of real estate just a little west of West Pismo Beach, California, that you might be interested in. Sometimes in murder cases, common sense prevails.

If it walks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And it just didn't walk like a duck. It was a media frenzy. If we were to try the Wayne Williams case today, I can guarantee you I'd walk that sucker in a heartbeat. Hindsight's always 20-20.

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, Rogers apparently was asphyxiated. Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps on killing. This is Atlanta Monster.

Apparently, I had some sort of reputation among defense investigators. In a period of three years, I had worked 23 cases, and I lost one, which was Wayne Williams. This is William Northrup, an investigator for Wayne Williams' defense team. Mary Welcome called, and Mary said, you know, we sure can use your help. And so I went to Atlanta, and it was a zoo.

In his eyes, the biggest obstacle was the sensation of the trial itself.

It was the crime of the century.

before OJ. It was that kind of intense interest. My name is Dale Russell. I'm the senior investigative reporter for Fox 5 News here in Atlanta. I began my career as a reporter the very same month of the first murders of the missing and murdered kids. So I have covered this story my entire career.

There were so many journalists that we couldn't all get in. We were actually all put in a room off to the side. On full side of the courtroom will be reserved for reporters. The overflow will be able to watch the trial from a special press room down the hall. And they'll all be waiting a few minutes before nine tomorrow morning when, under extremely tight security, accused murderer Wayne Williams will be brought to the Fulton County Courthouse for the first day of what may prove to be the most celebrated trial in Atlanta history. Our entire defense...

really rested on common sense. There was no place for that in that courtroom. The state would like to introduce the evidence to show the jury a pattern of killings it claims Wayne Williams committed. Was there a murder? As it turned out, there were five out of 30. The others were not legal medical murders.

As a defense investigator, one of his main points was that no one of authority could be 100% sure that these murders were actually murders. If you start with that premise, how are you going to try a guy for murder? In his investigation, he found that most causes of death were unknown, undetermined, or in some other way, vague.

One of the counts that Wayne was convicted of, the original death certificate said undetermined. And then when they charged Wayne with that murder, the medical examiner went back and changed it to homicide. It is not known yet whether Payne was strangled or suffocated. In the absence of injuries, there are some features of asphyxia. Any external marks at all around the neck? No external marks around the neck.

You may remember this story from episode four. The medical examiner changed the cause of death for Jimmy Ray Payne. Why? Because he had a problem. It wasn't a legal medical murder. And the idea that all these murders, quote unquote, stopped happening after Wayne was arrested is enough crap to fertilize some men. According to Northrop, there were way too many cooks in the kitchen and things were bound to get messy.

So you got this conglomeration of police from God only knows where, state, local, FBI. You know, they were walking all over each other. There was no one person out there killing everybody. You see, here's the problem. If you take non-legal medical murders—

and you call them murders, then all of a sudden, you've got a massacre of 30 children. These are the murder kids. And of course, the media did everything in their power to sell the idea that somebody was murdering the children of Atlanta. There were murders, five that I know of, but the rest, I don't know.

Investigators the morning of May 22nd wanted to know one thing. Why was Wayne Williams driving over a bridge at 3 o'clock after stakeout officers heard a loud splash? Well, according to Williams, he was out looking for the address of a singer, Cheryl Johnson, who had called him several days earlier about his talent agency. It starts off with the bridge. The bridge testimony was extremely strong.

The state today tried to show the jury that Wayne Williams frankly lied and that after telling his alibi to investigators, he tried to cover his tracks. The defense claims there's an explanation for everything we heard today and that the state didn't explore all the possibilities. Wayne would have to pick up Jimmy Ray Payne or Cater and throw him over the bridge rail into the water.

to make that whole scenario come about. Wayne stops on the bridge. Place is covered with police. Now maybe some of the cadets are asleep. I don't know. It's Bushwa. I've been on stakeouts and I can tell you guys were asleep. I mean, it just happens. But

We don't know that he was asleep. Although prosecutors had most of the pieces that night in May, it still lacked the essential part of the puzzle. Someone actually seeing William's car stopped on the bridge or better yet, the suspect throwing a body from the structure. Attorney Welcome appeared confident that the evidence against her client didn't amount to much. The young man who saw the car said it never stopped. I think what we'd have to picture is a man driving with one hand, opening a car without stopping and

and tossing 150-something pounds over a bridge. We ran tests on that bridge.

That sound, the defense claims, is the key to their proof. Police recruit Bob Campbell, part of the stakeout team, says Williams' car did not make that sound, indicating the vehicle was traveling at a slow rate of speed. So on the stand was this sound expert who conducted tests for the defense at the bridge this week. The conclusion of the expert was Wayne didn't stop.

And no one saw Wayne stop. - Testimony about the clankety-clank a metal expansion joint makes when a car rolls over it. The reason he didn't hear the car, attorneys claim, is because the recruit was fast asleep

Pulling from his notes and his memory, Dale recounted the bridge testimony. The bridge testimony alone was extremely powerful. They just think, oh, Wayne was stopped by the bridge or he was stopped near the bridge. But when you go through that testimony point by point, it's riveting. This is his testimony. Campbell hears a splash. He grabs his flashlight and a baton. He grabs for self-defense. He puts the flashlight on the river and sees big waves coming up on the shore.

He flashes the light up to the bridge. Nothing. Back down to the river, watching the waves subside. Flashes it up a second time. Now think of the timing that we're talking about here. You hear the splash, you get up, you get your flashlight, you're looking. This is what he testified to. The lights came on and the car began to move.

While looking up at the bridge, he saw lights go on after the splash. Then they moved away slowly. That testimony supported his partner's claim that the car Williams was driving approached the bridge very slowly and without headlights. Simultaneously. I have the word simultaneously written in my trial notes. So the lights were off when the splash hit the water.

But Williams and his defense team refuted this version of the story. Williams bluntly stated the police version of the now famous bridge incident was wrong, a lie. He claimed he wasn't driving slow, that he didn't turn around in a parking lot next to the bridge, that he did not throw anything into the river. But according to Northrop, wrong place, wrong time. He was convenient. A cynical establishment just scooped him right up and said, you're our boy.

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. 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.

For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. However, one murder of a crime boss sparked a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the mob.

It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Discover how law enforcement and prosecutors took on the mafia and together brought them down. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeartRadio, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System. The first two episodes drop on August 22nd.

Plus, did you know that you can listen to the episodes as they come out completely ad-free? Don't miss out. Subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel today. Available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. It all came down to fibers.

These are called fiber scopes. Criminologists at the State Crime Lab use them to compare and match fibers, rope or fabric for instance, from different sources. Now workers there have matched fibers from task force evidence to make the first official correlation between the murders of at least two of Atlanta's 15 murdered children. To tell you the truth, it scared me. I didn't have any experience with fibers.

I was afraid of it. I was afraid of the evidence. We've come up with some physical evidence that's common to at least two of the bodies, and it falls into the fiber category. People in the world need to know where somebody has been from the dust on their clothes or the soil on their shoe. And a geological map will have a region, I'll say, unconsolidated sediment. We can point to one spot and say this is what the soil was like at that point. So, for example, back there is the soil from the entire Punjab, for example, in Pakistan.

How'd y'all collect all this? How long did this take? My lifetime. This is a lifetime's work. This is sand and soil from all over the world. We visited Skip Palenik at his lab microtrace outside of Chicago. The walls were covered with small shelves, home to hundreds of bottles holding sand, dirt, and fibers from all over the world. These are all fibers from every manufacturer in the world, practically. ♪

I was eight years old and got my first microscope. I had my own lab, so I've been doing it for 64 years. I've been looking through microscopes. Senior research microscopist, and I guess president of the company. Microscopy? Yeah, lawyers can't say that, but it's microscopist. It comes from microscopy.

chemistry, physics, biology. Those things are all fundamental to you. There would be no forensic science if you didn't have those sciences. So forensic science, one of the basics of forensic science, one of our laws that we can call our own is called Le Card's Exchange Principle. Edwin Le Card was a French scientist. He formulated a principle based on the analysis of dust. He promulgated this theory.

Briefly, it states that whenever two objects come in contact, there's always a transfer of material.

Always. So let's say, for example, all of a sudden, for some reason, you make me mad and I jump on you and start attacking you. And we're never in contact again, but we were. You file charges against me for attacking you and you've saved your sweater. So we get your sweater and we get my sweater. So we're both black sweaters. Big deal. Well, if you look at the fibers from your sweater and my sweater, they're going to turn out to be different. Almost certainly.

Almost every day of my life, I look through a microscope for one reason or another. Every time I go somewhere or friends of mine go somewhere, colleagues or people I've had from places in other parts of the world, I ask them where they are, where they live, if they've gone there to visit and come back, that they vacuum their clothing for us and sew clothes.

So there's one of those cabinets you saw in the lab is just filled with these little vacuum cassettes with dust. But those are mixtures of things for us to analyze and do research on. But we have pure materials. So we have almost all the known synthetic fibers from different manufacturers. So we have reference material to work from. If your business is, like ours is, identifying unknown substances, the ultimate goal or the ultimate proof of an identification is to compare it to authentic material.

Skip explained the role of fiber analysts in legal cases. The police who are there to investigate materials, they feel they've got enough evidence that somebody should be brought up on charges. Someone's accused. You've got a defense attorney who's hired under the belief that his client is innocent, in fact, under our system here, and the defense attorney should do everything they can to

to help prove his case. So they're advocates for their clients. The district attorney is the state as their client. They're an advocate for their position, the position of the police. There is a jury in most trials. Their job is to listen objectively to the evidence. That's why a jury is selected carefully. In all this, the forensic scientist comes. Our job is supposed to be to help get to the truth.

We can certainly, in most cases, provide facts. If somebody thinks it's not a fact, they can try and prove that wrong. We go to great lengths to make sure that something we present as a fact is, though, so it can't be proven wrong because we don't have an ax to grind. We're just there trying to make sure the jury hears us and what the likely explanations are. And if it's not a likely explanation, there's something else, then we can comment on it. You know, we will. You know, I don't think much about the human players in these cases.

It probably sounds odd to people because if you watch detective shows and things, they're always analyzing motives and they're analyzing, you know, going back in the person's past and so forth. Honestly, I would be more interested in looking at the dust vacuum from his clothing than I would be, you know, in ever talking to him or questioning him.

If you were to bring me a hair and ask me to look at it and tell you everything I could, I would be able to tell you some things, and you might actually be amazed about what you see. The Atlanta child murders are a great example of microscopic trace evidence. Skip was involved in the Atlanta child murders case. One of his former students, Larry Peterson, was working on the case, and he called him up for assistance. I remember I got the first call from Larry asking me if I could come down there

to Atlanta. He was as enthusiastic, as intelligent a scientist as a young man as you would want to meet. He's also a good person. Sometimes you meet people who are talented and they're not nice people. Larry is just one of these easygoing guys whose innate kindness could lead people to believe that he's not as bright as he is. Larry Peterson was the key microscopist on the Wayne Williams case. So we met him in person.

When I graduated from college in December of '77, started with the GBI crime lab in January of '78. So in mid '79, I had a year and a half experience.

There were over 200 something investigators assigned full time to the task force. Fulton County, DeKalb County, the city of Atlanta, East Point PD, you had Cobb County, Rockdale County Sheriff's Department. You had a lot of agencies, all contributing people that let's just say have varied degrees of cooperativeness with one another.

They were collecting tips at the task force. They were constantly being barraged with tips and adding information about sightings and vehicles and people and all kinds of things. Some of that led to searches and collectives that they would send in evidence for or that we would go out and do crime scenes there. So I can't tell you how many homes and cars and suspect residences and whatever during this whole thing that I literally went to, much less that investigators went to and did collectives and sent in.

So it was a task force crime scene collective unit between myself and a serologist and a latent print, and that was the task force crime scene unit. So if there's something they thought of significance, this group went there and did the processing. Through the investigation, there were hundreds of fiber samples being sent in for a comparison. I don't have the exact number, but there was a number of dog hairs being sent in also.

After working multiple crime scenes in the Atlanta child murders case, Larry discovered a particular trend in the fiber evidence found on the victims. Most significantly, an oddly shaped green carpet fiber.

There's three principal things that I was looking for. There was the green carpet, there was the violet acetate, and the dog hair. Fifteen victims had the green fibers matching the green carpet. Some of them only had one. Some of them had more than one, five, six, seven green carpet fibers. One of the things I knew about the green fiber was, as the others had pointed out also, is that it was highly unique in its shape.

I certainly had never seen it. So when all those, including people in industry, had indicated they had never seen a fiber like that, then that just made it more intriguing as to how distinctive or where did the fiber come from. When this gentleman from DuPont sketched the cross-sectional shape on this napkin at lunch, the woman who categorizes these cross-sections said she thought she had remembered a fiber like that.

It was a very rare fiber, one that all the experts had never seen before. But they eventually identified it. This is the Wellman 181B fiber. The two very large lobes and this one short leg lobe on top. Wellman was a small company in Johnsonville, South Carolina, and made very little fiber. That made that one fiber just by its shape highly unusual and rare. But they didn't make carpet.

They just made fiber. So they sold fibers to several companies who then tufted it in the carpet. So now we need to figure out who was making it. So we had their distribution and there were five or six companies that Wellman was selling to. FBI field agents went and collected green carpet samples from all of these companies and sent them into the laboratory. So just how rare was this green carpet fiber? Larry pinpointed that exactly. So there was like 680,000 square yards total of that carpet made.

If you kind of looked at an average room, 12 by 15 or about 20 square yards, you roughly have 680 rooms total production of that carpet. And they distributed that carpet in 10 southeastern states. Now, they didn't have records of how much went where or who it was sold to. But if it was an equal distribution, that's 82 rooms of that carpet for the whole state of Georgia. Eighty-two rooms. This is not just distinctive. It's actually very rare.

The FBI had dug up there was 600 something thousand occupied housing units in metro Atlanta. So even if all 82 rooms of that carpet was in the metro Atlanta area, still it would be highly unusual to find it. Over the years, Larry developed a simple analogy to help people understand the rarity of this fiber. Imagine that you're a witness of a getaway car to bank robbery. The getaway car is a lime green Rolls Royce with a purple racing stripe.

So you're A, going to think, wow, that is really a distinctive car. If I ever see that car again, I'm going to recognize that car. And if you describe it to others and they have a recognition of generally what cars look like, they will also recognize that that's a highly unusual car. And if I ever see it again, I'll say that's the car. The odds of another car being like that have to be astronomically low, if at all.

In the trial, Wayne's defense investigator William Northrup was busy doing some testing of his own.

They gave me, they swore up and down he was the best fiber expert in the world, you know how that goes. He came out of Kansas, believe it or not. When I picked him up at the airport, took me out and he said, listen, stop by a department store. So we went over to Lenox Square, and there was a Rich's over there in those days. We bought two new pillowcases.

And we went down to the river, to actually the bridge where Wayne was spotted that night. We put the pillowcases in the water and let the water flow through it. Pulled them out. There were thousands of fibers in the pillowcases. So, so much for fiber evidence. We asked Larry about this. So here's what really happened.

He had gone down to the river with a pillowcase and allowed river water to flow through it for some period of time. I don't know how long. And then he had collected fibers from the pillowcase and was indicating that the river was full of fibers. With the notion then that there are so many fibers in the river, that's the logical source for where the fibers came from, as opposed to the Williams' home.

Through discovery, we were able to get the samples that Randall Brzee actually looked at, the actual fiber samples from the pillowcase he collected. Larry was able to test the fibers Wayne's defense found in their pillowcase experiment. According to him... So there were not thousands of fibers. There was like 30 fibers total. None of 30 fibers was any of the fibers remotely close to any of the connecting fibers that we had in the trial.

Northrup claimed that fibers could not be found on a body submerged in water for days because the skin dissolves. Within five days, if you're submerged in water, your skin dissolves. Peels all you have, what they call skin slippage. And what does that tell you about your fiber evidence? No fibers were picked up anywhere. They washed away if there were. We asked Larry about this too. So he opened his laptop and pulled up a PowerPoint.

with graphic pictures of Nathaniel Kater's body. That's Nathaniel Kater's body. Oh my. Let me put this presentation in. Let's see it. Here I am collecting fibers out of his hair and they're being placed into a Ziploc bag. The decomposition and his skin slippage, whatever, you know, you're right. You're not going to find anything on the skin or whatever of the body. Most of the fibers probably did get lost, but next to the scalp, below the hair,

There was a layer of silt, like out of the river, like clay silt. So his hair was acting as a filter and silt was depositing, you know, next to the scalp, under the hair. Because of this silt kind of encasing the fibers, whatever was there was going to... So I'm actually going, digging through the silt.

Larry had collected countless fibers from the bodies of victims, but they still hadn't made a match.

But all of that was about to change. He recalled the night that sent their investigation in a whole new direction. I was at a trial in Douglas County, and I got a call out there, hey, when you get done, you need to go to the FBI headquarters building. You know, there's something going on there. So myself and a co-worker who had helped me, he and I went down to the FBI headquarters building, and we're waiting, and there's a lot of hush-talking, and we're not getting a lot of information, you know, so what are we doing, and

Then he and I see the FBI crime scene team that they had flown down on several occasions. And then we were told that there was a car. There was a car to be processed down at the base by the FBI building. And so we go down there, he and I, and there is a serologist from the FBI team down there as well to process the car. It was Wayne Williams' car. And I'm asking, where did the others go? And they said, well, there's something about a house.

It was like, the house. So I actually called the head of the task force and said, what's going on? FBI folks are here and we got a car that's being processed by the house. Well, he had the address of the house. So I drove to the house. The FBI team was already in processing the house. I knew what I was looking for. I was looking for green carpet, violet acetate, and dog hair.

For the first time, Larry's fiber evidence seemed to be going somewhere. But it would all come down to what the samples looked like under a microscope.

Again, Larry and Northrup differed on this.

I actually was expecting it not to match. Now I'm feeling this needs to be a deep dive search. This is not other place where I've gone to where there's no green carpet and there's nothing purple and they don't have a dog or they've got a dog, but it's a different breed dog. And, you know, there was nothing even on the surface of it that made it seem like, hey, maybe this was a maybe.

And keep in mind that just because you find a fiber that's not of the clothing doesn't mean it's important. Because you're picking up fibers from your home, your car, a lot of places that you would normally go to. So there's nothing going to jump out and go, hey, I'm a fiber from a killer. These comparisons happened before Wayne Williams' home was ever searched, before we ever had a piece of green carpet. These were individual cases examined over time.

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. 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. There and Gone.

For decades, the Mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. However, one murder of a crime boss sparked a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the mob. It sent the message that we can prosecute these people.

Discover how law enforcement and prosecutors took on the mafia and together brought them down. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeartRadio, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System. The first two episodes drop on August 22nd.

Plus, did you know that you can listen to the episodes as they come out completely ad-free? Don't miss out. Subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel today. Available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I liked Wayne. He was nerdish.

Pretty much everybody in the media knew him at some level. He worked at the radio station I worked at right before I was hired. I knew him kind of from a distance. So when he was arrested, we were all talking about it. Everybody's going, that's Wayne. He's cocky. He's a little nerdy. Very kind of unassuming. Unassuming and cocky at the same time.

I called Dr. Brad Bayless and I asked him if he would come over and hang out and interview Wayne, let me know whether or not he was crazy.

This is Popcorn with the FBI. I was a Bureau of Sex Crimes instructor, and I should have seen this right away. He's a sexual sadist. He gets arousal from the act of murdering, the act of killing. He's the most dangerous of all sexual predators. They will plan their murders. They will carry them out meticulously. And he is a sexual sadist. He's the most dangerous of all sexual predators. And Mike McComas with the FBI.

I think Wayne has some mental issues, some disorders that would cause someone to be a compulsive liar. In my layman's terms, I think he's a sociopath. I think he exhibits all the characteristics. The compulsive liar, the inability to love or know that you're hurting somebody, the illusions of grandeur.

I was a hostage negotiator in the FBI, and of course we had to know when we were dealing with people that had mental issues. If you don't believe me, look up sociopath and look at what the five characteristics, the five biggies, the hair will pop up on your arm, you'll go, "Wow."

The term sociopath is used very loosely and there's no one meaning of it. It has five or six different meanings in the literature and we don't use it because it's kind of a colloquial term. This is Dr. Scott Lilienfeld, an author and psychology professor at Emory University. One of his fields of study is psychopathy.

Most of the classic work on psychopathy goes back to the work of a man named Hervey Cleckley, who actually was from Georgia, who wrote a classic book in 1941 that went through several editions called The Mask of Sanity. The Mask of Sanity he called psychopathy because he thought that they presented with a kind of convincing facade of being quite normal and quite healthy. So they often seemed healthy, actually in some cases even healthier than us, but deep down there was something very wrong with them.

He quickly delineated 16 criteria that he thought were central to psychopathy. Psychopathic people tend to be charming on the outside, they make a good first impression on other people. They often seem poised, normal, often seem to be largely immune to anxiety and kind of neurotic quirks. They also seem to show a number of interpersonal deficits. They often are very self-centered.

They often are manipulative. They also show a lot of affective emotional deficits. They're often callous. They seem to lack empathy. They don't seem to form very close emotional attachments to people. They don't seem to fall in love very deeply with people. Then you see a lot of behavioral issues.

Abnormality is a lot of things that they do that's very different from the rest of us. They tend to lie a lot. They cheat a lot. They're often sexually promiscuous. They often see themselves as the victims. They often see their problems as everybody else's fault, but theirs. They seem to like insight into the nature and extent of their problems. And my take on it, in part, is that they just...

have very little capacity for introspection. I'm having all of these problems, I keep getting caught, I'm doing all these things and so on. Well, it's got to be my upbringing or the way that people have treated me or the fact that I've had many bad breaks in life or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Rarely is it acknowledged that it's their fault.

They will often exhibit poor impulse control. They'll often explode unpredictably. They'll often have a short fuse. When someone insults them or threatens them, they may explode very quickly. They may have a very short fuse. So it's a very complex picture, I think.

When you put all that together, it's like, what is that beast? It's really hard to sort of summarize it, but what Cleckley argued is, again, it's this mask of sanity. You see this wolf in sheep's clothing. You see someone who superficially seems very healthy, well-adjusted, charismatic, poised, but then deep down, there was something very wrong with them. Even for the defense team, it was important to decide whether or not Wayne was stable. I wanted to know if Wayne was sane, which he was.

He arranged an interview between Wayne and a specialist. According to their expert, Wayne was sane. But there was still one major problem with their case. Wayne fit the profile. Wayne fit the profile that the FBI had. But he had a different take on that. Profiling to me is an inexact science. Now, people will argue with me, but I'm not going to be dependent on profiling. He wanted to make a breakthrough. He wanted to...

find his place. And the closest he had was his connections to the media. Wayne would call and tell me, "You know, we need to do this, we need to do that." "Okay, fine, Wayne, write me a check." "We don't have any money, Wayne."

It was two days of testimony. When the sun's first light hit the county courthouse, the crowd was already here. They started gathering at 4 a.m., even though the doors didn't open till 8. Some 400 showed up, hoping to watch Wayne Williams testify. And when you get a crowd this size competing for about 50 courtroom seats, you've got trouble. So he did, we felt, a pretty good job in the first day of testimony. Kept his composure, answered the questions. They had to break him.

They had to show the jury a different side of Wayne Williams. They had to let the jury see that this unassuming guy sitting in front of them had this other side to his personality. And they got it. Wayne Williams was not the mild-mannered witness we saw the last two days. He was irritable, arrogant. Assistant DA Jack Mallard had him right where he wanted him.

He finally broke, and he snapped at the prosecutor. He called FBI agents goons, didn't answer some of the prosecutor's questions, and said his own defense attorney, Mary Welcome, forced him to give an interview for money. You want the real Wayne Williams, well, you've got him right here.

as an observer, it was electric. "Mallard, Mr. Williams, you've been eating up all this worldwide publicity, haven't you? Williams, no I haven't. I'm tired of sitting here, you telling these folks I fit the profile. Mallard, wasn't these murders your center stage? Williams, you must be a fool."

I distinctly remember writing down, I've got it here for you, looking up at somebody, I don't remember who, making eye contact and looking at each other like, oh my gosh, here we go. Wayne became combative and testy, calling the prosecutor names. He was very, very combative as an observer, as a juror. You saw a different side to Wayne Williams. They did what they set out to do. Yeah. Yeah.

They got Wayne's goat. Mary advised Wayne not to testify. I mean, what are you gonna do? But Wayne viewed it as, "I'm just overwhelmed anyway. I want to tell my story." They got his goat.

They triggered him and he exploded. He was going to splain it. The defense may have recouped a little after Williams fought back tears later, telling the jury he was just sick and tired of jail, the murder charges, and the harassment from police and the media.

This was the star witness for the state, Larry Peterson, who for months has slumped over microscopes looking at fibers and hair taken from the two bodies. In court, he showed the jury photographs for the first time, pictures of fibers that he claims are similar. In his words, they match in every basic property. Nine weeks of testimony, the jury came back in what was under 10 hours, as I recall, which is a very short period of time.

They had an early verdict. All in all, having watched what the jury watched, having heard everything the jury heard, having talked to the jurors afterwards, I'm not surprised by their verdict at all.

I was a very young reporter when this was going on. This was burned into my brain. It was so impressionable for me as a young person. I mean, I can recall the, you know, Wellman 181B nylon trilobal fiber made by West Point Peperel that, according to the testimony, was found in only, I think it was 82 homes. This resonated in my head in a way that

A lot of other stories I've covered didn't. The problem with this case is it's complex and it's lengthy and there are many moving parts and many pieces of the puzzle. And no one piece blows you away. You can't talk about the bridge and say, "Okay, that's it." You can't talk about the fibers and say, "That does it for me." It was this long, slow unfolding of circumstantial evidence.

When the Williams trial is finally history, it will be distinguished not only by the sheer bulk of scientific evidence presented to the jury, but also in the methods that scientific evidence was collected. Sophisticated new microscopes were brought in and controversial testing techniques like neutron activity analysis were used to compare the fibers and dog hair found on some of the child victims with those found in Williams' home. I remember the closing arguments basically

where they use this deal. You know, there have been no more murders since Wayne was arrested. It was baloney. The defense, in closing arguments, placed a thimble on the stand in front of the jury and had mentioned that all the evidence, that literally there's just a thimble full of evidence. That's all there is.

you know, obviously trying to infer that because it's so small, it has minimal significance. But, you know, I think that if you take a jury today and you tell them that this thimble is full of the Black Plague and you set it on the banisher, I think people are going to immediately recognize that this is not a place I want to be in, that something that small. You think of microbes and viruses and things that are kind of common today that people fear.

things that are small can be very powerful. So really the only explanation is that either you can say all of this is just made up and so we went to a great deal during the trial to explain how the fibers have significance and why do these particular ones have significance.

Government conspiracy? Well, if there's a government conspiracy, then I guess I'm part of the government conspiracy because I work for the GBI in the crime lab. And as a young forensic scientist, you know, went to these crime scenes, did these collections, made these comparisons, I think it would be extremely difficult for anybody to come in and replace all of that with some kind of contaminated evidence to make it all match the Williams home environment. There's just no way. So I haven't heard another viable explanation

explanation to how it could be other than that. But I understand it's technical in a lot of ways and there are people who don't want to believe things or just not going to believe it. Had to be a black judge. Had to be. Had to be a black killer. All the racism, all of our prejudices, all of them just came to the surface in the middle of that and it was just a shame.

You know, some people are just, they're going to believe what they want to believe, and nothing you can say or do is going to dissuade them or convince them that it's something different than that. But I know what I know, and I think that if people are being reasonable and are being level-headed and they're not being biased about a preconceived notion of in or out, when you lay it out, you can see it. Among those kids that died could have been a great poet, could have been a

A kid that cured cancer could have been a Nobel Prize winner. Who knows? But they never had the opportunity. Even though Wayne was in the hole and couldn't talk, I didn't want to stop gathering stories. By this point in time, I talked to so many people with all different opinions. I felt that some things were finally cleared up for me. What really happened at trial? What truly were the linchpins in William's case? And how exactly trace evidence and fiber analysis stood up in a court of law?

After talking to Larry, the fiber evidence seemed stronger than ever. And right when things seemed to be making sense, I got a phone call. You may start the conversation now. What in the world? Hello, stranger. I'm finally on the hold and everything. I'm doing great. They let me out yesterday. You know, it was the craziest thing. They bought a car that instant happened. It would be a separate podcast, but you would never believe it.

Next time on Atlanta Monster, I talk to Wayne Williams again. But this time, I have a whole new set of questions for him. Next time, on the season finale of Atlanta Monster. That was the only hole that was ever knocked into the fiber evidence. We have these records that clearly indicate that 79LTD was not available to the family, but yet we have trunk liner fibers that

that matched that trunk liner. That had bugged me through post-trial. It always had bugged me. - It was physical evidence. Some of the strongest evidence that was presented in the trial, and I would tell you that 99.9% of your audience has never heard of it. Blood stains. - And when he said I was looking at the car and I was looking at the person in the car, and I was looking at the sketch, I was looking at the sketch in the back of my mind like, "The same dude be on TV."

Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week, with new episodes every Friday. 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. One last thing, we've set up an Atlanta Monster tip line. Anyone with information, leads, or personal accounts pertaining to the Atlanta child murders can call us and leave a message. The number is 1-833-285-6667.

Again, that's 1-833-285-6667. Thanks for listening. A lime green Rolls Royce with a purple stripe in the guise of a fiber. That unique. Not knowing how many lime green Rolls Royces might be out there with a purple racing stripe, I'd imagine. You've seen one. Yes.

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...

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.