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“Cold-case squad to probe decades-old Atlanta murders” Wayne Williams was NEVER charged with, let alone convicted of KILLING ANY CHILD. Instead he was convicted only of killing two bearded adult criminals; one as old as he and the other older than himself. The murders of children in the Atlanta area DID NOT STOP when Wayne Williams went to jail. The LAST child VICTIM was placed on the arbitrary list two months before Wayne Williams "went to jail." Yet others WHO HAD SEX with some of the victims; and who some of the VICTIMS SLEPT WITH on their last nights alive - convicted "child molesters" - went to jail at the time the last CHILD VICTIM was placed on THE LIST. . . . While investigating a murder, police failed to find the body of the murder victim's murdered child under the seat cushion of a couch in the room next to where the mother's body had been found. This discovery was left to be made by child's paternal grandmother after police had "cleared" the scene. NO ONE has ever even claimed to have seen Wayne Williams harm anyone, let alone kill anyone. People who claimed to have seen Williams with a victim on dates prior to their disappearances were referred to by the media as "eye witnesses." One of these sightings should have been known to prosecutors to have been impossible as the victim identified had been burried three months BEFORE the alleged sighting. One supposedly took place in a sports car the likes of which Wayne Williams was never shown to have had access. This testimony was given by a "witness" who admitted on the stand that he had "smoked some weed" before taking the witness stand. . . . No weapon was found, NOT ONE piece of evidence which could even be claimed to have come from a victim was found in the Williamses' home where police claim many of the killings took place. The prosecutor said it was the only time in his long career that he had ever obtained a murder conviction when he didn't have the slightest idea, where, when or how the murder(s) had been committed. . . . Is Wayne Williams even guilty of the two murders of which he stands convicted? Judge for yourself. Read THE LIST ” by the author, Chet Dettlinger (READ THE AUTHOR’S ENTIRE SUMMARY AT LINK BELOW) Nothing threatens the sleep of those who claim that there is no doubt that Wayne Williams is “THE Atlanta Child Killer” more than the saga of Clifford Jones. Victim Terry Pue lived in extreme Northwest Atlanta, within a mile or two of the laundromat where Clifford Jones met his fate. At least five witnesses told their stories to Jones case investigators. Another maintained that he knew nothing. One of them accused another of being present in the room when the killing took place. This meant that police had several versions to deal with and in the end they decided not to deal with any.. One thing is for certain that among the five, at least three said they saw Clifford Jones go into the back room with Jamie Brooks. Jones would never be seen alive again. For his part, Jamie Brooks admits that Clifford was at the laundromat. One of the witnesses, Freddie Cosby told police, and later prosecutors, that he saw the murder take place. He described the scene as follows:
Cosby had at least part, if not all, of it right. Clifford Jones was the only list victim to have been strangled with a rope. How did Freddie see all of this? He said he went outside and around the back where he knew he could see what was going on in Jamie Brooks’ apartment by looking through a grate which covered a fan set into the back wall of the manager’s apartment. This apartment took up the rear of the laundromat. It could be accessed from the outside or from the laundromat itself. Another “eye-witness” stated that he saw the little boy (Clifford Jones) brought to the laundromat by an older boy (I always wondered if this were Terry Pue who lived close by). Once the soon to be victim was inside, according to Freddie Cosby, Jamie Brooks and Horace Hopgood took him (Clifford Jones) into Jamie’s room and shut the door. In any event either Horace Hopgood or Calvin Smith said that Clifford had been brought to the “washhouse” on that fatal day by a larger black teenager. Terry Pue certainly fits the description that they gave of the larger boy. Police believed Hopgood’s story. He said that he was not in the room with the little boy. The report lists the same reasons for believing Hopgood as those listed in the Green River report that professes the investigator’s belief in the story of Gary Ridgway. He is so “cooperative.” Well, by now we know how much coffee that cooperation will by in Brazil. Clifford was more than likely looking for a place to sell the cans he had collected. Just that day, his normal buyer had opted out and someone had told Clifford that there was a guy at the “washhouse” who would buy them. That guy was Jamie Brooks. It didn’t escape my notice that Jamie Brooks, a convicted child molester and rapist who died of aids was at that time the “block Captain” for the “Neighborhood Watch,” you know the police promoted groups that are there to protect the residents of a specific community. This was the second time this great organization for preventing crimes came up in this story. The other was a sign at the end of the bridge where the state claims Williams dumped Nathaniel Cater’s body into the Chattahoochee River. It reads “This Neighborhood Protected By Neighborhood Watch!” Later, on the muggy August night of Clifford’s death, three neighbors sitting outside to escape the heat saw something that disturbed them. Alzada Tate, better known to her friends as Lay Lay, her granddaughter Teresa Smith, and Willie Dodson sat on the front porch of Lay Lay’s house. That porch overlooks the rear of the laurdromat and sits on a hill truncated by the leveling for the shopping center which houses the laurdromat. In effect these folks were sitting directly behind and slightly above the level of the back door of Jamie Brooks apartment in the rear of the laundromat. Lay Lay’s house was separated from the center by a concrete block retaining wall and a narrow service road behind the shopping center. The laundromat itself occupies the space at the northwest corner of the strip center building. All three witnesses from the porch told police that they saw Jamie, or somebody who looked just like Jamie wearing his “glory robe” come out of the back door carrying something heavy wrapped in plastic. They watched as the man in the “glory robe” ignored a dumpster that sat just a few feet from the door of Brooks’ apartment and proceed to the far eastern end of the shopping center. There the man placed the heavy item wrapped in plastic in front of a second dumpster and disappeared toward the front of the center. Police arriving at the scene of Jones’ dumping caused a commotion which caused Lay Lay’s nephew Calvin Smith to come outside from the house on the hill overlooking the laurdromat to see what was going on. “What happened?” Calvin who had spent most of the day in the laundromat asked. “They found a body,” Lay Lay replied. “Was it wrapped in plastic?” Calvin wanted to know. Was this a wag (wild assed guess) on the part of Calvin Smith or did he know something. It seems obvious that he knew something. Police would make the decision that Freddie Crosby who is a bit slow minded was NOT a reliable witness. Oh, but Sweet Evening Breeze, the joint smoking state’s witness is? Never mind that Cosby had correctly identified the murder weapon. There is no doubt in my mind that had Freddie Cosby stated that he saw Wayne Williams he would have been a star witness for the prosecution even if he had to be accompanied to the stand by a doctor. What about the unquestioned mental reliability of Lay Lay; Calvin and the others who saw Jones in the laundromat; of those who saw him taken into the private sleeping quarters of Jamie Brooks; of Mabel Sheets, a school system employee, who told investigators that she also saw Jamie Brooks carry Jones’ dead body wrapped in plastic past one dumpster to another farther from his back door; of those who saw Jamie Brooks lay the body out in front of a dumpster and then turn towards a bank of phones (within minutes Atlanta police received an anonymous phone call telling them that a body was lying in front of a dumpster in the Hollywood Plaza Shopping Center.) All of these witnesses knew Jamie Brooks. They knew that the long white hooded robe was Jamie’s and that he called it his “glory robe. The police knocked on Lay Lay’s door, but they never talked to, or inquired about, Calvin Smith who was inside. The F.B.I. was convinced that Clifford Jones was killed by Jamie Brooks. In a memo report an investigating agent said that there were only six things that needed to be accomplished before bringing the investigation to a close. Actually some were part of others so the actual count boiled down to three. 1) to locate the source of the plastic, 2) to locate the long white robe, and;. 3) locate a person named Michael who supposedly was with Brooks the night of this incident.. Brooks knew the FBI was on his tail and he complained about the F.B.I. investigators wondering why they had NOT contacted him. They would have, had it not been for a splash in the Chattahoochee River. When the investigation began to focus on Williams, the investigation of Jamie Brooks abruptly ended. In the late 90s, Emanuel Jones, younger brother of list victim Clifford Jones, contacted me. He had read the files that contained the above information and was positive that, in spite of the administrative clearance, Wayne Williams did not kill Clifford. Emanuel was seeking justice. Not unlike Pat Man, Clifford Jones had not been included in the pattern cases for a reason very important to the state - which gets to make such choices. Prosecutors didn’t want to have to attempt to overcome defense evidence that someone else murdered a victim on whose body the most unusual of all the fibers had been found. Prosecutors also didn’t want the defense to have an opportunity to refute the testimony of the Royal Canadian Police expert who testified that the probability was near zero of finding the combination of fibers found in the various cases. . . anywhere else except in the environment of Wayne Williams.” He of course conveniently, if not carefully, overlooked the fact that three other people shared the exact same environment as did everyone else who visited the Williamses. When evidence technicians wanted samples of the Williamses carpet, which was wall-to-wall throughout the house, they asked for Wayne’s bedroom. It was from, this room that they took the carpet samples. This was planned so that the laboratory technicians could later testify that the fibers on this or that victim are consistent with having come from the carpet in Wayne Williams’ bedroom. This sounds much more sinister and is much more beneficial to the prosecution than the same testimony about the same fibers but fibers that were taken from the carpet in Homer Williams’ house. This left the state with one unknown or ignored problem. The fibers were taken from Wayne’s bedroom, but it had not been his bedroom for a long time. Wayne was now occupying the bedroom which had been occupied by an aunt during the period of the slayings. It is unclear whether or not the Canadian “expert” was even aware of the murder of Clifford Jones, let alone aware that Jones was murdered in a laundromat. If he had been aware could he have been so positive that there was no place where the combination of very-common fibers might have come from other than the Williamses environment. How about a place where the fibers of hundreds of families are mixed together in traps designed to catch them. How about a laundromat? Don’t you think that such a location just might provide another such environment where the combination of even highly ususal fibers might be found?. By the time that Emanuel grew into a young man and contacted me, Sydney Dorsey was the Sheriff of DeKalb County. Dorsey had been the chief homicide investigator assigned to the case of Clifford Jones. In an interview on Atlanta’s ABC outlet, Channel 2, conducted by former ABC London correspondent Bob Sirkin, Dorsey stated that Jones was NOT killed by Wayne Williams but rather that Jamie Brooks was the real killer. Atlanta officials immediately removed Dorsey from his post as a homicide investigator and reassigned him to the airport to write parking tickets. Dorsey sued and won a large settlement. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution buried accounts of Dorsey’s court victory and did not bother to explain the issues of the suit. Perhaps they didn’t understand them. There was a lot about these cases that was not understood by the AJC. Jurors in the Wayne Williams trial heard none of this. The real culprit is the Georgia law on similar transactions. This law allows only prosecutors to propose cases as pattern cases. Prosecutors didn’t pick the Jones case as a pattern case and when the defense tried to bring it in, the judge ruled it out as irrelevant. Yet the murder of Clifford Jones, who was one of the few who had the relatively unusual green fibre on his body, later would be administratively cleared with the arrest of Wayne Williams. Even though as mentioned earlier, Jamie Brooks would admit that victim Clifford Jones had been inside the laundromat before his death. NOBODY would even claim that Wayne Williams was anywhere near that laundromat that day or any other day for that matter. Several weeks later, I got a phone call from Dorsey in which he informed me that Brooks was dead. He had died of Aids while in prison. There would be no arrest and trial of Jamie Brooks. No justice for the Joneses. I have served on the defense teams of two of the world’s most notorious “serial murderers,” Wayne Williams who was convicted of killing only two men, both older than he but who is infamous as the “so-called” Atlanta Child Murderer and Gary Ridgway, confessed killer of 48 women who probably murdered many more.
Serial murders are NOT rare! A King County, Washington police chief ,Terry Mangan. is quoted as having said: “At any given time in the Pacific Northwest we may have as many as 15 serial killers.” I suppose this depends on who is defining “Pacific Northwest,” and who is categorizing and counting murders. One thing is for certain the area is home to some of the best known serial killers, such as Ted Bundy and Ridgway and to many not so well knows such as those of an as yet unidentified killer that came to light in the Seattle suburb of “Bothell Washington in the late 90s
In any event by every account, most serial murders go unsolved by police action. In fact most go unsolved through any action. This doesn’t surprise me as the solution rate in all stranger to stranger crimes is abysmal. What did surprise me, however, is a vicarious tour of unsolved murders I recently took through Michael Newton’s The Encyclopedia Of Unsolved Crimes. Frankly, I was amazed at the size of the problem. I knew it was big but even adjectives like huge fall short as accurate descriptors..
Ever since I opposed an FOP proposal for a flat $100 per month state incentive for local police in Kentucky in favor of a percentage which brought more money to most police officers, but included even more money for officers having a college education, I have been considered an enemy by too many police officers. If allowed two generalizations based on the comments of the two police officers who have voiced their opinions to my face, I would chose, 1. They demonstrate an inability to see what is in their own best interest and 2. Most suffer from the fallacy that “If you ain’t with us, then you’re against us.”
I am a negative critic. A lot of people don’t like negative critics. Yet their work can be invaluable. There are plenty of people around who will praise the work of our police. Most of them however, are not familiar with the inner operations of police systems, and far too many base their ideas about effectiveness on the TV rather than the street versions. Even those in the occasionally lucky systems - lucky enough to accidently have been in the right place at the right time - seldom experience that little light bulb over their heads that might allow them to grasp just how futile most of their efforts really are.
In both the Atlanta and Green River Murders, I was hired by the defense teams. In Seattle my job was primarily to critique the investigation, looking for police foul ups. As a result, my recollections and the notes I had made in preparation to file my final report focus on the negative.
But, beyond the standard meaningless platitudes, what can one say to balance the negative? Usually the answer is absolutely nothing. But in the Green River cases after twenty years of futility, Gary Ridgway was arrested and pled guilty, primarily because of a laboratory procedure that just recently became available. The positive things are that the officers collected the evidence in the first place, that it was preserved for twenty years and that an officer had the tenacity to ask the state crime lab to reexamine the evidence in light of recent developments in the art of DNA identification. I have a few more kudos but they will reveal themselves in the following pages.
I expect to be criticized for this work but I would like to remind all involved that they were not always kind to themselves. In the Green River cases, Randy Mullinax’s review of victim Cheryl Wims case begins: “While I’m not criticizing the efficiency of ther investigation (the Hell he’s not) I believe that ALL KEY WITNESSES need to be RECONTACTED (emphasis supplied).
All I can do is join other critics, Dave Reichert and Robert Koeppel among them and hope that someday the light will go on for them as it has for me and allow them to understand that even had they performed perfectly, it wouldn’t have made any difference at all.
So, in the words of the so-called “Great Communicator” here I go again. The following is a mixture of my critique of two police “Task force” investigations and a mother lode of other personal experiences. There is even an occasional side trip into the courts with which I have more than a passing familiarity, having been a defense attorney for most of the last 15 years.
Those in the so-called police profession might assume that I am attacking police officers. Nothing could be further from the truth. My dad was a Louisville, Kentucky police officer as was I. I was also the assistant to the chief of police of Atlanta, GA.. I know that policing does a great job when it comes to responding to emergencies and even to a small extent in apprehending criminals. We could not survive as a society without them. However, the one thing for which we rely on police almost completely, crime(s) prevention is one thing with which policing has very little affect. What Iam attacking are a system that is charged with prevention of crimes but cannot work and the fact that most people assume that it can. It is burdened with failed procedures such as promoting safety by “chasing” speeders. The results are crime rates that seem to vary only with the demographics of the population and a lot of would-be honest cops who get hooked on “good money” and end up bringing shame to the badge so proudly worn by others.
This book must be read with an open mind. Otherwise preconceived ideas will block the stimula from entering the readers’ brains. This is true of any information which challenges commonly accepted “beliefs.” This is a story or group of stories about the so-called Criminal Justice System. My feeling is that the subject sounds too academic and that it is too obfuscated in wrongful preconceptions to tempt a person to pick it up. That is unless you include a few interesting activities it has controlled while telling the stories.
Throughout you will see the words fact or facts. Be careful. I doubt that there is anything such as an unabridged fact. Everything is perceived and as my wife once pointed out to me, “It is impossible to BELIEVE and correctly perceive at the same time.” She is absolutely right. The problem is that most people are “believers.”
Most of us have played the game of passing on a fact. The outcome has been similar every time I have witnessed the game. What starts out as a yellow Buick ends up a black pick up truck by the team it is passed on 20 or thirty times. I think this is the reason that there are usually several versions of the “facts.” ---
We do it all of the time. Watch or read the news and see that “the cops got ‘im.” Now we’re comfortable. There’s no concern, in fact no awareness of the dangers inherent in assuming that a long accepted solution is capable of solving the problem(s) assigned to it. It’s a must to remember that in our “system” an accused is presumed innocent until proved guilty. Many convicts are really innocent. So what if the guy they “got” is guilty, if he ever sees the inside of a penitentiary it will be one where two worse criminals are leaving as he enters.
We drop most societal problems in the lap of “government.” We assume that we pay our taxes and that the protection this affords is akin to buckling our seat belts. Government provides “professionals” to handle these problems. It does, doesn’t it? Not really.
Some of the deadliest errors available to mankind lurk in his naive acceptance of solutions which, if he only understood, have little if any relevance to solving the problems to which they are applied. The process resembles a trip to a mediaval bleeder or any number of alchemies that persisted in mediaeval times Actually those times are still with us. Such practices abound in the so-called “criminal-justice system.” The so called “criminal justice system” is one of the worst yet most tenacious After all it affects our quality of life - in fact life itself - 24/7/ 365.25+.
Society - including the “experts” who blindly apply what is actually a non-solution - place their trust in this now 21st century brand of alchemy. In the United States of America, this includes the President (all 43 so far) the Attorneys General of the United States, the Chief Justices, the Directors of the FBI down to your local beat cops. Unfortunately, this is particularly true of those among them who have degrees in this alchemy which are most often (more aptly than is realized) labeled BS in “Criminal Justice” or “Criminology.”
The real truth is that the ill placed trust in this system is a major ingredient of many of our problems. I recall in the late 70s when notice was first taken of children disappearing in metropolitan Atlanta and turning up murdered. I proposed a McFinder program to “McDonalds”. My thought then was that if a child was missing from home and was able to communicate, that child would be in a McDonalds at least once a month. The idea died aborning of course because it was forwarded to the chief of security for McDonalds, who was an ex-cop of some variety and knew only the fallacies he or she had learned while not solving missing children cases for the government..
News conferences often cheer the occasional success such as “catching a crook,” but when it comes to the prevention of crimes, not one of the “experts” has publically admitted that the system cannot work. I would like to think that surely some of them must know this, but I don’t. Their “belief” is akin to a childlike trust that Santa will come, or an adult reliance on the superstitions and dogmas of this or that religion.
Somewhere in that news conference one can expect to hear the words, “street value” and “approximately V Million, W Thousand , X Hundred, Y dollars and Z cents. When you hear this kind of “approximation” you know immediately that the speaker hasn’t the slightest idea what he or she is talking about.
The key word is “belief,” for belief implies a trust beyond all reason. Belief surrounds blind faith. It is an oft misused word which is mistakenly used to replace “think,” as in “I believe we have the right person.” But then most people in this business don’t think much either. They accept their training, seldom questioning the ersatz foundation of their trust.
Putting trust in a proven defense like a seatbelt can be a life saver but it is unquestionably deadly to trust your life to a solution that, as conceived, seldom works and on those few occasions, only by accident.
Generally, people who trust those “experts” and their “expertise” have been led to “believe” that there is a singular problem which is generally identified as “crime.” The unmistakable fact is that “crime” is just a collective noun and that there are many problems lumped under this misnomer.
What’s even worse is that most of these “crimes” are not even subject to being solved by society’s accepted singular solution. The assumptions made about the capability of this system to prevent criminal acts and thereby protect our lives can be and for the victims always turn out to be unrecognized ghastly, if not deadly, concept errors. How many date rapes inside a victim’s apartment can be prevented by police patrol? How many embezzzlements?
It is simple to understand how misidentifying the problems as “A” crime problem has led to the adoption of “A” singular solution and since that solution, even if functioning perfectly, is not designed to prevent each and every one of our myriad crime problems, it is doomed to fail much of the time. It cannot be fixed simply because it is not merely broken. Instead it’s designed to cope with a plausibly conceived problem. Too bad, as the problems it is applied to demand a myriad of valid answers.
Fine tune all you wish. It’s a waste of time. Even a brush with grammar school history is informative enough to suggest a realization that our current solution dates to Cicero of the Roman Empire and probably to a much earlier time. It well may date to the cave, where the toughest or the one with the biggest “stick” provided law and order by making the laws and giving the orders. It hasn’t worked yet.
Unfortunately in my almost 50 years within the entire worldwide system, from street cop to defense attorney, to Justice Department “expert, (so help me this was my title)” I am yet to hear a person who is responsible for making decisions about crimes who understands even the abc’s of the subject enough to put the s on CRIME.
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