For the defense it was the wrong man––a good, gentle, soft, weak, harmless guy––refuting witnesses, calling into question evidence, an upstate New York hospital pathologist specializing in pediatrics contradicting autopsy results, a weather service hydrologist claiming Cater’s body would not have ended up where it did had it been dropped from the James Jackson Parkway Bridge, and of course, Wayne Bertram Williams himself, confidently spouting protestations, proclaiming his innocence––a witness for the defense who may have done far more for the prosecution.
The pattern cases became the key factor for evidence to be used by the state against Williams, especially when linking similar fibers. By themselves the Cater and Payne cases were extremely weak, but by introducing evidence from each of the ten pattern cases, the prosecution was able to enter eyewitnesses and fiber connections among many of the victims.
The ten pattern cases used were Alfred Evans, Eric Middlebrooks, Charles Stephens, William Barrett, Terry Pue, John Porter, Lubie Geter, Joseph Bell, Patrick Baltazar, and Larry Rogers.
The characteristics of the pattern cases were that the victims were black males, street hustlers, from poor families, no evidence of forced abduction, from broken homes, no apparent motives for their disappearances, killed by asphyxiation by strangulation. None of them owned a car, their bodies were found near expressway ramps or major arteries and transported before or after death, they were all missing clothing when found, and they all had similar fibers found on them.
The prosecution called a successful black businessman, Eustis Blakely, and his wife because they were friends with Williams. They were asked if they knew Williams to lie and exaggerate. Blakely testified Williams had told him that he flew fighter jets at Dobbins Air Force base––something Blakely knew to be a lie because of how bad Williams’s eyesight was.
Far more incriminating was the testimony of Blakely’s wife. She had asked Williams after he had become a suspect if the police got enough evidence on him would he confess before he got hurt. He told her he would. She also testified that Williams told her he could knock out black street kids in a few minutes by putting his hands on their necks.
When cross-examined, the defense attorney asked if she was implying Williams had killed someone. She answered that she was, that she was sorry but she really did believe that he had.
Lugene Laster testified that he saw Jo-Jo Bell get into a Chevrolet station wagon driven by a man he identified as Williams. Robert Henry, who knew Cater, testified he saw Cater and Williams holding hands the evening of the bridge incident. A couple of youths claimed Williams made sexual advances toward them and a fifteen-year-old said Williams paid him two dollars to let him fondle his genitals.
Two other witnesses, a nightclub owner and a recreational director, discredited Williams’s statements that earlier in the evening on the night of the May 22nd bridge incident he was picking up a tape recorder and playing basketball.
The defense put a number of witnesses on the stand to rebut what prosecution witnesses had said about Williams’s behavior or where he was at a particular time. They even had a college student who had been recruited by Williams for a singing job testify that Williams disliked homosexuals and expected his clients to have high standards and morals, and a woman who claimed to having had what she called normal sex with Williams.
To refute time of death in the Nathaniel Cater case, the defense brought in its own expert who lost credibility when he testified that Cater had been in the water for at least two weeks––far less time than he had even been missing.
Others were called. No one was particularly helpful or even effective.
Finally, Williams himself took the stand.
He challenged eyewitness accounts and made it clear to the jury he was too small and weak to have quickly stopped the car on the bridge and thrown Cater over the shoulder-high guard rail into the river.
He also continually attempted to convince the jury he didn’t possess the temperament to commit murder. Something he seemed more or less successful at doing until cross.
Under a lengthy, skillful, aggressive cross examination Williams snapped.
Wayne Williams was no match for Jack Mallard.
Mallard would lull Williams with lengthy, repetitive questions about seemingly small details or fine points, and then pounce. One of his associates described it as slowly pulling the hammer back and eventually letting it fall.
On the third day of cross, Mallard let the hammer drop.
As if Williams was an inadequate sparring partner, Mallard jabbed and moved, peppering him with punches, setting him up for the knockout.
Mallard used Williams’s own contradictions against him and confronted him with all the lies and exaggerations and testimony and evidence and illogical and inane statements and claims he had made.
And Williams came undone.
“You want the real Wayne Williams?” he asked. “You got him right here.”
Williams transformed into something the jury had heretofore not seen.
Jekyll became Hyde. The Gemini was unleashed and the defendant became a witness for the prosecution.
On Saturday, February 27, 1982, at about seven in the evening, after only eleven hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict.
Wayne Bertram Williams was found guilty on both counts of murder and immediately sentenced to two life sentences.
But it was ultimately unsatisfying.
I was left with far more questions than answers.
Which of the victims had Williams actually killed?
Who had killed the others?
Would anyone ever stand trial for killing the kids?
The end of the trial was just the beginning of the investigation for me.
I spent the rest of my time in high school studying the case and preparing to become a cop.
While the world was being introduced to MTV and AIDS and the personal computer, while Michael Jackson was making and releasing the biggest-selling album of all time, while Challenger was falling from the sky, I was working on the Wayne Williams case and, with my dad’s help, on a fast track to becoming a certified law enforcement officer.
5
“You okay?” Merrill asked.
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t think of an answer that wasn’t a lie.
He had found me in the bottom of an abandoned boat at the landing, sleeping it off, still clutching Mom’s stolen vodka to me like a baby with a bottle.
I sat up slowly, the spinning world around me streaking by in blurs of blue and green, brown and burnt-orange, and surveyed the dusky evening.
“Thinkin’ about takin’ a boat ride?” he said.
“Came out here to swim,” I said, holding up the bottle.
“That’s not swimming. It’s drowning.”
I nodded. He was right and I knew it. I just didn’t know what to do about it.
He was big even back then, but, like the rest of us, still hadn’t fully grown into his features. Teeth and ears still slightly too big. He was wearing his basketball warmups over his uniform, the cheap fabric straining over the roping cable cords of his muscles.
“Missed you at the game today,” he said. “Coulda used that jumper of yours. Lost by five.”
“Not playin’ anymore,” I said.
“Call it what it is,” he said. “Not playing anymore sound better than quitting.”
“I’m quitting. Don’t have the time.”
“’Cause of takin’ up swimmin’?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let’s go tell Coach. He needs to know his best shooter sidelinin’ hisself.”
“I’m sure he’s figured it out.”
“Nah, I just left him at the gym. He perplexed as the rest of us.”
“I’ll tell him tomorrow at school,” I said.
“Oh, you comin’ to school tomorrow?”
“Believe I will.”
He didn’t say anything and we were both silent as the last of the sun streaking t
he treetops to the west finally faded out and the light in the landing changed.
After a while he said, “Tell me how I can help you.”
“Would if I could,” I said.
“I’ve been doing this a while,” Dad said.
“What?”
“Law enforcement. Investigating. And I’ve picked up a thing or two.”
I didn’t say anything, just listened.
It was 1985, my junior year of high school.
It was report card day and my grades had continued their recent trend of declining, which, I assumed, was why he was in my room.
I had stopped all extracurricular activities. I had pulled back to one degree or another from any and everything but my own personal investigation into the Atlanta Child Murders.
Maps of Atlanta hung on my walls next to bad copies of crime scene, suspect, and victim photos. Stacks of witness statements, evidence reports, UNSUB profiles, and lab documents were scattered about. The small space looked far more like a squad room than a seventeen-year-old boy’s bedroom.
“You’re gonna drive yourself crazy if you’re not careful. You’ve got a gift. You do. I can see it. It’s rare. You’re gonna make a great investigator––but only if you don’t burn yourself out first.”
He didn’t often compliment me or anyone else. Hell, he seldom spoke. This gave all his words weight––and his compliments the impact of a punch.
“A case like this . . . ” he said.
He trailed off and what for me at the time was the case hung there between us.
“It’s . . . got . . . its own . . . I don’t know . . . darkness, its own power. Maybe even presence. It’s evil like you’ll rarely encounter. A black hole you can lose yourself in.”
I had never heard him talk like this but I knew exactly what he meant and knew why he was pressing himself outside his normal, familiar, comfortable space to do it.
“I’m worried about you,” he said. “And it’s not the grades. They’re a symptom. Everything’s a symptom. The isolation. The drinking. The sleeplessness. Symptoms of the obsession, of the frustration, of . . . how . . . close you are . . . to the void.”
I nodded. Not because I agreed with his assessment but because I understood what he was saying and appreciated his concern.
I didn’t know anyone except maybe Merrill knew I was drinking and not sleeping. And I knew for sure he hadn’t said anything to anyone. Everything about this conversation told me my dad was a far better cop and man than my self-involved teenage self knew.
“The thing about it, son,” he said, his voice gentle, entreating, “is the empathy you feel with the victims, the unquenchable thirst burning inside you for justice . . . for restoring some kind of order . . . the rage you feel at the murderer . . . the obsession with knowing, with uncovering, with finding the truth . . . They are the very things that make you perfect for this kind of work . . . but also a perfect candidate for this kind of work to crush, to chew up, and . . . and I think I can see it already starting to.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“I don’t think you are,” he said, looking around at the glut of investigative documents and photographs that cluttered the room. “And I’m the reason you have most of this. I’ve encouraged you but I haven’t really guided you, taught you, helped you.”
“You’ve helped me a lot.”
“Help you find a balance,” he said. “Help you with how to let go.”
“Let go?”
“The case is over, son,” he said. “Williams is serving two life sentences. The murders stopped. Why can’t you move on? What else is there to––”
“The murders didn’t stop,” I said.
“What?”
“Here,” I said. “Sit down.”
I swept off a pile of papers on my desk chair and he sat down.
“A lot of people believe Wayne Williams is innocent,” I said, “but nobody with any credibility believes he killed all twenty-eight or -nine who made the task force list. There were two girls. There were adults, not just young black teens. Some of the victims were stabbed. Some were shot. Some asphyxiated with a ligature, others with bare hands. If Wayne Williams is the Atlanta Child Murderer and he strangled the young boys, why wasn’t he tried for that? And why wasn’t anyone charged with any of the other murders? If it wasn’t him, an innocent man is going to die in prison for something someone else did, and the real killer remains free. Can you live with that?”
He seemed to think about it for a moment, but as it turned out he was thinking of something else entirely.
“Son, there’s someone I want you to talk to, and your mom and I think it’s best if you come live with me for a while.”
6
When Dad had said he wanted me to talk to someone, I had assumed he meant a shrink, so I was as surprised as I was relieved when I found out it was a cop.
The cop, an L.A. detective with the same name as an Early Netherlandish painter whose work I had encountered in an art appreciation class earlier in the year, had impressed Dad during some special training on serial sex crime investigation he had attended in L.A.
The training had followed Ted Bundy’s rampage in Tallahassee at FSU’s Chi Omega sorority house. Something about the viciousness of the attacks, their relative proximity to Pottersville, and the fact that the victims had been the same age as my older sister Nancy, really affected Dad, and for a while it seemed all he did was travel for training.
“Y’all share the same relentlessness and obsession,” Dad had said. “He’s found a way to make it work. He’s one of if not the best cop you’ll ever encounter. Listen to what he has to say. He won’t say much, but what he does will help you.”
Words of praise like those from Jack Jordan were beyond rare. They were the only ones like them I ever heard him utter.
For him to say I shared any traits at all with such a detective did more for me than anything save the conversation itself.
The conversation took place on my second night living with him.
Not only had Dad taken the trouble to set it up, but he was letting me stay up late to take the West Coast call.
I was alone in the quiet, mostly empty house when the call came.
Dispatch had requested that Dad return to his office to deal with a disturbance in the jail just minutes before––something that actually made me feel far less self-conscious about having the conversation.
The TV was off and the only sound I could hear in the small, carpeted house was that of my own reflexive respiration.
The ringing phone shattered the silence, and like so many serendipitous occurrences during this significant and seminal time for me, the call changed my life.
“John?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s Harry Bosch. No need to call me sir.”
I felt an instant affinity with the detective who treated me like an adult, and the disembodied voice from the opposite side of the continent suddenly seemed far more like a brother than a stranger.
“Thank you for taking the time to call,” I said. “I hear you’re working a pretty big case right now.”
“No problem,” he said. “Sorry it couldn’t be any earlier.”
Faintly, in the background, beneath the voice and the static and white noise, I could hear the soft, soothing sounds of a lone alto saxophone.
There was something kind of sad and lonely about the sax that made me feel neither sad nor lonely, as if someone else feeling such things and expressing them in such ways helped abate them somehow.
I was unsure what to say next so I waited.
When he didn’t say anything either, there was a moment of, at least for me, awkwardness.
The silence set an early tone for what would be a conversation with a lot of quiet in it, and I could tell that Harry Bosch, like so many of the men I admired and attempted to emulate, was restrained and self-contained.
“Jack tells me you’re gonna be a cop,” he said eventually. “Says you’ve go
t all the makings of a great one.”
“That’s not what he tells me,” I said.
He didn’t respond right away and I wondered if what I said had sounded disrespectful.
“I just meant . . . he’s worried about me. It’s why he asked you to call. I think he thinks I’m too . . . I don’t know. Like obsessed or . . . something.”
“Whatta you think?”
I couldn’t believe he was asking me.
I thought about it for a moment.
“Not sure. Maybe. I just don’t know. Maybe I am. I . . . I don’t know any other way to be. I really don’t. He keeps tellin’ me I’ve got to let it go, got to be more . . . balanced or something, but I can’t—not when kids have been killed, not when those who should be tryin’ to solve their murders aren’t, not when nobody else seems to care anymore.”
I paused for a moment but continued when all I heard was the hum of the line.
“All those kids matter,” I said. “All of them. They all count––not just white kids, not just rich kids, not just victims from cases that are easy to solve or that have a perp who can be prosecuted.”
“Don’t ever forget that,” he said. “Everybody counts.”
“No, sir, I won’t.”
Here was someone who understood, who got it.
More quiet followed. More static on the line reaching across the more than two thousand miles between us. And more music.
Harry getting it made me feel the way the music did. Less alone in the world somehow.
“Listen, John, I’m not big on handing out advice . . . I’m no expert . . . but the work matters. The victims matter. When they don’t, I’d say it’s time to stop.”
Exactly, I thought. That’s exactly it.
“The thing is . . .”
Here it comes, I thought. Here’s where he agrees with Dad and undermines everything he’s said so far.
“You’ve got to be able to do the work,” he said.
True Crime Fiction Page 4