Papers On Wayne Williams Case

Wayne Bertram Williams was born on May 27, 1958, in Atlanta, Georgia. Catastrophically, Wayne Williams is still the prime suspect in the murders of more than twenty black youths from 1979 to 1981 that occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, although he was only convicted of killing two adults. Little is known about Wayne Williams’s early life, but his public journey to infamy began on July 28, 1979, when a woman in Atlanta came across two bodies hidden under bushes at the side of the road. Both corpses were male, black and children; Edward Smith, fourteen, reported missing a week before, was shot with a .22-caliber weapon. The other victim, thirteen-year-old Alfred Adams, was reported missing three days before and was murdered by asphyxiation. Unfortunately,

Apparently, the jury understood the evidence, because on February 27, 1982, Wayne Williams was convicted of the two murders which he was tried for and he was sentenced to life in prison, at which point Atlanta’s police commissioner closed twenty-one other murder cases. In 1998, after Williams’s lawyers argued that prosecutors had withheld evidence in the case, Judge Hal Craig upheld the conviction and termed the fiber evidence in the case, the strongest scientific link in this case. Since then, the DNA from two human hairs found inside one of the victim’s shirt excludes ninety-eight percent of the people in the world, yet it is consistent with the DNA of Wayne Williams (Nickell, 2011). When Wayne Williams went to trial in the two deaths DNA, testing was not as a common courtroom science and now it has grown significantly. New results have implicated Williams in the death of at least one eleven-year-old victim, Patrick Baltazar whose body was found dumped in a wooded slope behind an office park on February 13, 1981, when he was found a forensic scientist discovered two human scalp hairs inside the boy’s

However, that was a matter of judgement not science. In 2007, defense lawyers for Williams raised the question of DNA testing on the dog hairs, which were found on the bodies of many of the twenty-seven boys, and young men that were found dead during the killing spree. Simultaneously, the judge decided to allow the two hairs that were recovered to be sent to the FBI’s DNA laboratory at Quantico, Virginia. It was at that time, the laboratory found that Williams could not be ruled out; however, ninety-eight percent of every other person in the world was ruled out. As far as the DNA of the dog, those hairs were sent to the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, in 2007, the report said Sheba, the family dog, had the same DNA sequence, and that chain would be found in only 1 out of 100 dogs (Polk, 2010). By the evidence, I would conclude that the police got the right man. Regrettably, I wish he would have been tried for all of the