We had scored a major triumph for the art of profiling and criminal investigative analysis with this case. Our evaluation of the UNSUB and what he would do next was right on the money. Everyone was watching us, from the White House on down. I had stuck my neck way out, and if I’d screwed up or been wrong, the program would have died.
We’d always been told that this job was high risk, high gain. With tears in my eyes, I told Monroe and McKenzie I saw it as "high risk, no fucking gain." I said it just wasn’t worth it and threw my case folders down on the table. Jim McKenzie said I was probably right, but they just wanted to help me.
When I went to headquarters to appear before OPR, the first thing I had to do was sign a waiver of my rights. Upholding justice in the outside world and practicing it inside are not necessarily the same thing. The first thing they did was whip out the People magazine. Jackie Onassis was on the cover.
"Weren’t you warned about doing interviews like this?"
No, I said, the interview had been approved. And at the convention, I was talking about our serial killer research in general when someone brought up the Wayne Williams case. I was careful about the way I phrased my reply. I couldn’t help the way it was reported.
They raked me over the coals for four hours. I had to write out a statement, going over the newspaper reports and what had happened item by item. And when I was finished, they told me nothing and gave me no feedback on what was going to happen to me. I felt as if I’d given the Bureau so much of myself without any reinforcement, sacrificed so many other things, taken so much time away from my family, and now I faced the prospect of being censured, being "on the bricks" without pay for some period of time, or losing my job altogether. For the next several weeks, I literally didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning.
That was when my father, Jack, wrote me a letter. In it, he talked about the time he’d been laid off from his job with the Brooklyn Eagle. He, too, had been depressed. He’d been working hard, doing a good job, but also felt he had no control over his life. He explained how he had learned to face what life throws at you and to regroup his inner resources to fight another day. I carried that letter around with me in my briefcase for a long time, long after this incident was over.
After five months, OPR decided to censure me, asserting that I had been warned after the People article not to talk to the press about pending investigations. The letter of censure came from Director Webster himself.
But as pissed off as I was, I didn’t have much time to stew about it unless I was prepared to quit altogether, and whatever my feelings about the organization were at that time, the work itself was too important to me. I still had ongoing cases all over the United States, and the Wayne Williams trial was coming up. It was time to fight another day.
The Wayne Williams trial began in January 1982 after six days of jury selection. The panel they ended up with was predominantly black, nine women and three men. Although we felt he was good for at least twelve of the child killings, Williams was being tried on only two murder counts—Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne. Ironically, both of these young men had been in their twenties.
Williams was represented by a high-profile legal defense team from Jackson, Mississippi—Jim Kitchens and Al Binder—and a woman from Atlanta, Mary Welcome. Some of the key members of the prosecution were Fulton County assistant district attorneys Gordon Miller and Jack Mallard. Because of my work on the investigative phase of the case, the district attorney’s office asked me to come down and advise them as the trial progressed. For most of the proceedings, I sat directly behind the prosecution table.
If the trial were held today, I would be able to testify as to MO, signature aspects, and case linkage, as I have in many others. And if there was a conviction, during the penalty phase I could give a professional opinion on the defendant’s dangerousness in the future. But back in 1982, what we did hadn’t yet been recognized by the courts, so I could only advise on strategy.
Much of the prosecution’s case rested on about seven hundred pieces of hair and fiber evidence, meticulously analyzed by Larry Peterson and Special Agent Hal Deadman, an expert from the FBI lab in Washington. Even though Williams was charged only with the two murders, Georgia criminal procedure allowed the state to bring in other linked cases, something that couldn’t be done in Mississippi and that the defense didn’t seem prepared for. The problem for the prosecution was that Williams was mild-mannered, controlled, well-spoken, and friendly. With his thick glasses, soft features, and delicate hands, he looked more like the Pillsbury Doughboy than a serial killer of children. He had taken to issuing press releases about how he was not guilty and how his arrest was purely racial in nature. Just before the trial began, he said in an interview, "I would compare the FBI to the Keystone Kops and the Atlanta police to Car 54, Where Are You?"
No one on the prosecution side had any hopes that Williams would take the stand, but I thought he might. From his behavior during the crimes and this type of public statement, I thought he was arrogant and self-confident enough to think he could manipulate the trial the way he had manipulated the public, the press, and the police.
In a closed meeting between the two sides held in Judge Clarence Cooper’s chambers, Al Binder said they were bringing in a prominent forensic psychologist from Phoenix named Michael Brad Bayless to testify that Williams didn’t fit the profile and was incapable of the murders. Dr. Bayless had conducted three separate interview examinations with Williams.
"Fine," Gordon Miller replied. "You bring him in and we’ll bring in as rebuttal witness an FBI agent who’s predicted everything that’s happened so far in this case."
"Shit, we want to meet him," Binder said. Miller told him I’d been sitting behind the prosecution table for most of the trial.
But I did meet with both sides. We used the jury room. I explained my background to the defense and told them if they had any problems with my being an FBI agent or not being a doctor, I could get a psychiatrist we worked with, such as Park Dietz, to study the case, and I felt confident he would testify to the same things.
Binder and his associates seemed fascinated by what I had to say. They were cordial and respectful, and Binder even told me his son wanted to be an FBI agent.
As it turned out, Bayless never did testify. The week after the trial ended, he told reporters for the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution newspapers that he believed Williams was emotionally capable of murder, that he had an "inadequate personality," and that, in his opinion, the motive in the murders was "power and an obsessive need for control." He said that Williams "wanted me to do one of two things, and that was to change my report and not say certain things, or not testify." He asserted that one of the key problems for the defense was Williams’s insistence on controlling everything himself.
I found this all extremely interesting, in no small part because it dovetailed so well with the profile Roy Hazelwood and I had come up with. But during the trial I found another incident equally interesting.
Like most of the out-of-town participants, I was staying at the Marriott downtown near the courthouse. One night, I was eating alone in the dining room when this distinguished-looking black man in his mid-forties comes up to my table and introduces himself as Dr. Brad Bayless. I tell him I know who he is and why he’s here. He asks if he can sit down.
I tell him I think it’s a bad idea that we’re seen together if he’s going to be testifying for the defense tomorrow. But Bayless says he isn’t concerned about that, sits down, and asks me what I know about him and his background, which turns out to be quite a lot. I give him one of my minilectures on criminal psychology and comment that if he testifies the way the defense wants him to, he’s going to embarrass himself and his profession. When he leaves the table, he shakes my hand and says he’d really like to come to Quantico and take our courses. I kind of wink and say we’ll see how you do on the stand tomorrow.
The next day in court, lo and behold, I find out Dr. Bayless has
gone back to Arizona without testifying. At the bench, Binder is complaining about the "power of the prosecution" and how they’re scaring off his expert witnesses. I hadn’t set out to do that, if that’s what happened, but I certainly wasn’t going to back away when the chance fell in my lap. But what really happened, I think, was that Dr. Bayless had too much integrity not to call it as he saw it or to let himself be used by either side for their own purposes.
During the prosecution’s case, Hal Deadman and Larry Peterson had done a masterful job with the hair and fiber evidence, but it was extremely complex stuff and by its very nature, not a very theatrical presentation; all about how this carpet fiber twists in this direction and that carpet fiber twists in the other direction. Ultimately, they matched fibers from all twelve victims to Williams’s violet and green bedspread, connected most of them to the carpet in Williams’s bedroom, about half to the carpet in the living room, the same number to his 1970 Chevrolet, and in all but one case were able to make a connection to hair from the defendant’s German shepherd, Sheba.
When it was the defense’s turn, they had a handsome and charming Kennedy look-alike from Kansas who smiled a lot at the jury come in to rebut Deadman’s testimony. At the end of the session, when the prosecution team met to go over what had happened that day, everyone was laughing about how this good-looking guy from Kansas had not been at all convincing.
They came to me. "What do you think, John?"
I’d been watching the jury. I said, "Let me tell you something: you guys are losing the case." They were shocked and it was the last thing they wanted to hear.
"You may not think he was convincing," I explained, "but the jurors believe him." I knew what Hal Deadman was talking about and I still found it difficult going. The defense witnesses may have been overly simplistic, but they were much easier to follow.
They were gracious enough not to tell me I was full of shit, but, incisive profiler that I am, I realized I wasn’t wanted here. I had a big backlog of cases waiting for me and I was preparing for the Mary Frances Stoner murder trial. All this time on the road was starting to take its personal toll, too. I was having marital problems based on my lack of involvement with the family, I wasn’t getting the exercise I thought I needed, I was stressed all the time. I called Larry Monroe at Quantico and told him I was coming back home.
No sooner do I get back to National Airport and drive home than I receive a message saying the prosecution’s had second thoughts. They’re starting to think some of the things I said may, in fact, be happening. They want me to come back to Atlanta to help them examine the defense witnesses.
So two days later I fly back again. Now they’re much more open, asking for advice. And the big surprise to all of them is that Wayne Williams decides to take the stand, which I’d predicted. He’s examined by his attorney, Al Binder, who has a deep, resonant voice. The way he hunches over as he asks questions, he looks like a shark, which is why he has the nickname Jaws.
He keeps making the same point to the jury. "Look at him! Does he look like a serial killer? Look at him. Get up, Wayne," he says, telling him to hold out his hands. "Look how soft his hands are. Do you think he would have the strength to kill someone, to strangle someone with these hands?"
Binder put Williams on the stand the middle of one day and kept him on all the next day. And Williams did a tremendous job for himself, just as he must have known he would. He was totally believable as the innocent victim of an embarrassed, racially biased system that needed a suspect fast and had found one.
So the next question for the prosecution was, how are we going to cross-examine him? Assistant District Attorney Jack Mallard has the ticket. He’s the one on the spot. He has a low, slow voice and a mellifluous southern accent.
I didn’t have any formal training in courtroom procedure or examination of witnesses, but I had an instinct for what it would take. It was really all based on the idea of "walking in the shoes." I asked myself, what would be upsetting to me? And the answer I came up with was to be questioned by someone who just knew I was guilty, regardless of what I tried to make him believe.
I said to Mallard, "Remember the old TV show This Is Your Life?" You’ve got to do that with him. You’ve got to keep him on the stand as long as you can, you’ve got to break him down. Because he’s an overcontrolled, rigid personality, he’s an obsessive-compulsive. And to get to that rigidity, you have to keep the pressure on him, sustain the tension by going through every aspect of his life, even stuff that doesn’t seem to mean anything, like where he went to school. Just keep it up. Then, when you’ve worn him down, you have to physically touch him, just like Al Binder did. What’s good for the defense is good for the prosecution. Move in close, violate his space, and catch him off guard. Before the defense has the opportunity to object, ask him in a low voice, "Did you panic, Wayne, when you killed these kids?"
And when the time comes, that’s just what Mallard does. For the first several hours of cross-examination, he can’t rattle Williams. He catches him up in a number of glaring inconsistencies, but it’s the same calm, "How could it possibly be me?" Williams. The gray-haired, gray-suited Mallard methodically goes through his whole life, then at the right time, he goes in close, puts his hand on Williams’s arm, and in a low, methodical south-Georgia drawl says, "What was it like, Wayne? What was it like when you wrapped your fingers around the victim’s throat? Did you panic? Did you panic?"
And in a weak voice of his own, Williams says, "No."
Then he catches himself. He flies into a rage. He points his finger at me and screams, "You’re trying your best to make me fit that FBI profile, and I’m not going to help you do it!"
The defense goes ballistic. Williams goes nuts, ranting about "FBI goons" and calling the prosecution team "fools." But that was the turning point of the trial. Jury members later said so themselves. They stared with their mouths open. For the first time, they had seen the other side of Wayne Williams. They could see the metamorphosis before their eyes. They could understand the violence of which he was capable. Mallard winked at me, then went back to hammering Williams on the stand.
After his eruption in open court like that, I knew that he knew his only chance was to get back some of the sympathy he’d built up throughout the trial. I tapped Mallard on the shoulder and said, "You watch, Jack. One week from today, Wayne’s going to get sick." I don’t know why I picked the one-week time frame, but exactly one week later, the trial was interrupted and Williams was rushed to the hospital with stomach pains. They found nothing wrong with him and released him.
In her statement to the jury, Williams’s attorney Mary Welcome held up a thimble and asked them, "Are you going to let a thimbleful of evidence convict this man?" She held up a piece of green carpet from her office, saying how common it was. How can you convict a man because he has green carpet?
So that day, some other agents and I went to her law firm. We walked in, went into her office while she wasn’t there, and pulled up some carpet fibers. We brought them back and had the experts put them under the microscope and gave the evidence to the prosecution, demonstrating that the fibers from her carpet were completely different from the fibers in the carpet in the Williams home.
On February 27, 1982, after eleven hours of deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict in both murders. Wayne B. Williams was sentenced to two consecutive life terms, which he is serving in the Valdosta Correctional Institution in south Georgia. He still maintains his innocence, and the controversy surrounding Williams has never died down or gone away. If he does ever manage to win a new trial, I am confident the result will be the same.
Despite what his supporters maintain, I believe the forensic and behavioral evidence points conclusively to Wayne Williams as the killer of eleven young men in Atlanta. Despite what his detractors and accusers maintain, I believe there is no strong evidence linking him to all or even most of the deaths and disappearances of children in that city between 1979 and 1981. Despite what so
me people would like to believe, young black and white children continue to die mysteriously in Atlanta and other cities. We have an idea who did some of the others. It isn’t a single offender and the truth isn’t pleasant. So far, though, there’s been neither the evidence nor the public will to seek indictments.
I got a number of complimentary letters and citations as a result of my work on the Wayne Williams case, including ones from the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office saying I had come up with the effective cross-examination strategy, and one from John Glover, SAC of the Atlanta Field Office, summarizing the entire ATKID investigation. One of the most moving and appreciated came from Al Binder, the lead defense attorney, who wrote to say how impressed he was by the job we had done on the case.
These came in just about the time the letter of censure did. Jim McKenzie, very upset about this turn of events, had put me in for an incentive award, not only for the Williams case, but for five other cases I’d contributed to.
It came through in May. So now I had a letter of commendation from the director to go with my letter of censure on the same case. It said, in part, that "through your talent, dedication to duty, and professionalism, you have indeed enhanced the Bureau’s fine reputation throughout the Nation, and you may be certain that your valuable services are truly appreciated." A "substantial" cash award of $250 accompanied the commendation, which I figured worked out to about a nickel an hour. I promptly donated the money to the Navy Relief Fund for the benefit of the families of men and women who had died in service to their country.
If we were faced with a case like the Atlanta child murders today, I’d like to think we could get to the killer significantly sooner, before the trail of death and suffering was so appallingly long. We would all be much more efficient about coordinating our efforts. Our proactive techniques are more sophisticated and based on far more real-world experience. We would know how to stage the interrogation for maximum effect. We would plan better for the search warrant and get it before critical evidence could be destroyed.
Mindhunter Page 24
