Spinning a Web of Evidence

Friends and fiber experts testify against Wayne Williams

The state had saved one of its most damaging witnesses for the end. Sharon Blakely, an Atlanta jewelry-store owner, spoke at length last week of her troubled friend Wayne Williams. Last spring, hours after Williams was first questioned by police about the murders of black youths, he phoned Blakely. "The game has got Wayne," to she come said to she an told end him. sometime, "Before you get hurt, will you confess?"

"I'm not going to answer that," Williams replied. "If they get enough evidence on, will you confess?" Williams' answer, according to Blakely:"Yes."

The evidence was mounting last week in the trial that began on Dec. 28, but Williams, 23, a freelance news photographer, would confess to nothing. He is charged with killing Nathaniel ("Silky") Cater, 27, and Jimmy Ray Payne, 21 , and is implicated as well in the deaths of ten more among the 29 blacks murdered in Atlanta during the two years preceding his arrest. Lacking any confession, not to mention a single eyewitness or a murder weapon, prosecutors had to argue their case on circumstantial grounds. Last week the prosecution rested, after attempting to lay out an intricate web of Witness connections between Williams and the murder victims.

Robert Henry, 37, a gardener, said that in May he had seen Williams leaving an Atlanta theater hand in hand with Nathaniel Cater. Two days later, Cater's body was found floating in the Chattahoochee River. The person who reports last seeing Payne alive also testified. A.B. Dean, 80, said he had observed Payne in Williams company. The Payne man's body was dragged from the Chattahoochee five days later.

Although Williams is on trial only for the murders of Cater and Payne, Judge Clarence Cooper has permitted evidence that also links the defendant with ten other young, black, male homicide victims. Central to that evidence are tiny synthetic textile fibers found on each of the twelve victims' corpses, which forensic experts say were very likely picked up from Williams' bedding, rugs and cars. Yet it is impossible to trace any fiber conclusively to a particular garment, and none potentially from the victims' clothing was found clinging to Williams' belongings.

To establish a possible motive for the killings, the prosecution last week introduced testimony suggesting that Williams was a predatory homosexual who also hated his fellow blacks, especially poor children. Andrew Hayes, 16, said that for a time during 1978 he saw Williams "most every day," and that Williams had tried to pay him to perform an act of oral sex. Another black youngster, 15, testified that he once accepted a ride from Williams, who began fondling him, and then parked in a secluded woods. Said the boy: "When he went to the trunk, I jumped out and ran." One witness claimed that while visiting Williams' house, he saw children's clothing on the bathroom floor.

The prosecutors tried to portray Williams as having a pathological loathing of his sexual companions. Witnesses spoke of him as a man bristling with racial self-hatred. According to Sharon Blakely's husband Eustis, an electrical engineer, Williams called black youngsters "street gruncheons." Denise Marlin, a bookkeeper for an ambulance service, said, "He used to call his own race niggers." Ambulance Driver Bobby Toland claimed that Williams even cited high black birthrate statistics to denigrate his race. Williams once asked him, Toland said, "had I ever considered how many niggers could be eliminated by doing away with one nigger child."

On Friday, the defense aggressively began its counterattack. A Baptist minister and a former Atlanta police recruit damaged the credibility of Nellie Trammell, an important prosecution witness, who claimed she had seen Williams with one of the ten victims who have been linked to him by prosecutors. Dr. Daniel Stowens, a widely known pathologist who has been involved in 90,000 autopsies, startled the courtroom by declaring that he did not believe that Payne and Cater had necessarily been murdered. Said he of Cater's autopsy report: "There is no indication of any criminal activity at all." Defense lawyers will argue that authorities, desperate for a conviction, trumped up evidence against the defendant. The trial is expected to last four more weeks before the case against Wayne Williams is finally settled. -

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.