Mindhunter (30 page)

By February, the city was about out of control. Psychics were swarming around, all giving their own "profiles," many dramatically contradicting each other. The press was jumping on any possibility, quoting anyone remotely related to the case who would talk. The next victim to turn up after Terry Pue’s body was found along Sigmon Road was twelve-year-old Patrick Baltazar, off Buford Highway in DeKalb County. Like Terry Pue, he had been strangled. At that time, someone in the medical examiner’s office announced that hair and fibers found on Patrick Baltazar’s body matched those found on five of the previous victims. These were among the ones I had linked together as having the same killer. The announcement of the forensic findings received wide-scale coverage.

And something clicked with me.
He’s going to start dumping bodies in the river.
Now he knows they’re getting hair and fiber. One previous body, that of Patrick Rogers, had been found on the Cobb County side of the Chattahoochee River in December, a victim of blunt-force trauma to the head. But Patrick was fifteen, five foot nine, and 145 pounds, a school dropout who had been in trouble with the law. The police were not considering his case related. Whether he was or not, though, I felt the killer would come to the river now, where the water would wash away any trace evidence.

We’ve got to start surveilling the rivers, I said, particularly the Chattahoochee, the major waterway that forms the northwestern boundary of the city with neighboring Cobb County. But several police jurisdictions were involved, one for each county, as well as the FBI, and no one could take overall charge. By the time a joint surveillance operation composed of FBI and Homicide Task Force personnel was organized and approved, it was already into April.

But in the meantime, I wasn’t surprised when the next body found—thirteen-year-old Curtis Walker—showed up in the South River. The next two—Timmie Hill, thirteen, and Eddie Duncan, the oldest at twenty-one—appeared within a day of each other in the Chattahoochee. Unlike the previous victims, most of whom had been found fully clothed, these three bodies had been stripped to their underwear, another way of removing hair and fiber.

Weeks went by with the surveillance teams in place, watching bridges and potential dump sites along the river. But nothing was happening. It was clear the authorities were losing faith and felt as if they were getting nowhere. With no clear progress being made, the operation was scheduled to be shut down at the 6 a.m. shift change on May 22.

At about 2:30 that very morning, a police academy recruit named Bob Campbell was on his final surveillance shift on the bank of the Chattahoochee beneath the Jackson Parkway Bridge. He saw a car drive across and apparently stop briefly in the middle.

"I just heard a loud splash!" he reported tensely into his walkie-talkie. He directed his flashlight into the water and saw the ripples. The car turned around and came back across the bridge where a stakeout car followed it and then pulled it over. It was a 1970 Chevy station wagon and the driver was a short, curly-haired, twenty-three-year-old, very light black man named Wayne Bertram Williams. He was cordial and cooperative. He claimed to be a music promoter and said he lived with his parents. Police questioned him and looked into his car before letting him go. But they didn’t lose track of him.

Two days later, the nude body of twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater surfaced downstream, not far from where the body of Jimmy Ray Payne, twenty-one, had been found a month earlier. There wasn’t enough evidence to arrest Williams and get a search warrant, but he was put under "bumper lock" surveillance.

He soon became aware of the police following him and led them on wild-goose chases throughout the city. He even drove to Safety Commissioner Lee Brown’s home and started honking his horn. He had a darkroom in his house, and before a warrant could be obtained, he was observed burning photographs in his backyard. He also washed out the car.

Wayne Williams fit our profile in every key respect, including his ownership of a German shepherd. He was a police buff who had been arrested some years earlier for impersonating a law officer. After that, he had driven a surplus police vehicle and used police scanners to get to crime scenes to take pictures. In retrospect, several witnesses recalled seeing him along Sigmon Road when the police were reacting to the phone tip and searching for the nonexistent body. He had been taking photographs there, which he offered to the police. We also found out that he had, indeed, attended the benefit concert at the Omni.

Without arresting him, the FBI asked him to come to the office, where he was cooperative and didn’t ask for an attorney. From reports I received, I didn’t feel that the interrogation had been properly planned or organized. It had been too heavy-handed and direct. And I thought he was reachable at that point. After the interview, I was told he hung around the office and acted as if he still wanted to talk about police and FBI stuff. But when he left that day, I knew they would never get a confession out of him. He agreed to a polygraph, which proved inconclusive. Later, when police and FBI agents got a warrant and searched the house he shared with his retired-schoolteacher parents, they found books that showed how to beat a lie detector.

That warrant was obtained on June 3. Despite Williams’s having washed out the car, police found hair and fiber linking him with about twelve of the murders, the exact ones I had profiled as being done by the same killer.

The evidence was compelling. Not only did they get fibers linking the bodies to Williams’s room and house and car, Larry Peterson of the Georgia State Crime Lab matched fibers from clothing some of the victims had worn on occasions prior to their disappearance. In other words, there was a connection to Williams before some of the murders.

On June 21, Wayne B. Williams was arrested for the murder of Nathaniel Cater. The investigation into the other deaths continued. Bob Ressler and I were at the Hampton Inn, near Newport News, Virginia, speaking before a meeting of the Southern States Correctional Association, when the arrest was announced. I was just back from England and the Yorkshire Ripper case, and I was talking about my work on serial murder. Back in March,
People
magazine had run a story about Ressler and me and that we were tracking the Atlanta killer. In the article, which headquarters had directed us to cooperate with, I’d given elements of the profile, particularly our opinion that the UNSUB was black. The story had gotten a lot of attention nationally. So when I took questions from this audience of more than five hundred people, someone asked my opinion of the Williams arrest.

I gave some of the background on the case and our involvement with it and how we had come up with the profile. I said he fit the profile and added carefully that if it did turn out to be him, I thought he "looked pretty good for a good percentage of the killings."

I didn’t know the questioner was a reporter, though I’m sure I would have answered the same even if I had. The next day I was quoted in the
Newport News-Hampton Daily Press
as saying, "He looks pretty good for a good percentage of the killings," leaving out my critically important qualifying statement before that.

The story hit the news wire, and the next day I was being quoted all over the country, on all the network news programs, in all the major newspapers, including a story in the
Atlanta Constitution
with the headline "FBI Man: Williams May Have Slain Many."

I was getting calls from everywhere. There were television cameras in the hotel lobby and in the hallway outside my room. Ressler and I had to climb down the fire escape to get out.

Back at headquarters, the shit was hitting the fan. It looked like an FBI agent intimately involved with the case had declared Wayne Williams guilty without a trial. Driving back to Quantico, I tried to explain to Unit Chief Larry Monroe on the mobile telephone what had really happened. He and the assistant director, Jim McKenzie, tried to help me out and run interference with OPR, the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

I remember I was sitting in the upper floor of the library at Quantico where I used to go to write my profiles in peace and quiet. It also had the advantage of windows to look out of, unlike our subterranean offices. Monroe and McKenzie came up to talk to me. They were both big supporters of mine. I was the only one doing profiling full-time, I was completely burnt out from running all over the place, Atlanta had been a huge emotional drain, and the thanks I got for all of it was the threat of a censure for this statement that was picked up out of context by the media.

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.