The Wayne Williams case and its lessons for Guyana

Jun 16, 2015 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
In the Sunday edition of the Kaieteur News of 5th April 2015, Mr. Adam Harris made mention of the Wayne Williams case and conviction for specific murders in Atlanta. Unfortunately Mr. Harris was not correct when he stated that Mr. Williams was convicted for killing “twenty–seven black youths during 1979-1981 in Atlanta.”
Indeed Mr. Williams was never found guilty of these killings that became known as the “child murders of Atlanta,” because all those killed were aged 17 and below. In fact Mr. Williams was never tried for these murders. Williams was charged and found guilty for the killing of two adults Nathaniel Carter aged 27 and Jimmy Payne aged 29. Carter’s body was found on the 24th May 1981, while Payne’s was discovered 27th April 1981.
Like most of the 27 children killed Carter and Payne’s bodies were retrieved from the Chattahoochee River. However no one was ever found guilty for the killings of the 27 children.
I had two reasons for wanting to speak on the Wayne Williams case, the first was to clear up the mistake in Mr. Harris’s statement as mentioned above. Secondly, I read how much the previous Minister of Home Affairs had to say about the importance of a forensic lab. Recently Minister Ramjattan expressed similar sentiments, while indicating the challenges government faces in accessing the skills to make the said lab functional.
While I do not doubt the need for a forensic lab, I nevertheless want to caution those who might feel such a lab will end our police’s seeming inability to solve so many serious crimes. The Wayne Williams case demonstrated how questionable decisions can be made by law enforcement when it seeks to make forensic evidence by itself, prove guilt of a suspect.
On the evening of 22nd May 1981 when two policemen on a stake-out close to the bridge across the Chattahoochee River heard a splash, on checking the bridge they found Williams entering his station wagon. Williams was questioned and allowed to leave. But when the body of Carter and then Porter were recovered from the said river in quick succession, the police visited Williams. A search of his room and his wagon revealed that they were both carpeted with the same material and of the same colour to fibre found on the two bodies. Williams was charged for these two murders.
It was General Motors Atlanta that said it had used that specific material for carpeting cars and claimed to have outfitted only 628 vehicles with same.  At trial, the prosecution presented fibre statistics to show that at the time there were about 2.4 million vehicles registered in Atlanta, and that there was a one in 3,828 chance that other vehicles were fitted with the said material and of the same colour.
The prosecution argument was deemed by the defence as “based on speculative assumptions and misleading phrasing of probability”. However everything changed when under cross-examination Williams began a wild outburst screaming to the court that he would “show them who the real Wayne Williams is”. His fate was sealed, the jury now saw him as a violent person capable of committing the two murders and when this behaviour was coupled with the forensic evidence, his faith was sealed – the verdict was guilty.
It is important to note that experts in the main agreed that were it not for Williams’ wild outburst, it would have been unlikely that the jury would have found him guilty with only “speculative assumptions” based on forensic evidence.
It should be noted that about half the bodies of twenty-odd children and youths – whose killings Mr. Harris mistakenly credited Williams as being guilty of – were also found to have traces of the same material on them.  However the police did not seek to take Williams to trial for these killings based upon this trace evidence. The reason was because the police realized that forensic evidence by itself could not guarantee a conviction.
Recently I was exchanging views on this case with colleagues and offered some reasons why I thought the police would have lost the case if they had charged Williams for the killing of these children. My main contentions were as follows:
1) Police ignored the fact that millions of pounds of the exact fibre had been sold undyed to other business entities.
2) The investigators seemed to have made light of the fact that carpets made from material similar to that found in Williams’ room were found in other areas of the house, including the room used by his parents and another used by a cousin.
3) The police checked homes and vehicles for similar material. No checks were made of hotels and guest houses. There was no good reason for them to assume that hotels and guest houses did not use the said material.
4) On the issue of Williams’ wagon and its finer probability ration, the prosecution used metro Atlanta figures to show how rare station wagons – of the kind used by Williams – were in Atlanta. However this meant that Williams vehicle was not included because it was registered in Muscogee County which is far from Atlanta (“Challenging Evidence – Wayne Williams and the Atlanta Child Murders – Crime Library,” n.d.).
5) In restricting their search for vehicles to Atlanta, the police were suggesting that person/persons from Atlanta had to be the killer or killers. In doing so they overlooked the fact that thousands of cars – including station wagons similar to that used by Mr. Williams – come to or pass through Atlanta regularly.
Indeed six months after Williams’ trial and conviction of the killing of the two men, the DeKalb County Police Chief Graham reopened investigation into the killings of five of those youths who were from DeKalb County and who many thought to have been killed by Williams. Police Chief Graham, who was also one of the initial investigators in these cases, said he never believed that Williams was guilty of the killings of these children and youths.
So why do so many people believe so much in the absolute power of forensic evidence to solve crimes?
I think this is as a result of the Hollywood and television effect. Today the television is replete with shows like CSI Miami and 48 Hours, in which detectives use forensic science to quickly solve crimes. It is the consumption of these programmes that has conditioned many of us to see the presence of a forensic lab as the liberator that will solve all serious crimes in Guyana.
Forensic science has its limitations. For example, the truth is that trace evidence like fibre can offer an opportunity for the police to narrow down the list of suspects; it can’t establish guilt to a specific person. Fibre, unlike fingerprints, is not unique and therefore cannot pinpoint an offender in a definitive way.
So yes, Guyana needs a forensic lab, but forensic evidence demands patient and intelligent investigative work to back it up before guilt can be positively determined. A forensic lab without our police enhancing their investigative ability will be fairly useless.
Claudius Prince

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