February 9, 2018 • 49 mins
Payne and the team gear up for a closer look at the so-called "bridge incident."
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
The church was a little United Methodist church on Eastland Road,
which is right off of Morland. It was an elderly
white congregation in a neighborhood that had transitioned. It had
gone on several months when the pastor said, we've got
(00:38):
to do something to help the kids in this community.
I was twenty six years old, just finishing up my
undergraduate studies, and he asked me, if maybe you've got
some extra time, can you come and help us reach
these kids. So all I did was put up a
(00:58):
basketball goal in the church parking lot, bought one basketball
and went out there just myself and just started bouncing
the ball in the parking.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Just bouncing the bump.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Did it for a couple of hours. Went inside next day,
same thing, same time, just bouncing the bump.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I thought, maybe it's if I'm.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Consistent, and sure enough, a couple of kids showed up
from the neighborhood. One week, two weeks, three weeks went on,
and pretty soon before we knew it, we had one
hundred kids. The tragedy began to gain more and more publicity,
Our program began to get more attention, but it was
sad to see the kids and as you know, adolescens,
(01:42):
they don't want to show their fear. They would joke
with each other, you know, you're gonna get snatched and
somebody's coming, you know, to your house, and you know,
but you could tell, you know, deep down inside they
were they were really frightened. I got the feeling that
they knew they were in something together, you know, confronting
(02:06):
this serious danger. And they kind of came together and
around the program and saw me as the leader. Made
them feel good to be a community, you know, to
be a group. There was safety in our group, and everybody,
(02:26):
whether they admitted or not, responds to love. I think
that we've made some progress, with a long way yet
to go. I can see a tremendous difference in the
prejudices I grew up with, being born in the mid fifties.
I remember the assassination of doctor King, and I remember
(02:49):
the kids in my elementary school saying that they were
glad that he had been killed or a terrible thing
for a child to say, but that's what they were,
that's what they've been taught. Yeah, I remember those things
and unfortunately still see some of those same prejudices that
(03:11):
are alive, you know, even today, in our beautiful city.
Although we've come a long way, there are still bigotries alive,
not only here in the South, but I imagine throughout this country. Honestly,
I think perhaps we hide them a little better than
we used to, but they're still there. I found acceptance
(03:34):
in those kids, in their families, and together we made
a difference in that one little part of Atlanta. So
thankful for silver linings.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
That was a man named Bill him as a young
man in the eighties, he saw how scared these kids were.
The victims in this case are the children, and that
should never be forgotten. Because this story is so complex.
For years, people have argued whether or not they got
the right guy. From everyone I've talked to, there's been
a lot of disagreement over whether Wayne Williams is the
Atlanta Monster. Many people feel that he's guilty. His stories
(04:21):
just don't really add up. He fit the FBI profile
to a t, and depending on how you looked at it,
after he was arrested, the murder stopped. But some people
seem to think this was a huge conspiracy against Wayne Williams,
but with very little evidence to back up those claims.
But the question isn't as simple as did he do it?
The question is what did he do? Did he kill
Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy ray Paine, the two adults who
(04:43):
was convicted for Maybe he did, But what about the kids?
Did he kill the kids too? Did he kill all
of them? Even though people are still very divided over
Wayne Williams himself, there's one common thread that everyone seems
to agree on. It was time for all this to
end in the city of Atlanta, and someone had to
go away for this, and Wayne Williams was that guy.
Wayne still claims his innocence, and from our very first
(05:05):
phone call, he promised to provide strong evidence to prove that.
I want this podcast to be the final debate over
Wayne Williams and the Atlanta child murders, And now that
my investigation is in full swing, I'm going to put
everything out on the table. If Wayne Williams has anything
credible to say, now's the time to hear it.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
I've been incarcerated since nineteen eighty one in connection with
the Atlanta murders. It was a situation that few people
understood then and today even fewer people understand the truth
about what happened, and probably even more so about what
didn't happen.
Speaker 5 (05:43):
Due to the political.
Speaker 4 (05:44):
Climate and the fear and all of the uncertainty about
what happened, the police and authorities were just anxious to
arrest anybody that they could, and that person just happened
to be me. Sadly, it has taken all these years
for me to finally get the case brought back to
the Four Lights so people can see the truth about
what happened in fact, and not only am I innocent man,
(06:05):
but that the people involved in this, the family, it's
the city, and the nation deserve an answer. One of
the main objectives for US is to make people aware
of what really happened during events before the trial as
well as after the trial, and they continue today. I
(06:28):
don't think few people realized I was never convicted in
connection with any of the child murders. I was charged
for the depths of two adults whose murders were actually unrelated. Furthermore,
we were prevented from bringing out a lot of evidence
that could have helped me during the trial. We're talking
about the existence of other suspects. We're talking about physical evidence,
(06:49):
including fiber evidence from caucasion suspects and others who we
know were involved in some of these cases, as well
as false testimony about the synthetic fibers that the yeah
I presented during the trial. I refer not only to
setting the facts were record straight, but telling of the
(07:11):
story behind the scenes, about the hurt and the emotional
pain that ling us to this day.
Speaker 5 (07:17):
I've done several.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Interviews over the years, but none have addressed the full
context of what this story is about.
Speaker 6 (07:24):
And Atlanta and another BONDI was discovered today but twenty third.
Speaker 7 (07:27):
At Police Task Force headquarters, there are twenty seven faces
on the wall, twenty six murdered, one missing.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
We do not know the person or persons that are responsible.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Therefore, we do not have the money.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
From Tenderfoo TV in Housetiff Works in Atlanta.
Speaker 8 (07:40):
Like eleven other recent victrums in Atlanta, rogers are currently.
Speaker 9 (07:43):
Was a spectator.
Speaker 7 (07:44):
Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps
on killing.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
This is Atlanta Monster. According to Wayne Williams, the story
begins with that infamous night on the James Jackson Parkway Bridge.
Wayne first described a rather convoluted story about the timing
(08:11):
sequence of the bridge that night.
Speaker 10 (08:13):
Fia stillman, Yeah, I got it. He's coming towards him stopped.
That's the time in SeaQuest they testified to the New Court.
That's the contradiction during that sequest. There's no way any
car could have been born south on the piege, turn
into the gravel park lot and turn back north. That's
absolute possibility.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
He's saying that according to police testimony, the timing doesn't
make sense. In what he described as a matter of seconds,
the police recruit below the bridge heard the splash, shine
his light on the water, didn't see a body and
only saw ripples. Then radio to the other officers, who
then saw Wayne in his car turn around in a
gravel parking lot just moments later, heading the opposite way
on the bridge.
Speaker 10 (08:56):
That car had to have been traveling the entire time
of the sequence. Bottom line is there was no splash.
Speaker 8 (09:10):
If you take the bridge out of the equation, Wayne
Williams is not.
Speaker 5 (09:13):
In prison right.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
This is Vincent Hill, a law enforcement analyst and former
police officer. But more significantly, Vincent is an expert of
sorts on Wayne's case.
Speaker 8 (09:22):
If Wayne was not on that bridge, either the case
would have been solved a different way, or it would
still be unsolved. Take that bridge out of the equation,
and what do you have. I guess you can argue
that that had put Wayne next to the body, right,
I mean, he's on the bridge.
Speaker 5 (09:40):
They hear splash.
Speaker 8 (09:41):
Two days later, there's a body found.
Speaker 11 (09:44):
That morning, while four officers sat quietly under the South
cop Drive bridge, one of them and Atlanta recruit, heard
a splash.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Why do you think they stopped your car that night?
Speaker 10 (09:54):
You gotta remember that was the last night of the steakhout,
that was the last day they so I'm sure they
were probably, you know, anxious to stop something. Just make
an account for the time.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
The police recruit Bob Campbell was stationed below the bridge,
and he's the only one who heard the splash that night.
Speaker 10 (10:12):
And Campbell probably something probably poundering him, and he probably
made up the story just to justify the existence of
being on a stake. The point is that if the
stamus they said about the stop of what happened in
the bridge, cockrrect the only one that does not corrected.
That is what Campbell and Jacob said.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
He claimed that most of the FBI statements about the
bridge were in fact true, except for two major points,
the first being recruit Bob Campbell's account of the splash
and the recruit Jacob's accounts of the timing. The second
major point was over Wayne's strange story about a girl
named Cheryl Johnson.
Speaker 10 (10:45):
The only confusion in the statements was all of the
thing on the telephone nob in Cheryl Johnson.
Speaker 11 (10:51):
He tried to persuade the Jerry he really was out
near a bridge that night looking for a Cheryl Johnson,
who still remains a mystery to this trial.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
The Satan played he fabricated the.
Speaker 12 (11:01):
Story, but Williams didn't much from it, claiming the woman
simply gave him a wrong number and wrong address.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
When the FBI asked what he was doing out there,
Wayne said he was looking for a woman named Cheryl
Johnson who had scheduled an in person interview with him
that morning. He told the police he was out checking
the address that night. Wayne gave police an alleged phone
number for Cheryl Johnson, but later when they tried to
call the number, it didn't work. It didn't belong to anyone,
But Wayne says the FBI called the wrong number and
(11:27):
the reason was his handwriting.
Speaker 10 (11:31):
The number wasn't that four. You will see when you
get my riding up on the series was it was
four to three, four boys and my naves look alike
because I closed Luke top of them.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
The FBI claimed Cheryl Johnson wasn't real, but Wayne Williams agrees.
So Cheryl Johnson, when did she originally call you? And
what did she say?
Speaker 10 (11:55):
Well, well, she she originally did not call me. She
called my mother and my mother left for no I
talked to her that they there poor and I and
I figured she was a frank call tange. We were
doing public auditions of my music company over Entertainment. For
some of the accidents are because to ask you learned
on the radio and television stations in the newspapers club,
(12:17):
you know, in nineteen eighty, you know, the audists were
all over there your TV. And that's how she found out.
I got the poon them, and like I said, we
did probably we took maybe about eight hundred and nine
hundred calls and probably did we screened those downs here
my two assistants, and we probably did about one hundred
and fifty actual interviews or auditions out of that. I
(12:47):
even tell the police, I said, the only reason I
went out to check the address group because I felt
there was a big address. That's why I went out
to check it in the first place.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
He said, as a talent scout, you received hundreds of
calls during that time, and that every so often he
would get a fake caller, and Cheryl Johnson was likely
one of them.
Speaker 10 (13:05):
And this is the fun to think about, how why
in the world, if somebody was dealing killing people, why
would they be doing public cordise.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
That that makes sense, But why was Wayne out checking
this address at two in the morning when you was
scheduled to meet with her just a few hours later.
Speaker 5 (13:22):
That never made sense to me.
Speaker 8 (13:24):
I mean me being a forty five year old man.
If I'm out at two in the morning, if I'm
not working and I'm looking for someone's house, Let's be honest,
I know what I'm going to do at two in
the morning, and it's not the talk record contracts.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Did the FBI or the police ever find her in
real life?
Speaker 13 (13:42):
No?
Speaker 10 (13:43):
And I told him it's probably place had because I'm
not even sure that's her name. That was just the
name as she gave. We were doing public budlice, a
lot of people gave fake names and fake address. That
was why what I screaming, So I think all the
hoopla over Cheryl toss his peak. You know, I was
gonna playing coffee.
Speaker 8 (14:05):
So maybe Wayne was out getting ready to meet someone
and got lost. I don't know. Wayne likes to embellish things.
I don't know why. But again, I think that was
part of Wayne's downfall. Regardless if he told the truth
or not, I don't think the outcome would have been
different simply because he was on the bridge.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Do you regret being on the bridge that night? If
you could go back and change it, would you not
go that way?
Speaker 10 (14:33):
Well, paranalymic to you like this, I'm the type of person. Okay,
I'm liable to change my mind.
Speaker 14 (14:40):
He didn't.
Speaker 10 (14:40):
Given time. Everybody said, well do you think it was
a conspiracy, but they ought to get you ahead of that. No,
that was a conspiracy only after I became a suspect
and they have forgotten it involved. Nobody knew I was
going to take that route home, not even met that night.
That was a spur of the minute. The only thing
I regret was going out period that night. You know
(15:02):
I should have just took my butt to be it,
agreed to it.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
The more do you think that if you didn't go
out that night that you would not be.
Speaker 10 (15:09):
In jail right now, absolutely no question. They had to
ask the same questions that you're asking me right now.
Speaker 8 (15:16):
I wouldn't be bottom line, living in Fort Hood, Texas.
My dad was military, you know. Even then that story
was national news about these black kids being murdered in Atlanta.
I remember my mom to this day telling me not
to go outside, you know, past dark, even in Fort Hood,
Texas and Colleen, because they were killing these little kids.
(15:37):
Wayne Williams got arrested and got convicted, and that was
pretty much it, and.
Speaker 5 (15:42):
Supposedly the murder stopped. And that's what I took it for.
Speaker 8 (15:45):
You know, as a small child, you know, it's just
you trust what the police say, you trust what the
courts say, and that that was pretty much it, you know.
But as I got older, especially when I became a
police officer and a private investigator, and I realized this
keyword called evidence, then my mindset started changing about the
entire case. First, we can't say that the child murders
(16:07):
were solved because Wayne was convicted of killing Nathaniel Cater
and Jimmy ray Payne, which were adults. So we still
have all of these child murders basically unsolved because you
can't say it solved if you only convicted him of
killing two people. Wayne's a very intelligent guy. I think
Wayne's downfall back then was he embellished a lot.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
Wayne wanted to be the center of attention.
Speaker 8 (16:30):
He was calling his own press conferences, which just made
him a bigger target than the media.
Speaker 15 (16:35):
Right.
Speaker 8 (16:36):
You know a lot of people that were innocent at
this would have just said I had nothing to do
with it, and that's it. But I'm convinced it was
something totally different that happened.
Speaker 12 (16:46):
Williams bluntly stated the police version of the now famous
bridge incident was wrong, a lie. He claimed he wasn't
driving slow, that he didn't turn around in a parking
lot next to the bridge, that he did not throw
anything into the river. The state contends that louds splash
was the body of Nathaniel Cater heading the water. Although
prosecutors had most of the pieces that night in May,
it's still lacked.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
The essential part of the puzzle.
Speaker 12 (17:08):
Someone actually seen William's car stopped on the bridge, or
better yet, the suspect throwing a body from the structure.
Speaker 8 (17:15):
Could be something could be, nothing could have been a
bird taking off. It could have been a beaver, could
have been anything. You got police down there with flashlights immediately,
and they see nothing. So that would suggest that Daniel
Cator's body as soon as it hit the water, just
floated out of sight like a speedboat splash. You shine
(17:37):
your lights, now I don't see anything. Why not if
it floated down the river and you found it two
days later, why wouldn't you see it as it's floating
down the river right after its splashed. If you heard
the splash and you thought it was a body, why
didn't you send divers down there immediately.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Doctor Blackwelder was there during the trial, so I asked him.
He knew about the splash, and.
Speaker 16 (18:03):
The cadet that was under the bridge heard a splash,
and it had flashlights and all that shine around, but
they never saw anything, so they don't They said it
could have been a beaver because there were beavers in
that river.
Speaker 5 (18:15):
It could have been a beaver.
Speaker 16 (18:16):
Slapping its tail on the water, or it could have
been a body that was throwing off the bridge into
the water.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
But he heard a splash.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
I asked Popcorn with the FBI, what was his take?
Speaker 13 (18:29):
Two cadets under the bridge, two regular offices, and chase counts.
They were intense underneath the bridge. And the guy that
heard the splash had been a high school swimmer and
he knew what the sound of a body hitting the water,
and he said, that's a body hitting the water. There
was a splat, because you know, if you jump up
the diving board and you spread eagle and hit the water,
(18:51):
you splat. And that's what he heard.
Speaker 16 (18:55):
And he looked, you don't say what was in the water,
and did never could see anything.
Speaker 5 (18:58):
Floating in the water.
Speaker 16 (18:59):
And they brought a hydrologist in from the corp of Engineers,
and somebody testified that there were a lot of There
were a lot of beavers in the river. Hipopsis said,
or water ill make a splash, So a.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Body hating the water sounds like it would be much
louder than beaver.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
We've done that.
Speaker 17 (19:17):
I did.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
We did that when I was astrade.
Speaker 16 (19:19):
We would throw bodies they would be dummies, but wouldn't
make sure they didn't wade to shine them out by
using sand and things like that, because the beaver's saddle
is flat, and were just like hit it with a
boat paddle and the body wouldn't.
Speaker 8 (19:33):
If it was that the inucator at his stature, wouldn't
someone else have heard that.
Speaker 5 (19:39):
It's like going to a.
Speaker 9 (19:40):
Pool, right.
Speaker 8 (19:41):
You may be twenty yards away, but you can hear
people diving off the diving board. So this one guy
is the only one that hurt us. It's not even logical.
Wasn't he like one fifty one sixty? It's a loud splash. Man,
If they're spread out the way they say were, there's
just no way only one person heard it.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
That was a warning signal to say that danger was around.
Speaker 5 (20:09):
That's the same me.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Weave a state refuge here whenever they are alarmed.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
I can't help but think a splash from a beaver's tail,
which found a whole lot different from a splash from
a fully grown human body. So I decided to test
it out. The team at house Stuff Works helped me
put together the whole experiment. The best option we had
was rescue Randy. Randy is an adult sized mannequin used
for simulations and training for emergency person though, so when dropped,
Randy would fall like a human body. Accurate weight distribution
(20:46):
and everything. How do we try to recreate this sound?
Speaker 18 (20:50):
So what we want to do is drop something off
the James Jackson Parkway Bridge, something that is roughly the
same size and shape of a human body, to see
what kind of sound it makes, how loud it is,
if we can hear it. If what we're trying to
do is find something that we can drop off the bridge.
(21:12):
And we've been kind of racking our brains trying to
figure out how to approximate a human body. It's not
something you can just go to the hardware store and find.
Speaker 19 (21:20):
And we've actually gone through many iterations of this. Like
originally we were thinking we might want to try to
actually build a body out of like wooden dowels and
duct tape and like packing material, and we got kind
of far down that path, but then decided, you know,
it was just it was not going to really be
as flexible as a body the way we wanted it.
You know, we were thinking, well, maybe you know, like
something like an emergency rescue might have some dummies and
(21:42):
things like that, And so we did actually find a
fireman's dummy, and they use these in training and like
competitions for firemen.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
It just so.
Speaker 19 (21:51):
Happens that the dummy that they make has very similar
proportions both height and weight to the deceased within cator.
Speaker 10 (22:02):
Here he is.
Speaker 5 (22:08):
Yeah that's without legs.
Speaker 18 (22:18):
Wow, chunky arms your bat be careful lift with your legs.
Speaker 8 (22:25):
Oh my god, man.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
It's it's doable.
Speaker 15 (22:28):
List.
Speaker 19 (22:29):
Brandy's a very large gentleman. He you know, he does
weigh one hundred and forty five pounds, and you know,
hearing that, it seems like that's doable. But it's dead weight.
You know, the arms flail and the legs flail, and
so trying to pick up that mass is actually harder
than you would expects.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Which, oh wow, that is yeah, very correct.
Speaker 19 (22:56):
Wait, ways, you know, if you're adrenaline is up, you're
gonna be able to lift more than you know exactly.
Speaker 5 (23:02):
Can't return it if.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
It's a way, So this is ours.
Speaker 19 (23:04):
So we all kind of took turns trying to pick
Randy up in to varying degrees of success. But yeah,
it was a bit of a hassle.
Speaker 18 (23:12):
Yeah, it's it's not easy. I mean, I Tyler, you
could you were able to pick him up? I really wasn't.
But yeah, it's way more difficult than you might expect.
Speaker 5 (23:23):
How close is he in height and weight? To Nathaniel Cater.
Speaker 19 (23:26):
So the Corners report and some of the other reporting
had Nathaniel Cater's height at five to eleven and weighed
at one hundred and forty six pounds, And the Rescue
Randy dummy that we ordered has a height of six
feet and weighs one hundred and forty five pounds, So
we're really in that range of where we want to be.
It actually fits quite well.
Speaker 18 (23:48):
The bridge actually straddles two county lines, Fulham County on
the south side and Cobb County on the north side,
so we have to close the bridge down. We have
to get permits from both counties, and.
Speaker 19 (23:59):
On that we found out that we also have to
coordinate with the state Department of Transportation. They have to
approve it as well. You know, closing a road down
is one thing, but dropping a body into the Chatthoochee
River is a whole different thing. So we've been coordinating
with Army, Corps of Engineers, the Department of National Resources,
all these different groups to try to, you know, figure
out who we need to essentially get permission from.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Wayne spoke of a child sex ring that was operating
out of a house on Gray Street in Atlanta. He
told me that he believed many of these child murders
were related to this sex ring.
Speaker 10 (24:38):
We know that another six cases were involved in a
homosexual ring going on in Atlanta, Black homosexual ring.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Vincent Hill has spent the last several years looking into
this theory too, and he believes it has some serious
merit if.
Speaker 8 (24:52):
You look at old records and old police reports. Uncle
Tom Terrell, his friend Jerry Thornton, Larry Marshall. Jerry Thornton
told investigators ten of the victims used to hang out
at that house, that they would have sex with little boys,
and mid would come to that house to pay for
sex with these little boys.
Speaker 5 (25:13):
So how do you put that on, Wayne?
Speaker 11 (25:15):
It's been learned that investigators have now found this man
Tom Terrell and questioned him today about his role in
some type of homosexual ring operated out of this home
in northwest Atlanta. That ring apparently involved the latest child victim,
Timothy Hill, and through recent findings, may have linked together
several other children.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
On the task Force list.
Speaker 11 (25:35):
Terrell knows this man, Larry Marshall, now in a Connecticut
jail on armed robbery charges. Investigators also want to question Marshall,
but so far he is fighting extradition back to Georgia.
The next best thing is this man sitting in a
detective's car this morning.
Speaker 20 (25:49):
How many of the murdered children have you seen around here?
Speaker 9 (25:52):
I'm not ten out, I told.
Speaker 20 (25:56):
Jerry Thornton, Larry Marshall's former roommate, identified of the murder
victims from pictures shown him by a police investigator. Children
he's seen in the neighborhood, among them thirteen year old
Timothy Hill, eleven year old Patrick Baltazar, and fifteen year
old Joseph Bell.
Speaker 12 (26:13):
This morning, Terrell's house on Gray Street was empty, unlike
recent weeks, when neighbors said at any given time several
boys would be hanging out here. Terrell is an admitted homosexual,
who says one of the victims, Timothy Hill, spent the
night at this house a day before he disappeared, and.
Speaker 7 (26:28):
He was here on twelve grades.
Speaker 9 (26:29):
Fool to come back on the thirteenth, and that was
my bush.
Speaker 21 (26:32):
Geyahdd. I didn't see him, and I haven't seen him since.
Speaker 8 (26:38):
Back in the eighties, no one was saying, oh, I'm
openly gay, and you definitely didn't want to be known
as a city that's trading boys for sex. But if
you have ten people that have been identified at one
house where guys were coming in paying these boys for sex,
they were giving them drugs, they were doing all these
other types of things. You have all of these people
(27:00):
coming to this house trading for sex. How do you
put those ten bodies on Wayne Williams? So you tie
all these victims to Wayne, but you can't.
Speaker 22 (27:11):
Thirty four year old Larry Marshall, now behind bars in Connecticut,
is a known homosexual. He used to hang around this
neighborhood on Gray Street. Tom Terrell, who was also a homosexual,
said thirteen year old Timothy Hill also used to hang
out here, and Larry and Timothy knew each other.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Larry told you.
Speaker 22 (27:29):
He had Timmy over to his house.
Speaker 9 (27:30):
Oh he's a game there.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
What did they do over there?
Speaker 2 (27:33):
I don't know. They don't be doing them with drinking
and talking.
Speaker 22 (27:36):
But you do know for a fact that Larry knew Timmy,
he knowed him.
Speaker 8 (27:40):
Patrick Baltazar went missing after being seen at the Omney Hotel.
Patrick Baltazar from the Omni to his house to Larry
Marshall's house was about one point eight miles. Baltazar would
have had to pass Larry Marshall's house on his way home.
He's walking home right past Larry Marshall's house. Whose associate
(28:00):
it with this pedophile who's selling these boys for sex.
Speaker 12 (28:03):
Marshall is believed to have known at least three of
the victims, Patrick Baltazzar, Timothy Hill, and Joseph Bell, who
was still missing.
Speaker 8 (28:11):
If you're ten eleven years old, you say, yeah, I'm
gonna go tell my mom what you're doing. The heck
you are because I don't want to go to jail
for rape of a child, so I'll just kill you.
When Patrick Baltazar was found, one of the witnesses that
morning she said she saw a male white and a
green station wagon, you know, just lurking around like towards
(28:34):
the wooded area where Patrick was found. Who was a
white guy in the green station wagon.
Speaker 6 (28:40):
Baltazar was with a ten year old friend playing near
these railroad tracks near the Baltasar home on Foundry Street.
Baltasar's friend told Jack Perry a big man in a
car started following them and tried to get them to
come get in the car with him. Perry taped part
of the conversation with the young friend of Patrick Baltazar.
Speaker 21 (28:57):
He take come here, you two.
Speaker 23 (28:58):
Lod and Patrick started to in the car. I grabbed
him from my hand. I say, you don't know who
that man is. And then when you've gone underhill he
said I'd be back. Then me and Patrick ran out
and tried to get his tag number, but we couldn't
get it.
Speaker 6 (29:14):
They called the Task Force from this phone near the
key shop on North Side Drive, according to the young
man who was with Patrick Baltazzar. But after Patrick and
his friend made the call to the Task Force, they
didn't hang around waiting for police. They split up and
Patrick was not seen again. We don't know if police
sent a squad car to this area, but Jack Perry
says he has learned the Task Force talked with Patrick
(29:34):
Baltazar's friend just two days ago.
Speaker 17 (29:37):
I'm sure that the Task Force has the same information,
so I hope it's beneficial to it.
Speaker 6 (29:42):
I asked Jack why it would take more than a
month to follow up on talking to someone who had
phoned asking for help, particularly when one of the two
children who had called turns up dead.
Speaker 17 (29:53):
It's surprising that they would let this thing go this long.
You know, you want to follow up, Avery lead that
you had, and I think it's just a break down
on communications.
Speaker 6 (30:03):
Jack Perry also has learned that Patrick Baltasar may have
intentionally gone back to the area where the man tried
to pick him up because Patrick was a street hustler
and believed he could get the license number and maybe
he could collect the reward.
Speaker 8 (30:18):
There's no coincidence that the FBI had Tom Terrell's house,
Larry Marshall's house under surveillance for weeks because of this
alleged sex ring. If you follow the trail, you can't
call the coincidence that Patrick Baltizard lives here, Larry Marshall
lives here, the house where all this sexual activity was here,
(30:39):
which also tied to ten other victims, and you can't say, well,
it had nothing to do with anything.
Speaker 5 (30:45):
It's impossible.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
In the many years of Vincent's research, he's found a
recurring story in the FBI files, a story about a
vehicle that didn't belong to Wayne Williams, a blue Nova.
Speaker 8 (31:16):
I know there was talk about a blue Nova, which
Wayne didn't drive a Blue Nova. Why didn't police do
a motor vehicle record search to tie this blue Nova
to somebody other than Wayne? The case about the Blue Nova.
The guy had an afro with no glasses. Have you
ever seen Wayne without glasses other than his booking photo?
(31:38):
Have you ever seen Wayne Williams without glasses? Wayne can't see.
So who's this guy with the afro with no glasses?
Couldn't have been Wayne? You know, back then, a lot
of people said every black person looked like we're talking
nineteen seventy nine. I had an afro in nineteen seventy nine, right,
my dad had an afro in nineteen seventy nine. And
(32:00):
who didn't have an afro that was black in nineteen
seventy nine?
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Right?
Speaker 8 (32:04):
That was pre the Jerry Curl when Michael Jackson made
that famous. People were walking around with afros. So it
very well could have been someone that resembled Wayne because
he looked just like that he had an afro. The
description wasn't a white guy with red hair.
Speaker 5 (32:20):
He was a black guy with an afro.
Speaker 8 (32:22):
That was probably ninety percent of the black population of
Atlanta in nineteen seventy nine nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
This whole time, I've been wondering if there were any
kids that got away that were almost abducted, and if so,
were they still around. That's when I met Rodney. He's
an Atlanta native, a child living here during the time
with the murders. Rodney firmly believes that when he was sixteen,
he was almost a victim of the Atlanta child murderer.
He shared with me his chilling first hand account.
Speaker 24 (32:51):
I was fifteen, not old enough to work, but six
Flags accepted a fake idea which you could get downtown
at the time, and put me to work. So I
rode the bus from my neighborhood in Southeast Atlanta to downtown.
Speaker 5 (33:09):
There was at the time a Marta.
Speaker 24 (33:13):
Direct shuttle from downtown to six Flags, and all it
did was go back and forth from this stop downtown
to six Flags, no other stops in between. I would
change buses, get on the six Flag shuttle, go to work,
get on that shuttle to come back to downtown to
go home, and get on my bus, which was the
thirty four Cresham that particular day. For whatever reason, by
(33:37):
the time I'd gotten off thirty four, aggression walked across
from the end of the line and to the six
Flags shuttle. I had missed it, and as I'm standing there,
this guy approaches me. He was not tall about five
to six ish. He was in his mid twenties. He
(33:59):
was clean shaven, which was unusual for a black male
in the seventies, and he had a short afrow, had
a fairly soft voice, so he didn't come across very masculine.
He just came off as, you know, a nice guy.
He approaches me and he's he's just basically chatting with me,
asking if I'm okay, Yeah, I missed my bus. You know,
(34:23):
I've got to get to work. And you know, my
recollection is that he almost immediately offers.
Speaker 21 (34:27):
Me a ride.
Speaker 24 (34:29):
I'm going that way, There's no problem, you want to ride,
drove a Blue Nover. The Blue Nover was was parked
on that same street, just down the block. It wasn't far,
It was just walking down the sidewalk. I got in
his car and off we went to go to six Flags.
From downtown. One would go directly to I twenty, which is,
(34:51):
you know, maybe a mile or so from that spot.
What he did was drove on surface streets heading north
away from my twenty. On that ride, as he was
talking to me, he offered me a joint. I had
never done drugs, and to this day, I don't know
(35:12):
if there was anything in it, or I was just
new to that and just had gotten really really high.
I mean, frankly, I smoked marijuana years after that and
very familiar with it. But there was something about that
high that was it wasn't just marijuana, that was something
else in it. During the course of that ride, he
(35:34):
started to fondle me as he was driving over my pants,
and I recalled just kind of staring down at what
he was doing, just not knowing what was going on,
not really communicating with him.
Speaker 5 (35:51):
You know, at fifteen I I had no idea what
was going on.
Speaker 24 (35:55):
As we continued down Fulton Industrial, I knew that he
would get onto I twenty because we were one exit
away from six Flags. Either he'd get onto I twenty,
go over into Cobb County, drop me off for six Flags,
or he would continue downfalls An Industrial, which if he
passed under our twenty heading south, it was no man's land, industrial, warehouses, nothing.
(36:22):
And as we were at a traffic light, maybe two
blocks from the.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
Entrance to I twenty, it was like a do or
die moment.
Speaker 24 (36:34):
And as we were sitting at that traffic light, just
out of nowhere, I decided, I'm going to jump out,
and I grabbed the door, unlashed the door and opened
it and tried to bolt out of the car. Now
I didn't have on a seatbelt, but he had the
seat cover over his vinyl seats. It had a hole
in it, and my Afro pick that was in my
(36:56):
back pocket, which was the way we carried him. Then
got hung up in his seat cover. And I'm struggling
at this light to undo myself from this seat cover
as the door is open, trying to escape, and he
didn't try to stop me. He just said to me,
as I'm struggling, and it was the most eerie, sort.
Speaker 5 (37:16):
Of calm thing by Rodney.
Speaker 24 (37:28):
And I got out of a car and started heading
back in the opposite direction, back up the hill toward
a bank that I knew was the sort of the
last stop for a Marta bus line. I was really
out of it, really disoriented, looking out for him to
see if he had turned around to come back in
that direction.
Speaker 5 (37:50):
He didn't. He continued on.
Speaker 24 (37:54):
And I basically just laid on the grass in front
of this bank, waiting on a Martina to come, and
finally one did, got on it, went back downtown, got
on another bus to go to a relative's house, to
my aunt's house, and kind of slept it off during
the afternoon, just kind of slept, never told anyone about it.
(38:18):
I am convinced that had I stayed in the car,
we would not have gone onto I twenty. We would
have continued straight south on Fulton Industrial, which you know,
would have led into that no man's land outside of
southwest Atlanta. And I'm convinced that the way that that
happened at that time, that this guy.
Speaker 5 (38:37):
Has some responsibility for some of these murders, if not on.
Speaker 21 (38:40):
Them, you think that you would have been a victim.
Speaker 5 (38:44):
I'm sure of it. It was.
Speaker 24 (38:54):
It was an odd, disturbing thing that happened, but it
didn't heard of me until I was an adult and
and and had knowledge of the you know, the child
murders in general. It didn't dawn on me that, hey,
that situation was more than what it seemed to be.
And I started connecting the dogs to other things that
(39:14):
had happened as the years went by, understanding what went on,
you know, what that whole thing about the Atlanta Chilnel
murders was about, and the details of the investigation, and
you know, it became clear to me that my experience
was related to it. You know, by the time I
had that realization, now the investigation was over. You know
we're talking about you know, being in to late eighties,
(39:36):
and so you know, what's the point. What's the way
I thought about it? In my mind, the authorities had
found their man, the person they intended to put it
all on. And you know, what's the point of me
seeking out someone who cared in law enforcement to tell
my story? What's the point of that? So when I
came across this podcast, and you know, you guys were
(40:02):
were looking for information, yeah, I decided to offer. It's like, okay,
I've got something offer here. I I still don't think
law enforcement is interested. I in my mind, I think
they consider this a close case. I could be wrong,
but that was the way I always looked at it.
They were looking to close it and end it then.
(40:23):
And I you know, I know of no one in
law enforcement who would be interested in reopening or re
examining any evidence around this. So you know, why why
spend time seeking out someone who would wanna hear what
I would have to say.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Do you think the man who beat you up that
day was Wayne Williams.
Speaker 5 (40:40):
No, absolutely not positive of that.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
He sounds similar in description, Yes, similar, similar height, same.
Speaker 5 (40:49):
Hair, clean shaven.
Speaker 24 (40:51):
The photos I've seen of Wayne Williams from that time,
he had blemishes on his face that this guy didn't have.
So j in the shape of his face was different.
This guy was had a slimmer build, more of an
oval shaped face. Different in more ways than he was
the same, I'll put it that way.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
The night of our bridge experiment had arrived at around midnight.
We all headed out to the James Jackson Parkway Bridge
and planned to drop rescue Randy right at two am,
the same time they heard the splash. Ah, do you
hear my voice?
Speaker 5 (41:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 25 (41:47):
So you have to go to the opposite side of
the bridge.
Speaker 10 (42:01):
Hey, hey, there you are, This.
Speaker 19 (42:05):
Is Tyler over. Do you want me to stay down
here or come back up over?
Speaker 21 (42:08):
All?
Speaker 12 (42:08):
Right?
Speaker 14 (42:08):
So, and Alex gonna come down to you to follow
Pain with the camera.
Speaker 19 (42:14):
Okay, I'll stay down here to get him safely to
the spot.
Speaker 14 (42:18):
Yeah, that sounds good. So we want to get a
camera on Pain as quick as possible. Then Candler will
have his camera up here and at one o'clock now,
and I'm hoping we can do the drop right.
Speaker 21 (42:28):
Into its.
Speaker 19 (42:30):
Okay, that sounds good.
Speaker 9 (42:32):
Careful, don't it.
Speaker 15 (42:33):
Okay, that's right here.
Speaker 18 (42:53):
You could pull your truck down where that Georgia power
sign is and then we could at least walk him
up there and get the dumb onto the back of
your truck just to get.
Speaker 21 (43:01):
It back here.
Speaker 5 (43:01):
Quicker. Does that makes sense?
Speaker 18 (43:03):
Yeah, yeah, we're kind of approaching things as if we
might not get a chance to do it again.
Speaker 24 (43:11):
Sketch.
Speaker 19 (43:13):
It's I mean, it wobbles a bit, but it's it's
in the play of the joints. I don't think it's
like the bass feels stable.
Speaker 21 (43:22):
M h kayak body, I'm go moor with Okay, you guys,
(44:10):
get up there up here, back your.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
Action, okay. Atlanta Monster will be a ten episode podcast,
(45:17):
So there's four episodes left. Here's a preview of what's
to come.
Speaker 26 (45:24):
One of my attorneys, Lynn Watley, received a package on
his doorstep US anonymous package that it contained hundreds of
GBI fials about a classified investigation into White supremacit involvement
in the Atlantic killings. It also contains several tape recorded confessionals,
some of the lands they admitted and they were involved
(45:44):
in the murder of some of the missing and murdered pieces.
Speaker 15 (45:49):
I don't want to tell anything because my wife right
now is you're nervous. We've been through this before my
name was put out there and it was a scurry ordeal.
Family spent a few weeks in a hotel, just had
of being scarce. And I don't know you from Adam.
(46:15):
It's a story that I've held on to for a
long time that I've known about. I don't know how
you want to go about this, Dame.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
You can always come here to the office that we
have at pont I'd rather not.
Speaker 9 (46:32):
You wouldn't think here in this little sleepy town that
he was any kind of monster, or he certainly didn't
act like it until he drank and then he got
the eyes of Charles Manson. I don't know. I don't
know where it should go from here. I know that
there were some wrongs that should probably be righted there
(46:54):
his family still suffering. Anybody out there he thinks that
Wayne Williams didn't do all this by himself, is correct?
If I only know that from the mouth of the devil.
I'm sorry that I did not come come forth.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Sooner Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week,
with new episodes every Friday. A joint production between How
Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup
(47:36):
and Vanity Set. Audio archives courtesy of WSB News, Film
and Videotape Collection, Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries.
For the latest updates, please visit Atlantamonster dot com or
follow us on social media. One last thing, We've set
up an Atlanta Monster tipline. Anyone with information, leads, or
(47:57):
personal accounts pertaining to the Atlanta Child Murder can call
us and leave a message. The number is one eight
three three two eight five six six six seven. Again,
that's one eight three three two eight five six six
sixty seven.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Thanks for listening, Goss Rason.
Speaker 27 (48:42):
Yeah real well no now this uh yeah, that metal
card okay, this metal car.
Speaker 5 (49:00):
That was not that was not there.
Speaker 16 (49:01):
No, it wasn't there. Huh Now that that was just
a concrete up about this high. Probably, Yeah, you wouldn't
think that it sounded like a I would think that
if I was out there listening, that I could tell
the difference between a beaver and a body. But I've
never heard of beaver hit it, so I don't know
(49:22):
what they sound like. But a beaver's tail wasn't there
as be near as big as the body of a man,
and you would think it could probably tell
The church was a little United Methodist church on Eastland Road,
which is right off of Morland. It was an elderly
white congregation in a neighborhood that had transitioned. It had
gone on several months when the pastor said, we've got
(00:38):
to do something to help the kids in this community.
I was twenty six years old, just finishing up my
undergraduate studies, and he asked me, if maybe you've got
some extra time, can you come and help us reach
these kids. So all I did was put up a
(00:58):
basketball goal in the church parking lot, bought one basketball
and went out there just myself and just started bouncing
the ball in the parking.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Just bouncing the bump.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Did it for a couple of hours. Went inside next day,
same thing, same time, just bouncing the bump.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I thought, maybe it's if I'm.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Consistent, and sure enough, a couple of kids showed up
from the neighborhood. One week, two weeks, three weeks went on,
and pretty soon before we knew it, we had one
hundred kids. The tragedy began to gain more and more publicity,
Our program began to get more attention, but it was
sad to see the kids and as you know, adolescens,
(01:42):
they don't want to show their fear. They would joke
with each other, you know, you're gonna get snatched and
somebody's coming, you know, to your house, and you know,
but you could tell, you know, deep down inside they
were they were really frightened. I got the feeling that
they knew they were in something together, you know, confronting
(02:06):
this serious danger. And they kind of came together and
around the program and saw me as the leader. Made
them feel good to be a community, you know, to
be a group. There was safety in our group, and everybody,
(02:26):
whether they admitted or not, responds to love. I think
that we've made some progress, with a long way yet
to go. I can see a tremendous difference in the
prejudices I grew up with, being born in the mid fifties.
I remember the assassination of doctor King, and I remember
(02:49):
the kids in my elementary school saying that they were
glad that he had been killed or a terrible thing
for a child to say, but that's what they were,
that's what they've been taught. Yeah, I remember those things
and unfortunately still see some of those same prejudices that
(03:11):
are alive, you know, even today, in our beautiful city.
Although we've come a long way, there are still bigotries alive,
not only here in the South, but I imagine throughout this country. Honestly,
I think perhaps we hide them a little better than
we used to, but they're still there. I found acceptance
(03:34):
in those kids, in their families, and together we made
a difference in that one little part of Atlanta. So
thankful for silver linings.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
That was a man named Bill him as a young
man in the eighties, he saw how scared these kids were.
The victims in this case are the children, and that
should never be forgotten. Because this story is so complex.
For years, people have argued whether or not they got
the right guy. From everyone I've talked to, there's been
a lot of disagreement over whether Wayne Williams is the
Atlanta Monster. Many people feel that he's guilty. His stories
(04:21):
just don't really add up. He fit the FBI profile
to a t, and depending on how you looked at it,
after he was arrested, the murder stopped. But some people
seem to think this was a huge conspiracy against Wayne Williams,
but with very little evidence to back up those claims.
But the question isn't as simple as did he do it?
The question is what did he do? Did he kill
Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy ray Paine, the two adults who
(04:43):
was convicted for Maybe he did, But what about the kids?
Did he kill the kids too? Did he kill all
of them? Even though people are still very divided over
Wayne Williams himself, there's one common thread that everyone seems
to agree on. It was time for all this to
end in the city of Atlanta, and someone had to
go away for this, and Wayne Williams was that guy.
Wayne still claims his innocence, and from our very first
(05:05):
phone call, he promised to provide strong evidence to prove that.
I want this podcast to be the final debate over
Wayne Williams and the Atlanta child murders, And now that
my investigation is in full swing, I'm going to put
everything out on the table. If Wayne Williams has anything
credible to say, now's the time to hear it.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
I've been incarcerated since nineteen eighty one in connection with
the Atlanta murders. It was a situation that few people
understood then and today even fewer people understand the truth
about what happened, and probably even more so about what
didn't happen.
Speaker 5 (05:43):
Due to the political.
Speaker 4 (05:44):
Climate and the fear and all of the uncertainty about
what happened, the police and authorities were just anxious to
arrest anybody that they could, and that person just happened
to be me. Sadly, it has taken all these years
for me to finally get the case brought back to
the Four Lights so people can see the truth about
what happened in fact, and not only am I innocent man,
(06:05):
but that the people involved in this, the family, it's
the city, and the nation deserve an answer. One of
the main objectives for US is to make people aware
of what really happened during events before the trial as
well as after the trial, and they continue today. I
(06:28):
don't think few people realized I was never convicted in
connection with any of the child murders. I was charged
for the depths of two adults whose murders were actually unrelated. Furthermore,
we were prevented from bringing out a lot of evidence
that could have helped me during the trial. We're talking
about the existence of other suspects. We're talking about physical evidence,
(06:49):
including fiber evidence from caucasion suspects and others who we
know were involved in some of these cases, as well
as false testimony about the synthetic fibers that the yeah
I presented during the trial. I refer not only to
setting the facts were record straight, but telling of the
(07:11):
story behind the scenes, about the hurt and the emotional
pain that ling us to this day.
Speaker 5 (07:17):
I've done several.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Interviews over the years, but none have addressed the full
context of what this story is about.
Speaker 6 (07:24):
And Atlanta and another BONDI was discovered today but twenty third.
Speaker 7 (07:27):
At Police Task Force headquarters, there are twenty seven faces
on the wall, twenty six murdered, one missing.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
We do not know the person or persons that are responsible.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Therefore, we do not have the money.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
From Tenderfoo TV in Housetiff Works in Atlanta.
Speaker 8 (07:40):
Like eleven other recent victrums in Atlanta, rogers are currently.
Speaker 9 (07:43):
Was a spectator.
Speaker 7 (07:44):
Atlanta is unlikely to catch the killer unless he keeps
on killing.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
This is Atlanta Monster. According to Wayne Williams, the story
begins with that infamous night on the James Jackson Parkway Bridge.
Wayne first described a rather convoluted story about the timing
(08:11):
sequence of the bridge that night.
Speaker 10 (08:13):
Fia stillman, Yeah, I got it. He's coming towards him stopped.
That's the time in SeaQuest they testified to the New Court.
That's the contradiction during that sequest. There's no way any
car could have been born south on the piege, turn
into the gravel park lot and turn back north. That's
absolute possibility.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
He's saying that according to police testimony, the timing doesn't
make sense. In what he described as a matter of seconds,
the police recruit below the bridge heard the splash, shine
his light on the water, didn't see a body and
only saw ripples. Then radio to the other officers, who
then saw Wayne in his car turn around in a
gravel parking lot just moments later, heading the opposite way
on the bridge.
Speaker 10 (08:56):
That car had to have been traveling the entire time
of the sequence. Bottom line is there was no splash.
Speaker 8 (09:10):
If you take the bridge out of the equation, Wayne
Williams is not.
Speaker 5 (09:13):
In prison right.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
This is Vincent Hill, a law enforcement analyst and former
police officer. But more significantly, Vincent is an expert of
sorts on Wayne's case.
Speaker 8 (09:22):
If Wayne was not on that bridge, either the case
would have been solved a different way, or it would
still be unsolved. Take that bridge out of the equation,
and what do you have. I guess you can argue
that that had put Wayne next to the body, right,
I mean, he's on the bridge.
Speaker 5 (09:40):
They hear splash.
Speaker 8 (09:41):
Two days later, there's a body found.
Speaker 11 (09:44):
That morning, while four officers sat quietly under the South
cop Drive bridge, one of them and Atlanta recruit, heard
a splash.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Why do you think they stopped your car that night?
Speaker 10 (09:54):
You gotta remember that was the last night of the steakhout,
that was the last day they so I'm sure they
were probably, you know, anxious to stop something. Just make
an account for the time.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
The police recruit Bob Campbell was stationed below the bridge,
and he's the only one who heard the splash that night.
Speaker 10 (10:12):
And Campbell probably something probably poundering him, and he probably
made up the story just to justify the existence of
being on a stake. The point is that if the
stamus they said about the stop of what happened in
the bridge, cockrrect the only one that does not corrected.
That is what Campbell and Jacob said.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
He claimed that most of the FBI statements about the
bridge were in fact true, except for two major points,
the first being recruit Bob Campbell's account of the splash
and the recruit Jacob's accounts of the timing. The second
major point was over Wayne's strange story about a girl
named Cheryl Johnson.
Speaker 10 (10:45):
The only confusion in the statements was all of the
thing on the telephone nob in Cheryl Johnson.
Speaker 11 (10:51):
He tried to persuade the Jerry he really was out
near a bridge that night looking for a Cheryl Johnson,
who still remains a mystery to this trial.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
The Satan played he fabricated the.
Speaker 12 (11:01):
Story, but Williams didn't much from it, claiming the woman
simply gave him a wrong number and wrong address.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
When the FBI asked what he was doing out there,
Wayne said he was looking for a woman named Cheryl
Johnson who had scheduled an in person interview with him
that morning. He told the police he was out checking
the address that night. Wayne gave police an alleged phone
number for Cheryl Johnson, but later when they tried to
call the number, it didn't work. It didn't belong to anyone,
But Wayne says the FBI called the wrong number and
(11:27):
the reason was his handwriting.
Speaker 10 (11:31):
The number wasn't that four. You will see when you
get my riding up on the series was it was
four to three, four boys and my naves look alike
because I closed Luke top of them.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
The FBI claimed Cheryl Johnson wasn't real, but Wayne Williams agrees.
So Cheryl Johnson, when did she originally call you? And
what did she say?
Speaker 10 (11:55):
Well, well, she she originally did not call me. She
called my mother and my mother left for no I
talked to her that they there poor and I and
I figured she was a frank call tange. We were
doing public auditions of my music company over Entertainment. For
some of the accidents are because to ask you learned
on the radio and television stations in the newspapers club,
(12:17):
you know, in nineteen eighty, you know, the audists were
all over there your TV. And that's how she found out.
I got the poon them, and like I said, we
did probably we took maybe about eight hundred and nine
hundred calls and probably did we screened those downs here
my two assistants, and we probably did about one hundred
and fifty actual interviews or auditions out of that. I
(12:47):
even tell the police, I said, the only reason I
went out to check the address group because I felt
there was a big address. That's why I went out
to check it in the first place.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
He said, as a talent scout, you received hundreds of
calls during that time, and that every so often he
would get a fake caller, and Cheryl Johnson was likely
one of them.
Speaker 10 (13:05):
And this is the fun to think about, how why
in the world, if somebody was dealing killing people, why
would they be doing public cordise.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
That that makes sense, But why was Wayne out checking
this address at two in the morning when you was
scheduled to meet with her just a few hours later.
Speaker 5 (13:22):
That never made sense to me.
Speaker 8 (13:24):
I mean me being a forty five year old man.
If I'm out at two in the morning, if I'm
not working and I'm looking for someone's house, Let's be honest,
I know what I'm going to do at two in
the morning, and it's not the talk record contracts.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Did the FBI or the police ever find her in
real life?
Speaker 13 (13:42):
No?
Speaker 10 (13:43):
And I told him it's probably place had because I'm
not even sure that's her name. That was just the
name as she gave. We were doing public budlice, a
lot of people gave fake names and fake address. That
was why what I screaming, So I think all the
hoopla over Cheryl toss his peak. You know, I was
gonna playing coffee.
Speaker 8 (14:05):
So maybe Wayne was out getting ready to meet someone
and got lost. I don't know. Wayne likes to embellish things.
I don't know why. But again, I think that was
part of Wayne's downfall. Regardless if he told the truth
or not, I don't think the outcome would have been
different simply because he was on the bridge.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Do you regret being on the bridge that night? If
you could go back and change it, would you not
go that way?
Speaker 10 (14:33):
Well, paranalymic to you like this, I'm the type of person. Okay,
I'm liable to change my mind.
Speaker 14 (14:40):
He didn't.
Speaker 10 (14:40):
Given time. Everybody said, well do you think it was
a conspiracy, but they ought to get you ahead of that. No,
that was a conspiracy only after I became a suspect
and they have forgotten it involved. Nobody knew I was
going to take that route home, not even met that night.
That was a spur of the minute. The only thing
I regret was going out period that night. You know
(15:02):
I should have just took my butt to be it,
agreed to it.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
The more do you think that if you didn't go
out that night that you would not be.
Speaker 10 (15:09):
In jail right now, absolutely no question. They had to
ask the same questions that you're asking me right now.
Speaker 8 (15:16):
I wouldn't be bottom line, living in Fort Hood, Texas.
My dad was military, you know. Even then that story
was national news about these black kids being murdered in Atlanta.
I remember my mom to this day telling me not
to go outside, you know, past dark, even in Fort Hood,
Texas and Colleen, because they were killing these little kids.
(15:37):
Wayne Williams got arrested and got convicted, and that was
pretty much it, and.
Speaker 5 (15:42):
Supposedly the murder stopped. And that's what I took it for.
Speaker 8 (15:45):
You know, as a small child, you know, it's just
you trust what the police say, you trust what the
courts say, and that that was pretty much it, you know.
But as I got older, especially when I became a
police officer and a private investigator, and I realized this
keyword called evidence, then my mindset started changing about the
entire case. First, we can't say that the child murders
(16:07):
were solved because Wayne was convicted of killing Nathaniel Cater
and Jimmy ray Payne, which were adults. So we still
have all of these child murders basically unsolved because you
can't say it solved if you only convicted him of
killing two people. Wayne's a very intelligent guy. I think
Wayne's downfall back then was he embellished a lot.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
Wayne wanted to be the center of attention.
Speaker 8 (16:30):
He was calling his own press conferences, which just made
him a bigger target than the media.
Speaker 15 (16:35):
Right.
Speaker 8 (16:36):
You know a lot of people that were innocent at
this would have just said I had nothing to do
with it, and that's it. But I'm convinced it was
something totally different that happened.
Speaker 12 (16:46):
Williams bluntly stated the police version of the now famous
bridge incident was wrong, a lie. He claimed he wasn't
driving slow, that he didn't turn around in a parking
lot next to the bridge, that he did not throw
anything into the river. The state contends that louds splash
was the body of Nathaniel Cater heading the water. Although
prosecutors had most of the pieces that night in May,
it's still lacked.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
The essential part of the puzzle.
Speaker 12 (17:08):
Someone actually seen William's car stopped on the bridge, or
better yet, the suspect throwing a body from the structure.
Speaker 8 (17:15):
Could be something could be, nothing could have been a
bird taking off. It could have been a beaver, could
have been anything. You got police down there with flashlights immediately,
and they see nothing. So that would suggest that Daniel
Cator's body as soon as it hit the water, just
floated out of sight like a speedboat splash. You shine
(17:37):
your lights, now I don't see anything. Why not if
it floated down the river and you found it two
days later, why wouldn't you see it as it's floating
down the river right after its splashed. If you heard
the splash and you thought it was a body, why
didn't you send divers down there immediately.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Doctor Blackwelder was there during the trial, so I asked him.
He knew about the splash, and.
Speaker 16 (18:03):
The cadet that was under the bridge heard a splash,
and it had flashlights and all that shine around, but
they never saw anything, so they don't They said it
could have been a beaver because there were beavers in
that river.
Speaker 5 (18:15):
It could have been a beaver.
Speaker 16 (18:16):
Slapping its tail on the water, or it could have
been a body that was throwing off the bridge into
the water.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
But he heard a splash.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
I asked Popcorn with the FBI, what was his take?
Speaker 13 (18:29):
Two cadets under the bridge, two regular offices, and chase counts.
They were intense underneath the bridge. And the guy that
heard the splash had been a high school swimmer and
he knew what the sound of a body hitting the water,
and he said, that's a body hitting the water. There
was a splat, because you know, if you jump up
the diving board and you spread eagle and hit the water,
(18:51):
you splat. And that's what he heard.
Speaker 16 (18:55):
And he looked, you don't say what was in the water,
and did never could see anything.
Speaker 5 (18:58):
Floating in the water.
Speaker 16 (18:59):
And they brought a hydrologist in from the corp of Engineers,
and somebody testified that there were a lot of There
were a lot of beavers in the river. Hipopsis said,
or water ill make a splash, So a.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Body hating the water sounds like it would be much
louder than beaver.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
We've done that.
Speaker 17 (19:17):
I did.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
We did that when I was astrade.
Speaker 16 (19:19):
We would throw bodies they would be dummies, but wouldn't
make sure they didn't wade to shine them out by
using sand and things like that, because the beaver's saddle
is flat, and were just like hit it with a
boat paddle and the body wouldn't.
Speaker 8 (19:33):
If it was that the inucator at his stature, wouldn't
someone else have heard that.
Speaker 5 (19:39):
It's like going to a.
Speaker 9 (19:40):
Pool, right.
Speaker 8 (19:41):
You may be twenty yards away, but you can hear
people diving off the diving board. So this one guy
is the only one that hurt us. It's not even logical.
Wasn't he like one fifty one sixty? It's a loud splash. Man,
If they're spread out the way they say were, there's
just no way only one person heard it.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
That was a warning signal to say that danger was around.
Speaker 5 (20:09):
That's the same me.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Weave a state refuge here whenever they are alarmed.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
I can't help but think a splash from a beaver's tail,
which found a whole lot different from a splash from
a fully grown human body. So I decided to test
it out. The team at house Stuff Works helped me
put together the whole experiment. The best option we had
was rescue Randy. Randy is an adult sized mannequin used
for simulations and training for emergency person though, so when dropped,
Randy would fall like a human body. Accurate weight distribution
(20:46):
and everything. How do we try to recreate this sound?
Speaker 18 (20:50):
So what we want to do is drop something off
the James Jackson Parkway Bridge, something that is roughly the
same size and shape of a human body, to see
what kind of sound it makes, how loud it is,
if we can hear it. If what we're trying to
do is find something that we can drop off the bridge.
(21:12):
And we've been kind of racking our brains trying to
figure out how to approximate a human body. It's not
something you can just go to the hardware store and find.
Speaker 19 (21:20):
And we've actually gone through many iterations of this. Like
originally we were thinking we might want to try to
actually build a body out of like wooden dowels and
duct tape and like packing material, and we got kind
of far down that path, but then decided, you know,
it was just it was not going to really be
as flexible as a body the way we wanted it.
You know, we were thinking, well, maybe you know, like
something like an emergency rescue might have some dummies and
(21:42):
things like that, And so we did actually find a
fireman's dummy, and they use these in training and like
competitions for firemen.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
It just so.
Speaker 19 (21:51):
Happens that the dummy that they make has very similar
proportions both height and weight to the deceased within cator.
Speaker 10 (22:02):
Here he is.
Speaker 5 (22:08):
Yeah that's without legs.
Speaker 18 (22:18):
Wow, chunky arms your bat be careful lift with your legs.
Speaker 8 (22:25):
Oh my god, man.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
It's it's doable.
Speaker 15 (22:28):
List.
Speaker 19 (22:29):
Brandy's a very large gentleman. He you know, he does
weigh one hundred and forty five pounds, and you know,
hearing that, it seems like that's doable. But it's dead weight.
You know, the arms flail and the legs flail, and
so trying to pick up that mass is actually harder
than you would expects.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Which, oh wow, that is yeah, very correct.
Speaker 19 (22:56):
Wait, ways, you know, if you're adrenaline is up, you're
gonna be able to lift more than you know exactly.
Speaker 5 (23:02):
Can't return it if.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
It's a way, So this is ours.
Speaker 19 (23:04):
So we all kind of took turns trying to pick
Randy up in to varying degrees of success. But yeah,
it was a bit of a hassle.
Speaker 18 (23:12):
Yeah, it's it's not easy. I mean, I Tyler, you
could you were able to pick him up? I really wasn't.
But yeah, it's way more difficult than you might expect.
Speaker 5 (23:23):
How close is he in height and weight? To Nathaniel Cater.
Speaker 19 (23:26):
So the Corners report and some of the other reporting
had Nathaniel Cater's height at five to eleven and weighed
at one hundred and forty six pounds, And the Rescue
Randy dummy that we ordered has a height of six
feet and weighs one hundred and forty five pounds, So
we're really in that range of where we want to be.
It actually fits quite well.
Speaker 18 (23:48):
The bridge actually straddles two county lines, Fulham County on
the south side and Cobb County on the north side,
so we have to close the bridge down. We have
to get permits from both counties, and.
Speaker 19 (23:59):
On that we found out that we also have to
coordinate with the state Department of Transportation. They have to
approve it as well. You know, closing a road down
is one thing, but dropping a body into the Chatthoochee
River is a whole different thing. So we've been coordinating
with Army, Corps of Engineers, the Department of National Resources,
all these different groups to try to, you know, figure
out who we need to essentially get permission from.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Wayne spoke of a child sex ring that was operating
out of a house on Gray Street in Atlanta. He
told me that he believed many of these child murders
were related to this sex ring.
Speaker 10 (24:38):
We know that another six cases were involved in a
homosexual ring going on in Atlanta, Black homosexual ring.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Vincent Hill has spent the last several years looking into
this theory too, and he believes it has some serious
merit if.
Speaker 8 (24:52):
You look at old records and old police reports. Uncle
Tom Terrell, his friend Jerry Thornton, Larry Marshall. Jerry Thornton
told investigators ten of the victims used to hang out
at that house, that they would have sex with little boys,
and mid would come to that house to pay for
sex with these little boys.
Speaker 5 (25:13):
So how do you put that on, Wayne?
Speaker 11 (25:15):
It's been learned that investigators have now found this man
Tom Terrell and questioned him today about his role in
some type of homosexual ring operated out of this home
in northwest Atlanta. That ring apparently involved the latest child victim,
Timothy Hill, and through recent findings, may have linked together
several other children.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
On the task Force list.
Speaker 11 (25:35):
Terrell knows this man, Larry Marshall, now in a Connecticut
jail on armed robbery charges. Investigators also want to question Marshall,
but so far he is fighting extradition back to Georgia.
The next best thing is this man sitting in a
detective's car this morning.
Speaker 20 (25:49):
How many of the murdered children have you seen around here?
Speaker 9 (25:52):
I'm not ten out, I told.
Speaker 20 (25:56):
Jerry Thornton, Larry Marshall's former roommate, identified of the murder
victims from pictures shown him by a police investigator. Children
he's seen in the neighborhood, among them thirteen year old
Timothy Hill, eleven year old Patrick Baltazar, and fifteen year
old Joseph Bell.
Speaker 12 (26:13):
This morning, Terrell's house on Gray Street was empty, unlike
recent weeks, when neighbors said at any given time several
boys would be hanging out here. Terrell is an admitted homosexual,
who says one of the victims, Timothy Hill, spent the
night at this house a day before he disappeared, and.
Speaker 7 (26:28):
He was here on twelve grades.
Speaker 9 (26:29):
Fool to come back on the thirteenth, and that was
my bush.
Speaker 21 (26:32):
Geyahdd. I didn't see him, and I haven't seen him since.
Speaker 8 (26:38):
Back in the eighties, no one was saying, oh, I'm
openly gay, and you definitely didn't want to be known
as a city that's trading boys for sex. But if
you have ten people that have been identified at one
house where guys were coming in paying these boys for sex,
they were giving them drugs, they were doing all these
other types of things. You have all of these people
(27:00):
coming to this house trading for sex. How do you
put those ten bodies on Wayne Williams? So you tie
all these victims to Wayne, but you can't.
Speaker 22 (27:11):
Thirty four year old Larry Marshall, now behind bars in Connecticut,
is a known homosexual. He used to hang around this
neighborhood on Gray Street. Tom Terrell, who was also a homosexual,
said thirteen year old Timothy Hill also used to hang
out here, and Larry and Timothy knew each other.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Larry told you.
Speaker 22 (27:29):
He had Timmy over to his house.
Speaker 9 (27:30):
Oh he's a game there.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
What did they do over there?
Speaker 2 (27:33):
I don't know. They don't be doing them with drinking
and talking.
Speaker 22 (27:36):
But you do know for a fact that Larry knew Timmy,
he knowed him.
Speaker 8 (27:40):
Patrick Baltazar went missing after being seen at the Omney Hotel.
Patrick Baltazar from the Omni to his house to Larry
Marshall's house was about one point eight miles. Baltazar would
have had to pass Larry Marshall's house on his way home.
He's walking home right past Larry Marshall's house. Whose associate
(28:00):
it with this pedophile who's selling these boys for sex.
Speaker 12 (28:03):
Marshall is believed to have known at least three of
the victims, Patrick Baltazzar, Timothy Hill, and Joseph Bell, who
was still missing.
Speaker 8 (28:11):
If you're ten eleven years old, you say, yeah, I'm
gonna go tell my mom what you're doing. The heck
you are because I don't want to go to jail
for rape of a child, so I'll just kill you.
When Patrick Baltazar was found, one of the witnesses that
morning she said she saw a male white and a
green station wagon, you know, just lurking around like towards
(28:34):
the wooded area where Patrick was found. Who was a
white guy in the green station wagon.
Speaker 6 (28:40):
Baltazar was with a ten year old friend playing near
these railroad tracks near the Baltasar home on Foundry Street.
Baltasar's friend told Jack Perry a big man in a
car started following them and tried to get them to
come get in the car with him. Perry taped part
of the conversation with the young friend of Patrick Baltazar.
Speaker 21 (28:57):
He take come here, you two.
Speaker 23 (28:58):
Lod and Patrick started to in the car. I grabbed
him from my hand. I say, you don't know who
that man is. And then when you've gone underhill he
said I'd be back. Then me and Patrick ran out
and tried to get his tag number, but we couldn't
get it.
Speaker 6 (29:14):
They called the Task Force from this phone near the
key shop on North Side Drive, according to the young
man who was with Patrick Baltazzar. But after Patrick and
his friend made the call to the Task Force, they
didn't hang around waiting for police. They split up and
Patrick was not seen again. We don't know if police
sent a squad car to this area, but Jack Perry
says he has learned the Task Force talked with Patrick
(29:34):
Baltazar's friend just two days ago.
Speaker 17 (29:37):
I'm sure that the Task Force has the same information,
so I hope it's beneficial to it.
Speaker 6 (29:42):
I asked Jack why it would take more than a
month to follow up on talking to someone who had
phoned asking for help, particularly when one of the two
children who had called turns up dead.
Speaker 17 (29:53):
It's surprising that they would let this thing go this long.
You know, you want to follow up, Avery lead that
you had, and I think it's just a break down
on communications.
Speaker 6 (30:03):
Jack Perry also has learned that Patrick Baltasar may have
intentionally gone back to the area where the man tried
to pick him up because Patrick was a street hustler
and believed he could get the license number and maybe
he could collect the reward.
Speaker 8 (30:18):
There's no coincidence that the FBI had Tom Terrell's house,
Larry Marshall's house under surveillance for weeks because of this
alleged sex ring. If you follow the trail, you can't
call the coincidence that Patrick Baltizard lives here, Larry Marshall
lives here, the house where all this sexual activity was here,
(30:39):
which also tied to ten other victims, and you can't say, well,
it had nothing to do with anything.
Speaker 5 (30:45):
It's impossible.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
In the many years of Vincent's research, he's found a
recurring story in the FBI files, a story about a
vehicle that didn't belong to Wayne Williams, a blue Nova.
Speaker 8 (31:16):
I know there was talk about a blue Nova, which
Wayne didn't drive a Blue Nova. Why didn't police do
a motor vehicle record search to tie this blue Nova
to somebody other than Wayne? The case about the Blue Nova.
The guy had an afro with no glasses. Have you
ever seen Wayne without glasses other than his booking photo?
(31:38):
Have you ever seen Wayne Williams without glasses? Wayne can't see.
So who's this guy with the afro with no glasses?
Couldn't have been Wayne? You know, back then, a lot
of people said every black person looked like we're talking
nineteen seventy nine. I had an afro in nineteen seventy nine, right,
my dad had an afro in nineteen seventy nine. And
(32:00):
who didn't have an afro that was black in nineteen
seventy nine?
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Right?
Speaker 8 (32:04):
That was pre the Jerry Curl when Michael Jackson made
that famous. People were walking around with afros. So it
very well could have been someone that resembled Wayne because
he looked just like that he had an afro. The
description wasn't a white guy with red hair.
Speaker 5 (32:20):
He was a black guy with an afro.
Speaker 8 (32:22):
That was probably ninety percent of the black population of
Atlanta in nineteen seventy nine nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
This whole time, I've been wondering if there were any
kids that got away that were almost abducted, and if so,
were they still around. That's when I met Rodney. He's
an Atlanta native, a child living here during the time
with the murders. Rodney firmly believes that when he was sixteen,
he was almost a victim of the Atlanta child murderer.
He shared with me his chilling first hand account.
Speaker 24 (32:51):
I was fifteen, not old enough to work, but six
Flags accepted a fake idea which you could get downtown
at the time, and put me to work. So I
rode the bus from my neighborhood in Southeast Atlanta to downtown.
Speaker 5 (33:09):
There was at the time a Marta.
Speaker 24 (33:13):
Direct shuttle from downtown to six Flags, and all it
did was go back and forth from this stop downtown
to six Flags, no other stops in between. I would
change buses, get on the six Flag shuttle, go to work,
get on that shuttle to come back to downtown to
go home, and get on my bus, which was the
thirty four Cresham that particular day. For whatever reason, by
(33:37):
the time I'd gotten off thirty four, aggression walked across
from the end of the line and to the six
Flags shuttle. I had missed it, and as I'm standing there,
this guy approaches me. He was not tall about five
to six ish. He was in his mid twenties. He
(33:59):
was clean shaven, which was unusual for a black male
in the seventies, and he had a short afrow, had
a fairly soft voice, so he didn't come across very masculine.
He just came off as, you know, a nice guy.
He approaches me and he's he's just basically chatting with me,
asking if I'm okay, Yeah, I missed my bus. You know,
(34:23):
I've got to get to work. And you know, my
recollection is that he almost immediately offers.
Speaker 21 (34:27):
Me a ride.
Speaker 24 (34:29):
I'm going that way, There's no problem, you want to ride,
drove a Blue Nover. The Blue Nover was was parked
on that same street, just down the block. It wasn't far,
It was just walking down the sidewalk. I got in
his car and off we went to go to six Flags.
From downtown. One would go directly to I twenty, which is,
(34:51):
you know, maybe a mile or so from that spot.
What he did was drove on surface streets heading north
away from my twenty. On that ride, as he was
talking to me, he offered me a joint. I had
never done drugs, and to this day, I don't know
(35:12):
if there was anything in it, or I was just
new to that and just had gotten really really high.
I mean, frankly, I smoked marijuana years after that and
very familiar with it. But there was something about that
high that was it wasn't just marijuana, that was something
else in it. During the course of that ride, he
(35:34):
started to fondle me as he was driving over my pants,
and I recalled just kind of staring down at what
he was doing, just not knowing what was going on,
not really communicating with him.
Speaker 5 (35:51):
You know, at fifteen I I had no idea what
was going on.
Speaker 24 (35:55):
As we continued down Fulton Industrial, I knew that he
would get onto I twenty because we were one exit
away from six Flags. Either he'd get onto I twenty,
go over into Cobb County, drop me off for six Flags,
or he would continue downfalls An Industrial, which if he
passed under our twenty heading south, it was no man's land, industrial, warehouses, nothing.
(36:22):
And as we were at a traffic light, maybe two
blocks from the.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
Entrance to I twenty, it was like a do or
die moment.
Speaker 24 (36:34):
And as we were sitting at that traffic light, just
out of nowhere, I decided, I'm going to jump out,
and I grabbed the door, unlashed the door and opened
it and tried to bolt out of the car. Now
I didn't have on a seatbelt, but he had the
seat cover over his vinyl seats. It had a hole
in it, and my Afro pick that was in my
(36:56):
back pocket, which was the way we carried him. Then
got hung up in his seat cover. And I'm struggling
at this light to undo myself from this seat cover
as the door is open, trying to escape, and he
didn't try to stop me. He just said to me,
as I'm struggling, and it was the most eerie, sort.
Speaker 5 (37:16):
Of calm thing by Rodney.
Speaker 24 (37:28):
And I got out of a car and started heading
back in the opposite direction, back up the hill toward
a bank that I knew was the sort of the
last stop for a Marta bus line. I was really
out of it, really disoriented, looking out for him to
see if he had turned around to come back in
that direction.
Speaker 5 (37:50):
He didn't. He continued on.
Speaker 24 (37:54):
And I basically just laid on the grass in front
of this bank, waiting on a Martina to come, and
finally one did, got on it, went back downtown, got
on another bus to go to a relative's house, to
my aunt's house, and kind of slept it off during
the afternoon, just kind of slept, never told anyone about it.
(38:18):
I am convinced that had I stayed in the car,
we would not have gone onto I twenty. We would
have continued straight south on Fulton Industrial, which you know,
would have led into that no man's land outside of
southwest Atlanta. And I'm convinced that the way that that
happened at that time, that this guy.
Speaker 5 (38:37):
Has some responsibility for some of these murders, if not on.
Speaker 21 (38:40):
Them, you think that you would have been a victim.
Speaker 5 (38:44):
I'm sure of it. It was.
Speaker 24 (38:54):
It was an odd, disturbing thing that happened, but it
didn't heard of me until I was an adult and
and and had knowledge of the you know, the child
murders in general. It didn't dawn on me that, hey,
that situation was more than what it seemed to be.
And I started connecting the dogs to other things that
(39:14):
had happened as the years went by, understanding what went on,
you know, what that whole thing about the Atlanta Chilnel
murders was about, and the details of the investigation, and
you know, it became clear to me that my experience
was related to it. You know, by the time I
had that realization, now the investigation was over. You know
we're talking about you know, being in to late eighties,
(39:36):
and so you know, what's the point. What's the way
I thought about it? In my mind, the authorities had
found their man, the person they intended to put it
all on. And you know, what's the point of me
seeking out someone who cared in law enforcement to tell
my story? What's the point of that? So when I
came across this podcast, and you know, you guys were
(40:02):
were looking for information, yeah, I decided to offer. It's like, okay,
I've got something offer here. I I still don't think
law enforcement is interested. I in my mind, I think
they consider this a close case. I could be wrong,
but that was the way I always looked at it.
They were looking to close it and end it then.
(40:23):
And I you know, I know of no one in
law enforcement who would be interested in reopening or re
examining any evidence around this. So you know, why why
spend time seeking out someone who would wanna hear what
I would have to say.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Do you think the man who beat you up that
day was Wayne Williams.
Speaker 5 (40:40):
No, absolutely not positive of that.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
He sounds similar in description, Yes, similar, similar height, same.
Speaker 5 (40:49):
Hair, clean shaven.
Speaker 24 (40:51):
The photos I've seen of Wayne Williams from that time,
he had blemishes on his face that this guy didn't have.
So j in the shape of his face was different.
This guy was had a slimmer build, more of an
oval shaped face. Different in more ways than he was
the same, I'll put it that way.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
The night of our bridge experiment had arrived at around midnight.
We all headed out to the James Jackson Parkway Bridge
and planned to drop rescue Randy right at two am,
the same time they heard the splash. Ah, do you
hear my voice?
Speaker 5 (41:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 25 (41:47):
So you have to go to the opposite side of
the bridge.
Speaker 10 (42:01):
Hey, hey, there you are, This.
Speaker 19 (42:05):
Is Tyler over. Do you want me to stay down
here or come back up over?
Speaker 21 (42:08):
All?
Speaker 12 (42:08):
Right?
Speaker 14 (42:08):
So, and Alex gonna come down to you to follow
Pain with the camera.
Speaker 19 (42:14):
Okay, I'll stay down here to get him safely to
the spot.
Speaker 14 (42:18):
Yeah, that sounds good. So we want to get a
camera on Pain as quick as possible. Then Candler will
have his camera up here and at one o'clock now,
and I'm hoping we can do the drop right.
Speaker 21 (42:28):
Into its.
Speaker 19 (42:30):
Okay, that sounds good.
Speaker 9 (42:32):
Careful, don't it.
Speaker 15 (42:33):
Okay, that's right here.
Speaker 18 (42:53):
You could pull your truck down where that Georgia power
sign is and then we could at least walk him
up there and get the dumb onto the back of
your truck just to get.
Speaker 21 (43:01):
It back here.
Speaker 5 (43:01):
Quicker. Does that makes sense?
Speaker 18 (43:03):
Yeah, yeah, we're kind of approaching things as if we
might not get a chance to do it again.
Speaker 24 (43:11):
Sketch.
Speaker 19 (43:13):
It's I mean, it wobbles a bit, but it's it's
in the play of the joints. I don't think it's
like the bass feels stable.
Speaker 21 (43:22):
M h kayak body, I'm go moor with Okay, you guys,
(44:10):
get up there up here, back your.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
Action, okay. Atlanta Monster will be a ten episode podcast,
(45:17):
So there's four episodes left. Here's a preview of what's
to come.
Speaker 26 (45:24):
One of my attorneys, Lynn Watley, received a package on
his doorstep US anonymous package that it contained hundreds of
GBI fials about a classified investigation into White supremacit involvement
in the Atlantic killings. It also contains several tape recorded confessionals,
some of the lands they admitted and they were involved
(45:44):
in the murder of some of the missing and murdered pieces.
Speaker 15 (45:49):
I don't want to tell anything because my wife right
now is you're nervous. We've been through this before my
name was put out there and it was a scurry ordeal.
Family spent a few weeks in a hotel, just had
of being scarce. And I don't know you from Adam.
(46:15):
It's a story that I've held on to for a
long time that I've known about. I don't know how
you want to go about this, Dame.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
You can always come here to the office that we
have at pont I'd rather not.
Speaker 9 (46:32):
You wouldn't think here in this little sleepy town that
he was any kind of monster, or he certainly didn't
act like it until he drank and then he got
the eyes of Charles Manson. I don't know. I don't
know where it should go from here. I know that
there were some wrongs that should probably be righted there
(46:54):
his family still suffering. Anybody out there he thinks that
Wayne Williams didn't do all this by himself, is correct?
If I only know that from the mouth of the devil.
I'm sorry that I did not come come forth.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Sooner Atlanta Monster is an investigative podcast told week by week,
with new episodes every Friday. A joint production between How
Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Original music is by Makeup
(47:36):
and Vanity Set. Audio archives courtesy of WSB News, Film
and Videotape Collection, Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries.
For the latest updates, please visit Atlantamonster dot com or
follow us on social media. One last thing, We've set
up an Atlanta Monster tipline. Anyone with information, leads, or
(47:57):
personal accounts pertaining to the Atlanta Child Murder can call
us and leave a message. The number is one eight
three three two eight five six six six seven. Again,
that's one eight three three two eight five six six
sixty seven.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Thanks for listening, Goss Rason.
Speaker 27 (48:42):
Yeah real well no now this uh yeah, that metal
card okay, this metal car.
Speaker 5 (49:00):
That was not that was not there.
Speaker 16 (49:01):
No, it wasn't there. Huh Now that that was just
a concrete up about this high. Probably, Yeah, you wouldn't
think that it sounded like a I would think that
if I was out there listening, that I could tell
the difference between a beaver and a body. But I've
never heard of beaver hit it, so I don't know
(49:22):
what they sound like. But a beaver's tail wasn't there
as be near as big as the body of a man,
and you would think it could probably tell
Atlanta Monster News
Host
Payne Lindsey
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